by Sam Sisavath
Ted nodded again. He looked calm, even in control. Will didn’t entirely believe it, but he had no choice.
Will said to Danny, “Let’s go.”
Carly ran over and pried Vera from Danny. He smiled and kissed the girl on the forehead. “I’ll be back, Vera the Explorer. Don’t go joyriding on my ATV, you got it?”
Vera gave him a thumbs-up as she was whisked back behind one of the trailers by Carly, who fixed Danny with a serious look. “I’ll kick your ass if you get shot.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Danny and Will quickly unhooked the trailers from their ATVs and climbed back on.
Will gave Ted and Kate one last nod. “Unless they start moving up the road, you should be fine at this distance. But just in case, use the trailers as a shield. I’m counting on you guys to cover us.”
Ted said, “You got it.”
Kate’s eyes were locked on him. “Please,” she said, almost pleading, “bring him back.”
“I will,” Will said.
He gunned the ATV and took off down the road. Danny quickly caught up to him. They cranked up the throttle, chewing the distance between them and Luke in seconds.
He hadn’t been able to pinpoint the exact location of the shot, but he knew it came from the woods to their right. Probably camouflaged. They were dealing with people who had been here for a while, who had probably done this before. That meant they were prepared, well-armed, and there was likely more than one. The odds weren’t very good, especially just riding down the road in the open. He felt like an idiot, but there was no other way to save Luke.
He saw the kid moving up the road through his binoculars. Barely moving, but moving, that was the important part. Hurt bad, probably in shock, trying to understand what was happening to him. But alive.
The gunshot was from a hunting rifle. Probably a Winchester, similar to the one Ted was carrying. That wasn’t good. Ted’s rifle was loaded with .308s. Will had seen the kind of damage .308s could do to a human body. Depending on where Luke was shot, he was either going to die as soon as they reached him, or later tonight. Either way, he was going to be in immense pain for a while. The smart thing would be to leave him.
Of course, he wasn’t doing that.
You’re an idiot.
They were forty-five meters from Luke now, and he started to feel good about their chances. Maybe the people who had shot Luke had fled. That was a possibility. Maybe the shooters had expected only one person, but when they saw not just two more, but six more, they panicked and decided to fight another day.
He was still considering that very optimistic possibility when the air cracked with gunfire and he heard the incredibly loud buzzing of a bullet zipping by the back of his right ear.
Captain Optimism. Fuck you.
CHAPTER 21
KATE
Kate thought she had gotten used to the sound of gunfire after all the training sessions, shooting at targets, and nighttime hunting with Will, but she was wrong. She peered through her rifle’s sight and watched Will and Danny on their ATVs, riding low, pushing forward to reach Luke despite the bullets flying around them. It was insane. Illogical and insane.
Over the last few weeks, she had managed to cultivate some kind of order in her life out of the chaos. But this, this…
This was pure chaos.
And Luke. Poor Luke. Lying out there on the road. Bleeding. Dying. Maybe already dead. She couldn’t tell from this distance, though she could see his dark shape lying motionless on the road 200 yards away. She couldn’t make out any details, and maybe that was for the best.
She focused on the wall of trees along the right side of the road instead, where Will told them to concentrate. She moved the sight farther up the woods, even as gunfire made her jump each time it rang out. They were much louder than when she was shooting the M4A1 even on full-auto. It had to be the different caliber.
She almost laughed.
Bullets. Calibers. When the hell did words like that enter her vocabulary?
She tried not to swing the sight back to Will, to make sure he was still alive as he continued up the road. She needed to find the shooters, locate them within the green and gray and brown of the woods and—
There.
She saw it—the flash of a rifle firing among the trees. Will was right, they were in there. Hidden like cowards. Kate saw only one muzzle flash, though she was sure there was more than one person firing. There had to be. They were using hunting rifles like the one Ted carried, and those could only fire one shot at a time. And from the sounds of it, they were firing constantly at Will and Danny.
She stopped the pointless, random thoughts, and taking a breath, fired off three quick rounds from her M4A1.
She didn’t know if she hit anyone, or even came close, but she quickly adjusted herself and standing up, fired another three rounds into the same general vicinity. Somewhere behind her, she heard the thunderous boom of Ted’s rifle. It was so loud she almost jumped, but she gathered herself and squeezed off another burst into the trees.
Kate swiveled her rifle down the road and picked up Will and Danny, no longer on their ATVs, but on their knees next to Luke. Will was in a shooting position with his M4A1 and was calmly firing shot after shot into the wall of trees. Danny did the same before quickly slinging his rifle, grabbing Luke, and throwing the teenager over his shoulder then carrying him back to his vehicle.
She watched where Will was firing, then swiveled her rifle to the same spot and fired in that direction, squeezing off round after round until she was empty.
Kate quickly took out the magazine and pushed in a new one as Ted fired next to her into the trees, in the same direction that she had been shooting. She took aim and joined him, fighting the urge to switch the fire selector to full-auto and just unleash the entire magazine.
Will’s words flashed in her head: “One at a time. In a gunfight, your best asset is your ability to aim and fire.”
So she fired two shots, stopped, waited a second, then fired two more, stopped, waited and fired again.
She swung her rifle back to Will. He was walking calmly to the ATVs, firing into the trees. He hopped onto his vehicle at the same time Danny took off on his, Luke’s body thrown across the seat like some freshly killed deer. The image made her almost vomit.
She followed Danny’s progress back to them when the gunfire led her back to reality. The ambushers were shooting at Will and Danny again.
She scanned the wall of trees, looking for a muzzle flash…
There!
She emptied the magazine into the general vicinity she thought the flash came from, squeezing the trigger again and again and again, without pausing this time. The rifle bucked with every shot and it was like getting kicked in the shoulder by a mule. But she had prepared her body for it and absorbed the impacts, never taking her eye off the sight and the red dot at the center.
Then Will and Danny were there, a loud squeal as they jammed on their brakes and their tires slid along the highway road.
Suddenly it was quiet.
The ambushers had stopped firing. Maybe it was the distance, maybe they realized they had lost the advantage, but the world seemed to instantly shut down around them, all except for the chirping of birds and insects buzzing in the woods.
Will hopped off his ATV and began hitching the trailers back into place. He worked and talked, calmly—always calmly. “That roadside place about three klicks back. We’re going to use that for now.”
Kate, like Ted and Carly, was in a daze as she stared at Luke’s body, slumped over Danny’s ATV. His white shirt was now a ghastly purple color, his face covered in a sheen of sweat that dripped down onto the hot asphalt. He didn’t look alive, and Kate wasn’t sure if he was still breathing. She wanted to reach out and feel for a pulse, but she was frozen, unable to move, and could only stare dumbly.
Will was suddenly next to her. Slowly, she heard his voice: “Kate, we have to go.”
She swam through a h
aze and tried to focus on him, standing in the sun, sweat dripping from his face despite the December weather. She might have answered. Or nodded. Or moved. She didn’t remember.
Her next memory was wind against her face, because they were moving, riding back down the road they had traveled only minutes ago. She was barely aware of climbing onto the ATV behind Will, or wrapping her arms tightly around his waist. Her eyes focused up the road at Danny, riding up front with Luke still slumped across his vehicle.
He’s dead. I know he’s dead.
Carly and Vera rode double behind Ted, the little girl squeezed between the two adults, looking uncomfortable but not complaining. She never complained. She was such a good soldier. Better than her.
They reached their destination after what seemed like hours of riding against the wind, though it was probably just minutes. Her sense of time and space was out of balance, and it was hard to keep track of where she was.
They turned off the road and onto a patch of dirt in front of two old buildings, with nothing but trees behind them. A small diner on the left and an auto body shop on the right made up the roadside establishment, surrounded by something that didn’t even vaguely resemble a parking lot.
They stopped the ATVs in front of the diner, and Danny hopped off. Carly got there quickly, and together they lifted Luke off as Will, M4A1 in hand, led the way, pushing into the diner’s door.
Kate sat numbly on the ATV, unsure what to do, or even if she could move if she wanted to. She watched Will through the dust-caked diner windows as he disappeared into the back of the building, before re-emerging seconds later and slinging his rifle. Danny and Carly had laid Luke down on the counter, and even through the window, Kate could see blood dripping onto the polished countertop, roll off the side, and fall to the floor. The blood seemed to have an oddly pale color, but maybe that was due to the dust on the windows.
She was vaguely aware of Ted standing next to her, talking. “Come on, Kate, it’s not safe out here. We need to go in with the others.”
She followed him inside the diner. She was moving on automatic pilot, barely noticing the steps she was taking or the thick whiff of abandonment that surged out of the diner when Ted opened the door.
She wished she hadn’t followed him inside. Seeing Luke lying on the countertop, bleeding, was worse up close. At least through the window she couldn’t tell how miserably pale he looked, how much he was sweating and bleeding. He didn’t move at all. Carly was holding a rag against Luke’s belly where the bullet had pierced, but it didn’t seem to be helping. Luke was still bleeding.
There was so much blood.
She thought of Donald, bleeding in the garage all those nights ago. She had wondered then, too, how someone could bleed so much and still be alive. It had turned out Donald wasn’t alive for very long, and looking at Luke now, she wondered how long he was going to last.
Probably not very long, either.
Will hovered over Luke, looking at his wound, oblivious to the blood gushing out as he touched and prodded. “Large caliber,” he said to no one in particular. “Looks like a thirty-aught-six. Entered his side from the back and went clean through the front, so that’s the good news. The bad news is that he’s lost a lot of blood. A lot of blood.”
She sat quietly and watched Will continue to poke around Luke’s bloody mid-section. A moment later, Danny came back out of the backroom with a first-aid kit and more white rags that he put on Luke. The rags turned a bleak red as soon as they touched the teenager’s body.
She flinched.
“There should be more inside the closet,” Danny said to Carly, who hurried into the back room, her hands covered in blood.
Will was still poking at the wound, and Kate wanted to shout at him to stop. Didn’t he see that it was just making it worse?
“How’s he looking?” Danny asked.
“I’ve seen worse,” Will said.
“Jackson in Kabul?”
“Close second.”
“Well, at least Luke still has his legs.”
“Captain Optimism,” Will grunted.
“Someone’s gotta be. What about the shooters?”
“We’ll deal with them later.”
She reminded herself that Will and Danny were Rangers, that they were trained for this. Or something like this. Weren’t they?
Luke would be fine. He would live.
He had to.
She wasn’t sure what happened, or how, but she felt a slight bump on the back of her head and then everything went black.
*
When Kate opened her eyes, she saw spiders dangling from cobwebs along the blades of a fan on the ceiling, visible over Will’s right shoulder. She felt like crap, and trying to sit up sent stabbing pains through her body.
“Easy does it,” Will said and helped her up to a sitting position in the booth.
“What happened?”
“You keeled over backward and hit your head on the seat and somehow managed to knock yourself out.”
She looked over to the counter, but Luke wasn’t there anymore. Instead, there was a thick pool of blood where he had been lying. There was blood all over the countertop and on the floor. Like the leftovers of a gruesome crime scene.
Suddenly, the worst-case scenario washed over her. “Is Luke…?”
“He’s in one of the back rooms,” Will said. “We managed to stop the bleeding and patched him up as best we could. Good thing we found that animal clinic last week. The morphine and gauze tape came in handy.”
“He’s okay?” she asked, almost afraid to hear his response.
“I don’t know. He lost a lot of blood. We managed to get him stable, but… He’s lost a lot of blood, Kate.”
“I heard you tell Danny you’ve seen worse.”
“I have. But war wounds are different from getting shot by some dick with a hunting rifle on the road.”
“How is it different?”
“It just is.”
She felt faint again. Seeing her expression, he quickly handed her a bottle of water. She took a big gulp, somehow exhausted and wired at the same time.
“You did really good back there,” Will said. “You and Ted. You saved our lives.”
“Thanks.” She didn’t really feel all that heroic. She only recalled wasting two magazines by firing into the trees.
She looked around the empty diner.
“Ted’s on the roof,” Will said. “In case our friends decide to follow. I doubt they will. Guys who set up ambushes along country highways don’t usually have the balls to attack where you can see them. And Vera is in the back room with Carly, watching over Luke in case he wakes up or needs anything.”
“Where’s Danny?”
“He should be on his way back about now.”
“Back from where?”
“Up the road.”
“You mean back there? By himself?” She felt panic rising. “How could you let him go by himself, Will?”
“He’s safer by himself.” He looked amused. “Relax, he’s just doing a little recon. He’ll be fine. I’m more worried about you.”
“I’m just a little light-headed.” Standing up took a lot of effort, and she had to fight against her wobbling knees.
She wondered if he noticed. If he did, he didn’t say anything.
She looked out the window, at the road beyond the dirt parking lot and gas pumps. “How long has Danny been gone?”
“Kate, he’ll be fine. I just heard from him five minutes ago.”
“Five minutes ago?”
“Relax, Kate, this is what we do for a living, remember? Besides, he’s only supposed to make contact every five minutes.” Will glanced at his watch, then cocked his head, listening to something. “Speak of the devil.” He nodded to no one in particular, then clicked the PTT dangling from his Motorola radio. “Roger that. Get back here.”
“Was that Danny?” she asked.
“He’s on his way back now.”
“What did he
say? Did he find them?”
“He found where they were camping out in the woods. Looks like we might have hit one or more of them. They’re bleeding, leaving a pretty big trail to follow, too.”
“So what now?”
“We wait until Danny comes back. In the meantime, we have five hours until sundown. We need to get ready for tonight. We’re not moving from here for a while, not with Luke in his condition.”
She glanced toward the back of the diner, where Luke was…
“You should go see him,” Will said. “He’s sleeping, but he’s stable.”
“Tell me the truth. Is he going to live?” She didn’t look at him, because she was afraid she would see his eyes when he answered and she would know he was lying. She didn’t want to know.
“If he doesn’t bleed again in the night, yes,” Will said.
“And if he does?”
“He’s already lost a lot of blood. Right now, we’re at the mercy of his body. But he’s a young man, and they tend to heal fast.” He hesitated, before adding, “Truth is, we won’t know for sure until tomorrow morning if he’s going to live.”
They heard an engine approaching and looked out the windows to see Danny coming back on his ATV, kicking up a cloud of dirt and dust behind him as he entered the parking lot.
A few seconds later, Danny entered the diner. “Three, maybe four or five.”
“How many wounded?” Will asked.
“If it’s just one of them, then he’s a real bleeder.”
“What now?” Kate asked.
“Now, we get you guys ready to spend the night here,” Will said. His face darkened. “After that, Danny and I will go find whoever put a bullet through Luke and return the favor.”
“Good thing we have a lot of bullets to spare,” Danny said.
“Good,” Kate said somberly. “Make sure you kill them all.”
*
They chose the auto body shop next door. Or to be more precise, the garage. There were only two entrances in—the garage door itself and a door that led into the office. The garage door was made of heavy sheets of steel and it would take more than a dozen ghouls all night to break through with their bare hands. Kate remembered the last time she had found herself in a garage alone. The night of The Purge. Maybe this was a good sign. At least she wouldn’t be alone this time.