“I have to say, for never having done this before, I’m pretty amazing at it.”
He breathed out a laugh and glanced down at where he thought his leg had once been, only to be shocked when he saw that it was in fact still there—and functional, given the jerking it was doing at his reaction.
“Hold still!” Alice hissed. “How many times do I have to tell you that you have to be still or this is going to hurt even worse?”
She brought her hand firmly down on the bandage he could now see around his thigh, and he hissed back at the shock of pain that went through his leg. Leg still attached, check. All nerves working, check.
“What exactly did you do to my leg?” he asked, teeth clenched.
She heaved out a sigh. “The bullet went through clean, so you were lucky in that regard. There was a lot of blood but I didn’t have to dig anything out. I’ve just bathed the wound in disinfectant and wrapped it. It’s not pretty, but it’ll hopefully keep it from getting infected, for right now at least.”
He gaped at her, thanking whoever had been watching over him that she was the one who had found him. He’d known that she was good with emergency situations and she’d certainly been there to handle medical emergencies before, but right now she actually sounded like she knew what she was talking about.
“Thank God you found me,” he said numbly. “I think I—”
“You were going to die,” she said bluntly. “There’s no doubt about it. You’ve got some cracked ribs and a broken nose, but there’s not a great deal we can do about that.” She gave him the ghost of a grin. “It might heal a little bit crooked, but it’ll give you that swaggering air of mystery. Men can get away with that sort of thing.” A roll of the eyes.
Then she moved closer to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Are you awake enough to talk about the things that matter?”
He closed his eyes, checked in with his body about whether or not he was ready for that, and then opened his eyes and nodded. “I don’t have the luxury of saying no,” he said quickly. “And I don’t think we have the luxury of time, either.”
“We definitely don’t,” she confirmed. “I brought you up here and left you asleep, then went out to do some recon while you were resting. I count ten of the bikers from Helen Falls among the dead. Kraken isn’t one of them. The rest are missing. God knows where they’ve gone. I don’t know if they left town or if they’re still here, waiting. I’m hoping they fled into the desert when it looked like they were going to lose the battle. Maybe they just ran out of ammunition. If they did, if they left, they went without water or supplies. If they can’t find their way back to Helen Falls, they’ll be dead in a day.”
Right. Well that was a lot to take in that quickly, but it didn’t answer the question that had been weighing on his heart since he woke up.
“And our people?” he asked.
“Ten dead,” Alice said without hesitation. “The rest are gone. Into the desert with them as well. They came with me to find you, and I sent them away as soon as I saw how badly you were hurt. I knew we couldn’t go with them.”
“But they know where to find the cave?” he asked hopefully.
Alice nodded. “They do, and they took what supplies they could carry with them. Again, with luck, they’ll find the cave and be able to rest up for a day, maybe two. Then… Well…”
“We’ll hope they find a new town,” he said firmly. “A place where they’ll be looked after. I don’t want them coming back here. Not with the gang still on the loose.”
She met his gaze, seeming to know exactly how much it cost him to say that he didn’t want to see the Trinity Ranch townsfolk trickling back into town, and nodded slowly.
“We hope they find another home,” she answered simply. “You’re right, of course. It will be better for them if they can carry on somewhere less dangerous. And what about us? Did you have backup plans for two people getting stuck in a town that might still come under fire from a rogue gang of bikers with bad attitudes?”
He almost smiled at her words, but the truth was that he hadn’t thought about that. The extent of his planning had been to hope that he could act as a decoy long enough for the townspeople to escape—or that he could kill Kraken and bring the battle to an end before the townspeople had to leave at all. As it turned out, he’d failed at both of those goals.
“If our friends took supplies and water with them, it means we have very little left here for ourselves,” he said, thinking through it as he spoke. “We can’t stay here either. It’s just as unsafe for us as it was for them. We have some weapons and ammo, but that won’t last long.”
He sat up, groaning at the pain that came with the movement, and Alice moved to support him. He waved her off.
“I don’t have time to lean on you,” he said. “Believe me, it’s not that I don’t appreciate it. But I have to get used to the pain. I have to find a way to deal with it and move forward. You babying me isn’t going to help me do that.”
She reared back, offended. “And what in the world made you think I would ever baby you?” she asked. “I just want you out of bed sooner so that we can get moving. And if I have to encourage you to get up, I mean to do it.”
He looked at the sheets around his leg and laughed bitterly. Knowing Alice, she would shove him out of bed and tell him to get moving. Even when it looked like most of his blood was soaking into the sheets of what had been his bed.
“Why are you laughing?” she asked sharply. “Do you think I’m kidding? Do you think this is a funny situation? Have you actually gone insane with the blood loss?”
He gestured at his leg. “Just the fact that this would have been a serious wound six months ago—one that kept me in bed for weeks, no doubt. Now it’s just a flesh wound. Only enough to allow me to rest for an hour or so before you’re threatening to push me out of bed.”
“We have to leave before the bikers come back,” she told him flatly.
He gave her a look, hoping she realized how ridiculous she was being. Of course he realized that they had to go. That didn’t mean it was going to be easy.
“I’m not positive I’ll be any good on my feet,” he admitted. “I can barely feel my leg, and walking is going to be difficult. I don’t even want to consider running.”
She pressed her lips together, thinking. “Doesn’t mean we can stay,” she finally said. “It’s too dangerous. And we need to be far enough from town that they can’t find us, if they decide to come back. There are a couple of old motorcycles by the school—bikes that some of them rode in on. Maybe we can take one of them.”
“What happened to the men who rode in on them?” Garrett asked, trying to find any holes in the plan.
“Dead,” she said succinctly.
“Well then,” he answered, swinging his legs out of bed and wincing again at the pain. “Help me up and let’s get going. I want to be out of this town as quickly as possible.”
Alice helped him get into a new pair of trousers—after he noticed with embarrassment that he’d been in bed in nothing but his boxers—and threw one of his T-shirts over his head. Then she started shoving the rest of his things into his backpack. He noticed that she already had a bag sitting next to the door to the room.
“Already packed?” he asked.
“One of the first things I did when I figured out the gang had left town,” she said as she continued to shove things into his bag. “I figured we would want to get out of here as quickly as we could. And between you and me, I won’t be at all sorry to see Trinity Ranch in our rearview mirrors. This place feels like it’s been nothing but trouble since we got here.”
Garrett nodded. In many ways, she was right. In many others, this town had saved their lives. But with the gang from Helen Falls invading, he agreed with her—they needed to get out of here, as quickly as they could. Hopefully without attracting any attention.
“I think we can safely assume that the Helen Falls crew is currently involved in their own dramas,” he sai
d, skipping right to that last point. “If they’ve gone out into the desert, they’re worrying more about their own survival than whether they left anyone alive. Let’s stop by the schoolhouse to see how much we can take in terms of water and food, and then get the hell out of here. I vote we favor speed over stealth.”
Alice shoved the last of his clothing into the bag, followed that up with the three guns he’d collected, and then poured the clips into the front pocket before she looked up at him. “I second that vote. Let’s go.” She threw the bag over her shoulder and picked up the one she’d had sitting by the door, then held her arm out to him. “Lean on me as much as you need to. We just have to get to the schoolhouse and we’ll get you onto a vehicle that can take your weight.”
He nodded and leaned into her arm, thankful for the support. He didn’t even stop to ask whether she could handle it. He already knew she could.
They half-hopped, half-fell down the stairs to the front door, but Alice paused before she opened it.
“Be prepared,” she told him. “It’s not pretty out there. You’re going to see some things that you’ll wish you hadn’t had to see. I have things in my head that I very much wish I didn’t have to remember.”
He frowned, but nodded without answering, and she threw open the door.
The first thing he saw was Kristy lying by the fence around his house. She was dead, her eyes staring blankly into the distance, and Garrett knew that her child would have died almost immediately as well. His heart broke into a million pieces as he thought of what Shane would be going through, but Alice hustled him past her body before he could ask any questions.
From there, he saw Alan and Scott, along with Greyson and Ben, their bodies having been dragged into the street by someone for some unknown reason. Garrett’s gaze rested on Greyson and Ben, two of the only men in town who had truly trusted him.
If those men had been at home in their beds, armed with their guns, would this have turned out differently? If he’d been able to count on them in the battle itself, would they have managed to save their people?
“Not likely,” he said, realizing only later that he’d said it out loud.
“What?” Alice asked, hopping a bit to readjust his weight as they passed Greyson’s body.
“It’s not likely that they would have helped,” he said, gesturing to his two friends with his chin. “Even if they’d been in town and armed, we were outnumbered.”
Alice turned him up one of the smaller alleys—a shortcut to the schoolhouse, he thought with relief. He wasn’t even sure he could make it along the shortcut, honestly. The fire in his leg was now an inferno, and he was out of breath with trying to breathe only through his mouth, to avoid the scent of death around them.
“You know, when I saw them, I thought maybe we should stay and try to bury them…” Alice said, giving in to an emotionality that he rarely heard from her.
But Garrett shook his head. It didn’t matter if it made Alice emotional. It didn’t matter if everything in his heart cried out to do just that, to save these people from that one last terrible fate of sleeping forever in the street. It was a terrible idea.
“Too risky,” he told her. “We have to get out of here or we’re going to end up joining them. And I don’t know about you, but dying isn’t on my list of things to do today.”
“We definitely agree on that point,” she said.
They turned onto Ash and went for several blocks without speaking, each of them breathing heavily and hopping along as best they could. Then, in what felt like both an eon and thirty seconds, they were traveling up the alleyway and coming out in the square outside of the schoolhouse.
Steve was there on the ground, spread-eagled and quite dead, and just around the side of the building Garrett could see Lance where he’d fallen.
And there, leaning up against the schoolhouse itself, were several old motorcycles. The kind you had to jump-start on your own. None of that fancy electrical wiring in the starters.
“Perfect,” Garrett breathed.
“I guess they must have had a couple that we didn’t get to,” Alice muttered. “Thank God.”
They made their way to one of the bikes, and Alice was just working on strapping their bags to the back of it when she suddenly froze. Garrett looked at her, wondering what was wrong, and saw her staring past him, her large, dark eyes glazed with shock.
Then he felt the nose of a gun against the base of his skull.
“Turn around. Slowly,” a voice growled in his ear. “And don’t try anything or you’re going to be meeting your maker a lot quicker than you thought you would.”
Chapter 13
Garrett gulped, straightened his shoulders—in preparation for what he assumed was about to happen—and turned slowly toward the gun.
He wasn’t surprised when he saw Jack “Kraken” Nugent on the other end of the weapon, his face twisted into something that looked like a combination between a grimace and a grin, half angry and half victorious.
“Kraken,” Garrett said quietly.
“Garrett,” the other man growled, his lips twisting. He moved the gun slightly and pressed it into Garrett’s neck. “Don’t even think of yelling, boy, because there’s no one here to help you, and even if there was, they wouldn’t do you one lick of good. You’re out in the open, unarmed, and wounded to boot. And I’ll tell you what, I gave you a chance before. Thought you’d do the right thing. Thought you’d do the smart thing. But it turns out you’re not smart at all, are you? Turns out you just want to make things difficult on yourself. Well, the time for negotiating is done. This time, we’re playing for keeps.”
Garrett didn’t answer immediately. He certainly wasn’t going to tell Kraken that they were absolutely armed—with multiple guns, though some of them were in the bag that was now strapped to the motorcycle. He had his gun in his pocket, though, and he was willing to bet good money that Alice was packing some sort of artillery as well. It didn’t seem like information Kraken really needed, though—and it certainly wasn’t something that would help them get out of this situation. Instead, he put his hands up, gesturing that he was going to cooperate, and dropped his eyes a bit.
That was when he realized that he wasn’t the only one who had been shot. Kraken had been hit as well—and his wound was significantly worse than Garrett’s. A gaping hole in his belly was oozing blood, the crimson fluid flowing out and soaking his clothes.
Given the look in Kraken’s eye, though, he was ignorant of the wound. Garrett wondered for a moment what sort of drug cocktail the man was on, and whether it was actually keeping him from feeling any pain at all, but quickly put the thought away. Kraken’s mental state—and his drug choice—wasn’t going to be important for much longer. He couldn’t will himself into living without blood.
If they could keep him talking for long enough, keep themselves alive for long enough, he should just drop dead of the wound he already had.
Of course that meant Garrett had to keep his mouth shut. Keep from getting himself—and Alice—shot.
Kraken laughed, evidently having watched the thoughts rushing across Garrett’s face, but then guessed completely wrong at what Garrett might have been considering.
“I see you’re worrying about your girlfriend,” he snarled.
Garrett cringed, knowing that the statement meant his eyes had instinctively shifted toward Alice the moment before. Stupid, he told himself angrily. The last thing you do is look at the person you’re thinking about protecting!
“Don’t worry,” Kraken continued with a smile. “I’ll take care of her when you’re gone. Once you’re out of the way, there won’t be anyone to stop me. Figure I can have my cake and then eat it, too.”
He leered at Alice, his expression doing little to hide exactly what he meant by that last statement, and Garrett flexed his hands, shouting silently at himself to stand still, to wait it out. No matter what Kraken said right now, it was going to come to nothing—and going after the man for what we
re mere words and thoughts would get both of them shot. Stand still, he told himself over and over again. A few more minutes and surely the man would be dead on the ground.
If Alice didn’t kill him first.
Garrett almost laughed at the thought. Because if he was angry, she had to be absolutely boiling up over the implication that she wasn’t able to take care of herself—or shouldn’t have a choice in who she allowed to touch her.
Suddenly Kraken cringed and put his hand to his belly, seeming surprised when it came away covered with blood. The gun wavered as he stared in horror at his hand and then his wound, and in that moment, Garrett saw his chance. He shoved himself forward, grabbing for the gun and yanking it from Kraken’s hand, and in the ensuing scuffle the gun went off.
Behind him, Alice yelped.
Horrified, Garrett glanced back, sure that she’d been hit—that his own recklessness had resulted in her death. A split second later, his world disappeared into a field of stars, someone’s fist connecting solidly with his jaw.
He went to his knees, his ears ringing and his vision coming back in patches and mist, and before he could shake his head to try to retrieve his senses someone was flying at him, landing on top of him and trying to wrestle the gun back.
His clearing vision told him that it was Kraken on top of him, his long, greasy hair having come out of its ponytail and flying around as he thrashed on top of Garrett, grunting in what Garrett thought must be both pain and effort. Garrett reached further upward with the hand that held the gun, trying to keep it away from the other man. But Kraken had slightly longer arms than he did, and it was only moments before he’d wrapped his own fingers around Garrett’s and started trying to pry the gun from his fingers.
Desperate, Garrett yanked the gun down toward his body, catching Kraken by surprise with the sudden movement. The other man was thrown off balance and fell to the side, howling in pain at the abrupt change of position. Garrett jumped to his feet, the gun in front of him, the nose aimed squarely at Kraken’s forehead.
At Any Cost (Book 3): Bleak Horizons Page 9