At Any Cost (Book 3): Bleak Horizons

by Fawkes, K. M.

  Kraken took a few seconds to figure out what had happened, and then his gaze settled on Garrett’s—and then on the nose of the gun pointed at him. Garrett saw the realization of his new position register clearly in Kraken’s expression, and he knew what was coming before the biker even opened his mouth.

  “Please, man,” Kraken whined. “It wasn’t personal, was it? We’re just two people out here trying to survive, two people competing for the same things! Can’t blame a man for wanting to live, can you? Can’t blame him for wanting to take care of his gang. I never blamed you for it! Never would have—”

  Garrett pulled the trigger and put a bullet into Kraken’s head, silencing the man, then slid the gun back into his belt. It wasn’t what he’d wanted to do, but he’d given mercy before, and had seen it used against him.

  This time, he wasn’t going to give another man the chance to hurt him or his friends.

  He cast one more glance at Kraken, lying dead on the ground, and then turned on his heel and went to his knees next to Alice.

  Chapter 14

  “Alice, are you dead?” he asked, ducking down to get close to her face. A quick glance at her chest showed him that she was still breathing, but he could also see that her eyes were closed, her face still.

  He ran his gaze over her body, trying to see where she’d been hit, what had happened to her. He couldn’t see anything, but he was certain she’d cried out, and he knew she’d gone to the ground right after the gun had gone off. There was no other explanation but that she’d been shot. The only question was where—and how much damage had been done.

  Then he heard a breath that could have been a laugh, and he glanced from her body up to her face. He found her eyes wide open, a crooked smile on her face.

  “Just a flesh wound,” she joked. “Nothing serious. But you should see the look on your face right now! I’ve never seen you so concerned about anything!”

  Garrett stared at her, unable to summon enough emotion to return the laugh.

  “Where were you hit?” he asked numbly, his emotions having deserted him.

  She propped herself up on her elbows and pointed to her right leg. “Nearly the same place you were, actually. Right in the thigh. Outside.”

  He moved to the area she’d pointed out and quickly found what she was talking about. Her jeans were ripped along the outside of her leg and were now coated in blood.

  Standing, Garrett moved quickly to the bags strapped to the motorcycle, unzipped his, and pulled out a T-shirt, a length of gauze, and a roll of tape. He dropped down next to Alice again, well aware that he should be feeling something—anger, relief, concern—but unable to gather himself enough to get any sort of feeling out of his brain. Instead, all he felt was an empty hollowness. A numbness, as if he’d just taken too many shots of tequila and was still breathless with the taste.

  What the hell was wrong with him?

  He used his T-shirt to clean the area around the wound, enough to be able to see it clearly, and ducked down to get a better look before the bleeding obscured it again. Just a scratch, he thought. The bullet looked like it had just grazed her skin.

  “It didn’t enter your leg,” he told her quietly. “Looks like it just grazed you, barely broke the skin at all. Lucky,” he finished tonelessly. “It could have been so much worse. And it would have been my fault. I wasn’t being careful enough. Completely forgot that I needed to look out for you too.”

  She put a hand on his arm and squeezed it until he grew still in response and finally met her eyes.

  “It wasn’t your fault, Garrett, and you can stop saying that right this second,” she told him firmly. “And as you can see, I’m not hurt badly. It’s barely even a flesh wound.”

  She gave him another slight grin, inviting him to see the joke, but he just shook his head and went back to tending her wound. She might say that it wasn’t a big deal. That didn’t make her right. And it didn’t make him blameless in the situation.

  He refused to think any more deeply about the situation than that. Yes, he should be feeling something, and this numbness was strange, and most definitely unlike him. He had also just killed a man in cold blood, while that man was begging for his life. There were a number of things he should be feeling right now—concern, remorse, and regret at the top of the list. But he didn’t want to think about the reason for it. Didn’t want to think about the possible implications.

  Instead, he put the gauze gently against the wound and then started winding the tape around it, moving carefully around Alice’s leg again and again until he felt the bandage was secure enough.

  Once he was finished, he looked up at her, meeting her concerned gaze with a frown of his own.

  “Let’s get into the schoolhouse, get as much as we can carry, and get the hell out of here,” he said. “I don’t think any of the other bikers will try anything now that Kraken is dead. If they’re even still alive themselves. But we can’t guarantee that, and I don’t want to be out here like sitting ducks.”

  Alice just nodded, and Garrett pulled her to a standing position, bracing himself against the pain in his own leg in order to get her to her feet. They leaned against each other like a couple of drunks as they moved toward the door into the basement of the schoolhouse, taking turns listing the things they needed to try to find.

  When they got the door open and made their way into the storeroom, Garrett realized that they shouldn’t have been so concerned about picking and choosing what they had to take and what they could afford to leave behind. He’d known that most of the supplies were on the truck when Cora and John took it. He hadn’t been in charge of bringing the rest of the supplies back to the storeroom, though, and hadn’t quite realized how little they’d been left with. They’d had ten crates left to pack into the truck, and whoever had brought them back here had consolidated those into only five. Going quickly through them, Garrett and Alice found a number of protein bars, a packet of beef jerky, one container of iced tea, and three one-gallon jugs of water.

  “My God, this is all we had left?” he breathed, shocked.

  Alice sat back on her heels, her face wearing an expression that must have matched his.

  “This is all the rest of the townspeople left us,” she corrected him. “I told them to grab as much as they could carry before they left for the cave. It looks like they carried a lot more than I’d anticipated, though. This will barely get us through a day.”

  Garrett nodded, speechless for a moment, then straightened his shoulders. “I guess that gives us a day to figure out where else we can go—and where we can find more food and water,” he said firmly. “That’s not a lot of travel time. Stuff this into a bag while I get some fuel, and let’s get out of here.”

  He left her to it, moving quickly to the side of the room where they’d kept the fuel, and was gratified to see several full gas cans still sitting there. They hadn’t had much in the way of food or water, but they’d had plenty of fuel, thanks to the tanker he and the rest of the group had stolen from the bikers—and then refused to return. Now that fuel just might save their lives.

  Alice and Garrett climbed up out of the basement for the last time, their arms loaded down with supplies, and then did what they could to secure everything to the bike. It was going to be a tight squeeze, the back of the bike almost completely taken up with bags, but Garrett knew they’d make it work. After all, their lives depended on it.

  Chapter 15

  “What’s the plan?” Alice shouted over her shoulder as they tore out of town on the motorcycle, dust flying up behind them.

  Garrett wrapped his arms more firmly around her middle, trying not to think about how close they were, and bit his lip. They’d agreed that Alice would drive, as her wound was less serious, and less painful than his. Smaller chance of something suddenly hurting her and sending her focus off, and the two of them shooting into the sand or a ditch. But that was the furthest they’d gone in terms of discussions.

  In short, they had yet
to come up with any sort of plan in terms of where they were going. They knew they only had a day’s worth of supplies. They knew they had to get to another town before the end of the day, and that they needed that town to have either a friendly population or abandoned homes that they could raid. They were in a precarious position. But at least they had some supplies, and transportation.

  It was more than could be said for the rest of the people from Trinity Ranch.

  “We look for our friends,” he shouted back. “If we can find them, we can try to lead them to someplace where they’ll be safe.”

  He knew it was the right suggestion when Alice didn’t even argue. She just nodded and turned the bike to the right, to skim along the outside of town.

  “They left from right behind the schoolhouse, so we might be able to follow their tracks,” she shouted back at him in explanation.

  He gulped. Would tracking them be that easy? And if it was, did that mean the bikers from Helen Falls might have used the same tactic to find them, trap them, and rob them of their goods?

  Ten minutes later they were at the point where the desert reached up to the road that led away from the schoolhouse and into the wilderness, and Alice and Garrett were climbing off the bike and putting their noses toward the ground like bloodhounds.

  They moved through the rocky area, desperately looking for anything that might be a shoe print or stack of rocks that had been kicked over—anything that indicated human presence. Garrett focused on the ground, but also kept his eyes on the barrel cacti in the area, looking for scraps of clothing that indicated someone had walked too close to a cactus. The two of them circled the area for fifteen minutes, calling out to each other every so often when they found something that looked promising, but eventually they stopped walking and simply looked at each other.

  “I don’t think any of this means anything,” Alice said quietly.

  “I agree,” Garrett replied. “Definitely nothing we could reliably follow. Let’s head for the cave. If they followed directions, maybe we’ll find them there.”

  “It’s already long past time when they should have left the cave,” she countered. “If they followed directions.”

  Garrett stopped himself from pointing out that any footprints they’d found would have most likely led right to the cave, and shrugged. “Maybe they only followed some of the directions. Or maybe we’ll find their trail there and be able to tell where they’ve gone. There was more sand in that area. Better for making footprints.”

  Alice nodded and went back to the motorcycle without answering, Garrett two steps behind her. He climbed back onto the bike, cringing when his wound connected with one of the bags, and settled himself into what was left of his seat, making as much room as he could for Alice in front of him. She was a small woman, but this was still a tight squeeze, and he wondered momentarily if they should have taken two of the bikes instead of just the one.

  Only to have him crash one of them when he hit a bump in the road and hurt himself, he knew. It would have endangered his life, and potentially hers as well. No, better that they were on one bike—regardless of how uncomfortable it was.

  He sat back and tried to push the bags backward, then looped his arms around her middle, and she hit the gas, sending them shooting forward into the desert.

  Their friends weren’t at the cave, either, though they did finally see signs of them there: the wrapper from a candy bar, blood against one of the walls. The cave was awash with footprints and the smell of people, and Garrett breathed out a small sigh of relief at it. If nothing else, then, they’d made it this far. Or at least some of them had. If they’d stayed together, then it should have been the entire group. What was left of them, in any case. Where they’d gone from here…

  He and Alice moved quickly from the interior of the cave to the group of cacti that sat above the entrance.

  “Do you see anything that looks likely?” Alice asked, walking back and forth, her gaze on the ground.

  Garrett was standing still, using only his eyes and storing up what energy he had, but he shook his head. There was nothing there.

  “It’s just as sandy as I remember, but they could have moved on hours ago,” he said quietly. “The wind will have erased any trail they left.”

  Alice looked up at him, and he could see the knowledge in her eyes. The more time passed, the less likely they were to find their friends—and they were even less likely to know what might have happened to them. With luck, the group would have moved on to a town and found shelter there. It was what he’d hoped they would do, and what he would tell himself had happened. But she wasn’t willing to let it go yet. Truthfully, neither was he.

  “Concentric circles?” she asked. “At least for a little while?”

  He nodded. “Concentric circles. But only for an hour or so. We might come across them, or we might find someone who’s been separated from the group and needs help. But—”

  “I know,” she interrupted.

  Right. He didn’t have to tell her that they couldn’t search for much longer. They had limited supplies—only enough for the day—and though fuel had been plentiful back in Trinity Ranch, they’d only taken as much as they could carry. Wasting it all searching for the people of their community would be incredibly stupid, no matter how much their hearts were crying out to locate and potentially save their friends. They had to save enough to get themselves… well, someplace.

  They managed to get back on the motorcycle in record time despite the complication of the bags, having done it enough times to have come up with a process now. Seconds later they were shooting through the desert again, the cacti flying past, sand streaming up behind them in a dust-filled cloud.

  Garrett swept his gaze to the left and to the right again and again as he looked desperately for any survivors, leaving the directions to Alice, who seemed to have some sort of compass built into her conscious mind. A part of his brain warned him that any survivors they found might belong to the Helen Falls gang, and that they should be more careful about how much noise they were making, but the larger part of him knew that they couldn’t stop searching. Not until they were forced to. Yes, his group had been given specific instructions. Yes, they’d had food, water, and weapons, and yes they’d been in a large enough group that they should have found safety in numbers.

  But he was their leader, and he’d never taken that responsibility lightly. Never stopped worrying about them or what might happen to them. And he wasn’t going to give up on reuniting with them until they’d exhausted all their options.

  The problem was, there was nothing out there. He and Alice stopped time after time for a drink of water and a bite of protein bar, and to give Garrett’s wound a break from the constant bouncing of the motorcycle. Between those stops they drove relentlessly, Alice’s eyes on the road ahead of them, Garrett’s on the desert around them. Garrett trusted that they were indeed traveling in larger and larger circles around Trinity Ranch, and he could tell by the position of the sun that the day was progressing quickly. More quickly than he would have liked.

  When they finished the water in the last jug, he met Alice’s gaze with grim acceptance. They were out of supplies, and out of time.

  “I guess that’s our expiration date on this search,” Alice said quietly.

  “It is,” he agreed. “It breaks my heart, but I don’t see what we can do about it. We have to get out of here and find a place where we can get food, water, and shelter. We’re not going to be able to do anyone else any good if we die of thirst out here in the desert. How much gas do we have left?”

  Alice leaned over and checked the gauge on the bike. “Half a tank left in the bike itself, plus one five-gallon tank in the back,” she answered.

  Garrett stared into the distance, trying to force his brain to do the math and figure out how far that would take them. Then he frowned. Something about this area…

  “Alice, how far have we traveled from Trinity Ranch?” he asked.

  She
laughed. “It wouldn’t surprise me if we’d come hundreds of miles at this point,” she answered. “It’s hard to tell when we haven’t been moving in a straight line. Why?”

  He bit his lip, trying to realign his current reality with a memory from over four months ago. He squinted, seeing if that would help, and suddenly it did. It was as if two identical pictures had just finished their transition into a perfectly overlapped position, and he could see that they did, indeed, match each other.

  “Because I recognize that patch of cacti right there,” he said, pointing. “Which means I know where we are. And I know how to find shelter. And plenty of water, and plenty of food. I would never have imagined…” He trailed off, too shocked to continue, and paused again. Could it be that he was actually wrong? After all, groups of cacti…

  But no, when he looked to the left he could distinctly see the long, sweeping driveway running up to the succulents. And that could not be a mere coincidence. There just weren’t that many driveways in this part of the world.

  He pointed her in the direction they needed to go. Maybe another five hundred feet or so and they’d be in the midst of the stand of cacti. The vegetation he’d spent so much time looking at from the front step of the old silo he’d been converting, back before everything went straight to hell in a handbasket. He knew what he’d left in the silo, and though there wouldn’t be electricity there, he knew there would still be food and water. And most importantly, shelter.

  Which meant that once again, he would have safety here in his silo… and the people he cared about didn’t.

  He shoved the thought out of his mind. He couldn’t do anything to help them if he didn’t know where they were. But he could help Alice. And for right now, for tonight, that had to be enough.

  Chapter 16