“I put it in my coat pocket.” She pulled the flashlight out and passed it to him.
He stifled a sigh as his big hand closed around the slender tube; it wasn’t much larger than a penlight. He couldn’t use it until they were safe, of course, but lights this size were basically made for a single task directly in front of the holder, not for helping them safely make their way across rough ground. Still, any light at all was better than none.
“All right, let’s slip out the back door and get away from here.”
Teague’s two-way crackled to life, a faint voice coming from the radio speaker.
“Hawk, this is Owl. Hawk, this is Owl.”
Owl
was Blake, manning the farthest firing position. Teague moved away from Goss and Toxtel, taking care to remain behind cover. Those people on the other side of the stream had rifles, and he hadn’t forgotten it for a minute. He had the volume on the two-way turned down because noise carried at night; he sure as hell didn’t want to pinpoint his position for some lucky shot. With a large outcropping of rock securely between him and the community, he thumbed the “talk” button to reply. “This is Hawk. Go ahead.”
“Hawk, that guy you had Billy follow? I’ve sort of kept an eye on him, just in case you needed to know where he was. He went in that two-story building, third on the right—”
That was the feed store, Teague thought, pulling up his mental layout of the place. The place closed at
, so what was Creed doing there? Not that it mattered; he was just curious. “Yeah, what about it?”
“He stayed just a few minutes; then he came out and walked down to this first house on the right. Never came out, at least not before you started the dance. I’ve been pretty busy since then, but I’ve still tried to keep a lookout for him and I haven’t seen anything move. I put a few rounds in the place, maybe I got him.”
“Maybe. Thanks for the info. Keep putting rounds into those houses, and anything you see moving.” Teague clipped the radio onto his belt again, then worked his way back to his position near Goss. Going prone on the ground for the most stable firing platform, he lifted his weapon and put the scope on the house in question.
Carefully he panned the infrared scope from left to right, looking for a telltale heat signature. The house itself glowed from its interior heat, making it more difficult to differentiate body heat—more difficult, but not impossible. Blake might be optimistic that he’d gotten a round in Creed, but Teague wasn’t of that opinion. Creed would have hit the floor before the shooting ever started, and immediately sought the most cover available.
At least one other person, maybe more, would be in the house. Teague had no idea who lived there, didn’t care. What mattered was that Creed would assess the situation and then pull back to a more secure location. He sure as hell wasn’t going to simply walk out the front door—so that meant he’d be going out the back.
Teague’s pulse jumped at the idea of being able to pick off Creed like a cherry on a tree. Of course, he might already have pulled an Elvis and left the building, but not that much time had elapsed, maybe ten minutes, and being Creed, he would have first organized the people inside the house. Teague chewed his lip, then made a decision and pulled out the radio, keyed his buddies’ radios. “This is Hawk. I’m moving to the right, trying to get into position to see behind this first house.” Keeping them apprised of his movement was a good idea, so one of them wouldn’t accidentally blow his head off.
He repeated the same information to Goss, who gave one sharp nod of the head before returning his attention to his post. Teague was sort of impressed by Goss, not because he’d done anything spectacular, but because he seemed to immediately grasp the why of anything Teague did.
Teague couldn’t move all that far to the right, maybe seventy yards or less, before the ground sharply dropped away to the river. This side of the road was nothing but treacherous boulders on a steep incline; if he put a foot wrong, he was risking a sprained ankle or knee at the least, and maybe a broken bone. Moss made the boulders slippery, and the going slow, plus he had to carry the rifle and take damned good care of the heavy scope mounted on it. He couldn’t use a flashlight without pinpointing his own position, which made the going even slower. With every passing minute, he was aware that Creed could be slipping away, but there was nothing he could do to hurry. Damn it, if Blake had just told him where Creed was before the bridge blew—
At last, when he put the rifle to his shoulder to check the angle, he could see the back of the house, or at least part of it. The angle wasn’t the best, but he’d gone about as far as he could go. He settled behind a boulder and rested the rifle barrel on the rock to steady it, put the scope on the house, and waited.
No shots had come from this location. Creed would have automatically noted where the rounds were being fired from, so if he wanted to eyeball the situation, the most logical position would be from the near back corner of the house. He might allow for the possibility that they’d have starlight scopes, but he wouldn’t expect infrared because it was so damned expensive, and not exactly convenient. He would be moving cautiously as he approached the corner…
An enormous heat signature burst out of the house, moving fast, then diving behind something and vanishing. Swearing under his breath, Teague tracked with the scope, trying to get the crosshairs settled, but he’d been caught off guard and if he fired now, he would essentially be firing blind—and alerting Creed to his position. He’d have to wait for a better shot.
Jesus, that heat signature had looked weird, like some huge spider. Still unsettled, Teague’s brain took another moment before it interpreted the signal his eyes had sent and translated it to
two
people, moving practically in lockstep, with the big one in back right against the smaller one in front. Four legs, four arms, extra-thick body: two people.
Right now he could have used a starlight instead of the infrared, so he could tell exactly what they’d dived behind. A car, maybe; made sense to park one there, close to the back door. No heat signature emanated from the black bulk that was all he could see, though, so if it was a car, it had been sitting there long enough for the engine to get cold. Too bad; the engine block of a car was damn good armor, certainly enough to stop any round they had.
But by holding his fire, he’d given Creed a false sense of security, Teague figured. Thinking they were unseen, Creed wouldn’t be as careful in his next movement. This time, Teague would be ready.
A sliver of light in the scope caught his attention; then it bobbed out of sight. Shit. What were they doing? Changing position maybe, shifting around and getting ready for another run. They wouldn’t be running back toward the house, and they wouldn’t be coming toward the bridge, so that left only two directions. Creed had someone with him, someone he was trying to protect—someone smaller. A woman? Logically he would be trying to put more cover, more walls, more distance, between them and the shooters, which meant he would be pulling back, toward the river.
Time passed—way too much time. What the fuck was Creed waiting for—Christmas? Teague checked the luminous dial of his watch and saw that thirty-four minutes had passed since Blake had radioed with the info about Creed, making it maybe forty-four, forty-five minutes since the bridge blew. The rifle shots now weren’t being fired at anyone, because all the inhabitants were either down, behind cover, or had withdrawn beyond the range of the scopes. The occasional shot now was meant to remind them to stay where they were. Maybe that was what Creed had decided to do.
No, the cover of the vehicle—Teague was almost certain that was what they were behind—was too restrictive, and offered no shelter from the cold, no food, no water. Creed would move, but he was a patient bastard, more patient than Teague would ever have guessed.
The minute hand on his watch clicked off another minute, then another, then another. Fifty minutes since the bridge blew. He could be just as patient, Teague thought—more patient, because he
knew
they were there.
Fifty-three minutes.
Yes. There! The heat signature filled his scope, clear and bright, both of them bent low and moving fast. He took a breath, let half of it out, and pulled the trigger just as the glowing figures disappeared.
A split second later, a flare of light brighter than any he’d seen appeared in the bottom half of his scope, and the boulder in front of him exploded in his face.
CREED HEARD THE CRACK OF THE RIFLE AND FELT A HARD blow to his left leg, just above his ankle, while he and Neenah were still literally in the air. The next split second there was a deep-throated
BOOM!
and they landed with a teeth-jarring thud on the ground behind the pump house, landed so hard he couldn’t keep his arms locked around her and the impact sent her rolling. His leg felt as if a giant had taken a hammer to it, and a harsh grunt of pain tore from his throat, past his gritted teeth. Instinctively he rolled, grabbing for his leg even though he dreaded what he would find. “Shit!
Fuck!
”
His pant leg was already sticky with blood, and he could feel the wet warmth pooling in his boot. He clamped his hand as hard as he could over the wound, mildly surprised his foot was still attached. He’d seen too many wounds from high-caliber weapons, seen arms and legs literally blasted away, and in that first moment of realization that he’d been hit, he was outraged but curiously resigned to the damage he expected to find. Even though his foot was still at the end of his leg and not lying several feet away, the damage could still be severe and what he’d find when he cut away his boot remained to be seen.
The boot was interfering with his ability to apply pressure to the wound; it needed to come off, fast.
Neenah crawled to him, her hands patting over his chest and shoulders. “Joshua? Are you all right? What happened?”
“Fucker tagged my left leg,” he ground out through the pain; then a whisper from his conscience managed to make itself heard. “Uh—sorry.”
“I’ve heard the word
fuck
before,” she said briskly. “I’ve said it a time or two myself. Where’s that flashlight?”
“In my right pocket.” He lay back on the ground and fished in his pocket, removing both the flashlight and his knife. “Cut my boot off so I can apply pressure.”
“I’ll do it.” They both jumped in shock as the third voice sounded behind them.
Creed’s right hand automatically reached for a weapon that wasn’t there; then a dark figure went down with a sodden plop on one knee beside him, spraying drops of water over them as he did. Creed’s subconscious pulled out that second shot he’d heard, the deep boom, and the pieces fell into place. “You sneaky son of a bitch, where were you?”
“In the edge of the stream,”
“Why didn’t the shooter see you?” Creed asked.
“I figure they have infrared instead of night vision; they lose their specific targets at about the effective range for infrared. So I got wet and cold.”
Thereby losing his heat signature, Creed thought. Shafts of white-hot pain stabbed through his leg as
“Not lucky,”
He glanced at his leg, and was genuinely surprised. He was bleeding like a son of a bitch, but the wound, while bad enough, didn’t look half as bad as he’d expected. “Must have ricocheted and shattered,” he said, meaning the bullet. He’d taken a partial instead of a full round.
“Probably.”
“Just wrap it up so we can get the hell out of here.”
Likely the bone had been fractured by the force of the bullet. Creed knew he wasn’t out of danger, because the bleeding still had to be stopped and there was the possibility of infection, problems from torn muscles, and so on; but overall, he wasn’t in bad shape compared with how bad he could have been. He’d seen men lose legs from being shot in the thigh. Hell, on reflection, he was feeling downright cheerful.
“What will we wrap it with?” Neenah asked, an edge of panic beginning to show in her tone. So far she’d held up admirably, but the bad guys were still out there and could be getting closer to them by the minute, he was hurt, and
Silently
“Best I can do right now,” he said, slipping back into what remained of his shirt.