I will get back! he thought, and with that he launched himself, screamed “Preece” loud as he could and started to run.
“You know what’d happen to you in prison, puppy? Them old cons’d use you like a gal. You’d be a gal, in prison.”
Russ cowered at his feet, still in the rushing water, freezing, trapped.
“Please don’t hurt me,” he begged. It wasn’t The Wizard of Oz anymore. It was Deliverance.
“‘Please don’t hurt me,’” laughed Posey.
“I never did anything,” whimpered Russ.
“Damn, ain’t that the way it always happens?” said Posey, scrofulous and old, so rancid of odor that Russ could smell him even now.
“Bye, bye, Maryjane,” said Posey, lifting the shotgun. “Here comes both bar—”
An interesting thing happened. As he was speaking, the upper half of Posey’s head, that is, from the nose up, simply vaporized into a cloud of mist, as if it had been somehow squirted away by a giant atomizer. There was no sound, there was no agony or death spasm, it was simply that in a nanosecond a living man became a totally dead one, the instant rag doll, as Jed Posey imploded like one of those poetically rigged buildings where the explosives knock out all the weight-bearing girders and the thing dissolves downward into its own rubble.
So it was with Posey, who melted downward (“I’m melting,” Russ thought incongruously, returning to Oz), spun and in a second had fallen with such loose-limbed thunder that when his crownless skull hit the ground, it sent a spray of brain gobbets and plasma spattering into Russ’s face. It was raining brains!
Ycccch!
He bolted backwards and puked for several seconds.
Then he cowered in the water.
No way he was going anywhere.
Preece knew from Nam what it looks like on the green scope when you hit. He saw the exact second the shot hit the brain and blew it out, noted the instant of utter stillness that came across a body from which life has just been ripped. A white, glowing spume expelled from the stricken skull; the body fought the inevitable for a split second, then yielded to death and collapsed into the creek bed.
One down.
Bob?
Probably the boy.
At that moment came the call “Preece” from the other end of the creek bed and Preece cursed, recognizing Bob’s tone in it, and pivoted swiftly to track the man down. But Bob was outside of the field of fire of the hide—dammit!—and Preece lost a valuable second deciding what to do and another one or two in the actual doing of it; with a stout elbow, he punched aside the plastic roof of the hide and sat upright, dragging the rifle with him. It took still more seconds to reorient as his target now lurked in the range of forest and slope just beyond the hill.
He brought the rifle to his shoulder and the scope to his eye and through its lens began to scan. He pivoted back and forth, in and out, listening intently, waiting for the device to yield a treasure, for surely Bob was out there, running crazily outward, toward the crest of the next low ridge.
Damn! Nothing.
He blinked, wiped his eye, reset the rifle and began again to pivot, now cursing that he had active IR instead of ambient-light or passive IR technology, for it made him dependent on the range of the IR searchlight atop his scope. He looked for indicators: wavering bushes, crushed undergrowth, dust in the air, all of which might signify that the man had come through.
Then he had him. Bob was zigzagging toward the crest, near it, but Preece had him, could see him, nearly two hundred yards out and at the ragged edge of the black light’s ability to illuminate. He laid the crosshairs on the man, waited to take the tremble out of the sight picture until the reticle sat perfectly astride the shoulder blades and pressed the trigger.
Bob ran like a crazed man, zigging this way and that, trending north toward the crest of a ridge. He ran blindly through the dark trees, beyond caring what came at him. Branches cut his face, slashed at his arms, snarly roots tried to bring him down, sending him spinning at one point nearly out of control. He ran in darkness, and all his wounds screamed at him. He ran in fear, and all his doubts began to yell at him.
He could not will his imagination to cease: he saw it, a man in a ghillie suit with a big, silenced rifle, superbly accurate, drawing a bead, taking the slack out of the trigger, sending a bullet through him. The sniper sniping the sniper. Something enraged him about this: he was the man on that end of the rifle, and now he was the man being sniped.
Oxygen debt clawed at him; shrapnel from an old wound seemed to have worked its way free; loose glass ground and clicked in his stomach.
He could see the crest line just a few yards ahead but the trees thinned and he hated his nakedness, his gunlessness, his terrible vulnerability. Just a little bit more and yet as he moved from the trees to the open area just at the crest, the huge weight of intuition clamped down on him.
If Preece was going to shoot, this is when he’d do it.
Involuntarily, Bob went to the earth.
Sonic booms filled the air. The sound clapped loud and when the rounds struck the ground, they yanked up huge gouts of dirt and he could hear the whine of ricochets spiraling away.
He’s shooting, goddamn him, thought Bob, low to the ground and squirming desperately through the vegetation.
He crawled like a madman, for surely Preece would be scoping the area where he had to be.
Preece couldn’t see him, but he could feel him.
Recon by fire.
Every three or four seconds, Preece put out a probing round. There was the close-by crack! and the earth suddenly erupted as a bullet tore into it.
Bob found cover behind a tree which might stop a bullet or might not. He crawled to his feet.
CRACKkkk.
A bullet struck nearby, filling the air with dust.
Behind him: CRACK. Another one.
Bob stood behind the tree, as still as he could hold himself.
WHACCCCKKKK
Preece put a bullet into the tree; it exited an inch in front of Bob’s face, spewing slivers of wood and bark as it blasted outward. He blinked blood away and saw lights flash as his optic nerves fired off. A tongue of pain licked through his brain.
Oh, Christ, Bob thought. He’s seen me.
He stood very still.
Would the sniper fire again? If he fired again, the bullet would go through the tree and hit him. Would it have enough velocity to kill him?
Nothing could be done.
You just stood there, your ass on the line. If he fired again into the tree, the bullet would hit Bob and, yes, would kill him.
Please, he prayed. Get me out of here.
WHACCCCCKKKKK!
Another round tore through the tree; something stung Bob in the arm and made him flinch furiously. The bullet had torn through the dead center of the tree but, as bullets will by the alchemy of velocity, terminal energy, rotation and target density, had somehow deviated off the true and deflected enough to tear a furrow in an arm. It must have missed his body by a half an inch.
Would he shoot again?
Run, he told himself. Run like hell, get away from here.
But he knew if he ran he was dead.
CRACKkkk.
A bullet tore into the ground ten yards behind him.
The sniper fired again, farther away still. He was probing another area.
Bob heard a last shot, maybe thirty yards away.
How big was the cone of his light? Maybe not that big. Without willing it, he broke for the crest.