A voice, one of the guards Hugh assumed, carried angrily, forcefully through the night, but Hugh couldn’t make out what was said. His wristphone gently vibrated, but he ignored it.
When the line of prisoners began fumbling at their pants and urinating on the fence, Hugh felt tension flow out of him. He didn’t know why he’d thought it was going to be a mass execution, but he had.
Turning his binoculars to the trucks, Hugh looked for any markings that might tell him who these people were, but he couldn’t find any.
More gruff words, and the prisoners began hurrying to finish and forming lines back into the trucks. One of the prisoners slipped off the tailgate and fell back to his knees. A guard cursed and slammed a rifle butt between the man’s shoulder blades, knocking him the rest of the way over. The cry of pain carried clearly through the night. When the man didn’t stand back up quickly enough, the guard kicked him in the ribs, sending him tumbling out of the way of the other prisoners.
Hugh’s wristphone vibrated again.
The guard’s voice was rough and his motions quick as another prisoner tried to intervene and got a rifle butt to the face for his trouble. Gesturing with his gun, the guard harried the others back on the truck. When they were all aboard, he turned back to the last two prisoners, the first of which had just gotten himself off the ground. The guard drew a pistol and Hugh’s night vision binoculars flashed white with too much light.
The report reached Hugh’s ears and the image returned just in time for Hugh to see the prisoner topple backward and lay still.
Hugh’s wristphone began vibrating wildly, but he ignored it. His heart was pounding even more violently. He’d never seen a man killed before. And that was in cold blood. Unprovoked. Without reason.
He didn’t know who these men were, but they certainly weren’t dino hunters or scavengers and, for all the terrible things he’d heard over the years, he didn’t think any prison guard or lawman would have done what he’d just seen. Not even out here in the Abandoned Lands.
Three other guards, coming running from around the sides of the trucks, guns ready at the sound of the shot, quickly converged on the shooter, who was shoving the remaining prisoner back into the truck. Angry and confused exclamations reached Hugh’s ears. The shooter put his pistol away and waved the others off, his replies too low to hear. One of the other guards, tensed with angry body language, stayed in the shooter’s face and angrily pointed back toward the body.
No, Hugh realized, he wasn’t pointing to the body. He was pointing to Hugh’s house.
Hugh lowered the binoculars from his eyes so he could look out over the whole area. He couldn’t see anything in the night, but his wristphone began vibrating in S.O.S code. He looked down at it.
DANGER: RESIDENTIAL BREACH DETECTED. GUNSHOT DETECTED. HOMICIDE SUSPECTED. MALICIOUS INTENT LIKELY. CALL FOR HELP?
Hugh tapped the screen to pull up the map and was shocked to see a red dot inside his trailer home. One of the men had invaded his home. He zoomed in until the dot looked like a man, and the man looked like he had a gun drawn and was going room to room, searching.
A sharp whistle caught Hugh’s attention and he looked back to the trucks. Unable to see them in the dark, he lifted the night vision binoculars up and was confused to find only a white screen. It only took a second for Hugh to realize someone had an infrared spotlight on him, but it was a second too long.
The bullet stuck his shoulder, knocking the binoculars from his hands and sending him falling back, sliding down the slick metal roof.
His right arm numb, Hugh desperately scrabbled with his left hand for something, anything to grab onto, but he kept sliding. A sudden, sharp blow to the back stopped him, snapping something on the rifle across his back and spinning him around at the top of the ladder, leaving him gasping as he caught the top rail and found himself hanging off the edge of the roof.
Running footsteps crunched gravel in the darkness, and Hugh knew he only had seconds until someone arrived.
He swung a foot until he found a ladder rung and then put his weight on it. When he tried to use his right hand, his arm moved, but it didn’t move right, didn’t have any strength, and he couldn’t control it. Using only his left, he went down the ladder two and three rungs at a time, heedless of the noise. His grip slipped and he fell the last six feet.
The footsteps were almost upon him.
Hugh sprinted deeper into the junkyard, away from the approaching footsteps, and into the darkness where he hoped their infrared spotlights didn’t reach. He dodged squat washing machines and pallets of alternators, running by memory more than actually being able to see, trying to figure out where to go, how to get away.
He couldn’t stay in the junkyard. Though he knew the layout, they had the advantage of numbers, time, and, in the dark, those infrared spotlights. Sooner or later, they would find him.
There were only two gates out of the junkyard, one near where the trucks had parked, and one on the other side of the yard, neither of which Hugh could reach without going back toward the men. That only left the fence. He would have to climb it and hope he could escape into the night before they realized where he’d gone.
Pressed up against an old shipping container he used for storing tools, he paused to tap his wristphone, pulled up the home app, and opened the garage door, hoping to buy a few minutes by making the men think he’d somehow gone in there.
CALL FOR HELP? flashed across the screen. HOMICIDE SUSPECTED. MALICIOUS INTENT LIKELY.
Hugh was tempted, but he had no idea who the AI would or even could call for help, and for all he knew, these men were supposed to be the new local help.
He closed the app and did his best to move silently and, he hoped, invisibly toward the fence, using the rattling sound of the opening garage door as cover. When the door silenced, Hugh could still hear people moving around, and some whispered voices somewhere behind him, but nothing sounded close.
Reaching the rows of stacked cars, he picked an aisle and headed down it, trying to make sure there were no straight lines of sight between him and where he thought the men were. He changed rows twice and then froze when his boot hit something, kicking it across the dirt with a scuffing sound.
He’d picked up all the loose odds and ends years ago, clearing the path so tires wouldn’t get punctured, so he was surprised to have kicked something in the dark. He leaned closer, trying to make it out. It was the binoculars he’d dropped from the convertible weeks ago.
They weren’t night vision, but they’d come in handy when he was trying to decide if it was safe to come back. He scooped them up with his good hand and hurried on.
The feeling was returning to his injured arm, and it hurt like hell. By the time he reached the fence, he was sure it wasn’t a major wound. The bullet seemed to have grazed him between his neck and his shoulder, which led him to believe whoever fired the bullet had been going for a headshot. But the wound was still enough to stop him from climbing the fence. He just couldn’t pull himself twelve feet up with only one arm.
Frustrated, hearing more voices and movement, he knew he had to get out. He was sure they’d figured out he wasn’t in the garage by now and were searching the junkyard. He was just as sure they’d kill him, if for no other reason than they knew he’d seen one of them kill a prisoner.
There weren’t any weak places in the fence to push through. He’d spent too much time fixing and patching it, which he now regretted for the first time. He would have to get over it somehow, and the only way other than climbing was to jump over from higher up.
He changed direction and headed for the ramps up to where he dumped the nipper bucket every morning. The wooden ramps creaked under his weight as he worked his way up, eyeballing the top of the fence in the dark as he got higher. He would have to jump out three feet and try to catch himself on it, and it would be a twelve-foot fall if he missed the fence, but he’d be over it and out into the night.