They made their way across the small clearing. The branches were thick at the sides. John pushed his way through. He could see a path of broken branches, where the other guys had pushed their own way through.
“We can follow their trail pretty easily,” said John. “It goes without saying that we’ve got to be careful.”
“They don’t have guns, though. We’ve got the advantage.”
“They have guns now. Remember? They’ll have had time to go through Derek and Sara’s packs. Guns and ammo. That’s what they’re going to have.”
“Shit.”
John shrugged. “Fortunately, I bet we’re better shots than they are at this point.”
“They’re criminals. Don’t you think they know how to use a gun?”
“Probably, yeah. But they’re probably bad shots.”
“That’s not enough to risk our lives on.”
“Yeah, but that’s what the breaks are. The other option is leaving Derek and Sara to their own fate.”
Cynthia seemed to consider it for a moment.
“I guess we can’t,” she said finally.
“Nope.”
The going was hard. Even with the path having been blazed, so to speak, ahead of them, it was a real slog. The underbrush was thick and their boots sank into ground. Instead of being firm, the earth was soggy, draining their energy.
They still had their packs with them, and they were heavy. They couldn’t have left them back in the clearing, for fear that someone would take them.
After half an hour, John and Cynthia were exhausted. They stopped for a moment. Both were panting with exertion, and sweating profusely. Sweating meant losing a lot of water. So far they’d tried to avoid sweating too much. But they didn’t have that luxury now.
“Come on,” said John. “We’ve got to keep going.”
“Yeah, but where?”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s no more trail.”
John looked where Cynthia was pointing. She was right. There were no broken branches. No heavy footprints. The terrain was changing. The ground was firmer from this point forward, and the branches weren’t as thick.
“Shit, what do we do now? They could have gone in almost any direction.”
“I don’t know.”
It was hard not to feel discouraged. It was the mission they shouldn’t have been on in the first place, and now it had led to a dead end. Except that it wasn’t just a dead end. It was the start to a journey that might have no end. They might set off in one direction, and simply never find Derek and Sara. They might walk in exactly the opposite direction.
“This would be a hell of a lot easier with cell phones,” said John.
Cynthia laughed. She seemed surprised at her laughter, and maybe a little embarrassed, as if she shouldn’t have laughed, considering the direness of the circumstances.
She looked up at John.
“It’s fine,” said John, starting to laugh himself. “We’re screwed. And if it weren’t tragic, it’d be funny.”
“It’s a fine line, I guess.”
“So where do we go?”
Cynthia shrugged.
Suddenly, off in the distance, came an ear-piercing scream.
John and Cynthia looked at each other.
John’s grip tightened on his gun.
Cynthia took hers from her holster.
“Come on.”
16
They’d tied something to Miller’s finger. Some kind of simple tourniquet. It seemed to have stopped the blood.
The pain was there. Weird pain. Strong and powerful, but not acute. It pulsed, coming and going in intensity.
Miller sat between the two biggest guys in the backseat of his own SUV.
They were hurtling down the road, driving fast across a mixture of paved and dirt roads. They were heading back the way that Miller had driven just hours ago.
Miller’d had no options. He’d had to tell them something. They’d wanted the location of the radio, and they would have killed him.
In many ways, Miller longed for death. It would all be over. This nightmare. If he was dead, he wouldn’t be haunted by the loss of his family. Or so he hoped. He’d never been a spiritual man, and he didn’t know what waited him on the other side. He’d never put much thought into it before. But now he found his thoughts drifting in that direction.
But it was better to stay alive.
He wasn’t going to give up yet.
Miller was angry with himself. The anger went with the pain that radiated from his finger. He was angry that he hadn’t taken the time to calm down enough to form a reasonable plan. Instead, he’d just dashed away from the farmhouse, driving at top speed. He’d thought that his plan had made sense. Enough sense, at least.
But the plan had shattered when it ran up against the reality of these hardened killers. They weren’t going to fall for something so silly, so juvenile. It had sounded too easy to Miller, the whole plan, and that should have been a warning sign to himself.
Miller hadn’t known where to tell them the radio was. Of course, there was no radio. So what he’d needed was a place where he had some chance of killing these guys, or at least escaping himself, as unharmed as possible.
He’d debated about whether to tell them to go to the farmhouse. On one hand, if those people were still there, Max’s brother, whatever his name was, then it gave Miller a chance of surviving. But it also would put them all at risk.
In the end, Miller was so bent on revenge he told them how to get to the farmhouse.
He figured the people there would be able to take care of themselves. They had plenty of guns, after all.
But Miller was racked with guilt. Maybe he’d end up being responsible for the death of other innocents, not just his own family.
“Is this the place?”
Miller looked out the window. It was the driveway to the farmhouse all right.
“Yeah,” said Miller.
The pain in his hand was bad.
“Keep driving. This is the place.”
The atmosphere in the car was tense. The guys seemed more nervous than Miller. And that was strange, since Miller seemed to have more at stake.
These guys had no idea that Miller was trying to lead them into a trap. And they didn’t seem concerned about the possibility. What they seemed more concerned about was getting or not getting the radio that their boss so desperately desired.
By the way they talked, it sounded as if their boss was just as vicious with his own men and women as his enemies.
“He’ll reward us, though,” said one. “If we get it.”
“I hope. It could be good. But it could be bad, too. Really bad.”
“How so?”
“What if it’s the wrong radio? What if it doesn’t work?”
“You mean we’re going to disappoint him?”
“Yeah, and trust me when I say you don’t want to see the boss disappointed.”
“Oh, I know. I’ve already seen.”
“Come on, you didn’t see shit. You just joined us a week ago.”
“I saw him cut the throat out of some woman.”
“One of us?”
“Yeah. She’d fallen asleep instead of doing her assigned patrol.”
“Well, she deserved it then.”
“I mean, yeah, she deserved it. But having her throat cut out?”
“What do you mean cut out? You mean he slit her throat, right?”
“No, that would have been better. He just stabbed her, then dug around… literally digging out whatever the hell is in there. She was alive for most of it.”
“Sounds like something Kenny would get up to.”
“I hear that,” said Kenny, chuckling.
“So you scared or what?” A bit of a mocking tone.
“Not scared. Let’s just hope we get the right damn radio.”
“Is this the place?”
Someone jammed the butt of a gun into Miller’s ribs, stirring him.