“I owe it to a friend to make a pit stop there first,” Keo said.
7
Gaby
Horses. They sent the guys on horses after her.
Like a posse in a Western. Now I’ve seen everything.
But instead of six-shooters and Winchesters, this posse was carrying assault rifles and semi-automatic pistols. They were wearing identical uniforms, combat boots, and two of them had caps to keep the sun out of their eyes. There were four and they were spread out in pairs of two, which told her they weren’t complete dummies.
She kept that in mind as they moved slowly through the woods, sometimes ducking to get under low-hanging branches. The only positive she could find was that they didn’t appear to be expert trackers and seemed to be searching randomly, perhaps hoping to just stumble across her. So there was that. It had been hard enough keeping Peter and Milly on course, but it had been downright impossible to get them to stop stepping on every twig in their path.
This is what it’s like to run around with civilians. How did Will and Danny ever do it?
She gripped the AK-47 tighter. Mac had done her a favor and kept two magazines in his pouches, with two more for the M1911. Unfortunately all the bullets were regular ammo, which meant she had to get out of the woods by nightfall. If she was caught in here without silver to defend herself with…
Gaby looked down at Mac’s watch: 9:13 a.m.
Plenty of time.
That was the other good news. Night wasn’t her friend anymore, but she had plenty of time to find shelter. Of course, that might be harder to do than she had expected, given the lack of civilization inside the woods—
“What now?” Peter whispered behind her. He was so close she could feel his breath against the back of her neck.
“I don’t know,” she whispered back. “Maybe we can wait them out.”
Milly moved nervously behind them. They had been crouched in the same spot for the last thirty minutes, waiting to see how the guards would proceed. She had expected a stronger chase and was surprised they had only sent four. Then again, she had to remember they didn’t have that many in town to begin with.
You don’t need a lot of guards when no one wants to leave.
Well, almost no one.
She looked back at Peter and Milly. She had a lot of questions for them: Why leave and why now? The questions had been nagging at her ever since they entered the woods. No one else in town had seemed interested in abandoning the safety of L15. The woman Anna, who had sold them out the first chance she got, was proof of that.
“What?” Peter said when he caught her staring.
Gaby didn’t say anything. She turned away and took in their environment for the tenth time in as many minutes. They were surrounded by trees and bushes, with the sound of Hillman Lake behind them. Forty yards from the shore, give or take. Close enough to make the heat just slightly bearable.
The closest two men on horseback were moving away from them before turning right. Gaby listened to the fading clop-clop-clop of the horseshoes against soft earth. Every now and then there was the squawk of radios as the men communicated back and forth in muffled voices.
Gaby glanced back at Peter again. “How big is the lake? Can we go around it?”
He shook his head. “It’s big. Half a kilometer. It would take too long to circle it.”
“How deep?”
“You mean you want to cross it?”
“Where else are we going to go? If we can’t go around it and we can’t head back toward town, there’s only one direction left — across the lake.”
“It’s pretty deep,” Peter said. “There are shallow ends—”
Crack! A bullet slammed into a tree trunk two feet from Peter’s head, cutting him off. He flinched with his entire body, instinctively dodging flying bark as the gunshot echoed loudly around them.
“Go!” Gaby shouted.
Milly and Peter launched to their feet and raced off behind her. She stood up slightly, gripping the AK-47, and searched out the source of the gunfire the best she could, though it was like looking for a needle—
There! A man sitting on a horse sixty yards away.
He was taking aim at Milly’s and Peter’s fleeing forms when her movement drew his attention. She was still swinging the AK-47 around when he snapped off a shot with his M4, but his horse was moving under him and his bullet sailed harmlessly over her, chopping a branch free above her head.
Gaby took careful aim and fired — and missed!
Dammit! she thought, and was about to fire again when the horse, responding to her near-hit, reared up on its hind legs and tossed the rider as if he were nothing more than a nuisance. Long, luxurious brown mane flashed in the air as the animal turned around and galloped off, leaving its rider on the ground.
The man had lost his rifle as he went down, and he was scrambling to find it when Gaby shot him in the back, right over the ass. Or did she actually hit him in one of his cheeks? The man screamed, whether in surprise or pain, she wasn’t sure. He gave up on locating his weapon and began crawling to safety, his bleeding backside in the air, facing her.
Now that’s a sight.
She lifted her rifle to shoot when the man somehow half-crawled, half-lunged behind a big tree.
Gaby took a step forward to finish the wounded man off when another horse pushed its way through a thick bush in front of her, with another uniformed figure swaying in the saddle. They were still far away — almost eighty yards — and hadn’t seen her yet. Gaby decided not to risk a shot at this distance and instead turned and fled in the same direction that Peter and Milly had gone.
Or, at least, the same general vicinity. Her only hope was that Peter was smart enough to grab the girl before she could get too far ahead of him and lead her somewhere safe.
The first thing she had noticed when she fled into the woods earlier was that it was a massive place. It reminded her of Sandwhite Wildlife State Park, but minus the trails, which made it wilder and more unpredictable. If she thought every inch of Sandwhite looked exactly the same, she couldn’t imagine getting lost in here. Thankfully, there was Hillman Lake to her right, so if nothing else, she always knew which direction would lead her away from the town and the pursuit.
She had been running for two straight minutes at a full sprint before she finally heard the noise she had been waiting for. The clop-clop-clop of horseshoes, bearing down on her fast.
She looked over her shoulder. Nothing. But not being able to see the incoming rider wasn’t the same as him not being there. She could almost feel him gaining on her, and she could definitely still hear him getting closer.
Clop-clop-clop!
Clop-clop-clop!
Gaby pulled up to a stop and slid behind a tree. She hugged the gnarled trunk and waited, using the momentary respite to suck in air and did her best to control her breathing, but it was like trying to hold back a freight train.
She was still gasping for breath, trying to temper the adrenaline coursing through her like wildfire, when a man on a horse galloped past her. Like the others, this one was wearing a camo uniform and he was holding onto the reins for dear life with one hand while clutching an M4 rifle at his side. He didn’t look entirely comfortable in the half-second or so that it took him to ride past her.
Gaby didn’t let him get too far ahead. She pushed away from the tree, took aim, and shot the man in the back. He must have pulled on the reins reflexively because the horse let out a furious whine as it slid to a stop, horseshoes digging trenches into the ground.