He curled a lip at the simplicity of the trap; to show a promise of shelter like he couldn’t easily get it for himself, and that gave him pause. He stepped away from the high ground as the sun flashed a slice of orange in the distance and dropped to one knee to slide his pack off. He pulled out the map from the top pocket, opening it to show the scribbled marks of all the relevant places on the continent he knew of.
The map was older than he was, covered in a kind of rugged sheen that protected it, but many of the creases had degraded so much that strips of old, clear tape held many of the segments together. It always returned to the same position, easily folding to its original form out of habit.
“What’s up?” she asked, crouching beside him and peering at the map.
“Freeborn wouldn’t fall for that,” he mumbled. “The trap can’t be for us…”
“Who then?” she asked.
“Hunters? Maybe someone escaped…”
“Escaped from where?” she said as she gave his shoulder a shake. “Tell me!” He peered up from the map.
“You know there are other people, right? The ones they use to work for them?” She nodded. “Well, they escape sometimes, don’t ask me how, but there aren’t any places near here that the aliens keep them…” Cole stared at the map in the poor light and saw marks made over on the right of the map by the sea, lots of them up and down the coast and inland nearer the larger bodies of water, but nothing near where he had his finger to mark their approximate position.
“What does it mean?” she asked. He looked up, staring ahead at the seemingly empty ground that he knew in his heart held a dangerous hidden force.
“It means we might be stumbling into someone else’s fight here, and I don’t like it.” He paused for a moment, thinking, before looking at her intensely. “Are you too tired to keep going today?” he asked.
“Not anymore,” she said.
“Good,” he answered as he folded up the map and slipped it into his pack before shrugging into the straps and leading her fast into the dead ground downhill away from the distant pillar of smoke.
Cole’s assumptions had been partly correct. He was accurate that the fire wasn’t natural. He was right that it was an intentional lure for people to investigate, but it wasn’t a trap set by the Hunters to catch Freeborn or even what they called the Roamers. He’d met one of them once, many years before, and had listened with incredulity as she had told the Freeborn about her life.
It was a trap set by other Freeborn to catch Hunters.
The first he knew of it, walking exhaustedly through the afternoon heat having stripped off his jacket and stuffed it in his pack to drag his tired feet through the dust, was when a flash of movement ahead caught his eye. The sun was high in the sky and the blinding light dulled, added to the fatigue and hunger. He froze when he saw that movement; an instinct long ingrained in someone who lived his life as vulnerable as the rabbits that formed such a large part of his diet.
Lina, much newer to the life, didn’t appear to sense the danger as quickly as he did. She faltered and turned to face him in time to see him raise the shotgun.
The pile of rubble beside Cole, covered in the brown leaves of dried ivy, rose like a monster from the stories she had been told as a child to bring something heavy over his head. That blow, although it connected with his skull, seemed to connect directly to his knees as they buckled in an instant and dropped him to the dusty ground.
Chapter 38
Lina
Lina froze as the rubble and ivy shrugged shoulders back to let the camouflage drop away, revealing a man dressed in rags wielding the heavy wooden bat used to render Cole helpless and useless. She hesitated, searching for which way to run, as three other shapes rose up around her.
She ran back the way they’d come, tired legs burning as she stumbled and failed to make them move how they were designed to. Behind her, she heard a whistling noise she couldn’t place, unsure if it was fear, or panic, or exhaustion that made her unable to push forward, but she only had a moment to realize her ankles had been snagged before she associated it with the whistling noise.
Thumping the dirt hard with her face, her pack fell over her head to make it harder to stand. She felt the metallic tang of blood in her mouth only moments before a dull crack filled her entire universe and sent her into the nothingness of unconsciousness.
She woke inside a dingy, foul-smelling place. The room, because it had to be a room from the sunlight piercing the gaps between the boards across the windows, was small, but the sudden, agonizing pain in her neck and head took away any other information as it grew to consume every sense.
She rolled her head and groaned, feeling the savage burn in her wrists, arms, and shoulders due to her bound hands being hooked around a low wooden beam. She pressed down with her feet to push her body up and relieve the pressure, but that only made everything explode with yet more pain.
She blinked, trying to acclimate to the poor light, until her eyes rested on Cole.
He wasn’t suspended from the same beam but sat at the base of a large square pillar with his head slumped forwards and his hands seemingly bound behind it.
“Hey,” she croaked in a weak whisper. No response. “Cole!” she hissed, lifting one foot painfully to kick dirt and dust in his direction. Her reward was a groan and a twitch of his head, so she tried again, not wanting to make any more noise but needing him to be conscious so that she wasn’t alone.
He grunted and lifted his head, eyes screwed shut as a curse rasped from his clenched teeth.
“Wake up,” she hissed, earning another groan of pain as his eyes flickered open. They didn’t get any opportunity to speak before a bang of something being dropped came from outside the door.
“Looks like they wakin’” said a thick voice, lisping like the speaker had very few teeth. The door banged open on loose hinges and the light that appeared there was blocked out by two figures stepping inside the room.
“What we gots here den?” another voice said. This one was clearer but rumbled like a heavy stone rolling over concrete.
“Looks like we got ourselves a girly,” toothless crowed.
“We do dat,” Rumbler said menacingly. “We dooo dat!”
“You boys come on outta there, ya hear me?” a shrill voice snapped from outside. “Don’t be playin’ with the food like always. Go on now, get!” This third speaker appeared at the doorway to push past the other two, both of them shying away from the threat of a raised hand like they feared a backhand slap. He was shorter and older than the others but seemed to bustle like one of the male turkeys living in the wild like there was no fight on Earth he wouldn’t take on. “You boys go outside and keep watch in case there’s more. Leave this to me.” Grumbles of protest quickly faded away as the two admonished men fled from another raised hand. Lina glanced at Cole to see him slumped again as unconsciousness overtook him.
“Well, hello there,” the man said as he stepped close to Lina and peered up at her face with a smile. She clapped her mouth shut and turned away; not just to avoid looking at his ugly, scarred face and one cloudy eye but for the stench of rotten meat on his breath. He chuckled, turning to Cole and delivering a nonchalant kick at his outstretched legs. Cole didn’t respond, prompting another chuckle.
“Yeah, Billy done clocked you good’n hard, did’n he?” He turned to Lina and stepped closer, earning a response of her lashing her right boot out at him.
The man avoided the kick easily, laughing as she lost her footing and cried out in pain as she put pressure back on her bound wrists.
“Now hold on there, girly,” he said with a nasty smirk. “There ain’t no need for hostilities.”
“Let us go,” Lina snarled.
“Now that might be an option for ya, so long as you tell us what we want to know…” Lina doubted every word the man said, fearing a fate worse than what she was imagining would be in store for them if they didn’t change the situation. “First off,” he said as he step
ped towards the door and hefted Cole’s shotgun, “you gon’ need to tell me where y’all walked in from and why you in my town.”
Lina wanted to hold him off, make him pause until Cole regained consciousness. The man saw her eyes fixed on the weapon and put a hand to his mouth in mock surprise.
“Oh, I sorry girly, is this’um scatter gun yours?”
“It’s his,” she said, nodding at Cole. “I don’t know how it works.”
“But you gots one a y’own, right?”
“Mine’s different,” she said truthfully. “It’s easier.”
The man swung the gun up to point it at her without taking the mildly amused look off his face. “These things be simple things to use. You just point’m in the general direction and you gid the lil’ trigger a squeeze.” Something in his eyes changed as his face hardened and she thought he would shoot her there and then.
“We walked from the south,” she blurted out. She squeezed her eyes shut, hoping they weren’t to be her final words. When no shotgun report filled the room, she dared to breathe out and open her eyes again. The man still pointed the gun at her but wore an expression of mild impatience.
“We walked from the south,” she said again in a quieter voice, “after they came for our settlement with their drones and their ships. We’ve been walking for days and days.”
“See now?” he said as he smiled and lowered the gun. “That wadn’t so hard now, was it? Now, why you come here, to my town?”
“We didn’t,” she said. “I mean, we did, but we didn’t mean to come here.”
“Someth’n wrong with my town, girly?” He leered up at her face, making her turn away to avoid his fetid breath again.
“Don’t bother,” croaked a groggy voice from near their feet.
“Someth’n to say to me, boy?” the man snarled as he leaned down to eyeball Cole, whose head lolled around like it was too heavy for his neck.
“They’re going to kill us and eat us,” Cole said.
“Lies!” the man crowed with amusement. “We fully intend on havin’ some fun before we eats ya then kills ya.”
“Eats us then…” Lina said in confusion, missing most of what he’d said.
“And don’t you be thnk’n that me and my boys is particular,” he said, aiming another jab of his toe at Cole’s leg. “We gon’ have some fun with you too, purdy lil’ thang you are.”
“Just shoot me,” Cole mumbled.
“Cole, n-”
“You shut your filthy mouth hole, ya hear me?” the man said as he spun to push the muzzle of the shotgun up under her chin to shower her face with his angry spittle.
“What’s the matter?” Cole said, almost drooling as he couldn’t form his words properly. “You too cowardly or too stupid to figure out which end of the gun is the dangerous one?”
All thoughts of having “fun” with Cole before they killed him were abandoned when the man growled angrily and turned the gun back on him.
“Lina,” Cole said quickly, “the thing is still in the end of his barrel, right?” Lina opened her mouth to begin forming the words to ask him what the hell he was talking about.
True to form, demonstrating that he really was as intelligent as he looked, the man issued a surprised “huh?” and tipped up the weapon to peer into the end of the barrel to look for whatever thing shouldn’t be there.
Cole snapped his head up, holding it straight and calmly with none of the pained wobbling there had been before. He uncoiled, his hand unexpectedly free with a long slice of rough rope dangling from the left wrist, and shot upwards off the ground to reach out and dive for the gun.
The man, as dumb as he was to look down the business end of a weapon, acting partly on instinct in reaction to his words and partly out of the kind of relaxed state he felt in because his audience was quite literally captive. Lina could tell he hadn’t been raised like Cole, or taught the strict discipline of firearms treatment and maintenance, never to point a gun at something you weren’t intending to kill, and to keep your finger off the trigger until you needed it there.
Cole’s desperate stretch was enough to hook the fingers of his right hand across the forearm of the man and drag the limb down with him as he fell onto his face in the dust.
The shotgun, with a self-confessed rapist cannibal staring at the barrel, went off in an eruption of searing, smoky light, making their ears ring and whine painfully to accentuate their concussions.
The man’s head snapped back to the full extent of the range of movement so that it appeared like he was trying to see behind himself without turning around. His lifeless body took a while to react and seemed to return to the previous position slowly, so that by the time the gore that had previously been his face returned to look at Lina, he was only just beginning to slump to the ground. She bit down the scream of horror and fright, and watched in stunned silence as Cole struggled to his feet.
“How did you…” she started, realizing that it didn’t matter how he got free but only that he was, and she wasn’t. She wriggled, pulling on her bindings fruitlessly as he took three staggering paces towards her. She saw blood as his right wrist smeared up his forearm, which he raised and began sawing his watch strap against the ropes holding her in place. He struggled to stay upright, twice losing his focus and having to shake his head to clear his vision.
“It’s too thick,” he slurred. “Hold on…” He staggered away, tripping on the body of the man who lay at the foot of a growing puddle of blood. Cole righted himself, rolled the body over, and began checking the pockets and waistband of it, coming away with a small, bone-handled curved blade. He dragged himself to her, reaching up for her hands as shouts came from outside the room.
“Clay? Where you at, Clay?” rumbled the bigger guy. Lina’s wide eyes locked on to Cole, and he returned them with a murderous look of resolute survival as he raised a finger to his lips. Silently, he picked up his shotgun from the sticky, dusty mess it lay in and slowly racked the pump to put another faded red tube into the chamber before hugging the wall near the doorway.
“Clay?” called out the toothless lisper. “You in there? We done heard a gunshot.”
Lina stood above the body of the man, still bound in place, totally vulnerable and staring at the doorway that filled with the horrified bearded faces of the other two cannibals.
“She killed Clay,” the big one rumbled.
“Where’s the othe-”
He didn’t finish the question, because the second he crossed the threshold into the room, four sounds changed the course of the world.
BOOM, shuck-shuck, BOOM.
The sounds coincided with the rapid, crisp actions of a man acting without hesitation. Of someone so utterly believing that his execution of these two men was the right and only course of action. Both of them took the full force of the shot to the right sides of their heads, obliterating them and rendering them as headless as the one tricked into shooting his own face off.
Cole wasted no time freeing her from the rope, making her cry out in agony as the blood rushed into her arms and hands, rendering them useless. She followed him out of the room, finding their packs strewn open in the room outside their cell. Cole kept up nervous glances as he stuffed the contents back into them. Strapping on his own pack he helped Lina shrug her numb arms into hers and pulled the straps tight. She had to hook her thumbs behind the straps to stop her arms from swinging like tails, but not even that pain could slow her down as she followed Cole towards daylight.
Chapter 39
Alec
The trip went as smoothly as it could have. Alec sat on watch as Monet slept, and it wasn’t until the truck slowed down that she opened her eyes, instantly awake and clutching her gun.
“It’s okay. The truck is stopping.” Alec noticed the trailer slow and lift over some sort of speed bumps before coming to a halt. The truck then began to move in reverse, the backup alert beeping every second until the trailer bumped the bay door bumper and the truck shook before shutt
ing off.
They were at the front of the trailer, hidden behind tall skids of toilet paper labelled “Denver,” and that was where they intended to stay until the Omaha product was all unloaded. Alec was already sweating as he pictured them clearing the entire truck out and moving the skids to another vehicle. Monet said it was marked to make the entire journey, but things could change. The semi might need repair, the driver possibly becoming ill… during the entire trip, Alec had mentally compiled an insane list of outrageous complications that might arise.
The trailer doors swung open, allowing light to pour inside, and he heard mumbling voices as they began the process of unloading. They crouched uncomfortably for almost an hour while the workers methodically went about their business.
A woman with a clipboard walked onto the now half empty space, and Alec risked a quiet peek from the edge of his hiding spot to watch her check off her paper and leave the trailer before one of the workers shut the door.
He leaned back, taking a deep breath.
“Almost there, Alec.” Monet pulled the pilfered tablet out, and it showed the path of the truck. They were less than three hundred miles from their destination, which she calculated would take around six hours at the previous speed.
“Then what?” he asked. He hadn’t pressed her earlier, and he knew about the tire blowout, but it all sounded impossible.
“I blow the tire, and we bust out of here,” she said.
“Through the doors?” he asked.
She nodded.
“But the latch…”
She pulled a thin metal contraption from her pack and grinned at him. “Let me worry about that. You cover me when we escape. The driver will be worried about the blown tire, so as soon as it happens, we undo the latch. We open it and hop out while the truck is slowing.”
Occupation: A Post-Apocalyptic Alien Invasion Thriller (Rise Book 1) Page 19
