Into the River Lands (Darkness After Series Book 2) (14 page)

“The canoe could flip over here,” she whispered. “ I will be hung and Kimberly will drown if it does!”

“You’re exactly right. But if you sit still and don’t move, that won’t happen. So sit still!” he whispered back. “I’m not taking this canoe one bit farther down this creek until I find whoever fired that shotgun. It’s not worth the risk of getting ambushed. I don’t expect this to take long, because whoever fired that shotgun was really close.”

* * *
 

Wayne Parker looked at April and her baby one more time from atop the bank above the canoe. The clever way he’d devised to tie her neck to the branch high above her assured him she wasn’t going anywhere until he returned. He didn’t have to worry about her trying anything stupid; if she made a wrong move, it would indeed flip over and they would both be dead. The boat was well hidden, tied there under those overhanging bushes, and the current she had been worried about indeed made getting in and out of it without capsizing tricky. He had pulled himself up using roots sticking out of the bank, his bow slung over his back until he reached the top.
 

Wayne didn’t want to come back and find them dead, but he was sure April had enough sense not to try and escape. He didn’t want to leave her at all, but this sudden shotgun blast really had him concerned. He and the others had seen no one on their trek upstream from their camp until they stumbled upon April and her family. Whoever fired that shotgun may have been in the vicinity then too, but if so, they had not seen or heard any sign of them.

Before he set out to investigate, he unholstered the Glock 20 he wore on his right thigh and double-checked to make sure there was a round in the chamber. He already knew there was without looking, but it just made him feel better to verify it again anyway. Carrying a pistol like that was what gave him the confidence to travel with his bow as his only other weapon. There was nothing that walked in these woods that the 10mm couldn’t take down, and with the Glock Model 20’s 15-round capacity, he felt little need to be burdened by a rifle as well. It was nice to know it was on his side and ready for action, but the bow was what he would carry at ready, and he withdrew a carbon-fiber shaft with a Wasp Sharpshooter broadhead screwed on the tip and started in the direction from which gunshot came.
 

 
Creeping through the creek-side undergrowth, he stayed as close to the bank as the vegetation allowed. The sound of the shotgun was loud enough that he knew whoever fired it could not be far away, because it would not carry near as far as a rifle report. He planned to check out the area around the next bend that had been out of sight from where they were when they heard it, and if there was nothing there, he would check out at least one more. He had to make sure that whoever was around was not waiting right there on the bank when they continued downstream in the canoe.
 

Wayne was furious at the delay but there was nothing else he could do but stop and check out the situation. There was no other way to get to the planned rendezvous with Gary and the others than to continue down Black Creek. April’s ankle had gotten worse and he wasn’t leaving her behind after all this. If there was somebody standing between him and getting her back to the camp like he planned, then it was just simply going to be that person’s unlucky day. For whatever reason they did it, shooting that shotgun came at just the right time to prevent Wayne from paddling blindly into view with his two captives. He would have literally been a sitting duck out there in the middle of the creek for someone to take a potshot at and he had little doubt that they would do it to. Wayne Parker didn’t trust anyone these days, and he intended to be the one who got the chance to shoot first now.

 
His guess that whoever it was couldn’t be far away seemed confirmed when he heard a faint clank of metal on metal. There was nothing in nature that made a sound like that. Woodpeckers might sound like a man chopping wood or hammering nails, but no animal or bird banged metal against metal. He locked the mechanical release onto his bowstring and held the weapon at ready as he crept forward with more caution. The sound continued and he had no doubt that someone was just ahead, probably the same person who fired the shotgun. The only reason he couldn’t already see them was because of undergrowth.
 

He crept closer, holding the bow at ready in front of him until he came within view of an open area just downstream on the bank that looked like a place that had been frequently used as a campsite, probably long before the blackout. It was shaded by tall trees like those of the rest of the forest, but the understory of bushes and other vegetation had been cleared away and the ground was mostly bare earth. Pulled up from the creek’s edge was a green canoe, not aluminum like the one he had been paddling with April and Kimberly, but instead made of some kind of plastic or fiberglass. Beside it, a longhaired man was kneeling on the ground, carefully rolling up what appeared to be a big tent that he had just taken down. A pile of aluminum poles and metal tent stakes was stacked beside it. Wayne surmised that the clanking sound he’d heard was probably the sound of the man banging the tent stakes together to knock the dirt off of them before packing them away. He scanned the campsite area for any sign of a shotgun but did not see one. If this was the man who’d just fired one, and Wayne had no doubt that he was, it was probably lying close by but behind the tent or something where he couldn’t see it from this angle. The good thing was that as the man worked at rolling the tent into as tight a package as possible, his back was turned to him. Wayne was able to slip in closer without making a sound once he stepped into the park-like opening.
 

Wayne didn’t care what the man was doing there or what his story was. He looked rough and outdoorsy, as if he had been living in the woods out here ever since the blackout occurred. For a moment, he wondered if this man could be the “friend” April mentioned that lived near here. Whether he was or not, it didn’t matter. The man and his canoe were between him and where he needed to be that night. Even if he was ready to leave now and was shoving his boat in the water, he would be a problem, because he would be just ahead of them. They would run the risk of either overtaking him on the creek or catching up the first time he stopped for some reason. Wayne wasn’t into running unnecessary risks. The range from where he stood now was no more than forty yards. He drew the bow and put the sight in the center of the man’s back.
 

Just as he pressed the release to let his carbon fiber missile fly downrange to its target, a terrifying and unmistakable sound from off in the bushes to his right caused him to flinch. He heard his arrow strike flesh but because he was so startled his bow arm jerked at the last second. He saw the bright vanes of the fletching disappear not into his intended target, but instead into the back of the man’s arm just before he turned to face whoever it was that had racked the slide of a pump-action shotgun. There was no time to draw another arrow or even think about reaching for the Glock. A white-bearded man with wild gray hair as long as the other man’s already had a bead on him at point-blank range. Wayne Parker didn’t even get a chance to speak. The last thing he was aware of before the old man pulled the trigger was just how big the gaping black hole that was the business end of a 12-gauge shotgun looked from just ten feet away.

Twenty-one

M
ITCH
STOPPED
IN
HIS
tracks at the sound of a gunshot from somewhere off in the distance in the general direction he was headed. He knew immediately that it was the blast of a shotgun rather than the crack of a high-powered assault rifle like those the four men who took April were carrying. He had not seen any shotguns at all and the two weapons they took from April and David were both rifles. That didn’t rule out the possibility that one of them had a takedown shotgun in his backpack, but Mitch figured it was more likely that someone else fired the shot. He stood still and listened, waiting to see if there would be a follow-up shot or possible return fire from another weapon, but even after a good three or four minutes, there was nothing.
 

Despite the fact that the sound had come from some distance downstream, where the men he was following were likely to be, Mitch knew the gunshot could be unrelated to them. There was always the possibility of other survivors in the vicinity of the creek, and shotguns were a natural choice for hunting most of the available game in these woods. But even if it was someone unrelated to the four who took April and Kimberly, Mitch was sure that they must have heard the blast too. From where they were, the shooter had to be closer to them than to him.
 

He picked up the pace a bit as he got moving again. It would not bode well for April and her little girl if the one paddling the canoe got into an encounter with other strangers. He hoped something like that wouldn’t happen, but the sooner he closed in on the three he was following the better. He wanted to catch up and be there watching when they met the canoe, wherever that might be, especially since the coming darkness after they made camp would likely provide his best opportunity for a swift rescue.
 

The trail of the three soon led to the edge of a wide slough of stagnant brown water and Mitch followed their tracks where they tried to find a way around it. He knew they wouldn’t have been able to though, unless they wanted to go a half-mile out of their way. The slough was typical of the many that connected to Black Creek in this area, and he knew that the farther downstream one traveled, the more numerous they were as the land became more low-lying and swampy near the creek’s end.
 

The sloughs and swamps were usually shallow though, most of them full of cypress and other water-tolerant trees that grew right in the middle of them. Mitch soon found the place where the men had given up on going around and had finally waded right in. It was the only sensible thing to do if one were to attempt to follow the watercourse without making ridiculously long detours.
 

It was about a hundred feet across to the other side, and though his feet sank a few inches into the muddy bottom in some places, Mitch didn’t get wet above mid-thigh even in the deepest part. When he reached the opposite bank, he had to side step to avoid a big cottonmouth, which was not an unexpected encounter along the edges of waters like this, despite the cooler fall weather. The big snake was coiled around a protruding cypress knee, eyeing him intently, but Mitch didn’t get close enough to give it any reason to feel threatened and turn aggressive. He searched the mud on the other side until he found the place where the three men had exited the water earlier, and had just started tracking again when another gun blast just like the first echoed through the trees from the same direction.

He stopped again and waited. Two widely spaced shots like that could be explained by any number of things, and was certainly not out of the ordinary for hunters. The second shot coming some 15 or 20 minutes later could have been fired to finish off a deer or other game animal wounded by the first and then tracked down. Or, if the hunter was after small game such as squirrels, it could mean he or she made a second kill after the first. Mitch wouldn’t have given it much thought any other time; it was just that it had to be happening so close to those he sought. When there was no third blast from the shotgun and still no answer from a different weapon, he just shrugged and got moving again, threading his way along the easy trail the three men left, but staying alert and pausing often to listen as he went.
 

* * *

Gary Haggard froze and raised a hand in an unmistakable gesture that was a signal to “halt” to his two buddies that were right behind him. The shotgun blast from somewhere to the southeast, in the general direction of the creek was sudden and completely unexpected. Would there be another one? Would he hear Wayne’s 10mm Glock return fire? Did the shooter even know Wayne and the woman and kid were in the vicinity? Gary didn’t know, but he did know that it meant someone else was out here and that they were armed.
 

He and Jared and Paul were in one of those places where their path had taken them quite far from the creek bank. They had already waded three sloughs and were soaked to the waist, and a huge area of hurricane-damaged forest that was now overgrown in thickets had forced them to veer on quite a wide detour to the north. He didn’t like being this far away from the creek; for one thing, it was too easy to get disoriented in these bottomland forests and lose a lot of time just navigating. For another, he worried about just such an event as what could have just happened. Had some local woodsman hiding on the bank taken a potshot at Wayne as he paddled past? Gary wouldn’t be surprised. People tended to shoot first and ask questions later these days, and there was no law to answer to anywhere anyway, especially way out here where no one would even know.
 

“What do you think?” Jared whispered.

“I don’t know. I just know it proves somebody else is out here besides us. And they’ve got a shotgun.”

“Do you think the woman was telling the truth?” Paul asked. “That maybe there really were more people traveling with them, in other canoes?”

“I guess it’s possible, but I doubt it. Why wouldn’t they all stay together if they were doing that? It would be stupid to split up and divide your forces these days, considering what all could happen.”

“Yeah, just like you tried to tell Wayne this morning.”

“Exactly! Anyway, I think she was lying; hoping we would be afraid of her imaginary friends and leave the three of them alone. I suspect that whoever fired that shotgun is some local yokel that lives out here somewhere. I just hope he wasn’t shooting at Wayne. We’d better try to work our way closer to the creek bank, just in case. I don’t like this being separated one bit, but Wayne’s got some fantasy about taming that girl and keeping her around. You can’t tell him a damned thing!”