Out of Nowhere (The Immortal Vagabond Healer Book 1) (26 page)

Maybe it was just a bear or raccoon rooting through the trash.

Someone barked an order in that guttural language I was growing to hate. Probably ‘Stay out of the light and watch that door!’

Or not.

Keeping in the shadows, I stretched to look out the window. I could make out the dark shape of an SUV parked on the road at the top of the long driveway, and the shadowy form of a man about ten yards from the house.

I didn’t bother wondering who they were. How they tracked us I wasn’t sure.

‘Sarah,’ I said, pitching my voice low. ‘Keep your back to a wall.’

A bulky winter coat and hat hung near the door made a vaguely anthropomorphic shadow. I looked around and found a canoe paddle, reached it out and moved the coat, hoping to draw fire.

I saw a swirl of deeper darkness in the shadow behind it. A shape taking on substance.

I aimed my pistol at the biggest piece I could see and fired. The shape became a man, clutching his right shoulder and staggering back against the kitchen wall. I fired two more rounds into the center of his chest and he gave a grunt and slid to the floor.

Outside, there was a rattle of automatic gunfire. Rounds splintered wood from the walls and shattered windows. The security lights popped and flashed and went out. Urgent shouts in the strange language I’d come to hate followed.

I took Sarah’s hand, pulled her close and breathed in her ear, ‘We need to make for the back door. Onto the deck and then down to the woods. Stay right behind me, move when I move and keep in the shadows. Got that?’

She nodded.

I pressed the Browning into her hand. ‘You know how to use this?’

Again a nod.

‘It’s loaded and cocked. Round in the chamber. The safety’s right here. It’s on. Don’t take it off until you’re ready to shoot, and don’t shoot until I tell you.’

‘OK,’ she whispered.

I crept to the back door, staying out of the light. Outside, I heard a debate in hissing whispers. I assumed the guy who phased in was in charge, and the lackeys weren’t sure how to proceed.

If they were well trained and dedicated, they’d have surrounded the house.

My hope was that the snow and brush and slope of the yard would make moving around the sides of the house look like too much work, and that they’d be overconfident with machine guns and the ability to teleport. They had been playing the game like a street gang and not a rifle squad so far. Maybe my luck would hold.

If they were doing this right, we were screwed either way. They had the numbers and firepower to come in and get us eventually, or even just set the house on fire and pick us off as we tried to get out. Sitting and waiting to be wiped out was pointless. We had to move.

I opened the back door, gave a quick look around and moved out onto the deck. On one side it was only a five foot drop to the snow. I motioned Sarah over the side. I used my good hand, holding her arm and letting her down until she could drop the last foot or so. I tucked my pistol in my waistband, rolled over the edge and dropped, landing on my good foot, bending my knees and falling onto my side like they taught us in Jump School. Spared my bad ankle. Hurt my ribs, but what can you do?

I paused, listening. The conversation had stopped. I heard a few crunching footsteps as someone moved across the packed snow on the drive, then the sound of snapping branches.

Beneath the deck was an alcove, just a space between a corner of the foundation and a wooden bin housing the batteries for the solar electricity system. I pointed to the space.

‘Get in there,’ I said. ‘Get your back to the wall. You’ll be invisible unless somebody sticks his head in and whoever does that will be silhouetted against all this bright snow. Anybody does that who isn’t me, shoot him. I’ll be back.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To kill the rest of these bastards,’ I replied. ‘It may take a while. Don’t worry. I’m good at this.’ I kissed her once, then moved away. I got out of the open snow as quickly as I could, into the rocks under the cedars, where there wasn’t much snow to show tracks. It’s harder to move quietly under the trees, but you can do it if you don’t hurry. Since we had a lifetime, for some of us at least, I was content to move slowly.

They had me outnumbered and outgunned, but they were leaderless, hesitant and out of their element. The darkness leveled the playing field; better guns still need a target. I liked the darkness. I’d made friends with it a long time ago. Learned to trust my hearing, my sense of smell, of touch.

They would waste some time approaching and searching the house. When they didn’t find us there, they’d figure we were trying to get to the cars, so they’d move back that way. If they were even a little smart, they’d have left one man back at the road to watch the vehicles. I made my way toward the shapes of the cars, taking it slow.

Footsteps on the front porch. Doors banging open. Curses and hissed replies. Must have found their buddy with three new holes in him. A light went on in the house. Could they be that stupid? Now they had no night vision. I sat still, looking at the ground in front of the house, keeping both doors in my peripheral vision.

A man came out the back door onto the deck. Must have seen the marks in the snow below. I thought about taking a shot, but it was a long shot for a pistol, and that would tell everyone where I was. He moved back inside. I heard a cellphone up the hill near the car. Probably the guys in the house telling the guy up top to watch for us. Just keep giving it away, boys.

Sloppy. But they’d been facing street gangs before this, not soldiers. And they’d had the huge advantage of a few men who could teleport. That was a big ace in the hole. A guy who could appear behind a lookout and take him out, unlock a door for the brute squad. That was enough of an edge for what they’d been doing.

But having an edge can make people careless. Make them feel invincible. They think they have a trump card, like a breech-loading rifle or modern artillery against some primitive tribesmen and they forget the basics.

That’s how we get Little Bighorn or Isandlwana or Dien Bien Phu.

One man moved back out onto the deck and the other came out the front door, moving quickly into the brush on the far side of the drive. The man on the deck dropped down and began following my tracks. Sarah wouldn’t have left any on the bare, frozen earth under the deck.

They were working toward the road, assuming I was as well. Reaching down, my hand closed on a large pine cone. I tossed it up the hill. They didn’t shoot at it, but I heard the closer man stop, then change direction, stalking the sound.

He moved along the edge of the woods. The virgin snow muffled his footsteps, but his long coat snagged branches and dry thorns. He might as well have worn a bell.

I sat on my haunches, concealed in the shadows of the cedars, my pistol gripped lightly in my right hand, and waited. The cold seeped into my body, but I suppressed the urge to move. Graves aren’t any warmer, as Sergeant Daly used to say.

The man’s path took him right past me. I slowed my breathing, willed myself invisible and let him walk on by. He moved in a crouch, an MP5 with a collapsible shoulder stock held at the ready, his big stupid trenchcoat dragging behind him, the collar turned up and a balaclava pulled over his ears—ruining the best sense he had out here.

I let him pass within about five feet of me. Then I stood, extended my arm until the muzzle of my pistol was almost touching the back of the upturned collar, and pulled the trigger.

He pitched forward into the snow. I sank back down, shifting behind a thick tree trunk. It would be hard for them to pinpoint a single shot by sound, and my victim’s head, while it hadn’t served him very well, hid the muzzle flash.

There were a few more shouts, probably the remaining men calling out for their comrade. I heard a hushed conference. I almost felt bad. They were better armed, healthy and had started out with a huge numerical advantage, but they were flailing.

I, on the other hand, had been playing this game with armed men in the deep, dark woods since long before their grandfathers were just a glint in the mailman’s eye.

Footsteps in the woods indicated that the man across the drive was moving toward the cars. He was smart enough to keep to the shadow of the trees, even if he moved too quickly to avoid making noise. I was fairly sure where he was, from the snapping of branches and the squeaking crunch of boots in the snow, but I didn’t shoot. You never shoot without a target, especially at night. It shows exactly where you are; plus you’d have a better chance just praying for lightning to strike your enemy.

Boots on the gravel at the top of the drive told me he’d reached the vehicle. Maybe they were hoping to get away, or call for more help, or get the bazooka out of the trunk. Whatever the plan, I decided to throw a wrench into it.

I picked up the dead man’s submachine gun. The road was pretty far away to start plinking with my pistol, and if I did give them something to shoot at—me with a .45 against two men with automatic weapons—I could still lose this fight. I took a moment to get my sights aligned, which is harder than it sounds at night, lining up a black front sight in a black rear sight against darkness. I had to aim at a snowbank to do it but, once I had it, I was good. I knelt, my left elbow on my knee, leaning into the tree trunk, aiming at the dark bulk of the car.

The car door opened, and the dome light came on. A black-clad man stood by the passenger door watching the forest, an MP5 in his hands. Another tossed his weapon into the back seat and began to slide behind the wheel.

The driver was on the far side of the car from me, so I shot him first. One round, in the head. Before he had time to drop, I switched my aim to center mass on the near thug, and squeezed the trigger until he fell over.

I waited in the quiet darkness. No shots, no cries, no phones. I crept up to the road and checked the enemy. Both men were dead, sprawled in the harsh illumination of the car’s dome light.

Once the adrenaline of the fight drained away, I felt the cold in my limbs, the pain in my ankle and my ribs and my wrist. I hobbled back down to the house, stopped out of sight of Sarah’s hiding spot.

‘It’s me,’ I called. ‘It’s over, you can come out.’

She came out, shivering. ‘You’re OK?’

‘Frozen and sore, but otherwise I’m fine.’

‘And them?’

‘Four. All dead.’

She nodded in silence.

‘We should get in out of the cold,’ I said. ‘Then we need to get out of here.’

Chapter 28

WE QUICKLY GOT OUR THINGS TOGETHER. I limped into the bathroom and found a handful of ibuprofen to help ease the throbbing in my limbs. I wondered where Bob was, why he wasn’t here when a hit team showed up. Had he talked to anybody? Asked someone he trusted to check on me and tipped somebody off? I still wasn’t sure how Doors’ people found me two hundred miles away, in a car rented with a fake name, in a house this far off the beaten track. While Sarah packed, I stole the address book from beside the phone. Maybe there was something there.
I held on to the Browning and also took a .22 target pistol from the gun cabinet.

Sarah helped me drag the body of the teleporter off into the woods, where a snowfall would cover our tracks and he wouldn’t be noticed until the late spring, when he started to smell.

I stole his cell phone, figuring I could go through the call record and see what was there. OK, I was going to have Sarah go through the call record, but it was my idea so it counts. I also found a pair of hotel key cards, the protective sleeves helpfully marked with the room numbers, and slipped them into my wallet, along with his cash.

We dragged the other bodies off the road and left them in the snow of the yard. There wasn’t much traffic out here, but two dead men lying in the road wouldn’t take long to be spotted.

I kept one of the MP5s and two spare magazines. I’d learned my lesson about leaving heavy firepower behind. Besides, in New Hampshire I probably didn’t even need a permit for it. I think they make you fill out a card and show two forms of ID for crew served weapons, but that might be out of date.

‘I’ll drive their car up to the first nice pull-off and ditch it,’ I told Sarah. ‘Follow me in the Jeep.’

‘Why are we doing all this?’

‘If one hitter and the car are missing, maybe somebody will think he’s gone freelance, or maybe that we captured him, made him talk,’ I replied. ‘Maybe not, but let’s give ‘em something else to worry about.’

Sarah got in the Jeep without a word. I started the other car, wondering how she would hold up through this latest crisis. So far, she was coping, but I’d seen men take a lot without cracking before they collapse from one more tiny setback. Her composure couldn’t be that supreme; I couldn’t see the cracks, but they had to be there, and that scared the hell out of me.

I drove until the first pull-off at the head of a hiking trail. I parked the car far back under the trees, the side with the bullet holes against a snowbank. It would be invisible from the road, and even if it was found, it wasn’t uncommon for people to park at the trails and go snowshoeing or snowmobiling.

I threw the keys into the snow and got into the Jeep.

‘Where?’ Sarah asked without inflection.