The Devil's Anvil (19 page)

I didn’t make it

I ended up on my face in the road, and lay groaning at my inability to put one foot in front of the other.

‘
Get up, goddamnit!
’ The voice was Rink’s but it was only in my head. ‘
Quit now and you die. You ready to die?
’

If the question had been posed earlier, I wouldn’t have cared. I would have welcomed relief from the pain. But now I railed against death. It was more like frustration. I pawed at the dirt, tried to get my knees under me, and ended up rolling on my side. I blinked up at a patch of sky overhead. It was a narrow strip between the treetops.

‘
I never took you for a quitter, Hunter.
’ Rink’s voice again.

‘I’m not quitting. I just need to gather my strength.’ I have no idea if I spoke out loud, or that I merely answered the imaginary berating of my friend.

‘
The longer you lie there, the weaker you’ll get. Now get your butt in gear, soldier. Move, see to your wounds, or you’ll bleed out like a goddamn frog on a gig.
’

‘I’m up, I’m up, stop going on like an old woman.’ Surprisingly I had made it to my knees. I leaned forward, palms flat on the earth: the perfect position for purging my guts. It was many hours since I’d gorged myself on Billie’s homemade stew, but you wouldn’t think it. Perhaps through the chase and subsequent fight, followed by my hours of inactivity, my digestive system hadn’t been working effectively, because I vomited a huge puddle of meat and vegetables that looked little different to when I’d spooned them down. It was unpleasant, but I felt a small sense of relief. There was no blood in the sick. I’d probably escaped large-scale internal damage. I was sick a second time, and this time it was mainly liquid, which was rapidly replaced by stringy drools of bile. My head banged repeatedly, as if it was a tambourine being beaten on by an over-zealous Hari Krishna. I wiped my mouth on the back of my jacket sleeve, then lifted tremulous fingers to the lump on my head. I hadn’t been shot, but the whack of the gun butt had come close to cracking my skull.

‘
You’ve survived worse injuries. Get up, lameass.
’

I had been hurt worse in the past. I’d been shot before on a few occasions, one time to the point where I would have died if a colleague hadn’t dragged me out of the sniper’s sights and into the hands of the waiting medics. That time the bullet had gone right through my chest and out of my back, and there was no way I would have lived if not for the emergency surgery, blood transfusions and weeks in a hospital bed. Right there on the muddy trail there were no colleagues to drag me out of harm’s way, or to give even the most rudimentary first aid. If I wanted to live, I had to save myself.

The head wound could wait.

So could the one in my gut, and the nick on my shoulder. They didn’t trouble me the way the one in my chest did. The antiballistic vest I was wearing had stopped the bullet from entering my gut. The Kevlar had dispersed some of the kinetic force, but it still felt as if I’d been kicked in the belly by a horse due to the hydrostatic shock: if I lived, the next few days were going to be sore ones. I imagined that already I was sporting a black and blue bruise that would make even the slightest movement painful. I wasn’t bleeding into my stomach, and until I took a leak I wouldn’t know if the impact of the round had caused damage to my liver. I doubted it, because if I’d been bleeding internally I wouldn’t have wakened from my swoon, I’d have continued to fade and fallen into a coma.

Crawling to the edge of the road I found the same mossy boulder I’d woken against, but this time parked my butt on top of it. My left arm was numb, but it still had movement. I hooked my jacket collar, helping while I unzipped the front with my right. It hurt like hell to shrug the jacket off my left shoulder, but I persevered. Rink’s voice had faded, but had been replaced by my own self-berating. Jamming my jaw to my collarbone I could see the mess of blood on my shirt. Enough had leaked from me that it had darkened the vest in a wide ring extending from under my left armpit almost to my sternum. Above and to the left of my heart, there was a hole in the bulletproof vest – which in this case was somewhat of an oxymoron – and some of the internal padding had puffed out around the edge. It was wet with blood, but I caught a glint of a second colour and was happy to note that it was the copper alloy base of a jacketed round. The vest hadn’t saved me from injury, but had prevented full penetration of the bullet into my torso. The rear end of the bullet was wedged in the vest, and only a couple of millimetres of the tip must have made its way through to my flesh. Nevertheless, it still didn’t mean that I hadn’t suffered serious damage. If the bullet had fragmented, parts of the projectile could have penetrated deeper, spinning and tumbling and causing untold damage to soft tissue, bone and organs alike. But I thought that this bullet was a regular lead projectile jacketed in copper, and not an armour piercer containing tungsten or steel. It tells you something about the man when he’s happy that he has been shot with a full metal jacket round and not a high-density, soft nose or hollow point – any of those would have gone right through the vest and killed me, no question.

I struggled with the Velcro straps and unhitched the vest. It sucked off me, the wetness of my bodily fluids causing a vacuum. I swear I felt the tip of the bullet extracting from my flesh, and it was with mixed feelings. The relief was huge, but the pain was enormous. I almost blacked out again. Blood began to pulse anew. My shirt was sopping, and I didn’t bother pulling it off, just got my fingers in the bullet hole and yanked it apart. There was a shallow depression in my left pectoral muscle that looked far too small to have leaked all of that blood, but I knew that once I’d extracted the bullet the edges of the wound had puckered in on themselves, partly sealing it again. The flesh was sore and tender a good hand’s span all around it, and there was deeper pain in my ribs and even in my left lung when I concentrated on breathing. Thankfully the wound wasn’t mortal, the way I’d feared. I was lucky: those men that had taken Billie hadn’t realised I was wearing a vest. They just saw the hole in my jacket, the blood and likely the delirium in my face and decided I’d minutes to live at most. Their mistake. I was happy to note I wasn’t the only one to have made poor decisions last night.

Knowing that your next move won’t be your last has a placebo effect. Strength I hadn’t been aware of previously began to reach my hands. My numb legs began twitching in their urgency to get up and move. Not a bad idea, considering the engine noise had grown louder and was definitely approaching this time. Before I could do that I had to do something about the wound. If it opened again and I began bleeding then I’d be face-planting the ground again in no time. Our bags were gone, taken along with Billie and the guy I’d shot. I scratched through my jacket pockets but they’d been rifled, my wallet stolen. My outer clothing was filthy with mud and forest litter, none of it clean enough for a dressing. My shirt was saturated with blood. I pulled off my jacket, and checked the inner lining at the back. It was clean. My knife had been taken, so it was down to the strength of my fingers alone to rip the lining out. Ordinarily it would have been a task of seconds, but my limbs were still weak and the tough lining almost beat me. I had to nip the lining with my teeth – a painful job carrying a head wound – to get a hole opened up then insert my right fingers, stand on the sleeve with one foot and then throw myself backwards. A long strip of clean cloth came away. Once I’d got it going the rest ripped away with less effort. I tore off a clump of smaller strips and used them to dab away the blood from the chest wound. Once that was done, I folded a larger strip and pressed it over the bullet hole. Then came the difficult part. It took some contorting of my body, and much gritting of teeth to hold back the curses, but I managed to loop the impromptu bandage around my shoulder, back under my armpit and tie it off over the wadded cloth. With another rag I cleaned the blood from my shoulder wound, and found it was little more than a graze. I left that wound uncovered. It wasn’t ideal, but it was all I had.

The engine noise was nearby, but there was still no sign of a vehicle. The driver had gone up the other trail. Now that I was thinking clearer, I’d discarded the idea that the car belonged to either the Jaegers or Rink; it simply had to belong to someone else, hunters or perhaps someone out for a hike in the hills. I doubted those in the vehicle were enemies, and more likely people who could help, but I couldn’t take that chance. Leaving the vest unfastened down my left side in order to ease my breathing, I shrugged back into my jacket. Suffering from shock was still a firm possibility, and I needed the extra layer of clothing to keep warm, despite the sun being up now. I needed to replace fluids, too. Bleeding out, purging my stomach, all had conspired to dehydrate me, and helped weaken me, not to mention exacerbate my headache.

I wondered how far the people in the car would travel. Perhaps they were going to the cabin – which couldn’t be too far away now – and there I’d get a chance at taking their vehicle, or at least items that I could use while I trekked out of the hills to the main road. I was uncomfortable at the idea of stealing, but when it was a case of needs must, then I’d just have to put my morals on a back burner. I had to make a decision: did I backtrack down the road, find the fork and the second route to the cabin, or did I forge through the woods to the second road? The second route was much shorter, but the going tougher in my present condition.

In the end, the decision was taken from me.

Before I could strike out in either direction, a figure materialised from out of the dappled shadows below me and stood eyeing me, as tense as a wild animal caught in the open. The person lifted something to his face, and I knew he was calling in backup. The engine noise halted. In seconds it roared again and I realised the driver was heading at speed to join the searcher on foot.

I looked for a weapon.

The mossy boulder was heavier than I was; I had my choice of small pebbles or rotted twigs.

My run of bad luck didn’t appear to be getting any better.

19

The figure waited until the car was making its way up the trail towards us before taking a tentative step forward. I didn’t run or try to hide. There was no point. Even if the newcomers were dangerous I’d have simply looked a fool trying to do so, so it was better that I stay put, conserve what energy I had left and wait for a more opportune moment to act. But it wasn’t necessary, because with that one step the figure emerged from a deep pool of shadow and I instantly recognised his red coat. It was Adam, younger of the two private investigators I’d met the previous day. The SUV approaching was Adam’s Escalade, and it stood to reason that the one driving it was his older partner, Noah Kirk. They’d had the presence of mind to bring the SUV as opposed to Noah’s saloon with the sticky brakes, so maybe they weren’t as inept as I’d first thought.

We’d parted on decent enough terms, and I thought I’d been forgiven for my strong-arm approach with them when first we’d met – even Noah had shrugged his shoulders and rubbed at his head when I apologised for clubbing him unconscious – so hopefully we could remain on good terms now. You never could tell. I’d taken it as fact that they would hang around the farm because they still had a job to do, but I wondered if they’d been got to by the Jaegers and if they were here to finish off what the Procrylon team hadn’t. I didn’t believe either man had it in them, even if it was only to clean up a crime scene and lose a corpse deeper in the woods. Still, I wanted to feel them out before fully relaxing my guard.

Noah pulled the Escalade alongside Adam and they conversed through the window. Adam turned and peered at me. I stood facing them, attempting to look as if I wasn’t ready to drop. Trying to look tough. Adam raised an open palm to me. I lifted my chin, inviting them to come forward. The motion sent pain stabbing from my skull down the side of my neck into my chest wound. Static prickled along my hairline, and sweat flooded my face.

Noah drove the SUV slowly, following Adam as he approached on foot. The younger man could tell that I was hurt, his mouth hanging open at my dishevelled appearance. It hadn’t occurred to me that the blood on my clothing and hands was also all over my face.

‘What the hell happened?’ Adam croaked as he stood ten feet distant, as if afraid to approach in case my condition was catching. He glanced at Noah, and I followed his gaze. The older guy looked equally shocked. Both stared back at me.

‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ I lied.

‘You could have fooled me!’

I didn’t reply to Adam. I still wasn’t sure about their motive for trailing me to the mountains.

The door clunked as Noah got out of the SUV. He didn’t move further, just stood there with one hand resting on the open door. I noticed that he’d taken my advice and strapped two fingers together. ‘Man, you’re a mess. How the hell are you still standing?’