Stranger

Twenty-six

Dammit if the track didn’t have enough bumps to nearly throw us clean off the saddles. What’s more, it was steep enough to bring us close up to forty without having to fire up the Harley engines. Gripping the handlebars tight, the grass banks rising high and over-grown at either side of us soon made it look as if we were whistling through a green tunnel that blurred as we moved faster and faster.

I glanced at Zak. He concentrated on the track ahead, avoiding ruts and holes in the ground. The thing is, it was so quiet. All I could hear were the whisper of air by my ears and the hiss of tires on dirt.

At the bottom of the track Zak braked to bring himself to a stop where Michaela and Tony now shot us surprised looks. Only I didn’t stop. No way was I going to even touch the brake. I passed them in a blur, keeping the momentum going.

Now the track had leveled out. Bit by bit the bike began to slow, but I was still doing thirty when I passed the bunch of men and women with the newborn baby.

The guy with the shotgun looked as if he was making up his mind whether to shoot me or not when I called out, “Keep moving! You’re being followed!”

Temptation started to bite now. I wanted to fire up the motorcycle and power up to that bunch of killers that must still be heading along the track. But I fought it down. When I arrived I wanted surprise on my side.

The bike slowed as the track began to run uphill.

Twenty miles an hour… fifteen.

I saw a curve ahead.

Ten.

I put my feet down, my soles brushing the soil.

Five miles an hour.

I stopped. Then, with my feet balancing me I slipped the rifle off my shoulder and aimed along the track.

For a while I sat there. The sun shone down. I heard birds in the trees. Butterflies flitted among yellow flowers in the meadow. Honeybees buzzed through the long grass. Sweat trickled down my face; my heart pounded with a dark funereal rhythm.

The track ahead lay deserted. Maybe they’d gone back? Or cut through the trees into the field?

But then I got it. The Twitch. Not for the first time I wondered if bread bandits, hornets or whatever you called them carried some smell so faint I didn’t consciously sense it. But the old dinosaur brain locked deep inside the folds of primate brain still sniffed it bright and clear on the hot summer air. My stomach muscles twitched. In my neck and back more muscles snapped tight. So tight the contracting neck muscles pulled my head back and forced my chin up.

The bastards were here. They were right around the…

Then they walked ’round the bend. I pulled back the bolt. I’d only have to do that once because this little beauty had a self-cocking mechanism. OK, Valdiva. All you need do is aim… squeeze the trigger… aim and squeeze… aim and squeeze…

Muscles twitched like they danced in my gut. Blood sparkled through my veins. My whole being squeezed into that cubic inch behind my right eye. The one that looked through the sight and along that gleaming barrel. I concentrated on nothing else now.

There they were. A group of guys in their twenties and thirties, I figured. They moved purposefully toward me. Not running. Their eyes locked on me.

But they wouldn’t spook me.

I waited until they were maybe fifty yards away before squeezing the trigger.

The first shot punched clean through the chest of the one in the lead. The bullet tumbled out through his back to smash into the mouth of the guy behind him. His teeth vanished in a cloud of red glory and enamel splinters.

Both dropped down into the dirt. Two with one bullet! There was an angel on my shoulder today.

Forty-five yards away I dropped the next guy with a chest shot, too. He went down kicking his legs, vomiting blood. That bastard was dead meat.

I’d expected them to charge. There were still seventeen of them. I had eight rounds left in the clip. Do the math; I’d have to cut and run in the next ten seconds.

Forty yards and closing.

Bang… dropped the next with a head shot. A bald guy. The top of his scabby dome lifted off in one piece like you’d slice the top off a boiled egg. His comrades didn’t flinch when the guy’s brains spattered their faces.

Thirty yards. Bang, bang. I dropped two more with head shots through their eyes. One round exited the back of the sick fuck’s skull to slice off the guy’s ear behind him. The one who lost the ear bled like a pig but it didn’t stop him. I had to drop him with a shot through his lungs. He sat down on God’s earth to cough blood into his cupped hands.

Four rounds left. Thirteen mad fucks remaining.

They were twenty yards away. If they ran now they’d reach me in maybe ten seconds.

I fired again. Lousy shot, Valdiva. The bullet gouged out the hornet’s eye, but it exited through the side of his forehead, just below the temple. Most would have gone down with the sheer trauma of an injury like that. But his expression hardly flinched. His good eye still burned at me. And even though blood turned the righthand side of his face into a red mask he kept moving.

Where have you gone, sweet angel of mine? Now I had to use another precious bullet on Senor Solo Eye. It caught him in the throat. He went down gurgling to claw at the ground like it was the earth itself that hurt him.

Fifteen yards.

Then the goddam sly bastards went and did it. They cut and ran.

The twelve that remained burst through the bushes at the side of the road to disappear into the trees. They left the tail-end guy, though. The one who’d killed the old man back along the track. He still had that steel bar, too. He ran straight at me with the bar raised above his head. Old man brains still stuck on the end. Christ, he was so close I could see the moles on his face that bristled with black hairs.

I aimed at the center of his chest.

But I didn’t fire the gun. Not then. What got into me, I don’t know. Maybe the angel on my shoulder moved over for a devil to settle there to whisper in my ear.

Instead of blowing a hole in the killer’s chest I dropped the muzzle. When I fired the metal-jacketed slug smashed his balls. It might have chewed off his dick, too, I don’t know.

With that high-pitched squeal you only hear when you accidentally stand on a dog’s paw, he dropped down into the soil at my feet. There he rolled from side to side, both hands clutching the blood-soaked mess between his legs.

I didn’t have time to put a second slug in his head.

I knew what remained of the hornet gang would be running as hard as they could to reach the people with the newborn baby. Now was the time… I started the Harley’s motor, revved it until it howled like a phantom war cry, then blasted down the track, the back wheel throwing up a geyser of dirt as high as the treetops and coating the fallen man in filth as he writhed in agony.

It took seconds to reach the group. They hurried along the track. Some helped the mother, whose thighs were still slick with blood. A girl of around thirteen carried the baby. And there, cutting them off from going farther, hornets ran out of the wood. The young guy dropped a couple of them with the shotgun. Then he started fumbling with the thing, trying to reload.

Slowing the bike, I fired my last shot. The hornet went down with a hole in the back of his head you could have shoved your fist through.

There were still more than half a dozen left. I had to slow the bike, but I cut past the little band of survivors. I had nothing but air in the ammo clip now. Instead I accelerated toward the surviving bunch of killers. They were still intent on claiming their original prey and sidestepped me. One wasn’t fast enough. I caught him across the forehead with the rifle butt. He went down onto his back. Down but not out, he started to sit up. Whipping the bike ’round, wheels throwing out dirt like a smoke screen, I rode toward him. The front wheel bounced up over his chest, pinning him down to the ground. Slowly, hardly touching the throttle, I eased the bike forward until the rear tire pressed down deep into his belly. Frantically, he beat at my legs. His eyes bulged wide; spit bubbled through his lips in fast, glistening gobs. Bye, bye, freak boy. I opened up the throttle until the engine screamed; the back wheel blurred, spun and ripped out his intestine as efficiently as a chainsaw.

That left me with the other hornets who closed in on the group. The guy still fumbled shells into the shotgun breech, dropping them on the ground in the process, picking them up, dropping them again, picking them up again, panic distorting his face into a mask from which jutted two terror-stricken eyes

But then it was over.

In a blur motorcycles buzzed past me. Zak, Michaela and Tony rode alongside the surviving hornets. Balancing their shotguns in the crooks of their elbows, they fired. And, man, you knew they’d done this be-fore. In less than ten seconds the half-dozen-strong bunch of bad guys lay dead in a growing pool of their own blood.

Down in the valley the other hornets would have heard the bikes and the shooting. They’d come looking for us now. It was time to get that tired bunch of people with the newborn baby up the hill, then the hell out of there.