44

 

The words echoed through Val’s head: Lasting renown won through tribulation. It was the translation of the slogan on the first tunnel, or so Nils had told her. She hoped it would be a fitting epitaph for her group if this plan did not succeed.

As she blasted out of the fourth tunnel along the trail, the path became a straightaway for the next hundred feet before it angled to the right. She sped up, despite the loose rocky ground, her thick tires spitting rocks behind her. The path widened and she let Ulrik and Heinrich move ahead of her. Their ATVs made short work of the steep grade. After two more tunnels and a series of switchbacks, Val let Morten and Oskar move ahead as well.

Just outside the mouth of the sixth tunnel, she bade Anders to wait with her. Down the hillside they could see countless pines amid rocky crags, and far below was the series of switchbacks they had just driven up. Val stepped off her ATV, walked to the side of the path and picked up a large rock, just smaller than her head.

Far below, they could see a progression of the Hangers. The line of grisly men moved slowly on the loose rocky path, but there were dozens of them, and Val knew that if they were still giving chase when they returned to clear roads, the men would catch up. So she decided to rattle them a bit.

“Can you hit them from here?” she asked Anders.

The archer considered the request for a moment. “Too many trees. Probably not.”

Val looked at the rock in her hand, spun around in a full circle, and pitched the missile in a high arc. It sailed out into the void. “Maybe we will get lucky. This should at least give them a fright.”

 

 

Ruck happened to glance up the mountain, and the simple act saved his life. He saw a small gray shape arc down from the trail above, and beyond that he could see the smooth woman in her odd eyewear. She stood on the trail looking down with another of her flat-bikers.

Before Ruck could shout a warning through his laced mouth, the descending object crashed into a slight outcropping and bounced straight at Ziegel’s unsuspecting cranium. The rock was close to the size of his head—minus the hair—and it tore the man’s skull from his shoulders. A cloud of crimson detonated around the man like the seeds of a disturbed dandelion.

The velocity of the impact carried the rock, and the human head, well out into the void where they plunged downward. The momentum also tugged on the man’s neck and the wrenching motion pulled his body sideways. It toppled clean off the bike, flipping through the air, before a leg caught in a tree, and the corpse came to rest at a twisted angle.

Ziegel’s hawg bounced along as though it still had a rider, until it struck a rock and toppled over in the middle of the path.

Ruck was equal parts horrified and amazed. Either the woman was the luckiest shot on Earth, or she was the most skilled warrior he had ever seen. Either way, he knew what could stop her. He reached into his skin jacket, and pulled out his most prized possession.

There were not many handguns left in the world, and fewer bullets. But the top five members of the Hangers all had Glocks. They were antiques, and the men meticulously cared for them. They practiced firing the weapons once a year, especially after finding a new haul of bullets. Ruck was the best shot of the five of them. But he had only three bullets left. It had been a long time since they had come across ammunition of any kind—never mind the 9mm that the Glocks used.

Three bullets.

But he had just decided to use one on the smooth woman.

Frag her, he thought.

He already had a wife. He didn’t need another.

 

 

Val spun as something sliced into her upper arm. Then a loud, echoing crack rang out across the mountains, as she twisted and slumped across her ATV. Anders was crouched by her side in heartbeat.

“Are you okay?”

Val turned and looked at her arm. The bullet had ripped through the leather jacket and sliced through her skin, but it had missed bone, and had not carved deep enough to damage muscle. Just a scratch, but it burned like a bastard. And the same damn arm the Long Knife stabbed. It has only just healed. “They will be coming. Move.”

Anders rushed back to his ATV and they were off, buzzing up the trail to the next tunnel. Just before the ninth, the others were waiting for them, and Nils was off his quad. It was parked just inside the mouth of the tunnel. Nils was standing on it, stuffing one of his bombs into a crevice near the ceiling. He gave the detonator’s timer dial a twist with a clicking noise and then slowly pushed it into the soft, claylike substance. Then he dropped down onto the saddle of his ATV and sped off into the tunnel’s gloom. The others quickly followed, Heinrich glancing nervously up at the bomb as he passed under it. Val and Anders, last in line, did the same.

 

 

Ruck had quickly taken the saddle bags off his hawg and abandoned it for Ziegel’s. Although the bone cage on the side was scratched and cracked from its fall, the hawg’s headlamp worked, and at the moment, that mattered far more. He had left his hawg on its kick in the grass, to the side of the path. He took off up the hill. When he noticed Ziegel’s hawg had more juice than his, he had smiled at his good fortune.

He didn’t know he had hit the smooth woman with his shot until he saw blood splatter on the gray rocks, just outside the mouth of the sixth tunnel.

I actually hit her! Massive smooth!

And now, at the upper level of the switchback, he was thoroughly delighted to see that he’d exacted some blood for blood. But the smooth woman’s corpse was nowhere in sight. And the blood spatter wasn’t enough to suggest his shot had killed her.

It won’t matter. The next two bullets will do the trick, he thought with a grim smile. Throwing caution to the wind, he sped up, passing the Hangers ahead of him until he was just behind Klein.

And then he took the lead.

 

 

The passage from daylight to darkness repeated until it was like a blur. The stunning greenery around them and the fresh, crisp mountain air went unnoticed as Val struggled to keep up with the others on the shifting terrain. Occasionally there would be a huge rock embedded in the middle of the trail, and she would have to swerve, her rear wheel gripping the path’s edge.

Behind her, the maniac leading the Hangers, the man with the gun, closed in. He had put the weapon away, but it wouldn’t be long before he could stop and shoot her in the back. He was no more than twenty feet back when thunder rumbled across the valley, and the ground beneath her ATV shook. Pebbles bounced across the path.

The bomb, she thought.

It was much too soon. Nils had said he was setting it for close to half an hour, but it had been less than five minutes.

Then as soon as the explosion’s pressure wave passed, a second impact struck. The Hangers’ leader had sped up next to her and smashed his bike into her ATV, driving it toward the trail’s edge and certain death.