They found a dozen other damaged cars and trucks closer to the main hunting lodge, injured people lying all over the place. As soon as Hale brought the SWAT SUV to a halt, a sheriff’s deputy came stumbling toward them, name tag torn off his blood-soaked uniform. A tall woman in a cowboy hat walked beside him, helping the man stay upright. Far off in the distance, Hale heard the sounds of gunfire.
“Please tell me there are more of you on the way,” the deputy said as Hale stepped out of the truck. “There are five confirmed shooters out there in the woods somewhere, heavily armed and vicious as hell. We have multiple deputies and officers down, along with an unknown number of civilians. It’s like they’re being hunted.”
The irony of people who’d paid to come to this place to hunt now being hunted wasn’t lost on Hale.
“We have more on the way,” Carter said, walking around the back of the vehicle with Hale’s M4 carbine and his tactical vest. “They’ll be here in less than fifteen minutes.”
“But we won’t be waiting for them,” Hale said, shrugging into his vest as an extra-long burst of automatic weapon fire echoed through the nearby woods. “The three of us will go in now and try to save as many people as we can, while hopefully pinning down the location of the five…hunters.”
The deputy eyed Hale like there was something seriously wrong with him but then slowly nodded. “Okay, I’ll round up as many of my fellow deputies who can at least walk, and we’ll go in with you.”
“No,” Hale said firmly. He didn’t need to hear the man’s labored breathing to know the guy wouldn’t make it through another trip into those woods. A quick glance around the gravel parking lot revealed that the other deputies and local cops weren’t in any better shape. “Stay here and coordinate the medevac for the injured. When the rest of the SWAT team gets here, let them know which way we’ve gone.”
The deputy’s expression slowly morphed from anger to shame before finally settling on acceptance. “Okay, I’ll handle it.”
Hale paused long enough to glance at the woman, giving her a meaningful look he prayed she’d understand. Someone needed to keep an eye on the deputy so his pride wouldn’t cause him to bleed out. Apparently the woman understood because she gave Hale a slight nod as she moved a little closer to the man.
Turning, Hale ran toward the tree line. Ahead of him, Carter and Trey were already disappearing into the sparse woods. Over the radio, he could hear them softly announcing their intentions as far as which direction they were heading.
“I’ll be playing it by ear like I usually do,” Hale told them. “Be careful, you two.”
Receiving soft words of confirmation, he ran deeper into the woods, slipping a thirty-round magazine into his weapon as he went, then pulling the charging handle of the M4 to the rear and letting it go, loading the first round before stopping where he was. Once again, he wished his nose weren’t such utter crap. If it worked like his pack mates’ did, he’d be able to get a track on almost everyone in the area. Since it didn’t, he’d have to make do with his enhanced hearing and hope for the best.
Closing his eyes, Hale focused on the sounds around him. The tidal wave of noise almost overwhelmed him, from the pop of gunfire to the crashing of heavy underbrush and the wheeze of labored breathing. Even the rapid-fire thud of adrenaline-fueled heartbeats. With so many overlapping sounds, it was tough to distinguish direction and distance, but at least he managed to get a sense of where the majority of the crap was going down, and that was good enough.
Turning in that direction, Hale started running at full speed, weaving among the trees, ducking under low-hanging branches, and jumping over fallen logs. Off to his right, he picked up the sound of two sets of steady, crunching strides—Trey and Carter. They were some distance away but moving in the same general direction he was.
A flash of movement to his left had Hale throwing himself to the side, tumbling across the roughground before he brought his M4 up, ready to shoot. He froze when he saw it was a large white-tailed deer, the rack on the buck more than three feet across and at least a dozen points. The animal stood there in the middle of a shoulder-high nest of thickets, beautiful eyes wide in terror. Hale had no idea whether it was all the shooting going on or the fact that he smelled like a wolf, but either way, the poor deer looked ready to lose his mind.
Another burst of gunfire echoed in the air, startling the deer so much the animal jumped ten feet—sideways. Before Hale could even think about whether he should move, the deer bounded away through the brush, moving like he couldn’t get away fast enough.
Hale shook off the surprise, berating himself for allowing a deer to distract him. But he’d barely made it another fifty feet before something else slowed him down. There, on the far side of a fallen tree trunk, was a body.
He’d been so focused on trying to reacquire a track on the sounds around him that he almost didn’t notice it until he nearly landed on it. The man, wearing an orange hunting vest, wasn’t breathing. The three bloody holes in the back of the man’s vest were obvious evidence of what had happened.
“Confirmed civilian fatality about six hundred meters in,” Hale whispered into his radio mic. “There’s nothing I can do for him.”
“Copy that,” Trey murmured back. “I’m pretty sure he won’t be the only one we find. I’m smelling blood all over the place.”
Hale didn’t say anything as he continued to move through the woods, trusting his ears to lead him toward the closest fight. Within seconds, he could hear shouts and soft cries of pain.
Cursing, he ran faster.
A sudden thrum of noise overhead jerked him to a sliding stop, dead leaves flying everywhere as he dropped to a knee and jerked his M4 upward, in the direction of the noise, forefinger moving toward the trigger.
At the last second he backed off, realizing the noise was a helicopter coming in so low its skids were actually hitting the tops of some of the trees. He thought it was a police chopper coming in to provide air support, but then he saw some kook leaning out the side door of the bird with a big camera on his shoulder.
Crap.
Newsies.
A burst of automatic gunfire rattled from somewhere nearby, with at least one of those rounds slamming into the helicopter. The bird veered to the left suddenly, tipping so hard the cameraman would have probably tumbled out the door if he hadn’t been strapped in. Hale supposed that meant he wasn’t the only person in these woods not overlyfond of reporters. Especially those that flew a helicopter into the middle of what felt like a war zone.
Hale sprinted through the forest, following the sounds of fighting to a clearing where the trees and underbrush thinned enough to allow him to get a good look at what was going on ahead of him.
Four people were pinned down behind the minimal shelter provided by two relatively small trees that had fallen against each other at some point before collapsing to the ground in a condition that was more rot than solid wood. Even as he watched, automatic weapon fire from deeper in the forest began to chew into the tree trunks, blasting big chunks of the wood away, drawing shouts and curses from the people trapped there.
It took Hale way too long to find the two shooters. He’d been looking for the dark tactical gear they’d been wearing during the attack on the club, but instead it was a mix of browns and greens that blended in with the forest background. The two supernaturals were wearing camouflage clothing and gear. If it wasn’t for the muzzle flashes from their assault rifles, he might have completely missed them, even with his enhanced vision.
