Eli and Bruiser were side by side slightly in front of me. The rest of the crew, except Quint, were spread behind us, Grizz at the very back, at our six. Quint was riding point, in front by a good hundred yards, leaning into the turn beyond Parson’s Branch, a one-eighty twist in the road where it crossed over a small waterway that gave the turn its name, and the primitive road entering 129. She demanded of the Kow-bike everything it had. If she misjudged, it could have deadly consequences. But Quint rode like a boss, like she was born on a bike. I bent over the front of Bitsa and blasted around the boys, leaving them in my dust and closing the distance between my psycho bodyguard and me. Quint glanced back and laughed into comms, her manic expression visible through the face shield.
Her front tire blew. The sound of a rifle shot cracked. Time stuttered. Stalled.
In slow motion, Quint’s front wheel spun around. Her bike followed. Into a tight, twisting lean. Which instantly contorted into a rotating slide. Grinding. Sparks. A guttural scream into her mic. She released the bike and it slid away. Toward the drop off and the creek below. Her body skidded across the pavement. Rolled. Her limbs flew. Her helmet bounced.
I braked. Hard. Following the spinning, broken body.
Eli whipped his bike around me and to the left, up the primitive dirt road. Toward where the sniper had to be. Shouting orders.
Bruiser braked, positioning himself between the sniper’s likely location and me. Momentum carried us off the curve and off the road, into the brush and a few feet down. Out of sight unless the sniper was in the trees.Possible. We both cut the engines. Left the bikes. Bending low, Bruiser beside me, we approached the tangled limbs, bloody flesh, and ripped racing leathers.
The security unit had broken up, three following Eli up the rutted, one-way dirt road. Two of the unit, Grizz and Hernando, split away and pulled off the road, into the winter underbrush to either side of us. Hernando called 911 for the cops and medic. Grizz called for our security backup.
Bruiser reached Quint first. His long-fingered hands found a pulse. Came away bloody. “Pulse. Breathing.” Gingerly he checked her limbs. “Severe fracture of left tibia and fibula. Right humerus. Severe deformation, but no compound. Bleeding but no arterial involvement, at least on the outside of her. Major loss of flesh.”
“Fucked up my manicure,” Quint said. “Oh. Shit. Sorry about the language, Queenie.”
“Not the first time I heard rough language,” I said. “Not the last.”
Quint laughed in pain and groaned as Bruiser checked her other limbs, jarring her slightly. She gagged, any movement ratcheting up the pain levels. “Holy hell, this hurts. I guess that means I don’t have a spinal injury.” She laughed again, a sound full of agony.
There wasn’t a dang thing I could do.
Another rifle shot echoed. Two more. They sounded further away, as if the shooter was leaving. How many shooters? Several? One leaving, to draw off security?
Long gun. White man gun. Hate white man guns,Beast thought.
Did the shooter miss? Or was the shooter good enough to intentionally hit the wheel?
Hard to target moving prey.Beast rumbled in my mind,White man gun not that good.
If Beast was wrong, and the shooter was that good, then the shot was intended to put us exactly where we were, and another sniper had a weapon trained on us, from the trees across the road, or from farther away, down the hill, or even across the valley. We were exposed on the sloped land. As Bruiser worked with Quint, I pulled dead branches together, the makings of a bare shelter.
Grizz saw what I was doing and dragged up three old tires from the creek. She positioned them around the branches to hide us. She got lucky and found a muddy, disintegrating tarp and stretched it out on the downhill side. It was the color of dried mud and camo, probably tossed by a hunter last season. Better than nothing, but not by much.
Close to us, Grizz stretched out prone, binocs in hands, searching the trees uphill for the shooter. She was a crack shot but none of us had long rifles. “Hern’do.” Her voice fractured through comms, indicating a bad signal, which was common on the Dragon. “Cops and medic?”
I pulled my own nine mil and studied the closer territory in case another shooter was perched in the brush nearby.
Hernando, about thirty feet up the road, and also stretched out, but looking out across the valley for a distant shooter, said, “Cops’ ETA, fifteen to twenty. Medic closer to fortyby land. MAMA’s helos are already at a multi victim crash site, so no help from MAMA. We are officially orphaned.”
MAMA was Mountain Area Medical Airlift, which covered medical air rescue and transport for a large region. Without them, we were stuck waiting for a land ambulance, or we’d have to transport Quint on one of my helos. No sophisticated medical gear. No comfy rescue gurney with straps and inflatable pillows to position broken limbs. No high-strength, high-quality pain killers.Crap.
Hernando went on, “I got air splints and Second Skin in my saddle bags. Working my way over. Cover me.”
“You psychic, Hern’do?” Grizz asked. “Knew we’d be attacked?”
“Nah. I’m just real smart about staying alive. Besides, the queen always gets attacked.”
Bruiser laughed softly and muttered, “Just like old times.”
We were all talking into comms, and I felt Eli’s response through our funky connection—myriad emotions, composed mostly of amusement and bitterness that he tried to hide from me. I didn’t react. This linking of emotions seemed to have stabilized instead of going away, and neither of us wanted to make it worse for the other.
I scanned the roadsides and the scrub trees all around. Nothing. A good shooter would have ghillie cloth and the best camo. I was looking for movement, small twitches not associated with the wind. I glanced at Grizz. She was scanning the opposite direction from me.
Hernando slid down the embankment to where Bruiser hunched over Quint, beneath the tarp. Hernando was short, barely making the requirements for military service, wide, and solid, a former medic with the Rangers in some middle eastern country. He winced as he took in Quint, but his voice held nopity, only banter, when he said. “Damn, Quint. You’d go to any lengths to avoid wearing a dress to a fancy event.”
“I hate dresses. Waste of cloth.” She gagged again and shivered as shock set in. “Party’s only good for getting drunk and laid and Koun won’t have me. Fuckingfriendship.”
