Death Bed by Russ Linton

Author:Russ Linton [Linton, Russ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

23

Kade knew living and survival were two different things.

He had enough water for a few days. No trace otherwise. Digging into the sand produced only more sand. Cooler down there, but nothing to drink. Shriveled mesquite and dry grasses grew in scraggly tufts. Dormant. Hibernating until the spring rains soaked them. He didn’t have that luxury.

He could go longer without food. Would have to. Prickly pear had no fruit this late in the season. Every so often a lizard scuttled by.

Not enough to live on. Maybe enough to survive.

Be your own man. Rely on nobody else. Hiram Black had drilled those lessons into his boy. He’d come to learn surviving was a mental game. Defeating the isolation and loneliness. Living? Living required an assist.

A new drone took up pursuit at a safer altitude as Kade made his way through the canyon. A tough rock throw now. He wondered if it’d lose signal if it flew too low. Be forced to land under a kind of preservation mode or maybe retrace the route on autopilot until it found the signal again.

Great idea, boss. So good, I already made it happen.

Kade smiled. Special Agent Derek Alderman. The type of assist he could use right now.

An ET on his former team, Electronics Tech. Former Army SIGINT, his battlefield had been the ones and zeroes swimming in the skies over Afghanistan. The scary kind of Geek Squad. But if he were an alien intelligence that would’ve made sense too. He read code like a native language.

ETs got called in to plant bugs, setup covert cameras, collect digital evidence. The truly gifted, like Derek, could remotely seize control of military hardware or compromise satellites.

Derek would be able to resurrect the busted drones dangling from Kade’s pack. Force their preservation mode. Follow them right back to the pilot’s trailer. Way beyond Kade’s skill set. He’d tried to draft Gary for the role. The engineer was probably busy placing bets on the over under for Kade’s survival time.

Longer than Gary would like it to be.

But he didn’t just need to defeat the desert. Kade kept an eye out for sign as he moved. Competitors. Security. Wildlife. Nothing except weeks old tracks in a curling field of dried mud. Hikers maybe.

He didn’t know where this armed opponent of his was. Didn’t know what they’d been armed with. Anything hand-to-hand and Kade had enough pent up rage he was ready to unload. If they’d given his competitor a firearm? He was stuck in a mile long kill box with little cover.

He could free climb the rocky canyon. Wouldn’t be easy but doable. But if an armed opponent found him then, his survival odds dropped to nothing. Best to stick to the narrow canyon floor. Close to the meager cover.

According to the map, the canyon narrowed before emptying onto a broad plain. Getting into the open would let him probe the map boundaries and test their perimeter security. He didn’t view this as a one-on-one match. He considered himself in hostile territory.

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