Destroyer by Noah Mann

Author:Noah Mann [Mann, Noah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Dystopian, post apocalypse, Thriller
Publisher: Noah Mann
Published: 2018-07-05T06:00:00+00:00

Twenty

Six hours after we woke and began moving west again, I heard something.

“That’s just the water,” Neil told me when I’d directed his attention to the sound.

He could have been right in some respects. The stream still ran off to our left, trickling down from the still distant lake. But I did not hear water babbling along.

“I heard splashing, Neil,” I said.

We stopped and spread out, each of us taking a knee a dozen yards apart in the old grey woods. The terrain had flattened out, plateauing at the elevation where Medicine Lake was likely situated somewhere ahead. Without a map we had no sure way of knowing its exact location, relying instead on the stream to guide us there so that the road could be avoided.

After a few minutes of listening Neil looked to me and shook his head. I nodded and we rose again, coming back together to continue our way forward.

“I don’t know what it was,” I told my friend, my voice hushed.

“A piece of deadfall falling into the water,” he suggested.

That was possible. It made more sense than any of the nefarious scenarios I could imagine, where Perkins’ people would have found a way to get ahead of us and were, as we pressed on, surrounding us near the stream.

Twenty minutes later, though, there was no sign of any pursuer. No sign of any danger at all.

Until there was.

The sound this time was not some nebulous sloshing of water. It was the straining rumble of a diesel engine off to our right in the direction of the road. A vehicle was chugging its way up the mountain. It was climbing slowly but wasn’t stopping.

“Just one,” I said as Neil and I both shifted to full cover behind a pair of trees.

“Where are the rest?” he wondered aloud.

“We need to see what it is,” I said.

It was a risk, closing the distance we’d kept from the road, but without doing so we would be advancing in the blind. For all we knew the creeping vehicle could be dropping groups of fighters as it continued on. Groups that could be setting up to swarm us once we were spotted.

“All right,” Neil agreed, no fervor about him. “But we stay well clear of being exposed.”

I nodded and we started moving again, shifting course to the northwest, aiming at a point which, were we to continue on our chosen heading, would intersect the road a quarter mile away. Traversing rises and falls in the terrain we finally reached a point just past the crest of a hill bulging from the mountain’s east slope. From that vantage point, as we went to ground and shielded ourselves behind a dense knot of fallen trees, we were able to see the road maybe forty yards through the woods.

“Still coming,” Neil said.

The vehicle, sounding more like a truck now that we’d closed the distance, hadn’t yet reached the sliver of the road we could see. But it was close. I brought my AK up and kept it at the ready.

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