Hope Survives by Harley Tate

Author:Harley Tate [Tate, Harley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-01-31T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

SILAS

Woods north of Truckee, CA

6:00 p.m.

Silas came to with a pounding headache and no feeling in his legs. At first he thought the crash severed his spinal column and he’d lie there, paralyzed, until death finally took him. But after a few minutes, his brain began to function.

He thumped on his leg. Stone cold. He leaned forward with a grunt, tipping his whole upper body over until he found purchase in compacted snow. Using his arms as braces, he shimmied back and forth, working his lower body out of the snow. Every twist brought a surge of icy pain shooting in needles down his thighs and calves, all the way to his toes.

Judging by the rapidly diminishing light, he’d been unconscious for at least half an hour. Plenty of time for his lower body to suffer frostbite. At last, he managed to free his legs, not that it did much good. Silas tried to stand, propping one foot on the snow and dragging his body up using the nearest tree.

He collapsed and ate a mouthful of ice, cursing as he spit it out.

Chasing those girls had been a mistake. Just like everything else that happened that afternoon. He couldn’t believe their luck when they first spotted the U-Haul and the productive little worker bees trundling box after box into the back end. The idiots guarding the pharmacy were finally good for something: doing Silas’s work for him.

When his uncle heard the good news, he’d clapped Silas on the back and forgiven him then and there for Beckett’s death. For a moment, Silas felt the first stirrings of pride. But they’d been extinguished with Elias’s next announcement.

A roadblock? They couldn’t just swoop in there, guns blazing and take them all out at the hospital? Efficiency wasn’t his uncle’s style. Not when they could make a show of it for everyone to remember.

But Silas had kept that opinion to himself, dutifully loading up his Polaris and following his uncle through the backwoods trails up to Northwoods Boulevard. No one had anticipated the F-150 with the snowplow attachment. Ingenious, if you asked him. If those pansy-ass guards had some balls and charged the snowmobile line with the truck, it would have been over quicker.

Instead, they chose the hard way: a gunfight. They might as well have been back at the freakin’ O.K. Corral in the middle of a shoot-out. One after the other, his cousins went down. Silas almost took a bullet to the head. He was ten seconds away from cutting out to save his own skin when the Big Bird took off for the woods.

Silas and his cousin Aaron followed. That kid had never been good on a pair of skis. When he went down, Silas managed to swerve around him, but watching Aaron’s sled slam into a tree threw his concentration. He didn’t see the rifle until the bullet hit his thigh.

Everything after that happened too fast to remember. Now he sat in the snow, ass half frozen, with a bullet in his leg and an upside down snowmobile beside him.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.