Sooner Dead by Mel Odom

Author:Mel Odom
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780786958863
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast Publishing
Published: 2011-03-01T10:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

Full dark was only minutes away when Hella and Stampede topped the final rise in front of the Coyle River. Occasional gunshots still echoed through the trees, but the pacing had slowed down a lot. When Hella had first heard them, they’d been fast, and they’d been silenced almost equally as fast.

The last remnants of sunset glinted off the hard, dark water that whooshed through the small valley at the bottom of the hill. Whitewater runs across the surface told how dangerous the current was. The river had swollen over the banks at least two or three feet. Through her binocs, Hella spotted the tops of trees and brush.

Wroth’s Ferry sat on the north side of the river. Two stories tall, providing protection for passengers on the first floor and comfortable machine gun nests for the security guards, the armor-plated ferry jumped and jerked as the rushing water slammed against the sides. Four thick cables connected two poles on the south side and two poles on the north side. A fifth cable ran through the windlass that pulled the ferry back and forth across the river.

The Wroth family had built the ferry more than a hundred years before. Since then, they’d charged people for cargo carried across the river and made a decent profit. All of the charges were for convenience, not to cut a passenger’s throat. There were other places to cross the Coyle River, east and west of the falls, but none as safe.

Only a few crossings could be made in shallow water, and the nearest one was seventeen klicks away. With the rainy season on the Redblight, that wouldn’t be safe either. Travelers had to stay on one side of the Coyle River or the other, or they had to pay the Wroth family for passage.

Hella swept her binocs across the riverbank and spotted a half dozen men and women lying dead in the mud and the water. “The ’Chine killed the Wroths.”

“The Wroths have been killed before.” Stampede spoke matter-of-factly, but he kept his telescope trained on the ferry as well. Stampede used a telescope because they’d never found a pair of binocs that would fit him. He lost something on depth perception, but the telescope served him well enough. “Nobody’s ever killed all of them, and I suspect that all of them weren’t killed tonight.”

Hella felt sorry for the family. She knew them well enough to greet a few of them by name. They were honest and hardworking men and women who had managed to find a way to thrive in the Redblight.

And Stampede was right. The Wroths had been murdered a few times, but the murderers had never gotten away with it. Scouts along the trade routes had killed the murderers when they knew who had done it. Or a few years passed and the next generation of Wroths came along and evened the score.

But the ’Chine weren’t common murderers.

“This is our fault.” The guilt over the carnage stung Hella. She tried not

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