The Apocalypse War by Peter Meredith

Author:Peter Meredith [Meredith, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Market Publishing
Published: 2016-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 21

Sadie Walcott

Just at that moment, with Grey’s M16 cracking steadily away, Sadie’s guilt matched Jillybean’s in its intensity. She had left a good man behind to die. It was a hard truth to face and, lucky for her, she had plenty of excuses. They repeated themselves over and over like a skipping record: the captain was going to die anyway, he was too big to carry, and she would have been throwing her life away by staying.

The excuses were all worthless and served to inflamed her guilt rather than assuage it. She sobbed as she ran, her eyes blurred by tears. She could barely see her feet dancing from rock to rock and the camouflaged man with the M4 who was standing thirty yards away, catching his breath after a long climb, she mistook for a bush.

He was surprised, as well, by her sudden appearance. His gun came up and he fired a three round burst, missing high as she flung herself behind one of the boulders jutting up from the top of the ridgeline. The boulder was an oblong that protruded out of the earth to the not so staggering height of four feet.

It was crappy cover in Sadie’s opinion, and wouldn’t keep her safe for more than a few seconds. The shooter, and his friends—she could hear an excited whispering coming from further up the trail suggesting there were a lot more of them—would be able to flank her simply by moving to their right by about thirty feet where there was a lane between the rocks as wide and open as a sidewalk.

Unsnapping two buckles, she had the empty chest rig off in half a second. She swirled it once over her head before flinging it to her left; at the same time, she broke right. After the long morning of running up and down the mountains and fighting for her life, her legs were heavy and she moved without her usual blazing speed, as she headed for the edge of the ridgeline to the west.

She had no idea if there was any safety in that direction, in fact she was pretty sure a steep drop into nothing was likely waiting for her, and yet the alternative: capture at the hands of the Azael and sold off to whichever of her enemies bid the highest, was so much worse.

Behind her the chest rig danced in mid-air as bullets caught it and spun it away. Then the gun was turned on her. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw it blaze and the air was filled with the sizzle of lead. Eight feet from the edge of the ridgeline, she planted her left foot and hurtled over the rim.

The drop was nowhere near as steep as was needed for the fall to kill her. She landed twenty feet down the hill and with gravity pulling her urgently on, she immediately began to tumble in a flailing ball of arms and legs. Her momentum was slowed

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