The Mad Mick by Horton Franklin

Author:Horton, Franklin [Horton, Franklin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: thriller, Science Fiction, Adventure
Amazon: B07HJLZXL6
Goodreads: 41961155
Published: 2018-10-03T07:00:00+00:00

17

Following the kidnapper’s trail was becoming more difficult. The hard surface made it difficult for Conor to use even the most rudimentary tracking methods to determine how far he was behind the group. In soil, the definition of the print, the compaction of the soil, told him things. In woods or a field, crushed foliage gave him information. He was in an information vacuum now, blindly following the occasional scuff in the asphalt which he presumed to be made by the homemade rebar horse shoes and by the bent branches he presumed to be signs left by Ragus.

Even the bent branches were becoming scarcer. This section of highway was four-lane with guardrails on the sides. West Virginia had eradicated roadside foliage with napalm and there was very little left vegetation left within the public right-of-way, leaving fewer means by which Ragus could leave markers. The boy obviously had guts but he was lacking in experience. It was just sheer luck the boy had managed to follow the kidnappers this far without getting himself killed.

Earlier in the afternoon Conor crossed the state line into West Virginia, a state he'd traveled through but knew little about. He was unfamiliar with the road system and what cities it passed through. As night neared, he faced yet another evening away from his daughter. As much as that pained him, he was afraid to ride in the dark and possibly miss one of the scant trail signs. If this happened a few months back, he could have called in favors and had satellite footage, drone surveillance, and possibly even a strike team at his disposal.

There was a beautiful sunset that further enraged him because it was the kind of thing he would have pointed out to his daughter had they been home together. It enraged him because her absence reminded him of the absence of his wife, a woman he felt he’d barely gotten to know before she was taken from him. It enraged him because it illuminated the void within him created by all of the things he’d lost in his life from his father, to his grandfather, to his country, to his mother, to his wife, and now his daughter. Nothing hardened a man like loss. Nothing reminded you of the passage of time and brevity of life like a sunset. It could stop you in your tracks but disappear if you looked away for even a second. It was a beauty made painful by the inability to perfectly capture it in words, pictures, or in memory.

Conor was just past Princeton, West Virginia when he noticed the billowing black smoke. Considering the state of the world and the general unrest of people, he assumed the smoke to be the result of a bored miscreant or even an accidental fire. At this stage, he saw it as nothing more than something to keep an eye on. Further up the road, he started to smell the smoke.

It had to be burning tires. There was nothing in the world that smelled like it.

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