CHAPTER 4
[ No Manual excerpt this time, I’m still humming and hawwing over what it’s going to be about. ]
–
It was a week later when a group of six or seven civvies on horseback were received by the camp.
Gray was on weapons maintenance near the commander’s tent—a coveted job done in the shade of a tarp—when she saw the wastelanders being ushered inside. Except for the occasional band of merchants or trappers bringing in healthy bondsmen for selling, she hadn’t set eyes on an outsider in almost four months, and it was a bit jarring to see folks dressed in something other than threadbare fatigues. From their clothes, she could tell they were from one of the wandering clans, maybe a minor merchant family. Their loose, flowing dress was in deep reds trimmed with yellows and blues and beiges. The shade of red, though, was on the orange side – dyed from the plentiful eucalypts rather than the much–coveted cochineal. Definitely a minor family.
“Wonder what they’re here for?” wondered one of her duty partners, Cox, shielding his eyes. They had all paused to watch. “I don’t see any bondsmen.”
Azimi glanced at their horses and the man tending them. “No pack mule neither,” she noted. “I don’t think they’re here to trade.”
Gray shrugged. “They’re probably trying to get away from some brigs.”
“Maybe. Or maybe they’re the new neighbors looking to hammer out a protection contract. They look important enough. See those saddles?” The color of their clothes was one thing, but the tack had copper hardware. “And the closest civtown is only a couple hours’ ride away. I’ll bet they’re loaded.”
“Too bad we can’t ask them ourselves,” Cox muttered, getting back to work. Corps Protocol for interacting with wastelanders was strict. Enlisted corpsmen were not permitted to engage them in any way unless an officer was present, and were not, even then, allowed to speak unless spoken to first.
After a good half-hour, the group in their gaudy red was escorted to a lavish guest tent a few doors down.
“My friday’s on protection contract,” Cox said.
Azimi grinned, unable to resist a bet. “Mine’s on trade deal.”
“Brigs,” muttered Gray.
Commander Hitch stepped out of the tent, and the maintenance group fell silent, returning to their duties. Out of the corner of her eye, Gray saw him say a few words to a clerk, who nodded and took off at a brisk pace. By instinct her gaze fell on the tall flagpole beside the commander’s tent, which was already being fitted with a series of brightly-colored signal flags: a small blue one with a white square in the center went first and was followed by a red and yellow pennant.
“It’s a round-up,” Azimi said quietly. She was referring to the captains.
Gray didn’t have a good feeling about this, as there were few reasons to convene Fox’s fourteen captains all at once and most of them involved fighting.
“Better grab your boots,” Gray said, minding the lingering pain in her side. “I think we all just lost our bet.”
* * *
The commander met with the captains for almost two hours, after which the captains relayed the news to each of their toons. There’d been some kind of large ‘Nak mobilization: four–hundred of them, by the outsiders’ estimate, and at least six truckloads of equipment, heading south–west and massacring or menacing every human camp unfortunate enough to get in their way. Civvies rarely had the resources to fight ‘Naks without help from the Corps.
Alpine, which they’d cabled asking for advice on tactics given the size of the mobilization, took less than 8 hours to give their reply in that familiar clipped style afforded by telegraph bandwidth:
ALPINE 47G9D BLUE OFFICE TO FOX MSG FOLLOWS
FLANK AND AMBUSH FROM HIGH GROUND STOP
SAPPER ORDNANCE FROM UNDER OR BEHIND STOP
NALEZING STOP
This telegram was posted on the board outside every captain’s office. The colonels and generals at Base Camp Alpine, with their tactical bird’s-eye view afforded by the constant wires, were ordering a guerrilla attack. For some reason, the word “nalezing” was shorthand for “do no more than absolutely necessary”, and, according to Harper, was sent at the end of most wires from Alpine.
The in-person briefing with captain Burke of Brown Fox toon, those assigned to ‘barracks’ #11-12, took all of an hour, during which more intelligence brought by the wastelanders was revealed. Afterwards, there was little time to do anything but gather up gear and hit the sack unless you wanted to be marching on 5 hours’ sleep.
At 0430 hours the next morning, Gray and five–hundred others woke up to the sound of a horn, grabbed their loadouts, and began the ten–mile march that would put them on track to intercept the force of Anakim. Gray’s side still felt awful under load, so she dug out her last little broken piece of cody and slipped it between her lips for the trek.
Everyone was too preoccupied with focusing on the fight ahead of them, their footing below them, and their pack load on top of them. It was three miles in when the sun rose over the mountains, all pinks and silver–blues of the morning sky. Already it was hot, and Gray had to cover her neck and face with a kerchief. Others were beginning to do the same.
In her head, she took inventory of her equipment, making sure she hadn’t missed anything, not that she could turn back now: kicker, sider, tac knife, six spare mags for each gun, a trio of emergency grenades, cordage, mutli–tool, binos, more goddamn hardtack, and a gallon of water. There was no telling how long they’d be out here, but she hoped, for the sake of her busted ribs, that it wouldn’t be longer than one night.
They arrived at their destination under the unrelenting afternoon sun, where everyone was told to take a breather and get something to eat while the captains talked. Their location was an old floodplain next to a river that hadn’t seen water in decades. A collapsed bridge a mile away, covered in fading graffiti, completed the picture as did the other scattered remains of pre-Disruption life. There was a two–lane road on the high side of the riverbed, up on a low bank, and it was understood that the Anakim would probably be taking this road to their likely rendezvous point: a compound of theirs known to exist some sixty miles further.
The bulk of the enlisted boots were instructed to divide up into groups of six, each headed by at least one tenth-year, to stake out points in the rocks away from the road where they might stand a chance of landing shots. Meanwhile, the sappers and grenadiers would situate themselves closer, armed with a small arsenal of explosives that would be detonated as the ‘Naks stood directly over them. With that strategy in mind, the sappers, Wesson among them, got to work.
About an hour before sundown, Gray and a few others from Brown Fox were ordered to scout the area and see if there wasn’t any sign of the approaching unit. Gray headed due west, over a small ridge and into the dusty landscape below, kicker at the ready. She’d been sent on a lot of reconnaissance assignments over the years, being part of the scouting division; her good eyes and ears, and silent maneuvering made her an ideal specialist. As did her lackluster proficiency with Morse code.
Gray trekked along for a good mile, climbing rocks, descending embankments, weaving her way through the sagebrush and cactus trees, and kept an ear out for the snakesthat liked to come out at sunset. Eventually she found a good vantage point, a small hill, to stop and take a look around. Obscured by tall brush, Gray shimmied up a boulder and lay on her good side while she brought out herbinos to scan the horizon.
Far off in the distance to the north she could see the tall buildings of an old city, and at around her 10 o’clock was the faint silhouette of a large island not far off the distant coast. But so far, there didn’t seem to be a trace of the giants or anyone else. She glanced at her watch, and saw that she had some time to kill. With nothing else to do but wait, she got as comfortable as she could manage, and –
Ch–chak.
The sound of a round entering the chamber of a gun was almost as familiar to her as the beat of her own heart. Sometimes it was comforting. Sometimes it wasn’t.
Gray whipped around, sider in hand. There, she was met with the sight of an Anak and his long, rugged rifle pointed squarely at her. He was about thirty yards away, and her heart nearly stopped when she realized her odds of landing a fatal hit from this distance were next to nothing.
“Fuck,” she whispered, suddenly resigned to the arrival of death at any moment.
The two stared at each other for the longest few seconds of her life. Shoot him! she screamed in her head. Shoot the motherfucker!
But her trigger finger seemed frozen in place, just like the rest of her. Part of it was instinctual: if she fired and missed, she was guaranteedto be killed. If she didn’t, she still had her slim, slim chance. But part of it was something else entirely.
His face was obscured by his own kerchief, wrapped similarly around his head. He wore a plated vest, with straps and pouches making him seem even broader. There was a knife fixed to the webbing near his shoulder, what looked to be a mouthpiece for a bladder of water near it, and… a short, stout antenna sticking out of the top of the pack on his back. Gray’s eyes widened when she realized what she was looking at.
He was a sentinel.
With a scowl, Gray slowly raised her hands, letting the sider fall slack around her trigger finger. This was the smartest thing to do.
But he didn’t move. This was getting ridiculous.
“Fucking capture me or shoot me,” she shouted, trying to steady the wobble in her voice. “What the hell are you waiting for!”
She was expecting it in retaliation for opening her mouth; that bang, that white–hot flash. It didn’t come.
In the silence of the desert, Gray heard him growl. He lowered his gun like it took all his strength to do so, and he loosened the cloth, turning to slip silently back into the deep shadows of the land like she wasn’t worth his lead.
“Hey!”
Gray had no idea why she called after him. She had no idea why she jumped up, ready to hit the sand and get closer.
But she heard a whistle, one of the sentry’s calls. The both of them froze. They whistled again, but she didn’t respond. She was supposed to respond. Gray glanced at the Anak, who was coiled and ready to take off. He gave her a dangerous look.
Some seconds later a sentry from Brown Fox crested the hill. It didn’t take him long to see the both of them at the bottom.
“Holy shit!”
“Kessler, it’s not—!”
Panicked, he reached for his grenade anyway. Gray was surprised at how fast he managed to tear out the pin and hurl it at the ‘Nak, and just as surprised to find that, as her eyes followed the little ball of iron as it arced through the air, that his pitch was coming up short, and that it would land closer to her than its target. Gray dumbly stumbled back and away from the thing, moving in slow motion.
But the Anak didn’t. He moved decisively and she found herself suddenly inches away from that massive body as the flashbang exploded, sending dirt and bits of metal flying in all directions. The giant caging her against the ground hissed through clenched teeth.
They stared at each other for hardly a second, then he got his bearings and disappeared into the settling night with a sloppy trail of bullets on his heels. She’d never seen 500 pounds move so fast.
Gray was left sprawled in the dirt as it occurred to her that she’d felt no squeeze.
No pheromone.
No chemical musk to warp her mind into responding to him like a desert hare responds to a hungry coyote. It took her a moment to get up.
“Fuck! You alright?” Kessler asked as he slid down the embankment and helped her to her feet. “Did he do anything to you?”
Gray just stared off in the direction that the sentinel had gone, still a bit dazed. But things came back to her soon enough and she rose.
“You idiot!” she hissed, shouldering him away. “That little stunt could be heard for miles!”
Kessler’s face went white. “But he was right there! You’d have done the same thing!”
Gray was angry at the interruption and confused at why she was angry at the interruption. Either way, the youngyear had fucked up and bad.
“You need to use your goddamn head, Kessler, or you’re going to get people killed! You won’t make it to your fourth year keeping this up.” She turned to retrieve her binos from the rock and catch her breath.
“And I had the situation under control,” she continued. “He had his back to me.”
Then Gray started back up with Kessler scrambling to keep pace. “Why the hell was his back to you? Did he think you were unarmed?”
The more her hands shook and the redder her face, the deeper she scowled. “I don’t know why,” Gray muttered. “Now shut up until we get back. If you really did give us all away, I’d at least like to try putting up a fight.”
* * *
“The hell was that!” Burke demanded as soon as she caught sight of the approaching pair.
“Kessler here got spooked and threw a grenade, sir.”
She could see, even in the awkward illumination of a small flashlight, the cordage in Captain Burke’s neck tighten.
“Sir, it–it was a ‘Nak! He was right there, right next to Gray! I–I didn’t know what he was doing, if he was going to jump her or what!”
The words that came out of Gray’s mouth just then surprised her, and it felt as though she were suddenly watching herself and unable to do anything about it.
“I didn’t say it was a… ‘Nak, sir.”
Kessler all but froze, excepting for his mouth, which fell open.
“But you said… his back was…”
“You threw your flashbang at a dog.”
Burke took this opportunity to give him a good reaming. “You mean to tell me that you wasted a perfectly good ambush and a perfectly good grenade on an* animal**?*” barked the captain, stepping closer to obliterate his personal space with trained precision. “My god, corpsman, if it wasn’t against policy I’d have you shot.”
Kessler stammered, feeling a different kind of squeeze.
While enlisted soldiers were technically all of the same rank, corpsmen with more years of service were generally afforded greater respect. But Gray felt uneasy and had to look away. Burke excused her, and Kessler never spoke to the seventh-year again.
“You alright?” Finch asked Gray as she sat down on the hard ground without a word.
“Yeah.” A strained pause. “No sleeping tonight, thanks to Kessler.”
“Is that what that was?”
Gray nodded.
She tried telling herself that this was exactly what he deserved, but that was bullshit and she knew it. A sentinel snooping around should have scared the piss out of her, and not from the pheromone. That antenna? It was a direct line to The Algo. He didn’t need to kill her, all he had to do was report what he’d seen and sit back to watch the bloodbath.
Though there was something odd about him—no, she could no longer be sure about any of them—this second-guessing was already spinning out of control.
The Enemy was not to be humanized. Or everything would start making a little less sense than it did before.
But her thoughts kept circling back to the Anak. Who was he ? The way he looked up at the sky when he thought he was alone was eerily similar to the way he looked at her through the sightlines of his boomer. She remembered his eyes: blue, and hemmed with worry lines, laugh lines, maybe both. Or maybe just from squinting in the bright desert sun.
“Gray,” Finch said.
She started, and the younger corpsman looked at her as though she’d been trying to get her attention for a while now.
“What?”
Finch was holding out her worn deck of cards. “Draw to see who gets first watch.”
Gray ran fingers through her hair and took the first card. The four others did the same, and they turned them over together. Finch’s five and Saiyeh’s two committed them to the first one–hour shift, the pair of nines would go after, and then the face cards would finish up.
“Ass,” Finch grumbled at her luck, collecting the cards again and tucking the deck carefully away in a chest pocket. Gray didn’t give a damn about the watch sequence either way. Two hours of sleep on hard dirt was still two hours of sleep on hard dirt. And that was besides the ugly feeling that she’d secretly doomed them all to a grizzly, painful death. A cool sweat beaded along her neck.
As she settled down for sleep, arms folded tightly and chin tucked into the webbing across her chest, a word for what she’d done popped into her head, taken from Annex II of the Manual, and it sent a chill down her spine:
Treason.
* * *
She got a lot less sleep than she’d hoped for. And when she did, she dreamt of an Anak counter–attack: thousands of hulking, brown-banded shadows, lead bouncing off their armor as they ripped corpsmen from their foxholes. Gray woke with a start when a ‘Nak bullet caved in her skull.
“Nightmare?” asked Munez, their designated tenth-year who bunked on the other end of the Brown’s toon tent.
The moon had set at some point, and all she could see of him was the small orange speck of light at the end of his smokestick. Finch and Saiyeh were still hunkered down for a few hours’ sleep alongside Carey and a fourth-year whose name was escaping her. Munez’s cherry brightened as he took a drag.
“Not looking forward to this ambush.”
He chuckled faintly. “Who is.”
“What’s your style?” she asked.
Gray enjoyed working alone, but right now the eerie hush was getting to her. The Corps had a combat style it taught in training, but everyone had their own preferential spin. It would be useful to know how her fireteam was going to move.
“Keep mobile, aim low, don’t waste ammo.”
Gray nodded, peering out through the darkness. “Not sure how mobility is going to help us in this one,” she thought aloud. “Wouldn’t it be better to stay put? Hidden?”
“Way I see it,” Munez said, “By the time we need to start shooting, the ‘Naks are going to be on top of us. Gonna get chaotic out there if we’re outnumbered.”
1-to-1, of course, meant outnumbered.
“Point. But we do need to stay hidden as long as–”
She saw the outline of his raised arm and Gray stopped talking, whipping around to follow his gaze.
Off in the distance, to the north where the mission leader was positioned, shone a red light toward the groups of corpsmen hiding in the rocks. It began to flash in a legible sequence.
*Nak in 45, *it said in Morse code.
Gray frowned and glanced nervously at her watch: it was just after 0100 hours. “So much for sleeping.”
Munez took out his flashlight, snapped in a red lens, and responded with two quick bursts followed by a longer flash before putting it away: the letter U, the shortened prosign for “understood”. All around them similar responses lit up in the darkness.
Gray reached for Finch’s knee to give it a gentle shake.
* * *
Thirty minutes before they were due to step into the Corps trap, Gray could hear them. The roar of vehicle engines and the sound of many feet on asphalt gave them away.
Gray’s stomach turned. She just kept thinking about that damn antenna. Her fingers tightened their grip on the kicker in her lap and her heart pounded away painfully in her chest as they drew nearer. A quarter mile away; two–hundred yards away; one–hundred. Could this really be happening? What was the catch? Gray looked behind her, up to the top of the bluff, expecting to see a line of towering shadows sneaking up behind them, but all she saw was stars.
“I can’t believe they’re walking right into it,” she whispered.
Finch clicked off the safety on her gun. “Let’s hope our luck doesn’t run out before the night’s over.”
Munez hushed them, and in the darkness she could make out him counting down with his fingers. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
The sound was immense.
There was a bright flash of light, and the vehicles were suddenly no more: balls of fire billowing smoke littered the sides of the road. The force of the explosion killed many instantly, and threw others to the ground, stunned and injured. Hopefully most of them would stay there. The rest of the Anakim scattered in the tumult, trying to regroup just as the corpsmen flanking them along the ridge opened fire.
It was a lot easier to kill them this way, Gray noted as she squeezed the trigger; they didn’t look quite so real, shadowed against the dancing flames. She took one down, two, four—but regroup they did, and before long they’d reformed into smaller, single-file teams that snaked their way towards the scatterings of muzzle flash among the rocks. The pointmen had begun to pick up pieces of metal to shield themselves with.
“Two-o’clock!” one of them shouted, and one of the behemoths behind him opened fire at a group of corpsmen near where Gray and her team were hidden. A grenade was thrown too late, missing its target. Boom.
“Two o’clock clear!”
Munez stopped firing. “Remember what I said about keeping mobile?” he said over the noise. “We need to move!”
Finch swore as she reloaded her gun, pocketing the empty magazine.
“And we need cover,” Munez shouted as he unclipped a grenade from his belt. “Pull pins on my mark!”
It seemed like a good enough idea at this juncture, and Gray reached for a flashbang.
“Mar—“
As Munez stood to get a clear shot, a bullet caught him in the belly just as the iron left his hands and he was thrown to the ground with a wet sound. Gray winced as ten hard years of service bled out beside her. There was nothing to say, he was already dead. Dusted like so many others.
Their orders were, if things took a turn for the worse, to retreat. Nalezing. And from the way those menacing shadows were moving now, it seemed that a retreat was quickly becoming prudent.
“F-fucking kicker’s jammed again!” Saiyeh cried, frantically trying to engage his rifle’s action.
Gray blinked back moisture and yanked the gun out from under their dead comrade.
“Here! Munez won’t need his anymore!”
She shoved it at Saiyeh, and groped around to retrieve the dead man’s spare ammo with trembling hands. If only there’d been time to grab his smokesticks too. Could have traded them for a cody.
“They’re coming,” said Finch, her face hard in the red light.
“We need to get the hell out of this foxhole!”
Gray saw a small opportunity to make up for her guilt. “I’ll cover us,” she said. “Go!”
The fireteam’s remaining corpsmen leapt to their feet and dashed away like mice.
“There! Your eleven!” came the thunder of an Anak voice.
A line of four of the giants were approaching from behind. Gray was careful to spray their feet during the split-second she had clear sight of them through the bush. Protected only by leather, her shots easily found flesh, and they slowed. She watched with distant satisfaction as two of them hollered in pain and stumbled into the rocks, calling her a few colorful names. Quickly, she turned on her heel and hurried to catch up with the others ahead.
The briefing never mentioned a specific fallback point, because failure had seemed so unlikely. But the ‘Naks, as usual, stymied their best efforts. All it took was a charge or two that failed to detonate, a quick enough response to the first explosions—the devil was in the details, and the Anakim, damn them, never seemed to lose their edge. So the plan now was to simply run: run hard.
The flames from the burning trucks licked the air some thirty feet up, and shone so brightly that the entire floodplain was bathed in red. Gray, Finch, and the others scrambled up the bluff and hoped for the best. The best wasn’t looking so good, though: another six ‘Naks were on their heels.
“Twelve high!” one shouted. She could hear the grin on his face as they closed in. The air was starting to thicken with the *scent. *Gray swallowed and tried to ignore her body’s predictable response to it as she ran for her life.
“Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me,” she chanted. Bullets found purchase in the sand around her, which at least had the effect of hiding them in a cloud of dust.
They cleared the top, and looking south briefly, she saw movement among the rocks as other corpsmen disappeared into the moonless dark on the leeward side of the hill.
“Don’t you fucking lose ‘em!” one of the ‘Naks shouted. The pheromone in the air made his angry voice sound all the deadlier, like it was right behind her. Gray swallowed, breathing hard, and squeezed a little more speed out of her tired legs.
“Split up!” Gray called to the rest of her unit between labored breaths. Individually, they stood a better chance this way and they all knew it. “We’ll be a bitch to find in the dark!”
“Go, go!”
And like that, the five of them melted into the night.
Gray could hear the crunch of her own feet on the sandy earth now, her gear clunking and moving against itself, her quick gasps for air, even her pounding heart—it all suddenly seemed too loud. But she’d outrun her pursuers, and could hear them turning their fire to other targets and their voices got further away.
“Better not be any spiders in here,” she whispered, thinking on the irony of being killed by a brown recluse in the middle of this.
Gray made sure to listen closely to the battle still going on around her as she made herself as invisible as possible. Minutes passed, and she could tell that the fight was moving away from her.
But over the next short while, she stopped hearing the longer and more frequent bursts of fire she associated with open engagement; the kind you could afford when you had a clear shot at many opponents. What Gray heard now was slower, more measured. Her first instinct was that this was the strategy of predators stalking prey. Gray swallowed hard.
She was startled by an explosion of gunfire and the ear-splitting bang of grenades. The corpsmen were retaliating? A nearby ‘Nak was hit—she could hear his choked swear. Careful footfalls once again turned into a frenzied shuffle of dirt and rubber against a chorus of sharp pops and thundering booms.
There was nothing for it, Gray had to leave her hiding spot. As much as she hated the Corps, she still cared about the men. Gray gripped her kicker, steadied her breathing in spite of the pheromone growing stronger by the minute, and prepared for pain.
Though when she launched herself out of the crevice, she found something altogether different: the face of an Anak soldier. And a familiar one, to boot. It was the sentinel from earlier. Except this time he reeked.
By instinct Gray whipped her 5.56mm kicker towards him, and he did the same; suddenly she was facing the business end of his enormous 50-cal. As if there was a contest between them. She panted and shook.
“You always this ready for death?” he asked. He sounded like the desert.
“Like any good corpsman,” she said, focusing very hard on steadying her voice as the pheromone began to coil in the pit of her stomach. It’s just a chemical, Gray told herself. Keep your fucking head. Her mouth was like the desert now too: dry.
“Why’d you s-save us, sentinel?”
She minded her training: maintain Situational Awareness, focus, breathe, and you stood a decent enough chance. Gray breathed, focused on him. It was very hard to see his face, but she tried like her life depended on it. He had good bone structure, she thought. It was a strange thought. She should not have thought it, especially not now. Not while feeling so much like prey.
Without averting his eyes he lowered his boomer. They were close, Gray realized—very close. Then suddenly, they were closer. She choked down a yelp when she felt his fingers wrap entirely around her bicep.
Then the Anak’s lips were on hers. Gray trembled in his grip, feeling hot breath from his nose, and tongue quickly, urgently, prodding her open. There was a grunt of approval when she did. He tasted like smoke and smelled like dust. Breaking away left her panting, slack-jawed, stunned. The beating in her chest suddenly had an echo in her belly.
“I didn’t save anybody from anything,” he rumbled beside her ear.
Then he pulled back to study her.
“Huh. You don’t mind the stink.”
“Mind” was an understatement. Gray swayed when he pulled away, all but suffocating now. She wouldn’t have been able to describe her expression in that moment, or speak much at all. He didn’t think on it for very long, either way. Without warning, the giant turned and headed off toward what remained of the fight.
“Party’s over!” He shouted between bursts of gunfire, keeping ducked down. “You got what you wanted, 34th, now move out!”
Gray sucked in a breath to help clear her head, and saw two more huge silhouettes approach the sentinel less than 10 yards away. “Hey! What do you mean, move out? Move nothing, we have ‘em cornered!”
“You get your boots out of here, you fuckin’ hear me? Central wants you back in six hours.”
“And Central’s not gonna like us showing up empty-handed!”
“Do I need to repeat myself, brownband?”
“We’re not leaving until we clean up this mess!”
Her jaw fell further open when the sentinel swiftly jabbed the butt of his boomer into the soldier’s belly, sending him to the ground. Even the Corps knew that sentinels were bred to be agents of high rank and that defying their orders was unacceptable.
“Find your C-fuckin’-O and get the hell out of my section.”
The other soldier was not going to repeat his brother’s insubordinate mistake. “What about the cargo, sir?”
“It’s gone, now move!”
The three of them melted into the shadows and Gray was left alone, with her gun and her scattered thoughts. The squeeze had passed, leaving her feeling weak and her hands clammy.
She took a moment to breathe.
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