Broken Lands (Benny Imura 6)

Those killings were always quick. Part of it was a reflex of mercy, a desire to inflict no pain even as he ended a life. Part of it was efficiency—frightened animals screamed. Screams drew other kinds of creatures. The hunter did not want to become food for them.

And so he was quiet.

Silent as death.

He wore fatigues in a forest camouflage print, and when he stopped and became still, he vanished against the walls of the lush growth. He was very good at hiding. He was very good at not being seen. Years ago he had been the angel of death whose sniper bullets ended lives before the victims ever knew they were in his crosshairs. His rifle was seldom used now. It was noisy, and he rarely needed to kill something two or three thousand yards away. Now he had his knives and, for the direst of emergencies, a pistol with a Trinity sound suppressor, which, though not silent, was quiet.

He’d planned on spending the day in his small cabin; meditating, reading, and perhaps finishing his latest carving. A delicate little hummingbird he was fashioning out of a piece of oak. He had carved hundreds of birds, animals, and fish. The exacting precision and attention to detail kept his mind from falling into depression and numbness. Hunting was another way of staying sharp. He had many ways to keep from cracking apart in this broken world.

Those plans, however, had ended when he heard the sounds. Distant, but distinct. At first he thought it was a roar or growl of some beast, one of the exotics. A rhinoceros or elephant or musk ox. Or maybe one of the mutations. There were cattle out here that had developed a taste for meat, and a few hunting pairs of perentie—big and venomous Australian monitor lizards that had come from who knew where—and that had grown much larger even than their cousins, the Komodo dragons. They feared nothing, and in their arrogance of power tended to go crashing through the brush, stronger than anything faster, and faster than anything stronger.

Was this them? he wondered. But he didn’t think so. There were so many mutations these days, more every season. The logic and predictability of nature was so badly warped that it was sometimes like living in a nightmare, or a hallucination. Sometimes the things he saw made him doubt his own sanity. He was a practical, skilled, efficient man, but he had been alone for a long time. Too long. He’d begun to speak to himself on the really bad, really long nights. That scared him. His survival and every one of his skills were wired into his mind. The thousand things he did every day to live out here were components of the mental machine he had built since childhood, with the exacting studies of martial arts, the precision of competitive shooting, the structure of the Scouts and then the military.

He would find a rational explanation for the noise, and then he would deal with whatever made it. Destroy it, evade it, or anything necessary in order to impose logic on its existence.

The sound was too big, though; too steady and too unnatural. However, it couldn’t be what it really sounded like because—well . . . that was impossible. There could not be that kind of noise. Not a machine noise. Things that made those sounds had died when the EMPs brought the great silence to the world.

And yet that was what it had sounded like. A machine of some kind. A helicopter, but a wounded one, with an engine that screamed as it died. But by the time the hunter got to clear ground with good elevation, the sky was empty and silent. Only a smudge of smoke in the distance, but that could as easily have been from a brush fire. There had been lightning recently during a brief squall.

Still . . .

He went looking because he had to know.

He followed a game trail, pausing now and then to listen to the woods, absorbing what the forest wanted to tell him. There were prints mashed onto the trampled grass and exposed dirt. Deer, mostly, though there were several exotic hooves. Animals from some zoo, probably. Then he saw a set of prints that made him pause. Shoe prints. Specifically boot prints. Not the tread of work boots or hiking boots. No . . . these had the unmistakable pattern of military boots. Size eleven or a little larger. Wide.

Very much like the ones he wore.

The hunter touched the prints. The dirt was soft. It had rained this morning, but the mud had dried. These impressions were pressed into semidry mud. Which meant they were very recent. An hour old? Less?

The gait was unusual, though. Not a steady pace. Awkward, and there was a bit of a drag to the left foot. Someone with a bad leg? The dead ones, especially the slow shamblers, often walked with limps, or walked clumsily enough to leave uneven prints. Some of the smarter ones did too, if they had been injured before they died. Maybe a gunshot wound, or bites.

And there were the packs of ravagers. Infected, dangerous, strange, and always violent. More and more of them all the time. The fact that the tread was military didn’t matter, because those killers had taken down their share of soldiers, and they always stripped the dead for whatever they needed. Clothes, weapons. Meat.

The hunter moved along the path, careful not to obscure

the prints. Then he saw something glisten on a leaf at about thigh height. Red. He bent and touched it. Fresh blood. Less than an hour old for sure. The color had not darkened too much.

Whoever had passed through here was injured, limping. Which meant he was alive. Or, at most, newly dead and reanimated. The hunter squatted there for almost a minute, thinking, considering. Either way whoever it was had no business being in the hunter’s forest.

Moving silent as a ghost, the hunter melted into the woods, following the footprints and the trail of blood.

PART THREE

NEW ALAMO, TEXAS

LATE AUGUST

GHOST RIDERS

You will never do anything

in this world without courage.

It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.

—ARISTOTLE

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