Hunter/Prey

Chapter 23

It was the biggest weapon she could find in the little time that she had. Two feet long (or, well, twenty-six inches, if she wanted to be terribly specific about it) and four inches wide. It was heavy enough that when she broke it off the biggest tree she could find in the immediate area, she almost dropped it because its heft surprised her.

Her bloodied hands, despite being swaddled in ripped pieces of the dead state trooper’s shirt, screamed like wildfire as she tightened her double grip along the lower half of the branch, choking up on it as if she were about to wield a baseball bat.

Swing for the fences, girl.

For Carmen…

And he walked right past her, just like she knew he would. He might have been stumbling a bit, maybe even swaying slightly. That might have been the result of the pills he was wolfing down like candy to stave off the pain of last night. Either way, she took it as a good sign that he was unsteady on his feet, which did wonders to convince her that they were on almost equal ground.

If only she could get that gun out of his hand…

He couldn’t see her because she was well hidden, having circled back from the trail she had left in her wake to crouch behind a bush. A series of big and obvious (and oh so very “loud”) footsteps that led him here.

When he stopped ten feet in front of her and stared down at her tracks, she knew almost instantly that he had figured it out. He was lifting his head and starting to look around when she jumped to her feet and burst out of the bush, both hands cocking the heavy branch back, back, back—

He saw her and his eyes widened, and he might have even started to say something, but he never got it out because she hit him square in the right leg. She was aiming for the kneecap, but she landed just a bit too high and hit his thigh instead. The blow was still effective and he looked as if he was going to topple. Somehow, he managed to remain upright.

For a while, anyway.

She swung again and heard the very satisfying crack! as the branch hit and shattered against the Glock in his left hand. He had been in the process of raising it to shoot her when she landed the second swing. The gun flew out of his hand and he grunted, clenching his teeth in either frustration or pain; she didn’t know or care at the moment.

She expected him to leap for the fallen gun, or turn and flee. After all, she had the upper hand.

She was wrong, because he attacked instead.

He moved pretty fast for a man whose right arm was hanging at his side like a useless piece of meat. Then again, he was swinging with his left hand, the fingers tightening into a ball at the same moment it smashed into her chest.

Pain exploded across Allie’s vision. Beckard might have been operating at only fifty percent (or below), but she had clearly underestimated the man’s strength because the blow stunned her and she staggered back, fighting to regain her balance. She had taken three steps backward when Beckard let out a ferocious scream and lunged at her.

She swung again with the branch. It was mostly a defensive reaction on her part, but it prompted him to instinctively lift his right arm in an attempt to ward it off. The branch cracked! on contact and broke in half.

Beckard let out a howl that sounded more animal than human.

Allie thought he would retreat after that, but again, she was very wrong. The man must have been drawing from some deep reservoir of willpower, because he kept coming. She didn’t know if he couldn’t feel the pain that must have been rippling through his right arm at the moment or if he had just somehow chosen to ignore it.

He rammed his shoulder into her chest like a bulldozer. There was nothing elegant or strategic about it. He was bigger and heavier, and he was probably overconfident that he could knock her down with sheer brutality. And he was right.

They both tumbled to the ground with his much heavier body collapsing on top of her. A split second after her back slammed into the earth, the sky seemed to cave in on top of her in a blinding rush.

He was crushing her with his body, and she knew right away that physically grabbing and throwing him off wasn’t going to be possible. She had learned a long time ago that regardless of how prepared she was for a fight — physically and mentally — a man would always have the advantage over her when they were in close proximity. Which was why she didn’t bother wasting energy trying to push him off her and instead began whaling on his head with the remaining piece of branch still clutched in her hand.

The stick felt much lighter now without its other half, but it was still heavy enough to do some damage. She hit him once, twice—three times in the side of the head, and each time chunks of the branch broke free. She couldn’t have landed a fourth blow even if she had wanted to because by then the branch had literally fallen apart in her hand like a brittle piece of candy until she was just holding onto a piece of twig.

Blood was pouring down the side of his face, and she swore it only made him look more primal. Which she thought was ironic; she had never looked at him as a man but always as a beast that needed to be put down. That was how she had approached this mission, how she knew she could pull the trigger when the time came—

Trigger.

Gun.

Where’s the Glock?

Something wet landed on her cheek, and Allie almost threw up. It was Beckard’s blood, pouring down in thick rivulets from the gash along his temple and onto her. Some had streamed around his left eye socket and pooled there, making his eye look bloodshot. It was a sight to behold — one side perfectly normal while the other was fiery red, like something you’d see on the face of a demon from the pits of hell.

Allie was trying to fight through the revulsion of being bathed in Beckard’s blood when a streak of sunlight glinted off the sharp blade of a knife. He had pulled out the knife along his hip and was raising it over his head and was grinning down at her like a wild animal, blood running along the side of his face to his jawline, then drip-drip-dripping onto her.

“You wanna know what Carmen said before I killed her?” he asked, though every word came out sounding more like pained grunts. “She begged me not to do it. She cried and cried and cried. I got so tired of it I cut her throat just to shut her the hell up!”

She was waiting for it. Gathering her strength and loosening up her body. Her arms were flat on the ground, not fighting him. If he noticed that she wasn’t resisting his much heavier body as it pinned her, he didn’t show it.

Then again, she wasn’t sure if he was aware of anything at the moment but his own clearly maniacal emotions. He certainly hadn’t recognized that his entire right hand had begun bleeding again, that the white gauze was getting redder by the second. Was he even remotely aware that he was losing an obscene amount of blood, so much that he could actually bleed to death out here?

She stopped thinking about him and thought of Carmen instead.

Ten years of research, little sister. Six years of training and three years of getting ready for this one single moment.

This is for you, Carmen.

God help me if I time it wrong.

He plunged the knife down, aiming it straight for her neck. Just like she knew he would, because Beckard always went for the neck. All those grisly crime scene photos from his earlier years, and then later when he tried to hide his pattern, but they were there if you knew where to look, and she knew where to look.

The killing blow always goes to the neck!

She jerked her relaxed body to the right, twisting her torso at the same instant. The knife flashed by a split second later and sank into the ground, just barely half an inch from her neck. He had driven the blade down with such force that it kept going and didn’t stop until the guard thumped! against the floor of the woods.

Allie didn’t give him time to adjust, to pull the knife out. She balled her right hand into a fist and swung at his face, aiming for the spot along his temple where he was bleeding profusely. He had bent slightly over her body, his forward momentum carrying him so much closer to her that she didn’t even have to rise from the ground to make contact.

She felt the crunch of her knuckles slamming home against the side of his face. A thick wad of blood sprayed the area and splashed her at the same time. She flinched, blinked out the blood that had splattered her eyes, and refocused on her target through her suddenly red-tinted vision.

Again! Again!

She ignored the warm sensation of (his) blood on her face and hit him again, and again, and again, all while he was still trying to pull the knife out of the ground. He was grimacing with the pain — or was that confusion on his face? Did he suddenly understand what was happening now? That although he was on top of her and he was bigger and stronger, that he was no longer in charge? That she was? That soon—

The fifth time she smashed her fist into the side of his face, he finally relented and toppled off her like some kind of sleeping bear, unable to remain upright any longer.

Allie didn’t wait, didn’t hesitate, didn’t spend a precious second or two wondering if he was hurt enough that he would stay down. She broke into motion, rolling to her right, and didn’t stop until she was winded and pain throbbed from her side where her broken ribs reminded her they still needed medical attention.

She scrambled up to her knees and looked for the gun. Beckard’s gun.

Where the hell did it go? If it had fallen into one of the bushes, she was out of luck. There was no way she was going to find it in all of this green—

There!

It was fifteen feet away from her and five feet behind Beckard. Except Beckard was too busy pushing himself up from the earth, dripping blood from one entire half of his face, to know what was back there. He was a truly sorry sight, and she might have actually felt some sympathy for him if the last ten years of her life hadn’t been devoted to ending his miserable existence.

She ran for the gun.

He was still trying desperately to pull the knife out of the ground when he looked up and saw her running toward him. More than that, he saw where her eyes were looking, and he turned around, saw the gun, and gave up on the knife. He dived for the Glock, stretching out with his bloodied right hand with an almost guttural grunt.

She was still three feet away when he wrapped his fingers around the gun—

No, no, no!

She was moving on pure instinct when she veered off target at the last second and turned slightly to her left just before launching her body forward again, but this time feetfirst. She aimed for the biggest target — his chest — and slammed both shoes into it with everything she had.

He was swinging the Glock around when she caught him with both flying feet and sent him reeling back to the ground. She was hoping she could jar the gun loose, but Beckard somehow clung onto it even as he fell. She landed back down to earth on her ass and back, her body vibrating from head to toe from the impact. She wanted to scream out but couldn’t manage that much. The pain from her broken ribs was excruciating, and she wondered if that little stunt hurt her more than it did him.

Beckard was on his back and sitting up slowly. So she had managed to hurt him after all, though not enough to make him give up the gun. What was it going to take to put this monster down? The gun still clutched in his fist, she thought, might go a long way in achieving that end. Except the semiautomatic was in his hand and not hers, which was a big problem.

He turned his head and grinned at her through a mask of his own blood. She stared back at him because there was no point in moving anyway. He had her. The gun in his right hand was pointed across his chest and right at her from five feet away. Just getting up and running would have taken two, maybe three seconds. She had less than one at the moment.

It was no use. He had her.

Dead to rights.

I’m sorry, Carmen, I failed.

Please forgive me…

She thought he might say something clever — or at least something he thought was clever — before he shot her, but he didn’t. Instead, he just fired—

— and she felt a sharp sting as the bullet buzzed past her.

The sudden jolt of pain came from her right ear, the sensation like getting stung by a bee, as the bullet clipped her.

There was the look of surprise on his face, shock that he had missed her from less than five feet away. Maybe it was the fact that he was using his heavily bandaged hand to hold the gun, which couldn’t handle the recoil in its current condition. She didn’t know and didn’t particularly care, because she was alive!

Beckard attempted to stand up when she lunged at him, throwing herself forward, headfirst this time. He saw her coming and fired a second shot—

And missed again!

This time he fired so quickly that the bullet went wide, even as she barreled into him with everything she had and knocked both of them back to the ground again. He struggled under her, his much bigger body already getting into position to throw her off. Before he could do that, she grabbed the gun by the barrel with both hands and rolled off him. He let out a piercing scream as she twisted the gun and broke his finger in the trigger guard in the process.

She might have also screamed right along with him as every inch of her hands throbbed with misery under the swaddling, even as she tightened her fingers around the barrel and jerked it with everything she had until it slid out of his stubborn grip.

Allie landed in a pile next to him and kept rolling until she was sure she had enough space between them. She scrambled up, managing to get to her knees even as he mirrored her actions four feet away.

She heard rather than felt the blood dripping from her right ear, where his first shot had taken a big chunk. Every inch of her hands vibrated, currents of pain rippling from every single one of her fingertips. She tried not to think about what she looked like at the moment and focused on controlling her breathing instead. It wasn’t nearly as easy to shoot a man with a handgun, even from a few feet away. Despite her best efforts, though, it felt like a train was rumbling across her chest.

If she thought she looked miserable, Beckard was in even worse shape. He was cradling his broken finger, his face covered in a thick film of pain and fury and blood. Eyes — one bloodshot, the other normal — glared back at her as if he couldn’t quite believe what had happened, or what was happening.

She stared back at him, the Glock in both hands, and aimed at his head.

“No,” he gasped.

“No?” she repeated.

“It can’t end this way.”

“Why the hell not? What makes you so special?”

“It can’t end this way,” he said again, as if she hadn’t said anything.

“Yes, it can,” she said, and blew his brains out with the first shot.

His body — lifeless and empty, a husk of nothing, if he ever was anything to begin with — flopped to the ground and lay perfectly still.

She let the gun fall to her lap because it felt suddenly very heavy, and she just didn’t have the strength to keep it raised any longer. The recoil against her mangled hands didn’t hurt nearly as much as she had expected, and whatever fight she had in her seemed to evaporate in a rush of expelled air at the sight of his body toppling over and not getting up.

It was over.

Ten years of research, six years of training, and three years of getting ready for this moment…and it was finally over.

There wasn’t much of Beckard’s head left. With the hole in his forehead and the blood that covered nearly sixty, maybe seventy percent of his face, it was a grotesque sight, the kind that she was sure would give her nightmares for years to come. Even in death, the man would still continue to haunt her.

Allie let out a deep breath and lay down on the earth, letting the Glock fall from her numbed fingers. She stared up past the tree canopies and focused on the clearing sky. It was getting brighter with every second, signaling the coming of a new day.

Somewhere in the distance, she might have heard dogs barking, or maybe that could have just been her imagination.

She decided not to fight the unbearable fatigue and closed her eyes. She went to sleep, forcing herself to think about good things and better times.

Hi, Carmen, it’s your big sister.

You can go to sleep now. It’s over.

It’s all over…