Terminator Salvation: Trial by Fire

CHAPTER THREE

The eight-point buck was nibbling on the ends of some tree branches when it suddenly froze.

Hope Preston felt her cheek twitch. So the animal had heard them. She’d been afraid it would. Hope herself was more than capable of silent stalking, but this was the first time out for Hope’s new hunting partner Susan Valentine, and the older woman simply wasn’t experienced at moving through the twigs and dead leaves that matted the forest floor beneath their feet.

But it was too late now. The deer had been alerted to their presence. One more suspicious sound or movement and it would be out of here, escaping from the clearing into the deeply forested mountain slopes behind it.

Keeping her head motionless, Hope looked at Susan out the corner of her eye. There was an intent, grimly earnest expression on the woman’s face, and Hope had no doubt she was going to try her hardest.

But willpower alone wasn’t enough to send an arrow to its target. Susan’s bow was less than rock-steady in her left hand, and the taut bowstring was wavering visibly as she held the fletching close beside her right cheek. Already she’d held position longer than should have been necessary to aim, and there was no indication even now that she was preparing to release.

It wasn’t hard to guess why. That wasn’t a simple softwood target out there, like the ones Hope had spent all those hours training Susan to shoot at. It was a living, feeling creature, something that would gush blood, go limp, and die. Some people simply couldn’t handle that.

Hope, born and bred out here in the mountains, had a different take on the ethics of the situation. That buck out there was dinner. For the whole town.

And she was not going to let it get away.

Her own arrow was already nocked into her bowstring. Measuring the distance with her eyes, keeping her arrow pointed at the ground in front of her, she drew back the string as far as she could without being obvious about it. If Susan was going to stay in Baker’s Hollow, she was going to have to learn how to do this. Hope could take the shot, and she would if she had to. But she would rather give Susan every reasonable chance to do it herself.

Maybe Susan sensed that. Maybe she’d come to the same conclusion about this being her make-or-break moment. A small whimper escaped her lips, and with an odd sort of abruptness she released her arrow. It flashed between the small branches of their blind and buried itself in the animal’s side.

Too far back. The buck jerked with the impact, but instead of falling dead it twisted around and leaped for the pathway that led out of the clearing.

It was crouching into its second leap when Hope’s arrow drove into its side, dropping it with a thud onto the ground.

Susan’s bow arm sagged. “Sorry,” she said.

“It’s okay,” Hope replied, lowering her own bow and pulling out her whistle. “Watch your ears,” she warned, and gave her personal signal: one long, four short. “Come on—let’s make sure it’s dead.” She stepped out from behind the bushes and headed across the clearing. With only a little hesitation, Susan followed.

The buck was indeed dead.

“Good shooting,” Hope said, drawing her knife and starting to dig out the arrows.

“You’re very kind,” Susan said, an edge of weary bitterness in her voice. “But we both know better. I missed, pure and simple.”

“It’s not easy to hit the heart,” Hope responded diplomatically. “Especially your first time out.”

Susan exhaled a quiet, shuddering sigh.

“This is my last chance, Hope,” she said. “I can’t sew, I can’t tan, I can’t cook worth anything. I barely know which end of a hammer is which. If I can’t learn to hunt, there’s nothing left.”

“You’ll get the hang of it,” Hope soothed her, barely noticing the oddness of a fifteen-year-old mountain girl comforting a forty-year-old former world-class scientist. Maybe because it wasn’t girl to scientist anymore, or even teacher to student. Maybe because it was now friend to friend. “Or else you’ll find something else you’re good at,” she added. “Maybe something you don’t even know about yet.”

Susan sighed. “I just hope I can find this mystery talent before your father throws me out of town.”

“He won’t do that,” Hope said firmly.

But that was a lie, and she was pretty sure Susan knew it too. Hope’s father Daniel was the mayor of the small, tight-knit community that had built up in Baker’s Hollow through the dark years following Judgment Day. From the very beginning one of his jobs had been to make sure that everyone who ate their food pulled their weight.

And right now, Susan was the only one who wasn’t doing that. Nathan Oxley had been a molecular biologist, and his general medical training was also augmented by a leather-working hobby. Remy Lajard had been a computer programmer, but he’d also dabbled in microbrew beers in his spare time, a skill he’d brought with him to Baker’s Hollow. That had made him very popular among the residents, even more popular than Oxley.

But Susan had nothing. She’d been a metallurgist, dealing with high-tech alloys and materials that were miles beyond the iron, copper, and steel that were the best anyone here had or would ever hope to have. Up to now, she’d demonstrated no other skills except the ability to put an arrow into a piece of soft wood fifty yards away. If she could parlay that into the ability to hunt, great. If she couldn’t, it would be useless.

Hope’s father wouldn’t want to send Susan away. But he wouldn’t have a choice. Duke Halverson would insist that she be expelled, and Halverson had enough clout to get his way on things like that.

Hope had seen him do it at least once before, five years ago, when that clothing store manager had stumbled half-dead into town. Three months later, having exhausted every attempt to make him useful, he’d been taken to the edge of town and ordered to leave. Halverson had seen to it personally.

Three months was Halverson’s rule of thumb... and Susan’s three months were nearly up.

It wouldn’t be just Halverson who would insist, either. There were still fair numbers of deer and elk out there, but the wolves, coyotes, and cougars had also been coming back and were starting to seriously compete with the humans for those precious resources. Hope’s hunting party had had to travel nearly seven miles from town to find this buck, and that was going to translate into a long and wearying trek back home.

A trek the town’s best hunters were getting royally tired of. From the bits and pieces of her father’s conversations that Hope had overheard, some of the hunters were starting to talk about abandoning Baker’s Hollow and striking out on their own. Their argument was that a group of five or ten experts could survive far better alone than they were doing right now.

Which was undoubtedly true. Unfortunately, while that plan might work fine for them, it would devastate the town. Baker’s Hollow only had about fifteen good-to-excellent hunters, with another ten who Hope could charitably call competent. Skimming off ten or even five of the best would leave everyone else in serious trouble. The remaining woodsmen would have to scramble like mad to bring the competent hunters up to speed, and they would absolutely have to add new people to the rolls as quickly as possible. And they would have to immediately dump anyone and anything that constituted a drain on the town’s resources.

One way or another, Susan’s time was running out.

Hope had finished cutting the second arrow out of the deer when she heard footsteps in the undergrowth behind them. Not the quiet and stealthy movements of fellow hunters, but the casual strides of men and women on their way to collect a kill.

“Hope?” Ned Greeley’s deep voice called.

“Over here,” Hope called back, standing up and waving her bow.

A minute later the big man stepped through the trees and joined them.

“Nice,” he said, looking approvingly at the dead buck. “How’d she do?”

Hope suppressed a grimace. Ned was one of the expert hunters, as well as being a decent blacksmith. But if you weren’t one of his inner circle he had a bad habit of talking about you as if you weren’t there, even if you were standing three feet away. If Halverson ever decided it was time for the top hunters to strike out on their own, odds were that Ned would be the man right behind him when they hit the trail.

“Susan did fine,” she said.

“Um,” Ned rumbled, tilting his head and gazing pointedly at the marks of two retrieved arrows in the deer’s side. “Good save, anyway. Signal the others again, will you? It’s pretty thick there to the west, and Pepper may have drifted off target.”

Hope nodded and reached for her whistle.

Everyone had a talent, her father always said. That meant Susan had one, too. All they had to do was figure out what it was.

Hopefully before she was sent back out into the forest and the mountains to die.