Chapter 6 - Blood on the Asphalt
The woods behind our subdivision led into an abandoned industrial park two miles south—a sprawl of rusted warehouses, overgrown loading docks, and dark access roads.
I moved through the trees like a ghost, guided by the fresh boot prints left in the soft mud and the smell of raw diesel exhaust drifting through the night air.
The rain began to fall—a cold, steady Texas downpour that washed the soot from my face and turned the ground into a slippery slick of red clay.
Up ahead, near an abandoned grain elevator, the twin red taillights of a black Mercedes G-Wagon flickered through the dark.
Julian and his remaining sniper were standing near the open tailgate, tossing tactical bags into the cargo area while a pilot kept the engine idling.
I dropped behind an overturned rusted dumpster fifty yards away, bringing the iron sights of the carbine up to my eye.
The distance was too great, the rain too thick, and the light too dim for a guaranteed shot on Julian through the rear glass. If I missed, they would board the vehicle and hit the highway before I could reach them.
I shifted my aim lower—to the rear driver's-side tire.
PUB-PUB-PUB.
The suppressed rounds punched straight through the heavy rubber tire, the wheel collapsing onto the rim with a loud hiss of compressed air.
"Contact!" the sniper screamed, dropping behind the G-Wagon’s rear bumper, sweeping his rifle light across the dumpster line.
The high-power green laser beam of the sniper's scope splashed across the steel edge of my dumpster. A split second later, a heavy .308 round punched a hole straight through the rusted iron three inches from my skull, showering my face with metal splinters.
"I see you, Miller!" Julian’s voice boomed over a bullhorn from inside the SUV. "You think you're a hero because you saved your wife from a fire? You're a high school shop teacher with a mortgage! You're out of your depth!"
I squeezed back against the dumpster wall, wiping blood from my cheek where a steel fragment had opened a deep gash.
"You brought a fire to my house, Vance!" I yelled back, my voice echoing off the corrugated metal walls of the grain elevator. "You don't get to talk about depth!"
From the access road behind me, the roar of a heavy V8 engine tore through the rain.
A black Ford F-250 smashed through the chain-link security fence at sixty miles an hour, its high-beam off-road LED bars illuminating the entire industrial lot with blinding white light.
Mark.
The sniper swung his rifle toward the truck, but Mark didn't slow down. He plowed the heavy steel cattle-guard bumper of his F-250 straight into the side of the Mercedes G-Wagon, crushing the SUV against the grain elevator’s concrete support pillar with a deafening screech of tearing metal.
The sniper was thrown twenty feet into the air, landing motionless in the mud.
The driver’s side door of the crushed G-Wagon swung open. Julian crawled out from the wreckage, covered in glass and blood, still clutching the heavy pelican case in his left hand.
May you like
He scrambled toward the dark interior of the grain elevator, disappearing through a rusted side door.
I broke from cover, sprinting through the rain, and followed him into the dark.
