Urban Waite - Far Cry - Absolution

Will stopped and looked down at the valley below. He waited for Lonny to take the last few steps and then when the man came up and stood beside him, Will took the rifle from his shoulder, flipped the lens cover up on the scope, and put the lens to his eye. There was a wide valley below with a broad field of sedge and Junegrass and he ran his vision upon it. When he brought his eye away he almost could not believe that he had found Mary May.

She was walking down the middle of the field and he could see that she would be into the far wood in the next quarter mile. He placed the scope to his eye again and marked her. When he brought the scope away again, he looked down into the field. She was a tiny thing there in the depths and he knew that with the naked eye he would have missed her.

Without taking his eyes away, he handed the rifle over to Lonny. “Take a look,” Will said. He was watching the tiny figure out there below them. A hawk was circling high above and it was a speck itself, riding on the thermals. “You see the hawk out there? Put the scope on it and then run the lens down all the way to the meadow.”

He watched Lonny now. He watched Lonny find the hawk and then he watched Lonny move the scope down and find Mary May.

“John will be very happy,” Lonny said. He brought his eye away from the scope and looked to Will and in that same moment a rifle fired that was not the one Lonny held in his two hands.

Will turned and moved toward the sound. It was down in the mountain field out of which they had just climbed. The rifle fired again and he heard the echo of the shot and the reverberation as the sound spread from one side of the valley to the other. Then Will started to hear more shots, automatic gunfire, and the big booming of a shotgun.

At first he had thought maybe the herder and his son had followed them. Or had taken up some position to better take revenge. But now as Will peered back over a loose conglomeration of rocks on the sheep and the meadow below, he could see the herder had started shooting at five men now moving up across the meadow—moving exactly toward where Will and Lonny now had come.

Out front and leading the men, amid the surging sheep that swirled and stampeded in a sort of whirling sweep of white, was John Seed. He held in front of him a large metal antenna shaped almost like a wire grid. Will knew it immediately and he knew that John was not hunting wolves, but that he was hunting them and hunting Mary May and Will should have known it from the start.

The herder fired again and John’s men ducked and then rose, shooting over the backs of the sheep as they came up through the field. Will watched one man, holding an AK-47, strafe the campsite, the bullets raking across the dirt.

Several more single rifle shots were fired from the sheep camp but Will could not see the herders. They were somewhere beneath the trees and they were firing on the men as they moved in among the sheep. A moment later he heard the clop of the hooves and he saw the two herders doubled on the horse, riding fast along the bottom of the meadow and away. Several of John’s men were shooting at them, taking shots as they rose and fired again over the backs of sheep.

Will might not have heard the click of his rifle had they kept on shooting. But as close to him, and as familiar to him as it was, he turned almost in the same instant Lonny pushed the safety forward on the rifle. Lonny’s eye was to the scope and the barrel faced down toward the valley in which Mary May was walking, and Lonny did not need to push the .308 cartridge forward with the bolt, because Will now realized with horror that he had already done it for him.

MARY MAY WAS THREE QUARTERS OF THE WAY ACROSS THEmeadow when she heard the thunder. She stopped and looked toward the sky. Blue as a robin’s egg. She turned and looked toward the ridge she had descended from and she took a few steps back the way she’d come.

She heard the pulse of thunder again, but she knew it was not thunder. The booming sound was diffuse and more of a rumble, just as distant thunder might sometimes be. But around it, and at the edge of this new sound, was the snap of gunfire that she knew well enough and that she had heard all through her life out here in the country.

She was looking up toward the ridge and she was wondering whether whatever had happened could be helped and she moved now, walking with purpose back the way she’d come. Soon she was running and she had taken out the .38. She held it tight in her hand to make sure she would not lose it. She came nearly halfway across the field when the firing stopped and there was a strange moment when the world returned to normal. Just a breeze working across the meadow, and the sun above, and the far branches of trees wavering a little in the wind.

The rifle shot that passed her was no more than a foot from her, traveling in the air then thudding into the ground another ten feet on. She felt the air move, she turned and saw where the dust had bloomed up from off the ground and then as she stood there, beginning to realize what was happening, she heard the distant shot of the rifle sound from right there atop the ridge.

WILL MADE IT TO LONNY JUST AS HE PULLED THE TRIGGER. WILLbowled him over and sent him to his back. The rifle came loose from his hands and Will watched it skitter atop rock for a moment then fall over the edge of the ridge and disappear.

Lonny came up off the ground with his hands out on either side of him like a wrestler taking up his stance.

“You were going to shoot her,” Will said. They stood no more than five feet apart and Will watched Lonny circle downslope, his hands still out, his eyes never leaving Will.

“Better to do it here than to do it somewhere else. Better if it seems like she went into the woods and never came back out.”

“Christ, Lonny. We were told to find her. We were told to find her and help her out.”

Lonny struck out fast with a single fist and Will only had time to fall away and catch himself with one hand. He scrambled back to his feet, feeling too old and too slow to be any match for the quickness Lonny brought with each movement. Lonny was smiling at him and he whipped out a fist again that brushed past Will’s right cheek. Both still wore their packs and it made their movements awkward and a little counterweighted as Will circled the edge of the ridge then came down, trying to stay just out of Lonny’s reach.

“Pretty limber for an old guy,” Lonny said. He came inside and popped one fist up hard, catching Will in the ribs. “But still an old guy.” Will bent double, dry heaving. Lonny brought the opposite fist down hard against his cheekbone.

Will fell facedown against the smooth windswept rock of the ridge. His face was on fire from where Lonny had knocked him and his belly muscles were cramping and pulling on each other like some tug of war within his stomach. He tried to roll but Lonny kicked him and Will—using the force of the kick to move downslope—fell off a ledge of rock and landed another four feet down.

He felt like someone had thrown dynamite at his feet and he had been launched upward only to land, barely whole, forty feet away. He wasn’t sure if anything was broken and pieces of him ached and hurt like they had not hurt for years, but he knew he needed to get up. He knew he needed to help himself, and he knew he needed to stop Lonny from whatever it was he was doing.

Will stood fast, just as Lonny came to the edge of the small ledge. He took one of Lonny’s feet and pulled back hard. Will heard bone hitting the rock as Lonny landed first on his backpack, then the residual force whipped his head down and his skull bounced then resettled against the top of the ledge. Now Will moved around, wheezing with one hand held atop his belly. He came around the ledge while Lonny was still gathering himself together, now turning on his side. There was blood in his hair and on the rock where his skull had hit.