Urban Waite - Far Cry - Absolution

He could hear the man’s cry and he could hear the other men calling to him, but no one dared move to get him from where they’d dove themselves as soon as Will had fired. Down the gravel road Will could see many had hidden in among the houses. He watched the shadows of their movements and, as he ran the scope across the road, he watched a group of five break cover from one house, dashing for another. He shot at them, but he put the bullet low and watched it dig in among the dirt. The church members diving to the ground then scrambling up on hands and knees as they either went back the way they’d come or reached the protection of the next nearest house.

He shucked the bullet casing and loaded the chamber anew. Down in the road the man was crying for someone to come get him. He managed now to roll and get one arm beneath him, dragging himself across the road. The dirt and gravel beneath appeared slick and dark from the blood pouring from his back and front. Will shot at him again and watched him startle. The bullet had gone wide, but Will had placed it a foot in front of him, in the direction he had been going. The man was now too scared to move as he resigned himself to simply lying there, moaning and calling for his friends.

Will shucked the shell casing then, and as he loaded in another bullet, he saw first the shadow of the big man coming around the corner of the church, then the man himself. Will swung the Remington, but it was too late and the big man caught it in his hands and forced it back down upon Will. The rifle held crossways in his hands and the big man pressing the forestock now across Will’s windpipe as both big man and Will went to the ground in a tumble.

Will tried to kick out, but his legs and knees landed in awkward places. The man was at least a half foot taller than Will and probably had fifty pounds on him. And as Will fought to free himself he could feel the man was muscle and sinew and not much else. With his hands Will tried to push the rifle up off his throat, but it was like trying to bench press several hundred pounds and the most he could get was a half inch before the man forced the rifle down again.

Will started to lose consciousness. He could see the black beginning to spot his vision. His mind swooned and then for a moment Will’s sight went totally out, but he managed to overcome it. He pushed up on the rifle and felt the man rise a little. Will was left for a second to gasp at the air before the big man put his full weight down atop Will’s throat again. The smell of the big man’s breath in Will’s face and the teeth of the man seen bared with the effort of keeping Will down against the ground.

Will could still hear the man in the road calling for his friends, but it was growing fainter now, and Will was not sure if that was because the man was bleeding out, or if it was that Will himself was about to die, suffocated with his own rifle.

When the big man arched his back up, calling out in pain, his face suddenly seen as a web of vein and muscle tissue, Will could only roll and cough, gasping now to get more oxygen within his lungs. The rifle was turned loose now from the man’s hands and as Will rolled and tried to master himself, he watched the big man turn and saw his own hunting knife there in the man’s lower back. Will turned his head and saw Mary May now stepping backwards as the big man swiveled, clawing for the knife.

He was going after Mary May now and he grasped for the knife and missed then grasped for it again. Finally, on his third try, he got his fingers on the hilt and pulled it from his own back, while at the same time making a sound Will had only heard a few times and never from a man. It was animal and tortured and in it Will heard the anger and the hatred building now into certain violence. Mary May backed up even more and the big man advanced upon her, Will’s knife still within his hand.

When Will brought the rifle up and fired, the shot went straight, digging up through the man’s back ribs and exiting through the heart. He fell over almost immediately, turning slightly as he went. And when he landed there was a stillness seen in the body suggesting he would never move again.

Mary May bent down and got the knife and came forward toward Will. He could see the blood spatter on her face and on her clothes. Her collar was open almost all the way down her chest and Will saw how the blood ran from the fresh tattoo then disappeared in the cleavage formed by her bra. Will coughed and still he could not get the oxygen he needed. They were in rough shape, both of them.

Down on the road the man had stopped calling for his friends, but there was the sound now of footsteps making their way up toward them. Will bent and drew the .38 from his waist, then going to the corner of the church again, he fired twice, aiming the gun barrel down the small hill. He snuck his head out for a second and saw how his pursuers had scattered once again and soon were all back in hiding. Will simply looked on the place the man had been, and he saw that they had come and gotten him, and that he might be somewhere now getting the medical assistance he would need.

When Will looked back at Mary May she was waiting for him, kneeling over her brother and looking back at Will. Will stumbled over. He felt weak, but every breath he took seemed to give him new strength. As he moved toward her, he bent and picked up the rifle from the ground then loaded new cartridges from his pockets.

“Where’s John?” Will asked. It was the first thing he said to her and he felt badly that it was not to ask how she was, but he knew they simply did not have the time. She was alive and keeping her that way was what now mattered most.

“Drugged,” she said. “But I heard others back there and I know they’re coming. The siren is even louder out on the road than it is back here.”

Will looked past her to the stand of trees that surrounded the compound. He thought of the hundreds of tattoos he’d seen in that room. He had seen many people, but he had not seen hundreds. He spun and went to the corner of the church again and fired on the first thing he saw; a window in a house halfway down the road shattered then fell inward from its frame.

When he came back to Mary May he reached down and took the knife from off the ground where she had left it. He wiped the blood on his shirt then stuck it back down within his sheath. Next, he brought up the .38 and handed it over to her. “Three shots left,” he said, watching her stand and then take one wobbly step toward him.

“Jerome is still waiting for us?” she asked. She turned slightly and looked in the direction of the far bluff.

“You can barely walk,” Will said. “Can you make it?”

“I have to.”

He looked her over. Her eyes were not tracking right and she was covered in her own blood and the blood of the man Will had shot. “You’ll make it,” Will said. He bent low to pick Drew up off the ground. Will used his legs and hefted Drew upward, feeling the man try and fight against the electrical cords that bound him, and which held the gag about his mouth. Paying little notice to Drew and still high on the adrenaline that had flooded his system, Will told Mary May to go as straight as she could and look for the big nurse log by the roadside. “Jerome will be there.”

“Why tell me that?”

“Because you’re going to need to find him and you’re going to need to tell him how to find us.” Will went to the corner of the church now and with Drew still over his shoulder he peaked out around the edge and several guns opened up on him immediately.

Will came cautiously back to where Mary May had flattened herself to the side of the church. “Go,” Will said. “They’ve seen me and they’ve seen your brother. They don’t know you’re up here and they don’t know which way you’re going. Tell Jerome we’ll be a mile down on the road as he heads toward the state highway.”