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“Give me that.”
As I held it up to my eyes, I caught his mischievous grin.Damn him. He’d been getting me into trouble ever since we were kids.
Adjusting the lens, I watched the fuzzy gray blobs in the distance transform into living, breathing beings before my eyes. They walked upright, and given their slender figures and the rough proportions of their bodies, I guessed they were human. We were in human territory, I supposed. But one of the dark figures caught my eye. A female. Something about the way she moved gave it away.
I crawled forward on my elbows, holding the rifle out ahead of me and pulling ahead of Herod.
“Hey, where are you going?” he demanded, clamping a hand down on my ankle before I could get away.
“Closer. I want to see what they’re up to,” I said, as if this should be obvious.
He snorted and muttered something under his breath about how I never listened to his ideas until I thought they were my own. I ignored him, of course. Perhaps if he’d told me there was a lady up on that ridge, I would have agreed to investigate sooner.
I scanned the surrounding ground. There wasn’t much in the way of good hiding around here, and I didn’t know what kind of scanning equipment the strangers might have. Moving out in the open was too risky. I had to think of something else.
“What’s the plan, Dre?” Herod slid up beside me, kicking up a small puff of dust as he moved.
“I don’t have one… yet.”
“Well then, why don’t we just lay here on the ground a little while longer and wait for them to trip over us?” he asked derisively.
His attitude finally made something inside me snap, and I heaved myself toward him, swinging a fist at his smug face. He rolled onto his back, throwing up an arm and blocking my strike before it landed, but then we were grappling. He kicked his feet wildly. I clutched his collar in my fist, pinning him to the ground. I readied myself to swing on him again, growling curses under my breath.
“Get off of me!” he snarled, reached his hand out sideways to grab the barrel of the rifle, and jabbed it into my ribs.
I winced as I felt the rifle’s stock make contact. My ribs were a bit sorer from our landing than I’d realized. I grabbed his wrist and slammed it into the rocky ground until his grip loosened, and then I threw the rifle out of his reach. With his arm pinned under my knee, and my fist still twisted in Herod’s shirt, I lowered my face until I was nose to nose with him.
“Don’t make me remind you of your place, Herod. You will regret it.”
“Oh, come off it, you big brute. I don’t owe you nothin’ anymore, and you know it.”
“Hands up, both of you!” A woman’s voice cried out, and it struck me like a bucket of ice water.
The pair from the camp must have snuck up on us while we were fighting.
“I said, hands up!” she repeated.
When I raised my head to meet her eyes, I saw the barrel of a small handgun pointed straight at me. But even from here, I could see the way her hands were shaking. The poor thing was terrified. Still, there was something admirable in the way she tried to hold herself. I wanted to laugh, but I pressed my lips together to hold it in and raised my hands slowly so she could see I was unarmed.
“Careful, stranger. We don’t mean you any harm,” I said quietly.
“You… you speak English?” she asked, lowering her weapon an inch or two as she puzzled over my answer.
