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There was no warning. He came out of nowhere, big, as tall as me and leanly muscled, dressed in black military gear with body armor protecting his front and back. He was in his fifties, with close-cropped hair and a short beard that were both pure white. He was on Tanya in a heartbeat, grabbing her by the neck and hoisting her into the air.
I did something I’ve never done before. I froze.
It was the way he picked her up. I’ve seen plenty of awful shit in warzones. But even when two guys are trying to kill each other hand to hand, they make eye contact: they acknowledge the other person is human. But this guy...he picked up Tanya the way a bad-tempered parent grabs a kid’s toy they’ve found on the stairs. It was the most unsettling thing I’d ever seen.
Then his hand started to crush her throat and that snapped me into action. I was still holding my shotgun but I didn’t dare fire with Tanya so close to him. Shit!
Tanya was trying to claw at him with her bound hands but he was big enough that he could just hold her there, arm outstretched, and she couldn’t reach him. Her face turned purple.
Protective fury boiled up inside me. “Hey!” I hollered to get his attention, and then I went to work on him, angrier than I’ve ever been. I slammed a fist into his kidneys, then slugged him in the face. That’s what you get if you touch her! I was already stepping forward, ready to hit him again as he staggered backwards.
Except...he didn’t stagger backwards. He’d barely flinched when I hit him in the side and the punch to the face just made him scowl. And now I was way too close to him, and off balance.
He lifted one leg, planted a boot on my chest and shoved me backwards, and I went sprawling on the ground. By the time I sat up and got my eyes on him again, he’d thrown Tanya aside and was marching towards me.
I struggled up onto my elbows, panting, and looked towards Tanya. She was lying on her back, struggling to breathe. I turned back to the guy and he was almost on me. Shit. I’d dropped my shotgun, too, it was on the ground behind him. I scrambled to my feet just as the man pulled out a slender, wicked-looking knife. The two of us faced off.
I heard Tanya give a raspy groan of horror. “Don’t! He’ll kill you!”
The guy stabbed with the knife and I had to jump back, panting. Don’t? Don’t what? Don’t fight him? What choice have I got?
Tanya rolled onto her stomach and clutched at the grass, trying to lever herself upwards, but she was still struggling to breathe and her wrists and ankles were still bound. She locked eyes with me and croaked one word. “Run!”
I stared at her. Run? Run and leave her?! I turned back to the guy. No fucking way!
He advanced again, passing the knife from one hand to the other and crouching low. I started to get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. There was something about the way he moved, quick but not showy. Efficient, like a surgeon or a butcher. The knife flashed through the air and I had to twist and dodge. Fuck, he’s good with that thing. It flicked out again, so close I felt the breeze on my face, and I knew why Tanya had tried to get me to run. If we were both unarmed, I could take him. But with a knife in his hand, this guy was going to kill me.
The knife darted again. Jesus, he was good. The knife moved almost too quickly to follow and if I lost track of it even once and dodged the wrong way, it was going to be buried in my guts.
He forced me back and back. My foot suddenly skittered down a slope and I slithered into freezing, knee-deep water. Shit! He’d backed me into the river. Now I had a new problem: if I tripped on something under the surface or my foot slid on a smooth rock, I’d go down and it would all be over.
He climbed down into the river too and circled around, forcing me downstream with quick stabs and slashes of the knife. He was making me dodge around to wear me out, and it was working: I was panting and wheezing but he wasn’t even breathing hard. Any time now, I was going to make a mistake and that’s all it would take.
Then it got worse. The sound of the river became a low roar behind me. I risked a glance and cursed. He was herding me towards the waterfall.
I got that sick feeling again. Tanya had been right.
