Page 33 of Shadow of Death
Hunter judged the whisperers had to be close—very close—for him to hear them. He heard the slightest rustling, a sound that could have been a bobcat or even an owl moving in the night.
Except now, it wasn’t. The sound came from just a few feet to his left, deep in the cover of the spruce. Very carefully, he moved in that direction. He didn’t want to startle whoever was there and cause them to shoot wildly.
And he kept hearing an echo of the words he’d understood—I’m scared.
Adults could be scared, too, but Amy had said there were kids in the group. He was almost certain there was a kid in the spruce ahead of him.
He heard shots from across the distance of the cliff—and so did the little group hiding in the spruce.
“They’re here! Cops, someone—they’re here! We’ve got to move!” someone said harshly.
And the group was suddenly in the dirt path that led to the valley level below, two men, one woman, and a boy.
The kid was ten to twelve years old, tall and lean, with a thatch of dark hair falling over his forehead. The woman looked to be in her late twenties or early thirties, the man at her side a little older, and the other man a little older still, perhaps in his midthirties. The first two adults were probably the kid’s parents.
He held a gun and while he was startled to see Hunter, he was evidently the trained man in that group because he grabbed the kid, forcing the boy in front of him as a shield and taking aim at Hunter with his weapon.
“I’ll kill the kid,” he said, staring at Hunter.
And he would. There were times when Hunter would have tried conversation, when he might have believed he could have solved the situation without violence.
The woman screamed, lunging to save the boy, screaming, “No!”
The man’s gun went off. The woman went down. The man took aim again as the kid’s father screamed and started forward as well.
Hunter fired, and the man holding the kid went down in a split second, Hunter’s shot having caught him dead center in the forehead.
He holstered his Glock as he rushed forward, falling to his knees next the father and the kid, trying to ascertain the extent of the woman’s wounds. The kid was down next to her sobbing, murmuring words that sounded like, “It was wrong, wrong, wrong, we’re paying! No, Mom, no, Mom. oh, please, God, forgive us!”
“Peggy, Peggy, Peggy!” the man sobbed, trying to draw the woman into his arms.
“May be a through and through, he caught her in the shoulder. Use the jacket—get pressure on the shot. I’m calling for help,” Hunter said, ripping off his jacket, wadding it and pressing it against the woman’s shoulder and grabbing the man’s hand to keep it down on the wound.
He used his tiny mic, letting the team leader know a suspect was down and a woman was wounded. They needed EMTs as quickly as possible.
He wondered again just how quickly help could come.
“You armed?” he demanded of the man.
The man shook his head strenuously. “No, no, I—I am not a killer, I swear it!”
The boy heard his father speaking. His eyes were glazed. He was staring at nothing, looking as if he felt ill. He spoke quietly, with pain and confusion.
“But we were there... We were watching! Father Mateus was going to... Oh, God, he was going to stab that girl and drink her blood and share her flesh—”
The man Hunter presumed to be the boy’s father spoke again, his words passionate and tear-filled.
“That girl was a sinner, boy. She was a sinner! What we were doing would save her eternal soul,” the father cried. “But not my Peggy, my Peggy never sinned, never... Oh, God!”
Hunter wanted to take the man by the shoulders and shake him hard. It hurt far more than he had imagined to hear the horrible credo that was being spoon-fed to the boy.
Somehow, he refrained from hitting the man squarely in the jaw. But he couldn’t resist saying, “Curious. I have read the Bible cover to cover—especially the New Testament. None of us is without sin—and murder is, beyond a doubt, considered to be a sin.”
The man looked at him and again, seemed more confused than anything else.
“You don’t understand! It’s coming—the Apocalypse is coming, and we were just trying to save that poor girl’s soul!”
Hunter stared back at him, frowning. His words had been frightening enough.
