Breacher (Tom Keeler Book 2) by Jack Lively (reading well TXT) 📕

prone position. The truck ambled off the track, wobbled over dirt and rocks, then plowed into the base of a boulder.

The impact must have displaced the Breacher from between the pedal and the seat. The truck stopped dead against the rock face. At first there was a great silence. Then the wounded man began to howl. He’d been lurched out of a relative comfort zone. His bellowing cries were worse than ever. Which was the way I’d intended it to be. He was the most miserable person in the universe. If he were a friend of mine, I don’t think I’d be able to stop myself from putting a round into his head.

Which is how one of his friends must have felt. A single shot cracked out from the woods, followed closely by the tinkle of the windshield being penetrated once more. Silence. I homed in on the muzzle flash. The Remington was up and hot. It was dark in there. The distance and angle didn’t help any. I was watching a section of the woods, maybe ten feet up among the rocks. Nothing moving. The guy had taken his shot and was doing his best to be invisible. Through the scope everything looked gray and uniform and murky.

Then I saw him. One moment it was all grainy indistinguishable monochrome. The next moment I was looking at the shape of a hand. The hand moved slightly, and I saw that it was connected to a weapon. I shifted the scope higher and found the guy’s head. I couldn’t make out the features in the gloom. I moved down to center mass and put a round into his chest.

I hit the dirt and rolled. The response was almost instant. A triple burst came at me from the other side of the driveway, east of the first guy’s position. The muzzle flash was white. The rounds came over my head. I didn’t wait for the shooter to adjust. I rolled to an apple tree and waited. The shooter’s own muzzle flash might impair his night vision for a couple of seconds. He might not have seen where I’d moved. I got the Remington up and braced against the tree trunk. Through the scope my eye sought any and all movement. I was hungry for the shot, but not starving.

The guy fired first, he had seen me. Another triple burst out of his assault rifle. Three rounds, thudding into the tree. Almost perfectly on target, maybe three inches too far to the right. An impressive shot in the dark. At the range he would have been a hero. I zeroed in on the muzzle flash and found center mass. A millisecond too late. The guy rolled off as I dropped the pin on a .308 round, which spun into the thicket, sparked on the rocks, and ricocheted up into the ether with a loud ping. I pulled back behind the tree again. Another meticulously aimed triple splintered wood chips off the tree, spraying me with shredded wood. He was a very good shooter.

My brain started doing mental math. I’d jumped out of the truck at around seventy yards and eventually rolled up against the tree. Call it fifty yards from the target. Well within rifle range, but not buckshot. Thing is, with buckshot you don’t need to worry so much about accuracy. At forty yards the spread would be effective. Ten yards to go. Like a football game, I needed to get back to first down.

I pushed out and ran like a maniac for the next apple tree. I saw muzzle flash spitting lead in my direction. Heard the whirring whizz of hot rounds tearing the air. But none of it tore into me. I racked a shell into the Breacher’s chamber. Buckshot or slug? I was hoping for buckshot. The guy fired another burst. The rounds slapped into the tree trunk like a snare roll. I brought the shotgun around and fired in the direction of the muzzle flash. Boom. A slug.

The heavy metal tore into the trees, but not into the guy.

Disappointing, but not for long. Two mental events occurred then. The first event happened in the guy’s head. He now knew that I was armed with a weapon designed for close-quarters combat. Which meant that I was unafraid to come at him, a thought that made him panic. The second cognitive event happened in my head. I made a mental note that after the slug, the next shell up was buckshot. The guy wasn’t completely wrong to break cover. He might have been in a bad position for close-quarters, exposed and vulnerable. You can’t know what’s in someone else’s mind. Whatever the reason, he broke and dashed to get behind one of the big boulders. I raised the Breacher and put buckshot into him inside of forty yards.

I saw the pellets hit. The guy was running hard. When the shot reached him, his body was slapped weirdly off its intended line, as if pushed by an invisible hand.

I got up and walked the forty yards. The shooter was alive, breathing heavily. His weapon was in the dirt, ten yards away. The buckshot had struck him in the hip and the groin. I racked the next round into the chamber. A slug. We made eye contact. He didn’t stoop to begging, so I gave it to him clean.

Fifty-Two

Strange noises came from the pickup truck. The engine was still turning over, the gear shift in the drive position. The noise was a looping banging on top of the engine sound. There wasn’t pressure on the gas pedal, but the low idle was pushing the vehicle forward into the boulder like an autonomous robot gone bad.

I crossed the driveway to the truck and killed the ignition. The Breacher was lying on the floor, dislodged from where it had been wedged against the pedal. I crouched in the lee of a boulder and fed ammo into the shotguns. Same as before, one slug,