9 Seconds of Freedom, Original Suspense, Part 34, Links to first 33 Episodes
I stood and looked around. The night vision goggles fed everything back in green. The heat signature from animals and even some logs, still warm from the sun, created green blocks, in the rough shape of the object or creature. Other than a few small animals, there was nothing around.
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I had to warn the women. I stopped for a moment. I got my breathing under control, then removed the goggles. Without them, I could see some detail I couldn’t interpret on the goggles. It was a matter of getting used to them, I clearly wasn’t.
Slowly, I made my way back toward the edge of the clearing. I was unarmed, alone and untrained, as far as I knew. What was I going to do? If only I’d brought the nail gun.
Standing at the edge of the water was a dark shape, the silhouette of a woman. She looked back toward Jensen, then up and down the edge of the clearing. I knew that profile. It was Boots. She had a gun in her right hand. She seemed satisfied I was gone.
She held the gun pointed down, removing something. Must have been the silencer. She put it in her pocket. She slipped the gun into a holster under her arm.
Suddenly, I had an image of her. She was walking away from the table at lunch, talking on her phone. It hadn’t even occurred to me. There hadn’t been enough time for Crawford to reach Hobart Living Center if they had called him.
She must have tipped him off, and now she’d killed the only link to Leeanne’s baby, the mayor’s grandson, and possibly the only irrefutable evidence of Mayor Skinner’s connection to any of this.
Boots dropped into the water and started off toward The Farm, following the same course the insertion team had. I had to stop her, without giving them away. Did she know where the baby was? How could she? Jensen had delivered the baby to the parents, or had he?
Why was she doing this? Hadn’t she been a victim of Skinner’s fight club too? She’d managed to escape it, now she was working against us? It didn’t make sense.
I moved into the water. I stayed off to Boots’ right, working to stay behind plants and logs, not too close, but I couldn’t lose her. If she got to The Farm undetected, it could ruin the whole plan. People could die.
She reached the spot where the two teams had split off and stopped. She stood up out of the water. I moved up behind her. She was studying the fence line.
Finally, she recognized something and started off again, low down in the water.
The gun was on her left. I needed to grab her, so she couldn’t make noise. I could only think of one way. I took off my shirt and wrapped it around my left hand. If I could pin her right arm behind her and get the shirt over her mouth, I might have a chance.
By now we were close enough to see into the cage. Bright lights shone on the ring at the center. It looked like something out of a post-apocalyptic movie. In the ring, women circled, and every few seconds another two would pair off, tearing into each other.
There were screams, both from the fighters, and from the spectators lining wooden benches outside both ends of the cage. At this end, the cage and the outer fence of The Farm were one and the same, with the cage being built up against it.
There was fifteen feet between the outer fence and the ring. At the ends where the benches were, the distance was shorter. There must have been forty women inside the cage. Some were perched on wooden doghouse looking structures, others prowled along the caged in tunnel that ran the perimeter of the ring. It was exactly as Leeanne had described it Boots turned. She’d seen me in the dark.
“Dalton?” she hissed.
She moved straight toward me.
“What are you doing out here? I thought you were supposed to be with Jensen,” she said.
I should have played along, should have just told her what I’d found. But, I didn’t.
“I think you know why I’m not,” I said.
“Shit,” she said.
She reached for the gun, and I sprang toward her. I missed her entirely, but managed to knock the gun from her hand, into the dark water. Our splashing drew attention. From the attack team on the left, someone stood up, silhouetted in the dark and looked toward us.
Boots went down, chest first, into the icy water, pawing along the bottom for the gun. I was on her back before I had time to think about it. She was strong, and she almost threw me off. She reached back and moved her thumbs to find my eye sockets. I bit one wrist.
From somewhere inside my head came a memory. I was young. Maybe six. Someone was showing me a pressure point, right behind the ears. So, I grabbed Boots’ headed and jammed my thumbs in behind her ears and pressed. Her thumbs pressed back.
I held on and her thumbs began to relax. Then she was limp in the water. My foot hit the gun. I grabbed it up and slipped it in the back of my jeans. I wrapped an arm around Boots, with my elbow under her chin and crawled up toward the left, where Leeanne would be.
I’d heard someone say that unconscious bodies are heavier, and they were right. Boots couldn’t have weighed 100 pounds, but soaking wet, and knocked out, she felt like she weighed 300.
I found Leeanne.
“What’s wrong with Boots?” she whispered.
The noise from the cage was covering us, but why take chances.
“She shot Jensen, I knocked her out,” I said. “Jensen’s dead.”
“What? Why?” Leeanne asked.
It came out louder than she intended.
In that moment, kneeling in the water with an unconscious girl in my arms, I looked at Leeanne, she was beautiful. Her face was suddenly lit by a red glow. There was a loud pop, as a second flare joined the first, over the front gate. It was time.
Automatic gunfire ripped through the night. The noise in the cage stopped. The prisoners rushed to the front wall of their enclosure. From the benches and guard stations, there was swearing. The huge lights in the ring went dark. Then, the guard towers went dark.
Thanks a lot for your valuable post sharing.......... i like this ....
best of luck my dear friend
Dun dun dun....oh crap think I may have missed a few now I need to go back and read...lol .. hazards of working I guess.
upvoted and resteemed.
Thanks, glad you're enjoying it.
I want to be honest with you... I have started to read this book from beginning and I am only at the 3th part yet -reading at my works break- ... and I won't read this part... I will wait... when I finish previous parts I will read this and next chapters.. I want to enjoy with this novel...