Read The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky for Free Online Page A

seconds ago. They were probably halfway to the crash now.
    “Who are you?” The young woman’s voice was broken and faint.
    Travis turned, and was surprised to find her sitting up on the table. Her body still shuddered with sobs, but she showed remarkable control, all things considered. She looked to be in her late twenties. Dark hair. Large, dark eyes. He found himself thinking she must be beautiful on anything but the worst day of her life.
    “Travis,” he said, suddenly lacking a better answer. She seemed to be waiting for more. “I’m just a guy. I found the plane, found Mrs. Garner.”
    “She lived?”
    “Long enough to leave instructions.”
    Before she could ask about that, movement between them drew their attention sharply.
    String Mustache was alive, trying to turn himself over in the dirt. Though a good chunk of the man’s face had been cleaved away by one of the bullets, Travis now saw that the other two had glanced on the hard cheekbones and skull. He unslung the M16 and was an instant from finishing him when the woman spoke.
    “No.” The word came out rough, halfway between whisper and growl.
    Then she surprised Travis by pivoting and putting her feet on the ground, and standing—shaky for a moment, but standing all the same.
    With her undamaged left arm she took Travis’s knife from where he’d set it on the table, and dropped hard with one knee onto String Mustache’s back, pressing him flat to the ground. She put the blade, edge-up, under his armpit and pulled savagely. Travis heard a sound like heavy elastic parting, and the man screamed. The arm quivered, uncontrolled. She did the same to the other arm, then turned a hundred eighty degrees and slit both of his hamstrings behind the knees. His screams ebbed to a low moan, gurgling blood in his throat.
    The woman stood, put the knife aside, then stooped and gathered a fistful of String Mustache’s back collar.
    Had Travis actually wanted to stop her, he wasn’t sure he’d have had time. She lifted String Mustache’s upper body, dragged him ten feet across the needles and loose soil, and dropped him facedown into the white-hot embers of the campfire. He screamed and thrashed, but could only command his limbs to jerk about; all control had literally been severed. He managed to contract his back muscles and raise his face for a few seconds, but then the young woman put her foot on the back of his head and pressed him deep into the coals again. She kept the foot there until his hair caught fire. By that time he’d stopped moving and screaming. She watched him for another ten seconds; then she picked up a rifle dropped by one of the hostiles, thumbed it to auto without even looking at it, and fired a burst into the back of String Mustache’s head.
    She dropped the gun and turned back to Travis, and for a moment he wasn’t sure her eyes were even human. Then they fixed on her father, dead against the base of the tree, and all doubt about her humanity evaporated.
    She crossed to the pine and sank beside his bound corpse, pulling herself against him, her face pressed to his despite the blood. She cried again, silently.
    Travis went back to the edge of the camp and listened to the distant ATV engines. Thirty seconds later they stopped.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    Travis expected to have to gently pry the young woman from her grieving. They needed to get out of the encampment and find positions from which to kill the other two hostiles when they returned.
    But she sat with her father only a few minutes before standing, taking Travis’s knife again and cutting the dead man free. She set him carefully flat on the ground, then looked around, troubled.
    Travis understood. “Where do you want to take him?”
    Her gaze settled on the dense stand of pines where he’d hidden earlier. “There.”
    Travis knelt and lifted the man, and carried him to the trees. He maneuvered the body among the boughs and laid it under the deepest cover, then waited silently as the