Ancient Echoes

CHAPTER 61



THE FIRST GLOW OF sunrise peeked over the mountains. Melisse had kept watch all night while the students, Charlotte, and Lionel slept in a relatively secluded and secure culvert. Melisse guarded the group’s south flank and Quade its north.

Anxiety and a sense of hopelessness gripped her. The night before, as the group hiked, they heard the sound of high-powered rifle fire in the distance. They assumed the mercenaries found Jake and Michael. She prayed the two located the cave with weapons before that happened. But when the men didn’t return by nightfall, dread became despair.

The small group pushed on. They had managed to hide from both the mercenaries and the villagers for a day, but she doubted their luck would hold out much longer.

Something moved not far from her.

She crept cautiously toward the movement, then lay down flat in the scrub and waited.

Two strangers approached dressed in black tactical gear, and ball caps. They carried semi-automatic weapons. The mercs.

Three bullets remained in her Beretta.

She waited.

The men crept closer, but she still didn't act. A head shot would be the best way to stop them, but the hardest to make. She weighed her options. She didn't relish the thought of dying out here, not when she had so much to live for. Thoughts of her pretty little daughter, Marianna, came to mind, but she pushed them aside. She had no time for them now. The possibility of sidling back, out of the killers' view, waking Charlotte and the students and running appealed to her, but it wasn’t possible.

Heart pounding, she watched the mercs. They stepped into the open now, just as the sun peeked over the horizon, casting a whitish-pink aura over the land. They crouched, careful. She hadn’t moved for a long while so they had no idea she was there.

The sky was too beautiful for anyone to die under, she told herself.

Then, her training kicked in. She aimed, adjusted as she remembered Michael’s caution about bullet trajectories, and fired.

She hit the first man in the middle of the forehead. He dropped, instantly dead.

The other man ran as she turned the pistol in his direction. Her shot went wide.

He fired as he ducked, but his foot caught a rock and the split second he wobbled caused his spray of shots to go wild.

As he fell, she aimed a little to the left, calculating that he'd catch himself and correct in the opposite direction. She squeezed off her third and last shot. He fell.

She'd beaten the odds.

Adrenaline rushing, she waited three full minutes. She heard and saw nothing more, so she crept toward the dead mercs to take their weapons. She assumed Quade and Charlotte woke the students and set them running at the first sound of gunfire. She would have to move fast to catch up to them, but the mercs rifles, and anything else useful they might be carrying, would serve them all well.

She reached for the first merc’s M-107 when a rapid burst of firepower roared. Bullets tore at her back and side, knocked her sideways, and spun her around.

She fell face up, looking at a pastel sky, at the start of a beautiful new day, before her eyes no longer saw anything at all.





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