Edge of Collapse Series (Book 4): Edge of Anarchy Read online

  He circled the house, his boots sinking deep, and studied the snow for tracks, for any sign of the intruder.

  There it was. A mass of fur and bloody entrails staining the pure white snow. The carcass was hidden just inside the tree line, downwind about thirty yards from the back of the house.

  It used to be a wild hare but was now a message from an enemy—an enemy who should be dead but wasn’t.

  Pike was alive.

  Liam rocked back on his heels. Darkness opened up inside him. A black rage sprouted in his chest, his whole body thrumming with revulsion.

  The psycho was goading him, provoking him.

  If this was an attempt to get him to abandon his training and rush headlong into a trap, Pike would be sorely mistaken.

  Liam would hunt him down and kill him. Today. Right now.

  “Ghost!” Liam commanded. “Stay with Hannah.”

  The dog let out another great booming bark, his muscles straining in his eagerness to seek out the threat, but he obeyed.

  Liam went to the rear door, moving backward, keeping his rifle trained on the woods. Ghost followed him.

  Hannah was waiting for them. She held her daughter close to her chest. Her face was bone-white, her lips pale. “He’s not dead.”

  “No.”

  “You’re going to kill him.”

  Liam hesitated. He felt conflicted to his very core. He did not want to leave her. Every instinct warred against it. She was his vulnerability. It put him between a rock and a hard place—for he needed to both protect Hannah and kill Pike.

  “Go,” Hannah said. “He needs to die.”

  Liam put on his coat and scarf and pulled his hat low over his ears. He pulled on his gloves and took three loaded magazines—two for the AR-15, one for the Glock—and stuffed them in his pockets. He missed his chest rig and military-grade cold weather gear.

  “When I come back, I’ll whistle ‘Happy Birthday.’ Shoot anyone else. Don’t hesitate.”

  She nodded, her features tight. “You’ll come back.”

  “I will.”

  Ghost paced from the living room to the kitchen and back, alert and wary, a low rumbling growl deep in his chest. He felt a little better with the dog with her. Only a little.

  “Use your whistle if you need me,” Liam said. “Where’s your .45?”

  She shifted, holding Charlotte with one hand, and pulled the gun out of her sweatpants’ pocket. “It’s loaded. Round in the chamber, like you taught me.”

  “That never leaves your hand.”

  Her expression hardened. “I know.”

  Pike

  Day Twenty-One

  Pike doubled back on his own tracks.

  Soldier Boy erroneously believed he was the hunter. Alas, he was not.

  Along the outskirts of town, the houses along the river ended abruptly as the ground dipped into a steep ravine near the river’s edge. Woods lined the ravine on both sides.

  The snow had started up again. Even under the canopy of the trees, the powder rose midway between his knees and thighs. He waded through it. His boots made muffled squeaking sounds with every step.

  Snow built up on his head and shoulders, drifting into every crack and crevice, sneaking between the folds of his scarf, dripping down his neck and back, and slipping between his gloves and coat sleeves.

  The rapidly falling snow made it impossible to see more than thirty feet in front of him. It would get worse. Pike wasn’t worried.

  He’d created the necessary tracks before doubling back, planting the fresh kill, and waiting for the trap to be sprung.

  The soldier would follow the plan perfectly. He believed that Pike was ahead of him; he’d never see him sneaking up from behind.

  Pike had no sense of fairness, no honor. As soon as he saw the man, he intended to shoot him in the back.

  The storm offered cover. The soldier wouldn’t hear his approach over the wind. Wouldn’t be able to smell him or sense him. Hell, Pike couldn’t trust his own senses.

  He plodded through the snow, stepping in Soldier Boy’s methodical footprints that trailed his own, pushing blindly forward. It was becoming more difficult to see. The wind was picking up, sending clouds of ice crystals swirling across the packed snow.

  He tightened his grip on the pistol and quickened his pace.

  A sound ahead of him. Fifteen, twenty feet. Directly ahead? Or a little west?

  Pike whirled around, gun up, searching the trees. Everything looked the same. The same ugly barren oak and maple trees. The same pine and spruce laden with snow.

  A flicker of unease curdled through him. It wasn’t a feeling he was accustomed to. He didn’t like it.

  Another noise, this time behind him. A soft squeak, like careful footsteps sinking into the snow.

  He twisted around, craning his neck wildly.

  He sensed movement to his left. Then ahead.

  He didn’t hear a sound. He didn’t see a thing.

  The forest was a tangle of black straggly trees that pressed in on him from all sides. The menace was palpable, the frigid air heavy and smothering.

  To the southwest, a branch overloaded with powder snapped beneath the weight. A mound of snow thudded to the ground.

  He gritted his teeth in irritation. Just his overactive mind playing tricks on him. This brutal cold getting into his head.

  He kept going, pushing hard through deeper drifts. The tracks were partially buried and becoming harder to locate with each passing minute.

  His legs felt leaden and stiff. He tripped over something buried in the snow and nearly fell but regained his footing.

  He was fast growing tired of this.

  The girl was waiting for him in the warm house. He wanted Soldier Boy dead—he didn’t care how anymore. It was time to end this and be done with it.

  A branch creaked. Powder thudded to the ground. A chipmunk skittered through underbrush.

  Sound drifted. It was impossible to tell where it came from.

  Behind him. Ahead. To the left or right.

  That disconcerting feeling niggled at his gut. Maybe the soldier was smarter than he’d anticipated. More wily and cunning.

  Maybe Pike was no longer the only one playing the game.

  He felt the ground sloping beneath his feet and recalled the location of the ravine. It should be directly to his left. Ten feet? Fifteen? In the near white-out conditions, he couldn’t see the drop-off past the thin line of trees.

  He visualized the topography in his mind. It was a sharp incline and steep. Easy to fall over a cliff of snow and tumble fifteen yards down to the river below, the water black as blood.

  With the inclement weather, an unsuspecting person wouldn’t even see it coming.

  Pike stepped into the next footprint and halted abruptly. His unease growing, he blinked the ice from his eyelashes and squinted down at the prints.

  Something was off. Nothing he could put a finger on, just a gut feeling.

  He brought his pistol up and twisted left then right, neck craning, squinting hard, searching for any hint of danger.

  Nothing. He could see nothing. But he felt the soldier like a sinister presence, lurking just beyond his line of sight.

  His apprehension transformed into something else—an alien feeling, but one he still recognized, an instinct every mammal possessed, even him.

  Fear.

  Like prey, Pike ran.

  Liam

  Day Twenty-One

  The snow drove into Liam’s face, stinging his cheeks, forehead, and nose.

  It was miserable. His lower back ached in protest. He’d been crouched in the same position for too long.

  His teeth chattered. His hands were stiffening. He flexed his fingers on the trigger guard of the Bushmaster AR-15 to keep the blood flowing.

  Liam squatted behind the cover of a cluster of trees about fifteen feet to the left of the trail of breadcrumb tracks that Pike had left for him to follow. He’d followed them around a bend and was lying in
wait, ready to ambush his target.

  Pike had attempted to circle around and sneak up on Liam from behind. It wouldn’t work. He would use Pike’s own plan against him.

  Liam had checked for double-backed tracks. He’d swept in a semi-circle from the obvious trail outward until he’d found it, and then he’d set up his ambush after checking the ground conditions around his firing position.

  From Liam’s vantage point just behind a V-split in the trunk of an oak, he would see Pike before Pike saw him. And then he would kill him.

  Liam shivered. He was surrounded by white static. When he turned to look the way he’d come, there was nothing but white, like the houses had been blown away completely. Or had never existed.

  The snowstorm had blown in seemingly out of nowhere. Snowstorms blew in across vast Lake Michigan all the time. It wasn’t unusual. But without weather alerts, they no longer had forewarning.

  Even with his parka, layered clothing, and the Ziploc baggies between his socks, he wouldn’t last in conditions like this for very long. No one could.

  Cold was a far greater threat to survival than it appeared. It decreased the ability to think and subdued the will to do anything, even to survive.

  The cold was an insidious enemy. And Liam already had Pike to contend with.

  He needed to end this, and quickly.

  As if on cue, a dark shape appeared around the bend.

  Just a shadow through the snow at first, then a deeper, darker outline trudging forward, slow and purposeful, head down against the wind. Thirty-five feet away.

  Adrenaline kicked through him, rage a clenched fist in his chest. Liam brought the Bushmaster AR-15 to bear on his target and thumbed off the safety. He tapped the bottom of the loaded magazine to ensure it was properly seated and squinted through the scope.

  Conditions had deteriorated so rapidly that Liam could barely see past fifteen to twenty feet. The wind and snow effectively deafened him and limited visibility. His senses, which he urgently depended upon, were blunted.

  He needed his target closer to make sure he nailed the shot.

  Liam tensed. He focused his breathing and slowed his heartrate. Anger slashed through him. He felt it thrumming through every frozen cell in his body.

  This deranged psychopath was dying today. Full stop.

  In his military career, Liam had killed hundreds of men. He’d killed dozens more just in the last few weeks. They were the enemy; he was the soldier who took them out.

  This, however, was personal.

  After what Pike had done to Hannah, the irreparable harm he had caused her… Liam wanted the scumbag to die a slow, painful death. For Liam’s face to be the last thing he ever saw.

  Twenty-five feet away. The wind cut through his clothes and whipped the snow into a frenzy. Liam blinked, clearing his vision, and aimed, finger applying pressure to the trigger.

  The figure stopped. Pike moved abruptly to the right.

  Liam fired. Boom!

  Pike’s body jerked. He stumbled but kept moving.

  Due to the poor conditions, Liam’s shot had gone wide, winging him in the shoulder instead of the chest.

  He quickly shifted to adjust his aim, but Pike had already slipped between two towering pines and vanished into the swirling snow.

  He resisted the urge to squeeze the trigger. To fire now would waste ammo and give away his position.

  Patience was bred into an operator’s DNA. He would wait for Pike to make a mistake and reveal himself first, then take a confirmed shot.

  “She’s mine!” Pike shouted.

  Liam gritted his teeth and didn’t answer. Pike was provoking him to betray his location.

  “I’m going to take my time with her! Nice and slow!” His voice was muted, stolen by the wind and flung away, echoing off the snow and trees. It sounded like it was coming from nowhere and everywhere at once.

  Liam remained crouched, tracking with the rifle muzzle, blinking snow out of his eyes, finger poised on the trigger.

  The crack of a gunshot. Bark splintered from a maple tree ten or fifteen feet to his right. Muffled by the snow, it was difficult to determine the origin of the shot.

  Another shot boomed. Twenty-plus feet ahead and on his left, bark sprayed from a pine tree. Pike shouted another curse and fired again.

  Pike was shooting blindly, hoping to flush him out. It had the opposite effect.

  This time, Liam was able to get a bead on where he was likely hiding.

  Liam moved. Electric pain shot through his spine in protest, his discs threatening to lock up after so long in the same position.

  He blocked it out. He had a mission, and nothing would get in his way.

  Keeping low, stock pressed against his cheek, Liam dodged back between the trees and made a wide circle as he flanked Pike’s suspected location. Even with his aching back, he stepped as quietly as he could in the deep snow.

  He ducked low, spine twinging, and peered out from around a thick trunk, leading with the AR-15. He squinted, searching through the driving snow and wind for shadowy movement or the glint of metal.

  He swept the weapon from left to right, steadily searching in a grid pattern—scan left to right. Bump down five degrees. Scan right to left. Bump down five degrees. Repeat.

  There.

  Liam glimpsed a blurred figure. Twenty feet to the northwest, barely visible, a small, dark shape poked out behind the tall trunk of a birch tree. An odd contour that didn’t belong. Liam squinted through the scope.

  Pike’s shoulder protruded. A thin strip of the back of his skull. He was facing away, searching for Liam to the north, back the way they’d come.

  Liam carefully stepped backward to get a better angle, always mindful of the ground conditions around his shooting position. The discs in his spine shifted, fresh pain jolting through him. He stumbled.

  Abruptly, the snow beneath his feet gave way. He tried to leap forward, but his boot snagged on a fallen log hidden beneath a drift of white powder.

  The shelf of snow collapsed beneath him.

  Liam fell.

  10

  Liam

  Day Twenty-One

  Liam scrambled for purchase on the collapsing snow, but there was none. His boots skidded, his arms flailing.

  He tumbled down the steep slope, tree trunks and fallen logs battering his body, his pants and coat snagging and ripping, twigs scratching his face.

  He came to a sudden, jarring stop. His back struck the base of a large pine tree. Pain knifed from his lower back to his neck. His spine felt like it’d been filled with molten lava.

  Dizziness flared through him. Black spots behind his eyelids. He blinked rapidly, disoriented and in incredible pain.

  He gasped. Snow spilled into his opened mouth. He lay prone in the snow, jammed sideways against the trunk at the base of a steep ravine.

  Trepidation speared him. He had to get up, had to get to his feet and reassess the situation. Pike had the high ground now. Liam was a sitting duck.

  Urgently, he tried to sit up, instinctively reaching for his weapon. Nothing happened. His body refused to obey.

  He moved his arms, flexed his fingers, and shifted his shoulders. His upper body seemed to be in working order.

  His legs wouldn’t move. He couldn’t feel his feet.

  He couldn’t feel anything from the waist down.

  He was numb. No, worse. He was paralyzed.

  Fear and dread pressed down, suffocating him. A part of him had been waiting for this for years—the moment his injured back finally failed him.

  The moment his own body betrayed him.

  He would die here. Unable to climb the ravine, he would succumb to hypothermia within an hour. And Pike was still out there.

  The cold was already burrowing into his bones, sinking deep inside him. Thickening his thoughts, the pain blurred everything to a distinct white haze.

  You’re not dead yet, Jessa whispered in his mind. Don’t give up now.

  She was r
ight. He couldn’t move his legs, but he could still move his arms. He could still shoot. As long as he had breath in his lungs, he could fight.

  He thought nothing of his own survival. Only one thought drove him—ending Pike before he could get back to Hannah.

  He shifted, ignoring the pain, and got his right elbow under him. He pushed in the snow, managed to raise his torso enough to snag his tangled AR-15, and pulled it out from beneath his ribs.

  He pushed himself into a seated position against the trunk, legs splayed uselessly in front of him, and positioned the rifle stock firmly against his shoulder. He peered through the scope, his finger stiff on the trigger, and spanned the ridge top.

  Normally, he could shoot a half-dollar head shot cluster at twenty-five yards. Not now. Not in conditions like this.

  “Come on!” he shouted. “Come fight like a man!”

  A blurry figure moved furtively through the trees along the ridge line. Twenty-five, maybe thirty feet above him.

  Liam waited. The wind and the driving snow made it a difficult shot. His hands were like blocks of ice. The creeping cold bore down on him.

  A gunshot splintered the air. Fifteen feet away, bark sprayed from an oak tree. A second and third round tore into pine trees ten feet to his right. Shredded bark and pine needles showered down on him.

  “The hunter always wins!” Pike shouted from the top of the ravine.

  Liam waited until he glimpsed movement. There. He exhaled, shifted slightly, and the AR-15 barked twice. The hot shells fell smoking into the snow.

  Pike’s curse was nearly swallowed by the storm as he went down. Liam sought him through the scope. By the time he found him, he was up again and had shuffled back behind the trees.

  He was limping. Liam had nailed him in the leg. How badly, he couldn’t tell.

  “Come out!” Liam shouted. The cold seared his lungs, the wind snatching his voice and hurling it away. “Show yourself, you coward!”