Page 72 of Viral Justice

It backed onto the hill and there were other houses to either side of this one, but they were a few feet lower down the hill.

Which way?

The boy in her arms pointed and wiggled to be put down. She set him carefully on his feet, then put a finger over his mouth. If he wasn’t quiet, they were both dead.

He took her hand and pulled her to the very back edge of the house, then pointed down.

A trail.

Narrow, steep and completely unsafe, but a trail.

The boy hopped over the edge and in two seconds was gone from view. She followed and discovered the trick to staying on the trail wasn’t just putting your feet in the right places, but your hands too.

The kids around here must be part mountain goat.

Ali followed him until they were four or five houses away and about one hundred feet from the boy’s home. The trail continued on, but they’d be visible to the men approaching, so she gave the boy hand signals to stop and crouch down behind the wall of a house that hid them from view.

She listened hard, but the men didn’t speak. Judging by the footsteps, they were almost there.

A door slammed open and gunfire erupted.

Shouting now in Arabic, too many voices to make out individual words, and more gunfire. The voices grew heavy with anger, the weight of them pounding against her ears. The crackle of wood smashing against wood sounded five times too loud. The sounds of bullets never stopped.

Whoever lived in the house she and the child were hiding behind dashed out their front door. More than one person, probably the whole family.

Ali grabbed the kid, hugged him tight and hurried after the fleeing family.

The boy clung to her, his hands tight on her poncho, front and back, his legs around her waist.

Other people came outside to see what the commotion was about, then ducked back inside.

“Do you know where your father and brother are?” she asked the boy in a whisper.

He nodded and pushed at her to be let down.

She put him on the ground, he took her hand and trotted down the hill.

Ali kept checking for pursuit, but no one seemed too interested in her and the child. They reached the halfway mark on the hill then the child made a left-hand turn and led her away from the noise and confusion.

They rounded a corner and someone running knocked them down.

Ali scrambled to her feet, turned to see who they collided with and discovered a man with a rifle. A SCAR rifle. There were only two ways for anyone else to have one of those here.

One, he was a member of the team coming in to help.

Two, he was one of the militants who’d captured Bull and had taken his Special Forces combat assault rifle.

A single look at the man and she knew he hadn’t come through door number one. He had none of the lethal grace she was used to seeing in her fellow soldiers. This man didn’t know what he was doing.

Still, he knew enough to be dangerous.

He yelled at her and lifted the muzzle of the rifle in her direction.

If he fired, someone else might decide to investigate the noise.

She couldn’t let him fire.

Goddamn it this was going to suck.

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