Page 51 of Following Their Heart

Adrenaline has me amped up as I turn to Cora and Grim. “You two might wanna get back to the shelter. This can be our little secret.”

“Da,” Grim says, and he curls an arm around Cora’s shoulders.

“No,” Cora says with a defiant toss of her head. “We’re better together.Allof us together. That’s how you were able to get things working.” She leans into Grim, but she stretches out a hand to me.

I take it and instantly feel more confident. She might be on to something.

“We go down to the lodge,” she says. “All three of us.”

“And face the music,” I say.

Grim and Cora share a look.

Cora nods.

“And face the music,” Grim says.

Chapter 20

Rev

The radios work!And whose voice do I hear first but my Scrappy boy’s announcing he brought down one of Raptor’s choppers!

Hunkered in the tank, I do a fist pump. “Way to go, kiddo!” He must have figured out his Gift was under attack and found a way to fight back.

While I check in with the gang over the comms, everything in the tank comes online without me touching a single button. It’s like the power got magically restored.

“Thank you, Working!”

All right. Rubbing my palms together, I get to work. I can hear and be heard, thanks to the radio. Let’s find out if I can see.

Now that I know one of Raptor’s choppers is down and the other ran away with its tail between its legs, I need to figure out why Jud’s not answering. I click to turn one of the command monitors into a viewscreen, and I pan the night vision camera. I start by aiming at the last place I saw Jud with that grenade launcher.

I’m parked on a berm and below me, the camera shows the rooves of vehicles parked in the lot. Earlier, we moved a bunch of them this way to give the tanks some camouflaging. Looking over the vehicles, I point the camera directly at the lodge. Midway between here and there is where Jud had been.

There’s no sign of him.

The ground is dotted with bird carcasses, some of them still flailing, but around the lodge itself is a frigging mound of feathered corpses. All the way around. It’s like we had a massive snowfall, and everything that fell off the roof made drifts up to the height of the windows.

All those birds must have killed themselves flying into the structure. Raptor turned them into Kamikazes for his cause, and now they’re all dead.

“Jesus Christ.” What a goddamned awful waste of life!

We’re going to have our hands full disposing of all those bodies, but right now, we’ve got bigger fish to fry. Where the hell is Jud? I scan all around the lodge, panning the camera left, then right, all the way to its limits. There’s not a single living soul outside, aside from the birds that didn’t die outright in the attack. Switching to thermal tech, I scan again. Maybe Jud followed one of Raptor’s crew into the forest, and I’ll be able to pick up his heat signature.

No dice. I see the cooling carcasses of the dead birds, but no human sized heat signatures. Not anywhere. Until I pan the camera toward the lodge.

The curtains are drawn, but thanks to the thermal tech, I can read the signatures inside. I count three sets of head-and-shoulders. “Come in, base. This is Rev. You guys got Jud in there?”

“Negative, Rev,” Shep says. “He is not here.”

“Who all’s there with you, now?” If our leader isn’t able to take inventory of our men, it’s up to me.

“Me, Brawn, and Doc. Over,” Shep says.

“Everyone okay in there? Come back.”

“Ja.We are all fine.”

---