» Fri May 04, 2012 11:17 am THE FOUR HORseman RIDE AGAIN
2161.
Wyoming.
Chapter 1: Stalker
Walking the Big Dog – Reticence Mode – Anti-Matter – Nothing Goes According to Plan – Box-Trot – This Year’s Models – Situation Normal: All [censored] Up – Thinking Inside the Box –Defective / Defected – In the Land of the Blind… – Mr. Potato Head – Tastes like Chicken – What Is Poison – A Deadly Meal – Freedom Fried
On a cold August evening a box with legs walked across the wasteland—large and rectangular, about the size of a roll-off dumpster and built of wicked riveted steel. It needed no wheels, no treads, and no truck to carry it. On four legs it strode over the rocky terrain and down a steep hillside—huge robotic, hydraulic legs, bent in roughly the shape of a dog’s, each as long and thick as a man stood tall. It moved silently despite its immense size and weight. Several figures walked alongside it, shrouded in black.
DI-246 watched them from a distant hillside through the ocular of a powerful telescope mounted to a very powerful rifle. He lay prone in the dust, steadily moving his crosshairs along with their movement. He counted five. Three of them wore metallic armor, glossy in a way but at the same time seeming to absorb and negate rather than reflect the light of the stars and moon. They looked like dense black shadows against the backdrop of midnight—shadows cast by themselves. They carried weapons. Two others wore only black cloth uniforms and caps indicative of an officer’s rank and carried no weapons.
When they’d moved far enough, Dutch hefted the rifle, folding its bipod, and hurried along a course parallel to theirs. When he found another decent vantage point he lowered himself again to the ground and unfolded the bipod and aimed the rifle.
They had stopped. As he watched, the dog-like legs bent down and the container sank slowly to the ground until its legs had folded entirely into its sides. The three armed guards formed a semicircle around the front of the container, while the two officers walked around to either side of it. The one on Dutch’s side of the container opened a pair of cabinet doors to reveal a glowing computer monitor and an array of blinking lights and esoteric switches and buttons. Dutch couldn’t see the one around the opposite side of the container—he expected something similar. The officer started pushing buttons and a metal pole like an antenna rose over the top of the container and began to rotate.
The earpiece in Dutch’s headset beeped a warning. He took his hand from under the front of the rifle and turned his forearm to show the display of his wrist-mounted computer. The small screen displayed a warning—unauthorized scan detected. Bits of data flashed by. Entering reticence mode. Depowering. The screen went dark, and Dutch’s senses, sight and sound, seemed to dull. His night vision and heightened hearing dimmed, and all the world became as dark and as quiet as men were meant to perceive it. The scope was a good one, at 32-power magnification with a 56mm objective, but on a cloudy night he could see little, least of all his crosshairs. After a while, the antenna ceased spinning and lowered back into the container. His wrist computer flickered back to life, and then light returned to the world and he could hear again. His reticule also began to glow red.
One of the officers flipped a switch and a set of thick steel doors slowly opened outward on one end of the container. All of the figures down below entered through the doors and they closed behind them. For a long while, nothing moved. Dutch took slow breaths. His thumb snicked off the rifle’s safety. Its magazine contained four heavy .50-caliber cartridges—armor piercing explosive rounds intended for disabling heavy machinery, though not quite enough gun to breach the container’s armor, he wagered.
And then, movement. Dutch moved the reticule to the other side of the container. Another set of heavy mechanical doors opened slowly. He took a long breath and held it. His finger snaked around the trigger and began to subtract from its four pounds of resistance.
At first, it emerged only briefly, and only with its nose. A flicking tongue, testing the air. That vanished back inside and more than a minute passed. Then a hulking shape emerged all at once—an easy eight feet tall, even hunched, and a quarter ton or more of scaly, bulging flesh. Even at several hundred meters, he could make out the size of its teeth, horns, and claws. It looked left, and looked right, took another cautious sniff of the air, and began to walk forward.
He fired.
The scope picture rose with the surge of recoil. An immense flame emerged from the barrel, split four ways to the sides by the muzzle brake, the concussion lifting a haze of dry earth from the ground in front of him. He brought his reticule down just in time to see the beast slump limply to the ground in a messy heap, blood and bits of scaly flesh and bone still raining down around it. His hand flew to the bolt, heavy metal turning, unlocking as he pulled. A smoking shell the size of a salt shaker landed in the dirt beside him. He pressed home the bolt and locked it shut. His hand went back to the trigger.
He waited. He might have worried his huge muzzle flash had given away his position, if the soldiers hadn’t been cowering inside their box. The container’s heavy doors tried to close but closed only around the corpse’s midsection and jammed. Everything that happened next came sudden and very fast.
His headset beeped another warning, and his vision began to dim. “No,” he said. “[censored] you.” He swung his crosshairs around at the emerging antenna and fired. The explosive round sent sparks in all directions off the top of the container and a hundred pieces of the antenna went spinning off into the night. His vision continued to dim and his reticule lost its glow. He swore again and punched the cancel button on his wrist repeatedly. He fumbled with the bolt, shucked in another round. His vision returned only in time to see the second monster explode through the open doors just as they nearly squeezed shut. It shot across the ground as a blur. He tried to fire after it—saw the geyser of dirt sent up just beside his target. By the time he’d loaded another round, it was gone.
“Damn it,” he said. Another warning blip came over his headset. His eyes went to his wrist. Detection Warning. Detection Warning. By the time he found the second antenna, it was no longer worth the bullet.
A hatch opened over the personnel section of the container and a gatling gun on a spinning turret rose and immediately began to fire. At the same time, the legs emerged from under the container and it rose and turned and lumbered toward him at a gallop. He fired once to disable the turret and didn’t wait to see if he would hit it. He grabbed the gun and rolled. A hundred rounds had already filled the air and came down splashing up nasty puffs of dirt all around him. He rolled just in time behind the cover of a boulder and the little explosions chewed up the world around him.
They stopped as quickly as they started. He worked the bolt and swung the rifle up over the top of the boulder. He’d hit the turret. It still fired, but swung crazily in a circle shooting out as many sparks as bullets. It made a full rotation, came around again, and he ducked just as another wave of bullets tore into his cover. He rose and fired again and blew it apart.
The great machine lumbered toward him. He wrenched open the bolt, pulled a solitary round from a bandolier over his chest, and fed it straight into the chamber by hand and closed it. He took aim at the thing’s front left leg and fired. It sent out a shower of sparks and the machine staggered in a way eerily akin to a wounded creature. He loaded another round and fired again. The shot severed some pipe or hose in the mechanism, the leg spraying pressurized hydraulic fluid like arterial blood, and the front left corner of the machine sank into the dirt. The doors at the back of the container, at the personnel end, opened rapidly. He hurried to load another single round. When he looked again he could see two of the guards running across the remaining ground toward him. At least, he could see a spectral outline of them—a pink and blue haze generated by his night vision. To the naked eye, they would not appear at all.
They thought he couldn’t see them. He proved them wrong. He aimed and fired and the antimaterial round, more than overkill against a human target at close range, ripped the poor man completely in half at the waist. The man beside him dove behind the cover of a ridge. Then Dutch’s headset beeped another warning, and he looked just in time to see the flash, and the telltale streak of fire across the sky, washing out his night vision and growing rapidly. He dove for cover, abandoning even his boulder, and leapt down the steep and rocky hillside behind him.
The explosion shattered the boulder behind him and seemed to push him farther through the air than he’d intended. He landed on his back to protect his rifle and the impact drove all the air from his lungs. He fell, skidding, onto and over coarse rock. Caught himself, spun around, left the rifle in the dirt and rose bringing up the compact submachine-gun that hung at his side. The stock was folded, the sling tangled. He scarcely had time to hit the safety and find his sight picture before the second guard emerged over the top of the hill just above him. [censored], the new models can move fast.
The guard leveled a pulse rifle at him. Dutch triggered of a burst of plain lead at him, holding his burst as straight as he could without the aid of the stock. The bullets thumped sparks out of the inner wiring of the guard’s stealth armor. The guard’s aim was knocked away and when he fired his bolt of hot plasma shot toward outer space and probably made it there. Dutch fired another burst, and another, hammering into the guard. The shimmering haze fell away as the guard’s stealth field flickered out. A bullet hit the battery back on his energy rifle and the guard threw it aside just as it began to emit shards of blue flame. Dutch SMG clicked empty. Before he could reload, the guard leapt through the air and came down right on top of Dutch and they both fell again, rolling and tumbling backward down the hill.
Before they had stopped rolling, the guard pulled a handgun, and Dutch pulled his as well. Two-tone, double-action automatics—both identical models. The guard grabbed Dutch’s gun hand by the wrist and tried to wrench it away. Dutch grabbed the front of the guard’s pistol and managed to squeeze the slide out of battery. The guard, stronger than Dutch, shoved the pistol right into Dutch’s ribs—but when he tried to fire, nothing happened. When Dutch fired, the bullet caught the guard in the side of the neck and a gusher of blood spurted out. The guard released Dutch to grip his wound. Dutch hit him across the head with the pistol and rolled on top of him and pushed his head into the dirt with the muzzle of the pistol and fired until he stopped twitching.
The blood was wet on Dutch’s face, and he could taste it. He staggered to his feet, battered all over. He spat and wiped a sleeve across his mouth and chin. He couldn’t see from one of his eyes. Blood in it. No, worse than that. Cracked. Stupid. Stupid. Everything refracted. He reached up and turned it until it powered off. Dust in his other eye. He’d taken off the covers to look through the rifle. Stupid.
He holstered the pistol and reloaded the submachine-gun and unfolded the stock. Where was the other guard? One got the drop of him so quickly. The other should have…
An inhuman roar came from across the wastes. A human scream came after, followed by another, and another, and then one louder and more anguished that ended before it could finish. Dutch’s next thought was to run back to his rifle. He found it, loaded another round. He raised it to his shoulder but couldn’t see through the scope. Wrong eye. He switched to his weak hand and tried again. Still could barely see. He wiped off his remaining eye with a shirt sleeve. Wasn’t supposed to do that—smudges, scratches. He went to the top of the hill and looked down.
No sign of the third guard. No time to think. He ran toward the lopsided container. The personnel doors on the rear end were still open. He ran for them. That end of the container still angled sharply upward. He would have to climb. He slung the heavy rifle as he ran under the upturned end of the container. He raised his submachine-gun, prepared to deal with the two unarmed officers inside.
As he turned to look up into the open end of the container, something fell out just in front of him. He paused and looked down, and found a human head lying at his feet. When he looked back up, the second deathclaw crouched in the opening of the container and looked down at him, its mouth still full of dripping human viscera.
Dutch ran back under the container. The deathclaw hopped down, roared, and pursued him. He fumbled to unsling the big .50 rifle—whirled around. The deathclaw stood right over him. He fired the huge rifle from the hip, winging it in the shoulder, while the explosive round impacted the side of the container and blew fire and bits of metal back into the beast’s face. The deathclaw screamed and tore at its face. Dutch dropped the rifle and ran to the other end of the container. It was still open, jammed around a crushed heap of the first deathclaw’s remains. Open just enough for Dutch to barely squeeze through. He did, and just in time. The deathclaw fit a head and arm through the crack, a gnarled hand with fingers terminating in ten-inch claws swinging wildly for him. The claws passed within a hair’s width of Dutch’s face.
He drew his pistol and fired once, twice, into the beast’s face. A 10mm pistol—practically a toy against a deathclaw. It screamed once at him and pulled back. When it pulled out, it shook the remains of the other deathclaw free and the doors finally slid shut, leaving him in perfect darkness.
He leaned against the wall, breathing, breathing. Then, when he thought himself alone, a voice. A woman’s voice.
“Who is there? 341, is that you? Hello? Who is there?”
Dutch’s night vision adjusted just fast enough for him to make out the figure of a young woman dressed in an officer’s uniform before she raised a pistol and started firing. In the darkness, most of her shots missed. One hit him in the side, thankfully armored—nevertheless painful. Before she could fire again, and hit her in the jaw with the butt of his own pistol and knocked her out cold.
***
The sun had risen by the time Dutch had managed to get the doors open again—or, more aptly, to craft a shaped charge that could blow apart locking mechanisms designed to keep in deathclaws without also blowing up himself. When the door crashed to the ground and sunlight streamed in he emerged through the haze of smoke coughing and swearing as the sunlight burnt out his night vision. He carried his prisoner, also coughing, over one shoulder—her hands and feet tied behind her. He set her down on the ground in the shade of the container and pulled the foam plugs from his ears and waited for his remaining eye to adjust to daylight.
A couple of giant roaches picked at a piece of human remains near the other end of the container. He shot one with his pistol and the other scurried off into the brush. A headless torso with its ribcage stripped nearly bare of flesh, wrapped in the tattered remains of an officer’s uniform—just like his prisoner wore. He found his rifle where he’d dropped it. Picked it up, checked it, loaded it, and slung it over his shoulder. Heavy [censored] thing—still, a comfort with one their deathclaws still at large.
His prisoner gazed at the remains with a look of sorrow on her face. “Friend of yours?” Dutch said.
She gave him one of the most hate filled looks he’d ever received.
“Your own doing,” he said. “This is the dish you’ve been serving. You think this one tasted any different?” He chuckled. “Because the deathclaw certainly didn’t.”
“I know who you are,” she said. He realized this was the first she’d actually seen him in the light. He gave her a good look.
“Oh?”
“You’re the defective.”
“The what?”
“The defective one.”
“Defective, or defected?”
“Both,” she said. “The one who left and returned and left again. We knew you’d be back again. Trying to get us to accept you back.”
Dutch laughed. “Oh, is that what this was?”
“Who knows what you thought your goal was—how your brain works. You’re defective—in your design, or your programming. We’ll determine which after we dismantle you, and make sure it never happens again.”
He pulled her up by her collar and forced her to face him. “You don’t program a person. You don’t design a person.” The look in her eyes told him his words were wasted breath. He let her fall to the ground.
He headed back up the hillside. He retrieved each of his spent shells that he could find, for later reloading. From there he could see a pair of large scorpions picking and fighting over the remains of the guard he’d fought. He didn’t want to get too close, and he remembered looking into the man’s natural, biological eyes as he’d killed him. He went to the dead tree where he’d hung his heavy pack and found, without too much surprise, that some scavenger had ripped open and emptied the pocket filled with his consumables. He hefted the rest and headed back down.
He saw no sign of the third guard. The deathclaw perhaps had carried it away. Roaches were gathered around both halves of the guard he’d blown apart. He shot two of them and the rest dispersed. He kicked the upper half of the torso over with his boot and a pair of glass-front mechanical eyes looked up glinting in the sun on a face otherwise stripped of flesh—down to white bone interlaced with bits of circuitry and metal wiring. He took that half of the torso by its hand and dragged it back to the container.
When got back, he found his prisoner doing her best to push herself away from the container and toward what he noticed to be a pistol half-buried nearby. She was nearly on it. He grabbed her by her ankles and dragged her back to the container and retied the rope around her feet to an upper portion of one of the container’s mechanical legs—nearly suspending her upside down. She cursed and spat at him, writhing around in the dust.
He went back around and set down his gear and leapt up and climbed into the personnel compartment of the container. Blood covered everything, and much of the equipment had been thrashed to pieces by the deathclaw’s rampage. In a cabinet he found some MREs, medical supplies, and a water dispenser. He dispensed some water onto his hands. Cooler and clearer than any he’d seen in months. He resisted the urge to drink and rubbed handfuls onto his face and hair to wash himself. He satisfied his thirst with a swig of the rusty-tasting natural water from the rubber bladder on his back—fed to him through the end of a hose fastened to his collar. He threw everything else not fastened down to the ground below and hopped back down.
He went into a medical kit and found bandages, antiseptics, forceps, sutures, screwdrivers, hex keys, and a soldering iron. He went to the dead guard and with a screwdriver unscrewed the bolts around the man’s eyes and carefully pried them out. The eye assemblies resembled small video cameras. He looked over them for flaws and chose the one in the best condition. Both appeared to be far from new—the guard, more than likely, had not been their original owner either.
He went into his pocket and found a woman’s powder compact and unfolded it and set it beside the corpse so that he could see himself in the mirror. He inspected the cracks in his eye. It had to go. He went into his pip-boy and made sure power to the eye was disabled. A prompt asked him if he meant to disable both eyes. He pressed no. Another warned him of the dangers of operating on one eye without power to both disabled. Self operation on eye circuitry is strongly discouraged. Proceed, cancel?
He looked at his prisoner. “I don’t suppose you’d like to assist me?”
She glared at him from her inverted position. He pushed proceed.
He took the screwdriver and undid the four small screws around his left eye and turned the locking mechanism and the ocular and retinal assemblies bulged forward and he felt that dizzying sensation of negative pressure, that pulling sensation, against his frontal lobe. He nearly vomited.
When his senses returned he slowly, carefully drew the eye assembly forward until the wiring was exposed and then he carefully detached each with the forceps. The ocular cavity went all the way back to his brain. He tried not to look down it while he took up the dead guard’s replacement and reattached each wire before shoving it back in and fixing it back into place. He went into his pip-boy and reactivated power to the eye and his vision came back as poor as he’d expected. Double-vision, depth perception critically off. He went into advanced mode and tried to fine tune the settings. Fifteen minutes later his vision was still not perfect but close enough. He put everything away into his pack, stood, and went to his prisoner.
“How long you suppose it will take for another team to come check on this one? More than a day, I would guess. We’ll be far from here by then.”
He let her legs flop to the ground and pulled her to her feet. HE untied her hands and forced her to wear his backpack and then tied her hands again in front. Then he untied her legs. “Walk,” he said. “I’ll be behind you.” He pushed her forward.
She stopped and turned. “Where are we going?”
“Hunting,” he said. “From there…we’ll see.”He pushed her onward.
***
He stalked and killed a large lizard with a single, silenced shot from his SMG as evening neared. He prepared a campfire and then skinned and gutted it and skewered it on a spit and let it roast. His prisoner sat regarding the bleeding meat with a glum look.
“Look familiar?” he said.
That made her angry.
“Looks familiar to me. I don’t mean gecko meat.”
“Go to hell.”
“You rarely see deathclaws. And that’s Including the one that kills you. It stalks you. Smells you. Feels you—the vibrations you let off when you walk. Doesn’t need a line of sight with you. Then you look away, and it knows you did, and if you ever look back it’s too late.”
He took one from his pack—the titular claw, nearly a foot long and sharp as a blade. He dragged it across his abdomen. “One of these swipes the air, and you, so fast and so quiet you don’t know it happened until you see your intestines around your feet.”
She said nothing.
“They’re surgeons, deathclaws. They know how to hit your spine, just right, so you’re left as just a head attached to the meat it’s after. Then it drags that meat back to its lair, where its young ones can eat it slowly. And that head of yours can just watch, and wait.”
She said nothing.
“Thing is, as dangerous as they are… You aren’t what it’s looking for. You’re too much trouble. It would rather just have a rat, or a dog, or a cow. But lately. Lately people talk of deathclaws that eat nothing but you, and me, and your friend. That they’ll do all they can to break into a family’s home, and drag them all away…men, women, children…babies. The chilling thing is…deathclaws are so good at what they do, some hypothesize that if they had a mind to, they could all but wipe man off of what’s left of this cinder of a planet. And some people think this is a sign they finally do.”
Dutch cut a sliver of meat off and chewed on it. Sticky, flaky, oddly sweet. He cut another sliver off and threw it to her. She brushed it off her lap into the dirt.
“Eat,” he said.
“No.”
“It’s not poison,” he said.
She looked at him.
“That’s what they tell you, right? Don’t eat anything from outside. Don’t drink any but the water we give you. You’ll be poisoned. You’ll bring the poison back with you. You’ll become poison.”
She nodded. “You will.”
“Well I’ve been eating this for years. That must make me poison.”
“You are.”
Dutch nodded. “Maybe true. What else do you call something small, hidden, undetectable. That infiltrates something larger and better and attacks it from hiding, anonymously, with the sole purpose of killing, exterminating, until nothing is left. And then it fades away itself, pointlessly, because it has no better goal, no other purpose.”
“Yes, what else?”
He cut off another piece of meat and ate it whole. He guzzled natural water through the hose to his pack. He went into his bags and found one of their MREs and one of their steel canteens of water and threw them both across the fire into her lap.
“Eat your own, then. Everyone eats, tonight.”
At sundown he led her to a lone tree, long dead and partially petrified, barren of branches and polished nearly smooth. He tested its strength and it held firm. He looked around. Aside from a few distant hillsides, flat ground stretched on in all directions. Easy to see for miles.
“This will do,” he said.
She looked around, confused, trying to see whatever he did.
He untied her hands and retied them behind her back and around the trunk of the tree. “What are you doing?” she said.
“Not me. You,” he said. “And you are doing what you came here to do. Feeding your pet.”
She fought him, but too late. He roped her hands and elbows firmly in place. “You’re not serious,” she said.
“She’s angry, and hungry, and she’s following us. As soon as it’s dark, she’ll strike. I intend to be far away when she does.”
“This won’t work. You don’t scare me.”
“I shouldn’t. I’m the least of your worries.”
Her voice trembled. “Is this is your plan? You think this will make me talk?”
Dutch finished one last knot. “I would prefer you didn’t.”
“You’re not serious.”
“We’ve been over that.” Dutch picked up his back and turned to go.
“Wait,” she called.
“That’s your job.”
“Don’t leave me here.”
He kept walking.
***
She put up as much of a struggle as she could. Good. A deathclaw loved a struggle—could smell a struggle a mile off. By the third hour of waiting he began to sense, without quite seeing or hearing, the presence of something. The night became especially quiet. Dutch lay as still and as quiet as he could as he watched through the scope from his vantage nearly a mile away. It would come sudden. He’d get one chance.
He weighed the pros against the cons of letting the deathclaw eat her. He would get a much cleaner shot, surely. She deserved it—they all did. She’d be a burden, at best—at worst, a danger. To bring her any farther would require him to sacrifice one of his most valuable tools. He could think of few cons.
Still, when he saw the surge of motion, and heard the girl’s screams even at so far a distance, his finger went to the trigger and he fired. In the time it took the bullet to reach them, the deathclaw cleared the distance and loomed over her and raised one clawed hand to bring it down and…
The bullet tore its arm clean off at the shoulder. Blood gushed as though from a pressurized hose, showering his prisoner. The beast let out a horrific roar and tried to flee. He fired again—it stumbled. He fired again right as it disappeared over the ridge and it vanished out of sight.
He swore. Not because he expected it to live. Not because he’d wasted two shots. Because he hadn’t meant for it to suffer.
He walked the grueling long way back to his prisoner. She hung limp around the tree, breathing heavily. The deathclaw’s blood covered her head to foot. He walked past her, following the blood trail. He soon came upon the beast lying on its side in a pool of blood. It still breathed—labored, with each breath ejecting blood from its nose and mouth. It turned one yellow eye toward him as he approached. It didn’t rise.
One last shot ended its misery and some of his own. He went back to his prisoner and stopped thirty yards before her. She looked at him coldly. The fight had left her. From his belt he took one of several grenades and pulled the pin to prime it and threw it. It landed very near her feet. She looked at it and then at him. He took several steps back.
“What are you—”
Instead of an explosion, the grenade emitted a sharp crack and an arc of blue electrical current. The effect was almost undetectable. The prisoner screamed and shook violently in her bonds and her face contorted with pain for a moment. Then she went limp again.
Dutch went to her and drew a knife and cut the ropes holding her to the tree. She collapsed to the dirt. He sheathed the knife and knelt down beside her.
“Are you conscious?” he asked.
She stirred. Her hands went to her head and held it as if it contained a great pain. “What…did you do?”
“I hit you with an EMP grenade. I should have saved that. Could have made a battle with a very dangerous enemy very easy. You should be grateful.”
“What have you…why…”
“You don’t have any signs of them on the outside like me, but I know you have some cybernetics in you. We all did, whether we knew it or not. Did you know? Doesn’t matter. They’re all fried now.”
“My head. Burning.”
“Probably one in the back of your skull. Recording your thoughts, perhaps. Implanting others? You’re free now.”
She rose swinging. He blocked one hit. Another caught him in the jaw. It hurt. She knocked him over and leapt on him screaming and clawing and punching. He flung her off, pinned her, put his pistol to her forehead. Cocked it.
“I guess you did know. Then you were counting on the tracking devices they gave us also—to bring help. Well too bad. That’s gone now. As I said, be grateful. The alternative was that I cut it out of you, shoot it out of you, or let that thing eat it out of you.”
He stood, hauled her up. His face against hers.
“Now we’re both defective. Someday, maybe you’ll recognize it as a gift. I am taking a lot of risks to give it to you. Make me regret it, and I will make you regret it.”
“I’m not going with you.”
“Yes, you are.”
She kneed him hard in the ribs. His armor absorbed most of it, but she got him in the same bruised spot where she’d shot him before and he doubled over. She broke free and ran. He aimed his pistol at her back. He fired a shot into the air. She still ran. He sighed, set down his heavy rifle, and gave chase.
He caught up with her after a hundred yards and tackled her. She hit him. He hit her back. He tied her feet and hands and hefted her over his shoulder. Then he went to retrieve his rifle.
