Page 94 of Ransom
"You don't have to come," I said.
Coyote snorted. "I know. But if I let you die, Nimue will be sad, so I'm going."
Past the gate, Mateo rode up to join us.
"You should go back," I told him.
He rode up closer and slapped a satchel full of ammunition against my belly. "And miss all the fun? Hell naw."
A quarter mile out, Linc came up from somewhere with Fenix on a horse beside him. Linc had his rifle across his back. Fenix was armed with a pair of binoculars and a few extra canteens. Fenix looked up at the sky and said, "It's a good day to die."
"Amen," said Linc.
Coyote gave a loud whoop and dug his heels into the mare. The rest of us rode faster to catch him.
Something hot and wetwas on my upper lip, and my mouth was full of the iron taste of it. I knew before I'd opened my eyes that my nose was broken again. Hell. I'd just gotten that nose set last night, and now it was set crooked again. Ransom was going to give me an earful about it.
Ransom.
Where was Ransom?
I tried to open my eyes, and there was nothing to open them to. It was dark. No, scratch that. There was a cloth on my face, some kind of hood. I made myself lie still and listen, because moving in the dark would get my throat cut, and whoever had put a hood on me hadn't done it because they liked me.
I was in a truck bed, on my side. My hands were behind my back, and they weren't moving how I wanted them to. Someone had tied me up with a length of old rope. Okay, bad, but not the end of the world. Not yet.
Then everything else came online at once, and I was sorry it had.
My ribs. Christ, my ribs. Every time the truck hit something, pain shot through my torso, and I gritted my teeth against it.
My arm was wet inside the sleeve. I couldn't see it, but the cold of it sat against my skin, and some of the stitches had pulled. There wasn't enough blood for me to be bleeding out, but there was enough to be a problem. If there was a later for it to be a problem in.
The back of my head was its own conversation. Somebody had hit me with something hard. I remembered the trough and going down, but after that I didn't remember anything.
The last I'd seen of Ransom, he had been climbing the arroyo lip away from me with his back set, and he had been alive.
If Ransom was dead, I didn't want to be alive for the next part.
Stop it, Winston. Can't think like that. Focus on what you can do.
The truck slowed onto a dirt road, then asphalt, then a turn, and gravel, and a stop.
This was where it was happening, then, wherever this was.
Two men were talking in the cab. A door slammed. A third opened the tailgate, got me under the arms, and pulled. My ribs lit up so bright I made a sound I'd rather have kept to myself. My stomach turned over, and I swallowed back bile.
"Easy, sweetheart," a voice said. "Boss wants you walkin' and talkin'."
Sweetheartwas a new one.
They walked me, and I counted: twelve steps on gravel, up two wooden steps, across a porch, through a door, down a hall, through another door. The counting was the only thing keeping me upright. Hammering started somewhere, faint through the hood, and I had a bad feeling about it.
Hands pushed me down into a hardback chair. Somebody untied my wrists from each other and tied them to the arms, one each. I tested it and it held, and that scared me. Whoever hadtied it had done it before. I'd been around men who tied other men to chairs, and none of those men had been good company.
The hammering was clearer now. I could pick out the men working: the rasp of a saw underneath, hammers on top, somebody calling to somebody else. I'd heard a barn raising once at my granddad's. It sounded like that.
A door closed.
I sat there a while, five minutes maybe twenty, breathing slow because my ribs preferred slow, sweating into the hood. I thought about Ransom on Galahad coming over a ridge somewhere, head down, hat low. It was the only thought that didn't make me sick.
