The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

the sound baffle strapped to her face seemed not to affect it.
    Travis got his left hand on the spare M16’s barrel guard. Twisting his body, swinging up the stock, his right hand finding the grip and the trigger well—
    String Mustache put his pistol to the bound man’s head and fired. The woman’s scream doubled.
    A half second later, as the man pivoted to execute the young woman as well, Travis’s M16 barked, already set to full auto. Three shots caught String Mustache across the face before the recoil pushed the weapon off target. Travis stopped firing, watched the torturer fall, his 9mm tumbling away over the dirt and pine needles.
    Travis swept his gaze across the bodies of the first four hostiles to be sure they were dead. They were dead.
    He slung the rifle and went to the woman on the table, taking his knife from his pocket as he went. She startled when she saw him, and he realized she had witnessed almost none of what had just happened—just her father’s death and then String Mustache’s.
    The mechanics of the crank table were obvious enough. Travis took hold of the metal handle and turned it until the surface lay flat. He carefully lifted the strap of the sound baffle, cut it, and pulled the thing away.
    She wasn’t screaming anymore. She lay there hyperventilating instead.
    The straps holding her body were sturdy, but his knife got through them without any trouble. Her hands went to her face; her legs folded up to her chest as she rolled on her side. She felt for something inside her mouth and pulled it out. A rubber clamp of some kind.
    Her upper right arm looked as bad as anything Travis had ever seen, but she paid no attention to it now.
    Thinking to give her some privacy, Travis turned and walked to the edge of the camp, cocking an ear to listen for the ATVs. He could hear the engines, very distant now and still receding; no way could the riders have heard the gunfire over the roar of those machines up close. They’d left maybe ninety seconds ago. They were probably halfway to the crash now.
    “Who are you?” The young woman’s voice was broken and faint.
    Travis turned, and was surprised to find her sitting up on the table. Her body still shuddered with sobs, but she showed remarkable control, all things considered. She looked to be in her late twenties. Dark hair. Large, dark eyes. He found himself thinking she must be beautiful on anything but the worst day of her life.
    “Travis,” he said, suddenly lacking a better answer. She seemed to be waiting for more. “I’m just a guy. I found the plane, found Mrs. Garner.”
    “She lived?”
    “Long enough to leave instructions.”
    Before she could ask about that, movement between them drew their attention sharply.
    String Mustache was alive, trying to turn himself over in the dirt. Though a good chunk of the man’s face had been cleaved away by one of the bullets, Travis now saw that the other two had glanced on the hard cheekbones and skull. He unslung the M16 and was an instant from finishing him when the woman spoke.
    “No.” The word came out rough, halfway between whisper and growl.
    Then she surprised Travis by pivoting and putting her feet on the ground, and standing—shaky for a moment, but standing all the same.
    With her undamaged left arm she took Travis’s knife from where he’d set it on the table, and dropped hard with one knee onto String Mustache’s back, pressing him flat to the ground. She put the blade, edge-up, under his armpit and pulled savagely. Travis heard a sound like heavy elastic parting, and the man screamed. The arm quivered, uncontrolled. She did the same to the other arm, then turned a hundred eighty degrees and slit both of his hamstrings behind the knees. His screams ebbed to a low moan, gurgling blood in his throat.
    The woman stood, put the knife aside, then stooped and gathered a fistful of String Mustache’s back collar.
    Had Travis actually wanted to stop her, he wasn’t sure he’d have had time. She lifted String Mustache’s upper body, dragged him ten feet across the needles and loose soil, and dropped him facedown into the white-hot embers of the campfire. He screamed and thrashed, but could only command his limbs to jerk about; all control had literally been severed. He managed to contract his back muscles and raise his face for a few seconds, but then the young woman put her foot on the back of his head and pressed him deep into the coals again. She kept the foot there until his