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The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

Titel: The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Patrick Lee
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space against the valley wall sixty yards north.
    Shaw screamed for them to get more space among themselves. He’d just finished saying it when a bullet hit his throat and came out the back of his neck, making a fist-sized crater. He dropped, his eyes wide and his hands pawing at his collar.
    The men broke formation, running and firing at the same time. One of them stooped, grabbed Shaw’s rifle and threw it at Travis; he just managed to get his hands up and catch it.
    Then he was running with them—the half that had split in this direction. Running for the encampment, and then through it, his mind only now getting around to what his body had already decided.
    The tree stood out like an obelisk, easily twice the width of any other nearby. He pulled up short and swung past it, kicking aside the carpet of needles to expose the gouged surface where Paige had refilled the hole.
    Somewhere a man screamed and went down hard as he ran. He lay crying for help, but after only a few seconds Travis heard him gargle as his windpipe filled with blood.
    Travis dropped the rifle, fell to his knees beside the hole and attacked the dirt with his bare hands. It was soft, having been torn up and replaced only a day and a half earlier, but the going was—
    Not fast enough. No way was it fast enough.
    Because the killer knew it was buried here. Travis had given this location out loud, right outside the helicopter.
    He heard another head shot, twenty feet to his left, and turned to see a body still plunging forward with its running momentum, but with the top of its skull missing. The shoulder hooked a tree trunk and the body twisted around it, falling in a tangle at the roots.
    Travis dug faster, his ears suddenly keening with the rush of blood through his carotid arteries—why could he hear that now?
    Then he understood: the shooting had stopped.
    He quit digging and looked up.
    They were all dead.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
    His hands went to Shaw’s rifle again and lifted it. They were caked with clay; he could barely get his finger into the trigger well.
    In the silence, only a soft breeze moved. The boughs of the smallest saplings rose and fell with it.
    What had Shaw yelled? Eyes open for a weapon. Would the killer’s gun be visible?
    Travis swept his gaze left to right, slowly, trying not to focus on any one thing. With no other sound or movement among the trees, maybe he’d see something.
    Then he did see something—but not in front of him.
    At the bottom edge of his vision: a shimmer of blue. Against all instinct to keep his eyes on his surroundings, Travis looked down. His last handful of dirt had exposed a dime-sized portion of the Whisper’s surface. The color swam across the face of the sphere. It looked like a little world, all ocean, all in twilight at the same time, somehow.
    Something stirred in the trees.
    He snapped his gaze up but saw no sign of movement. He couldn’t even be sure which way the sound had come from. He pivoted, still kneeling, but saw nothing on any side.
    The killer was being careful, now that it was just the two of them, but there was no question of how this would end. The question was how many seconds of his life remained.
    If you have to wake it up …
    He took no hope from the idea. Whatever the Whisper did, how could it possibly help him in this situation? This was far beyond any danger Paige could have foreseen.
    Ten seconds? Did he have even that much time left? Ten seconds on his knees in the dirt, wondering if he’d feel it when the bullet fragmented in his head?
    It wasn’t much to lose.
    He dropped his free hand from the rifle’s barrel guard, drew the cellophane key from his pocket and plunged it into the hole, mashing it against the Whisper as he pulled it free of the dirt.
    Light flared from the thing, searing blue, so brilliant that even over the pulse of his own fear a new thought dominated: it was a star, somehow he was holding the heart of a star—
    Then that thought was gone as well, like a scrap of paper in jet exhaust, and his mind filled with a voice more beautiful than the blue light, and he realized he knew it, though he hadn’t heard it in years: Emily Price, when she was seventeen and he was seventeen; Emily’s voice in the humid dark of the tree house in her parents’ yard, the night she’d told him it all felt right, that the moment was right—
    But she wasn’t saying any of that now.
    “Behind you,” she said, “two feet left of the double pine. He’s

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