Ashen Winter (Ashfall) Read Online Free PDF Page B

didn’t you shoot?”
    “Was a losht cause. Can’t be washting ammo. Now git out of here!”
    “We need to know where the shotgun Darla’s holding came from. Maybe we could trade. We could patch you up if you tell us about that shotgun.”
    “I can see the flensing knife on your hip, boy. Don’t take me for no fool.” The gun sagged again, and he snapped it back to horizontal.
    “You’re bleeding out—we could help you if you tell us what we want to know. You even know where the shotgun came from?”
    “Course I do. Was Bill’s.” His gun dipped again.
    “Where’d Bill get it?”
    He raised the gun again, training it on me. “Get on out of here,” he whispered, “or I’ll drill you both.”
    “Okay, okay. Take it easy.” I backed out of the bedroom. Darla kept pace with me, the shotgun trained on the guy all the way.
    Once we were in the hall, out of his line of sight, Darla hissed, “What now?”
    “What was that?” I whispered back. “Last night you were crying about killing two of them. Today you’re ready to blow one of them away?”
    “Slumbitches had it coming. Just because I felt bad about shooting them doesn’t mean it was wrong. They weren’t taking Rebecca and Anna to the state fair, you know.”
    “Yeah. Maybe so.”
    “So what now?”
    “Just wait and listen a sec.”
    Everything was still for a minute. It was so quiet in the hall that I could hear Darla’s soft breathing. Strange, that such a quiet place was almost the scene of gunfire; that bullets could easily have shredded this silence—and Darla and me with it. I rested my hands on my knees, trying to stop their trembling. My side hurt, but I welcomed the pain. Welcomed the aliveness of it.
    I heard a soft thump from the bedroom. I got down on my knees to peek around the doorjamb, figuring the guy would probably expect me to be standing.
    I couldn’t see anything in the darkness of the bedroom, so I thrust the lamp through the doorway. The guy had slumped sideways in the closet. The hand holding the MAC-10 was flung outward, resting on the carpet beside him. I stood and stepped quickly through the bedroom.
    When I got to the guy, I stepped on his wrist so he couldn’t raise the gun. He didn’t even wake up.
    Darla reached down and pried the MAC-10 from his fingers. She fiddled with it for a moment and pulled a rectangular piece off the bottom of the weapon. “Huh. Check this out.” She held the block of metal out toward me.
    I shrugged. “What am I looking at?”
    “The magazine, dummy. It’s empty. Guy was out of bullets. That’s why he didn’t shoot you at the farm.”
    “I can see why his buddy left him here. He was bleeding out, probably slowing his friend down. But why’d he leave him with the gun? It’s valuable. And one without bullets? Useless for defense.”
    Darla shrugged.
    I bent over the bandit. His skin was pale as snow, and his lips looked bruised. I put the back of my hand against his mouth—he was breathing. When I checked his pulse, though, I had trouble finding it. “He’s alive, but barely.”
    “Let’s melt some snow,” Darla said. “Maybe if we splash water in his face, he’ll wake up enough for us to ask him about the shotgun again.”
    “Should we try to stop the bleeding first? If he dies on us—”
    “Then we won’t find out anything. Yeah, I guess we should patch him up first.” Darla scowled.
    I didn’t like the idea of helping this guy any more than she did. He and his buddies had shot Max, had tried to kidnap the girls for who-knew-what. But we had no good way to track the other guy—the one who’d worn a blue scarf, and I needed to know where the shotgun had come from. I yanked the guy out of the closet. Blood was still oozing from the wound at his side.
    “Get the med kit off Bikezilla, would you?” I asked.
    “Christ.”
    I stripped the bandit to the waist while I waited for Darla to return. She had shot him low on his right side. The wound on his back was just