The Bounty Hunter: Reckoning Read Online Free PDF Page A

turns to explore, only a straight line of blood to what Jess
immediately knew had been Burke’s main home.
    There were more crates in the large
room. It must have been full of them at one point, she guessed, seeing as how
many were left even after he had taken so many with him. Some of the boxes had
been broken apart and used to build things with varying success. She saw many
shattered pieces of wood and plastic. A crude bed had been made out of some of
the pieces, combined with piles of torn up clothes. They smelled terrible.
    There were metal components that
had been stripped down and then put together, as if by someone who knew what
they were doing but lacked the experience and practice to do it. There were too
many beginner mistakes for the complexity of what Burke had attempted to do: a
transmitter that was half finished, salvaged scraps of solar arrays, dozens of
meters worth of cables that had been pulled out of the destroyed walls. She
thought it looked like he had someone with technical knowledge instructing him
on what to do, but without the capacity to step in and show him how. For a
moment she considered that he hadn’t been alone and then discarded the thought.
The base was certainly empty now.
    “Except for me,” she said to
herself and then closed her eyes. “It’s far too soon to be talking to myself
already, isn’t it?”
    She started to laugh. It was a
slow, quiet thing at first but it quickly grew into a loud, obnoxious, horrible
noise. She thought if anyone could see or hear how she laughed she would have
imploded with embarrassment, and the realization that there might never be
someone to see her again made her laugh even harder. She cursed her
intelligence during those moments. She knew the planet, Meidum, was massive. It
could support human life but the system it was in had a plethora of other
worlds that could do the same without the hassle of sand, little water, and
elongated day and night cycles. She laughed because she knew the chances of
being rescued were next to nothing. No one would ever come looking for her like
they had come for Burke.
    She marched purposefully out of the
base and back to the surface. She walked into the room where Burke had
slaughtered the animals he had hunted. Hysteria still threatened to consume her
entirely and she forced herself along, busying herself so she didn’t have the
chance for idle thoughts to be filled with madness. She walked over the
bloodied floor without a second thought. She made multiple trips, taking every
tool that lay on the floor with her. They were arranged neatly behind the wall
of the building and then she went to the pile of bodies.
    Marcus had a massive wound in his
chest, which Jess guessed was from some sort of blade. His shirt was soaked in
his blood but his outer jacket hadn’t been zipped up and had avoided being
soiled. She took the jacket from him, as well as his pants and boots. She left
his under clothes and blood drenched shirt. She dragged the body behind the
building where she had placed the tools.
    She stripped the other corpses in a
similar way. Eric and his partner were the cleanest of the four, having been
shot in the head and bled out onto the sand rather than over themselves. She
couldn’t bring herself to remove Eric’s clothes. He had been the only one she
had bonded with on the ship and she refused to tarnish that memory.
    The new man was in the worst state,
having had his throat slit open and then left to lay in his blood. She took
only his shoes and searched his pockets, and then dragged him, near fully
clothed, to the rest of the bodies.
    In the hours it took her to bury
the dead, she reached some sort of calm. It would have been deep into the night
of her sleep cycle when she was finally finished with the graves, but the
planet’s star still shone as brightly in the sky as when she first arrived. She
made many trips down into the base for water and was only happy to elongate the
task. She barely noticed the