“I’m not sure if—” I began, but the blonde Scavenger reached into her backpack, pulled out a handful of AK bullets, and weighed them in her hand. Then she turned around and lobbed them back into the forest as far as she could, and they landed somewhere off in the distance with a rustle.
Instantly, the two Rubberfaces twisted their heads and stared off in the direction of the sound. The one closest to us motioned for his partner to follow him, and then the two mutants began to slowly approach our position.
Natalie grinned at me as she pulled her pocket knife from her pocket. “Give the word, and we’ll drop down and stab them with our weapons.”
It couldn’t possibly be that simple. There was nearly twenty feet between us and the ground. I was no doctor, but I figured that distance would definitely hurt like hell and break a bone or two, if nothing else.
“How is that going to work?” I demanded as we watched the Rubberfaces approach the shoreline.
“We get closer.” The blonde woman shrugged, and then she lowered herself down onto a descending branch, followed by another.
I slid off the branch I was currently on and down onto the one below fairly silently.
It was the second jump that caused a problem.
Natalie silently pointed to another branch about ten feet from her current position, on the opposite side of where I was situated.
So, I turned around, squatted down, and leapt onto the wooden appendage.
Then my heart sank into my stomach when I heard a loud snap.
The wood under my feet started to give way, so I instantly pushed against it with all my might and jumped toward the next nearest branch. The wind was knocked out of me as my chest slammed into the wooden cylinder, but I was somehow able to wrap my hands around the branch and then hoist myself up onto it.
Too bad the damage had already been done.
The branch I’d just been on snapped off the trunk of the Radon Root, plummeted to the ground below, and slammed into the forest floor with a loud crash.
“Iktunar?” one of the Rubberfaces hissed.
The scouts froze in place as they began to scan their surroundings.
Natalie and I both went prone and pressed ourselves as close to the branches as we possibly could. My heart was pounding out of my chest, and I was foolishly worried its repeated rhythm was going to reverberate through the tree and give us away.
However, they still must not have seen us. The two Rubberfaces began to move forward cautiously once more, but this time they did so much more slowly.
Once they were about twenty feet away, Natalie got up on all fours and moved into a crouched position. She opened up her large pocket knife, flipped it around so it was in a reverse, close-quarters-combat position, and then tightened her grip around its base.
I got my own weapon ready. Then I held my breath as they drew closer to the tree, and Natalie gave me a pointed look.
I’d only seen this in movies, but I held up my fingers to indicate a countdown.
Three… Two… One.
I took one last deep breath, and then I jumped off the branch as I raised the E-Tool above my head.
The Rubberface below me must have heard the commotion, because he looked up as I plummeted down to the ground below. He went to raise his gun, but I was falling way too quickly.
I grunted as I simultaneously slammed into his body and thrust the tip of the shovel into his skull.
The Rubberface didn’t even have a chance to yelp before his head was split wide open by the razor-sharp edge of the E-Tool. His body went limp underneath me as we hit the ground, and his eyes rolled away in different directions as blood gushed from his fresh wound.
I quickly yanked the E-Tool out of his skull and gagged when bits of brain matter began to pulse out onto the foliage around him. Then I turned back to Natalie, who was now wiping off her blade nonchalantly.
“We totally ninja attacked them,” I whispered.
“Ninja?” Natalie echoed with a frown.
“Sneak attacked,” I corrected.
“Ah,” she mused. “Well, see? That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“Stealth kills number one and two, success,” I whispered to both Natalie and Karla.
Don’t get ahead of yourself, Karla warned, you’ve still got some more to go.
Natalie bent over and rummaged through the pockets of the fallen Rubberfaces. However, she seemed to come up empty.
“That’s odd… ” she pondered aloud. “Usually Rubberface scouts have a lot of supplies on them. Bullets… medipacs… sometimes even food. But these ones have nothing but the clothes on their backs and their weapons.”
“You said they were scouts, right?” I questioned as I wiped my shovel against the ground. “Maybe they were short distance scouts who didn’t need supplies?”
“That’s impossible,” Natalie scoffed. “That would only be the case if— Oh. Oh… no.”
“What’s wrong?” I demanded as I looked around cautiously. “Do you see more of them?”
“That’s not it,” the blonde woman murmured as her eyes widened. “It’s just… The only way these could have been short distance scouts was if there was a Rubberface encampment somewhere around here. Which would mean—”
“That they’re really close to the Scavengers’ camp,” I gasped. “Damn.”
“Who knows how long they’ve been on our doorstep, Hunter?” Natalie looked like she was about to have a mental breakdown. “We need to get back to the camp and warn everybody.”
Oh, no… The calm and collected half of the team was panicking.
This couldn’t end well, and I needed to stop it before it became a crisis.
Customer service voice, don’t fail me now.
“Look, Natalie,” I explained as I put my hand on her shoulder, “we can’t go back now. We’re so close… Besides, do you really think the Scavengers would listen to what we’re saying? They’d throw us into prison or exile us or torture us or whatever the hell Marcus does to traitors before we’d even get a chance to explain. And if that happens, we’re all dead. The best thing we can possibly do right now is to forge ahead and finish our mission.”
“I-I just can’t believe we’ve been this blind,” Natalie sighed.
“That’s what happens when you get too comfortable,” I admitted, “you let your guard down, and then the next thing you know Kyle Dover passes you up for a promotion.”
“Who?” the blonde woman asked as she tilted her head in confusion.
“Not applicable in this situation,” I chuckled, “I see that now. Anyway, we need to keep moving. There’s still more Rubberfaces between us and the nuclear plant.”
Natalie’s lip was quivering, but she held it all together. She gave me a nod of agreement, and then I helped her back onto her feet.
“If these are anything like the scouts we encounter in the Fallen Lands,” the blonde woman explained, “then the rest of the unit will grow suspicious when they don’t hear back from these two. When that happens, they’ll come and check out the scene wherever they were originally stationed.”
“Which would be…?” I trailed off.
“Probably just up the beach, where I first saw them,” she admitted. “Let’s go back there and set up a trap for these melted-faced bastards.”
Without any further discussion, the two of us made our way out of the forest and back up the beach, and we remained stealthy the whole time. Natalie snatched up one of the makeshift beds as we walked, and I looked at her curiously.
“What do we need that for?” I questioned in a whisper.
“Just let me worry about that,” she reassured me.
Before long, we got to the spot where the Rubberfaces had originally been seen. Instantly, Natalie placed the base of the bed down against the ground, kicked the middle with her foot, and snapped the whole thing in two. Then she crouched down and began to dig at the earth with her hands, like a rabbit.