Or he might be a single lone prisoner.
There was no way to know right now.
Max looked around, his eye leaving the scope for a moment. He didn’t see anyone near him.
He put his eye back to the scope, and got the crosshairs right on the gaunt man’s head. Max knew he could put one right into his forehead. The man would die instantly. He wouldn’t feel much pain. Just an instant of terror and confusion. And then he would be gone, dead to everything.
Max paused. Was it ethical to simply kill the man? After all, Max realized quite well that he was merely hypothesizing about his potential prisoner status.
What if the man was just like Max, Georgia, or Mandy? What if he’d been through hell the last few days, and was wandering the woods without provisions, looking for a way to survive like everyone else?
Should Max confront him, head on? That was Max’s instinct, to confront the man like a man, to speak to him and to question him. But at that point, it would just be the man’s word. Max would have no way of knowing if he was telling the truth or not.
He had a bad feeling about the gaunt man. A feeling deep in his gut.
Max knew the safe thing to do was to pull the trigger.
He moved his finger inside the trigger guard, feeling the trigger against the end of his index finger.
Max knew he had to shoot the man, but he didn’t want to.
He hesitated just a moment too long.
He heard something off to his side, but it was already too late. Something struck him on the torso. Something sharp.
Someone was there with a knife. Max understood the situation quickly. He didn’t yet feel the pain from the cut, but he knew that it was bad. It was a sort of strange background awareness he had.
Max turned, gripping the rifle with both hands, and jammed the butt as hard as he could into his attacker.
The man fell, the rifle colliding with his side. Max heard a sickening crunching sound.
Max managed to scramble up to his feet. The adrenaline was pumping through him, but he was also starting to feel the pain from the wound.
His attacker was a man with a completely shaved head. He had tattoos all over his face and his arms. He wore a wife beater t-shirt. He clearly was some kind of escaped inmate. Max’s initial assessment had been correct.
Max knew that the man in the red would be approaching. Max didn’t have much time. He needed to deal with this man first before the red shirted man arrived.
But Max was wounded. It was hard to move his right arm, and when he did, the pain seared through him like a red hot poker. Why couldn’t the pain have taken a little longer to kick in?
The convict on the ground grunted. He opened his mouth, full of rotting teeth that had been filed down to vicious-looking points. He roared something unintelligible, some curse.
Max knew he didn’t have time to waste. Holding the rifle in his left hand, he reached for his Glock and drew it.
The man sprung up from the ground in an instant, charging Max.
Max’s finger squeezed the trigger, letting loose two rounds which hit the convict in the chest. He screamed and fell heavily, the holes in his chest visible through his shirt.
Before Max could do anything else, something heavy hit him in the back.
He knew who it was in an instant. It was the man in the red shirt. It felt like his fist had hit Max hard in the back.
The blow made Max reel, falling forward. He managed to catch himself from falling, stepping forward with his right leg.
The man behind him rushed Max from behind, slamming his weight into Max’s back.
Max fell forward, right towards the convict he’d just shot in the chest. He held both guns as tightly as he could, knowing that he could not relinquish them.
But the convict, despite being gaunt, was surprisingly strong. He seized the rifle while Max was lying on top of the dead man. The attacker had too much leverage, since Max held the rifle with only one hand towards the muzzle. Max couldn’t hold onto it for much longer. A second later, the rifle had been ripped from his hand.
Now his attacker was armed with a hunting rifle.
Max acted quickly, wasting no time in thinking.
Despite the pain, Max spun over onto his left side. He raised his right arm, pointing his Glock at his attacker, who was already raising the rifle.
Max’s finger squeezed the trigger, and the Glock fired.
The round hit the attacker in the leg. Max’s aim had been off from the pain, from the strange angle, from firing quickly, from being disoriented.
Max saw in slow motion as his attacker squeezed the trigger of the rifle.
Max gritted his teeth upon impact. He felt the round slam into his thigh. The pain ravaged his body, a searing hot sensation burning through his nerves.
The attacker’s aim had been bad. Just like Max’s first shot.
But Max wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice.
He steadied his right arm as best he could, keeping the Glock straight. He took his time. He took a deep breath and held it. He had it lined up perfectly.
Before his attacker could fire another round, Max’s finger squeezed the trigger of his Glock.
The bullet hit the attacker square in the middle of his forehead. His lifeless body crumbled to the forest floor.
Max felt the intense pain. It was trying to overwhelm him, but Max wasn’t going to let it. He wasn’t done yet. He had to keep going.
Max lay silently on his side. It was too much effort to keep his right arm up, so he let it fall to the forest floor.
There were no more sounds. No animals. And no convicts.
Max knew it was the end of the battle.
For now.
There had just been two of them.
It was good that Max had got them before they’d gotten to the group. If the convicts had snuck up on them, it might have been disastrous.
Max struggled to stay conscious.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity, he sat up slightly to examine his leg. This seemed to take all his strength.
The wound was bleeding.
But he could still move his leg and he could still move his foot, ever so slightly.
He wasn’t going to die. Not yet.
Max tore off his shirt and used it to fashion a rudimentary tourniquet, as well as a bandage. He cut the shirt into long strips and was able to use these to do what he needed to do.
The bleeding somewhat under control, Max tried to stand, but he immediately fell over. He fell with a painful thud on the ground, his head smacking into a piece of dead wood. But he shook off the pain.
OK, so he couldn’t put weight on his leg.
Max looked around for something to use as a crutch. He remembered Georgia’s story about fashioning a crutch from a sapling.
On all fours, moving slowly, Max moved to a small sapling. He took his pocket knife from his pocket and sawed at the sapling’s base. It seemed to take forever, but in the end, he had a serviceable crutch.
Max wrapped some fabric around the end of it, to make it less painful as it stuck into his armpit.
It wasn’t perfect, but Max wasn’t going to bleed out immediately, and he could move.
He recovered the rifle, slung it over his shoulder, made sure his Glock was in its holster, and went to recover his pack.
He knew intuitively that he couldn’t carry the pack all the way back, at least not the way it was currently loaded down.
Max opened the pack and started discarding things that wouldn’t be essential. That was the idea, at least. But unfortunately so much of what he had was essential. But he simply wasn’t going to be able to carry it all.