The Bounty Hunter: Reckoning (3 page)

Burke neared the door as Jess
balanced on her left foot, keeping her right one suspended above the blood
below her. He took a single step through the door way and she twisted on her
left foot, putting only her right foot through the door and turning on it, not
risking more noise than a single step. She held her breath as she stared at him
through the wall. She could feel the blood rushing through her ears; her face
felt hotter than when the planet’s air had smothered her. Burke made no
reaction that he noticed her. He walked to the stairs to explore the upper
floor and she exhaled slowly in time with the rush of relief.

She kept her neck craned and faced
upwards to watch him as she stepped back into the cargo bay. The ship had many
secret places to hide storage from unexpected searches. She had crawled around
the ship so many times to rig pieces together that she knew the hidden places
more than Marcus did. She saw that Burke was in the middle of the shared crew
quarters. He looked like he had picked something up and was inspecting it. She
took the opportunity to move.

She toggled off the x-ray lens and
crept silently across the room and under the framework stairs. There was a
hidden door near the lower steps. Part of the wall would seal off a small,
second storage compartment barely large enough for one crate. The door sealed
itself, air-tight, when the ship was in space and the outer compartment could
be jettisoned mid-flight. It was intended for the most incriminating cargo,
with the option to eject its contents before the ship could be boarded and
searched. She pulled open the door, winced at the creak it made, and slipped
quickly inside.

Jess pulled the door closed and
huddled herself against it. She felt out of breath and filled her lungs
quickly, ignoring the stench of grease and grime that had permeated the
compartment. She could feel Burke’s heavy footsteps soon come back down the
stairs and the vibrations of the ship’s doors lowering back down. She didn’t
understand why he hadn’t restarted the engine and flown away. She shuffled her
way through the compartment—she had to stay crouched, the ceiling was too low
to stand—and stopped at the opening on the ship’s outer hull. It was covered
with a removable grate but she only leaned against it, staring through the
horizontal slits.

Burke walked away from the ship and
stopped between it and the ruined base. He had a rifle now and Jess recognized
it as one of Eric’s. Burke lowered himself onto his stomach and waited. She
wanted to climb back into the ship but stopped herself. She had powered down
the engines. She cursed and wanted to throttle herself. If she started the
engine, Burke would hear it and would be back on the ship before the doors
could close. If she closed the doors first, he would have ample time to force
his way in before the engine had cycled enough to lift off the ship.

She rested against the grate and
watched Burke. She heard someone talking in the ship above her and knew
instantly that Eric was trying to contact someone over the radio. She knew he
was careful enough to know that no answer was a warning. She stayed pressed
against the grate and hoped for Burke to get impatient.

Hours passed before he stood up.
Jess straightened up and watched him. A sound like a thunderbolt boomed from
somewhere she couldn’t see and a burst of hot sparks erupted from Burke’s
shoulder. Eric had hit him, Jess knew, but she wasn’t sure if it would be
enough to pierce the armor. She saw Burke crawl over the sand and hide behind a
chunk of the broken building. A few more minutes passed before two more shots
fired, closer this time and she closed her eyes, knowing that it was Burke that
had fired this time.

“Don’t move!” she heard him shout
and snapped open her eyes.

“Moron! He’s got us!” Eric yelled,
closer than she thought he would be. She still couldn’t see him from her
limited perspective through the grate.

She heard someone running and then
another gunshot. Something splattered on the floor of the ship above her. She
turned her head from the sound, as if the blood could reach her through the
floor.

“Your name?” Burke called out.

“Edward,” Eric answered.

Real creative, Jess thought.

“Is that your real name?” Burke
asked.

“No.”

Jess watched Burke restrain Eric
and then vanish back into the ruined base, returning with crates and boxes that
he loaded onto the ship. She timed how long it took him to make each trip and
decided it wasn’t enough time to grab Eric, start the engine, and lock Burke
out. She waited instead, certain that Burke would bring Eric as a prisoner and
she would surrender herself then. Burke hadn’t killed Eric because he had given
up. The man was capable of mercy and reason. She waited.

The cargo bay was filled above her.
She watched Burke move the bodies of the crew outside onto the sand. When he
was finished, he stood in front of Eric. He was holding Eric’s long barrel
rifle as he spoke to him.

“I need to know who sent you here,
and where I can find him,” Burke said.

When there was no answer, he
continued:

“I’ve been on this planet for three
years, two months, and sixteen days. I never want to see another grain of sand
for the rest of my life. Every minute I stand here is another minute I spend in
my own personal hell.” He pressed the end of the rifle into Eric’s head. “I’m
going to give you one more chance to answer my question before I get on your
ship and you never see me again. The only thing you can change is whether or
not I leave with one less bullet in this fine weapon of yours.”

Jess felt a pang of sympathy for
the man but quickly cast it aside. She knew Eric. He had been good to her when
the others hadn’t. She urged him to talk, as if her thoughts could somehow
help.

“I don’t know,” Eric finally said.
“He was some hotshot, retired merc. Marcus acted like he was some sort of
celebrity, and he only ever spoke to the boss.” He turned and looked at the
bodies Burke had piled together. “Who I see is in your pretty heap of assholes
over there. Good job.” He inhaled and then hissed out a deep breath. “Look,
whoever hired us is the reason I’m fucked here. If I knew who he was I’d tell
you. If that’s not good enough, then just fucking shoot me.”

“Come on,” Jess whispered quietly
to herself. “You don’t have to kill him. Come on, come on.”

Burke lowered the rifle and stared
down at Eric for a few moments. Finally, he tossed the rifle toward the ship
and then leaned down. He cut through the line he tied around Eric’s legs but
left his arms restrained.

“Go down there stairs there,” Burke
explained. “Follow the blood to the right. There’s a few blades you can use.
You might cut yourself. You might have to do it for hours. Trust me that it’s
still a damn side better than the welcome that I got on this shit hole. There’s
food and water. You’ll have to hunt at night. You’ll learn.”

“So you’re really going to fucking
leave me?”

“Yes.”

“Shit,” Jess whispered. She decided
she could come back. She’d sneak back through the compartment and into the
cargo bay when the ship was starting to take off. Burke wouldn’t kill her if
she didn’t give him a reason. She could come back for Eric.

She watched Eric’s face contort in
anger and then relax, slumping down with his shoulders as he turned and dragged
his feet toward the base. She watched Burke turn around and pick up the sniper
rifle he had thrown aside. She watched him turn to Eric with the weapon in his
hands.

“Oh no,” Jess breathed. “No, no.
Don’t don’t don’t.”

She watched as Burke stared at
Eric’s back. She saw the conflict playing out on his face before he raised the
rifle’s scope to his eye. Jess kept her eyes wide and watched the bullet punch
into Eric’s head and exit out the other side. He fell to the sand only a few
meters from the rest of the corpses.

She felt numb. The sound of the
ship’s doors closing didn’t register at first. Instinct kicked in for her after
that. She crawled up the compartment and pressed against the door. The door
would seal her out for good once they neared the planet’s upper atmosphere,
effectively killing her. She pushed against the door and it didn’t budge. She
turned on her back and slammed her feet into it, seeing it give a little before
snapping back in place. Burke had unknowingly stacked one his crates against
it, she reasoned.

“Shit, shit. Fuck.”

She felt the familiar jitter in her
stomach of the ship beginning to ascend. She pushed herself back toward the
grate, leading with her feet. She kicked wildly at it as she saw the sandy
surface move, as if it was beginning to fall away from her. She braced with
both of her arms and kicked with both feet, knocking the grate out and sending
herself tumbling out of the ship. She fell a few meters before hitting the hot
sand.

Jess scrambled to her feet to
uselessly watch the ship leave her behind. She brought up her right arm to her
face and emitted the image of the ship’s engine once again. She changed it to
track the ship’s distance instead, a quick pinging of how far away it was. As
the ship flew farther away, the pinging slowed. The connection was always
terrible when it wasn’t physical, she reminded herself, but it still felt like
the signal vanished too quickly.

She looked down at the indent the
ship had made in the sand. She turned to face the pile of corpses behind her.
Blood was still spreading in the sand around Eric’s body. She closed her eyes
and felt a gust of wind blow around her. The hot air scraped against her face;
the warmth of it made her feel no less alone.

* * *

Jess stared at the bodies of what
had been her fellow crew. She had grown to dislike them more over time but she
hadn’t wished death on them. After watching the ship leave, she dragged Eric’s
body to the rest of the men and then stepped back. She knew full well what she
had to do next but she stood paralyzed, feeling like her mind detached itself
from her body. She stared at the corpses as though she could make the task of
burying them disappear if she left them alone for a moment longer.

There were three ruined buildings
around her that she could pick out from the larger chunks of rubble. She
guessed the base had been bombed years ago. One of the buildings had been
knocked clean away, leaving only its foundation as evidence that it had ever
been there.

The second had kept half of its
walls and a portion of its roof. Inside, a disgusting mess was waiting to greet
her. The floor was layered with blood stains, both new and old. There were
discarded furs and bones in the corners of the room. There were no tables or
work surfaces, only scattered tools around the floor with no discernible order
to how they were arranged. Jess guessed that Burke had used the room after the
hunting he had mentioned to Eric before he killed him. She winced as the
thought came so casually into her head. She didn’t walk on the bloodied floor.
She turned and stepped back onto the sand.

The last building had been the
largest of the three. It had fared the best of them but half of it had still been
levelled. A section of the roof was still standing and there was a stairway
leading down into a basement. She saw evidence that it had once been collapsed
and then cleared away. Chunks of different steps were missing or had been
blasted away. There were occasional droplets of blood from when Burke had
carried up the corpses of Marcus and the new guy. She felt like Marcus then,
unable to remember his name.

She stepped down into the sub level
and judged that it had been the majority of the smuggler’s base. She guessed at
some older defensive fortifications that had worked better in the corridors
underground, and then dismissed the thought. She concentrated on exploring.

There were two potential directions
at the bottom of the stairs. A larger, thick blood trail led to the right and
only sparse droplets to the left. She went left first and discovered that many
of the rooms had been blocked off in whatever destruction the base had endured.
Some had been cleared away and contained more of the crates and boxes that she
had seen Burke load onto the ship. Farther down the halls she found Marcus’s
gun and a single bullet casing laying not far from it. That had been the
gunshot she had heard, she assumed. She stepped over it and stopped in the
final room at the end of the hall. There was a water filtration unit in the
last room, seemingly built into the far wall and, she knew, stretching down
underground. She was thirsty but she turned away from it. She wouldn’t feel
comfortable until she had made a mental map of the entire facility.

She retraced her steps back to the
stairway. She followed the thicker trail of blood. It looked like Burke had
dragged a body along the floor, leaving a wide streak over it. There were no
other corners or 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.