Refuge
He supposed there was a remote chance that Muriel could yet survive. What she needed was a diversion.
“You’re first, Mr Kalashnikov,” he silently informed the face in the graticule.
The bullet entered the youth’s head below the left eye, a couple of centimetres from the nose. Suter’s retina just had time to register there a small, dark hole. The target may have moved slightly, in the quarter of a second it had taken the match-grade, mercury-charged 7.62 millimetre round to travel the two hundred metres from the muzzle of Suter’s rifle.
Instantaneously, the head exploded backwards in a shower of pulp.
Thanks to the built-in flash hider, there was nothing but the noise of the report to reveal his position. He cocked the bolt again.
“You next.”
The group had not yet had time to react with anything but incredulity. Suter took aim at the one with his boot on Muriel’s neck, the graticule centred now on his chest, since a head shot would no longer be reliable. He compressed the trigger.
Arms and legs wide, the victim was flung backwards into the water, a huge pit blown in the front of his T-shirt.
By now a number of the group had realized what was happening. Suter heard desperate shouting and saw some of them dropping to the ground, slithering down the bank to gain what cover they could.
He had eight rounds left, one in the chamber and seven in the magazine. Were it not for the weapons they were carrying, he could easily have killed the lot of them. As things stood, Suter had only a very short time in hand. The two L85s were equipped with telescopic sights, probably the infantry’s standard four-power SUSATs.
“One more. You. You with the earrings.”
It is twelve years on from a global plague. John Suter believes himself the sole survivor. He has gradually come to terms with his fate and has settled into a steady and self-reliant daily routine.
One morning he finds a mutilated body in the river near his house. In his terror, Suter knows he has no choice but to investigate.
What he discovers upstream stretches his endurance to its limits and forces him to reassess not only his own humanity, but also his place within the human family he had once believed extinct.
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