"There's more of them coming," the youngster said.

She was half a head taller than Celia, with thick dark hair and a long face. That face now was trembling, and her eyes were brimming. In all his living days, Sam had never seen a child so frightened, and despite the heat of the day, she looked cold. The girl was frightfully thin.

The thump of a helicopter—no, two helicopters—sounded in the distance. They were moving closer.

"Damn."

Reaching into the truck, Sam grabbed two full hydration packs and an assault pack. Fishing about, he came up with five MREs and shoved them in the pack. He turned. The girl was gone. Looking about, he saw her running up the slope in the opposite direction from which he had come. As thin as the child was, she ran like a deer.

There was a sudden sound of a diesel engine down the muddy road. Sam took off after the girl at a run. His speed was remarkable for a man of any age, even injured, but he quickly lost sight of the child in the underbrush ahead. There was nothing about running wildly in the woods that he liked, but he had no choice. He didn't want to lose her.

Fortunately, after 10 minutes of careening breakneck through the bush, Sam again caught sight of the youngster. She was hunkered down near a clearing. In just a few seconds, he joined her.

"We have to go," she whispered shakily.

As she went to rise, Sam gently took her arm and pulled her back. Her eyes widened, and she looked to her right.

Following her gaze, Sam saw three men standing on a rise in the clearing about 70 yards away. The chugging of a vehicle in that direction and the squelch of a distant radio now caught his ears. Looking back, he saw the tears streaming from her eyes.

There was no faulting the child. Speed likely had been her only ally for more than a month. How she had lasted in the wilderness this long, even against these rank amateurs, was a mystery for the ages. He pulled her closer and raised his finger to his lips in the universal sign of silence.

Gently, tenderly, he began creeping away from the men, using whatever cover was available to him. Over the next hour, Sam took every opportunity to demonstrate his skills to the child—move little, pause often, and look, listen, and smell constantly.

By the time an hour of careful skulking had passed, not a single mercenary was within a mile of them. Still, though the worst of the kid's terror had subsided, she remained nervous and jittery at every sound in the forest.

Probably not the worst instinct, he decided.

And there was worse yet. Sam's injuries had improved, but he still was nowhere close to 100 percent, and the girl—well. She was a wreck and very possibly on her last legs. They needed to find a place to rest.

"Where do you go to hide, darling?" he asked her.

Without speaking, she took a new direction, quickly at first, but it appeared that hearing Sam rush to catch her reminded her to slow her pace. Soon, the two began creeping up a slight rise in the forest. They shortly approached a rocky outcrop in which Sam could see a series of caves.

His guide took him past those, however, and they continued along some rocky ground for about a mile before coming to an exceptionally dense section of the forest. The ground there was soft and spongy, and Sam realized, looking back, that they left little or no trail behind them. After winding about the woods for some minutes, the two arrived at what looked like a mound. Lydia disappeared inside.

Sam followed her into what must have been an old storage bunker, now completely covered by the forest floor. There was no door, but the entrance was at a sharp angle and below ground level, so no wind entered. The place was damp and musty, but it was relatively cool against the heat of the day. There had been some effort to clean.

The child turned to him and mustered a weak smile. She stood, weakly, with her arms still together as if she were cold.

"Welcome to my home," she said in a voice that was almost a woman's.

The kid was so, so thin. Sam thought he'd have to feed her hamburgers for a month before he could honestly call her skinny. It was then that he realized he already should have given her something to eat. When he did, the girl ate ravenously of the MREs he produced from the assault pack. So quickly did she consume the first that he worried.

"Darling, eat all you want," he said, "but slow down or you'll make yourself sick."

She did slow, but continued to eat hungrily. He urged her to drink from the water bladders he'd secured and wrapped her in an insulated shirt he'd found in the pack. He ate one of the six power bars he found in the bottom of the bag and saved the rest for the child.

During a pause in her eating, they talked.

He told her about Celia and how she was as well as could be expected. This heartened the lass. Celia, it seemed, was not her actual sister, at least not by blood. The two had been in the same control group at The Farm and, being girls of roughly the same age, had clung together. They were the only two people each had in the world, and both had vowed never to forsake the other.

But Lydia's escape from the facility had been a meaningless gesture. She at first had waited for an opportunity to steal into the small compound that formed The Range in order to rescue her sister. Her every attempt had been thwarted by the walls of the facility and its heavily armed guards. The cadre there also frequently sent patrols into the woods looking for her.

Ultimately, she'd decided to attempt to go for help—though she had no clear sense of what that help might be. The Range was quite literally in the middle of nowhere, located in a broad valley in a place she knew not where.

To the north, east, and west were mountains and woodlands. The mountains to the east and west were beyond her ability to scale. She'd travelled twice into the wilderness to the north, but each time had become hopelessly lost. It was only by happenstance that she'd managed to find her way back, one time after having been lost for nearly a week.

During those journeys, she'd had nothing on which to subsist but berries, nuts, and other things she'd found in the wilderness. Those had rendered her so sick on several occasions that she thought she might die.

Back near The Range, she at least was able to scrounge half-eaten MREs her pursuers sometimes carelessly left behind. It was these odd bits of refuse that had kept her alive these many weeks.

To the south, it was even worse. Some four to five miles in that direction was another, larger, military post that sat athwart a point where the valley narrowed. It was heavily patrolled, and there were security cameras, high fences topped with razor wire, and numerous guard towers. She hadn't been able to approach within a half mile of the facility without being detected.

And then there were the hunts.

The girl cried as she recounted watching three other victims of this insanity, two of whom she knew from The Farm, as they swiftly were run to ground and murdered, all while she'd watched helpless and afraid. None of the previous victims had stood a chance, and it was only when she'd seen how easily Sam had dispensed with his pursuers that she'd mustered the courage to reveal herself.

Lydia hesitated before tearing into the last MRE, but he encouraged her to eat and, afterward, to rest.

"You're going to need all of your strength," he said. "Tonight, I'm going down to The Range and get your sister. Then the three of us are getting out of here."

She managed her first smile before finishing her meal and then drifting off to sleep.

***

Sam crept outside the bunker and took a cautious look around. Once all seemed clear, he took a seat and allowed his senses to open and to familiarize themselves with the surroundings. As he did, he worked his arm and neck, attempting to increase their range of motion and strength.

He thought of Amy, not knowing whether his friend was still alive, or whether she had met her fate in this or another place like it. Lydia had known nothing of her.

He thought of Christy Sue Fennel, the innocent child who'd come to his home years before, seeking his help.

He thought of all the others who'd gone missing, of the scientific experiments Celia and Lydia described at The Farm, and of the brutal savagery of The Range, a place whose reason for being was clear. There, people were killed for sport, and somewhere someone was getting rich from it.

It mattered not one whit to Sam whether the victims of these atrocities were Gifted or not. His mind didn't work that way. All people were the same, and all of these people were innocent victims of a system run amok.

There now was a darkness in him, one he'd never before felt.

He'd killed men in his life. The Viet Cong guerrillas and North Vietnamese soldiers he'd killed during the war were enemies. He never once had felt hatred for any of them. It was war, and that was his duty. The men he'd killed defending himself and others in Chicago over the years were criminals and assassins. Still, he wished that in some way those men could've been spared or even rehabilitated.

When he'd shot at the gross racist in Viet Nam, as hard, callous, and brutal as that act had been, Sam had no intention of killing him. He merely had fired, impulsively and recklessly, into the man's upturned canteen cup, hoping only to cause the man great pain and suffering.

It was the only act of true animus Sam had committed in his life—until today.

The men he'd killed earlier that day, and the men down the valley who hunted him and Lydia even now, might've been worthy of some small mercy, some chance at salvation. But not today. The sin of hunting Sam might be forgiven, but these men hunted an innocent child for nothing more than their own amusement.

For the first time in his life, Sam Babington thought of another human being with murder in his heart.

From his own short observations and from his conversation with Lydia, he had a good sense of the layout of The Range and the number of personnel inside. Tonight, he would go down and get Celia, and he was going to kill everyone else he found, whether they attempted to stop him or not.