Free Necessary Evil by David Dun

watched the man cautiously approach.
    "Help, I'm hit," he groaned as the man got very close.
    Nudging Kier with his gun barrel, the man bent over, apparently trying to see his face. Kier kept it buried in the other man's parka and moaned. He waited until he felt the man lifting his shoulder. Kier rolled and at the same time delivered a hard kick squarely to the man's chin. He was on his stunned enemy in an instant, choking him to unconsciousness, keeping him silent until his body slumped.
    Visibility was improving slightly, but steady polka-dot sheets of frozen moisture still blurred the landscape. Kier did not want to kill. If only these people had not brought their destruction to this place.
    Once again his mind went over the facts like a watchmaker sorting the parts of an old-fashioned timepiece. Even if he didn't understand the nature of the power that the scientists had given Tillman or the extent of Tillman's plans, he knew that these men were capable of wanton killing. Common sense told him that escape would require a profound subterfuge. He needed to make them think they had solved the puzzle of their disappearing comrade.
    He took Jones's automatic, fished out the rest of his ammo clips, grabbed his radio, his light, and took his money. Then he turned to the second man, leaving his weapons, but taking his money, his knife, his light, more ammunition, and his grenades. Pulling off Miller's field pack, he quickly loaded the booty.
    Cringing even as he did it, he turned the second man over onto his belly and aimed the M-16 at the fleshy part of the man's buttock, taking care that the shot missed bone. The single shot blew out a chunk of fatty flesh a little smaller than a walnut. It bled profusely, allowing Kier to smear blood over the back of the man's outer coat. He fired off some more rounds.
    "Miller has turned, Miller has turned," Kier said into the radio in the whispered growl of a dying man.
    "Code nine, say status, Jenkins. Code nine, say status, Jenkins."
    In response Kier fired his automatic and made an ugly gurgling sound into the mouthpiece.
    "Code Zulu, switch and answer Zulu."
    Again they were scrambling.
    He was reaching to pick up Jones's body when a flurry of snow from overburdened branches cascaded to his right, and out from a wall of frosted evergreen boughs stepped another of his tormentors. The man was a good distance away and looking in the wrong direction. Striding directly back up Jenkins's trail for at least twenty paces, Kier heard no shots until he was almost out of sight. He dived for an elderberry thicket, shooting a volley as he flew. Though wild, the bullets made his quarry duck. Kier crawled desperately for cover. Already rounds slammed into the brush around him, missing him by what he knew must be inches. Finding a log, he climbed over it and hunkered down. A tremendous explosion directly behind him numbed his ears and tossed the bushes around him like salad. Somebody was using hand grenades or a mortar. There was no sound but the pounding of his heart; his ragged, too-fast breath came not from fatigue. Panic pooled in him like a reservoir trickling through the cracks of a dam. He needed to calm his mind. Now he would need another unconscious captive to carry out his plan.
    "I've got him at sector seven. He's near the northeast corner, south and east of the corner maybe twenty or thirty feet. Repeat. Sector seven. Northeast corner, south and east of the corner approximately twenty to thirty feet."
    The man was actually shouting. Kier felt a different kind of chill as he heard the enemy radioing his position. In minutes, there would be armed men everywhere. He dropped and crawled into a dense windfall of criss-crossed fallen trees shot through with Pacific bayberry and overgrown with salal. In this thicket he was all but invisible. But he had not been there ten seconds before he discovered that he shared the spot with one of the enemy.
    It was the heavy sound of Kier checking his clip that