Free Wayward Pines: Nomad (Kindle Worlds Novella) by Robert Swartwood Page B

toward Tobias.
    Tobias raised the knife above his head and threw it. He had been aiming for center mass but the knife plunged into the shooter’s thigh.
    Crying out, the shooter dropped the rifle and reached for the knife. Tobias was already charging forward. Just as the shooter grabbed the handle of the Bowie, Tobias jumped forward, planting his foot into the shooter’s chest. The shooter hit the ground and Tobias was on top of him at once, extracting the knife from the man’s thigh and pressing the bloody blade to the man’s throat.
    The man—late thirties, long dark hair, thick beard, weathered face—squinted up at Tobias in pain.
    “Please,” he moaned, “please don’t take me back. I don’t want to go back. Just…just kill me instead.”

    The man was dressed in dungarees and a sweatshirt, dull and drab colors that mixed in nicely with the foliage. Tobias had already searched him. A knife and extra ammunition, but besides that and the rifle, he found nothing else.
    He pulled a long piece of cloth from his backpack, hating to give it up but sacrificed it anyway so the man could wrap it around his thigh and try to keep in the blood.
    The man now sitting on the ground, his back against a tree, winced at the pain as he talked. “Me and my wife and children, we…we escaped during one of the fêtes. We used it as cover and grabbed our things and ran the other way. We didn’t really know where we were going until we reached the fence. And then…then we followed it for a bit until we found a place to climb under and just kept running.”
    Tobias sat on a rock several yards away, both the Winchester and Smith & Wesson fully loaded. The rifle he held across his knee, not exactly aimed at the man but angled so he could kill him in a second if need be.
    “How long ago was this?”
    The man shrugged. “Months. Years. Weeks. I don’t know. You kind of lose your sense of time outside of Wayward Pines.”
    “Why did you shoot at me?”
    “I told you, I thought you were coming to find us. We don’t want to go back there. That…that isn’t life.”
    Tobias thought about Wayward Pines, the last town in the world, a town that was just a façade. The real world was here, beyond the fence, in the wild with the abbies. This was the only place Pilcher didn’t control, and because of that, it was pure.
    Still…
    “I never heard about any family disappearing from town.”
    The man winced again, both in pain and irritation. “Why would you? The puppeteers wouldn’t want people to know. They wouldn’t want the secret getting out.”
    Puppeteers . Tobias found a strange sort of logic in the word.
    “How have you managed to survive this long?”
    The man shook his head, tears starting to well in his eyes. “Not all of us did. My—my—my daughter, we lost her. We almost lost my son, too. It was…it was awful.”
    A beat of silence passed.
    The man said, “I won’t take you to them. You’ll have to kill me.”
    “I’m not going to kill you.”
    “I won’t let you take them back to that town.”
    “I told you, I’m not going to kill you.”
    “You’re lying.”
    “If I was going to kill you, wouldn’t have I already done it?”
    The man thought it over. “You’re just trying to trick me. Make me think you aren’t here to take us back.”
    “What I am,” Tobias said, “is a nomad. Do you know what a nomad is?”
    The man, wincing again in pain, shook his head.
    “Basically I’m exploring the outside. I’m not here to take you back, or kill you, or cause you any harm. Like I told you, I never even heard about a family leaving town.”
    “That’s because of the puppeteers,” the man said, and then went quiet for a beat. “ You’re one of them, aren’t you? You’re one of the bastards who’s pulling everyone’s strings.”
    Tobias was losing his patience. They were getting nowhere. As incredible as it was to find another living person outside of the fence, it wasn’t like they had the time to