Free Hunt the Dragon by Don Mann

bed. Then it rolled onto the roof and was stopped by something hard that blew out the passenger-side window. Bam!
    Crocker unclenched his teeth, exhaled, and shook the glass off.
    “Manny?”
    All he heard was a groan. Then he smelled gas.
    “Manny, you all right? You hear me?”
    The pickup had come to a rest on its side at a forty-degree angle, with the driver’s side up. He pushed open the door with his left foot, unbuckled his seat belt, then turned to attend to Mancini. He seemed to be slipping in and out of consciousness, but was breathing freely and his pulse was only slightly slower than normal. Crocker unbuckled his seat belt, then felt carefully along his neck and back to check if anything was broken. His spine was intact.
    “You hear me, buddy?”
    No response, so he wrapped his arms around him and slowly lifted out the bear of a man—230 pounds of bone and muscle. Crocker managed to lug him a safe distance away from the vehicle and set him on the ground.
    “Manny, can you hear me?” he whispered.
    After a ten-second pause, Mancini groaned and responded, “Yeah.” Then, “Fuck. My head hurts. What happened?”
    “We crashed. I’m going to look for the phone and call for help.”
    He inspected Mancini more closely and found multiple cuts to his right arm and side, and a large contusion near his right eye. He didn’t have the iPhone in his pocket or clutched in either hand.
    “Wait here,” Crocker whispered. “I’ll be right back.”
    Turning and looking over his shoulder, he saw that they had fallen into a twenty-foot-deep gulch. As he took a step toward the pickup, he heard helicopter rotors echo off the incline ahead.
    He scurried upward across the dirt and rocks on his hands and knees, looked up and followed the sound. The helo was drawing closer. He made out its dark form in the night sky. It hovered with lights out. Then suddenly the bright landing lights came on, illuminating a wide circle five hundred feet ahead and to the right, temporarily blinding him.
    “Fuckers!”
    It was descending, looking for a place to land. To the right of the circle he made out the two black SUVs. Men with automatic weapons stood around them.
    “Now what?”
    Without thinking he broke into a sprint, keeping his eyes on the ground ahead of him, juking to avoid boulders, holes, shrubs. Focused on his target and calculating that he should swing right of the SUVs and approach from behind. His legs and lungs burning, he pushed with everything he had left, making sure to land on the balls of his feet to minimize the sound.
    The helo engines were idling now. He heard voices ahead, echoing off the mountain. They seemed to be speaking a foreign language. Sounded like barked instructions, said with urgency.
    He felt urgency himself, pushing harder and closing within two hundred feet. Men were carrying suitcases from the Escalades and loading them into the helicopter. He ran as fast as his legs could take him, fighting through stiffness and pain, remembering Mancini and the pickup past his left shoulder, ignoring all the warnings that flashed in his head.
    He looked up again. Saw the sides of the SUVs from a hundred feet, then the bottom of his right loafer slid across something and he lost his balance and fell forward. He tried to break the impact with his hands, but still hit his chest and chin hard enough that his teeth smacked together and he lost his breath. Ten seconds later he had recovered. He tasted blood in his mouth and felt it dripping down his chin. More alarming was the sound of the helo engine revving up as if it were about to take off. Again he ran, hobbling this time, ignoring the pain from his knee, mouth, and lungs.
    Out of breath, he ducked behind the first SUV. The whine of the helo engine was deafening, the light it emitted blinding. The rotors kicked up a violent swirl of dust that stung his skin. They seemed to be waiting. Crocker saw someone emerge from the back of the other SUV carrying a suitcase