Free 600 Miles: A Post-Apocalyptic Adventure by G.P. Grewal Page B

came inches from cracking open my skull.
    Suddenly there was more shots from behind me— BAM, BAM, BAM! —steady and unwavering. I turned to see Roy standing there, his pistol flashing in the sun as every one of those bullets he let loose found its mark, half-naked Mexican warriors dropping like flies. Only one of them managed to get close enough, and him Roy plugged right in the head, my .357 knocking down one more who was running away, the others, seeing so many of their number die, quickly vanishing back into the ruins.
    We was all worked up, sweating and puffing, especially me and Gitty, Roy seeming a lot more calm.
    "Well, hell!" I said. "Was that the goddamn Alamo or what? I thought we was goners for sure!"
    " Were , Elgin! You thought we were goners!"
    "Oh damn it, Gitty! Ain't no time to be correcting me. Can't you see how shook up I am?"
    "Damn it, and I ain't?"
    She was, even more than me. Her hands was shaking so bad that I took her rifle and she threw her arms around my neck, grateful that we was alive.
    "They must have been looking for us all night," Roy said, his eyes still searching up the street.
    "How many more of them you think there are? I mean, damn, so many dead."
    "I don't know, but let's not wait here to find out."
    We hurried up, leaving all them corpses and continuing up the street that led us in the direction of those green hills, always expecting to see more of them Mexicans coming for us, though no doubt we'd licked them good. After a couple of blocks, straight ahead I could see an old cathedral, just as lonely and crumbled down as everything else, one of its walls laying on the street in heaps of broken rubble, though its fancy white tower, taller than any building around it, still rose high.
    We passed the cathedral, the bottom of the hills thick with greenery, the woods having taken over one side of the street and breaking up the road, houses buried way back in a tangle of trees and thickets, some of them half covered with vines.
    "Looks like we're home free," I said. "Ain't no way they's—I mean, no way they're going to find us now."
    I pushed my way through the bushes and low-hanging branches that blocked our way, telling Gitty to calm down when she warned me not to be making so much noise. We skirted around the hills to see where things went, not wanting to spend the strength to go straight up. There was another old street we found back in those woods and so we followed it, gaining higher ground as we went. Through the treetops was a bright and sunny sky, though in them woods it was creepy and foreboding. The earth had long since risen to eat up most everything, and we climbed or edged our way around rusted up, half-buried automobiles and peered into second-story windows at all the junk and broken old furniture and giant spider webs, the bottom floor way underground.
    Gitty was the first one to hear someone coming up from behind. She whispered a sharp warning and we spun about, pistols drawn. It weren't any animal, by the sound of it, and it sure wasn't just one man.
    We hurried on, knowing we'd been found again. The noises grew louder, like men hacking through the brush as they closed in on us, and from the sound of it they was fanning out, one of them shouting out something excited in Mexican like he was hot on our trail.
    I kept moving, keeping Gitty in front of me, Roy leading us through the thickets as we hurried to gain higher ground. We kept behind the houses, keeping cover as the voices eventually trailed off only to pick up again, the chase lasting a long time and all of us short of breath before finally we came out of the trees and were standing near an open road.
    "Mira!" the shout came.
    Startled, we turned around. There he was, that crazy, skull-faced man with the big black eagle on his chest, staring back at us from the edge of the woods. I fired a shot but missed, the bastard ducking behind a tree as a couple more came running out. Roy plugged them both and then we was