Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 140965 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 705(@200wpm)___ 564(@250wpm)___ 470(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 140965 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 705(@200wpm)___ 564(@250wpm)___ 470(@300wpm)
Draden didn’t move, staying as still as any predator with his gaze fixed on his prey. No muscle moved. He didn’t take his eyes from the man. He could just make out a part of his thigh and boot. The MSS member was stoic, but the pain had to be excruciating. Draden had made certain the shoulder was shattered. He went for maximum pain. He’d also put the man’s dominant arm out of commission.
The man held out for over an hour. He had to have been worried about blood loss at that point. Draden was. He didn’t want the man to bleed out on him and die. It would be far easier to follow him back to the nest than to backtrack.
2
The home of the Milisi Separatis Sumatra was a good distance from the river, and Draden found it an hour after the sun rose. It was still close enough that they could use the river for escaping or traveling. They had established themselves in a village of similar size to Lupa Suku, which Draden found a little ironic. One village they had captured, keeping the occupants prisoners, treating them almost as slaves, while another they’d annihilated with a hemorrhagic virus.
The people in both villages were Indonesian, the same as the members of the MSS. The cell wanted to overthrow the government and to do that, they were hurting their own people. Draden had never seen the logic in that, how they could convince themselves that what they were doing was justified because they believed in the end game. As far as he was concerned, the MSS was a band of murderers.
He spent most of the day studying them. He wanted to be able to identify every single member and hopefully learn their habits quickly. He was good at detail. He watched them from each direction, circling around the tight cluster of houses until he knew their routines. The man he’d wounded had been taken to a small infirmary just on the outskirts on the western side. He observed a man being dragged out of one of the homes and taken forcibly to the small makeshift hospital.
Draden waited until nightfall before he entered the village. He kept his hands gloved and wore a mask over his mouth and nose to be safe. He didn’t plan on infecting the residents, but he did plan on killing as many of the terrorists as he possibly could in one night. The village was heavily guarded, everyone stirred up after the man he’d shot stumbled back into their camp. MSS members had been easy to identify, running around, shoving weapons at people and shouting orders. They had doubled the guard around the village, allowing Draden to spot every position they used to protect their home turf.
He noted each member, paying attention to faces and identifying marks. None of them made any attempt to hide themselves. If anything, they wanted the villagers to recognize them in order to pay deference to them. Some were aggressive and belligerent toward the people, and others ignored them or were more courteous. It didn’t matter to Draden what they were like. They had committed mass murder and clearly had been hoping, by infecting Draden, that they would kill many more.
He needed to know where the virus had originated. How they had gotten it. By the time darkness fell he was ready for warfare and had a plan. Ignoring the rain, he slipped past the guard and made his way to the infirmary first. He told himself it was to take out the man who had tried to kill his teammates, but he knew it was to check on the villager they’d dragged from his home. He was most likely the closest thing the inhabitants of the village had to a doctor.
Most of the houses were very small and built from an amalgamation of any type of materials possible, including wood, mud and rusty corrugated tin. Some were built on stilts with thatched roofs. All electricity was powered by forest water rather than government power lines, and the people relied on agriculture to survive. They grew their crops, harvested them and sold them, mostly utilizing the river for their farmer’s market. Like Lupa Suku, they were just isolated enough to be a perfect village for the MSS to infiltrate and then take over.
Draden peered through the dirty window. He could see the man he had shot lying on a cot, moaning and rolling back and forth in obvious pain. Two others, clearly his friends, tried to get him to drink water and let them look at whatever the “doctor” had done to him. The “doctor” lay on the floor in a pool of blood. Clearly, the village healer had been out of his depth trying to work on a shattered shoulder.