The Forge of Darkness (Darkness After Series Book 3) by Scott B. Williams

going to try and kill him too, and the only reason he didn’t was because Benny shot him with his shotgun.  
    It was just Tommy’s bad luck in the first place that he was the one in front and the first one to step out in the open. Tommy always led the way when they were on patrol together because he knew where they were going and David didn’t. David just followed along wherever he went because Tommy told him to, and he didn’t have much of anything else to do anyway. Without Tommy, David wouldn’t have known what to most of the time. Tommy said the reason they went out and walked the fences every day was to check and make sure they were okay and that the cattle were still inside them, and also to keep an eye out for strangers. They never saw any before today, but Tommy always carried his rifle in case they did. David didn’t have a rifle but he carried the long, sharpened stick that he called his spear and he often glanced back along the path behind them to make sure they weren’t followed. Tommy had told him there were bears and panthers in the woods and he told him all kinds of scary stories when they were walking. David believed every one of them because he didn’t have any reason to doubt what his friend said. Ever since he’d come here, following Mitch out of the woods, he’d liked Tommy and it wasn’t long before he considered him his best friend in the whole world. Now someone had shot him just because he was trying to save the cows. It made David sad to see him looking like he looked now, his jacket and shirt soaked in blood and his face contorted with pain as he lay there trying to breathe.
    David was glad Benny had shot the one with the knife, and he hoped he would get the other one too, before it got too dark to find him. Before he left, Benny said the strangers must have come there by way of the road from the west, because that was the way to get here from every place else. Benny said he was going to head that way, staying in the woods alongside the road, because he said he thought the other one would probably circle back to it and try to go that way to get away. But Benny wouldn’t let him get away if he could help it. He was going to make him pay for what he did to Tommy, and David didn’t feel sorry for whoever it was at all. Nobody had the right to shoot Tommy, and David wished he could shoot whoever did it himself.

Nine

    T HE SHOOTER ACROSS THE road wasn’t sure how many adversaries he was facing. He had seen the man with the rifle approaching his son initially, and had taken him out, but then the other one had charged out of nowhere like a madman, throwing a spear. Then, from the woods in the direction the rest of the cattle had run, another one had slipped up on Kenny and shot him with a shotgun. It was such a pity he didn’t see that one in time to save his son, but the visibility was poor in the woods in this rain, and even with the scope he’d not been able to pick him out from where he was hiding. The boy had been ambushed and didn’t have a chance. He’d figured all along something like this was going to happen to that one; it was just a matter of time. Kenny was overconfident and far too often, careless. He shouldn’t have left his rifle leaning there against a tree out of reach while working with his knife. If he’d been paying attention, he would have heard those two coming and could have shot them on sight and been done with them. But even if he had, there was the other one with the shotgun neither of them had seen.  
    That was the problem with reacting to and focusing on one threat while assuming it was the only one. His son had paid for his mistake with his life, and now there were even more unknowns. All that .22 rifle fire had come as another surprise. It sounded like someone emptied an entire 25 or 30 round magazine in his general direction, not really knowing exactly where he was. His position behind a solid hardwood stump gave him both cover and concealment, so he