Bounty Hunter

Chapter 20

Rex waited until just before dawn, then sat up in his hole and looked around. The sounds of crickets and wild critters greeted him, which was a relief—if the hunters were out, everything would go silent. He pushed to his feet, dusted off his cape, and made his way back to the Iron Guild.

A sane person would've gone in the opposite direction, choosing to brave the desert over a guild full of hunters. Lucky for Rex, he'd never been accused of being sane. He walked slowly, as much because he was weak from thirst as to not scare the wildlife. They'd grown accustomed to him over the past two days and didn't go quiet on his account.

He trudged back up the long hill. A coyote trailed him for a while, likely out of curiosity since Rex assumed he had far too much gristle to be tasty to any animal out in the Salt Flats. The coyote grew bored after several minutes and broke off to the north. Rex continued onward, listening for any human sounds: footsteps, the swooshing of clothes, or the clicking of a blaster's composite components.

Only the blissful sounds of nature.

When he reached the hilltop, he went down on his stomach and crawled forward. What he saw made him pause. In the parking lot below, all the bounty hunters were loading into their cutters and pulling out. Even Cat had climbed into a cutter—the driver's side, of course, as her personality wasn't that of a person to ride shotgun. Twenty or more vehicles formed a convoy and departed across the desert.

Rex waited until the last lights were out of sight before he stood. He was curious, but more than curious, he was relieved. Not a single vehicle remained in the parking lot. Well, Cat's cutter and the other rig it'd smashed were still there, but no operational vehicles remained. That made the odds low of anyone being left behind.

Rex chanced it and walked down the hill, through the parking lot, and around the back of the building to where various vehicles were parked within a chain-link fence. When he found his cutter near the end, he grinned. "Beatrice baby, I'm on my way."

He hustled to the fence, saw that it had no power feeding it, and had the lock picked in five seconds flat. He shook his head. Cat really should think about getting better security.

He jogged to his cutter, checked it over for restraints or alarms, and was about to climb in when he stopped, his eyes caught by what he saw the next row over. He dropped off the step and walked toward the long tank. He knocked on the metal hull, growing even more interested. He hustled around to the back, climbed up the ladder, and strode across the top, stopping at a round cover. He twisted. It didn't move, and Rex put all his strength into it. Finally, the cover turned an inch, then he turned it some more. It opened with the sound of a hawk's screech. Rex knelt over the opening and immediately backed away from the strong odor emanating from it. He shone a light into the tank to find the container nearly full.

He laughed, looked up at the stars, and said, "Thank you."

Rex wasn't a religious man. He didn't even know about the gods people prayed to, but he'd seen other people pray, and they always seemed to look up at the sky as though salvation would come for them from a spaceship. He didn't care one way or another as to what folks believed, as long as they stayed out of his way. But at that moment, he felt like he should be thanking someone for the best present he'd ever received.