The Omega Team: Tough Target (Kindle Worlds Novella) Read Online Free Page B

moving, the boat rocked in the water and it brought back memories of what happened.
    Can’t sleep. Gotta move.
    She tried to sit up and pain shot through her shoulder and side. She cried out in agony and fought to hide her gasps. She remembered losing consciousness. Now she didn’t know where Camila and her pit bulls had gone. They could be anywhere. Her fingers felt the metal of her shotgun. She’d brought a box of extra shells, but she didn’t have time to bring anything to stop the bleeding.
    Sam’s handsome face flashed through her mind. The evil woman and her two assassins had come to kill her boy. Were they hunting him now?
    Gotta get help…to stop this.
    When Geneva defied her throbbing misery and forced herself to sit up, she heard a splash of water and caught the moonlit glimmer of a water moccasin cutting through the river toward her. She yanked her hand back from the edge of the boat. The current forced the snake to drift downstream, away from her canoe and she breathed a sigh of relief. But in the shallows downriver, more danger lurked. The eerie glowing eyes of gators at night glistened across the surface of the water.
    That’s just God’s creatures, uprooted by the storm , she thought, to calm her heart. But with her eyes on the water moccasin and the gators, she nearly missed the real enemy.
    In the distance, she saw a light flicker through the shadows of trees and the steady onslaught of rain. A man called out something in Spanish. Two-legged snakes were far more dangerous. On instinct she hunkered down into the boat, but she soon realized she’d be a sittin’ duck if she stayed.
    Geneva clutched at her belly and rolled out of the boat and into the water. When she felt the slippery silt of the river bottom under her feet, she straightened her legs and stood up. Dizziness threatened to topple her over, but she fought to stay conscious.
    You collapse here, you die.
    Under normal circumstances, she knew help could be downstream—if some folk were stubborn like her and had stayed to wait out the storm—but that would be a long shot. She knew that now. With the rising water, she didn’t have the strength to control the canoe that far and she couldn’t risk losing consciousness again. She had to play it smart and do the unexpected. If she pushed the boat out into the river, it would drift away from where she hid. Whoever hunted her wouldn’t know where to look.
    Using all her strength, she shoved the boat out into the rising water with a grunt and she watched as the current took the canoe downriver. She crawled ashore and into the thick brush, praying it would be enough to confound the bastards who wanted her dead, as a message to her boy.
    She grimaced in pain and pushed on as Sam’s voice and her memories of what he used to say comforted her. ‘Bravery is being the only one who knows you just peed yourself.’ That one always made her smile.
    Or he’d say, ‘Never draw fire. It irritates the people next to you. Me personally, I try to look unimportant, in case they’re low on ammo.’ Sam would resort to humor to downplay the danger of his missions, but not everything he said had been intended to be funny. She remembered something else he’d told her once. ‘Anything you do can get you killed, including nothing.’
    She wouldn’t die doing nothing.
    Geneva vowed to fight to her last breath. Every time she planted a knee or dug into the dirt with her aching hands, dragging the shotgun with her, she pictured the face of her only child, Sam. She imagined him from the impish boy he’d been to the handsome and brave man he’d become.
    She had to stay strong—for him.
    ***
    Sam followed the shoreline on foot and in the dark. He steered clear of the rising water and raced to find signs of his mother coming ashore before the river covered her tracks. The storm had beaten his body and drenched him in rain, making the going slow. After he’d chosen not to use a flashlight—for fear the light would