With High Desert Vengeance going live tomorrow, here’s another sneak peak. Things are starting to get tense in the aftermath of the massacre in Chapter 1.
Mario Gomez squinted in the sunlight. It was cool at the moment, but it still felt warm after Transnistria in the winter. He’d been home for a month, but most of that month had been spent watching over Sam Childress as he underwent multiple surgeries. His wounds had been bad, and he still wasn’t ever going to walk again.
He rarely showed it, but Mario worried about his comrade. He’d prayed every night for him, either for his recovery, or the strength to cope with whatever came next. It wasn’t something he talked about much. Mario Gomez wasn’t much of a talker.
He never had been. He had always been more comfortable watching, listening, and acting than talking. His tendency to silence had been a source of eternal aggravation to his gregarious younger sister, and his propensity for sudden, apparently impulsive action a matter of often grave concern to his more stolid, hard-working father. Only his mother, Cocheta, had really understood him, and even that was an often-unspoken understanding. She had been the only one who hadn’t objected when he’d joined the Marine Corps, simply telling him to keep their people’s honor intact.
His comfort with silence had been why he’d slipped away without telling the rest of his new comrades, the mercenaries who called themselves Brannigan’s Blackhearts when no one else was in earshot, without saying a word. Nor had he explained what had made him almost miss the Transnistrian job. His problems were his problems, not theirs.
He knew that his silence had separated him somewhat from the rest of the team, except maybe from Joe Flanagan, who was a quiet man, himself. But it was just his way, and he was too set in it to change.
It had been a long drive from the airport in Silver City, but he was almost to Lordsburg. Almost to the mortuary where the remains of his family were waiting.
