Light It Up

by Nick Petrie

  That big spruce didn’t stand a goddamned chance.

  3

  Peter had adjusted to the claustrophobic white static by moving his life outside. Trying to reset his fight-or-flight reflex, he’d spent more than two years in the mountains, sleeping out in the open, or in a tent, or in the cab of his truck, where the big windshield kept the static at bay.

  Part of Peter loved living out in the weather, free to go wherever he chose. The stars for his rooftop.

  Another part knew the static was only making it harder for him to get back to something like a normal life. He just hadn’t cared enough to really try, or so he told himself.

  Until he met June Cassidy.

  Smart, profane, hilarious, bossy, delicious.

  They’d met in a redwood tree, and the rest of their time together had been just as strange. Some bad guys had been bothering her, and he’d helped her with that. She’d helped him, too. He’d never felt about anyone the way he felt about June Cassidy.

  She’d told Peter to get it out of his system, whatever it was that kept him outside. She’d told him to come back when he could sleep inside, in a real bed.

  When he put it to himself like that, it sounded like June had just told him to get over it.

  He didn’t think that was really what she meant.

  It wasn’t that easy, for one thing.

  He wasn’t over it. He’d probably never get over it.

  But he was working on it.

  He was making progress.

  Which was, he figured, what June had really wanted.

  For Peter to make the effort.

  For her.

  —

  His cheap phone had died before the other volunteers arrived, fell out of his pocket and the casing cracked wide open. He didn’t mind. Cell service was lousy in the mountains. He didn’t even bother replacing it. Peter had never really liked the telephone anyway.

  Instead, he’d started a letter to June his first night on the trail, had added to it every night after that, and put it in the mail when they got down to Eugene.

  You could write a pretty long letter in ten days.

  He told her how the mountains looked in the first light of day, and about the deep dark blue of the evening sky, and how the stars appeared, one by one at first, then in clusters, then somehow all at once.

  He told her about the people he worked with. The college kids on their Oregon adventure, passing a joint between them when the workday was done, and the schoolteachers on summer break, having a beard-growing contest. But he found himself writing most about Henry, the Vietnam vet, who was becoming a real friend.

  You’d never know how old the man was, watching him clean a log of its branches with the double-bladed ax, then use the adze to flatten the round to make a walking surface for a simple footbridge. He’d stop every few minutes to sharpen the tool with the file he carried in his back pocket, then relight his big Honduran cigar.

  Henry was old-school in some ways. In other ways he was more modern than most. When he found Peter doing yoga one morning—Peter’s shrink had told him that yoga’s focus on mindfulness was supposed to help with post-traumatic stress—Henry had asked Peter to show him some poses. He’d confessed that he was a little worried about keeping up with his new girlfriend in Eugene, a tech consultant twenty years his junior, who’d put herself through business school working as an exotic dancer.

  In that first letter, Peter asked June to write him back, care of General Delivery at the Eugene post office.

  By the end of his next ten-day rotation, he’d written a second letter, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to send it.

  He mentioned his reluctance to Henry, who had already volunteered himself to drive Peter back to town. Henry just shook his head in disappointment at Peter’s general character, then drove directly to the post office.

  June had sent him a picture of the little teardrop-shaped valley where she lived, taken from the top of the waterfall, along with a nicely designed lightweight backpacker’s hammock and rain fly that Peter never would have bought for himself. On the back of the picture, she’d written: “Tell me more!”

  He thought the hammock was a good sign.

  He bought a stamp and mailed the second letter.

  And over each ten-day rotation, he wrote another one.

  Slowly, he began to tell her about his time in the Marines. Officer Candidate School, the challenge of making Recon. His first platoon, most of them as green as he was, hungry to get into the fight, few of them with any idea what they were getting into. The sergeants who’d taught him all the things he hadn’t learned in OCS, which was almost everything.

  He told her about Afghanistan and Iraq. The sounds and smells, the stifling heat of summer, the bitter cold of the winter nights.

  He told her about Big Jimmy and Manny Martinez, about Spook and Tony and Cho, Bad Bob and Jamal and Smitty and the rest. The ones who lived, the ones who died.

  He told her about their interpreter, Asif, who wanted to be called Andy, who loved Simon & Garfunkel, who knew all the words to the song “America.” He’d sing it if you asked, and also if you didn’t. “Let us be lovers and marry our fortunes together …”

  Asif had been a pediatrician in Baghdad until his clinic was destroyed by a suicide bomber. He’d asked Peter to write him a letter of recommendation so he could get to the States after the war. He had family in Indiana. Instead he got killed in an ambush in the tall corn along the Euphrates.

  Peter tried to tell these stories lightly. He didn’t want to put his burden on her.

  Over time, he told her everything.

  Almost everything.

  He hoped, maybe, she’d understand him better, knowing.

  He was afraid that she might understand him too well.

  He was a trained killer. There was no way around it.

  His time in the Marines had changed him profoundly, had turned him into himself. He’d been like red-hot steel in those years, with the war as the hammer and the Corps as the anvil. He couldn’t unlive those years, nor did he want to.

  Most days, he was proud of what he’d done.

  Most days.

  He and his platoon had done their job, done it well. Gotten some bad guys, looked out for each other. He could have done better, he knew.

  He didn’t like to think about the dead, but he did it anyway. Not that he had any choice. It was part of his duty, to carry them with him. Part of his mission. These honored dead.

  He didn’t know if he could explain that to June.

  But he was trying.

  —

  It was a strange conversation, because of the gaps in time. He’d mail a letter he spent two weeks writing, get her response to a letter he’d written two weeks before, and start a new letter to send two weeks later.

  But somehow it was easier, too, because he could write it down without having someone else there, without having to see the response in her face. He wrote this to her, told her that she didn’t even have to read the letters, that maybe what was important was for him to write them.

  Her response made him laugh out loud. “Don’t be such an asshole,” she wrote. “Of course I’m reading your fucking letters.”

  June’s language was as bad as the carpenters Peter had spent summers working with. Worse than some Marines.

  She didn’t try to tell him she understood his experience. She couldn’t, not really. She hadn’t been there. But she said the letters helped her understand him better, knowing more about his war.

  She wrote that she rode her bike the length of the teardrop-shaped valley every day, all the way down to the mailbox on the state highway, hoping there was another letter.

  She wrote that she liked the slow pace of their correspondence.

  She wrote that it was like living in the Old West, their letters wrapped in oilskin and carried in strangers’ saddlebags across the high passes. Like an old-fashioned courtship, although she hadn’t put it in quite those terms.

  The
idea had occurred to Peter, too. He’d started tucking a wildflower into his letters, pressed flat from days between the pages of whatever book he had on the trail.

  He’d learned that tactic from the Marines. Use the terrain to your advantage.

  It wasn’t a war, nothing like it. But definitely a kind of campaign.

  And his heart was captured, hopelessly, irrevocably.

  Had been since the first time he’d seen her.

  Her eyes so bright, so full of humor and ferocity.

  Those arms strong enough to carry him home.

  —

  He didn’t know what their correspondence might lead to. But he knew his campaign was making progress when June’s letters began to weave him into her life in the valley.

  “You could help in the orchard at picking time,” she wrote at the end of July. “If you’re interested.”

  In mid-August, she wrote: “The guest cottages could use some repairs, when you’re back this way.”

  Most promising of all was her last letter at the end of August. Several pages were taken up by rough pencil sketches of a modest farmhouse, with a wide porch off the back bedroom. She’d drawn an arrow to it, marked Sleeping Porch in her messy scrawl.

  “Maybe a fall project,” she’d written. “See you late September?”

  So that was the plan.

  Until their last day, coming down from the mountain. Cell service was better there, and Henry stepped away to check his messages.

  When he came back, his face was grave.

  His daughter had called.

  Her husband had gone missing, along with a senior employee and a shipment of client cash.

  “I could really use your help,” Henry told Peter. “Maybe a week, two at the most. Just until I get things squared away.”

  Peter didn’t have to think before he answered.

  “No problem.” He’d send June a postcard. Maybe leave out a few details. He didn’t want to worry her. “Sign me up.”

  Later, he’d wish he’d answered differently.

  He’d have plenty of reasons.

  But he knew he’d have answered exactly the same way.

  4

  Henry’s pickup was nose-down in the ditch, and Peter’s head was killing him.

  He remembered the red wrecker smashing hard into the passenger side, knocking the big truck off the road.

  He reached for the door handle but couldn’t get a grip, something wrong with his coordination.

  Then his door opened. A man reached inside, hooked his fingers inside the neck of Peter’s body armor, and pulled him out and down, headfirst, banging his shoulder against the ground.

  Releasing Peter’s armor, the man twisted Peter’s rifle from his useless grip while his legs were still up in the truck, then took another grip on the armor and hauled him bodily to the embankment.

  The man switched the rifle from safe to fire, chambered a round, and pointed it at Peter with his finger on the trigger, all without having to look at the weapon. He wore combat boots and greasy blue mechanic’s pants with black body armor over a black long-sleeved T-shirt. A black ski mask covered his face and neck. With his black combat gloves, not a single square inch of skin was exposed. He had a matte-black sidearm in a black nylon leg holster.

  “Hands behind your head, fingers laced together,” he said. “Do it now or I’ll blow your knee apart.”

  Peter still wasn’t moving right, he could feel it. His head hurt. He wouldn’t have a chance to get to the pistol on his own belt.

  He didn’t like it, but he did as he was told.

  All this while a second man with a shotgun, identically dressed, was pulling Deacon out of the driver’s seat. Protected by the air bag, Deacon had managed to keep hold of his own rifle and tried to bring it to bear, but the second man just cracked him on the head with the butt of his shotgun, a very businesslike maneuver that put Deacon on the ground without his rifle.

  Peter looked for the ambulance but couldn’t see it from his position in the ditch. The red wrecker was parked on the near shoulder past Henry’s truck, red lights flashing. Hiding the armed men from the view of any oncoming traffic, but looking like they were there to help.

  The hijackers had put some thought into this. It wasn’t their first rodeo.

  Deacon crawled onto the embankment beside Peter, his dark face shining with sweat, blood matting in his hair. He put his trembling hands behind his head. Peter couldn’t tell if the shaking was from fear or rage or the adrenaline burning like gasoline in his veins.

  The second man covered them both with the shotgun, a black combat model with what looked like a five-round tube and almost certainly one in the chamber.

  “One move, I blow your legs off,” he said. “Don’t even think about reaching for your pistols. Got me?”

  The first man put Deacon’s rifle on safe, pitched it out of reach under Henry’s truck, and did the same with Peter’s weapon. Then without ceremony, he put his knee on the rear driver’s-side seat, reached in, and dragged Banjo across the wide bench and out of the truck by the neck-hole of his vest, spilling his rifle to the ground.

  Banjo’s face was bloody and his arm hung wrong and he was barely moving. Not resisting. Hit hard by the wrecker.

  The first man lugged Banjo down the ditch to the embankment and dropped him beside Peter. He landed on his hurt arm and let out a yelp like a kicked dog.

  The hijacker quickly turned to the driver’s seat and climbed in to get to the passenger side. It occurred late to Peter that the passenger-side doors wouldn’t open because of the impact with the wrecker. He still wasn’t thinking quite right. He heard the first man grunting as he hauled Henry over the center console and out of the truck to the ground.

  Henry wasn’t moving at all.

  He’d taken the brunt of the side impact. His body was limp and his face and head were covered with blood. But his hands were still clamped onto that rifle. Henry was a big man. The hijacker had to pry his hands free, finger by finger. Henry showed no other sign of resistance. Peter looked for the rise and fall of his chest, but he couldn’t see that, either.

  Don’t be dead, Henry. Please don’t be dead.

  The attackers were fast and efficient. Peter figured maybe ninety seconds had passed, certainly no more than two minutes.

  This was no ordinary carjacking. This was a two-man assault on four armed, trained men.

  The hijackers had hit them in motion as a force multiplier. The surprise impact had knocked Banjo and Henry out of commission completely, and banged up Peter and Deacon enough to disorient them, make them take longer to react. Which gave the hijackers a distinct advantage.

  Like a roadside bomb, only mobile.

  Peter was familiar with the tactics.

  He just hadn’t expected them in the mountains of Colorado.

  —

  The second man stood guard with the shotgun while the first man looked at Peter, Deacon, and Banjo in turn, his eyes dark and empty in the holes of the black ski mask.

  The sun was gone behind the mountains, but there was still light enough to see.

  “I’m taking your pistols now,” said the first man. “Hands stay behind your heads, fingers stay laced. If one of you resists, he’ll kill all of you. If you cooperate, you’ll live until tomorrow. Understand?” He pointed at Peter. “I’m starting with you.”

  Peter didn’t like it, but he didn’t see that he had a choice.

  Still, it was the first mistake he’d seen. The shotgun wasn’t a precision weapon. If Peter made a move and the second man fired his shotgun, he might kill Peter, but he might also hit his partner.

  Peter would bide his time. His head still hurt, but he was improving.

  And he didn’t need the pistol, anyway. He had a good folding knife in his pocket and a hidden blade built into his belt buckle, something he’d bought after losing his backpack to a big bear that spring. He thought of it as a survival tool, not a weapon, but it would do for both.

  Still
, he felt the nakedness as the first man stripped the weapon from the holster with practiced speed. Peter watched as the man dropped the magazine into his waiting palm, racked the slide to eject a possible chambered round, then tossed everything into the back seat of Henry’s pickup.

  He did the same to Deacon, then Banjo, then Henry. Then he retrieved their AR-15s from under Henry’s truck and emptied them the same way before laying them in the back seat with the pistols.

  The blip of a siren pulled Peter’s eyes to the road. A police car was rolling up the slope behind them. It was an unmarked black Dodge Charger, but red and blue lights flashed in the front grille and on the dash. A cluster of antennae rose from the trunk.

  A state trooper, probably, which was good. Better than the county cops, anyway.

  He hoped it wasn’t a single trooper, because the man wouldn’t last thirty seconds against this crew. He probably wouldn’t even get a hand on his weapon. But not many cops traveled two to a car anymore. Budget cuts. So unless the trooper hit the gas and drove on like he’d seen nothing at all, the man was dead already.

  But driving on wasn’t in the typical state trooper mentality, Peter knew. Often operating on their own, many miles from backup, troopers tended to function more like the Lone Ranger. He was probably already on his radio, calling it in. Calling for more cars on this remote stretch of road, calling for an ambulance. Peter and Henry’s crew still had a chance.

  The trooper slowed his car and pulled onto the far shoulder. Peter glanced at Deacon, who gave him a tiny nod. He was locked on and pissed off, Peter could see now, although he was bleeding nicely from the head where he’d been slammed with the shotgun.

  Deacon’s last job in the Army had been as a hand-to-hand combat instructor. He’d be formidable.

  Banjo’s eyes were closed. He wouldn’t be much help.

  Henry was unconscious or dead.

  Peter looked at the man with the shotgun. He was half turned toward the police car, the muzzle rising away from Deacon.

  Peter carefully unlaced his fingers and flexed his legs, trying to get the blood moving. He’d have to move fast. He caught Deacon’s eyes again, then pointed his eyeballs at the man with the shotgun, then back to Deacon. Deacon gave another tiny nod. He was closer, he’d take the man with the shotgun. That would be the quickest way to get a weapon. Peter would take the first man, who only had a sidearm.