Deadfall

by Robert Liparulo

  “Yes, he went because a lot of people wouldn’t.”

  “Why wouldn’t they?”

  “Well . . . it’s not their jobs.”

  He nodded.

  She looked into his eyes, still red though he had not cried for hours.

  He reached over and picked up her hand. He touched her fingertips, which were raw and bleeding. “Do you want me to work on it now?” he said.

  “I almost got it.” She kissed his forehead and stood.

  She reached under a metal shelf and felt the nut and bolt that secured it to the brace, against which Dillon leaned. The pressure of his body prevented the metal from rattling and screeching on the floor. She had already removed the bolts from three of the four shelves. It was an arduous process. The bolts were rusty, but she found that if she applied steady pressure to the nut, it would eventually turn. After a few rotations, the bolt wanted to turn with the nut. She had tried holding the head of the bolt, but the smooth, round surface would slip through her fingers. Even pressing her thumb and fingernails into the bolt’s slotted head would do nothing but snap off her nails. Then she discovered that if she pulled on the nut, she could hold the bolt in place while she slowly, slowly unscrewed it.

  Her thumb, index, and middle fingers of both hands throbbed in pain, as though she had touched their tips to a griddle. Still, she had worked the nuts off three bolts. Only three quarters of an inch long, they were insufficient weapons, but the brace was an L-shaped, sixfoot- long metal spear. Or club . . . She would decide how to use it at the time of their escape.

  As she worked—feeling the bolt turn with the nut more times than not—she looked down at the top of her son’s head. Her love for him, her grief for Tom, her hatred for Declan: it was a volatile mix, the way hydrogen peroxide, acetone, and sulfuric acid combined to make the binary liquid explosive that could blow an airplane out of the sky.

  “Mom,” Dillon said.

  She was pushing her left palm into the head of the bolt and pulling the nut on the other side of the upright with all the force she could muster into the thumb and index finger of her right hand.

  “Mom,” he said more sharply. “They’re coming.”

  She heard the lock snap, and she turned to the door just as it opened.

  The teenage boy stepped in. He had told them his name was Kyrill one time when he had brought them sandwiches and she had asked. He had a sweet face and spoke to them gently, but he was too much under Declan’s influence, and she would never forget that he had held her son when Declan cut his face.

  Declan entered next. The fluorescent light behind him was bright, illuminating the front half of the room while the rear remained in shadow. He studied her, then dropped his eyes to the boy sitting at her feet. He seemed to be puzzling over the activity that would put them in that position.

  She held her hands in fists, hiding her bloody fingers and thumbs. Hoping it looked to Declan like she was merely angry.

  “You all right?” He said.

  “What do you think?”

  His eyes roamed down her body, and she felt an icy spider scamper up her spine. She crossed her arms over her chest.

  “I think you’re very all right,” he said.

  Don’t go there, she thought. I’m not ready yet, but I’ll fight you to the death. “What do you want?” she said.

  He stepped closer. “A favor.”

  “Yeah?”

  He tilted his head back toward the door. “We have a videographer here. He’s shooting sort of a documentary, some footage we’re going to use in a video game. He was wondering if you’d consent to an interview. You and your son.” He looked down at the boy. “What’s your name again?”

  Dillon answered, almost inaudibly.

  “Dillon,” Declan repeated. “That’s right.” He looked up at Laura expectantly.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said.When he remained silent, she continued. “Why would I do something like that?”

  He took a step closer. “I thought . . . in the interest of reconciliation.”

  “Reconciliation?”

  He smiled. “We didn’t make out so well the last time we spoke. I thought you’d like to do something that showed there were no hard feelings.”

  She couldn’t help it: she stepped over Dillon’s legs and swung her hand at Declan’s face.

  He grabbed her wrist before she made contact. Glaring at her, he pulled her hand away. His eyes lowered to her bloody fingers. A scowl broke his icy countenance. Without releasing one wrist, he grabbed the other and twisted it. “Show me.”

  She loosened her fist to reveal the bloody digits on this hand as well.

  He looked at Dillon, who blinked up at him, innocent and unknowing. He scanned the room, squinting into corners, at the objects on the shelves. “What have you—” he started. The handle of the open door behind him banged loudly into the wall as someone crashed into it.

  “Declan!” the girl, Cortland, called.

  He glared into Laura’s eyes, his own moving, searching, as though reading her thoughts.

  “Declan!” Cortland repeated.

  “What?”

  “We found them. They’re in town.”

  His hands tightened on her wrists, pneumatic vises.Then he released his grip, spun, and headed out the door. “Where?” he snapped, passing the girl.

  She hurried to follow him. “Coming into town—they’re by the Elks Lodge.”

  Kyrill rushed out the door and slammed it, throwing Laura and Dillon back into a pool of darkness.

  23

  Declan left the supply room and headed for the hall.

  “Where’s the Slacker?” he said to Cortland, who was on his heels.

  “Pru’s room,” she said.

  Behind him, Declan heard the storeroom door slam shut and the lock engage. He had more crucial things on his mind, but not hearing the door shut and lock would have nagged at him. Eventually, he would have interrupted the bigger task to discover why he hadn’t heard it. It was a slightly obsessive-compulsive thing that he trusted to keep loose ends from entangling his many endeavors. If, in a movie, a character opened a cabinet and walked away, it would bug him to no end that the cabinet door was never shut. But he wouldn’t throw a fit and refuse to watch the rest of the movie; the compulsion wasn’t disabling that way. He saw it as a skill. Sort of an extra sense— his Spidey sense, though it wasn’t as cool or powerful as Peter Parker’s ability.

  Just as the absence of a slamming door would have nagged at him, he would not forget to follow up on why the woman’s fingers were bloody. This freed him to move on to more important matters. So while OCD tended to inhibit its sufferers, making a mess of priorities, his version of it helped him do the right thing at the right time. It was a mental notepad and security system that he hoped to develop over time.

  He breezed into what the folks of Fiddler Falls had apparently used as a meeting room. It had been commandeered by his boys and turned into a bedroom and a getaway from the sound of the cattle mewing through the auditorium doors. Pruitt was sitting on the floor with his back against the far wall, the device in his hands. His ever-present camera lay on the floor beside him, a dog always at its master’s side.

  “When did you spot them?” Declan asked.

  “Just a minute ago. Looked like moving shadows, maybe an animal. Then they crossed the street by the school, and I zoomed in.”

  Declan snapped his fingers and held out his hand. Simultaneously, he pointed at Cortland. “Get Bad and Julie back here now.”

  She pulled a gray walkie-talkie off her belt.

  Pru gave the device to Declan. Known as SLCR—or Slacker—it was shaped like a horizontally oriented Palm Pilot. Buttons and thumb controls cluttered the left and right sides of its flat face. In the center, a four-inch LCD screen showed an image of the street outside. The camera was situated high above the town, so buildings were represented by their rooftops, cars looked like Matchbox toys, people were mostly heads and shoulders. />
  Though the screen was color, the video signal received from the satellite was black-and-white. Actually, sixty-four shades of gray, Declan thought. This allowed the lens to zoom in and focus on a newspaper headline from 280 miles in the sky.The drawback was that dark grays became black, and objects that were white or in bright areas tended to bleach out beyond recognition. Nighttime imaging was worse. Optics was not the system’s strong suit.

  Declan had to admit that what it was designed to do, it did well. It was like programming a video game—trial and error and one bug-fix at a time.

  “Where?” he said.

  “I was tracking them, heading this way. Nudge it down a bit.”

  Declan’s thumb twitched over a knob, and the image blurred. It quickly resolved itself into a different section of Provincial.

  “I don’t—” But suddenly, he did see them. First one, then two, then three bodies emerging from shadow. Sticking close to one another. One broke off and stepped into the street. Declan recognized the point of interest and smiled: Ol’ Tom’s mortal remains. Not much to look at, a tattered boot and piece of leg.

  After traversing the circular depression that marked the end of Tom’s career as a cop, the figure paused. It moved back to the others. A moment later, they all turned to look at something, then darted back into the shadows. Declan tapped the thumb control. He watched the Hummer take the nearest corner—so fast, it appeared to nearly tip.

  “Bad’s back,” he said. “Get your camera ready.You’re going out.”

  Pruitt hoisted himself off the floor, yanking the camera up with him.

  A door banged. Moments later, Bad rushed into the room. Julian appeared behind him.

  “What, you got them?” Bad said.

  Squinting at the screen, Declan said, “Just up the street, heading this way.”

  They were right there. Three little heads, swaying arms, jerky feet.

  It had taken a while to get used to watching objects from directly overhead. They crossed the street a block and a half away from the community center. They were now near the site where Declan had gotten the ball rolling by blasting away that trapper and his crappy Subaru. He moved his thumb to bump away a clear plastic cover over another thumb control. He pushed down on the control, causing red crosshairs to appear. He moved the targeting optics over one of the figures. When he let go, the crosshairs disappeared.

  “Ah!” he snapped in frustration. If the target had been in range, the crosshairs would have remained active. As a safety precaution, and because of a lot of technical nonsense Declan didn’t understand, the designers had built into this prototype what they called PTL—proximity targeting limiter. It required the Slacker to be within two hundred yards of the intended target—sometimes closer, depending on the satellite’s precise location. First thing back home, he would insist on conducting another field test without PTL—it had inhibited his desires too many times.

  “We gotta get out there,” he said. “Julie, you stay. Kyrill, Bad, get your—”

  They held up their weapons.

  “Cort, your choice.”

  She thought a moment. “Stay. I wanna get some food for—”

  “All right,” Declan said, brushing past her. As he strode along a corridor and into the vestibule, he watched the screen. At the front door, he stopped. He turned to face his crew, resting his butt on the push bar that would open the door.

  “All I have to do is get close.This should take three minutes, tops.”

  He heaved backward, rolling off the swinging door and into the night.

  24

  Hutch paused in front of a used-book store to consider the car in the street. It was crushed and burned. Of course he knew what had happened to it, but he would have liked a closer look; perhaps it would offer more clues to what they were up against. Keeping him from the inspection was the Hummer. It sat in the street only a block away. Doing anything other than reconnoitering the killer’s whereabouts would be akin to having a picnic within sight of a lion’s den.

  Terry nudged him. He gestured at something: a dog in the gutter, nearly torn in half.

  They moved in single file, as close to the storefronts as window ledges, mailboxes, and various other protrusions would allow. They reached a glass door that had spiderwebbed. Clinging to the cracked pane, like an Easter decal on a broken egg, were the words SASKATCHEWAN ENVIRONMENTAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT. A picture window next to the door had lost its glass completely. Shards as long as swords lay on the sidewalk and just inside the interior.

  Hutch could not see a way to avoid the glass, which he knew would crunch and snap under their feet. He turned to Terry directly behind him. “We need to move out into the street.”

  “It’s too open,”Terry whispered.

  “It’s that or—” He leaned sideways from his waist so that Terry could see the glass.

  “I’d rather be heard than seen,”Terry said. “If they’re in the building on the next block, they might be watching, and anything in the street this close will be seen.We may not know it until a bullet hits one of us in the head or the cannon takes us all out.”

  Hutch agreed. “I can’t help but feel that smashed car right there and that depression we passed in the road are the tracks of some monster, and it’s close.”

  Phil leaned past Terry. “More like the bones of an ogre’s victims scattered in front of its lair.”

  The image hit home.

  Terry said, “I don’t want to be seen or heard. Let’s go back and around. There has to be another way to get to the next block.”

  “Phil?” Hutch said and gestured for Phil to turn around and lead the way back to the corner. Three steps toward it, Hutch heard the sound of a heavy commercial door opening behind him.

  “Go!” he whispered. “Hurry!” Running on tiptoes, they reached the corner and turned one by one. Hutch stopped.

  “Right there,” he heard someone say. He felt a hand squeezing his guts. They’d been seen.

  The voice continued. “I lost them in the shadows, but they were right there, right there.”

  Feet pounded on the pavement, growing louder.

  “Wait!” demanded the same voice. “Back off.”

  A chime sounded, the faint tinkle of a musical tone.

  Then the whoosh-crack explosion erupted on the street. The sidewalk under Hutch shook. He heard bricks and wood, stone and glass ripped from the storefronts and hurled in all directions. He ran toward the back of the building around which Terry and Phil had disappeared. On the main street debris rained down, forming a teetering melody.

  Hutch swung around the corner and nearly crashed into Terry and Phil.

  Phil’s eyes were huge. He said, “Holy—”

  Another explosion. The building itself vibrated. Something fell off the roof. The destruction of this one blast seemed to extend much longer than the strike itself. Like a scream of agony after a gunshot. All three of them crouched low and covered their heads with their hands. Terry slapped Hutch on the shoulder and said, “That house . . .”

  Across a small dirt parking lot and grassless yard was a darkwindowed residence.Terry started for it, but Hutch grabbed his arm.

  “Stick to the shadows,” he said in a harsh whisper. He rose to lean over Terry and bat at Phil’s head. “Stick to the shadows,” he repeated. “I heard someone say he lost us in the shadows. I don’t think they can see us if we stay under the eaves.”

  Terry said, “What do you mean, they can’t see us? They’re blasting at us.”

  “A shot in the dark,” Hutch said. “Literally, a shot in the dark. I think they saw us in front of the stores and thought we were still there. Turning around saved our lives.”

  Terry shook his head. “Pure luck.What’s going to save us next time?”

  Phil chimed in. “We can’t stay here.What if they blast this whole block?”

  Hutch said, “I think they want to see us. They’re having fun.”

  “Except,” Terry said, “they know we’re ar
med. They know you have a bow, and they think I have a gun.That might make them a little more trigger happy.”

  Hutch looked around, thinking. He didn’t like staying stationary, either—on the same block, their backs pressed against the same building that the killers were bombarding. But he was convinced they couldn’t see them as long as they remained in the shadows. So it was either stay there or run and expose themselves. If the men hunting them truly believed they had their prey pinned down, they would investigate, looking into the stores and eventually circling the building. The only thing slowing them down now was either their intention to continue bombing or, as Terry pointed out, their fear of getting shot.

  Hutch slipped past his friends and, waddling in a low crouch, started moving along the length of the building. He let his left knee bump against the brick, assuring that he remained in the shadow of the eaves while his mind explored their options.

  “Hey,” Phil whipered, coming after him. “What are you doing?”

  Hutch slipped his bow off his back and extracted an arrow. He stopped to nock it. “Bringing the fight to them.”

  Blood seeped from Laura,s fingertips. She pulled on the nut and turned, pulled and turned. Declan had seen her fingers, and it would not take him long to return and find out the cause. At minimum, she would lose her potential weapon. He would either refasten the shelves to the upright, making sure they were impossibly tight, or move them altogether. It was possible, however, that he would also punish her. And what was Declan’s idea of punishment? He might try to act on his crude ogling of her body. Or worse, get at her by hurting Dillon.

  After his senseless slicing of her son’s cheek, that seemed the more likely of Declan’s choices. She would not let that happen. He would not hurt her son again. Ever. Her fingers tingled with pain, occasionally feeling like needles were sliding under her nails, but she pulled and turned.The palm of her other hand was also raw and bleeding as she pushed it into the head of the bolt, trying to stop it from turning.

  “Hey,” Dillon said, looking up. He was touching the top of his head. He looked at his fingers and smelled them.