Deadfall

by Robert Liparulo

  Their voices trailed away. The last thing Hutch heard was: “Dec wants to level the town, maybe get some crowd shots of an SLC strike . . .”

  59

  Hutch pushed off his blanket of moss, dirt, and needles. Quietly he rolled away from Phil, out from under the blowdown. He half expected to hear a shout, someone standing at the edge of the plateau, but no calls rang out. Kneeling on the slope, he leaned close to Phil.

  “Hold still,” he said. He brought the arrow’s broadhead up to the gag and made little slices in the material. It came free. As Phil yanked it out of his mouth, Hutch noticed that the tip of the broadhead had drawn blood. Phil wiped at the cut, a minor annoyance. He stretched his mouth and before he could say anything out loud, Hutch held his finger up to his mouth.

  Phil whispered, “I think I was close to a town when that helicopter swung down to pick me up. I thought it was a rescue chopper.”

  “Tell me later.” He squinted at Phil’s restraints. The handcuffs were professional, solid shackles connected by a short, thick chain. Hutch had the arrow but not his utility belt. He could think of nothing that would unlock the restraints or break their chain.

  “Hutch, I didn’t mean to leave you guys like that. I saw that cannon thing blast the back of that big building, and I thought—”

  “Wait a minute. You never met up with Terry? I thought he was with you.”

  “I never saw him. I thought you guys . . . I thought that cannon got you.”

  “You didn’t see a woman either? She was with Terry.”

  “A woman?”

  “We got separated.” Hutch looked up to the plateau, then out toward the open area. “The woman’s son was with me. I left him around that hill. I’ve got to go get him.You stay here.”

  Phil swung his legs out. He tried to sit up, conked his head on the wood. “No way!” he said, too loudly. “Don’t leave me here.”

  “This is the safest place for you. I’ve got to cross some open space to reach the boy. I’m pretty sure the door to where he is got hit by the laser. I might need to find another way in. You can’t be traipsing around this steep slope in the open with your hands bound.”

  “But if you . . .What laser?”

  Hutch had forgotten Phil had shown up after Declan had explained his weapon. “That’s what it is.That’s what got David and keeps blasting down. It’s called a satellite laser cannon.”

  “Satellite . . . laser . . . cannon.” He said it slowly, as though in doing so some secret to its existence and defeat would come to him, but then he simply nodded.

  “So stay here, okay? You’ll be safe.”

  Phil shook his head. “No way.”

  Hutch did not want to waste time arguing with him. He was anxious to find Dillon. And who knew when Kyrill and Bad would decide that, if not for the money then to please Declan, it was worth their efforts to find the escapees?

  “All right,” he said. “Just be really quiet and don’t ask questions. I’m not giving you a guided tour of where I’ve been or where I’m going. So if you want to tag along, be quiet.”

  Phil nodded.

  “Where are your glasses? Can you see?”

  “I’m fine,” he said dismissively, but his eyes were squeezed into narrow slits. “They weren’t that strong.”

  Hutch slapped Phil on the arm. “We’ll get you out of those handcuffs as soon as we can.”

  They walked parallel to the edge of the plateau and stopped where the trees ended. The open area was grassy and gravelly. It had dried quite a bit, which made the grass less slick but the gravel more eager to slip out from under their feet. Hutch was afraid one of them, especially Phil, would fall and not stop until reaching the valley floor.The noise could very well draw Kyrill or Bad’s attention; he could not tell for sure that they were in the car and not heading, at that moment, to the edge of the plateau.

  “We’ll move downslope through the trees. The ground covering here is quieter, and the trees will keep us steady.”

  They began descending. After a short time, a glint in the dirt caught Hutch’s eye. One of his arrows. He retrieved it and found two more. He felt better. Four arrows instead of one. Never mind his bow was gone. He continued down the slope. When he believed they were even with the secondary exit, Hutch left the forest to walk across the slope, around the bend of the hill.

  A smoking hole marked where the exit had been. His insides felt pulled tight, as though a net had caught them. Huge chunks of concrete lay around the gaping hole. Having come around the bend of the hill, he and Phil were no longer visible to someone at the edge of the plateau. If Kyrill, Bad, or Pruitt walked the perimeter of the crater, perhaps to reconnoiter the area from that higher advantage, or if they came down the slope to pick up their search where they had left off, they would spot the two men.

  While they were far from home free—far, far from home free—the relief of not being within sight of their pursuers was like shrugging off a crushing coat of chain mail.

  Hutch climbed atop a ripped chunk of concrete and peered into the hole below. It was no longer the cement shaft he had ascended, but it was still a shaft.Wider now, lined with earth, but a straight chimney all the same. The laser had not struck the shaft perfectly centered. It had left a semicircular column of concrete and roughly half of the metal ladder, sheared vertically its entire length. It looked like half a spinal column dangling down into the dark. The remaining rungs did not look strong enough to support him, since only one length of the metal side rail remained. In two spots visible to Hutch, the cement beneath the rungs had buckled and broken, causing the ladder to become unmoored. Unsafe was not the word. More like suicidal.

  He did not have a rope, didn’t know where to find one, and did not have the time to weave one out of branches. Still, even without the partial rungs, he would have found a way to climb down into the mining tunnels.

  He set the arrows down and stepped down onto a shelf in the cement to maneuver his way toward the rungs. He was vaguely aware that his body ached in a dozen places—head, arms, legs, ribs, guts. His desire to get to Dillon pushed the pain away, back into a foggy place where its shadows stirred, but the full extent of its horror was masked and muted.

  “Hutch,” Phil whispered. “You can’t get down there.”

  Hutch tapped his lip with his finger, reminding Phil of their bargain. He whispered, “I’ll be back as soon as I find Dillon.You don’t have any matches, do you?”

  Phil shook his head.

  “I had some . . . not anymore. I know where I can find a few, but I may be able to do without. Find some branches with dead needles and toss them down to me in five minutes. Don’t worry about where I am. Don’t call down. Just toss them in the hole.”

  Phil nodded.

  Hutch made his way to what was left of the ladder. He tried his weight on one of the rungs. It creaked and bent down. He moved his foot closer to the metal brace to which the rung was welded. He lowered his weight onto it. The rung bent slightly, but held.

  The ladder disappeared into the dark below. He lowered himself one rung at a time. His mind kept urging his body to rush. He pushed aside the image of Dillon and focused on reaching the bottom of the shaft alive. At the first bulge in the concrete and ladder, he leaned out over the shaft and tried to stretch his foot back in below the hump. The shift in weight distribution caused an anchor bolt to pop loose.The ladder came away from the wall several inches, jarring Hutch sharply. That movement, in turn, caused the next bolt up to snap out of the concrete.The metal ladder jerked out further from the wall.The next bolt popped out.

  “Hutch!” Phil called, as quietly as his concern allowed him.

  Hutch swung over the empty space below him.With each lost bolt, he had levered farther and farther from the wall. A fourth bolt snapped out of the concrete. Hutch released his left hand from a rung, grabbed the one below it, did the same with his right hand. Using only his arm muscles, he shimmied hand over hand past the bulge.When the ladder was straight again, he
stood on a rung, breathing hard. He rested like that for twenty seconds, then continued on.

  At the next bulge, he immediately stepped off the ladder and lowered himself by hand. No bolts gave way. As the dark shadows of the shaft swallowed him, a thought formed in his brain: I’m descending through the throat and into the stomach of a great beast.

  The fragrance of rich soil and ozone hung heavily in the air. Something like the smell of faulty brake pads also tinged his senses; he thought it was probably burnt concrete. God help him, he sniffed for that pungent, charbroiled-meat odor he remembered from when David had died. When he did not detect it, a surge of hope hit his heart like adrenaline.

  After the circle of light above had become a distant disc, the ladder became whole again. He moved down more quickly. He stopped once to gauge his progress and thought he was near the bottom.

  “Hello?” he called.

  An echo. No answer. A sound—like pant legs rubbing together.

  “Dil—”

  A tree branch struck his head. It continued on, its needles brushing against the wall of the shaft. He looked up to see another branch sailing down. He ducked out of its way. The branches landed just under him.

  He found the end of the ladder and hopped down. A large boulder immediately met his feet, he slipped on it, fell. His head struck more debris from the widened shaft. He felt around and realized most of the concrete that had come out of the shaft had pulverized into powder. The larger blocks evidently broke off after the laser strike; they had not been directly in its path. He found what he was expecting to—a length of metal rebar and, after some searching, a particularly stony fist-sized wedge of concrete. With these items and the branches, Hutch moved deeper into the tunnel.

  “Dillon,” he called. And again. “It’s me, Hutch!”

  He laid the branches in the center of the tunnel, speared the rebar through the bundle of needles, and started striking it with the concrete. After a few strikes he found the sweet spot, and sparks flew.The needles did not ignite, and after twenty strikes he worried that the rain had drenched them too thoroughly.

  He kept striking and striking. With each blow he called into the tunnel: “Dillon! . . . Dillon! . . . Dillon! . . . Dillon!”

  His voice grew hoarse. He stared into the darkness, which seemed to shift, black on black. Every time it did, he expected to see the boy. A flicker caught his attention. He looked down to see flames. They were indistinct and blurry. He realized his eyes had teared up.

  Teared up? He had wept in frustration and worry.

  None of that now, he thought, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.That was no good. Useless. Pointless.Weird.

  He tossed the rebar and the cement chunk aside and blew gently at the flames. The fire grew larger. He had made a torch. Smoke curled from the dry needles, stinging his eyes, making him cough. He picked up the branches, holding them together. He went back to the open shaft, slowly arcing the torch across the area.There were large chunks of fallen concrete, a lot of powder, but no Dillon. He felt relief wash over him. Now it was a matter of finding the boy, not burying him. He noticed something in the dust and bent to retrieve it. It was his bowstring, the one he had used to tether himself to Dillon. He would need it. He looped it into a tight coil and slipped it into his coat pocket.

  He considered briefly which way to head. He had told Dillon to go back into the tunnels. He believed the boy would head back to the beds they had made and wait for Hutch there. With the fire flickering, spreading yellow light five or ten feet into the tunnel ahead of him, and smoke pooling like gravity-deprived liquid on the roof of the tunnel, he headed toward the mine’s main entrance, calling Dillon’s name.

  60

  Laura clung to Terry,trusting his navigation.The smoke, rising from where the green light had flashed down, had become almost invisible against the white-blue sky. The ferocity of that green light, coupled with its thundering peal, had made her think that the smoke would go on forever, but it hadn’t. By the time they realized they could not use it as a marker, they were already near enough that they didn’t need it.

  Twice more she thought she heard the same crack of thunder that was not thunder. Each time Terry had stopped and killed the engine. They’d listened, heard nothing, and started up again.

  Terry had tried to keep their route as straight to the smoke as possible. He was now traversing a swath of woods, slaloming around trees, crashing through brambles and tangled clumps of dead branches.

  As his confidence increased, so did his speed. Laura gritted her teeth and held on tightly. She wanted to reach the spot of that strike from the sky as fast as she could, but it would be nice to arrive alive. Several times Terry had zoomed so close to a tree that Laura felt her knee and thigh scrape it. She was happy to recognize the end of the woods not far off.

  She did not know why she believed that Declan had used his sky cannon to shoot at Dillon and Hutch. She just could not imagine that other people were out here, or that he would be doing anything but pursuing her son and his protector.Terry came out of the trees and slid to a stop.A shallow hill sloped down to a long wide valley and up again, becoming woods and more hills upon which the smoke emanated. Now she saw a second column of smoke, darker than the first. Coming from some place lower than the first, it dissipated and vanished lower in the sky.

  Almost directly in front of them, heading for town, was a green Cherokee. It was coming from the direction of the smoke.

  “Maybe they haven’t seen us,”Terry said.

  “I don’t care if they do,” she said, not really meaning it. “Just get to those hills, okay?”

  He nodded.

  Then the truck turned directly toward them.

  People were always amazing Declan. He needed to work that fact into his video games. Most often, programmers were immersed in a corporate environment, despite believing themselves to be independent and artistic souls. Their monsters were deadlines, bosses, and the never-ending competition for employee of the month.The games they created often involved characters battling invading armies or creatures from hell or from another planet, or a biological experiment gone haywire. Always, they were pitted against things that wanted to tear them apart, to destroy them; the stakes were as high as they could possibly be. The Harley-riding, tattooed MIT graduates who fancied themselves both tough enough and smart enough to design video games always created characters who earned stamina and strength by surviving increasingly difficult challenges. To programmers it was a logical progression: lift a hundred pounds today, a hundred and ten tomorrow; kick little Tommy’s butt today, his big brother’s tomorrow.

  Made sense to Declan as well—until this trip.What he’d witnessed up here was not so much a progression of strength and skill. After all, in a condensed timeline, people grew tired, tempering their physical and mental abilities. No, what he learned was that people developed stamina and ingenuity in proportion to their level of attachment to whatever it was they stood to lose—a loved one, their life—or the anger of having been attacked. Call it the adrenaline factor. That’s what he wanted to work into future games.

  And it would look like this: The woman he’d kept in the storage room—Laura—whose husband he had killed, whose son he had cut. Finding a weapon in a room full of paper. Knocking out her captor. Escaping. Joining forces with—

  Declan squinted through the windshield.

  “Is that the guy who shot at us? The hunter?”

  Cort leaned forward in the passenger seat. “I think maybe . . .”

  Okay. Joining forces with another rogue element of the adventure.

  Great stuff. The adrenaline factor. He liked that.

  If Laura had been a character in a video game, by this time she would be either dead or holed up somewhere, waiting for rescue. Or, on the other end of the spectrum, she’d have acquisitioned a bulletproof flying suit, acquired martial arts skills, and found a gun to rival Declan’s to vanquish her enemies. The vanquishing part Laura seemed to have got. That
she would attempt it without a special suit, skills, or weapon was something nobody in the world Declan came from would understand.

  Chaos theory. The unpredictability of life. Programmers talked about these things, but they didn’t get it. Not really. The hunter who had taken shots at them; the man with the bow; jacking their Hummer; Laura and her kid escaping from the community center. The archer had said Dillon was dead. Declan had suspected otherwise. The blast to the mine’s emergency hatch had been meant to kill anyone hiding in the shaft, or at least turn the tunnels into an inescapable tomb. But now, here was the kid’s mom, looking to wreak some serious havoc. Declan was learning what chaos theory meant in the real world. This knowledge was so invaluable he would not have believed it without experiencing it. Excellent.

  “Get your gun, Cort.”

  “I don’t have one, remember?”

  “Julie, give her your gun.”

  Without a word, he did.

  Cortland held the pistol in both hands. She bounced up on the seat, tucking her legs under her. “What are we gonna do?”

  “We’re gonna go get ’em.” Declan’s answer made the question sound stupid.

  He accelerated toward the motorcycle. Instead of peeling away in another direction, to his astonishment it came straight for them. No, not to his astonishment. Not anymore: Chaos. Unpredictability. Adrenaline.

  The Jeep bounded through the open field. In the rearview mirror, Declan glimpsed Julian pulling the seat belt over his shoulder. He laughed.

  “Shoot them,” he instructed.

  “Now?” Cortland asked. The motorcycle was still at least a hundred yards distant.

  “Plug away, baby.”

  She rose onto her knees. “Like Bonnie and Clyde,” she said, a big grin splitting her face.

  “I was thinking more True Grit.”

  She skewed her face: Whatever. Then she popped her head and shoulders out the window.

  The speedometer edged up to fifty. The ruts and rocks of the field shook them like dice in a backgammon cup. The motorcycle—sixty yards away, closing fast.