Deadfall

by Robert Liparulo

  “He’ll kill you. He will.” His voice was strained. His eyes brimmed with tears.

  She noticed the hand he extended toward her was shaking. They were in a terrible situation, far beyond repair, and he knew it. Unlike Declan and the others, he knew what they had done. He was not living in a bubble. More accurately, he recognized that they were not playing a video game. They were destroying lives, whole families, an entire town. The reality of that bore deep into Julian’s soul. His eyes were at once haunted and intense. He did not want to be here any more than Laura did. And like her, he did not know what to do about it.

  But he had said something, and she had to know—“You told Declan to use me to get to Dillon.”

  “I didn’t mean it. I was trying to stop him from killing you.That’s all.”

  “But Dillon . . . is he alive? Please.”

  Julian shook his head. “We haven’t seen him.” His lips were dehydrated, cracking. He moistened them now with his tongue.“We didn’t kill him.”

  “We can’t let him do what you said. Declan wants to get him . . .” Her thoughts tumbled like jigsaw puzzle pieces falling from the sky. She grabbed at them, not knowing how they could fit together into something that would save her and Dillon. Declan had mentioned the cabin. Somehow, he knew about the cabin. No matter what they tried to do, he seemed always to be either one step ahead or so close behind it didn’t matter. Grasping, grasping, she said, “Give me your gun.”

  Julian considered it: she saw it on his face.

  He looked at it, then at her. “I can’t,” he said.

  “Then what is this about?” she snapped. “Your good intentions don’t mean anything.Your being sorry for what your brother is doing doesn’t matter. None of it matters if you don’t help now.”

  His face pleaded with her. He was a child caught in a situation that would crush most adults. He did not know what to do, and his fear of Declan did not leave room to hear her. Anguish made him appear much older than he was. Uncertainty gave him much more youth. The result was not a compromise that approximated his actual age, but an awful coexistence of innocence and guilt. He was a man-child being torn apart.

  He sighed deeply, heavily. He inclined his head. “Come on.”

  “Julian, please.You know Dillon. He’s going to die if you do this. Do you want that?”

  Julian shook his head. “No. Of course I don’t.”

  “Then help me.”

  The Jeep’s horn blared—twice, long.

  Julian jumped. He stared at the Jeep in thought. Without looking at her he said, “You have to come. Maybe . . . I don’t know . . .”

  Quietly, she said his name.

  He snapped his gaze at her. “Come on,” he said more firmly. “Declan won’t like us talking.We have to move.We have to go. Do you need help?”

  She studied the ground, shook her head. She rose to her feet and straightened her back, feeling bruises she couldn’t see. She walked stiffly to the rear passenger door. Julian fell in behind her, keeping his distance. She opened the door, sat, and slid across the bench seat to the other side. Declan was in the driver’s seat in front of her. Julian got in and shut the door.

  “I don’t think so, honey,” Declan said, gazing over his shoulder at her. “Far back for you. Go ahead, climb over the seat.”

  She did, feeling every bruise and cut on her body.

  Declan watched her in the rearview mirror. He said, “I don’t know if you can open the back hatch from the inside. Don’t. If you do, I’ll just turn around and run you over. Then I’ll drag your body behind the car.”

  She glared at his reflected eyes. Her fury meant nothing to him. Her white-hot anger was a spark against an iceberg. She sat back, leaning against the hatch, then shifted so her weight was against a molded spare tire cover. She did not want to risk even accidentally opening the rear hatch.

  Declan presented his open palm between the front bucket seats. “Give me the gun, Julie.” The boy did, and Declan’s hand disappeared with it. His eyes came back to her in the mirror. “You know, I thought for a minute Julie was gonna give you his gun. If he had . . .” He waggled a semiautomatic pistol where she could see it. She recognized it: it had been Tom’s.

  A chill tickled Laura’s arms, lightly, like walking through fog. Her stomach tightened, but not as much as it should have realizing that it was only Julian’s defiance of her request that had saved them both. She was growing numb, and that scared her. While fear could paralyze her, make her think irrationally, numbness would make her lethargic and slow to react. If an opportunity to escape presented itself, she wanted to seize it quickly and passionately.

  Declan lowered the gun. He sighed, sounding bored. He plucked the walkie-talkie from his breast pocket and keyed the mike. “Kyrill? Bad?”

  After a moment, a fuzzy voice came through: “It’s Bad.What’s up?”

  “What are you doing?”

  Bad: “We’re looking for those guys you said.”

  “In the woods?”

  Bad: “Following the tree line.”

  Declan said, “You’re not going to find them that way. They’ll stay out of sight. Go straight through.You can do it.”

  Bad: “Straight through? Straight through where?”

  Declan was silent. He looked out the window and said to Cortland, “It’s them I should blow off the face of the earth.”

  Cortland laughed.

  Declan keyed the walkie-talkie: “The woods, Bad. Do you know where you’re going?”

  Long pause. Then Bad’s voice came through: “Okay, we got it.”

  Declan dropped the walkie-talkie into a cup holder in the center console. He draped an arm over the back of his seat and watched Julian return his gaze. “You ever hear the joke about the farmer and his bride?”

  Julian said nothing.

  “This farmer was heading back home after marrying some gal in an arranged wedding. They’re in this old carriage, getting pulled by a donkey. The donkey stops to eat some grass. The old farmer whips it and whips it until it starts going again. The guy says, ‘Donkey, that’s one.’ After a while, they pass a water trough, and the donkey stops to drink.The man whips it to get it going again and says, ‘Donkey, that’s two.’ After a while, the donkey sees something interesting and stops to check it out. The man says, ‘Donkey, that’s three.’ He gets out of the carriage with a shotgun and shoots the donkey dead. His wife yells, ‘How can you do such a thing!’ And the man looks up at her and says, ‘Woman, that’s one.’”

  Cortland giggled.

  Declan could have been carved from stone.

  Julian did not respond.

  Declan lifted his hand so that it was positioned between the brothers’ faces. He held up one finger. “Your helping that hunter escape on the plateau was one.Your trying to grab the gun from me just now and then sticking up for the woman—I’ll count both of those as number two.” He held the fingers in place for a long time.

  Finally Julian slapped them away.

  “You know I’m not joking,” Declan said. He sat back in his seat and got the car moving.

  Cortland glanced over the seat at Julian. Even she appeared shaken.

  64

  As they walked, Hutch used the broadhead as he would a knife, slicing and hacking away bits of wood from the sapling. He had asked Phil to keep watch for pursuers.

  In tending to his duty, Phil turned and spun and jumped at every sound.

  Finally Hutch said, “Listen for the big things, Phil. A car engine, footsteps crunching over the ground, gunfire. Things like that.”

  “No wind in the trees? No squirrels?”

  “Only if the squirrels have machine guns.”

  He went back to whittling, hoping he wasn’t wasting his time. Hoping more than that: if his efforts proved fruitless, it meant more than a waste of time; it meant certain death—no more running, no more chances. It would take at least a few hours to reach the cabin. He hoped that was enough time.

  As Hutch’s proje
ct took shape, the sun dipped closer to the horizon, the shadows grew darker, and the two of them pressed on. On occasion, Hutch stopped to check his compass and the topographical map. He would sometimes glance around, half expecting to see some sign of Dillon’s passing—something unintentional, like a broken branch or a sneaker print, or a clear indicator of the boy’s hope for a reunion with Hutch, like a piece of cloth tied to a tree or a smiley face written with a gooey energy bar. He realized the chances of their treading the same path were more than slim. Hutch was cutting as straight a line to the cabin as the terrain would allow. Dillon most likely would have followed landmarks he recognized to get him there.

  Hutch had no idea what he would find when he reached the cabin. In his mind it had become mythically important to their survival. It was their quest, and no matter how firmly or frequently he warned himself against hoping for a sudden solution to this whole stinking mess, he did think of it that way. What other place would a mother send her child in an emergency? To what other place would a child insist on going even when it meant forgoing the next town, with people and phones and shelter? To Hutch, the cabin had become a fortress, set among towering trees that provided not only seclusion but vantage points from which to guard and protect. The cabin-cumfortress would be impenetrable and contain not only a well-stocked kitchen but several satellite phones. And an armory.

  Yeah. If this was not what Hutch expected, it was what he hoped for. Unrealistic, to be sure, but in the middle of a nightmare couldn’t one dream?

  At minimum it would be set among trees, as most hunting cabins were. And as he walked, he worked to turn that fact into an advantage.

  Phil trudged along, now and then stopping to listen. “I think we’re being followed,” he said.

  Hutch stopped, cocking his head. “I don’t hear anything,” he whispered.

  Phil said, “An engine . . . sometimes. Sometimes, kind of a crunching sound, like you said. Something moving in the woods.” It had not yet become twilight, but in the woods it could have been. The distant trees and shadows became indistinct, murky, the way silt could make clear water opaque.

  “There’s not much we can do about it now,” Hutch said and continued walking. But fifteen minutes later he found a heavy bush. He and Phil crouched behind it, low. They stayed there for five minutes, listening, waiting. Hutch heard the engine Phil had mentioned. It seemed far away, but he knew not to trust his ears. The trees’ foliage and hills made visual confirmation almost a necessity. The vehicle could be traveling directly outside the woods, its noises severely dampened as they traveled through the trees, or it could be miles away with the hills and open valleys magnifying its sound.

  “Definitely a vehicle,” he whispered. “But I can’t tell if it’s near or far, coming or going.”

  “Creepy,” Phil said. “It’s like a ghost messing with my mind.” He punched a finger at his temple to illustrate the point.

  Hutch smiled. “So now we’ve got ghosts too?”

  Phil shrugged. “I don’t believe in ghosts, but if I did, David would be watching out for us.”

  “I think David’s the one messing with you. Getting back at you for always calling him Pretty Boy.”

  They waited a few more minutes. When no other sounds reached them, they continued toward the cabin. He believed they were almost there when he held up the branch. “What do you think?”

  “What is it?”

  “What is it? It’s a bow.”

  “I thought bows were arced.”

  “It will be, when I string it.” He held a flat length of wood, six feet long and two inches wide. It was thicker in the center than at the ends. He had whittled a groove into each end to hold the bowstring. His recurve had featured an arrow rest at the handle; for this one, he would rest the arrow on his hand. He said, “It’s called a longbow. It gets its firing power from its length.”

  Phil said, “You got string?”

  “Yep.”

  “Put it on, man.”

  “I have one more thing to do with it. It may not be the smartest thing to do, especially if we’re being pursued, but I’m pretty sure it needs it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It needs to be fire-hardened.”

  “You want to start a fire?”

  “It won’t take long. I’d like to do it before we reach the cabin. I want to have this thing ready in case they’re already there; if they aren’t, I don’t want the smoke to lead them there.”

  “Aren’t we close?”

  “Close isn’t there.”

  Hutch cleared away a patch of loam while Phil gathered twigs.

  “The drier the better,” Hutch reminded him.

  “I know, I know.”

  Hutch made a fist-sized pile. He asked Phil to keep feeding the fire as necessary. He wanted the flame to be as small as possible. Using the matches he had taken from the mine when he had also retrieved the mouth harp, he lit his open kiln. Several inches at a time, he fed the bow into the fire, turning it slowly. When he thought the wood might ignite, he removed that section, feeding in another.When all the wood had been thoroughly heated, he stomped out the fire.

  “We’d better get moving,” he said.

  They walked, and Hutch withdrew the bowstring from his pocket. He stopped. He slipped a loop into the groove on one end, flipped the bow over, and wedged the stringed end against his boot. He pulled back on the riser—the center of the bow—while pushing down on the other end. He slipped the loose end of the bowstring into the groove. He had a bow.

  “Yeah,” Phil said.

  “We’ll see.”

  He nocked the arrow that he had used to whittle the bow onto the string and rested the shaft on the notch at the center. He drew back, thinking of all the things that could go wrong: one of the string grooves could crack the end of the bow, a bow arm itself could snap, the draw weight could be insufficient to propel an arrow straight or to penetrate a target.

  The draw weight felt heavy: sixty, seventy pounds. Keeping his left arm slightly bent, he pulled the string but stopped before its ideal position, where his thumb could fit into the notch of his jaw, below the earlobe. Intuitively, he believed pulling back further would snap the bow. The trick with recurve bows, which did not use cams to counter the draw weights as did compound bows, was to find that fine line between drawing power and bow strength. Hutch would rather fire an arrow at slightly less than maximum power than risk losing the weapon altogether.

  Phil pointed at a tree some distance off. “That one right there,” he said and described it.

  “No . . . see that mushroom near it?”

  “Mushroom?”

  Hutch let the arrow fly. It struck the ground ten feet before its target and disappeared under a blanket of needles, peat, and moss.

  “Not as strong as it felt,” Hutch commented, walking toward the mushroom. He retrieved his arrow and returned to Phil.

  “Hit a tree,” Phil urged.

  Nocking the arrow and drawing back on the string, Hutch said, “I don’t have enough arrows. A tree might break the broadhead, or the arrow could get wedged in too deep to remove.”

  This time the arrow sailed inches above the mushroom. On the fourth shot Hutch bagged himself a fungus.

  Phil hooted in triumph, then caught himself. “You made yourself a pretty nice bow,” he said.

  Hutch nodded, appraising the bow with appreciation. “I’m doing some compensating in the shooting, letting the arrow come off the bow a little bit, guessing the right draw length. Means I can’t be precise . . . but close.”

  Phil sounded concerned. “Is close good enough?”

  Hutch looked at him. “Gonna have to be.” He went for the arrow.

  They walked another half hour.When Hutch checked the map, he found that they were about five minutes from the cabin, give or take, considering it was based on Dillon’s recollection.

  He pushed the bow onto his shoulder. He hoped he wouldn’t need it. But he knew he would.

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sp; 65

  Fifteen minutes later they stepped out of the trees into a meadow. Hutch closed his eyes in despair.

  Phil said, “You’ve gotta be kidding.”

  Three hundred yards across the grassy meadow sat a rustic log cabin, roughly the size of a single-car garage. One of the narrow sides faced them. There was a window, dead center, and above it, near the apex of the inverted-V roofline, someone had mounted a set of moose antlers. The visible long side must have been the rear wall; it bore no doors or windows. Made sense: it meant the facade faced down the valley meadow, toward Fiddler Falls, the Fond du Lac River, and a picturesque vista of rolling trees and hills.

  Beyond the cabin, the land had been scorched bare by fire for as far as Hutch could see. At one time, the cabin had been positioned on the outskirts of what was probably a lush, verdant forest. The fire had burned to within fifty feet of the cabin. The line delineating undamaged soil from a sea of black ash and burned timber formed a scalloped pattern down that far side of the meadow—coming from far north, ebbing around the cabin, and continuing down the valley.

  Hadn’t Dillon mentioned something about the cabin surviving the fire naturally? That was one reason his family considered it special. Hutch understood the sentiment. It seemed miraculous that this one structure had survived. He wondered if the trees had been cut back around it to form a firebreak or if someone had dumped water on it from a crop duster–type plane. He did not know enough about fires up here or how attached people were to their cabins to guess how they’d behave in such circumstances.

  Clearly, the area had been beautiful before the fire. Now, however, the cabin was a lonely building in the center of . . . nothing.Worse than nothing. The blackened landscape and astringent odor of smoke and charred wood made it seem like an outpost on the periphery of hell, where even the flames only passed through occasionally.

  The only living trees within sight were the ones from whose shadows Hutch and Phil had just stepped—way, way beyond his effective firing distance. Maybe he could hide on one side of the pitched roof and at the proper moment spring up and fire.Two problems with that: both sides of the roof were visible from the most likely approach to the cabin; and if Declan used the optics available to him from the satellite, Hutch would be in plain view. He had hoped the cabin was set among the trees not only to shield it from Declan, but also to provide plenty of places for him to protect it from outside and out of sight.