by Jack Lively
“Damn right she does.”
Ellie looked at me. I shrugged. “You straight now?”
She said, “Enough for now. What about Dave? Can we let him go home?”
Dave had worked out as a useful appendage to the operation. “Yes. You should bring him a donut. It’s the least he deserves.”
Ellie nodded and brought out her phone. She tapped a couple of times on the screen and then held it up to her ear. Nothing. She looked at me. “Not answering. Goes straight to voice mail.”
I said, “Dave’s had an eventful evening. I bet he’s asleep. You want me to go check on him?”
Ellie shook her head. “I’ll cruise by on my way home. Maybe bring him that donut.” She walked away from the Land Cruiser. Turned back and said, “See you when I see you.”
Ellie got into her Ford pickup truck. The engine growled and then she was gone. Taillights receded into the dark. I pulled out after her.
About a mile from the roadhouse, the Land Cruiser hit the asphalt again. Tires that had been rocking over gravel now began to hum. I was back in America, whatever that was supposed to mean. I blew past the airport with the fence on my right. The runway was a strange field of mist, like a soft and flat surface that went on as far as the eye could see. Which wasn’t far, given the reduced visibility. I had come in from a logging trail alongside the southern fence. Past that was another length of straight asphalt before a T-junction.
When I arrived at the junction there were three choices. But only two of them were viable. Left and right were official roads, straight ahead was a logging trail. Ellie would have taken the left turn, back to town and Dave. To get to Ellie’s I would take a right turn. Problem was, it was blocked off by pylons and a big temporary Alaska Department of Fish and Game sign. The sign had the departmental logo on top, a circle divided into three horizontal areas: a goose above, a moose in the middle, and a Coho salmon on the bottom. The sign read ‘Road Closure: Accident Ahead’.
I remembered Ellie saying that she had been delayed by a ‘wildlife situation’, I figured this was it. Who knows what had gotten hit by a truck up here. The logging trail was my best option.
The trail was wide for several miles, before pinching in and getting rough. I put the pedal to the metal and maxed out the four-wheel-drive, taking the turns hard and rollicking over bumps. I had the windows down and felt a surge of exuberant energy, which made me lean my head out the window and holler into the night.
The trail descended and the headlight beams got sucked into mist before they could project more than a yard or two. Making it only a touch better than driving with a blindfold. I flipped up the high beams. When the road dipped again, I was flashed in the eyes by another set of high beams reflecting in the rear-view mirror. Another vehicle was following close. I punched the gas and got some separation. But the mist was tough to penetrate. Which only made me want to push the Toyota harder. The vehicle behind maintained its distance, set back a couple of hundred yards.
After a couple of minutes the lights behind me were gone. But there hadn’t been any other roads for it to go on. Maybe the car behind had turned off their lights to follow me in the dark.
I smiled to myself in the darkness of the Land Cruiser’s cab, which must have looked wicked in the dim light from the dashboard. I was enjoying the thought of Deckart attempting to use his brains. The guy had put together some kind of a plan.
Bring it on.
Forty-Seven
I was cruising down the track at a considerable speed when I saw the thing, about three seconds before crashing right into it. A grey hump emerged from the low hanging gloom, right in front of the Toyota. A mound almost as wide as the trail itself. Three seconds was enough to hit the brakes and turn three into six. The big old Land Cruiser fishtailed like an angry rattlesnake until it came to a stop right up against the thing.
Which, in the strong light from the vehicle, was obviously a very large animal.
I looked in the rear-view. No more lights following. I came down from the Toyota and approached. The animal musk was there. Similar to what I’d sensed at the creek with the bears, but stronger. A close and thick stench. The thing was not dead, it was agitated and moaning and grunting.
And then I saw the distinctive antlers and knew that it was a moose. A moose isn’t some kind of overgrown deer. It is another kind of thing altogether. Not on the level of an elephant, but maybe halfway there.
This one looked to be about ten feet long, which made it an adult male of the species. Standing, he would come up about six, seven feet at the shoulders. The moose was struggling, he was definitely not having a good day. My initial thought was that he had been hit by a car and come down through the woods from the main road, wounded and spooked. I looked for signs of damage by the light of the Land Cruiser’s high beams.
But then I got up close and saw two things. One was the bright pink feathering of a tranquilizing dart in his neck, which had been hidden from view by the antlers. The other was the moose’s enormous front leg, and the blood spilling all over the gravel trail. But the bright blood told only one part of the story and didn’t attract my attention so much as the cut from which it spilled. Which was clean and vivid in the hard light, splitting the flesh unnaturally. I was able to see the cross-section of muscle, and the white tendon, severed too perfectly. The moose was floundering in a pool of his own blood, heaving and shifting on the gravel, unable to stand, but trying desperately to do so. The blood didn’t come from a single cut, but four. Each of his limbs had been cleanly scored by a razor sharp blade wielded by a human hand. This intentionally cruel person had severed tendons to hamstring the moose, leaving him alive but incapable of getting up or moving.
I could think of only two reasons why someone might want to do that. One was to block my path and prevent me from continuing down the trail, and the other was for the pure psychopathic enjoyment of cruelty to another living being. Those cognitive processes took about a half second, and during that half second I detected another sound. Another, because it wasn’t the humming car engine or the moose, who was making enough noise all by himself, grunting and groaning and heaving. It was a distinctly human sound, that of a foot stepping on gravel. Specifically a booted foot. And then there was a flicker in the murky dark beyond the headlights, as the high beams from the Toyota glinted off dull metal.
There was no time, so I lurched to my left and dropped. I allowed my body to relax and let gravity do its work, tucking my head under. I heard the abrupt and brutal sound of a shotgun cartridge firing. At about the same time, give or take a millisecond, I was hit. The shooter was using lightweight bird-shot, which would have been a good thing, if it wasn’t for all the negative implications. Good because number nine shot won’t kill you from twenty feet. Bad because it meant they wanted me alive. Very bad because, given what he’d been prepared to do to the moose, I wasn’t optimistic about his plans for me.
The initial blast had propelled something like 600 pellets out of the 12 gauge barrel. They’d shot out in a tight pattern, but seeing as the pellets were light, they’d spread quickly. About ten or twenty of them struck me in the neck and the side of my face, the other five hundred and eighty odd pellets swooshed past and shattered the Toyota’s left headlight. So, first thing I did when I hit the ground was raise the Glock and take out the other light.
One shot.
Which left me lying in the dark alongside a sedated and hamstrung moose with bird-shot embedded in my face and neck. But at least it was now dark, but not impossibly so. There’s always going to be some ambient light coming down through the break in tree cover over a trail. The moose went still, maybe trying to understand what was going on, which might have been tough in normal circumstances, but incredibly difficult under the influence of a tranquilizer. That was one confused moose. I heard the shuffle of booted feet, two sets. What I didn’t see or hear was the vehicle that’d been following me.
Which made me think of two sets of adversaries, the ones follo
wing, and the ones setting the trap. The ones who had set the trap were right up there with me on the other side of the moose. The ones following were sitting back and waiting. No way to kill two birds with one stone.
Many people finding themselves in a position like that would get up and run for the trees. I did the opposite and rolled closer to the moose. I figured he was so big that I could hide in the black shadow of his mass.
I backed right up to the animal, warm and bristly. I got perfectly still. Around me the moose was becoming agitated. He was trying to raise himself, wounded, incoherent, and double spooked by the gunfire. But there was no way he was going to get up. I was worried about being crushed if he lurched in the wrong way. I could feel my face burning with shot, dripping blood. I resisted the urge to wipe the blood away.
I heard an excited voice from the other side of the wounded animal, speaking low. “You get him?”
Another voice. “Yeah, but I can’t see.”
I recognized those voices, but couldn’t place them. It was not Deckart or Willets.
The first voice spoke again, this time I detected slurring of the speech. He had been drinking. He said, “Fucking moose. What am I, a lucky genius or what?”
The other man said, “Shut up, Gavin.”
I placed the voices. Gavin. The skinny prison guard who had set me up with the 1488 goons.
I saw a dark upright humanoid form creeping around the side of the stricken animal. I put up the Glock and pulled the trigger on two rounds, bang-bang. Directly into the figure’s center mass. Then it was time to move.
I rolled out from under the moose and came up behind the first tree I happened to bump into. There was a sudden flurry of movement to my left, so I put two rounds in that direction and rolled off the tree. A second shotgun blast barked. The tree protected me. Shredded wood shot past and tinkled into the undergrowth. By now I was counting my ammunition. Five rounds fired, one that had already been in the chamber, plus the four pushed up from the fifteen round mag. Eleven rounds waiting.
Someone coughed near the moose. There was a sound of grunting from the animal. Then a whole lot of shuffling and shifting and heavy breathing.
I stopped behind another tree and stayed absolutely still and silent. Quiet enough to hear stealthy movement from the woods, across the trail from my position. Like someone tip-toeing through the forest. I stayed still another couple of seconds. More movement, this time further away. The second guy was trying to get away. Trying to do it quietly. The one I’d shot was wounded, and no longer on two feet. There were guttural noises coming from there and a muffled cry. Like moose and man combined in one flailing package of misery. I crossed the trail and entered the trees.
I moved fast and quiet. My aim was to flank the guy who was trying to get away. I came around without making any effort to get a visual on him. Concentrating on moving fast enough to get ahead of the guy. I cut inside his line. In front of him, and in his path. I stuck myself against a large tree.
A moment later, I heard loud panting, and heavy footsteps approaching. The guy didn’t know how to walk quietly in the woods. He came level with me and I saw his silhouette. A heavily built guy. The other prison guard, the one with the tattooed arms. I had the Glock up. Problem was the other people, the ones who had been following me in the car. I had no location on them, no idea where they might be.
It was best if they felt the same way about me. I slid the Glock into the waistband at my back. My knife thumbed open with a soft click.
I considered throwing the knife at the guy. The salmon season on a purse seiner is interesting and tough work. But there is downtime. In such times, the fisherman will occupy himself with knife work. Many guys carve things into wood. Like pretty maritime pictures, or the initials of their girlfriend’s name. I used the time to practice my throwing technique. Which was good. I could nail a target at six feet, no problem. Hard. I could get that point buried into soft wood. I knew the weight of that knife like an extra limb of my own body. Like what the scientists call proprioception.
But that would not be necessary here. Which was too bad, I’d never taken down an enemy that way.
I could see the dark hulking form against the darker background. I was close enough to the tree that he didn’t see me there. The guy was breathing heavily. I could hear his teeth chattering. He was condition black, panicking, not seeing anything clearly. I was condition orange. On the spectrum of combat awareness, the precise opposites.
Condition black, the world converges into an impenetrable morass of chaos and fear.
Condition orange, the world divides into discrete and intelligible elements, harmony.
I was able to weigh and judge with care. I stayed patient and let him come. The knife was up and out. My thumb on the butt for added force. Once he was close enough that I could recognize his face, I stepped forward and stabbed down diagonally through his left clavicle, otherwise known as the collarbone.
It’s the only horizontal bone in the body, and it takes a slim and long blade to get in there. But once you do, there’s nothing left but quick death from the internal bleeding of severed arteries right up close to the heart. I wasn’t completely sure that the fishing knife was going to do the job. So, I used extra force. The collarbone snapped under my fist. I felt the collapse and the extra penetration, gaining maybe two inches or more. The knife went right past the clavicle and did its work in there.
I took his weight down and lowered him into the undergrowth nice and easy. My other hand covered his mouth and I kept it there until he was well into his death rattle. Up close I recognized the prison guard’s face, eyes bulging and staring at me. With what he’d done to the moose, I figured the guy deserved to enjoy the rest of his death alone.
I picked up his fallen gun. The contours and shape were familiar, a Remington Breacher.
I slipped back through the woods to the trail. The moose wasn’t any happier. I’d have to take care of that and ease his suffering. But first the human threat. I walked around the struggling animal and looked for the guy I’d shot, the one named Gavin.
For a moment I couldn’t find him. Then I did. He was pinned under the moose. Only a leg and an arm stuck out. The phantom limbs looked permanently out of commission. Gavin must have slumped after I’d shot him, slid under there and been finished off by the restless beast. If he wasn’t already dead, the weight of the animal would have been enough to suffocate him. I waited for the moose to shift. When he did, I pulled the body out by the arm and leg. It was Gavin alright. He had a surprised expression on his face. But he wasn’t surprised anymore. He was dead.
I was focusing my mind on the others. Safe in their vehicle, up the trail. I was angry. Not in any unfocused way, and not because they wanted to kill me. Fair game. I was pissed off because of the moose, who hadn’t asked for any kind of trouble, he’d just been minding his own business. Or worse, he’d been hit by a car and then used to try and trap me. The more I thought about it, the angrier I got.
The moose looked at me, eyeballs pale in the moonlight. I put a hand on his head. The eyes blinked. I said, “Give me a minute, buddy.” I hoped that the tranquilizer was still working.
Forty-Eight
I figured it was Deckart and Willets up there, and that they deserved a terrible and surprising end.
The Toyota’s engine was still going, had never stopped running. I pulled the vehicle around on the narrow trail, carefully performing a K-turn. My mind was firing off orders to my driving hands and foot. At the same time, it was making other calculations. They’d have heard the two shotgun blasts, and the four little popping sounds from the Glock. So, they’d be thinking about what might have happened. I wondered how they were judging it. Two shotguns, one shot off each. One handgun, two sequences of two shots. Bang-bang twice. That would be hard to call.
I drove slow at first, not wanting to make any more noise than the Toyota had already been making. The noisiest part of a vehicle is the tires on the road. Engine hum pales in compa
rison. My goal was to reduce the sound of tires on the trail.
I crept up the track for a sixty-second count. I estimated that they would have stopped close by, no more than a half mile. The Toyota had no working headlights, and I didn’t want to use the brakes because the taillights would give away my position. I wanted nothing but darkness. After that first sixty count, I stopped trying to navigate consciously and went on pure instinct. I counted another thirty seconds slow creeping. Then it was time to make the magic happen.
I hit the accelerator and shot the Toyota up the trail.
I had a dim memory of that part being pretty straight. I must have hit sixty going up the small gradient. The engine was whining maniacally and the Toyota was definitely making noise from all aspects of its locomotion. Which is why they did exactly what I figured they might do. They flipped on their headlights to see what was coming at them.
I saw the Subaru in a blinding flash of white. Much closer than I had estimated. I was really right on top of them. I almost drove right by them. But I used the fraction of a second to twist the wheel and home in on target. As I closed in, their headlight beams reflected off my Land Cruiser and I saw Deckart and Willet’s faces congealed in a single ghastly white-strobed impression of terror, a millisecond before the end.
The Toyota was an older model with a steel body. A heavy utility vehicle designed to withstand anything that man and nature could throw at it. Three and a half tons of military grade steel exploded into the Subaru’s fiberglass shell.
No contest.
The front end of the Subaru shattered into thousands of pieces as I drove the vehicle in. The block exploded right through the Subaru’s smaller engine, dislodging it from the shell and thrusting it through the dashboard and into the cab, crushing everything in its path.
The crash took less than a quarter of a second. That quarter-second absorbed all movement and it was suddenly deathly still. Only the sound of hissing from severed tubes and crushed electrical work remained. The impact happened at an angle, so the majority of force punched through into the passenger side. I came out of the Toyota with the Glock ready.