by Noah Mann
Neil stood in silence near a tree just a few yards from where Elaine and I slipped into our sleeping bags. Falling asleep was no trouble at all. We began to drift off, exhaustion and the first licks of starvation sapping our ability, our desire to keep eyes opened to the world outside. I reached out to where she lay and put my hand to her cheek, letting it rest there as I gazed at her, and she at me, like teenage lovers on a campout.
Then I began to dream. As I had for so long. Of trees and fields of tall grass swaying in the breeze. Grapes on the vine, oranges, asparagus. Things alive. Remnants of the world when it was green.
Now, though, I dreamed of that place, that time, with another inhabiting it. She walked in the fields. She picked the fruit. Ate the bounty. She laughed. She smiled.
But I was nowhere to be seen. It was as if I, the dreamer, could not exist in that place. I could only see it. Sense it. Want it.
Want to be with her in it.
Elaine and I walked the grey earth in our waking time. I wondered if she dreamed as I did. I hoped that she did. I hoped that she found some escape as sleep took her.
My slumbering mind reveled in the sight of her living in that good world, that perfect time.
Until the sound woke me just before my time to stand watch.
Fourteen
The click registered without alarm. Just enough to lift me from sleep. My eyes opened and adjusted to the dark surroundings. Neil lay to my left, dead to the world. To my right, just a silhouette against the wooded blackness beyond, Elaine stood, finishing her time as sentinel. Motionless. Still as a statue. Too still.
Something was wrong.
I slipped out of my sleeping bag and took my AR in hand, rising, quickly at first. Noisily. Then I saw her hand, reaching down and behind, palm waving gently at me. A gesture.
A warning.
As quietly as I could I reached to Neil and nudged him. He drew a too loud breath and rolled toward me, opening his eyes to see the AR in one hand and the other bringing a finger to my lips, shushing him. Instantly he was awake, arming himself and standing, the two of us joining Elaine where she stood next to a thick, lifeless pine.
“There’s someone out there,” she whispered, her MP5 held at the ready. “I can’t pinpoint where.”
Neil stepped to the side, taking a position on the opposite side of the tree, covering that slice of pitchy landscape. I stayed next to Elaine, listening.
“I’ve been hearing them for five or ten minutes,” she said.
I didn’t hear anything. Not as we stood there. But that didn’t raise any doubt in my mind that she’d heard precisely what she’d described.
“How far out?” I asked, my voice barely rising above a soft breath.
“Close enough to hear,” she answered, thinking on a better estimate. “Thirty, forty yards.”
A hundred feet. Maybe a little bit more. That wasn’t much buffer. Not much cover space, even in the woods, to allow us to gear up and get out of Dodge before the situation developed into something between dangerous and deadly.
“The best defense...” I muttered quietly.
Elaine glanced to me, reading from my words what my intention was. I stepped behind her and tapped Neil on the shoulder.
“You still have that light that attaches to your Benelli?” I asked in a hushed voice.
Neil’s gaze narrowed at me for a moment, then returned to normal with understanding of what I was suggesting. He nodded.
“I’ll shift about thirty yards to the right and see if I can get behind them,” I said, even quieter now.
“I’ll give them something to look at,” Neil said quietly, keying in completely to his role as bait.
“I’ll back him up,” Elaine whispered.
I gave her a thumbs up and began moving away from our campsite, west, stopping when I’d paced nearly a hundred feet. When I looked back I could see Neil’s weapon light coming on, its sharp, straight beam cutting the darkness like a glowing sword. I turned south and pressed forward, my AR ready.
CLICK...
The sound that had roused me came again. Off to my left. I paused and listened, trying to judge whether I was past its point of origin yet. But all that followed was quiet. Just silence drifting through the wasting woods.
Once more I moved, taking a chance, angling my path back toward the sound but beyond where I thought it had come from. I swept the way ahead, left and right, the muzzle of my AR pointed slightly down, ready to come up to engage any threat. Five yards I progressed, Neil’s light prominent to my left, a good distance off, moving slightly away from my direction of travel. Ten yards. Neil was closing the distance to me, and I to him. Elaine would be trailing him, likely by twenty feet.
I stopped and came to one knee, listening again. Neil’s footsteps now crunched along the dry earth in the near distance. Somewhere, close to me, the sound had to have come from. Five yards in any direction. Once more I scanned the space ahead. To each side. And still there was nothing.
Then, by chance, I looked down. While taking a quiet, exasperated breath, I glanced briefly toward the ground past the muzzle of my AR and saw it. Saw them.
Boot prints.
The same as we had seen upon entering the woods in daylight. The line of them now that I could see in the dim drizzle of moon and star light moved away from me, almost due east, disappearing in the darkness ahead.
I rose and followed the tracks, keeping to one side, leaving them intact, weaving around trees, treading as lightly as possible, until, suddenly, they were gone. Stopped at the base of a once mighty fir. Carefully I leaned around the wide trunk, but no prints were pressed into the ground there, the darkness beyond cut by arcs of light as Neil approached.
How could the tracks have just stopped? Gone into thin...
...air.
My gaze rose, angling toward the sky as I stepped back from the tree, actions unfolding quickly as I did.
Neil was close. Just on the other side of the tree by thirty feet or so.
Above, the muted groan of a string being stretched sounded.
I stepped further back and brought my AR up, looking past its suppressed muzzle at a black shadow blotting out the star-flecked indigo sky. A shape dark and familiar twenty feet off the ground.
The silhouette of a man drawing a bow.
An archer.
A hunter.
I aimed and pulled the trigger, four times, somewhere within that span of shots a twang sounded, and a guttural moan, then the drop of dead weight thudding above as a compound bow fell to the earth at my feet.
“Eric!”
It was Elaine, calling out.
“I need light over here!” I shouted back, keeping my aim on what I could make out of the figure suspended in the dark above.
The grey woods around me was cut by a jousting beam of light swinging fast as Neil ran toward the sound of my voice, reaching me just ahead of Elaine, the glow of his weapon light finding the bow on the ground first.
“Up there,” I said.
He swung the muzzle of his Benelli upward, to where my AR was directed, Elaine joining us with her MP5, the aim of three weapons converging with the light so that we now could see what hung above us. Who hung above us.
The man was still alive. He wore a patterned camouflage jacket over similar pants, and a belt around his waist was connected to a short length of rope tied to a higher branch. One below that, thick and short, was where he’d perched himself, and the light now splashed upon him and the tree revealed spikes that had been driven into the trunk, widely spaced hand and footholds that had allowed him to climb with awkward ease. Blood dripped from his left arm and his side, and pinkish bubbles built upon his lips with each gasping breath he managed. His eyes, wide and surprised, seemed to look past the glare splashed upon him, finding my gaze. Locking with it.
“What’s your name?” Elaine asked, some force to her words, demanding as she might have when the FBI credentials she held onto still meant something.
The man, though, said nothing. His body twisted slowly against the bulk of the tree above, the angle at which he was suspended forcing the blood to the precise spots where my shots had found their mark. More spilled now, flowing red and thick, staining the tree, the ground, his clothing.
“Where did you come from?” Elaine pressed him.
Again, he ignored her question. But he did not remain silent. Neil lowered the beam of his weapon light just a bit, letting the man see us all clearly beyond its harsh brightness, and he took a moment to look at each of us. Then his eyes drooped downward, and the lids mostly closed over them, and a few final breaths rasped wet past his lips as he uttered his valediction.
“Thank you...”
He went limp at the end of the short rope that was little different than what any bow hunter would have anchored themselves to a tree stand with. The flow of blood slowed, no beating heart to pump it out the wounds now, just gravity draining him, drip, drip, drip.
We lowered our weapons.
Thank you...
“Thank you,” Neil said.
“I know,” I said, believing my friend was parroting with incredulity the man’s dying words.
I was wrong.
“No,” Neil said, looking directly at me. “Thank you.”
Elaine keyed in on the confusion that was obvious on my face and added context to my friend’s gratitude.
“One of this guy’s arrows planted itself in a tree six inches from Neil’s head,” she told me.
“You shoot a second later and I’m a pin cushion,” he said.
There was no timing or plan to my actions. Luck, true blind luck, with a fortuitous dose of observation, had put my finger on the trigger at the very instant it needed to be to save my friend. And to take a life.
“He was stalking the guy with the cell phone when he saw us,” I said.
The flash I’d seen had been from this man’s binoculars, sun reflecting off the precision optics. He’d watched us and then moved to cover. Estimating our path of advance. Our destination. Then he’d set up his ambush, and waited, finally calling us in like a hunter might a prize turkey. Making a sound. Drawing us out into the night.
“Why settle for one when you can prey on three,” Neil said in agreement.
“One against three?” Elaine asked, an almost imperceptible flourish of sympathy about her. “How desperate do you have to be to do that?”
Neil shifted the beam of his Benelli’s weapon light over the man dangling above, illuminating his belt, his back.
“No pistol, no rifle,” Neil said. “No backup. Just the bow.”
Wisps of steam drifted upward from the hot suppressor at the business end of my AR as the cool, moist air hanging in the valley met it. The accessory had quieted my shots. But I realized the dead man’s would have been quieter. Just the twang of the released string and the whispery whoosh of an arrow flying true.
“He didn’t want to announce his presence,” I said. “Didn’t want anyone to know he was out here. That’s why he didn’t take us with a rifle.”
I knew my estimation was probably correct. There was no shortage of weaponry lying about for the taking. And if one heard a shot, that signaled there was life. And life, to some, meant food. To the unfortunate, the prey, that meant death.
We would have been sustenance to the man suspended from the tree. He would have lived at the expense of our lives.
“Will we ever be that desperate?” Elaine wondered in the darkness.
“No,” I said. “Never.”
Human flesh would never cross my lips. That was an absolute. A line I would not cross.
“We could follow his trail,” Neil said. “Find his camp. His hideout. He might have food there.”
I let my AR hang from the sling across my chest and shook my head.
“We know what he has there,” I said.
Yes, my friend knew. He’d experienced exactly what I implied we’d find. He’d heard the screams and gone with me to the mining sheds near my refuge. There we’d found the horror of people turning their fellow human beings into little more than cattle. Butchering them like any fresh kill. Neil had reacted viciously to that discovery, executing those who’d perpetrated the evil.
Yet here, in this moment, I sensed a vague hint of allowance from my friend. Not that he was thinking of going down that road, but, rather, that he could imagine being forced to take that path. To become what he had personally destroyed.
“You’re right,” Neil said, shaking off whatever internal thoughts I’d sensed as some outward expression.
Elaine looked from the body suspended above to the dark woods surrounding us.
“You think he was worried about being heard because there’s someone around to hear?”
Her question was logical. Whatever answer there might be didn’t warrant waiting around for confirmation.
“We have to move,” I said. “Put some miles between us and this place before daybreak.”
We were exhausted. None of us had grabbed more than an hour or two of fitful sleep on the hard earth. Yet we all knew that it was the right decision to make haste and depart.
It took us ten minutes to pack up our meager camp and get moving. East once again.
Fifteen
Two days after killing the man in the dark, grey woods, we stopped a half mile from the town that lay before us and looked through binoculars at an M1 Abrams tank blocking the road ahead.
“Is this Wyoming or Colorado?” Neil asked.
“Wyoming,” Elaine said.
I lowered the binoculars and held them out to Neil again. He’d already taken a look and shook off the offer of another as he leaned heavily against the fencepost at the side of the road. His body was spent. His mind weakened. Some sickness, minor in normal times, had combined with the beginnings of starvation to attack his body and wear him down. Simple facts, such as which state we were in, obvious to Elaine and me for the moment, were lost on him. Worse than those effects was the possibility, maybe the probability, that his spirit was nearing a breaking point.
We were all in bad shape. Worse than bad. Back roads and open country had brought us to this place. Just a dot on the map called Baggs. But going any further, pushing on to reach our goal, to accomplish our mission, was dependent on one thing. One simple, elusive thing.
Finding food.
“How long do you think that beast has been there?” Elaine asked.
“A while,” I answered.
A while...
In the world as it was, estimations ruled. I wasn’t even certain of the date anymore. So to look at the hulking metallic behemoth a few thousand feet north of us, all I could tell through the binoculars was that it was there, there were no scorch marks indicating it had been part of a battle, and, most ominously, its cannon was pointed directly at us.
“How far have we come?” Neil asked, his voice a rasping loud whisper.
“From where?” Elaine asked.
“From that dead town where you gave our food away,” Neil specified with gritty accusation.
Elaine didn’t take the bait. In the four days we’d been walking since leaving Manila the dispute that had momentarily raged between them had settled into mostly quiet tolerance. They spoke rarely. Whatever camaraderie we’d started this journey with had been broken, maybe irretrievably so, by the appearance of the little girl, the death of her father, and the events that followed.
“A hundred miles,” Elaine said, uncertain. “I don’t know.”
“And how much farther to Cheyenne?”
I looked away from the tank to my friend. His hollowing eyes were fixed on me as he half hugged the fencepost that was keeping him upright. There was fear in his gaze. But, to my welcome surprise, there was also hope. Just a glimmer of it, maybe. Still, it was there. And if it was there it meant that the will to continue existed within him.
But for that will to matter, for hope to be our driving force onward, we needed what might be in the town ahead.
&n
bsp; “Hop, skip, and a jump,” I told my friend.
“Does that have an equivalence in miles or kilometers?” Neil asked.
It did. And I didn’t want to tell him, though I knew I would have to.
“Maybe another two hundred miles.”
He thought on that, then nodded and managed a thin smile.
“Okay,” Neil said. “We’d better go hit the diner for some grub and get this show on the road.”
It was my turn to smile. Mine was full and true. He wasn’t beaten. Not yet. But that state of despair I could feel on the horizon.
“Stay behind me,” I said. “A good ten yards. Both of you.”
Neil shoved himself off the fencepost and wobble-walked back onto the blacktop. Elaine stood further back, spacing herself from him. When they were ready I began walking, hearing the soft stomp of their boots behind when I’d put some distance between us.
Twenty minutes later, beneath the relentless sun, the sixty ton tracked monster sat just ten yards away. I stopped and studied it from this closer vantage, Neil and Elaine pausing some distance back. The canon hadn’t shifted since we’d come upon it. There was no sign of life from the tank. But no evidence of violence or destruction, either. It simply looked as though someone had parked it and left it abandoned, like a thirty year old car whose transmission had finally given out.
But who would leave an Abrams tank in the middle of a two lane road where nowhere met no place?
“No one,” said to myself in reply.
I looked back to Elaine and Neil and signaled them to hold position and wait, then I turned back to the tank and moved slowly around it, surveying front, back, both sides. Aside from a thin coating of dust, the armored vehicle looked as if it had rolled off the assembly line last week.
That was the outside, though. What I had to concern myself with now was what might be within.
Using the tank’s beefy tracks and running wheels as steps I groped for handholds on the hull and hauled myself up where the back of the turret hung over the grated engine compartment. Heat soaked from the blazing sun radiated off the metallic skin. I squinted at the rush of hot air rising from the turret as I climbed to the highest point of the vehicle and knelt next to the largest hatch. A .50 caliber machinegun was mounted just ahead of the sealed opening, the beefy weapon hanging limp, ammo can fixed to one side. I checked the metal holder and found it full, a linked belt of ammunition folded upon itself within, one end feeding into the venerable, unfired gun. I knew it had seen no use here, no action, from a quick scan of the turret. There was no sign of any spent casings ejected from the weapon being fired, just as I’d seen none on the nearby ground as I walked around the tank.