by Barr, Nevada
As an added incentive, she dropped the stick so it fell pointing toward the rocks. Wily sniffed it. “Does it look like a big fat arrow on a yellow sign?”
Since Wily didn’t piss on it, Anna decided it would pass.
“I’m following them,” Anna whispered. She pointed toward the boulders. Behind them several trees, not dead yet but with roots exposed, had blown in a heap and lay piled like pick-up-sticks in the child’s game. “You should be able to find a dry spot. You can stay here and rest if you need to.”
Wily shot her a dirty look.
“Sorry,” she said. Anna put a span of trees between herself and the trajectory Reg had been on. Running as quietly as a rabbit across the rain-damp duff, she kept on a parallel course. It was an hour or two until dark. The light was diffuse and low with tails of fog clinging to the ground as the air cooled more quickly than the earth. The forest had become a place of mists and pools without light. Unformed shadows painted trees; damp and lichen drew faces on the stones. From the dying leaves, raindrops fell in slow motion, hitting the soggy forest floor with the splat of baby frogs hitting pond water.
Anna’s effortless run was short-lived. The trees grew more thickly. Her breath shortened. Beneath the coat she began to sweat. Reg hadn’t much of a lead, and he was hunting and gathering. Knowing she was close, she slipped into stalking mode. Wily caught up with her just as she heard the crack of breaking branches and men’s voices. Reg and the dude; they were together.
Anna didn’t try to get close enough to see them. Too much light remained in the sky, and, fierce as they were, she and Wily couldn’t take down two armed men.
Jimmy’s coat protecting Anna’s rump from the wet ground, her lap protecting Wily, they made themselves comfortable in a stand of oaks ringed with wild-rose bushes and bracken. Hunkered down to prey, the two waited with the patience of wild animals. Putting her hands under the nylon rain cape she’d made Wily, she let his fur warm her fingers. Head back against the bole of the tree, she listened to the progress of the men gathering firewood. Ears and nose being of superior quality, Wily closed his eyes and rested his chin on Anna’s forearm.
* * *
Reg was performing a remarkable feat; he was whining in a baritone, and with bravado. The timbre put Anna in mind of a tractor engine with a loose fan belt.
“I don’t know why we gotta wait for the fuckin’ plane. We gotta be practically on top of the landing strip. I mean it’s like a big old camp or shit, right? We could’ve got there by just keeping on.”
Wily cocked an eyebrow at Anna. She mouthed, “Right.”
The dude said nothing.
“Are we supposed to build a fire out there in the ashes and shit? The pilot could see it, right? If he can see it, he can land, right? If it’s cloudy we could hear him, we could follow the fuckin’ sound, for Christ’s sake. When’s the asshole coming back?”
“When he comes,” the dude answered. Irritation was loud and clear in his tone. Reg kept on. Scared, Anna guessed, angry, resentful: one of those emotions that make people chatter. Scared, she bet, mostly scared, of the dude and the alien environment.
“There’s like buildings at the landing place, isn’t there?” Reg asked. “Some kind of lumberyard or something? I hope they got food stashed there. I’d eat anything about now, shit on a shingle, that’s what my dad called it in the army. Beef on toast. How long you think it’ll take us, when the pilot does his thing?”
“As long as it takes,” the dude said.
Anna shuddered with cold to amuse Wily. The dude’s voice could chill beer on a hot afternoon. Reg was quiet for about thirty seconds. Like grazing cattle, the men were moving erratically, but surely, past where Anna and Wily lay hidden.
“Hey, Dude,” Reg said when he couldn’t stand the pastoral tranquility any longer. “That’s a small fuckin’ plane. I never been up in a little plane like that. Shit, it looks like a toy some glue-sniffing kid built in the basement. There’s no way it carries six. No way, man. I mean, he’s gotta take the cripple and the kid, too, now, right? He’s gotta take them. No way we can be driving around with a cripple and a kid in the car. You were like flying out, so, what? He going to take four women and you?”
“It depends,” the dude answered.
Anna promised Santa she would never again ask for anything for Christmas if only the dude would snap and put a bullet in Reg’s brain.
“Shit, man,” Reg said, and Anna crossed her fingers. “How much of this shit do we need? You think we got enough firewood?”
“For now,” the dude said in a metallic monotone, not unlike the sound the slide on a semiauto made.
One set of boot-falls crackled back in the direction of the burn.
Anna eased Wily off her lap. She stood, shifting her weight back and forth to get the blood circulating in her legs.
“Dude,” Reg called. He was staying where he was, and Anna wondered why. The last thing Reg wanted—and the first thing she wanted—was for him to be left alone in the big bad woods.
“What?” The dude was farther away than before, and still walking.
Anna began methodically clenching and unclenching her fists to loosen up her hands.
“I gotta take a dump,” Reg hollered miserably.
“Yeah?” The dude didn’t stop.
There was a long time with no words. Footsteps receded. Small forest sounds dripped in: water falling from branches, squirrels or small birds scratching in the leaves, the music of a trickling stream.
Through it, faint and cold, the dude’s voice came, needling. “You want me to watch?”
“You’re a sick bastard,” Reg shouted.
The dude’s humorless excuse for laughter percolated through the trees. Then even the sound of his feet on the forest floor was gone. Anna’s heart rate climbed until cold stiff muscles grew pliant and ready.
Catching one of the thugs, not only alone but with his pants down, would be the most wonderful of things. She’d skin her kill. His coat would make a dog bed for Wily. His Walther PPK could make her dreams come true.
Then she and Heath and Elizabeth and Leah and Katie and Wily would go home.
Thinking of the coat and gun made Anna’s mouth water. The concept of home was too insubstantial to have much allure.
Rocking forward onto her toes, she sniffed the air the way Wily was doing. Nothing but rain-damp earth registered. A part of her had expected her nose to have evolved to a higher degree of efficiency. Time and timelessness had merged. She’d been in the forest for millennia. Her claws should have grown sharper, her pelt thicker.
Placing her feet one in front of the other to minimize the impact of each step, she slipped deftly from the copse. Wily, encumbered by his makeshift splint, fell behind. In moments, shielded by the twin trunks of two aspens that had grown together, Anna could see the thug. Reg’s back was to her. Between them was a ravine, no more than six feet across and half that deep. In the bottom ran a narrow, shallow stream; the music she’d heard earlier. On the far side of the stream was a stand of firs, their lowest branches sweeping the ground.
Alone, in the woods, with wolves and night coming on, Reg had to be scared half out of his wits. Twice he started to follow the dude. Twice his bowels called him back. Under certain circumstances, men of all ages exhibit the same symptoms. Having to take a dump is one of them. Anna was willing to bet Reg’s lower cheeks were pinched as tightly as his face, as fear and need warred within him. He opened his mouth to cry out again for the dude, but something stopped him. Manly pride, no doubt.
Pride cometh before the fall, Anna thought as she slid down the soft bank. She didn’t bother to avoid the water. Her moccasins were already soaked. Two steps brought her to the other side. Dropping to her stomach, she raised her eyes above the rim of the miniature ravine.
Reg muttered his word of choice for all occasions, “Fuck!” He dropped the collection of twigs and bark he’d gathered. Throwing his arms up he shouted, “God damn it!”
The dude didn’t reappear. Reg lowered his arms and looked around as if he might find one place better than another for the business he had in mind.
Anna watched, nerves singing like high-tension wires.
Wily slid into the ditch. Anna gave him a hand up. Belly down on the bank, ears flattened, he took his place at her shoulder.
Reg’s arms hung at his sides, swaying lifelessly as he turned around several times. The hoods of his double-layered sweatshirts were down, the yellow of the undershirt bright in the dreary close of afternoon. He must have pushed them off when the work of finding wood warmed him. Now he pulled them up, both together, making himself black as a ninja, and putting two tough layers of fabric between his neck and the dull knife Anna held.
Given his terror of wolves and loons and things that go bump in the wilds, Anna doubted he would have ventured two feet from the group without the Walther PPK. In the failing light, and the black of his sweatshirt, she couldn’t see whether he carried it in the pouch pocket on his stomach or shoved into the waistband of his pants.
In over forty years of movie viewing Anna had seen hundreds, if not thousands, of pistols shoved into the back of a corresponding number of pants. In the spirit of scientific inquiry, she had tried it. Her SIG SAUER 9 mm was more comfortable than her old Colt wheel gun; still, it either gouged into her back, fell out, or slid down her butt. She suspected the carry had been invented by actors. Reg didn’t hold his weapon as if he’d learned to use firearms at the movies. He held it as if he used it as a tool in his day-to-day work. The gun would be in his pouch.
Not finding any place more conducive to elimination than another, Reg stopped turning. Furtively, he glanced around. Anna didn’t flinch. His gaze traveled only at eye level. Threats from up in the trees or down on the ground were safe from detection. Assured he was unobserved, he half squatted, fumbling at the front of his trousers. The Walther tumbled from his pouch and struck the ground with a solid thud. Anna could almost feel the weight of it in her hand. It took concentration to force her eyes away from the gun, and to the man she had to go through to get it.
“Fuck,” Reg whispered. He stood again, undid his pants, pulled them down around his knees, then squatted. Using his left hand for balance, he leaned forward in much the same position as a linebacker waiting to charge.
The time would never be better. Anna rose from the ditch like a mist. Wily was a shadow at her heels. Together, they drifted past the boughs of the fir that had hidden them. The bittersweet smell of Christmas was in Anna’s nose. The knife was in her hand.
Reg was too big, too strong to rush. He had to be disabled before he knew the fight was on. Nothing fancy, a knife in his back, deep enough she could keep his hand away from the Walther until he bled to death, or she got hold of it and shot him. Four yards, then three. Eyes on the ground, he was grunting with the strain of relieving himself when he was cold and dehydrated and frightened.
Six more feet.
An indefinable ghost breathed into the clearing. Neither seen nor heard nor smelled: felt on the skin like cobwebs, a faint electricity in the mind. Anna had sensed it before. It was the unvoiced whisper that tells the stag to look up as the hunter centers him in his sight, that hushes the entire flock when the hawk flies over. Reg felt it: a brush across the nape of his neck, a bell in the back of his brain. He wrenched his head around so far it looked like demon possession. He saw Anna and Wily, screamed, and fell sideways, his legs bound by his trousers.
The gun was in his hand and he was firing before he truly hit the ground.
Anna dropped like a stone, rolled, and didn’t stop until she was beneath the kindly veil of fir boughs. Wily stood his ground, growling. Reg kept firing. The sharp shriek of bullets ricocheted off stone, the reports cracking the air. Not on the firing range, no ear protection, the noise stunned Anna.
“Wily,” she hissed or screamed. The dog scrambled under the bough. A chunk of mud the size of a man’s fist exploded near him. More shots and branches breaking. Half deaf, she wrapped her fist around the dog’s mouth to stop him from growling. It didn’t. It wasn’t Wily. It was her; teeth bared, she was snarling. Unable to remember how to stop, she released Wily and put a hand over her mouth.
It didn’t matter. They might as well howl. Several yards of unprotected space lay between them and the ravine. The stand of firs was an island of cover in an otherwise exposed area. Knife clutched in her fist, she crawled rapidly around the fir, slipped out from beneath, and, keeping it between her and the gunman, listened.
* * *
The knife fell from her fingers. Wily whined. Blood covered Anna’s hand. Fascinated, she stared at the red, so like that of the checks on the coat, as it spread down her fingers and dripped onto the duff in bright splashes of color. Like maple leaves in autumn, she thought. Dizziness spun the world into a kaleidoscope of trees and dogs. Her knees gave way and she went down like the devout before the altar.
She’d been shot.
That doesn’t mean I’m dying, she told herself. “Shh,” she shushed Wily, though he wasn’t making a sound. Together, they listened.
Silence. Reg was waiting, toying with them. Anna tried to get to her feet and failed. She reached for the knife and fell on her face.
THIRTY-THREE
“Hey, blondie, ever played hide the salami?” Sean grinned. The night before, the dude had all but handed Katie over to this wretch. Had they reached the airstrip, Katie might have been saved. Another night in the woods: Heath had no reason to think the dude would keep Sean off of her.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” she said wearily, pretending that it couldn’t happen, that the idea was absurd, in the vain hope pretending would make it so.
Sean’s grin hardened around the edges. “I’ll let you know when I’m kidding,” he snapped. “Come over here, kid.”
Leah’s arm went around her daughter’s shoulders. Awkwardly, she dragged Katie’s slight form into her lap. The look of shock on Katie’s face saddened Heath and, perversely, made her want to laugh. “Leave her alone,” Leah said. No murmur this time. Leah was loud and clear.
The rifle was lying on the ground next to the thug. He sat hunched over his belly, legs thrust out, the pointy-toed boots at cockeyed angles like jackass ears. Raindrops plopped on the leather of his jacket, beaded, and rolled. He picked up the rifle and held it across his knees, the barrel pointed at Leah and Katie.
“Oil slick.” Heath said the first thing that came into her mind to distract him before his affront could turn to rage. “You remind me of an oil slick. Shallow and dirty.”
“That so?” Sean sneered. He moved the rifle so the bore pointed at her, a black, all-seeing eye that never blinked. “How about I shoot you? When you’re dead, you won’t be reminded of anything about anybody, now will you?”
Heath wasn’t sure what he meant, but she was convinced he meant it.
“The dude won’t be happy if you kill one of his cash cows,” she said. She was seated on her tailbone, her back against the burned tree. The muscles of her lower back trembled so violently she had to put her arms to her sides for support. They were so shaky she feared her elbows would give way and she would fall onto Elizabeth.
Flipping the rifle as deftly as a professional baton twirler, Sean brought the butt down on E’s foot. Both Heath and her daughter screamed. “Shut up!” he bellowed.
Heath and Elizabeth stopped screaming. Her sneakered foot in both hands, Elizabeth glared, fierce and furious, at the thug, her bruises making the scowl gargoyle-like. That level of courage was beyond Heath. Her own face, should she be able to see it, would undoubtedly be a mask of abject terror. Worse, a thousand times worse, Heath prayed Katie would do as Sean said, or Leah would order her daughter to go to him, anything to keep him from hurting Elizabeth again.
“Now, blondie, you come over to old Uncle Sean. Now!”
“No!” It was Heath who spoke. Command was in her voice. Strong and cold, it slapped into Sean’s face, and for a heartbeat
he looked stunned. Before he could recover—before she could sink back into craven selfishness—Heath forged on. “You can hammer my child into the ground with that goddamned rifle and it will not make us one iota more compliant.” Scared speechless by her own outburst, Heath concentrated on keeping her shaking arms from collapsing and ruining her imitation of valor. Beside her, she could hear E breathing through her teeth, a hiss, like air leaking from a tire. She dared not look at her. Should she see betrayal in those beautiful brown eyes, she would fold, throw Leah, Katie—a whole busload of toddlers if she had them—to the devil.
“We do not negotiate with terrorists,” Leah said firmly.
This new Leah startled Heath to silence. Until today, she realized, she’d not heard the woman’s voice, only a feeble echo of it from the recesses of her intellect.
“Jesus,” Sean said. Clutching the rifle, he jammed the butt into the ash and levered himself onto his torn feet, then limped over to where Heath sat. The rifle arced through the air. The barrel struck her on the side of the face.
“What’re you? The fuckin’ United Nations?” He was snarling at Leah. He hadn’t dare hit her.
Still, Heath thought, he’d hit her, not Elizabeth.
We won, she exulted.
That was the last coherent thought she was to have for a couple of minutes. Pain and shock shut her down.
True unconsciousness didn’t come for her—in her cowardice, she might have welcomed that. Not a blackout, but a sinking brownout, where she could not participate in the world of the living, nor could she sleep in the world of the dead. Cheek on the ground, ashes blinded her right eye. Rain fell on the upturned side of her face, unsalty tears. Gray faded in and out of her vision. Thoughts simmered in the recesses of her cranium, none rising close enough to centers of logic to string together.
When focus returned, the rain had stopped and the dude was back. Sean was still talking.