He couldn’t wait. He had to run around to the high ground on the side in case the one in there got out the front and down the slope. He slipped and fell, running, reached the side, mud soaking through his clothes, and had a good view of anyone who might come out the front or back. There was always the chance that the guy in there might already have gotten out, but he himself had moved fast, and in any case the guy down there would likely be cautious, hesitant to leave cover.
He didn’t want to prolong it, so he shot the lantern he had put on the sill of the bedroom window on this side in case he trapped them in the cabin. He blasted it apart, chipping the phosphorous strips he had covered with tape on the glass, the phosphorus open to the air now, burning, igniting the spilled-out kerosene. At least it was supposed to work that way. But he saw no sign of fire, and he was beginning to think that he’d been wrong when the flames surged up to fill the window. Now all he needed to do was wait. There were no windows on the other side, the stove and cupboards against that wall in the kitchen, the fireplace against it in the living room, so when the fire got too close the guy would be forced to come out either through the front or back. The flames were all through the bedroom now, smoke rising through the windows in the upper rooms. Smoke came from the front now too, and it wouldn’t be long before the guy would need to come out. Even so, he stayed in as long as he could, flames spreading through the upstairs and reaching the tower before the guy dove out the back.
He almost missed him, glancing once at the tower, then at the back, and the guy was running past the two men spread out on the ground, racing toward the cover of the trees when he fired, missed, fired again and the guy’s right leg whipped out from under him. The guy flew sideways, cracking against a tree, lying there, shaking his head, starting to crawl into cover when a bullet in that direction stopped him.
“Don’t move or you’re dead!”
Afraid, the guy was holding his leg now, craning his neck to look around. His face was pale. His blood soaked into the snow.
“Get rid of the shotgun!”
As if the thing were alive, the guy threw the shotgun away.
“Now stay where you are!”
He started down through the trees, looking around. The flames licked through the roof of the house and the tower, smoke rising thick and black, the sound of the flames like a furnace, crackling in there, whooshing. He saw where the snow was melting all around the house and where the moisture on the jacket of one guy close to the house had started steaming. He looked carefully at the other guy and then started for the man he’d wounded.
He searched him, taking away a knife and a .38 handgun, putting a tourniquet on his leg, then forcing him to stand. Looking around the trees, he saw a fallen branch with a crook where the guy could put it under his arm and a shaft that was stiff enough that it wouldn’t break if the guy put his weight on it. He forced him up into the trees toward where he had camped. He collected his gear, slipping it into his sack, shoving his rifle into the sleeping bag, rolling the bag up and hitching it over his shoulder, then pushing the guy up toward the hills.
The guy was in shock. It didn’t matter. He kept him on the move. He let him rest when it seemed he couldn’t go any farther, letting him drink water, then forcing him onward. He kept looking back toward the direction they’d just come from. No one was after him, although for a time he did hear the sound of a siren. He looked up toward the cliff wall they were approaching, and he knew he would never get the guy over to the wash that led up to the top of it, so he finally chose a flat circle of snow-free ground near the base, thick trees encircling, and pushed him down.
“Take your clothes off.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Take your clothes off.”
“Why?”
He kicked his wounded leg, and the guy took his clothes off.
“Lie down flat. Spread out your arms and legs.”
The guy didn’t move, and he kicked him again, and the guy spread out his arms and legs. His skin was white against the cold brown ground, his leg red-caked and swollen. The hole in his leg was just below the knee, the bone untouched, a black hole through the flesh. He had been loosening the tourniquet and tightening it as they came up through the trees. Now he loosened it and tightened it again.
“I don’t want you to lose too much strength.”
He made four stakes and shoved them into the ground, secure enough that they wouldn’t come free, tying the guy’s arms and legs to them so that he was spread out with his chest and privates exposed to the sky. Then drawing his knife, he sliced once thinly from the guy’s nipple to his navel. The guy started screaming even before he did it, flesh spreading, blood swelling, and he looked at him, grabbing his face so that he could look him directly in the eyes.
“Now I’m going to ask this only once. Were you with the others at the town they burned up there?”
The guy’s eyes were wide, darting to the right and left. “I don’t know what you mean.”
He made another cut.
“Yes. Yes, I was with them.”
“That’s very good. You don’t know how good. If you hadn’t been with them, you might have been useless to me, and then I would have needed to kill you. All right now, here’s another one. What did they do to the woman they shot?”
“They buried her.”
“That’s not what I mean. What did they do to her?”
“Took an ear.”
“And then what?”
“Nothing. They just buried her.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Two others did it.”
“But where did they say?”
“In a cabin across from the river.”
“Which cabin?”
“I don’t know.”
“All right, I believe you. Tell me who you report to.”
Little by little, it came out, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes in obvious lies, him cutting, probing, digging at the wound or at his chest or his arms or his other leg, sometimes staring at his privates and the guy talked faster after that, about who had told him what to do when and who that other guy might be responsible to and what might be the structure of command. They were an hour at it that way, the guy crisscrossed with gashes, him learning everything he could, the names of the other men that this one had worked with, forcing the guy to keep talking so that he could remain alive. And then he was finished. He couldn’t think of anything more he needed to learn, and he just sat back, looking at the guy, working through a litany of all that had been done to him, unable to stand it anymore, plunging his knife in and twisting.
EPILOGUE
1
It took him a year. He went back to the house in the town where everything had begun, standing in the dark between the two fir trees, looking toward the place. He went back to the cemetery where Ethan was buried, staring at the tombstone. Then he made his way back toward the hills, hiking carefully up into them, up through the break in the cliff, past the line shack and the sheep desert to the town again, and he found where Claire was, where the guy had said, in a shallow grave in one of the tumbled cabins on the tree side of the river, and she had one ear gone as the guy had said, and he quickly covered her again. Then he hiked up toward the corrugated metal shack and the mine, across the pass and down toward the country of the mound, and the mound was as he’d left it, green boughs turned to brown but otherwise the same, and he didn’t want to bother her, just sprinkled the dust he had gathered from the graves of Ethan and Claire over it, scooping up dirt from underneath one side of the mound, starting back toward Claire, sprinkling the dirt from the mound and some from Ethan’s grave upon the soil that covered her, and weeks later, standing again in the dark in the cemetery, staring down toward Ethan’s grave, he sprinkled the dirt together.
Then he started.
2
He lay on his chest among a line of trees that looked down on a fertile valley. It had taken him the summer, fall, and winter to get there. He had gone aro
und to the people the guy had mentioned when he was torturing him, and he had made them talk before they died as well, getting other names, higher ones, and finally he had gotten a lead and then another, working back and forth across the country, using different names, shaving his beard, then growing it again, taking jobs on farms, mending fences, painting barns, anything for which he didn’t need a Social Security number, angling southwest as the weather changed from warm to cold but needing to go that way anyhow, the dog always with him, through Kansas, Colorado, Arizona, California, spring again, and he was lying among the line of trees, looking down toward the valley.
A farm was down there, a big wide house and a barn and sheds, and everything was white against the green of the growing crops, a family down there eating at a backyard table, Kess, his wife, two daughters, and a son, eating, talking, smiling as he peered through his scope.
They were far enough from the house that only a few of them would have a chance to make it to safety. Maybe he would get them all. Maybe they’d be so confused, looking around, trying to help each other, that none of them would make it to the house.
Now that he looked closer, he noticed the bodyguard by the corner of the garage and the other one just inside the screen door of the house, but they didn’t matter. By the time they figured where he was, he’d be gone, and if he got a chance, he would shoot them too and the cat that was playing in the flower bed, that would make a nice balance, and his only question now was how to go about it.
He sighted on Kess, but that would be too easy. Kess would be dead, and he’d never know the agony he’d caused, and the only way to do this was to do it the way Kess had started. But he wouldn’t take the cat, not at first at any rate, that would give some of them too much chance to reach the house. He’d start with the people, youngest to oldest, take the cat when he couldn’t take anything else, and if in working up he gave Kess a chance to get away, well that would be all right too. He would hound Kess then, hunt him just as he had been hunted, let him know the way it felt, and his only question now was which one was the youngest.
The girl on this end to the right looked to be about twelve, which left the girl and the boy beside her, and the boy looked older than the other girl, so he centered on the farthest girl. Perhaps five or six years old, she had long hair that was fine and sandy. She had freckles. Impossible to tell from this distance, but he was certain that she had blue eyes. The way she smiled reminded him of . . .
Sarah.
He was aiming at Sarah.
No. He looked away and shook his head,
No.
He aimed again.
Again he saw the same thing. The little girl blurred into Sarah. He switched to the boy, but all he could think of was Ethan if he’d grown, and the woman suddenly looked like Claire, and through the telescopic sight, he saw them all down there, Claire, Sarah, Ethan, eating, laughing, and he couldn’t do it.
He told himself that he was being foolish. So what if the little girl down there reminded him of Sarah? So what if the family reminded him of his own family? All the more reason to continue.
Tears streamed down his cheeks.
Forget the family. Shoot Kess, he told himself. There had been no sense of seeing himself when he sighted on Kess. It wouldn’t be like he was shooting himself.
Or would it? All he could think of was the agony of shock and grief that Claire and Sarah would suffer if they saw him shot in front of them.
He told himself that if he didn’t pull the trigger, Kess would just keep sending men after him. He told himself that if he didn’t end it now, he would never feel safe, never stop running.
A bottle of milk was on the table.
He blew it apart, glass and white liquid spraying. He emptied the rifle, bullets shattering the glass table as the family dove for cover. He heard screams from down there.
Screams of fear, not grief.
He crawled back from the ridge. When he couldn’t be seen, he stood and ran through a field as frantically as he possibly could, the dog racing with him. He didn’t run to escape but instead to release the unbearable frenzy in him. He couldn’t stop sobbing.
3
He sits in his room in a remote town, sometimes goes out, mostly doesn’t. The dog stays with him, wondering why he scribbles endlessly on sheets of paper. As he shoves one page away and hurriedly starts another, he remembers his passage up through the graves from Ethan to Claire and Sarah and then back down again, sprinkling dirt over them, waking from nightmares about them, and sometimes it seems those specks of dirt falling through his hands, like these words, will never end.
If you liked this harrowing thriller, check out the disturbing stories in NIGHTSCAPE.
Acclaimed author David Morrell (First Blood, Creepers) is praised for his riveting short fiction as much as he is for his best-selling thrillers. His stories appeared in many Year’s Best anthologies and received prestigious awards. In his second collection, Morrell leads you through an adrenaline-charged Nightscape of serial killers, third world revolutionaries, a policeman stalking a murderous cult, a son obsessed by his cryogenically frozen father, a psychology professor forced to suffer intense confinement, and a doctor combating an epidemic that he fears will destroy the world. Complete with autobiographical introductions in which Morrell links the stories to painful incidents in his life, Nightscape includes a mini-novel, “Rio Grande Gothic,” set in Morrell’s home of picturesque Santa Fe, New Mexico, where mysterious shoes appear day-after-day in the middle of a road. Soon it becomes shockingly evident that the shoes are the aftermath of ritual murders.
You can buy NIGHTSCAPE here!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Morrell can be contacted at his website, www.davidmorrell.net. He is the award-winning author of First Blood, the novel in which Rambo was created. He was born in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. When he was seventeen, he became a fan of the classic television series, Route 66, about two young men in a Corvette convertible traveling the United States in search of America and themselves. The scripts by Stirling Silliphant so impressed Morrell that he decided to become a writer.
In 1966, the work of another writer (Hemingway scholar Philip Young) prompted Morrell to move to the United States, where he studied with Young at the Pennsylvania State University and received his M.A. and Ph. D. in American literature. There, he also met the esteemed science-fiction author William Tenn (real name Philip Klass), who taught Morrell the basics of fiction writing. The result was First Blood, a ground-breaking novel about a returned Vietnam veteran suffering from post-trauma stress disorder who comes into conflict with a small-town police chief and fights his own version of the Vietnam War.
That “father” of modern action novels was published in 1972 while Morrell was a professor in the English department at the University of Iowa. He taught there from 1970 to 1986, simultaneously writing other novels, many of them international bestsellers, including the classic spy trilogy, The Brotherhood of the Rose (the basis for the only miniseries to be broadcast after a Super Bowl), The Fraternity of the Stone, and The League of Night and Fog.
Eventually wearying of two professions, Morrell gave up his academic tenure in order to write full time. Shortly afterward, his fifteen-year-old son Matthew was diagnosed with a rare bone cancer and died in 1987, a loss that haunts not only Morrell’s life but his work, as in his memoir about Matthew, Fireflies, and his novel Desperate Measures, whose main character lost a son.
“The mild-mannered professor with the bloody-minded visions,” as one reviewer called him, Morrell is the author of thirty-three books, including such high-action thrillers as The Protector, Testament, and The Spy Who Came for Christmas (set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives). Always interested in different ways to tell a story, he wrote the six-part comic-book series, Captain America: The Chosen. His writing book, The Successful Novelist, analyzes what he has learned during his four decades as an author.
Morrell is a co-founder of the International Thriller Writers or
ganization. Noted for his research, he is a graduate of the National Outdoor Leadership School for wilderness survival as well as the G. Gordon Liddy Academy of Corporate Security. He is also an honorary lifetime member of the Special Operations Association and the Association of Intelligence Officers. He has been trained in firearms, hostage negotiation, assuming identities, executive protection, and car fighting, among numerous other action skills that he describes in his novels. To research the aerial sequences in The Shimmer, he became a private pilot.
Morrell is an Edgar, Anthony, and Macavity nominee as well as a three-time recipient of the distinguished Stoker Award, the latest for his novel, Creepers. The International Thriller Writers organization gave him its prestigious career-achievement Thriller Master Award. With eighteen million copies in print, his work has been translated into twenty-six languages.
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