by TAYLOR ADAMS
That answered his question – the killer hadn’t relocated because there was no need to. Eventually, as the sun set and rose, they would either wither from the creeping death of dehydration or choose to break cover and make a futile run back up the northern wall of the crater. And then the bastard would enjoy hundreds and hundreds of yards of luxurious open ground to pick them off, one by one.
James couldn’t decide which death was better. Maybe, he decided, they were past better and worse, and the new yardstick was shitty and less shitty. As he considered this, Elle stirred, moved to his lap and lay with her hands around his shoulders and her face buried in his dusty white shirt. She sniffed once and squeezed the back of his neck. He knew she shouldn’t be here. Her life was hard enough. Miscarriages and a nonstarter career and her two beloved pets gone forever. He had to get her out of here, at any cost. He rallied himself and tried to pare the enormity of this nightmare into something smaller, simpler, more bite-sized and manageable.
Think of it like a puzzle.
He’d loved puzzles as a kid. He’d had books of them – little one-off situational riddles less than a page or two long. They’d give you a location, list the objects at your disposal, set a few ground rules, and then it was up to you to engineer a solution. Many involved escaping inescapable concrete rooms or solving unsolvable murders. He loved them. He was great at them. He never had a sibling and he built only shallow friendships, but James Eversman always had his puzzles. Even – no, especially – after his dad died.
You’re crouched behind a car, he thought grimly. A sniper, a mile away on the opposite ridge of the valley, has you in his scope. You’re thirsty and tired. It’s a hundred degrees, and you only have two bottles of water for four people. You have no cell phone signal. You’re surrounded by hundreds of yards of open prairie, in all directions, with nothing to hide behind. Every inch is no man’s land. Any mistake, any exposure, is instant death.
He sighed. And the asshole shot your GPS.
He wanted to do something he had never allowed himself to do – flip to the back of the book and read the solution. It was always reassuring to know that a solution existed (however cheap or poorly constructed) and that was comfort he sorely missed here. There might be no humanly possible way to overcome this situation, and if that was the case, what then?
“You said you’d think of something.” It was Saray’s sister – tall, waifish, dyed blue hair. Ash? He hadn’t gotten a good look at her when she was inside Roy’s Acura. Her voice was hoarse, and he knew she’d been crying, watching her sister bleed out.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She sniffed and said something unclear, choked with tears.
He knew his words were hollow. There were no words worthy of the moment. It came to him then, a crushing wave of guilt – why hadn’t he thought of something? A distraction? Anything? Sure, he’d intervened, but he might have actually made things worse. Failing any breakthroughs, he should have at least given Roy the go-ahead to try and save her, if he’d really wanted to risk it. He was certain the sniper would have shot Roy. Right?
Did I save a life? Or let one go?
He would have done it for Elle, he realized. In a heartbeat. He would have grabbed her and hauled her dying ass back behind the car. He wouldn’t have even thought about it. And Elle would have done it for him, too.
I told him not to save her.
He felt sick now; his stomach coiled and heaved. Elle’s teeth chattered against his shoulder and she sniffed again, wetly. She was crying but fighting to hide it. She didn’t like anyone to see her cry. Not even him.
“You’re an asshole, James.” It was Roy now. His voice shivered with rage. “You told me you were thinking of something. So I waited. I waited for you to think of something and now she’s dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
Elle stirred and put her lips to his ear. “Don’t listen to him.”
“You don’t . . .” Roy spat in the dirt. “You don’t tell people you’ll help them if you can’t. Your optimistic shit . . . You’re lying to them. You told me, so I waited. That’s on you, you piece of shit.”
“You did everything you could,” Elle whispered.
James closed his eyes and ignored Roy. He knew his wife was lying and that he had already screwed up terribly, but he appreciated it. He needed a new project now. He needed to busy himself, to do something, to keep his thoughts in motion. He couldn’t allow himself to lose momentum and dwell on his mistakes, on that poor girl he’d failed, because if he allowed himself to step into that quicksand he would never claw himself out.
“Don’t hate yourself,” Elle said. “Just keep thinking.”
Goose bumps crawled up his arm. She could read his mind sometimes.
Water, he decided. Drinking water for the survivors will be my project. He rolled over, grabbed the two Aquafinas and held one in each hand, swollen with hot liquid. One for him and Elle. One for Roy and Ash.
“She was right there.” Roy coughed. “She was ten feet away—”
James arched his back and two vertebrae popped like gunshots. He kneed his way to the rear of the Toyota and peered around the taillight to see Roy, huddled on his knees by the Acura’s grill, holding Ash by her shoulders. The vehicle sagged, something internal drip-drip-dripping a steady beat, forcing them to hunch even lower to stay out of the killer’s view. It was eerie seeing such a big man bent under the hood of the sporty car, shoulders sloped, spirit crushed. He couldn’t see Ash’s face, just a waterfall of blue hair in the indecisive wind.
“Water,” he said hoarsely.
Neither of them looked up.
He tossed the bottle – too hard. He watched in horror as it twirled over Saray’s dead legs, tumbled past both Roy and Ash before they could lunge for it, and – oh, thank God – wedged under the Acura’s front tire with a puff of dust. A few inches from Ash’s sandaled toes, gleaming hot in the sunlight.
“It’s all we have,” James sighed. “Make it last.”
Neither of them reached for it. Fair enough.
James broke the seal on his own bottle and took a half sip. He swished it through his teeth and tried to enjoy it, but there was nothing to enjoy. It tasted like boiled plastic and burned the roof of his mouth. Reluctantly he swallowed and let it disappear forever. The Aquafina bottle held twelve fluid ounces – how much was that sip? A quarter-ounce? He dealt in advertising market shares and percentages at work, so his brain immediately jumped there and estimated that miserable little sip had cost them two percent.
He passed it to Elle and she took a big gulp. Ten percent.
He didn’t want to argue. What difference would it make?
When you’re trapped in an ambush . . . you charge your enemy.
A military thing he’d heard from his father while watching a fuzzy Audie Murphy movie on the brown living room carpet. He was only seven – he didn’t know if it was true or even tactically sound. What had it mattered then? His father only spoke to him when there was another entity in the room, like a chattering radio or television, to fill the quiet spaces. In another year, his father would be slumped against the dishwasher, one eye shut, slain by the walnut-colored squirrel rifle he kept loaded by the front door.
The idea being, if you’re in an ambush, you’re already exactly where the enemy wants you to be. They built this engagement. If you stay where you are, and try to fight on their terms, you will die.
He spoke in circles sometimes, but James listened patiently because his father was undeniably fascinating. He would work his jaw in circular, wolfish motions mid-sentence, like he was trying to yawn but not quite pulling it off. He made violent gestures with his hands, stabbing the air emphatically through curls of smoke. He touched his beard – not a stroke, not an adjustment – just a touch, as if checking on it. Sometimes his friends would come over, ragged men with long hair and loud laughter. Camouflage pants, mullets, and dirty fingernails. The Anti-Weathermen, they called themselves, with sarcasm or pride
or maybe a mix of both. His mother would hide James in the bedroom, and the tiny house would rattle with voices and stink of skunk marijuana. James would sleep watching the cracks of light around the door, hearing only fragments. Something about a coming war. A great war. The Tip-over, they called it.
So you charge your enemy. You charge the fucker, close-quarters, and surprise them, and most importantly, you relocate yourself out of their kill zone. And maybe, if you’re lucky, you can swing your odds back to fifty-fifty.
Charge your enemy.
When the Tip-over happens, James, you remember that.
Now James had a crazy-stupid idea. If he could kick the Toyota into neutral, and he and Elle ducked low in the seats, they could roll the car down the sloped road and crash it somewhere in the darkened riverbed at the center of the crater, a half mile away. Anywhere but here. Maybe, just maybe, the arroyo would be defiladed from the sniper’s scope, if they survived the crash. He knew it was a desperate idea (moving toward the armed killer?) and it chilled him to realize that yes, he was indeed this desperate. The situation was that bad. Then he remembered the Rav4’s shift lock release was useless without the keys, which had been jingling in his fingers when Saray took the bullet. In the ensuring blur, he had no idea where he’d dropped them. And Elle’s set, of course, had been lost in the house fire.
She capped the water bottle, set it between her knees and looked at him purposefully. Her tears had smeared her eyeliner, giving her raccoon eyes.
“What?” he asked her.
“I lied.”
“When?”
“I lied when I told you I sold my cameras on Craigslist.” She brushed a flyaway bang from her eyes and grinned, half-embarrassed. “I couldn’t do it. I have both of them still, in a black case under the clothes, under the crib.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
He kissed her forehead, scorching hot. “I told you not to sell them.”
“I did it so . . . so I could prove a point to myself. So if I ever came back to it, it would mean something.” Her voice lowered, as if divulging a secret: “The Nikon has a telephoto zoom.”
“How far?”
“Far.”
“Far enough to see him?”
She smiled cautiously. “I think so—”
A hollow snap interrupted her, and a pillar of dust billowed from Roy’s Acura and scattered into the prairie. The hiss of falling sand came and went. A few clods of dirt pattered down. James tensed his back against the driver door and shouted to the other car: “Hey! What was that?”
Silence.
“Roy, Ash, you still alive?”
“Bullshit.” It was Roy’s voice.
“What happened?”
“Asshole just shot the water bottle.”
* * *
Tapp clacked the bolt and the ejected brass pinged off limestone to his right, ringing like a little bell. He couldn’t hear his victims but he liked to imagine their shocked reactions to his power:
Oh my God.
Did he really?
How is that even possible?
It was an incredible shot. A small bottle swollen with warm water, sideways on the gravel, 1,545 meters away, and behind two sporadic crosswinds. It was barely a dot in his hyper-magnified optic. It could have been a speck of windblown sand on the lens, or an opaque cell inside Tapp’s own eye. It was a minor miracle that every intuition and rounded decimal point had guided his hand-loaded projectile to exactly where he wanted it to go. No other marksman alive, in any army or competition, could hit a target that size, at that range, with any degree of certainty. Simpler men might find the supernatural in Tapp’s work, and he could think of at least one who did.
Just like how he shot our GPS.
Could he be military? Ex-Special Forces?
He has to be.
He hoped they understood how difficult shooting was. Movies fostered grotesque misconceptions about marksmanship. It’s not point-and-click, even at the shortest ranges. The human body was the shooter’s greatest enemy – a furiously pumping machine full of spasms, aches, and softness. To plot a bullet’s trajectory every environmental force had to be calculated. The parabolic tug of gravity, the elevation and angle, the air pressure, the air temperature, the round’s ballistic coefficient, the rotation of the earth, and of course, the devastating, unpredictable wind.
Isn’t it windy today? Doesn’t that make it even harder?
Meanwhile you got these asshole CSI agents on television diving over backwards in slow motion and still shooting the bad guy, like a gunfight is some kind of fucking bullet ballet. Or shooting with a pistol in each hand – who decided that made the faintest lick of sense? It was bullshit. Preposterous. It made Tapp angry. He couldn’t think about it now.
He must be the best sniper in the world.
Tapp cracked open his second energy drink (grape-flavored, of course) and replayed the last few seconds in his mind. It wasn’t a headshot but it was close enough to send a rush of pleasure down his favorite neural pathways. After the rifle’s kick, first came the ‘swirl’ in his scope – the bullet’s vapor trail, more visible on a hot day like today. By reading it, he could watch the shot go low and left to burrow under the wind shear, exactly how he’d planned. Then the impact – magnified in his 100x spotting scope because during the projectile’s flight he had time to comfortably lean forward and switch optics – he saw the fountain of mist and dirt. The water itself was vaporized, blown into a fine curtain of fog that blossomed and swept sideways in the low wind. He envisioned this, the lovely payoff, again and again until he was exhausted and felt only the creeping hunger to hit more.
More, please.
This was becoming his longest shoot ever. Typically they were thirty-minute affairs; heavenly little bursts of excitement after months of work and buildup. He would kill one, two, three, a runner here, a crawler there, and then he would shed his ghillie suit, grab his target pistol, hike a mile across the crater, and study the stiffening bodies where they lay. He would close his eyes and reconstruct the shoot as a play-by-play, imagining each second from their ground-level viewpoints, sketching mental lines suspended in the air like lasers to mark each move, counter-move, and kill shot.
This shoot was different. These four were intelligent enough to immediately take cover behind their cars at a perfectly observed angle. No one had lost it. No one had hit the dirt like the sissified modern human is trained to. No one had chanced a run for the hills (yet). As it stood, this engagement was becoming a stalemate, which Tapp did not want. Not this late into the afternoon with dwindling sunlight. No, sir. No thanks.
“Move their cars for me,” he said into his headset radio. “Now.”
As he spoke he spotted a flash of movement under the Toyota’s front bumper. The wife – it appeared – was doing something there. Her shadow bobbed against wiry grass, then shortened and lengthened. Something small and silver scooted slowly into view under the bumper, feathered by mere fingertips.
He blinked and his eyelashes scraped the lens.
What’s this?
* * *
Elle steadied her Nikon digital camera on the soft earth. She gently swiveled it to face downhill across the crater and then another thirty degrees to the right as James had instructed. The reflex viewfinder allowed her to see the image without exposing her head. She hoped. At this obtuse angle beside the Toyota’s front tire, she wasn’t sure how far, exactly, was too far to lean out.
She could hear the girl – Ash? – sobbing by the other car. What an awful thing. She couldn’t imagine losing her own sister, let alone in such a graphic way, in full view and unflinching sunlight. She had to say something.
“Hey. Hey, your name is Ash, right?” she shouted. “Like Ashley?”
Silence.
“Yeah,” the girl said.
“I’m Elle.”
No response.
She could barely see the viewfinder at this angle. The aperture was still set for indoors
and let in far too much sunlight, registering a blizzard whiteout. Carefully exposing one finger at a time (she doubted the sniper, for all his godlike powers, could possibly target individual fingers, right?) she dialed the f-stops back to four, then eight, then eleven. Finally the horizon traced itself on the screen.
“How . . . how old are you, Ash?” She licked her lips and lowered the camera, dipping the two center hash marks below the craggy skyline.
“Eighteen,” the girl sniffed.
“Tell me about yourself. What do you like to do?”
“I . . . I don’t know.”
To see the viewfinder, Elle contorted her back into an s-curve – shoulders forward, head twisted back. She couldn’t possibly know where the invisible line between life and death was, but she imagined her cheeks were just touching it, her eyelashes fluttering against it, her heaving breaths and arched spine holding her back and upright and just barely out of the killer’s scope. Maybe she was teasing him.
“Why is your hair blue?” she asked. Stupid question.
Ash huffed. “Why not?”
Swing and a miss, she thought. She thumbed the optical zoom and watched the far valley wall slowly enlarge and darken. Good Lord, she loved that telephoto lens. She loved the compressing effect it had on buildings, how entire city blocks of steel, glass, and brick would flatten into a single wall of crushed depth. Downtown had always been an amazing place for her, full of verticality. Some of her favorite shots were on the roof of the Quigley building looking down on the rooftops of Wallace, with those parapets and utility boxes and gargoyles suffering Big Apple envy. She had a hell of an eye for compositions, but she quickly learned that talent doesn’t pay the rent.
She tried again. “You going to school for anything?”
“September. I start vet school in Reno.”
“That’s good. I love pets.”
“Yeah?” Ash sniffed. “You seem like a dog person.”
Silence.
James looked at his wife and stifled a laugh.
Elle smiled bashfully. “No. Snakes.”
“Snakes?”
“Yeah. Two snakes and—”