by TAYLOR ADAMS
Her cry reached a horrible peak.
“I’ll grab her.” James bellied down and slid under the Rav4’s engine. “She’s close enough that I can pull her to us—”
The sniper split Ash’s head and silenced her. James didn’t see all of it, just a splash of blue hair from behind the tire and then a puff of misted blood. Her shadow slackened. The rifle’s distant bark, from the first shot, thumped against the badlands.
Silence.
Then the second gunshot came, thinner than the first.
Twenty yards away, the Soviet kicked his jeep into gear. The motor snarled, the tires dug deep, and the winching cable lifted off the road with a piercing twang. The Acura’s bumper groaned and the vehicle moved on locked tires, digging tracks. James crawled beside the Toyota’s driver door and watched the Soviet depart downhill, trailing that cable, a pillar of dust, and finally, the surrendered Acura. Under a flash of reflected sunlight, he could suddenly discern a crowd of silhouettes in the jeep’s back seats. He saw broad edges and jutting right angles, and with a sigh of realization and creeping shame, he recognized the red ROCKSLIDE DETOUR signage from hours earlier.
It was a fake.
And it worked.
He was sickened with himself. There were a lot of things he wished he’d done differently now. He should have done more to help Glen in his confused final minutes. He should have immediately noticed the two dime-sized holes in the Rav4’s grill and realized the engine hadn’t just sprung a dozen leaks; it had been shot by two silent, fragmenting bullets. He should have thought to activate the GPS’s emergency roadside assistance function before the sniper had noticed it and destroyed it. He shouldn’t have discouraged Roy from saving his fiancée while she bled out in plain view. All of these failures came back like the tide, and he felt them all at once.
“I’m so sorry, Elle,” he whispered.
She wasn’t listening. She sat trance-like with her shoulders sloped and her fingers interlaced around her knees. She didn’t move while he scooted beside her and put an arm over her shoulder. Her eyes glimmered in the sun. “Ash . . . Ash spent the last five minutes of her life listening to me talk about snakes,” she said quietly.
“That’s good,” James said.
“No, it’s not. I talk about snakes to everyone.”
“She had just watched her sister die. And in all of this, you gave her someone to talk to and something better to think about.”
“Yeah. Snakes.”
James sighed. He didn’t know how to reach her. She had turned to glass before his eyes. She looked like she had two years ago, after the first miscarriage, when he came home from the radio station and found her sitting on the stairs with her arms folded. Only her lower lip had moved, only a tiny bit. All it takes to break glass is a single fracture, and that had been just the beginning.
Here lies Elle Eversman . . .
He heard her voice in his mind, singsong and drunk as he’d dragged her out of her Subaru, engine loping inside the garage at 2 AM on a Thursday: Here lies Elle Eversman – only cold-blooded children for her and her arsenic womb. It wasn’t a suicide attempt (she had started out with a clear objective, apparently, which was to drunk-drive to the gas station on Wellesley for a burrito) but it wasn’t quite not a suicide attempt, either. He had been so furious with her. His hands were shaking as he carried her into the living room and propped her on the couch. She had thrown up down her shirt. She was barely coherent, reeking of exhaust, babbling in a way that legitimately frightened him, as if she was possessed: No babies for Elle because her uterus is like the surface of Venus. Showers of acid rain and poisonous air and volcanoes of sulfur . . . He went back to the stuffy garage (her voice called out to him over his footsteps, echoing, strangely lyrical: Volcanoes of molten sulfur and an atmosphere made of mouthfuls of quiet death . . .) and he shut off the engine and lifted the garage door, and by the time he had returned inside with his eyes watering, she had fallen asleep on the couch.
If that seemed like the sort of thing you’d discuss in the morning, you’d be damn right – but James hadn’t brought it up. He’d waited for her to mention it, which of course never happened. A few days buried it, then a month, then three, and then the meth lab exploded next door and the world changed. In the peaks and valleys of their life together, the Subaru incident had just been one more valley. James thanked God that there were no guns in their household or that night could have ended very differently.
Only cold-blooded children for Elle.
Only snakes.
“I know . . . I know how we can escape the sniper,” she said now, in that same dreamy tone that turned James’ spine to ice.
He looked at her. “How?”
She looked down at her Converse, as if embarrassed. “I’m not saying . . . we do it. I’m just saying that if nothing gets better, it’s an option.”
“Just say it.”
“We stand up. Both of us.” A tear rolled down her cheek.
“No.”
“We’ll hold hands. Like this.” She wiped dried blood from her wrist. “And we’ll think of a memory. You know what mine is?”
“Shut up, Elle.” He didn’t have the energy for this. Not now.
“My mom . . . so we’re at the hospice and she’s still coherent. And she’s telling me in that rock-steady voice that if there’s life after death she’ll find a way to communicate it to me. Like knocking on the walls, or dumping a book off a shelf and opening it to a certain page, or blowing up a light bulb. Something to tell me that she’s still real somewhere, and that there’s . . . you know, a point.”
He pressed his forehead against hers and felt her breath on his cheeks. Something about the way she said a point profoundly depressed him.
“And of course nothing happened.” Her voice broke. “I never expected to see anything paranormal, but it was just . . . you know. A nice thing for her to say. Her last gift to me, I guess, to make it easier.”
James knew where this was going. He wasn’t proud of it, but of course he had intervened. He hadn’t even given the ghost of Rachel De Silva much time to send a real message. A week after she’d quietly succumbed to bone cancer, he had met with one of the engineers at work and learned a practical, safe method of making light bulbs explode when you turn them on. Shockingly practical, in fact. All you needed to do was plug in a significantly lower-voltage bulb (the cheaper, the better) and wait for the show. He did exactly this with the overhead light in the living room – but when Elle sat down to pick photographs for the funeral slideshow the next morning, it lit up just fine. Over the next few weeks, James had secretly installed several more low-voltage bulbs – the kitchen light, the bathroom light, the oblong light beside the couch – all with zero results. By then the grief was receding. Elle had started smiling and making her little jokes again, so he decided to just let it be and forgot about his little plot.
Until two weeks later, when a minor power surge slithered through the city’s electrical grid. Elle had been pulling a bowl of soup out of the microwave when all seven bulbs, in three rooms, went off like firecrackers. James had been outside checking the mailbox when he’d heard them exploding like champagne corks behind the front door. He raced inside to find Elle hunched under the dinner table – the floor littered with crunchy glass, the air curling with smoke, her noodles splattered all over the sink and fridge door – and she was rocking back and forth and hugging her knees like a PTSD victim. She was half-crying, half-laughing, and even though she somehow knew it was one of James’ schemes, and he knew she knew, and she knew he knew she knew, it had been a weird moment he wouldn’t let himself forget, sitting under the table together in the darkness with burnt filaments stinking up the air like gun smoke.
Even out here in the Mojave, if he shut his eyes he was almost back there.
“And you made a poltergeist for me,” Elle said with a scratchy smile.
“Yep.”
“I never thanked you for it. But . . . thank you.”
She looked up at him with suddenly vacant eyes, and the dream was over, and the crappy world took hold again. “Because there’s no life after death, James.”
He never understood how she could be so certain. It broke his heart.
“He’s going to come back,” she said coldly. “He’s going to drop off that car somewhere, and then he’s going to come back to tow ours. And then we’ll have nothing to hide behind and nothing to run to. And we’ll die.”
He nodded.
“We have a few minutes. At most.”
He nodded again, emptily. Tires spun in his mind.
Burnt filaments.
What?
Burnt filaments.
What about them?
Burnt filaments stinking up the air like—
Then an idea slipped into his head and stayed there, at once stunningly brilliant and stunningly obvious. He held a half breath in his lungs and sat rigid, as if the slightest motion, even a sigh, would shatter this fragile realization. It was too perfect to be real. It couldn’t be real. It was a half-gone dream, turning to mist.
He turned to face Elle and said, “You’re not going to die here.”
“James, please.” She traced random patterns in the dirt with her finger. “For everything you are, and everything I love about you, there’s nothing you can do to save us from an impossible situation. I’ve accepted that. That’s the hardest thing we have to do today, and I’ve done it.”
“We’re going to Tulsa.”
“You can’t save any of us in the next twenty minutes.” A ghost of a smile flickered over her face. “And I forgive you for it.”
He stroked her cheek with a dusty hand. And he smiled too, fragile at first, but gaining strength and conviction, curling into a boyish grin. “I have an idea. It’s not impossible.” He imitated the doctor’s Swahili accent. “Eet’s just . . . unlikely.”
She looked at him.
Then something struck his jaw.
8
Elle screamed.
Roy was bigger than James and knew it. It was a knuckle-to-teeth, brain-jarring hit from a man who had delivered a few in his life. James saw a Windex-blue sky, caught himself with an outstretched palm, and felt warmth race down his nose and chin. He blinked but saw only white sunlight, couldn’t find Roy, and raised his hands to guard against the next hit, whenever it came, but it didn’t.
Elle screamed something else. Louder.
He saw him. Roy was . . . he was crying. He cut a sad silhouette, falling on his ass against sun and sky, cheeks slick, pulling his own wrists up in a trembling fighting stance. He wanted to fight. He needed to, but James wouldn’t give it to him. The man – kid, really – whispered something through ragged gasps, rocking back and forth, his fingers tightening as he repeated it again and again, each time with more awful truth: “I didn’t save her, I didn’t save her, I didn’t save her . . .”
Saray.
James pulled himself up to the Rav4’s driver door and squeezed his nose. Pain flared between his eyes. It ached but probably wasn’t broken. Even if it was, it was the least of his worries right now. He tipped his head forward to keep the blood from running down his throat but kept his eyes cautiously fixed on Roy.
“I’m . . .” Roy looked up at him, suddenly ashamed. “I’m sorry.”
James spat red for possibly the hundredth time today. “It’s okay.”
“I’m so sorry, man—”
“Asshole.” Elle scooted out from behind James, knees scraping, throwing her ponied hair back. He grabbed her by both shoulders and held her.
“Let him be.” He crossed his arms over her chest. “Let him have this.”
“He hits you again, I castrate him.”
“I believe you.”
Roy punched the Toyota’s back door. The bamboo crack of bone on aluminum made James flinch. The guy’s shoulders sagged and he fell against the car with glimmering eyes, and then he slugged the door again, and again, and again. The last hit burst his knuckle and left a butterfly print of red on the yellow paint. He cried out, but not in pain. It was a long note of larynx-shattering rage.
Elle buried her face.
James pinched his nose and his nostrils stuck together with a double-clicking sound, like a computer mouse. He wasn’t angry with Roy. He should have been – he could have been pushed into the sniper’s crosshairs, or knocked unconscious, for God’s sake – but he wasn’t. Not even a little. James Eversman was never angry with people. He pitied them and empathized with them, even when their pain spilled out and struck him on the jaw. It was a simple truth he had understood for years: people hurt others when they are hurt, and hurting them back won’t make a damn difference. He had always been ashamed of this sensitivity because it felt like a personal weakness, but Elle had told him once, on a drunken walk home under amber streetlights, with her lips to his ear as they passed iron gates, that it was a secret sort of strength and she loved him for it.
“Roy,” he said.
The guy sniffed, his face to the door.
“Roy.” He placed a light hand on his shoulder. “Listen to me—”
“Saray was bleeding. And I didn’t help her—”
“Roy.”
“I let her die. And I—”
“Roy, shut up,” James said. “Blame me.”
He blinked. “What?”
“I told you not to go to her.” James swallowed a mouthful of metallic-tasting blood. “And I told her not to move. So blame me. Because I own it. I screwed up and got your fiancée killed. That’s on me, not you.”
An uncomfortable silence descended.
Am I lying? James honestly didn’t know.
Finally, Roy shrugged. “We’re dead anyway. When that jeep comes back and winches your car, it’s open season on us. So what does it matter?”
“Because . . .” James couldn’t suppress his crooked grin and stopped trying. “Because I think Glen Floyd had a gun on him.”
Elle gasped.
“I saw it in the way he walked,” James said. “I saw the bulge on his hip.”
Roy’s face didn’t change. “You’re sure?”
“No. It’s a hunch.”
“So how do you know?”
“I don’t. That’s what a hunch is.”
“When I was sixteen, I was at a cabin party that got rolled by park rangers,” Elle said with dawning hope. “They carried guns.”
“We’re going to get Glen’s gun,” James said. “And when the Soviet comes back to tow our car, we’ll give him the biggest surprise of his life. We’ll steal his jeep and we’ll drive out of this godforsaken place and we won’t stop.”
Roy narrowed his eyes. “What if he doesn’t actually have a gun?”
“Then we’ll be no more screwed than we are right now.”
“Problem.” Elle threw her head back at stared at Glen’s crumpled body, thirty feet up the road where he’d taken that fatal bullet. “He might as well be on the moon.”
James smiled. “One second.”
“What?”
“One second. Remember what we learned with your camera? The shooter has to think one second ahead of us. Plus however long it takes for him to find his target and zero in on it. So maybe . . . maybe two seconds.”
“Two seconds,” she said, unimpressed.
“Still have your older camera?”
She pulled it from the back seat, encased in bubble wrap and brown tape, and started tearing at it with her fingernails. “You know the Sony doesn’t have much image magnification. Right?”
“He doesn’t know that.” James pointed across the valley. “We’ll scoot the Sony out, under the bumper, just like you did with the other one.”
“He’ll shoot it again.”
“Yes. That means he’ll be watching the shot.” He glanced back at Glen’s body. “That gives us our first second. Immediately, instantly, the microsecond that camera explodes, I will run for Glen.”
&nbs
p; “How fast can you get there?”
“A second and a half.”
Elle crinkled her nose.
“Fine. Two seconds,” he said. “It still works.”
“He’ll be targeting you by then. He might have already pulled the trigger.”
“Maybe.” James opened and closed his hand, rehearsing the motion. “I’ll stop at Glen’s body and take another second to throw his jacket open, unlatch his holster, and grab the gun.”
“He’ll shoot you.”
“I won’t take more than a second over Glen’s body. So if he shoots at me, he’ll miss.”
“Right.” Roy leaned forward like a football player in a huddle and spoke with surprising clarity and focus. Almost like he’d done this sort of thing before. “But what if you take more than a second to grab the gun? Or he predicts that you’ll stop at the old man’s body and shoots before you get there?”
“He’ll . . .” James swallowed. He knew that was the biggest flaw in this plan. “He’ll have very little time to predict that.”
“What if he does?”
“My run back will take another two seconds,” he said. He couldn’t afford to start thinking critically about this batshit idea because scrutiny would only expose more holes. “I’ll start to run for the back of the car, and then change direction halfway to throw him off. That’ll give me one final second. Five seconds, four changes of movement.”
“Ash zig-zagged,” Roy said. “He still got her.”
“The shooter’s good. He can’t be perfect.”
“Neither is this retarded idea—”
“The math works,” James hissed. “It adds up. In theory, it’s possible. You can doubt my running. My zig-zagging abilities. But you can’t doubt me when I tell you that one plus one, plus one, plus one, equals four.”
Roy shrugged. “If it equals five, you’re dead.”
“If it’s stupid and it works, it’s not stupid.”
“It has to work before you say that.”
“James, honey, you’re making a lot of assumptions.” Elle tore the last piece of tape away and pressed the Sony into his hands. It was bigger than the Nikon, heftier, with an analog VCR feel to it and a silver chip where James had dropped it on a marina dock five years ago. “One mistake, one little unexpected detail, and you lose your one-second lead. What if . . . how fast can you even open a gun holster?”