by TAYLOR ADAMS
“Elle!” her husband screamed, louder and sharper.
She watched the last bits of rock settle and realized some of it was sticky and wet. Like hot raindrops, Amazon showers, pattering loudly to the ground. Blood. She felt another surge of animal panic. Was it Glen’s blood? Or hers? She hurled her head to the right and saw a red trench sliced up Glen’s thigh, opening him up like meat. That’s where it hit. The sniper’s bullet had passed right over her elbow, or just below her armpit perhaps, and missed her by an eyelash.
“I’m okay,” she gasped.
“Come back!” Roy shouted.
Run, she urged herself. Now. Forget the stupid gun. Get back to the car. Had she already spent a full second on the ground? Probably. She kicked, heaved sideways—
“Don’t move!” James shouted.
She froze.
“Don’t move,” he said again, his voice small and distant. “He thinks he hit you.”
She needed to move. Badly. She inched her right hand forward, tarantula-crawled her fingers over the road and miraculously found the revolver beside her. Yes! She must have yanked the little weapon free of whatever was snagging it when she tumbled backwards, somehow. She clasped her thumb and index finger around what she hoped was the safe end. How embarrassing would it be to accidentally shoot herself, here and now? Here lies Elle Eversman: Shot at by a homicidal sniper. Shot herself to save him the trouble.
“I have it,” she said. “Glen’s gun.”
“Don’t even talk,” James said. “He might see your lips move.”
Her chest was rising and falling with adrenalized breath – if the killer could see her lips move he could damn well see that, too. She felt her heartbeat again, swelling in her neck. She was starting to hate herself. She had no idea why she’d done this. What recklessness! And for what? She hadn’t admitted it to James, but she’d never really believed that Glen had a gun on him. Even in her hand, she somehow doubted its existence. Like God, like an afterlife with wings and clouds and harps, it just felt too easy to be real.
Why had she run for it, then?
A warm wind passed over her, raising drifts of sand and peppering her dry eyes. Her contacts burned. She desperately wanted to rub them but knew it would be a dead giveaway. But what did it matter? The sniper might have already fired his next shot anyway. The supersonic bullet might already be racing toward her, right now, and she wouldn’t know until it hit her.
“Don’t breathe,” James said.
She blinked once, twice, wincing from the sudden pain and digging her fingers into the road. Her elbow felt hot and damp where she’d scraped it. Somehow she sensed the crosshairs were back on her, if they’d ever left her at all, and she felt his eyes, silent patient eyes, moving up and down her body with piggish amusement, just like the Soviet Cowboy at the Fuel-N-Food. God, she hated being stared at.
“What do we do, James?”
“I’m thinking.”
* * *
Tapp was thinking, too.
The wife had crumpled in that weightless, soundless way that bodies always did inside his scope. Part ragdoll, part muscle spasm. She had landed on her back beside the park ranger’s corpse, arms flat at her sides. He saw a jetting fog of pink but he couldn’t ascertain an exact point of impact, so he leaned into his 100x spotting scope and scanned her nice little body for a wound. She was hyperventilating but struggling to control it. He saw the fingers of her left hand clawing and holding fistfuls of chalky dirt. He couldn’t see what the right was doing.
Tapp figured he should shoot her again, in the head. To be humane.
The visceral pleasure of the shot – the impossible, wind-curving, against-all-odds shot – was unmatched, but watching the victim succumb to the damage was the uncomfortable and necessary evil that came with it. Yet another shooting myth nurtured by movies is the pleasant fantasy that a gunshot to the torso equals instant death. It doesn’t, unless the heart is pulverized on impact, and even then the victim still has ten to twenty seconds of miserable awareness while their circulatory system depressurizes. Shot anywhere else in the torso, the human body takes its sweet time.
That was Tapp’s first kill in a nutshell, back in the dewy Oregon field where he’d watched a nineteen-year-old hitchhiker in a brown Nirvana shirt choke to death on his own ribs. His breathing had sounded like fluorescent light rods crackling. His fingers had crunched into vulture claws. Mouthfuls of blood rising like tidewater. Tapp had turned away. He couldn’t watch. He couldn’t be near that awful fireworks display of human misery. Until you’ve actually killed a person, nothing can prepare you for how bad it will be.
Stay with me, Nirvana Shirt had said.
Tapp had been hunched over a fence, power-puking into the nettles. At first he’d thought he’d only imagined the hitchhiker’s voice, or maybe he’d just hoped he had, but the second time was unmistakable: Stay with me. Please.
Nirvana Shirt hadn’t even seemed upset. Certainly not angry. He was shivering, teeth clicking, and his face was graying out. He looked like he’d spent an hour in a walk-in freezer. So Tapp took a knee and awkwardly held the boy’s hand. It had been excruciatingly uncomfortable, like square dancing, where you sometimes had to hold a guy’s hand. And the damn false alarms! He’d kept looking like he was going to die – this is it, here comes the final breath – then he would swallow and stoically wheeze on.
Don’t go, he gurgled.
I won’t, Tapp said. I’ll stay with you.
Another light rod fractured in his chest. Thank you.
What?
Thank you.
Certain this was a misunderstanding, Tapp said: I did this to you.
I know, Nirvana Shirt said peacefully.
That made Tapp angry. Or something – a white-hot flash of something stirred snake-like in his gut. He wasn’t sure what reaction he had been hoping for (he still wasn’t) but this quiet forgiveness sure wasn’t it.
I did this to you, he told Nirvana Shirt again with more of a snarl: I saw you crossing the field and I knew there was no one for miles, so I pulled over and grabbed my .270 and sat on the tailgate and shot you. On a lark. Like a split-second decision to pull off at a gas station for Cheetos, I ended your life. I did this to you, I destroyed your entire world, and it means almost nothing to me.
I know, Nirvana Shirt said again with Christ-like peace. Then he had quietly died, somehow winning the argument forever.
Tapp would never be fully okay with killing. He had accepted that. Hadn’t that guy on the news (the one in Reno, who cut up his aunt and uncle and baby twin sisters with a paper-cutter blade) said that he would have killed more if he hadn’t been caught? He had grinned through his trial like a fat Cheshire cat with yellow teeth. That guy was a monster, a genuine piece of human garbage. He deserved the chair and got it last spring. Tapp knew he was something else, something better.
Yes. This woman has suffered enough.
Let’s punch her ticket. Shall we?
Dust curled around the wife’s body in smoky wisps. Her breathing had stilled and her hands had stopped moving. She stared straight up at the sky, her shoulders flat to the road, anguished but unmistakably alive.
Not for long. Like the blue-haired girl, Tapp would excuse her from a slow death of blood loss by splitting her head like a squashed melon. This, again, was the kindest gesture he could offer another—
Wait.
What’s this?
* * *
James stood up.
Elle rolled onto her stomach, kicked up another swirl of dust, and looked at him with gaping horror. He saw the gun – Oh my God, it exists – a tiny black thing, clenched in her right hand. She tucked it in her back pocket.
“Run!” he screamed.
She hunched her legs, raised her heels, and launched into a dead sprint. She shouted something but he couldn’t make it out. He felt like he was underwater. One ear rang, then the other.
Keep standing . . .
He turned to face the sniper. �
�Feeling exposed’ didn’t do it justice. He felt like he might plunge off the surface of the earth at any moment and keep falling. The world was a colossal fishbowl, the horizon stretching in all directions and lazily curving to meet the infinite sky. A small, selfish part of his body urged him to sit back down – That’s enough, she’ll make it – but he swallowed it. His mind darted to memories of rock climbing, to the part where you’d scaled the artificial wall and now you had to let go. You fall into your belay rope so your partner can winch you back down. The fall of faith. It always looked easy from fifty feet below, until you’re the idiot clinging to concrete and fiberglass by your fingers and toes. You had to ignore millions of years of evolved self-preservation instinct inside yourself, will your mind over your body, and just do it. That had been over two years ago and there sure as hell wasn’t anything resembling a belay line here.
Keep standing . . .
I’m not afraid of you, he thought, which was a lie. He was terrified.
He heard Elle’s footsteps racing back behind him, kicking a wake of hissing dust. She was close, almost back to safety. He couldn’t turn around. He kept his eyes locked on that distant cliff rippling with heated air, on that invisible killer a mile away, who was certainly staring back at him now. He hoped he was making history here. He hoped that if the sniper did cut him down, he would never forget the one man who stood up and stared back.
Keep standing.
The wind tugged his shirt and hair, surprisingly cool. A sweat stain on the back of his shirt had turned freezing cold. The ringing in his ears became an ambulance siren. He knew enough time had passed now, at least two or three seconds, and that the sniper had to have pulled the trigger. He was certain that a mile across the crater, the end of his life was racing toward him at thousands of feet per second—
“James!”
She’d made it.
He threw himself to the road, back to earth and shadow. Sure enough, he felt the shot slice the air above him, buzzing like a hornet and snapping a concussive blast in his left ear, and he flinched only a little because he already knew he was alive and had literally just dodged a bullet. When he hit the ground beside the Rav4 she was already there. He wanted to tell her how stupid she was, how furious he was at her for risking everything, but words were weak and small and not enough. He grabbed the back of her neck, mashed her forward and kissed her, every inch of her goddamn stupid face. Her hands clasped the sides of his head, bracing hard, fingers squeezing. The report of the sniper shot came and went, but they didn’t care.
He pressed his forehead to hers. She was laughing now – she tried to hold it in but blew a nasal snort – and shuddered with giddy chuckles, her hot breath on his face, a buoyant hymn of holyshitthatworked. He kissed her again and held her while the world bled away, and he whispered something in her ear almost beyond words, half-formed syllables floating in a sea of gasping breath, that only they understood.
I’m lost without you.
“Get the gun?” Roy asked.
She flashed a goofy smile and cradled the weapon in both hands. It was a revolver, blued steel and checkered wood battered with scrapes and dings. She pressed it toward James. He took it and was surprised that the weapon felt at once heavy and light. Maybe just dense. Or maybe its power made it feel heavier. Suddenly it all seemed within reach, the situation still fluid, the world still alive and thumping with possibility.
James looked at Roy’s shirt. “Did you piss some excellence in your pants?”
“I . . . can’t believe I did that.”
“It still worked.”
“I once jumped a thirty-foot creek on an Enduro bike.” Roy’s lip curled and he stared at the road between his knees. “I’ve never . . . I don’t know, frozen like that before.”
James immediately felt bad. “I’m sorry—”
“No.” Roy beamed a signboard grin and forced a laugh. “It makes sense. I’m not afraid of hurting or dying, but I finally found something that truly scares me. I had to go all the way out here, in this asshole’s personal shooting range to find it. Liza and I won’t work, I’ve accepted that, but I can still be a dad to Emma. That’s still on the table. And I want so badly to fix it. And I can’t, because I’m stuck here, and if I die, it’s all erased.”
James touched his shoulder.
“I’m not afraid of dying,” Roy said. “I’m afraid of dying an asshole.”
“You won’t. Alright?”
“Alright.”
“We’ll get out of here.”
“Man,” he sniffed. “Your wife has balls.”
James hesitated. “That’s . . . please word that differently.”
Roy laughed uncomfortably.
“Here.” James handed him the revolver and gladly let the burden shift. “I hate guns.”
Roy grabbed it with his finger on the trigger and aimed up the road, scrunching one eye and sticking out his tongue as he aligned the stubby little sights. Then he lowered it and thumbed a button on the left (guns have their own language, and the initiated seem to be able to pick up any model and intuit its operation) and the central cylinder rotated a few inches out. In it, he saw five golden bullets seated in a circle, gleaming in the sun. Five?
Roy made a sour face.
“Don’t they usually hold six?” James asked.
“I wish that was our problem.”
“What’s our problem?”
Roy huffed and threw the gun back.
James caught it with both hands. “What?”
“You tell me.”
Uncomfortable with it in his possession again, he studied the five brass circles. He noted the smooth twirl of the cylinder, the .38 SPECIAL stamped on the perimeter of each bullet, and . . . Oh, no. A tiny metallic ping impressed in the center of each one.
“See?”
James nodded numbly.
One of his earliest memories was of a party in his parents’ farmhouse. He had crawled on a blotted carpet through a forest of legs, searching for his mother. He couldn’t have been more than six, but he knew that when his father was with his friends that he’d be ignored. That was the way it was. The Anti-Weathermen were serious business. The Tip-over was coming, ready or not.
There was one man in particular at this gathering – tall, skeletal shoulders, dark as ebony, with a polished head – that all the others, even James’ father, seemed frightened of. Everyone watched and hushed when the Tall Man was near because something about him, or something he had recently done, made him dangerous and toxic. When he walked through the crowded living room, Diet Coke in hand, the others parted like water breaking off the bow of a ship. And he was walking toward James.
At that age he didn’t like to look adults in the eye, but the Tall Man took a knee to his level. The crowd spread in a circle around them, voices lowered to a murmur. The man gently took James’ hand with knuckled fingers and opened it, palm up. Then with a smile of piano-white teeth, he produced a single brass bullet casing and placed it upright in his hand. The Tall Man said something too quiet to hear, closed James’ tiny fingers around it, and then he was gone. James had studied the tiny ping in the center of the shell for a long time before his father noticed and snatched it away without a word. He never learned the story behind it. By the time he was old enough to ask meaningful questions, his father had been dead for years, and the Tip-over had never happened anyway.
What did it matter? You can’t rationalize evil. Like the Tall Man, or the Soviet Cowboy, it just is.
“Is it—”
Roy nodded.
Five spent cartridges. Elle had risked her life for an empty gun.
“Oh, no.” He stared at the weapon. “Elle, we—”
He noticed something on the heel of the gun’s grip, a sidelong brushstroke of blood, and immediately knew it wasn’t Glen’s. The old man’s blood had long ago browned and cracked under the sun. This was fresh, oxygenated, pulsing with bright red life, and had only been spilled in the last minute.
H
e turned to Elle.
She had fallen silent. He realized that she hadn’t spoken at all for the last few moments. She held both hands out as she had when she presented the revolver to him, and stared mystified at them. There was suddenly much more blood, a thin stream running down her wrist and beading between her fingers. He followed it up her arm to her chest, to just below her armpit, where her shirt was clinging and soaked.
The sniper hadn’t missed her after all.
She sighed and it sounded wet and thick, like water running down a plugged sink drain. “Well, this sucks.”
10
Tapp stacked his .338 casings in a tidy, single-file row, toppled one, and realized his fingers were trembling.
How had they learned so much, so fast? They knew the bullet’s flight time. They knew where he was. They knew how fast he could fire. And they had used all of these factors against him and misdirected his attention twice. He had been humiliated by three strangers cowering behind a disabled car. Nothing would undo that. Like shooting paper targets, that hole was there forever.
He strained to replay Sergei Koal’s awed words about him being a demon but didn’t feel any better because, of course, there were no gods or demons. There was only this charming little accident that is the universe, expanding to its heat death. Life existed only here on this rock, only by chance, not for long (atheism: the ultimate non-prophet organization). And on this godless little rock, William Tapp had just screwed up.
Are they laughing at me?
Laugh all you want. You’re still going to die.
His naked eye saw Svatomir’s jeep as a tiny dot following the hairline Shady Slope Road, chugging up the valley wall to the survivors. He tried to muster some shivery excitement – he’d tow the Toyota away and then they’d all be his, three easy little squeezes, gouts of red, joints flopping unnaturally, bodies pirouetting under spurts of gravel – but realized this simply wasn’t fun anymore. Somehow it had become work. It was worse than work, he decided, because now his emotions were tangled up in it and he had something to lose.