by TAYLOR ADAMS
The first debris-meteorites were landing now, touching down on his hill in flashes of ember. A big one, wreathed in fire, crashed down somewhere to his left. The air thickened with burnt powder, melted plastic, white-hot aluminum.
Suicide. He scooped up his thoughts like loose sand. Sure. Suicide would do well enough. He just had a few little things to tie up first—
As if on cue, another kernel of red light ignited at the foot of the blaze as James lit a second emergency flare. The salesman, the lanky white-collar guy with the self-deprecating shrug and the yellow Rav4 crammed with furniture, was coming to kill Tapp. This was it. It was on, as the kids say.
Okay, James. You ruined me. Before I go, I’ll ruin you worse.
A scythe of sheet metal twirled over the sniper’s head like a fiery windmill blade. Tapp didn’t even flinch as he peeled off his headset microphone, and when the shrapnel banged into rock a few meters behind him, all he heard was his deceased, biggest fan:
You’re a demon. You just don’t know it yet.
23
James was starting to climb the sniper’s hill when he heard Roy’s Acura ignite behind him and the escarpment throbbed under another wash of light. A secondary blast thumped from the skeleton of Tapp’s building, and then a third. He supposed there were more acetylene tanks in there than the two he’d seen, but it didn’t matter now. He heard Tapp’s library of ammunition and exotic gunpowder cooking off like machine gun fire, popping in ragged bursts. Thousands of candy wrappers rained down like a ticker-tape parade from Hell. Sheet metal came crashing down around him, warping and twanging, some glowing molten. His scalp and back tingled with second-degree burns and he recognized the dense stench of burnt human hair. Somewhere behind him, the Soviet was howling like a kenneled dog, his lungs full of bubbling fire, burning alive. James ignored all of it.
Elle is running out of time.
Get up there and kill him.
The grade steepened immediately as the land crested around the building in a harelip and became a wall of columned rock and scree piles. Granite emerged from the land like bones tearing through skin. Every step loosed a small landslide. Wiry brush tore out in handfuls. Even the rain worked against him as it ran down the hill in torrents, washing rock faces clean and spurting dirty water in his eyes and mouth.
His arm ached from holding the second signal flare skyward like an Olympic torch. It burned erratically in the downpour, hissing and snapping, dumping flurries of sparks. It threatened to die at any second. Weren’t they supposed to be waterproof?
“Keep burning.” He didn’t recognize his voice. “Please.”
Because it had been almost sixty seconds now and James wasn’t dead yet, he knew his plan was working. It was like a horror movie – stay out of the shadows and the monster couldn’t grab you. As long as he remained in the light, Tapp’s night vision scope couldn’t see him. Light beats darkness. The coughing flare, the reflective jacket, the burning building; so far, it was enough.
Up, up, up. Rock faces grew taller. Footholds fewer. He was ascending further from the well of orange firelight, or maybe the flames were already dying behind him. That would be bad. He didn’t have time to turn around and check. He could only go forward. Only forward.
The flare wheezed and for a second, blackness rushed in on all sides.
“Oh, God.” He sheltered it with his hand. “Don’t go out. Please.”
Wet limestone under his feet, slick as ice. His knees slammed down and sickening pain shot up his legs. He lost the flare, groped frantically for it, and found it rolling in a puddle, gurgling and bubbling red fish eggs. He recovered it with both hands while his mind screamed at him: I’m running out of time. Elle is dying. Not fast enough. He’s—
Ahead, something stirred in the darkness.
He shot upright and held the flare forward like a lantern, his breathing labored and his heart thudding in his eardrums. It was a flag. A yellow flag, triangular, flapping in the deluge, just like those meticulously spaced flags Elle had first spotted on Shady Slope Road, forever ago. He came closer, dousing it in red light, and read jotted black Sharpie: 150M. Somehow he knew immediately, instinctively, that M stood for meters. He was only a hundred and fifty meters away. So close.
“Tapp!” he screamed into the darkness. “I’m coming for you.”
A dry gunshot popped in answer – James couldn’t discern from where – and slapped into the ground somewhere close to him. He fought a jolt of panic. He felt thick globs of dirt stick to his face and as the fear subsided he fought something else, something unexpected – a shit-eating grin. Tapp had fired at him and missed. It was working.
Don’t stop. Keep going.
Another shot cracked and landed somewhere behind him. This one was closer, disturbing the air above his neck like a fastball and peppering his back with rock chips. He shook it off, tucked his head and pumped his arms to cross a patch of level ground at a sprint. Already he could see the sniper’s hundred-meter flag, coming fast.
* * *
Tapp slammed the bolt up, back, forward, down and ejected brass to his right. He clicked the scope to one-power but still couldn’t locate James in the pulsing blowout of confused whites. So much light. So much changing light. The optic could open and close its iris on the fly to adapt to changing conditions like high beams and enemy torchlights, but not to this. The contrasts were too severe. He considered firing a third blind shot but every second James climbed closer, the range pulled in shorter, and his scope grew more cumbersome.
He hunched both legs to his belly, grabbed his rifle by the checkered grip and hand guard, and rose to a bladed rifleman’s stance under a double-flash of lightning. It wasn’t even remotely graceful but he didn’t care. The chrome barrel was forward-heavy and tugged him on his toes. His hanging belly didn’t help. His biceps were already burning under the weapon’s twenty-four pounds and he could feel the growing tremor in his nerves. Rain bounced off the useless BlackEye scope, beaded on the barrel and ran down his tattered ghillie camouflage in streams.
James climbed closer. With that flare, he was a moving red beacon.
The marksman sucked the rifle to his shoulder to accommodate the .338 Lapua Magnum’s punishing kick and estimated his point of aim. Firing downhill helped his balance and took much of the strain off his arms. He tracked James’ path from the hip, swung the bore to match him like a skeet shooter zeroing in on a clay pigeon, and in a split-second he discarded everything he had mastered about the art of the rifle – the trigger squeeze, the sight picture, the half breath – and handled the thing like a shotgun. He slapped the trigger, the weapon barked in his slippery hands, and James kept coming.
He drove the bolt home and tried again. The scope had finally gone black (BlackEye – ha, ha!) because the processor had judged it to be daytime and automatically powered down to prevent damage. It was okay. Fine. He’d expected it. He was back in his confident rhythm. Cool, unhurried, with nimble fingers and an agile mind. There was such finality to this battle, a culmination of every terrific shot he had taken in his life, and it was a special exhilarating rush. He caught himself giggling and didn’t try to suppress it. Why bother? Not even the sun lives forever.
Downhill at the base of the towering fire, he noticed a figure pushing through and staggering out. Wearing a coat of flames, palms out, it walked a few paces and collapsed in a blind, burning lump. Now Svatomir could join Sergei in nonexistence. Tapp couldn’t let it distract him.
We’re all dead.
We’ll all be dirt by morning.
He wiped a dribble of saliva from his mouth and fired at James again, and thunder boomed overhead in unison.
* * *
A firecracker of chipped rock exploded in James’ face as he passed the fifty-meter flag. Stinging shards buried themselves in his nose and lips. He felt a fragment rattling between his front teeth like a popcorn kernel and spat it out. He elbowed back up to his feet, rubbed blood and rainwater from his eyes – yes, his eyes we
re undamaged and he could still see.
He laughed. “You missed!”
But Tapp hadn’t missed by more than a foot. His shots had inched closer ever since the first, and as the distance continued to narrow, it seemed inevitable that the sniper would regain the advantage. Even crippled by firelight, at close quarters a sniper rifle was still better than a screwdriver. That was probably why no armed force on earth outfitted its troops with screwdrivers. He couldn’t even allow himself to think about how the hard part wouldn’t be over when he finally clawed his way up into the sniper’s nest – no, the hard part was just beginning. It would be like running a marathon and then fighting a bear. With a screwdriver.
His laughter faded. He realized that he was still going to die tonight. It had been a pleasant few minutes, pretending that any other outcome was still possible.
Keep going.
But he was losing momentum now. His limbs felt heavier. The flare sputtered and the red light flickered, inspiring another realization – as this engagement morphed into touch-and-go combat, broadcasting his exact location was becoming an awful idea. His natural night vision was absolutely destroyed. He could only see what the flare saw, twenty feet around him in a warping zone of red light. All else was blackness, black as space, cold and hopeless and indifferent. Tapp could be anywhere in it, moving, positioning, aiming, preparing his ambush like a craftsman measuring out wood before the first cut. This is what he does, after all. Orchestrate ambushes.
He sees me, James realized. I can’t see him. We’re right back to where we started. He swallowed nauseous terror.
Keep going.
But he was exhausted. His knees melted. His throat burned with smoke and hard breath. Blood ran over his eyes and glued his eyelids shut. His cheeks and lips stung with what felt like a face full of birdshot. If Elle were here she would have a remark for it, maybe something about looking like he’d gone hunting with Dick Cheney, but she wasn’t. She was almost a mile away, dying alone.
Another gunshot boomed, tugging the jacket off his left shoulder. It trailed like a cape. He was numbly aware that a large-caliber bullet, the kind that would kill a buffalo, had come within an inch or two of ripping off his arm. By now he was used to being shot at. Whatever, right? He was close to Tapp. Maybe thirty meters? Twenty-five?
The rocks grew taller and he climbed on all fours. Scrub grass sliced his cheeks and raindrops pounded his eyes. He had to shield his face with an elbow, spitting clots of blood, climbing forward, only forward, nowhere but forward. In his other hand he held the screwdriver as an icepick, piercing soft shelves of earth and hauling himself up and over, like he was climbing a glacier wall.
Keep going. For Elle—
That was when Tapp shot him. It was true – you never heard the one that got you. Something monstrous slammed his body down flat and he heard the sheriff’s wormy voice, crowing from uphill: “Oh, no! My night scope is back, James. My night scope is back and I can see your wife. Dumb bitch was safe in the car but now she’s . . . she’s crawling around the grass looking for something. Oh, no! I’m gonna pop her head off like a goddamn water balloon. Oh, no . . . oh, no . . . oh, no . . .”
He heard the deadbolt click-clack of Tapp’s weapon. It was sharp, piercingly metallic, and it made him think: Oh, Christ, I made it so close to him.
I’m so close.
Then the floor dropped out and James was falling, plunging, becoming weightless, and all he heard was the ragged monster that was Tapp, half-wounded, half-hysterical, fading fast like water swirling down a sink:
“Why was my old AR15 like Bob Marley? Because it was always jammin’. Oh, no . . . oh, no . . . oh, no, James . . .”
24
Elle saw the keys.
Ten feet away, in the cone of illumination produced by the miniature keychain flashlight she’d discovered under the deputy’s driver seat, they glimmered silver in the packed soil by the road’s edge.
Coming closer.
She gripped the flashlight with her mouth as she crawled and the checkered metal scraped against her teeth. With her cuffed hands forward like a swimmer preparing a dolphin dive (much like running, she hated swimming) she pushed forward on knees and elbows, croaking dry breaths and feeling more cold and uninvited air ballooning her chest every second.
Closer. Then she could breathe again.
She didn’t care that Tapp could probably see her in his night scope. She would rather probably die out here than certainly die in the police car. At least out here she had a paper-thin, it’s-not-impossible-it’s-just-unlikely shred of hope. She couldn’t believe she was doing this, crawling through mud with a flashlight in her teeth and her tortured breaths whistling like a wet flute. Mud in her hair. Black fingernails. She must look like a ghost from a J-horror movie. She didn’t even feel like herself. Not her real self, at least. She felt like the badass, blood-soaked version of Elle that James had imagined when he saw her eat shit on that hurdle track. Elle Eversman: the girl who wanted it.
What do I want?
I want kids.
I want kids with James.
I want kids so bad.
No matter if her uterus was made of arsenic, or Drain-O, or whatever the hell her problem was that baffled every doctor in California and kept her grandmother’s Ark-of-the-Covenant crib empty and desolate inside a “baby room” that slowly morphed into a home office before finally being reduced to ashes. She would keep trying. They would keep trying. And for God’s sake, she would name every one of them with James, because we’re all nothing before we’re something, and every chance of existence, even the tiniest and most blade-thin, deserves to be believed in.
Here lies Elle Eversman. She gave a damn.
Closer . . .
The handcuff keys reflected a ring of light and she let the flashlight drop from her mouth. Were her hands not clasped together, the keys would be close enough to reach right now, but she had to make one final lunge.
She did this and reached for them with both hands—
And she heard a gunshot over Deputy Doogie Howser’s radio. Not the hollow knuckle-cracking pop of distant gunfire – no, this was booming, deep, close. It was as powerful and unsympathetic as a car accident. Every detail smeared and her mind whiplashed from the roof of the Whimsical Pig with James, to the speeds of sound and light, to a single juddering train of thoughts, tugged by the slamming beats of her heart:
Gunshot.
At me.
Move.
* * *
Rarely did a shot feel so right to Tapp. The trigger broke as cleanly as the tick of a pendulum. He hardly registered the recoil against his shoulder, or the thunderclap report, or even the warm cloud of rich smells – charcoal, gunpowder, rainwater sizzled to steam – and he was already unseating his hand from the grip to work the bolt while leaning back into the BlackEye viewfinder. He found her again in his green world, doubled over and crawling, unaware that the end of her life was less than a second away, racing toward her at thousands of miles per—
She dodged it.
She had started moving the microsecond his trigger broke, and she was now completing her somersault. She hurtled sideways and the .338 Lapua Magnum round skimmed over her shoulder (maybe slicing off a centimeter of skin, but probably not) and touched down with a spray of wet dirt.
She fucking dodged my shot.
She couldn’t have seen the distant pinprick of the muzzle flash; she was facing the wrong direction. It couldn’t have been dumb luck, either. There was a purity of intention to her movement. She had somehow known exactly when Tapp had fired and removed herself from the bullet’s path.
He clacked the bolt home and prepared a frustrated follow-up shot.
But now Elle Eversman had sprung to her knees and was groping for something in the soupy green beside the deputy’s body, silhouetted in curls of smoke from the destroyed car. Then she thrashed upright with something black in her hands. It was too grainy, too low-resolution to make out in the six-power BlackEye
at this range – and then she raised it to her mouth, and he knew at once that it was Deputy Koal’s radio. Suddenly he understood everything.
Radio waves.
A radio wave travels faster than a bullet. The instant his primer struck, the gunshot traveled twenty meters down the hill to James’ stolen radio, passed through the Motorola eight hundred meters away at Deputy Koal’s feet, and reached the woman’s ears three-quarters of a second before the bullet. That’s how she knew. For a sweet moment, he was relieved – overwhelmingly relieved – that he hadn’t actually missed. He was off the hook. James, in a truly impressive final sacrifice, must have died with a stiffening finger wrapped around the Motorola’s PUSH TO TALK button, to secure his wife one last shot (ha-ha!) at survival.
Then Elle spoke into the radio and Tapp heard her crackling voice: “James?”
It came from right behind him.
He froze.
He took in a half breath and held it, stemming back a wall of nervous pressure in the back of his throat. Then he closed his eyes, willed his heart into a tight rhythm, and methodically scanned his senses, through the gentle patter of the rain and the dripping rocks, the settling flood basins, the flexing grass, the low rush of distant wind, and recognized . . . wait . . . maybe . . . yes, there it is . . . the audio shadow of someone standing behind him, over him, with trickling rainwater tapering and beading on a bladed point.
Tapp had been ready to die before, but suddenly he wasn’t. Suddenly he was terrified, and words burbled in his throat as he started to say, “Please—”
But fingers had already twisted his scalp, his head wrenched back to face the sky and a pierce of reflected starlight, and simple, childish fear was the second-to-last thing to go through William Tapp’s head.
25
Checking the sniper’s pulse was redundant but James did it anyway, and when he was certain it was over, he let the scarecrow wrist drop. There was surprisingly little blood. He wanted to sit down and rest, but he needed to go back to Elle. He had to see her. So without even catching his breath, he turned and began to descend the hill.