Blood Is the Sky: An Alex McKnight Mystery (Alex McKnight Mysteries)

by Steve Hamilton

  That’s when I heard the first gunshot.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Vinnie was down. That was the first thing that came to me. I ran over to the front porch and said his name, saw blood on the side of his face. I heard another shot. Wood chips flew from the side of the cabin.

  I grabbed him by the coat and pulled him to his feet. There was another gunshot, and then another. Everything after that was a mad rush of fear and adrenaline. We ran like animals, tripping over rocks and roots, pine boughs lashing our faces. There was nothing left but running. No thought. No sanity. No reason. Just running through the trees with our hearts pumping in our throats.

  Vinnie tripped and went down hard. I picked him up, just as we heard a branch snapping somewhere behind us. We kept running. He went one way around a great rock, I went another. I thought I’d pick him up on the other side, but he wasn’t there.

  There was a stream here, maybe the same stream we had seen before, maybe not. I had no idea where the hell I was. I almost called his name out loud, then realized how suicidal that would be. I stopped and listened. I could hear nothing but my own breathing and the soft sound of the water on the rocks.

  Something moved in my peripheral vision. I ducked instinctively, waiting for the rifle blast. Vinnie’s face appeared around the trunk of a tree. He was holding his right ear, the whole side of his face painted in blood. He was leaning against the tree like it was the only thing holding him upright.

  I went to him, pushed his hand away, and looked at his face. He brushed me away and pointed at the ground. I looked down and saw my own footprints. We were making it pretty damn easy for them to find us.

  “Come on, this way,” I said. I was about to take him up the stream but thought better of it. That’s exactly where they’d expect us to go. Instead, I led Vinnie downstream for a good hundred yards, cutting back against our original direction. The water was cold and it soaked my boots again, but what the hell.

  We jumped out of the stream and hit the woods again. We couldn’t run anymore. But we kept moving. There was no trail here. We didn’t want a trail. We squeezed our way between trees and climbed over rocks. I don’t know how long we kept going. I don’t know how far away we got from them, or how hard we made it for them to find us. When Vinnie started to slow down and stumble, I figured we had gone about as far away as we were going to get.

  We came to a large ridge of exposed rock. I peered down over it and saw that there was an overhang. “Vinnie, down here,” I said.

  I helped him crawl down over the ledge. He collapsed right there, his back against the wall of rock. I grabbed the trunk of a big pine tree that had fallen down and muscled it over, leaning it against the overhang. When I ducked inside, I saw that I had showered Vinnie with brown pine needles.

  I brushed him off and finally got a good look at his face. There was a long furrow in his cheek, where the bullet had grazed him. His right earlobe was gone.

  “Ah, fuck, Vinnie,” I said. “God damn it all.”

  He was breathing hard, a long line of mucus hanging from his nose.

  “Give me your arm,” I said. He was losing blood a hell of a lot faster from his face, so I rolled up his sleeve and untied his bandage. I took it off and pressed it against his cheek and his ear. He struggled, but I held on tight. Finally, he gave up and went limp against me. I leaned back against the rock. He slid down with his head in my lap. I kept the cloth pressed against his face, closed my eyes, and listened.

  Every sound in the forest, every mouse running over a leaf, every breath of the wind—it all made me wonder if they had found us yet. They could be standing on top of the ridge right now, looking down at us, waiting for us to move so they could shoot us.

  It’s just a matter of time, I thought. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, just how fucking hopeless it was. You’ve got no food, no water, no weapons, no way out. You’re gonna die here, just like Tom and those other men.

  Those other men. They have to be the reason for all this. Somehow, they got hooked up with something bad, and Tom went down with them. And now us.

  Fuck that, I thought. We’re not dead yet.

  We are not dead yet. Five words. Keep saying them to yourself, over and over.

  We are not dead yet.

  Vinnie shivered. He tried to say something, but I couldn’t make any sense of it.

  “You’ve got to hang on,” I said. “For God’s sake, just hang on, okay?” I tried to huddle up closer to him, to keep him warm.

  “Don’t give up,” I said. “Please, Vinnie. We’ll get through this.”

  I hung my head down. I was so exhausted, I felt myself sliding into a half-awake dream. I felt pine branches hitting me in the face, felt my legs running, my lungs aching for air.

  I saw dead bodies in the ground. I smelled the burned flesh.

  Minutes passed.

  Hours.

  The shadows grew longer all around us. I kept slipping in and out of the dream.

  Running. Running away from the men in the ground.

  The hand reaching out like a claw.

  The smell. God save me, the smell.

  Something woke me up with a start. A sudden noise above us. I held my breath and listened.

  Nothing.

  I looked down at Vinnie. His eyes were open. “Alex,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “Is this really happening?”

  “Yes,” I said. I was still holding the cloth against the side of his head. The whole thing was stained red. “We’ve got to figure out what to do.”

  He took the cloth from me and pushed himself up. Blood dripped down his neck.

  “Keep holding that,” I said. “You’ve got to keep the pressure on.”

  He winced as he put the cloth back to his face. “I think we’re having ourselves a bad day,” he said.

  How he could make a joke like that, I couldn’t even imagine. But it made me feel better. Somehow, the Vinnie I knew was back. It made me feel like we still had a fighting chance.

  “This might be a dumb question,” I said, “but why would they leave us out here overnight and then come back the next day? Why didn’t they just kill us yesterday?”

  “Alex, that wasn’t Guy and Maskwa shooting at us.”

  “They’re the only people who knew we were up here.”

  “It couldn’t have been them.”

  “Why not?”

  “They would have found us by now, for one thing. And they wouldn’t have shot at us from so far away.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Guy and Maskwa knew we weren’t armed.”

  “They knew we’d run away as soon as we saw them.”

  “They could have still gotten a lot closer. Anybody else would have had to be a lot more careful.”

  I thought about it. “Okay, so who is it?”

  He took the cloth off his face, turned it over, then put it back. “God only knows, Alex. Whoever did that …” He pointed in the general direction behind us. I didn’t have to wonder what he was talking about. “Whoever that was, I think that’s who we’re talking about here.”

  “If it’s not Guy and Maskwa,” I said, “then where are they? They were supposed to be here today.”

  “Maybe they already got to them,” he said. His voice was drained of all emotion. “First them and now us.”

  “If that happened, then there’s nothing we can do about it. We’ve got to think about getting ourselves out of this.”

  “Time’s not on our side,” he said. “I’ll probably stop bleeding, but we’ve got to find some food. I saw juniper by the stream. And some dandelions, but that’s not gonna do much for us. We’ve got to get to them soon, while we still have some strength left.”

  “Do you think they’re at the cabin?”

  “Probably. Our only chance is to try to sneak up on them. We should wait until nightfall.”

  “What, try to go back there in the dark? They’ll have lights.”

  “Exactl
y,” he said. “That’ll be our only advantage. If it’s like last night, there’ll be enough moonlight for us to see everything we need to. If they have flashlights, their eyes will never get adjusted to the dark.”

  “Okay,” I said. “We take our shot at ’em. We do it tonight.”

  “Look at that sky,” he said. Through the branches we could see another blazing sunset. It looked just like the sky from the night before, but of course everything was different now. The whole world had tipped upside down.

  “Last night,” he said, “I was thinking to myself, that’s Tom’s sky, the ‘Pleasing Sky,’ the sun going down in the west. I thought it was a good omen.”

  He closed his eyes and kept them closed for a long time. His breathing grew ragged.

  “Vinnie, are you all right?”

  “Our grandmother used to tell us these stories,” he said. “These stories about our ancestors, all the things they did, the ceremonies, the medicines. Here’s Tom and me, growing up in this house on the reservation, going to the public school. We didn’t know anything about this stuff. But our grandmother, she made sure we learned our real history. She made us promise we’d remember it and tell it to our own children.”

  He stopped for a moment to wipe his eyes with one hand. He kept the other hand held tight against his face. The blood was drying on his fingers.

  “You don’t go to war for land, or for power. You go to war to avenge your brother’s death. You gather your warriors, you gather your medicines. You make a war pole, you do your war dance. You sing the war song. I don’t remember how the song goes, but there’s one part that always stuck with me. Something about looking up at the sky and seeing the red, and knowing that someone would die. ‘Blood is the sky.’ That’s the line I remember ‘Blood is the sky.’”

  He dipped one finger into the dirt and rubbed a streak across each cheek. “You paint your face with black,” he said. He dipped his finger in the dirt again, leaned over close and put a streak on each of my cheeks, as well.

  He took some of his own blood and rubbed another streak on each cheek, above the black. “And red,” he said. He took more blood and rubbed it on my face.

  “Then you’re ready,” he said. “You’re ready to go to war.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  We waited for the sun to go down. The darkness seemed to creep in all around us until we were totally swallowed by it. Under our little overhang with the dead tree covering us, the darkness made me realize how alone we were, how far away we were from anyone who could help us.

  We kept close together, trying to stay warm. As I shivered I could feel the last gallon in my tank burning away to nothing. Without food or shelter, I didn’t see how I could live to see another night.

  “How are your eyes?” Vinnie finally said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look out at the trees. Can you see them?”

  “Not very well.”

  “Use the sides of your eyes,” he said. “You have better night vision if you don’t look at things directly. Try it.”

  I picked a tree, tried to look away and still be aware of it. “All right, I think I see what you mean.”

  “Okay, good. Are you ready to go?”

  “Of course.” I said it like I actually believed it.

  Standing up was an ordeal. We had just spent the last few hours sitting on the cold ground, leaning against the rocks. It took me a full minute to straighten out my back. Vinnie had to keep his head down even longer than that to keep from passing out. When we were both finally on our feet, there was enough moonlight for us to see each other’s faces. The war stripes on our cheeks were like a cruel joke.

  “Do you remember the way back to the cabin?” I said.

  “I think so. Back to the stream, and then we can work our way back to the trail.”

  “What if they’re out looking for us?”

  “They won’t be, not unless they have flashlights. And then we’ll see them long before they see us.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

  We climbed back over the little ridge and started picking our way through the trees. My feet were numb from the cold and from the moisture still in my boots. I didn’t want to even think about what they’d look like if we ever got through this. My stomach was growling so loud, I was sure they’d be able to hear me from a mile away.

  A branch caught me full in the face. I shook it off, kept walking, and took it right in the face again.

  “Alex, don’t look right at where you’re walking,” he said in a low voice.

  It took a few minutes until I got the hang of it. Once we got out from under the trees, the moonlight made everything come alive with an eerie glow. Every star was burning in the cold distant space, just like the night before. I stopped to catch my breath.

  “Alex, are you thirsty?”

  “God, yes.”

  “The stream’s just up ahead.”

  “Can we drink from it?”

  “There might be a few little things swimming around in it,” he said. “Right now I wouldn’t worry about that.”

  We heard the stream long before we got to it, the sound of the water carrying far in the night air. The trees opened up and there was moonlight shining bright on the rocks. Vinnie held me back for a moment. He stood there and listened for a long time, and then we both went to the stream, got down on our knees, and drank the cold water.

  I drank as much as I could, and splashed the water on my face. It made me feel a hell of a lot better, and even made my stomach stop hurting for a while. Beside me I could hear Vinnie gritting his teeth as he splashed the water on what was left of his ear.

  “I’m gonna tear up my shirt,” I said. “You need something else to stop the bleeding.”

  “Hold on,” he said. “Let’s see what happens at the cabin first. If they’re not there, we can use the other stuff you boiled.”

  “How far away are we?” I said. “It felt like we were running forever.”

  “Probably not as far as you think. That trail has to be down here pretty soon.”

  We followed the stream maybe a half mile until we found the trail. Vinnie bent down to look closely at the ground. He stood up and looked all around us. “They were here,” he said. His voice was a hoarse whisper.

  “Can you tell how many?

  “No, not in this light. I can make out some tracks, though. Somebody was here.”

  We headed south down the trail, making as little noise as possible. When I stepped on a twig, the sudden snap was like a gunshot.

  “Fucking shit,” I said. “Sorry about that.”

  Vinnie let out his breath and kept walking. He seemed to know just how to pick up and plant his feet without making the slightest sound. I tried to follow in his exact footsteps. A few minutes later, he stopped.

  “What is it?” I whispered.

  He didn’t say anything. Then I noticed where we were. It was the stand of birch trees, looking ghostly white in the moonlight. This is where he had found all the bootprints, and now it all made a horrible sense. There was some sort of struggle here. The bodies were only a half mile away.

  I heard the sounds again. I knew Vinnie could hear them, too. I put my hand on his back and led him away. “Come on, let’s keep going.”

  I couldn’t take seeing that scene again. Not in this moonlight.

  He didn’t resist me this time. Instead, the sounds seemed to give him new life. He took off down the trail, walking quickly. He wasn’t quiet anymore. He was kicking up dead branches and leaves, and if anybody was waiting to ambush us, Vinnie was suddenly making it very easy.

  I caught up to him and slowed him down. I could see new blood on his face, running all the way down his neck.

  “Find something you can swing,” he said. “A good solid stick.” He picked up a long stick from the side of the trail, dropped it, looked for another.

  “Vinnie, you’ve got to get a hold of yourself. They’re gonna hear us.”

 
He picked up another stick and swung it. “I want to kill somebody, Alex. For the first time in my life I really want to kill somebody.”

  “I’m with you,” I said. “Let’s do this right. We’ll only get one chance.”

  He tapped the end of the stick in his free hand, testing its weight. “This one will do.”

  I looked around for my own club. As I picked up a branch, I flashed back on my playing days. How long ago now? It was forever. Back when I’d pick a good bat out of the bin, swing it a few times, and tap my spikes with it. That’s what I needed right now, a good 34-ounce Louisville Slugger.

  I finally settled on a straight piece of pine I picked up off the forest floor. It was light enough to swing, and hard enough to really hurt somebody. If I got the chance to use it.

  A single cloud moved across the sky and hid the moon. It was too dark to see anymore. We waited for the cloud to pass and then finished our journey to the cabin, slowing to a crawl as we got closer. Finally, we left the trail altogether and made our way through the dense trees. I held my breath with every step.

  At last, we were close enough to see the cabin through the trees. It was completely dark. We each got down on one knee and stayed there, perfectly still, watching the cabin and everything around it. Nothing moved.

  “What do you think?” I whispered.

  “I don’t think they’re in there.”

  “How can we tell for sure?”

  He shook his head. “We can’t just walk in. We’ve got to fake them out somehow.”

  “The only windows are in front,” I said. “We should go one on each side, until we get to the door. We’ll throw something, see what happens.”

  “If they shoot?”

  “Then we’ve got to go for it. Hit them as they come out the door.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll take the left side, you take the right.”

  “If nothing happens, I’m gonna go in,” I said. “You should move back into the woods.”

  “No,” he said. “I’ll try to cover you. If they’re out there and they start shooting, just get down. You’ll be pretty safe inside if they’re outside. I’ll try to pick up on where they’re shooting from.”