Night Wings

by Joseph Bruchac

  I don’t have to look back to see what is going on behind me: Field staring at the place where we both were tied, seeing the picked lock. The other three come out of their tents, Tip stumbling, Louise as lithe as a panther, and Stazi already fully dressed with his boots on his feet and the look of a hunter in his eyes. I am out of their sight and running for real now, vaulting over rocks, scooting around boulders, but I am not too far away to hear Field’s bellow.

  “Get them!”

  And then the sound of thudding feet in pursuit.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Trip

  I could lose them if I wanted to. They’re not used to running in the mountains, and I’ve been doing this my whole life. But leaving them behind is the last thing I want to do now. I have to keep them following me.

  I’m far enough ahead to risk looking back. It’s not the blocked trail that we took to get up here, nor is it the one that they’d planned to follow toward Small Lake of the Clouds. That’s the trail Grampa Peter is on now, hoping that no one will come after him on it soon enough to catch up. The trail that I’m on leads down into the gorge where the brook cuts through and there’s a spectacular waterslide ending in a deep pool. If they’re able to follow me that far, I have a plan—sort of.

  I make sure I am visible from below and that I am sitting holding my wrists together as if they were still connected by the tape. I also put an exhausted and discouraged look on my face. The first one to come into sight is Stazi. Of course he notices me right away. His eyes are scanning back and forth, up and down, trying not to miss anything. That is not good.

  I make like I can’t see him and that I’ve sort of fallen down exhausted. Out of the corner of my eye I see him nod and then disappear out of sight. He’ll reach the place where I am soon. I can’t wait here much longer. But I want to see if the other two are still on my trail.

  A voice drifts up from down below. “Hurry up.” There’s such cold command in Louise’s tone that I wonder why she’s content to take orders from Field.

  “I’m goin’ as fast as I can,” Tip complains.

  Although Stazi is out of sight from me, he must be where he can hear or see them because he calls down to Louise.

  “Only der boy,” he shouts. “Der old man must have gone anudder vay.”

  “I’ll go back and tell Darby,” Louise calls up to him. “You and Tip get the kid.”

  Only two of them after me now. But that’s enough. Sounds of feet scrabbling on the rocks of the trail are too close for comfort. I jump up and start running again.

  Downhill the trail cuts into a valley where layers of soil have been trapped and there’s enough shelter from the wind for some trees to grow. The path goes between two of those trees, cedars as thick as a man’s forearm. I leap high as I pass between them, fly a good eighteen feet through the air, and land to take a few stumbling steps and fall down so that I’m on my side and looking back over my shoulder.

  Stazi is closer than I thought he’d be. Less than twenty yards behind me, he’s seen my leap and he slows to a walk, stops before he gets to the cedars. He looks down at the bicycle cable that had been used to tether Grampa Peter and me to the tree. Takes note of how I stretched it between the two trees at just the right height to trip someone running down the path. An unpleasant smile comes over his wide face.

  “Good try,” he says to me. His deep voice is self-satisfied.

  I am hoping he’ll just step over the wire or go around the trees to either side. That’s where I’ve set three different snares with the nylon cord Grampa Peter shoved into my hands back at the van. I cut the rope into pieces with his knife blade, each one long enough to make a single snare. Not the kind you see in movies where it snatches someone up into the air upside down. I didn’t have time enough for something elaborate like that, much less a big enough tree. But a small snare can catch a man’s ankle and make him fall.

  Stazi, though, is either smart, suspicious, or vain enough to want to outdo my impressive leap. He backs up, takes a run, and leaps as high and far as I did to land right where I’d been on the ground. Not that I am there anymore. As soon as I saw him start to back up, I got to my feet and sprinted down the trail. But I look back over my shoulder in time to see Stazi land as lightly as a cat.

  “Tip,” I hear him shout, “vatch out for der trip wire!”

  What I do next has to be done just right. My heart is thudding, my breath coming hard as I pound uphill. I’m no longer pretending that my hands are bound. I can hear Stazi behind me, getting closer. Maybe ten strides behind. He’s not going to give up now.

  The stream is just ahead, over the rise and about forty feet downhill. The wall of brush I piled in the moonlight has obscured it from sight, though. I crest the rise, start down. I have to jump higher and farther than I’ve ever jumped before.

  I take a deep breath, think about the flight of an eagle, then launch myself. I go up, up, and over. My right foot ticks the highest twig of the brush wall, but doesn’t catch, doesn’t slow me down. I land on the other side of the stream, roll, and come up on one knee.

  I’m just in time to see Stazi’s huge body almost blot out the sky as he, too, comes sailing over the brush. But not as high as I did. Both of his feet tangle in the branches that I tied together near the top with the remainder of the nylon cord. It slows him just enough that instead of landing on my side of the brook, he lands hard in the shallow water on his back. He doesn’t seem to be hurt because he immediately tries to get up to his knees. But the smooth rocks of the creek are slippery here. His feet go out from under him. He’s on his back again, out of control. The swift flow of the water and the forty-five-degree angle of the trough he’s landed in are carrying him down the long, long slide. There’s no way he’s going to keep from going all the way down to the pool two hundred feet below.

  I stand up as I watch him going faster and faster. That’s when I see it. It hadn’t been visible in the moonlight. At the bottom of the slide a dead tree has lodged. Not that big a tree, but its broken branches look like short spears. Stazi can’t avoid hitting it. I close my eyes, but I hear the crashing thud and a throaty cry of pain even above the noise of the rushing water.

  When I open my eyes, I can see, to my relief, that the worst didn’t happen. He’s not dead. The way he is dragging himself out of the water, though, his left leg seems to be broken. He looks up and his eyes find mine, two hundred feet above him. His gaze is dark and expressionless. He is reaching into his coat. Maybe he’s looking for something to use as a bandage. Then I see the glint of metal and drop to my belly. A dozen bullets from Stazi’s pistol ping off the stones where my head had been. I crawl backward, keeping way out of sight. Any thoughts I had of trying to go down there and help him are gone.

  Now I only have Tip to worry about. Or maybe not. I cross the creek and make my way quietly back to the place where I’d set my snares. I hear something even before I get there. Someone is “exercising their Anglo-Saxon vocabulary,” as Mom puts it, using a few curses I’ve never heard before. I peek around a big lichen-covered rock carefully, just in case Tip has his gun out. No worries there. Tip stepped into one snare with his left foot, and when he tripped and fell, both of his outstretched arms were caught in a second snare even more neatly than I could have planned. He is stretched out between the two snares, and the more he struggles, the tighter the little nooses get.

  I come out from behind the rock and walk over to him.

  “Hi,” I say.

  His response, which begins “You little…” is less than friendly, but I don’t take it seriously. I just take note of the fact that not only has his pistol fallen out of his jacket pocket, so too has a small roll of duct tape. By the time I am done, I’ve used all the tape and Tip’s wrists are even more tightly connected than Grampa Peter’s and mine had been. Also, his one formerly free ankle is taped to the base of one of those cedar trees. He doesn’t look comfortable, but I did the best I could under the circumstances.

  I
have to admit that I am feeling pretty satisfied with myself. I know that Grampa Peter and I still have Darby Field to contend with, but this is a really good start.

  I’m almost whistling as I make my way down the hill past the lookout point where I saw Stazi and heard Louise yell up to him that she was going back.

  Or so she said. The thought comes to me just as I feel something hard pressed against the back of my skull and a thin, muscular arm snakes around my throat.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  No Funny Stuff

  A minute ago I was feeling like a hero. Now, though, I am certain that I’m a zero. Why did I think I could succeed against these people? One gawky thirteen-year-old Abenaki kid against a bunch of experienced psychopaths? This makes twice that I’ve been caught by one of them when I thought I had things all figured out. It just proves what my dad told me about combat: expect the unexpected.

  Louise raps the right side of my skull with the barrel of her gun. It sends a jolt of pain like electricity through my head. I feel blood start to flow through my hair from the gash that the gun sight has made in the thin skin of my scalp.

  “Hold your hands up, palms out, and hook your thumbs together,” she says. “Now turn around.”

  I do as she says. I’m about five inches taller than her, so when I look at her I am looking down. She has to reach up to grab the hair on the back of my head. But that makes it easier for her to jam the gun barrel up under my chin.

  There’s a smile on her face, and it’s probably not just from feeling satisfied about fooling me the way she did. She’s enjoying the pain she’s causing. She licks her lips and shows her teeth as if she is thinking of going for my throat like some kind of vampire. There’s a far-off look on her face like you see in movies just before some character transforms from a human into a monster.

  She shakes her head as if to wake herself from a trance, lets go of my hair with her left hand, and yanks Tip’s gun out of my waistband.

  “Where’s Tip?” she asks, holding up his gun. The tone of her voice isn’t worried, not as if she cares anything at all about him.

  “He’s busy,” I answer. “All tied up.”

  She clonks me across the left temple with Tip’s gun. This time she does it almost gently. I’ll have a bump, but I don’t think she’s broken the skin.

  “Funny boy,” she says in that emotionless voice of hers. “And Stazi?”

  I shouldn’t give her a wise guy answer, but that is all my brain seems capable of right now. “He fell and he can’t get up,” I reply.

  Louise lifts up the gun to slug me again, then thinks better of it. Maybe the fact that I don’t flinch doesn’t make it seem rewarding to her.

  “You and your grandfather have been more trouble than you’re worth,” she says. She steps back and looks me up and down. “If I didn’t think Darby still needed you to make sure the old bat takes him where he wants to go…”

  She rubs her chin with the barrel of Tip’s gun while she keeps her gun trained on me. “I could still put a round into you someplace where it wouldn’t interfere with your walking,” she says slowly. “Perhaps your shoulder?”

  Although her words are being spoken aloud, I can tell by her tone that she’s talking to herself, sort of thinking out loud. Trying to make up her mind about what to do, the two choices being equal. Shoot me or not.

  This time I keep my mouth shut. No smart-aleck remarks that might make her decide to teach me a lesson.

  “Turn back around,” Louise says. “Start walking. And no funny stuff.”

  I bite my lip and don’t say anything, even though I almost answer, “What, no more jokes?”

  But with her finger on the trigger, I take her very seriously. She is one cold person. She’s not even going to go back to check on Tip and Stazi. Her focus is on reuniting me with her boss, using me to convince Grampa Peter to give himself up and then proceed according to the original plan.

  The sun is directly overhead now. When I look up at it, I think I see that wide-winged shape again, way far up.

  “Hold it,” Louise says.

  I stop and she comes up to me, kicks one foot behind my ankle, and pulls on my shoulder so that I have to sit down quick or fall. A Canada jay squawks and flaps up and startles Louise. She almost snaps a shot off at it before realizing it’s just a small bird. The scent of the patch of wintergreen I’ve found myself sitting in drifts up to my nose. There’s red-capped reindeer moss growing on the side and top of the boulder next to me. I can see the ridges rolling away beyond, and a part of me—even though I know I’m in mortal danger—is thinking how beautiful this all is right now.

  But I can see that is not how Louise feels. She’s way jumpier than she lets on. She’s not at ease or at home here. To her this place is alien and threatening, even if she is armed to the teeth—with her own gun and Tip’s, the big bowie knife in the sheath on her belt, smaller buck knife on the other side, and probably a couple of hand grenades or maybe a rocket launcher up her sleeve.

  She points up at the sky. “What’s going on?” she says. “You know something, don’t you? Why no planes?”

  She’s been paying closer attention than I thought.

  “They’ve been trying to keep flights from going low over the White Mountains,” I answer. “So they won’t bother the hikers. When planes are way up high, they’re hard to see.”

  All of that is true, even if it isn’t the complete answer I could actually give her.

  “And what is that big bird we keep seeing?” she says. Her voice is suspicious, but I can tell that she wants to hear something that will reassure her. So I oblige.

  “Turkey buzzards look even bigger than eagles. They like to circle way high where the hot air rises.”

  The truth again. Although I am willing to bet that is no turkey buzzard up there.

  Louise looks as if she’s about to say something more, but instead she looks at her watch.

  “Up,” she says. “Darby’s waiting.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Onward and Upward

  “Ah, the wandering boy has been brought back to us. Callooh callay. The prodigal son returneth. Shall we kill the fatted calf?”

  It’s only been about three seconds since I came into view of Darby Field posing theatrically on a flat boulder, and I am already sick of his oily voice.

  Field unfolds his arms and steps down to grab me by the chin. I don’t resist as he turns my head back and forth to get a better look at the blood clotted on my cheeks and in my hair. He shakes his head and then lets go of me.

  “Louise,” he says in a disappointed voice, “my dear girl, didn’t I ask you not to damage the merchandise?”

  “He’s walking, isn’t he?” Louise replies. “Ask him what happened to your boys, Tip and Stazi.”

  The crocodile grin vanishes from Darby Field’s face. His right hand whips out and slaps me so hard across my cheek that it makes a sound like the crack of a gunshot. It spins me halfway around. His other hand grabs me by the wrist and jerks me back toward him. His nostrils flare with anger as he shoves his face so close to me that I can see the red lines of broken blood vessels in the whites of his eyes.

  “Where?” he snarls, so angry that his words are almost choking him. “Where…are…my…men?” He holds his hand up to threaten me with another slap.

  I don’t react. I don’t act defiant. I don’t stare him in the eyes, daring him to do it again. I just stand there looking down at the ground, so that striking me will give him about as much satisfaction as hitting a dummy.

  Field is breathing hard, but my lack of response is not what he expected. He lowers his hand, then repeats his question in a calmer voice, as if rage had never taken him over.

  “Where are Tip and Stazi?”

  Give an angry man a gift. That’s an old proverb Mom taught me. So this time I give him some of what he wants, though I’m careful to word it so it doesn’t make me seem that much responsible.

  “Tip got all tangled u
p in some brush while he was chasing me. I was able to sort of tie him up, so he’s still stuck there. Stazi slid on some wet rocks, and I think he broke his leg. When he shot at me, I ran away.”

  Field nods and looks at Louise, who shrugs her shoulders since she didn’t go to check on either of his missing henchmen.

  “All right,” Field says. “We shall retrieve them later. For now—Louise, would you handle the camera?—we shall press on.”

  Field doesn’t ask how I managed to get my hands free. He’s too busy composing his next dramatic monologue. He has Louise tie me up again. They’re out of duct tape, so this time she uses nylon cord, which would have been cutting into me even more if I hadn’t tensed up my muscles and pressed out against the cord after the first time around my wrists. It’s one of the Houdini tricks that Grampa Peter taught me. After the person tying you up is done, it looks as if your bindings are tight, but as soon as you relax, they loosen up and there’s enough room to start working yourself free.

  The fact that she also wrapped the cord around my waist so that my wrists would be tight against my body actually helped too, since she hadn’t knotted the cord before she did that. Louise may be good at some things, but tying up captives is apparently Stazi’s specialty, not hers.

  She is also in a hurry—because Field is waiting impatiently in his arms-folded pose back on the boulder. She quickly gets out the smaller of the two cameras.

  “Ready?” Field says.

  Louise moves around him, getting different angles as he delivers a speech about how close he is to their forbidden mystery, how even though two of his crew were injured and he wanted to stop and secure immediate medical attention for them, they begged him to press on. Onward and upward (and he makes a heroic flourish with his extended right hand, like Don Quixote lifting up his sword), for his motto is ad astra per aspera. To the stars through difficulties.