by Stella Green
Matt’s fingers gripped the ax before the last shot. While he landed a hard blow against the shooter’s jaw, the Stranger burst out of the back of the trailer swinging his walking stick. With a sickening thud, the Stranger’s stick connected with the head of one of the men holding Cheryl. If the man survived, he wouldn’t remember his own name. Matt was relieved to see the Stranger hitting the other guys and not aiming for him. He would have liked a moment to check him for sores and decay, but another gang member drew a pistol. Matt knocked the pistol flying, at the same time smashing the small bones in the man’s right hand. Another blow with the flat end of the ax put the man on the ground. The Stranger hit one of the men holding Cheryl in his knee. The thug shrieked as his kneecap splintered and let go of her. One of the others shoved Cheryl back into the store before pulling out a large knife. Cheryl tried to run for the camper, but a gang member grabbed her arm and swung her hard into the ground. Matt hoped the fall didn’t dislocate her shoulder, but this wasn’t the time to find out. He faced the knife guy, ready to fight ax against knife, but the man held his knife by the blade and prepared to throw. The man’s confident smile would have looked better without the green globules dripping out of his mouth. Matt assumed he had thrown many knives and hit many targets. As he prepared to dive behind a body, the Stranger’s stick slammed down on the man’s wrist, breaking it. Matt turned to acknowledge the help and saw another man aiming a pistol at the back of the Stranger’s head. Matt threw his ax hard enough to make the guy stumble, and the bullet hit one of their attackers instead.
Matt scrambled to retrieve his ax, planning to then grab Cheryl, but the moving truck from the side of the building pulled up, and Maggot Whiz began to spray bullets from an automatic weapon. Ax in his hand, Matt rolled behind Jeff’s truck. The Stranger was right behind him. Three of the gang members dragged Cheryl and their wounded into the back of the moving truck. The door slammed, and there was nothing Matt or the Stranger could do. The truck squealed out of the Fill ’er Fast, throwing gravel and the smell of burning tires back at them. When Matt jumped up to get a better view of the fleeing kidnappers, bullets passed inches from his face. The remaining gang members were firing automatic weapons as they ran for the two jeeps. The violent storm of bullets continued for several more minutes, until, as if it had finally occurred to the men that no one was shooting back, the gunfire stopped. Matt wondered if they had figured out that they were the only ones in the fight with guns. One of the jeeps drove around to where Matt and the Stranger had taken cover. They dove under Jeff’s truck. The gang members hosed the truck with bullets but couldn’t get Matt and the Stranger, who were crawling out the other side. It was quiet for a moment. They crouched and prepared to leap for cover if a jeep swung by again. A harsh, unpleasant smell surrounded them. The truck or the gas pumps or both were leaking. He looked at the Stranger. “Gas.”
The Stranger grunted and pointed.
Under Jeff’s truck was a growing pool of gasoline. The jeeps squealed away, but before they did, Matt saw Ant Man take a cigarette out and flick it into the fuel. Flames immediately arose from the gas, spreading faster than Matt could yell, “Run!”
Matt grabbed Jeff’s motionless hand and dragged him away from the truck into the desert. The Stranger, still holding his walking stick, shoved Matt fiercely from behind. “Leave him. He’s dead.” Matt was about to explain that he didn’t leave people behind when the truck exploded and the nearest gas pump flew into the air. Sharp pieces of metal and burning upholstery landed all around them as Jeff and Cheryl’s possessions rained down. The other gas pumps exploded into the air in quick succession. Flaming debris fell on the station’s wooden building and set it ablaze. Matt looked at his duffel and felt a twinge of guilt that he was the only one left with his possessions, until he noticed that the Stranger had also managed to keep hold of his.
The cashier ran out, zigzagging through the flames, but she was encircled by the fire. Her wails of fear were a terrible thing to hear. Matt started back for her. Evil or not, he wasn’t leaving her to die like that. He heard the Stranger yelling at him to stop, but Matt couldn’t let her stagger around until she burned alive. Covering his face, he ran into the circle. As he began dragging her to safety by her good arm—the one without the boil—he felt something moving under his feet. His last thought was, Fuel tank. Oh shit.
CHAPTER FOUR
Matt knew he was asleep, and he wanted to wake up. His heavy body felt like it was pinned to the ground by gravity. He could smell a fire, and there was food cooking. A sharp little rock poking into his lower back hurt more than his head. If only his arms and legs would budge. The air was cool, and even without opening his eyes he knew it was almost dark. Because his eyelids seemed like they had been sewn shut, he had to sense these things. He pictured himself struggling to climb out of the snow, but then felt himself sliding down as everything faded away.
When he woke again, hours later, he forced his eyes open. The Stranger was sitting at a small campfire.
“How long have I been out?” Matt’s voice was thick, and he rasped out the words.
“A day and a half.” The Stranger handed him a bottle of water. “You missed dinner. I’d have saved you some, but I wasn’t sure you were going to wake up.”
“Gloria?”
“You knew the cashier’s name?” The Stranger raised his eyebrows. “It was fast. She didn’t suffer. Might have deserved to, but she didn’t.” He pulled some crackers out of his pack and handed them to Matt.
“I should be dead, too.” Matt brushed splinters of glass off his arm. They had been embedded in his skin, but his body pushed them out as he healed.
“Yep. But you’ll be up and about by tomorrow.”
The matter-of-fact tone in the Stranger’s voice rang through Matt’s battered head. He knew about Matt’s healing ability and probably had it, too. Matt was slowly accepting something that he had known all along: the Stranger was like him.
“Jeff?”
“He was dead before you dragged him through the desert. That was stupid, by the way.”
Matt could still see Cheryl’s terrified face as the gang members shot her husband.
As if he could read Matt’s mind, the Stranger said, “Those were some seriously bad guys.”
“Did you see their faces?”
“I see what you see. Probably Mexican. They were speaking Spanish the way Mexicans speak it. Probably coyotes, but they are likely doing more than smuggling people in. Lots of traffickers around here. Most of those guys are in the Mexican drug gangs. So that means drugs and kidnapping and tricking girls into prostitution by pretending they’re taking them to good jobs in the North. They’re violent and mean on a different level. It’s about intimidation. Everybody’s scared of them, so they do what they want and kill who they want. Jeff didn’t have a chance. We were lucky—especially you.”
“What happens to Cheryl?”
“Maybe if she plays along, she’ll get a chance to escape.”
Matt sat up and rubbed his lower back. “Plays along?” That sounded grim. It didn’t take much imagination to understand what the Stranger meant.
The Stranger threw sand on the fire. Then he put his rucksack down as a pillow, settled onto the ground, and pulled his hat down over his face. He was going to sleep.
Matt cleared the rocks away from his side of the fire and lay down. “In the morning we’ll go find her.”
“Why?”
“Because we can.”
“It’s his game. He makes the rules. You can’t win, and she will probably die.”
“Whose game?”
“You know.” And with that, the Stranger went to sleep.
Matt’s aching head needed sleep, too. He drank some more water and slept like the dead man he was.
The white-hot desert sun woke him up. The campfire was cold and the Stranger was gone, but a second water bottle sat next to the nearly empty one. Matt knew the Stranger wasn’t coming back. It was clear that he wa
nted nothing to do with Matt and his questions. Last night, with his head still swimming in confusion from the explosion, Matt had not been able to articulate his thoughts. The Stranger’s why? when Matt said he wanted to help Cheryl was a surprise that left Matt more confused than angry. Some things you don’t need to discuss. If your neighbor is in trouble and you are able to help, you help. If a guy is stuck in a snowbank or a ditch, you hook up your hitch and pull him out. If you’re the only one who knows a young woman has been kidnapped, you help her. This wasn’t complicated stuff. How could the Stranger just walk away?
Then there was the second part of the Stranger’s answer: It’s his game. He makes the rules. Matt was sure he meant Mr. Dark, the vicious creature who enjoyed bringing out the evil in people and pitting Matt against them like it was a game. He seemed to feed on the violence, but Matt wasn’t going to let Mr. Dark’s enjoyment of a bloody rescue stop him from saving Cheryl. He also wasn’t going to let the Stranger just walk away without an explanation. Clearly, he had information, maybe even answers about what had brought Matt back to life. The Stranger knew things about Mr. Dark, and Matt needed to know too. Starting with, What in the hell is he?
The hard desert ground didn’t show Matt any clues about the Stranger’s route. The desert didn’t give much of anything: no shade, no shelter, and, of course, no water. Instead it sucked him dry. The mountains, to the east, were the only source of shelter for miles, so Matt began walking into the sunrise. Even if he guessed wrong, at least the sun wouldn’t be in his eyes for long. A few hours later he was feeling the noon sun beat down on him. He hadn’t given himself enough time to heal. Since he had come back from the dead, he had come close to death many times, but usually he healed within a day or two. The explosion must have done more damage than he’d thought. Matt needed rest and he wanted water. This morning he’d drunk only the dregs of the first bottle. He was saving the second bottle of water, planning to drink some of it in the afternoon. It was hard to resist opening it.
He picked a point in the sky where he thought the sun would be in two hours. When the sun hit that spot, he would stop and drink some water. Every step sent pain upwards from his feet. It pulsed through his body like a drummer keeping time. The wind came up fast, blowing from the north, but it was a hot, dry wind. Dust and tiny leaves from desert plants blew into Matt’s eyes and stuck to his sweaty body. Sand and small dead plants were lifted up and swirled around him as the wind grew. Matt wondered if he was about to be swallowed by another haboob. The sand cut into his face and hands, giving him a new pain, so he wrapped a bandanna around his face and shielded his eyes with his hands.
The storm was so strong, he could feel it pushing him sideways while he struggled toward the mountains. He was going blind now, trying to correct for the wind and stay on course for the shelter in the east. It was tempting to drop to the ground and curl up into a ball, using his duffel to protect his face, but he was certain that if he stopped, his next death would be one where he was buried in sand instead of snow. At least the ice had preserved his body. This desert sand would dehydrate and shrivel him. His remains would just blow away in the next haboob. He focused on Janey and saving Cheryl to keep his legs moving. The sun traveled a considerable distance before he stumbled into a boulder and realized the mountains were near, so he used all of his considerable strength to push through the last hundred yards, counting off his steps. When he knocked his head against the side of a rock formation, it was the best pain he’d ever felt. He used his hands now, climbing through the formation and working himself into the center of the rocks. The air was still heavy with dust, but he wasn’t being cut by the sand.
He slumped down against a majestic outcropping, grateful for the rocks and his bottle of water. Above him he could see the hazy outline of black clouds being propelled by the wind. An hour later, lightning began to dart through the sky. Rocking thunder, which seemed unreasonably loud, followed it. The lightning continued its crazy dance as a hard rain poured down. The drops came big and fast. It was like being doused with a bucket of water. Matt shook his head, shedding drops of water and the dirt that the wind had deposited on him. The water bottles’ narrow openings were useless for catching rain. Instead, he lay down on the ground and opened his mouth wide to grab whatever moisture he could. Fifteen minutes later, it was over, and Matt moved uphill to a sandy spot with no muck. Well, the desert did give you things after all. It had a certain rough generosity. Grateful for the soaking, he slept.
CHAPTER FIVE
Matt woke to the Stranger tapping the bottom of Matt’s shoe with his walking stick.
“You’re a damn fool.” The Stranger sat across from him on a rock. “If you’d stuck to the highway, someone would have given your sorry carcass a lift.”
Matt had no argument. He felt lucky to have survived.
The Stranger held out a canteen as Matt slowly sat up. Before he could take it, he heard hissing on his right. It sounded like a hose with a bad leak. The Stranger dropped the canteen, but Matt caught it with one hand and grabbed his ax with the other. The Stranger used his walking stick to pick up a coiled rattlesnake and give it a gentle toss. The angry reptile continued to shake its tail for a few moments, but quickly made for the shelter of a rock as a hawk circled above.
Matt grinned. The desert clearly didn’t want him to get to comfortable or stay too long. “Why did you come back?”
“I had a feeling about you. That you’d just keep after me. You seem like the kind of dog that doesn’t let go of a bone…”
Sunlight glinted off the ax blade in Matt’s hand and directly into the Stranger’s eyes.
“That looks like a well-made tool.”
Matt handed it to the Stranger so he could take closer look. “It was my grandfather’s. My family has been chopping wood with this for eighty-five years.”
The Stranger tested the ax in the air. He nodded his approval and handed it back to Matt. With an easy, graceful sweep, the Stranger swung his rucksack over his shoulder and began walking.
There was no reason for Matt to ask if they were leaving—the answer was obvious. But would it kill the guy to say something before marching out into the desert? Matt stashed his ax and water in his duffel and caught up. As they walked, he began telling his quiet and unpredictable companion about his life. He grew up in a small town in lumber country and married his high school sweetheart, Janey. She died. Normally that was the end of the story, but Matt kept going because he was convinced the Stranger had a similar story of his own. He talked about the avalanche, waking up in the hospital months later, trying to go back to a simple life and the weird things he saw. “I had to shoot my best friend because he turned into a killer and I felt like what he became was my fault. Like I’d brought something dark and evil back with me.”
Just thinking about Mr. Dark had Matt reaching to touch his ax. “I’ve used my grandfather’s ax to kill. I never thought I’d need to use it on people, but I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve needed it to defend myself or someone else. I don’t hunt them down. I don’t want to hurt them. It seems like some of them aren’t even that bad, but Mr. Dark does something to them. It’s like he can make the little bit of bad in a person stronger until that’s all they are.” Matt didn’t look at the Stranger. He didn’t want to see the reaction yet, because even though he knew it was all true, talking about the past wasn’t easy for him. If he had guessed wrong and the Stranger thought he was crazy, Matt didn’t need to know that right now. But the Stranger just listened and walked. Matt had told bits and pieces of his tale to others, but never the whole story. How could he? Any normal person would just back away slowly or call a cop.
They walked another forty-five minutes in silence before Matt decided it was the Stranger’s turn to talk. “What is that? Cherry?” Matt pointed to the walking stick. He wasn’t making small talk. Matt was a lumberman who loved a good piece of woodworking. Timber had been his life. He liked to feel its weight and know its history. There was honesty
in the simplicity of a fine piece of wood.
During the long pause before the Stranger’s answer, he seemed to be considering much more than just whether to tell Matt the species of tree. “Mahogany. Belonged to my uncle. He was a land surveyor until the Revolutionary War. Then he became a captain in the First Pennsylvania Regiment. After he was wounded he had a terrible limp. A blacksmith offered to make him a sturdy walking stick with a metal cap and tip. Weeks later my uncle and some others were riding out to inspect a bridge and map its location when they were ambushed by the British. When he ran out of bullets, my uncle fought with the walking stick. It saved his life, and he was able to ride back to warn his regiment. Afterwards, he went back to thank the blacksmith, but the man and his shop were gone. He asked around, but nobody in town even remembered the blacksmith…”
Again they walked in silence. If the Stranger’s uncle was in the Revolutionary War, the Stranger was much older than forty. Matt waited as long as he could before asking, “How long have you been doing this?”
“I don’t bother with time anymore.”
Matt grinned. The Stranger wasn’t getting off that easy. “How did you die?”
“We were mapping the Northwest Territory for the government. I knew it was dangerous. I figured the natives might get us, but in the end it was just snow. There was a storm like I’ve never seen before. Snow for weeks. The others died before me, so I took their clothes and wore them over mine. Made me look fat, but I was starving. I remember lying down just before Christmas and thinking about those roasted chestnuts my mother used to make. I could even smell them and feel them burning my hands, because I never waited long enough for them to cool. Then I woke up in the spring with a wolf cub chewing on my leg. I picked up my walking stick when I thought his mama might try to make me supper, but she sniffed the air and snatched her pup by its scruff. The rest of my party was gone except a few bones here and there. I thought I must have been dead, but I was something else.”