by Joseph Flynn
A silent, “Look over there.”
Freddie saw people walking through the woods, his forest. A man with an assault rifle warily led a clump of poorly dressed people who looked ill at ease. The group seemed as if it expected to be attacked at any moment. Delivered to some awful fate.
Their desperation touched a chord in Freddie he hadn’t known to exist.
He knew the word for the feeling, of course. Empathy.
No one should have to live in such circumstances, he thought.
Certainly not on his property.
Catching both himself and Marlene by surprise, Freddie stepped out from behind the tree, making himself an easy target for the man with the rifle. Guided by some subconscious instinct rather than the process of reasoning, Freddie raised his hands and smiled. Showing he was not only harmless but also friendly.
Behind him he heard the start of another fearsome growl.
If he wasn’t just imagining things.
He shook his head and whispered, “It’s all right. I’ll be okay.”
Getting a better look at the group in front of him, he saw the five women and four men were all trembling in fear. Except the guy with the rifle. He was tense but not shaking. To Freddie’s eye they all looked Hispanic. He could work with that.
Keeping his hands wide, he bowed and said, “Bienvenidos. Soy Freddie Strait Arrow.” Welcome. I’m Freddie Strait Arrow. “Mi bosque es su bosque.” My forest is your forest.
The look Freddie saw on all their faces was one of incredulity.
Who had his own forest?
The guy with the rifle offered a suggestion. “¿Es usted un capo de la droga o simplemente loco?” Are you a drug boss or just plain crazy?
Still smiling, Freddie said, “Soy un indio rico. ¿Puedo ofrecerles un lugar para refugiarse? Algunos alimentos y bebidas? I’m a rich Indian. May I offer you a place to take shelter? Some food and drink?”
The frightened people looking at Freddie may well have thought that he was truly crazy, but in their situation they didn’t have the luxury of dismissing any charity out of hand. Still, Freddie could see, they were hesitant.
Until Marlene stepped to his side, and all their mouths dropped open.
Freddie turned to look at her and he nearly did the same.
He’d never seen Marlene look better or, to his surprise, kinder. There was an air of a Madonna about her he’d never noticed before. There was an unsuspected tenderness, too, when she took his hand in hers.
“I didn’t know you spoke Spanish,” she told him.
“I don’t speak it so much as butcher it. My adoptive parents were missionaries in Central America for a few years. I picked it up from them.”
Marlene addressed the group, “Hola, amigos.”
She gave them directions to Tesla. Told them there were some bad men with guns in the forest. Hide from them. And when they got to town there was one house to avoid. It needed a lot of cleaning. Otherwise, they were free to lodge where they chose.
Then she told Freddie, “Come on. We still need to find Tall Wolf.”
It was the damnedest thing, he thought.
She turned to look at him, as sexy as ever.
But not the least bit gentle anymore.
Chapter 33
Tesla — Washington State
“Run, hide, watch, report.”
That’s what Marlene had told Beebs. He’d managed to accomplish the first three of her directives, and photograph the bad guys on his own initiative. But how the hell was he supposed to report?
His only means of communicating with the outside world was to send photos from his Wi-Fi camera. That had worked the first time he’d sent a message to Freddie’s cloud, but who knew if … if Freddie and Marlene had gotten out of his house before the shooting started? They might be inside the house that was all shot to hell. They might be dead.
The one area of photography that had no appeal to Beebs was shooting a crime scene.
Especially when the crime was homicide. Involving someone he’d met.
He could, of course, get in his car and drive back to civilization. Stop the first cop he saw and communicate the old-fashioned way, person to person. Only, Freddie and/or Marlene might be wounded not dead. Not dead yet, anyway. If he took the time to drive out of the mountains, though, who knew how long it would take him to find a cop?
With his driving history, all he’d need to do would be speed just a little and a cop would find him immediately and write a ticket. Of course, that was what would happen in normal circumstances. This situation was anything but ordinary. He might go an hour without finding a cop. If someone in the house was in need of immediate help, he or she might die in the meantime.
Not that they’d necessarily survive if he made it to them in the next few minutes. He was not exactly versed in first aid. On the other hand, he could load Freddie or Marlene into his car and then get back to the modern world. Welcome any cop who might stop him for speeding.
Sounded like a plan. Only it meant he’d have to put his precious pink backside on the line. That being the case, there was only one thing for him to do. He ran to the bathroom for a quick pee. With an empty bladder, he still might die, but he wouldn’t embarrass himself.
Quick as he could, but taking every opportunity to peek outside and look for those assholes with the guns, Beebs pulled his new Civic out of the garage where he’d kept it and eased at idle speed up to Freddie’s house. The little car wasn’t as silent as an electric vehicle but the engine was soothingly quiet.
Beebs stopped in front of Freddie’s house. He could see the shards of glass that had been blown out of the windows. Hell, the front door and the walls had a Swiss cheese motif: holes everywhere. How could anyone inside have survived an assault like that? Beebs’ resolve to enter the house ebbed.
He lowered the passenger side windows and listened closely for someone moaning in agony. He told himself he’d go inside if he heard … Christ, what if he actually heard a death rattle? He heard no final gasp, though. Neither that nor anything else.
All he’d done was increase the chance of exposing himself to people who’d shown themselves not to give a shit who they killed.
What kind of fool would he be if he didn’t burn rubber out of town then and there?
If a Civic was capable of doing such a thing.
As much as he wanted to, Beebs just couldn’t bring himself to cut and run.
“Report,” he’d been told.
Yeah, sure, but at what cost?
Any price apparently. Without the least bit of conscious volition, Beebs found himself stepping out of the car and walking toward the perforated front door. No, no, no, his mind told him. But it seemed his nervous system had been hacked and someone else was in control.
Marlene?
Maybe. He kept moving forward.
The best he could do to protect himself was crouch, afford a smaller target to any shooter. That or appear more ridiculous. Make the killers double over with laughter. Give him a second or two to run before they shot him in the back.
At that moment, Beebs felt a wave of fatalism wash over him, displacing his anxiety. He couldn’t say he became calm, more like accepting. Whatever would be would be. Just get past the damn present moment one way or another.
The front door wasn’t latched and he gave it a push.
Beebs’ jaw dropped when he saw a masked man lying on the floor in front of him. Sure, it was a bloody mess. But not exactly in the way he’d expected. The dissonance gave him the measure of detachment he needed not to run for his car shrieking. As far as Beebs could see, and he had a fine eye for detail, the dead man hadn’t been shot a single time.
What it looked like to him, something had taken a real good chew out of the guy’s throat. It wasn’t just a nip to rend flesh. Blood vessels had been severed right and left and a good three inches of the dude’s gullet was missing. If the shock hadn’t killed him outright, his final moments couldn’t have been any fun at all.
You came to kill other people, look what could happen to you.
For all Beebs knew, though, Freddie and Marlene might be dead, too. He searched the rest of the house, now feeling he’d done the right thing whatever might happen. To him, he meant. What he was doing comforted him, reassured him that he might mature into a man of righteous character. Who the hell would have thought that?
Not him, but he did think of something else. If he found Freddie or Marlene, one of them might have a phone he could use to call the cops. That notion went off the tracks when he saw there was only the one corpse on the premises. On his way out of the house, passing the mangled body again, a new application for his idea occurred to him.
Maybe the dead bastard had a phone on him.
If that thought had presented itself ten minutes earlier, Beebs would have gagged on it. Now … what the hell? It’d just be going through a stiff’s pockets. Nobody to complain. Sure enough, he found an iPhone in a vest pocket, battery charged, with four dots of signal. Tried 1-2-3-4 for the password and found it worked. People. He was good to reach out to the world.
He told the dead man, “Your loss, my gain.”
Before making a call, Beebs bowed to an impulse that came out of nowhere, one that had the power to surprise if not shock him. He lifted the dead man’s ski mask. Took the guy’s picture with his own phone. Saw that he’d been right.
Dude’s death had been no fun at all.
Chapter 34
Cascade Mountains — Washington State
The humans confronted the bear in force. John, Ernesto, and Valeria had firearms pointed at the animal. Rebecca had her bow out and an arrow knocked. Only Basilio remained unarmed. His wrists were bound and he’d been made to kneel in front of the others, giving him the most terrifying perspective on the predator: a fang’s-eye view.
For its part, the beast seem to regard the cluster of people, normally a platter of hors d’oeuvres for its kind, with high suspicion. It paced back and forth in a line parallel to the bipeds as if it was trying to figure how the predator had become the prey. Had the bear spied a spot of vulnerability in the line of those who confronted him, he might well have charged.
Only the creature on the ground reeked of fear to the bear. It might have made a passable meal for the carnivore. The bear tried to decide if this one was an offering. Take it, eat it and spare the others. That feeling was highly tempting as the bear was hungry. Still, the others should have shown at least some fear. Had they done so, he would have snatched the crouching creature.
Grabbed it and run off to feast.
Better still, eat it where it was. Make the other creatures flee in terror.
As they should have. That was the natural order. Only the bear’s world had been turned inside out. It had been the one to suffer the last time it had tried to find food. Its prey, one of the long-haired creatures standing in front of it, had bellowed in defiance when it charged, and something it couldn’t understand had caused it great pain. One of its front legs still throbbed.
Unable to work through its dilemma, the bear continued to pace.
In time, it intuited that the creature seemingly being offered as a sacrifice to it might be a trick. Should it charge and begin to eat, the other creatures might not scatter at all. They might do something to cause it further pain.
The bear stopped its pacing opposite the middle of the pack confronting it. Didn’t these puny things know they were defying nature. Such irregularities could not be tolerated. The bear grew angry. It pawed the earth, scattering clods of dirt, and began to growl, the rumble starting deep within its chest, signaling a building pressure that inevitably must be released with a mighty charge to rend the flesh and break the bones of all those who mocked its needs. The bear would sate its hunger for many sleeps to come.
The predator saw the spindly things tense. They were finally coming to understand the way things should be. The way they must be. The bear’s lead leg, the one that caused its pain, moved forward in what would be the start of its burst.
The second step never came. The bear looked up and, behind the creatures it had intended to devour, saw the monster that had cheated it out of an earlier meal. Once again, the bear felt vulnerable and insignificant, even without hearing the giant thing give its own horrible growl.
The grizzly’s charge became an abrupt turn and a headlong retreat.
The animal’s lightning change of heart puzzled all the people who’d been ready to kill it.
Except for John. He looked behind him and saw Marlene approaching with Freddie in tow.
“Was Brother Bear about to bother everyone?” she asked.
“Until he saw you without your makeup on,” John said.
Meaning the bear saw Coyote in her true form.
Only Marlene got the joke, and she didn’t think it was funny.
Julián might have. Looking on from his hiding place on the ridge, he’d witnessed the standoff between the people and the animal. He’d had to cover his mouth with a hand to keep from laughing at Basilio’s plight. Served the prick right for running off. He hoped that the bear did take his cousin for its dining pleasure. Shithead tartare.
What riveted Julián as much as Basilio’s plight was the unflinching cool of the others. Sure, they had their guns out, but from what he could see even the automatic weapons were small caliber weapons. Hell, you might empty a clip into an animal that size and not bring it down. Even if the bear didn’t get all of them, he still might get one or two.
And the woman with the bow, what the hell was she thinking? You put an arrow into a bear that size, you were only going to piss it off. Honey, you weren’t going to be nearly so pretty when that bastard tore into you.
Maybe she thought she could put her shot right into one of the beast’s eyes. That’d certainly hurt. Might distract him for a while, but if the arrow didn’t penetrate the brain, well, the bear would still have one eye left, still have its sense of smell and maybe the archer’s scent firmly embedded in memory. The damn thing could hunt her down.
At least that’s the way it seemed to an MBA.
He might have felt otherwise if he’d take some life sciences classes.
He wasn’t prepared for what he saw next, wouldn’t have been even if he’d taken a raft of mythology courses, and he had taken a few as an undergrad. Something enormous appeared among the trees. Damn, it was monstrous. Made him think of Fenris Wolf, the father of all wolves in Norse mythology, the beast destined to kill Odin, the king of the gods.
Julián blinked to clear his eyes, giving him the time to hope he wasn’t suffering some kind of mental breakdown. All the blinking did was let him revise his opinion slightly. It wasn’t a wolf he saw; it was an epic coyote. Something out of a sagebrush nightmare.
Whatever it was, it sure scared the hell out of the bear.
It turned its stubby tail and beat feet out of there. Julián watched the bear run for a moment. Jesus, it was fast, especially for something that size. Then Julián turned back to … the coyote was gone. In its place was a woman. Looked indio, from some north of the Rio Grande tribe. She also had a face that might appear on the cover of a fashion magazine.
Caramba, what was happening to his head?
He didn’t do drugs, not even the kind he grew and sold.
So …
Before Julián could ask himself another question, he saw there was someone standing next to the beautiful woman. A young guy who didn’t seem bothered by the shape-shifting qualities of his traveling companion. Then again, maybe he hadn’t had the same hallucination Julián had.
Whatever the case, he was the guy Julián had researched, the one he wanted to find: Freddie Strait Arrow.
He’d hoped to have a one-on-one with the man. Not talk to him with a bunch of armed people around. Ernesto and Valeria Batista especially. His prick cousin Basilio, too.
Maybe he should wait. Or trail the group and make h
is move when he saw Freddie was alone. Yeah, that’d be —
Dangerous. Julián heard something big moving through the trees behind him and a chill raced down his spine. The giant coyote? No, that had to be some kind of mental aberration. Christ, maybe even a mini-stroke. Now, the bear on the other hand, that was entirely real. He was sure of it. That big bastard might have circled around behind him.
Time to introduce himself to Freddie right now, Julián decided.
He looked in the direction of the group of people downslope from him.
They were moving away. Heading off in the direction of the old camp.
Julián jumped up and cried out, “Hey, wait for me.”
In a rush though he was, Julián remembered to grab the backpack with his cash.
He left his assault rifle behind.
Chapter 35
Downslope in the Cascades — Washington State
Baker fired a shot before Mateo could stop him. Mateo turned his head and saw a man go down, lifeless before his legs crumpled. A wail rose from a group of men and women near the fallen man. They all sank to their knees and raised their hands above their heads.
A cloud of panicked prayers begging for deliverance in Spanish rose above them.
“Why the hell did you kill that poor bastard?” Mateo demanded of Baker.
Showing no remorse, he replied, “He was carrying a weapon, and he looked my way. I was protecting myself and my men.”
Charlie and Dog nodded in approval.
Charlie raised a further point. “Should we waste them all?”
Dog nodded once again, but Charlie waited for Baker’s decision.
Mateo looked back at the cowering group and preempted it. “They’re peasants. They couldn’t describe you to the police if they wanted to, which they don’t. Just hold your goddamn fire until I tell you to shoot.”
Baker replied, “Somebody’s got to pay for Able.”
Mateo ground his teeth. “Okay, somebody just did, even if the poor sonofabitch had nothing to do with it. It’s also possible we’ll run into someone who wants to put up a fight or someone I need to have killed. So wait until then, goddamnit.”