by K. M. Fawkes
He shook his head. “That would be the equivalent of an alarm system going off, alerting them to our presence. He’d have time to grab his weapons and be waiting for us when we climbed in.”
“In that case we can try the back door. Or the garage,” Anna said. She pressed one hand against a fresh indentation in the doorpost. “Do you remember there being bullet holes here, before?”
Brad shook his head, not wanting to consider the implications of that. “I don’t, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t there. Let’s check the back.”
The back door was locked but someone had neglected to lock the door leading into the garage, which slid open easily. Again motioning for quiet, Brad led Anna inside into a room with a cement floor that smelled strongly of gasoline and motor oil.
The silence that greeted them as they left the garage through a door leading into the main hallway boded well at first—if no one was yet stirring, they might even be able to coax the kids out of the house before Lee knew they were there. But each of the bedrooms on the first floor was empty, and Brad fought back a rising sense of panic as they neared the living room. A familiar stillness lay over the house, the kind of stillness he had experienced once or twice before when entering a building where death dwelt. Anna seemed to feel it, too, for she paused near the hallway bathroom as if not wanting to go any further.
Reluctant, but determined to know the worst, Brad pushed open the hall door and stepped into the living room.
The sight that greeted him there was even worse than he had anticipated, reminiscent of images he had seen on television of war zones and bombed-out houses. Several people lay dead, Vanessa among them, their bodies riddled with bullet holes and dark blood blooming onto the sofas or floor where they had fallen.
Catching his breath, Brad was relieved to see that neither of the kids was among them. Neither was Lee; he must have taken them with him when he fled the house.
Brad swore as he saw that the body of Remington, the retriever, lay among the dead. What kind of hellish scene had broken out here that led to an innocent animal being caught in the crossfire?
He looked up just in time to see that Anna’s face had turned a ghostly color. Turning away, she vomited the remains of last night’s dinner.
He waited until she had finished before saying, “Lee and the kids are still alive; we know that much.”
“How?” said Anna faintly.
“Because if they weren’t, this is where they would be.”
“Where could they have gone, though?” she asked. “The truck is still parked out front.” She motioned toward the window, where a weak sun was rising over the snow-clad woods. “Unless someone else had a car and they took it.”
“Around here cars are as scarce as hen’s teeth,” replied Brad. “It’s more likely they fled on foot. The question is, when? If we knew that, we could make a rough estimate of how far they’ve traveled.”
“These bodies couldn’t have been here for more than a few hours,” said Anna. “I’ve seen bodies in varying states of decomposition. These are fresh. Their blood is still drying.”
“You’re right.” Brad was standing in the kitchen; reaching over the stove, he turned off the front burner with a loud click. “They left the water boiling and it had only just reached the bottom. Not enough time to start a fire.”
As he spoke, Brad’s gaze fell on the back yard through the kitchen window. A thin layer of powdery snowfall lay over the un-mown grass, in the midst of which he spotted fresh footprints. Shoulders tense, pulse racing, he turned to summon Anna, but was interrupted by a scream that jolted every nerve in his body.
“Anna!” he yelled, darting into the living room where he found her clutching a pile of blankets and pointing cryptically toward a still-moving body.
“He’s—he’s not dead,” she said in a tremulous voice. “I wanted to cover them up—it seemed like the decent thing to do—and I was just walking past him when he reached out and just about grabbed my ankle.” She rested a hand over her heart and sat down in the one empty chair, too overcome for words.
“Jesus,” Brad said lowly. The man lying on the floor was Joe—one of the two men who’d joined Lee on the road before arriving at Vanessa’s weeks before.
Brad stood hunched over the big man and peered into his eyes. “I don’t even think he knows we’re here. If he’s still alive, he’s on his way out.”
Slapping him lightly on the cheeks, Brad said in a louder voice, “Joe? Can you hear us?”
When he failed to respond, Brad turned to Anna, “I think we’re too late.”
Just then, however, the man turned his face toward him and spoke.
“Lee’s gone,” Joe wheezed, blood making his words hard to distinguish. “He took the two little ones with him.”
Brad waited for the initial thrill of shock and horror to subside before asking him, “Did he do this? What happened here?”
Joe spoke now only with difficulty, pausing between breaths.
“When he came back to the house last night, it was obvious that he was out of his mind. Vanessa wanted to know how he had gotten the kids, and why you weren’t there with them. But he wouldn’t answer. Just kept ranting about how he was out of fuel and needed a place to hole up for the night, and how the Bible commands us to show hospitality to strangers—”
Joe’s speech was interrupted by a long, hacking cough, and Brad turned his face to avoid being sprayed with flecks of blood.
“We made a collective decision not to let him stay. Lee said that was fine; he’d keep going, into the woods if he had to. He said the kids would be safe with him.”
“I’m guessing Vanessa didn’t like that,” said Brad.
Joe shook his head with difficulty; it was clear that he was fading quickly.
“She planted herself in the doorway, telling him he wasn’t taking the kids with him. That was the last thing she ever did. He shot her, more than once, as the rest of us ran to defend her. Lee was better prepared though, and faster.”
Swallowing his horror, Brad asked, “Do you know where he went, then?”
“Not a clue.”
Brad counted to twenty, but that was the last thing Joe said. Reaching over and placing a thumb on his neck, Brad found that the pulse had gone still.
He was gone, as were the good people around him, but Brad and Anna had no time to waste mourning the dead; the two children were still alive, as far as they knew, and the trail would be getting colder by the minute.
Motioning for Anna to toss him one of the blankets, Brad draped it over Joe’s body and began heading for the back door.
“Where are we headed?” asked Anna, rising from the sofa with difficulty.
“Away from the house,” he repeated, eyes trained on the faint tracks near the wood’s edge. They were now rapidly disappearing beneath a flurry of new snowfall. “I wasn’t sure at first, but after hearing Joe’s story I don’t think those footprints can be anyone else’s. If we hurry, we might still catch them.”
Chapter 16
They followed the fading footprints through a meadow that in the spring would be profuse with mullein and goldenrods, but whose flowering bushes and dogwood shrubs now lay shivering under a thick blanket of snow. Brad no longer felt the cold. Every nerve tense, he waited for the crack of a rifle or the scuffle of boots alerting him to his father’s presence. He had been given one advantage in the altercation that was about to ensue: he had learned his father’s tracking skills at a young age.
“We need to be careful,” he said lowly to Anna. “Lee’s tricky. I wouldn’t put it past him to have doubled back and be waiting behind us, because he knew someone was going to follow him into the woods.”
“He couldn’t have known you would come,” said Anna. They were standing now at the dark edge of the woods. “He left us for dead back at the lake.”
“He left you for dead,” replied Brad. “He always knew I would come after him. I’m guessing that’s why he fled after dispatching Vanessa
, because he knew he would be safer on his own turf, and he wanted to be ready.”
With a growing sense of trepidation, they followed the tracks into the woods, Brad wondering why his father, who was usually so careful, hadn’t bothered to clear away the tracks before advancing further. He was leading them straight to wherever he was hiding.
Brad kept his misgivings from Anna, but he couldn’t help wondering whether there was some purpose in this. Maybe, he thought, as the wings of an immense partridge fluttered past them, maybe Lee wanted to be found. Or maybe, as he had suggested before, the tracks in front of them were a ruse designed to lead them away from his true hiding place.
“Have we talked about what we’re going to do when we find them?” asked Anna, after they had been walking for about three quarters of a mile. She was having to lean on him, now, because her own lungs were beginning to give out.
“It’ll depend.” Brad had been up thinking about this for most of the night. “If he starts shooting at us, we have the advantage of being protected by the wood cover. We can slip away and let him exhaust his ammunition.”
“What if he doesn’t have the kids with him?”
“I’m not worried about that.” He nodded at the small footprints spread out in front of them. “He wants us to find them. He’s testing me.”
“I realize I don’t know your father better than I do, Brad, but why would he do that?”
“He always had a very masculine ethos.” Brad spat into the snow distastefully. “He wants me to prove myself. He wants to find out if he raised a man or a—” He stopped. He had heard the words spoken over him so many times he couldn’t bring himself to repeat them.
They walked another mile deeper into the woods, down a trail burdened with tamarack trees and frost-bitten mountain laurel. Here the tracks looked more pronounced, as if they had been newly made and the snow hadn’t had time to settle over them.
“They were here less than an hour ago,” said Brad. “Still alive, all three of them.”
“Oh, thank God,” said Anna, fighting back tears. “Oh, my sweet babies.”
“Which means they’re close,” Brad went on. “The snow might have slowed their flight but they can’t be more than a mile or two away.”
Holding tight to the rifle, Brad forged ahead, eager to finish the journey that they had started four days ago.
His father had paid him an odd tribute by knowing that he would eventually make it out of the woods in pursuit of the children; there had been moments during that hike when he didn’t think he and Anna would ever emerge alive. He could feel his father pulling him forward as though by invisible strings; he could feel the respect that blazed between them in spite of their mutual animosity.
Rounding another bend in the trail, they found themselves approaching a broad clearing surrounded by tall cedars and slender pine saplings. Brad pulled Anna to an abrupt halt, wordlessly pointing to the sky over the canopy: plumes of smoke were rising above the treetops into the murky and overcast sky.
“Unless it’s a trick,” he whispered, “which we can’t rule out, they ought to be camped out in that clearing.”
Anna struggled to maintain her composure, not wanting to give away their position. She had the look of someone who had almost given up seeing her children again, only to learn that the cause wasn’t as hopeless as she had feared.
“What we’re going to do,” said Brad, “is we’re going to walk slowly to the edge of the clearing and find out what they’re up to—hopefully without being seen. From there we’ll decide how we want to move forward.”
Anna’s heart was racing madly, clearly petrified for the children’s safety. “Promise you’ll aim carefully.”
“I’m not aiming at anything, yet,” said Brad. “Lee would be disappointed if I did, anyway. He drilled into me the importance of strategy and planning. He said only fools reach for their guns before all other options have been exhausted.”
“But he didn’t always follow his own advice,” said Anna, remembering the grisly tableau in the living room of Vanessa’s house.
“No. No, he didn’t.”
Further up in the clearing they could hear the clatter of wood upon wood, the repetitive scuffle of footsteps on the topsoil and voices faintly speaking.
“I told you to listen,” Lee was saying, “and you’re not listening. Now I need you to get up and sweep the debris out of the tent. Get up and do it before I get angry.”
“But we didn’t pack a broom!” came the voice of Sammy, and a cry rose to Anna’s lips that was quickly stifled.
“Do you need a broom?” said Lee with paternal belligerence. “Use your hands; use your feet if you have to! This is just our temporary home until I find us a real house to live in—one of those big two-story houses with a wraparound porch. And when Christmas comes we’ll put up a Christmas tree and decorate it. Won’t that be fun?”
The sound of his father’s voice cutting through the silence seemed to awaken Brad’s earliest memories. He remembered the last Christmas before his parents divorced, when his mother had bought a tree on sale the week after Christmas because she couldn’t afford one otherwise. And now here Lee was promising houses and Christmas trees to children he barely knew, as if wanting to give them the childhood he had denied Brad.
Anna was eager to rush the encampment and seize the two children, but Brad advised caution. “He’ll need to go hunting at some point, and he won’t want to take the kids with him. They’ll just be in the way at this point. The second he leaves, we’ll seize our chance.”
“What does he even want with them?” moaned Anna. “What was that he said about finding them a home?”
“He thinks he’s the only one fit to care for the next generation,” Brad said lowly. “He’s trying to keep up their spirits.”
Once the debris within and around the tents had been cleared, and the paper towels hung on a wire between them, and water bottles handed out, Lee reached for his rifle. His hands grasped for it eagerly, as if they had been longing to hold it during the slow, monotonous process of setting up camp. Summoning the children to him, he knelt down at eye level.
“Listen up,” he said: “I’m going away for a little while, but I’ll be coming back with fresh food in an hour or two. I don’t want you going anywhere while I’m gone. If you try to escape through these woods, you could get eaten by bears. Or you might fall and break a leg and I would never be able to find you. So unless you want to die in the snow, I suggest you don’t step foot outside of this clearing. Got it?”
“Okay,” said the two children numbly.
Lee rose to his full height, looking unsatisfied. “When I ask you a question, I expect to be addressed as ‘sir.’ Let’s try that again. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“Yes, sir,” they replied in the same dull tone of voice.
Still shaking his head and muttering to himself about a deficit of enthusiasm, Lee left the circle of the clearing and disappeared into the woods.
Despite his earlier promise, Brad cautioned Anna to wait for a few minutes in case Lee turned around and returned to the campsite unexpectedly. But when six, eight, ten minutes had passed and he hadn’t returned, Brad rose and motioned for Anna to follow.
Pausing at the perimeter of the clearing, Brad turned to her and said, “I need you to go and take care of the kids. I’ll meet you back here.”
Anna suppressed a cry; she had clearly been expecting them to do this together. “But where are you going?”
Brad hugged his rifle tight to his side. “I’ve still got some family business I need to take care of. I’ll come back when I’m done, I promise.” He didn’t have any idea whether he was really going to return from this tête-à-tête in the woods, but showing false bravado was another skill his father had taught him.
Looking encouraged, Anna placed her arms around his neck and hugged him tearfully. “Be seeing you,” she said.
Brad couldn’t quite bring himself to reply in kind.
Waving her arms and signaling for silence, Anna entered the clearing and approached the two children. Silent and incredulous, they ran forward to greet her, Sammy burying his runny nose in the immensity of her jacket, Anna bringing her arms around him and Martha as silent sobs wracked her frail body. Brad looked on from a distance, waiting just long enough to watch the reunion before skirting the perimeter of the clearing and following his father’s footsteps into the dense woods.
By now it was almost noon and a pale sun shone as behind a veil from behind a gray layer of clouds. Brad had eaten nothing since dinner the night before and, though his stomach had growled throughout the morning’s trek, he now forgot his hunger in his haste and resolve to find his father.
He no longer felt fear. Lee might have been hiding behind the next pine; he could have shot at him from any direction; Brad welcomed the encounter, the way an athlete welcomes a competition for which he’s been preparing his entire life.
At about three hundred paces the trail made a sharp turn to the right. Rounding the bend on swift and silent feet, Brad’s heart gave a jolt of excitement. His father was walking at a leisurely pace less than fifty yards ahead of him wearing a gray cap and a white-and-gray camo vest that leant him a faux-military bearing. He was standing directly in Brad’s line of sight and his back was turned; if Brad wanted, he could lift his rifle now and fire a single shot and be done with it. Not exactly sporting, but at least it would be quick.
His half-second of hesitation proved costly, however, for just then Lee paused with an attentive air, as if listening for the rustle of a grouse or partridge in the scrub nearby. Then, wheeling sharply around in a 180-degree turn, he raised his rifle with a knowing smile that seemed to suggest a certain pride and delight in being hunted. As Brad took aim and fired a single shot that echoed through the woods, he wondered just how long Lee had known he was trailing him.
“You’re getting better, Bradley,” Lee yelled, “but your aim needs improvement. Watch!” And he fired his rifle, the bullet lodging in a bare cedar just inches from Brad’s skull.
