Off the Grid

by C. J. Box

  Sheridan closed her eyes and waited for another gunshot.

  She was grateful when the sound of huge diesel motors started up in the shed next to them and apparently distracted the killer. The sound shook the walls and made the ground vibrate as the two eighteen-wheelers backed out one after the other and stopped outside with their motors idling.

  Sheridan could hear a half-dozen individual conversations going on through the walls. The men who’d just arrived spoke in guttural and urgent tones. It was obvious they were charged up and ready to leave.

  To do what? she wondered.

  “We’re all fucking going to die,” Kira said to her as she leaned in close. The rumbling of the motors outside obscured the sound of her voice from the killer. In fact, Sheridan could barely hear her.

  Kira said, “Dude, I’ve seen some of those videos. The ones where they march a whole bunch of guys in orange jumpsuits out on the beach and cut their throats all at once like it’s been choreographed. Have you seen those?”

  Sheridan quickly shook her head. She wanted Kira to stop talking.

  “Or they have us all get on our knees and get behind us and shoot us all in the head. At least it’ll be quick, I guess. We won’t know what’s coming until it comes.

  “I just hope they don’t do some of the other things they do to people, like burn us alive or crucify us and leave us out here in the desert.”

  After a pause, she said, “Maybe they’ll just do that to the men. Maybe they’ll spare us for a while. You know what I’m talking about, right?”

  Then: “This is officially the worst fucking weekend of my entire life.”

  “Shhhhhhh, please.”

  “Are you scared they’ll kill us?”

  “Of course,” Sheridan said. “You saw what they did to Ibby and that CU idiot.”

  “Kicking Seth in the head wasn’t so bad, though, was it?”

  Sheridan looked over to see if it was even possible Kira was joking at a time like this. She was, although her eyes were oddly vacant. She was either in shock or she was the coldest and toughest person Sheridan had ever met. Probably a mixture of both.

  Kira was a piece of work, she decided.

  • • •

  SHE FELT like she was inside someone else’s nightmare—not hers. Maybe it was the lack of sleep the night before and the strange new environment she’d encountered that morning. Certainly being herded outside to watch Ibby’s head get cut off had created the sense of unreality she now felt.

  The new men who had arrived, as well as Saeed and his two thugs, seemed not to be real people but others, she thought. She had no idea how to communicate with them or to engage them on a human level. They seemed to be from a different century and a different culture, even though they carried modern weapons and cell phones. They had nothing but contempt for Ibby and for their hostages.

  Sheridan realized that, to them, the students sitting around her weren’t real people, either. To them, they were all enemies, throwaway units of a world they despised. Or even lower than that.

  She should be wailing like Suzy or losing her grip on reality like Kira, she thought. Instead, she seemed to be sleepwalking through it; letting herself be herded here and there, sitting on the dirt as ordered, wondering who was going to die next. Maybe it was shock that had taken over Kira as well as herself, she thought. Maybe her brain was not letting her absorb and react to what was happening around her, but somehow keeping her at a distance from it.

  It was Saturday, she knew. She thought of Lucy, April, her mom and dad. She liked to think they were all somewhere together, but she knew it was unlikely. The older she got, the less her family was actually all together at once.

  She never realized she would miss being with all of them so much.

  But she was glad in a way that none of them even knew where she was.

  If they knew, she thought, it would be too horrible to bear.

  • • •

  OUTSIDE, ONE OF THE MOTORS raced and there was a grinding sound as an eighteen-wheeler was clumsily put into gear. As it pulled out, Sheridan could smell diesel fumes waft into the shed. The smell made her nauseous.

  She noticed that the fighter in front of the room had turned around and was looking out the window. He apparently wanted to watch the trucks as they passed by. Saeed’s man shouted at him and the man turned around. He looked both embarrassed and angry at the same time for not having paid attention to the hostages.

  It darkened momentarily inside the shed as the first big semitrailer rumbled out and blocked the light from the window. Then the second truck. Four white pickups followed. She could see the forms of men in the back. They were shouting “Allahu Akbar” and pumping their rifles up and down in the air as they passed.

  It all looked like a bad cartoon, but it wasn’t.

  “Where do you think they’re going?” Kira asked. “Do you think they’re still going to Utah?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You know what?” Kira asked too loudly. “I just realized I don’t know, either, and I don’t care anymore, because I’m going to die right here. I’m going to die while on a fucking camping trip.”

  “Kira, please.”

  “No,” she said with sarcasm. “I can’t die while doing something really cool like swimming with dolphins or helping to achieve world peace. No way. No, I have to die doing something I hate more than anything in the world. It’s kind of ironic, don’t you think?”

  Sheridan looked around. The killer was turning toward them. Toward the sound of talking.

  “I don’t even have anyone to pray to,” Kira said. “I just fucking realized that.”

  “Shhhh, please.”

  “Sheridan,” Kira said as her voice choked with sudden tears, “I’m so sorry I brought you here.”

  “Me too, but please stop talking.”

  Sheridan shut her eyes and tried to recall the feeling she’d had while visualizing her family together a few moments before. It had briefly comforted her.

  And there they all were at the breakfast table—Lucy looking angelic, April being annoying, her mom refereeing between the two, her dad looking on with a befuddled expression from the stove, where he was making pancakes.

  Only this time, she noticed the presence of Nate leaning against the doorframe, watching them all. She couldn’t remember him being there before.

  When she opened her eyes and saw him flash by the shed window, she thought she was still in the grip of her dream.

  Then she realized she wasn’t when the side door to the shed was kicked in and there he was.

  29

  To Nate’s surprise, in the safe he’d found a scoped .454 Casull by Freedom Arms, as well as three boxes of ammunition, next to his .500 and the encrypted satellite phone. There were scores of other arms—semiautomatic pistols, grenades, a half-dozen Heckler & Koch UMP submachine guns—but he left them behind.

  Semiautomatics and automatic weapons were for those who couldn’t hit what they aimed at.

  That the .454 was there, just like in his dream, only reinforced a sense of doom and inevitability that hung over him.

  He’d powered on the phone, strapped on his shoulder holster, checked the loads in his .500 Wyoming Express, and waited for the two semitrucks and the convoy of pickups to rumble up and over the rise. Then he scrambled out of the third shed and ran to the second one, peering through a smudged corner of a window.

  Seated on the dirt floor next to Suzy Gudenkauf was Sheridan Pickett. Her eyes were shut tight. She looked terrified.

  • • •

  THERE IS A MOMENT when a peregrine falcon, hundreds of feet in the sky, identifies a target below. The raptor stalls for a moment in the thermal current, draws in its wings, and gracefully does a 180-degree rotation to its back.

  Now bullet-shaped and sleekly aerodynamic, the peregrine
falls through the sky, gaining more and more velocity until its speed reaches more than two hundred miles an hour. It is the fastest creature on earth, and as it shrieks through layers of changing crosscurrents and atmosphere, it subtly keeps a perfect bead on its prey by slightly shifting a wing or moving its head a degree. As it drops, the falcon’s focus narrows until the target—whether an unsuspecting duck rising from a pond or a rabbit foraging for young shoots of grass—becomes the one true thing to the exclusion of everything else.

  As the peregrine closes in on its target at tremendous speed, its talons descend like the landing gear of an airplane on final approach. The talons are balled into fists.

  It is known as the state of yarak to falconers, and the end result is a concussion of blood and tissue from the target as the peregrine strikes home.

  For Nate, at the moment he kicked in the shed door and dropped low to his haunches, the one true thing consisted of three men, including the Syrian, who were standing over the people inside the shed, guarding them with AK-47 rifles.

  There were two gunmen inside he’d never seen before and he assumed they’d arrived in one of the pickups. The first stood at the front of the hostages with his back to Nate. The second was in the back, positioned so he could view the hostages. The Syrian paced among the men and women. At the sound of the door being crashed open, the Syrian, like Nate, dropped to make himself a smaller target.

  Nate shot the man in back of the gathering first because he was the most immediate threat. Nate went for center mass and the gunman flipped over backward in the air and landed with a thud on the dirt, his rifle clattering to the side.

  At the sound of the explosion, the gunman in front wheeled around, turning on his heel, and fired two quick, wild shots that sailed over Nate’s head—where his head should have been—and through the open doorway.

  Nate had cocked his .500 while he brought it down level from its tremendous kick and he fired and hit the gunman on the side of his nose. The force of the .50-caliber slug threw the already-dead body into the seated males.

  There were screams and shouts from the hostages, but Nate tuned them out. He leaped to the left inside the shed so his body would no longer be silhouetted within the doorframe and be an easy target.

  Sun streamed in behind him and he counted on the Syrian being temporarily blinded inside the dark shed. Nate hoped the Syrian’s eyes wouldn’t have time to adjust now that he was inside. He scrabbled low along the wall until he found cover behind an ancient rusted tractor body mounted on cinder blocks.

  The Syrian had chosen not to try to outgun Nate but to stop him from firing again by other means. He did it by snatching up a young woman from the group and pulling her up in front of him as a shield. The Syrian held the hostage erect by clamping his arm around her throat and lifting her off her feet in front of him. She was thin, dark, and birdlike. Nate recognized her from when he saw her sitting next to Sheridan.

  Nate’s sense of yarak was interrupted when a voice he recognized—Sheridan’s—cried out: “Kira!”

  The Syrian stuck his rifle out between the girl’s body and her right arm. The muzzle wavered and Nate ducked down behind the tractor. He knew the man hadn’t yet located him.

  Nate ignored the sounds of panic inside the shed: males scuttling away in a crabwalk from the Syrian, but not yet bold enough to rise up to their feet and run; women crying out and extending their arms as if their bare palms would ward off bullets.

  He knew he had only a second or two more before the Syrian found him and blasted away, hoping for a direct hit through the gaps of the tractor body or for a ricochet that might do the same damage. Either that, or he could shoot his human shield and turn his weapon on the other hostages.

  Nate quickly exchanged the revolvers in his hand so that he had the .454 with the scope in his right. He rose and rested his arm on the cowl of the tractor. The magnified left brown eye of Kira dominated his scope. It blinked with tears.

  He couldn’t fire without hitting her.

  That’s when Sheridan launched herself at her friend and hugged her around the waist, pulling her down out of the Syrian’s grip. Nate moved the weapon slightly until all he could see in the scope was the Syrian’s right eye. He fired.

  The Syrian stepped back with only the left half of his head still attached. Sheridan was on top of Kira on the ground, shielding her.

  Although it wasn’t necessary, Nate also shot the Syrian in the chest, if only to make sure he went down hard and didn’t squeeze off any involuntary rounds from his rifle at the hostages.

  He heard shouts of relief and shrieks of terror as he stepped out from behind the tractor. He yelled, “Are there any more of them?”

  The volunteers and engineering team members were in various stages of grief, terror, and pure anger. Women hugged each other and cried; several of the men simply stood and stared at him, not sure who he was or if he’d turn on them next.

  “I said . . .”

  “No, Nate. There were three of them and you got them all.” It was Sheridan, looking up from where she was with Kira on the ground.

  “Is she hurt?”

  Sheridan untangled herself from her friend. “No, no injuries.”

  “That was a good move,” Nate said to Sheridan.

  “I nearly died,” Kira said, choking on a sob.

  “She means, thank you for saving her life,” Sheridan said.

  “Could have been worse,” he said.

  Sheridan’s eyes widened and she said, “I can’t believe you’re here. Is my dad with you?”

  “No. Why would he be?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I know you two work together sometimes . . .”

  “We can talk about it later,” Nate said, stepping forward to address the former hostages.

  “Okay, everybody,” he said. “It’s time to get out now. Don’t gather up your things, don’t stand around talking about what just happened. Just get the hell away from here and go home.”

  He had their attention. “The keys to all the four-wheelers you drove out here are in the safe in the third shed. There are guns there, but don’t take them. Just grab a set of keys, find the right ATV, and go.”

  Suzy had recovered enough to ask, “What about our work here?”

  “It’s done,” Nate said. “It’s been hijacked.”

  “But . . .”

  “It’s over,” he said. “Go with them. Everybody.”

  Nate gestured toward the bodies of the three dead gunmen. “They were keeping you here just long enough to make sure they could get the trucks out and on their way. They were waiting for word to kill you all.”

  A few of the males hesitated, unsure of what to do. So did Suzy, who obviously didn’t want to leave the place where she’d dedicated her last year and a half.

  Nate said to them, “Do you want to be here if they come back?”

  “Fuck no,” Seth said through broken teeth. His left eye was swollen shut from being kicked in the head.

  “Then go,” Nate told him. To Sheridan, he said, “Not you. You’re coming with me.”

  “What about Kira?”

  Kira looked up at Nate with pleading eyes. So did several of the other volunteers. Apparently, they wanted to be with the guy with the guns.

  “She seems like a pain in the ass,” he said.

  “Oh, she is,” Sheridan said, nodding, “but we’re roommates . . .”

  “I’ve got room in my Jeep for you two only,” Nate said. “I need space for my birds.”

  As Sheridan led Kira toward Nate, he saw that Suzy hadn’t moved.

  “Okay, you too,” he said.

  Reluctantly, she followed Sheridan and Kira.

  “My Jeep is here,” he told them. “Hang with me here for a minute, then we’ll make our way there. Right now, I need to make a call.”

  N
ate dug the satellite phone out of his back pocket and punched the solitary number on the speed-dial list.

  • • •

  TYRELL ANSWERED on the first ring.

  “So you’ve got my location,” Nate said.

  “That we do,” Tyrell said. “We got a ping on you about a half hour ago, then nothing. Now we’ve got you on the screen.”

  “Good.”

  “Have you now decided to keep your phone on and follow instructions?”

  Nate didn’t respond.

  “Did you find Ibby?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Is he up to no good?”

  “He was,” Nate said. “But there’s a much bigger problem now.”

  Tyrell hesitated for a moment, then said, “We’re on our way. Don’t take any action—I need for you to sit tight and wait for the cavalry to arrive. Then you can brief them. Do you copy?”

  “Roger that,” Nate said, even though he bristled as always when someone—anyone—told him what to do without saying why, and used the phrase “I need you . . .” to do anything. The connection ended abruptly before he could ask how much Tyrell knew about Ibby, the sheds, and the EMPs.

  He started to call back but thought better of it. The brief conversation was all wrong. Tyrell hadn’t asked what Ibby had been doing or what threat might still be out there.

  To Sheridan and Kira, he said, “We’re leaving now. Run, don’t walk.”

  “But—” Suzy argued.

  “Now,” he said as he holstered one of his revolvers and snatched her up around her waist and carried her, running, toward the door.

  Before they got to the door, though, he heard the distant deep-bass chug of oncoming helicopters.

  30

  Ten minutes before, Joe looked through the bullet-punched windshield of Phil Parker’s pickup and thought he was seeing things. The shattered glass, he thought, had surely distorted and enlarged the images of oncoming vehicles into what looked like a convoy that included two full-sized eighteen-wheel tractor-trailers.