Jack looked more closely at the footprints and saw that a set continued on past the vehicle, further north up the side street in the direction away from the bend in the highway. He had never walked that way. Instantly, his heart was in his throat. He jumped to the first clear footprint past the jumble next to the car. He leaned over, viewing it from an angle. The indentation was indistinct in the new-fallen snow. He placed his foot next to it. His heart thudded against his ribcage. The print was too small to be his own.
Chapter 4
In a wild panic, Jack jumped back to the car door. For just a split second, he considered climbing inside. But then he looked back in the direction of the footprints. He scanned the surroundings of the tracks, into the middle distance, seeing no movement. He jumped to the rear of the vehicle. As he swung to his left to look past his little house, he also swung the rifle from his shoulder. He brought it up as he turned back to the right. He scanned the curve of the highway and the corners of the nearby houses down the sight of the rifle. Why had he brought the Weatherby? For once he actually wished for the high-capacity Sig, stowed away inside where it would do him no good. He raced forward to the front of the car, visually tracing the footsteps again as far as he could. He bolted back to the house. Inside, he ran through the main room, glancing quickly around, and then ran into the kitchen. The door there was still blocked by a table turned on its side. He ran through a small room at the back of the house off the kitchen, scanning as he did so, then to the two tiny bedrooms at the south end of the house. He returned to his room at the front. No one present. He stepped on his bedding, nearly tripping in the strewn-about blankets, to get back to the front door. One more glance outside. He slammed the door shut, shoving the bureau back into place to block it. Then he swept his loose belongings off of a ratty chair near the door, onto the floor, placing the Weatherby upright on it for quick access. He reached for his Sig 556, gripping the bottom of the magazine curve to feel that it was snugly fitted while he stepped back to the window next to the front door. He chambered the first round. The “slock” sound of the slide seemed too loud in the room.
Time to pause and breathe. The room and the light streaming in seemed brighter than before. The world had become instantly alive. Too alive. Jack ducked under the window, stepped in front of the fireplace, and then ducked under the next window, standing and holding the Sig at the ready as he peered from the edge of the window outside, in the direction ahead of his vehicle. His view reached as far as a football field ahead of the car before fading into the incline and the cloud-inducing gray. There was no movement.
Jack stood like that for what seemed a long time and then noticed that his hands holding the firearm were shaking uncontrollably. He was momentarily perplexed but then realized that he was witnessing unspent adrenaline. He knew he couldn’t hit anything right now with his rifle, except possibly himself. Time to take stock and plan. He forced long, deliberate breaths. He moved away from the window and into the center of the room, across from his bed and the fireplace, and began jumping up and down. Too much thumping. He pulled some blankets toward himself and jumped up and down on those.
Somewhat steadier now, he moved along the interior wall toward the kitchen so he could look out the back window there, and then into the successively adjoining rooms so he could do the same there. As his panic reflex subsided, Jack considered the facts. There was no sign of movement outside. He’d been left alone for some time before his discovery—perhaps an hour or even two. The area around the car had been disturbed a good bit, but some or most of that was his own doing. And there was but one set of footprints headed north. Conceivably another person might have circled around in a different direction. Maybe several others. Jack hadn’t noticed another unfamiliar set, but he hadn’t thought to look, either. It seemed most likely either that there was no immediate threat, or that he was about to be in big trouble. Either way, it made sense to move. If there were people about, and they meant him harm, he needed to be a moving target. He would get out and encircle them in an attempt to shift some advantage back to himself.
Jack regretted not having coursed through the little streets of Luna before settling down. It wouldn’t have taken five minutes—there was hardly anything there. The long highway through the lonely San Francisco Mountains had trended mostly north or northwest before making an abrupt turn west, toward the Arizona border. Right at the elbow of that turn was Luna. Jack’s state of mind on arriving had been to just steer straight onto the secondary road north at the bend, and just roll till he found a suitable stop. He was only a hundred feet or so from the highway. The streets, such as they were, seemed to run north-south and east-west. The hills all around were clothed in well-spaced conifers, and in Luna, the pinion and juniper and lodgepole pines were even further spaced apart. The town lay in a plain surrounded by even higher hills. High desert. Well over a mile in elevation. Not a lot of cover.
Not of the natural variety, at least. There were surprisingly close-spaced houses on the little bit of paved road, but otherwise the houses were well-spaced, scattered here and there around the valley. The pinion and juniper grew in thickets alongside struggling deciduous trees, and off the main highway, there were little graveyards of rusting trucks and other automobiles, along with the sprawl of other transportation debris, square footage here not being at a premium.
That would do for Jack’s purposes if it had to, but it was not ideal. The area didn’t lend itself well to slinking through underbrush, which was what Jack felt like doing at the moment. Unless he happened into an unusual profusion of straw-grass, he’d have to make do with what he had. On the positive side, his sight distance would be good once he was out-of-doors, except where it was constrained by the rise of land away from the San Francisco River or the intermittent copses plopped here and there. The binoculars! He quickly found the bag he kept them in among the things he’d swept off the chair. He grabbed them and slipped the strap over his shoulder. Rethinking this, he removed both the bag and rifle straps and slung the bag over his left shoulder and the rifle strap over the right, on top.
Jack made a last scan from all of the windows and then moved cautiously to the back door. Nothing in sight out the windows. He quietly moved the kitchen table from in front of the door, though his presence was hardly a secret—he’d been burning wood in the fireplace for days. Out the back window was a large expanse of white. There was a clump of fir trees to his left. To his right was mostly open. A little to the south, facing the opposite direction as his house, was the even more modest house with the pickup. Jack eased outside, into the chill wind, and made his way along the back of his house. He was completely exposed to anyone at the east. The dirt road was maybe thirty yards away. Across that was open land, giving way to trees spaced closer and closer in the direction away from the road. These were vacant lots for the housing boom that would never hit Luna. Just south of his house was another, smaller house, which Jack had bypassed because it was even more dilapidated than the one he’d settled in. He moved along its back side, too, all the while scanning for tracks in the snow.
All this while, Jack was scheming how he would encircle the Other who was there. He was next to the bend in the highway now, and the tracks he’d seen went the opposite way, north. Another road ran due east from the highway bend, so he resolved to slink along that as best he could. He ran, pausing briefly at the occasional tree cover to reconnoiter. After what seemed a long time, he had gained a couple of football fields’ distance on the east/west road, so he sprinted across it and found that there was a fairly steep slope away from the dirt road, away from the street. He made his way along the edge of the lot of a large church with a still fresh-looking sign above the door: Luna Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Not a big church, but the biggest building in Luna, by far. Jack made his way toward it, on the east side, still seeing no sign of foot traffic.
It occurred to him, somewhat belatedly, that he should be on the lookout for vehicle traffic, too—and for that m
atter, for the sound of a vehicle. Or multiple vehicles. He circled the back side of the church with confidence that he was out of sight, but in a bit of a hurry in order to get the east/west dirt track and, especially, the main highway back in sight. He proceeded west along the snow-covered dirt road, at times moving behind the thin veil of junipers, cedars, and firs, and at times crouching low, below the level of the road where the slope from the road was steepest. In this way, he made it back to the highway bend, feeling that he had a good chance of not being seen. He was feeling better. He was no longer jittery. It was conceivable that someone had watched his every move, perhaps losing him behind the church for a while. But unlikely. Jack was out of the zone of fear created by the sudden realization that he was known at a time when he was oblivious to the presence of another.
With the reasonable hope that he had evened the odds, Jack paused and kneeled in a thicket, peering through branches toward the center of Luna. He began to remove the binoculars from the bag, to take stock. As he did so, he started to consider the implications, beyond the immediacy of danger. What if the Other was not a threat at all? Why could they not be friends, alone in all the world except for each other? And if not friends, at least not enemies? They could exchange intelligence. Maybe the other guy had traveled, too. Even his knowledge of this bit of New Mexico and Arizona would be helpful. And then, he thought, it was possible that there could be more than just one. He’d considered the possibility of two or more interlopers—“interlopers” is what he had considered them—but that was in the context of survival. Hostility, until he knew otherwise. Maybe there was a whole group. Or maybe this one or two or three were scouts and part of a larger group elsewhere.
But how could there be another person in Luna, New Mexico, with a population at its peak of maybe fifty, if you count all the ranchers for miles around plus their dogs, and their horses, and their children who had moved away, and there not be another person left in all of New York City? Or in all the ghost towns between there and here that Jack had stopped in? Maybe he was losing it. Maybe he was delusional. Maybe he had been looking at his own tracks. Maybe he was just mistaken about the size of the one track he had closely examined.
Through the binoculars, Jack scanned near and far, side to side, for quite some time. There had been no vehicle traffic on the east/west road since the snow. The highway was not far away, but he couldn’t tell much from here. The angle to the side view of the north/south section was so acute that his name could have been spelled out in the snow and he wouldn’t have been able to make it out. Looking down the east/west section of highway was a little awkward. He didn’t have a great view. If there had been traffic on it, it certainly wasn’t obvious.
Jack socked his gear away and prepared to move on. Further west, there was more cover around the highway, but to get there without being totally exposed, he would need to detour quite a bit south. He had the glasses case strap and rifle strap across opposite shoulders, and he ran at a scissoring jog so as not to jostle them more noisily than necessary. He detoured quite a bit south then sprinted across the highway even though the road had curved enough that the bend in the heart of Luna was out of sight. In the woods on the other side, he found the incline pretty significant. No need to take on the San Francisco Mountains to encircle Luna. He skirted the lower reaches of the mountain in order to cross the highway again a half-mile or so west from the bend.
At the corner of a little house adjacent to the highway, Jack stopped to do some more sighting. He’d seen no sign of human life, and he was beginning to seriously entertain the notion that it was all in his imagination. The house he hid behind was on what appeared to be another scraped dirt road running north from the highway. There were more modest houses further north, along with what appeared from this position to be a small graveyard of perhaps a dozen cars and trucks and pieces of miscellaneous rusted-out equipment. The road was poorly maintained, visibly so despite the blanket of snow. Lots of open space again, but Jack was several hundred yards from where he’d first seen the tracks. It was getting colder. And darker. He briefly considered whether there might be an advantage to the late-afternoon gloom, but decided the advantages would be canceled out by the difficulties.
Jack was getting impatient, even as he told himself to be prudent. On the one hand, this was wild overreaction to a set of footprints in the snow. On the other hand, the world was so different now that Jack’s memory of casually encountering other people, in their hundreds and thousands, was more like a dream. Encountering another person wasn’t just a long-missed event. His very sense of self was entirely different now. The idea he carried around in his head about himself was no longer what he envisioned others’ perception of him to be. His was now an inward-out view. He knew pragmatically that another person would be intelligent and resourceful like him, but seeing himself in relation to them was impossible. During all this time of circling in on the Other, he tried to recall what he was supposed to think. What he might have thought was, “What will he think of me?” Instead, he only thought of the Other as a being unto himself. As distinct from Jack as a dog or a deer. A foe, possibly, but friend? It was scarcely conceivable. There was no society to which Jack felt a part and of which both he and the Other were representatives. No sense of belonging which would bind them both.
Jack hustled along to the derelict vehicles and from there continued east along a line of cedars that had evidently marked an undeveloped property boundary. After a while, he took to walking steadily without pausing—not because he had plenty of cover, but because the twilight would catch up with him if he didn’t. Stopping at the corner of another house that fronted on the next north/south road, Jack glanced up and down the road and then to the next road. He thought he could just make out a suggestion of disturbed snow on that far road. He hustled closer, risking exposure.
He was not yet to the road that his house was on, where he’d originally found the tracks, but he wasn’t far. It might be the next road over, he thought. He could detect just a hint of wood smoke in the still air, whether from his own dying fire or another, he couldn’t discern. As he moved closer, there in front of him, he saw the tracks again, continuing north along the road. His could feel his heartbeat accelerate. He had certainly never been here before. He became more alert to every nuance of the landscape, every sound and every smell. Scanning south with the binoculars, Jack could just make out where the tracks appeared to cross from the far block to the nearer one. So this could be the same person. There were houses on this side of the road, well-spaced out, so he could move north, sprinting between houses, pausing at each to sight the one set of tracks and look for others. Finally at one such pause, he realized the tracks ceased their northward trail and seemed to disappear. But then Jack could faintly make out a disturbance in the snow in the driveway of the next house up. The binoculars weren’t so effective this close, but he used them to connect up the tracks as best he could in the fading light. He felt sure they ended at the front patio of the next house north. There was no smoke from the chimney. No sign of a vehicle. It was quiet.
Nothing for it but to chew up the distance as quickly and as quietly as he could, Jack decided. He dashed across the space between houses and stopped at a little brick wall that marked the edge of a carport. There was a patio enclosed by a high fence, and a narrow sidewalk on the street side of that, extending from the carport and turning to the left, to what was evidently the front door, out of sight to Jack at the edge of the carport. He quietly took the rifle in hand and set the binoculars bag down on the brick wall. It would be preferable to approach the front door from the opposite corner, but to do that he’d have to circle the house, where he could be seen from all the windows, or else circle a long way around, and there was no time left if he were to approach in daylight. Jack hopped across the concrete floor of the carport and the few steps down the sidewalk. At the corner, he dropped to all fours and peered around it with his face inches from the sidewalk.
An ordinary closed doo
r. Still all quiet. Jack briefly debated leaving the rifle and taking up the .45, but decided that more firepower was better. He hopped quietly to the front door. Testing the front door, he was surprised to find it unlocked. He eased the door open an inch and paused. His heart was pounding so hard it seemed that if someone were inside, they’d hear it. Weighing his options but charged in his whole being to move, he threw open the door as he brought the muzzle of his rifle down.
A split-second too slow. The business end of a .12-gauge smooth-bore barrel took up what seemed like his whole field of vision. A shotgun at can’t-miss range, positioned to blow his head right off his body.
Chapter 5
Jack could not even utter a gasp in the fraction of a moment before his life might be forfeit. His head remained on his body at that first instant, and then for another moment, and time expanded like eternity into the space of a full second. His own rifle was frozen at an angle forty-five degrees from his hip. All those seconds and fractions of seconds, making up a lifetime, seemed to fill his consciousness all at once. Yet he remained alive, and his abatement of breath gave way to a sharp intake of air. He remained alive and considered, in the tiniest spit of time, whether to back away or whether to remain frozen in place. From the ether came a distant memory—he was a child, reaching up into the arbor for a tiger lily bloom when a bee buzzed right into his ear canal. He had frozen still until the bee departed and the danger was past. He did the same now. Another second elapsed. His weight shifted to his heels, but he was otherwise motionless. At the other end of the barrel was a pair of eyes above a face pressed at an angle against the stock. Eyes an orange-flecked brown. Almond-shaped. Female. Alert but not panicked. Resolute. Jack couldn’t see her hand but knew better than he knew anything else that her finger rested lightly on the trigger, and he was one twitch away from death.
Another Like Me Page 4
