“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.
“You’re lucky I was aiming for the tree,” he said, “otherwise we wouldn’t still be having this conversation. What else have you got?”
Brad retaliated in bullets, and for several minutes—during which he thought he could sense the fear and despair of Anna and the two children as they crouched, waiting, back in the clearing—the two men unloaded their ammunition on each other.
Lee was no longer aiming for the trees, now. Bullets landed on the ground near Brad’s feet and whistled through his hair, sending blackbirds and kestrels that had been roosting invisibly in the trees above them scrambling for safer locations. Brad was an excellent shot, no matter what Lee said, and would likely have killed his target already if Lee wasn’t so skilled at evasion. With mounting frustration Brad fired the last of his bullets; it soared through the top of Lee’s cap and came out the other side, leaving a prominent hole at the entry point.
Smartly, Lee had resisted expending all his remaining ammunition and waited for Brad to exhaust his supply. Not wanting his father to know that his gun was now empty, he mimicked reloading; but he could only do this for so long before Lee got wise to the deception.
“Out, are you?” he called after him in the same radiant, gloating tone as before. “You disappoint me, son. All those summers spent training you in the woods and you can’t even kill a single old man.”
“That makes two of us, then,” Brad pointed out. “You still haven’t managed to kill me, despite all your proud talk.”
“You were never a very patient kid, were you?” Shaking his head, Lee strode boldly forward until they stood just a few feet away from each other. He seemed to be gambling that Brad wasn’t carrying any concealed weapons. “I hope you don’t mind giving me this,” he said, grabbing the rifle and taking it into his arms. “I don’t suppose you’ll be needing it again; not today, at least.”
“What do you want?” asked Brad, annoyed and feeling like Lee was just toying with him now before he killed him. If he wanted to do it, there was no way to stop him. Lee had all the weapons and he had none. If he had brought his axe, he might have a chance of surviving the next few minutes. Instead, he would have to rely on his brain.
“I want to know why you’re following me,” said Lee, pulling open the chamber to verify that the rifle was indeed empty. “I was hoping maybe this was just a friendly visit, but the bullet in my hat suggests otherwise.”
“I came here to get our kids back.” Brad paused, his attention seized by a loud rustling and snapping in the scrub to his left. A bird or squirrel, most likely. “What was your plan, exactly? You’re almost sixty years old and you’re out here abducting other people’s kids. Where were you taking them? How did you expect to feed them?”
“I can take care of them better than you can,” said Lee. That maniacal look that Brad detested had returned to his eyes. “I would have fed them; I would have found them a home. I’ve been telling you for years that the world to come is going to be led by hunters and survivors. You don’t have any right to take them from me. You’re sending them to their deaths!”
“They don’t belong to you,” replied Brad, “or had you forgotten that?”
“You don’t even know where that girl is from,” said Lee, presumably referring to Martha. His breath was rank in Brad’s nostrils, smelling of onions and dried salami. “You don’t know who her parents are.”
“Are you seriously lecturing me about the evils of kidnapping children? We found her; we saved her. She would have died otherwise.”
“And she’ll die if you take her back! You don’t have the skills to survive in this world without my assistance. By winter’s end you’ll be frozen to death in some abandoned home, turkey vultures gnawing at your eyeballs.”
Again Brad heard a rustling at a distance of about twenty paces. Ignoring his father’s insane ranting, he scanned the area but saw nothing to raise his suspicions with the exception of a white-breasted nuthatch that almost blended in to the surrounding snow.
“Were you traveling with someone?” Brad asked.
“No, it’s just me and the kids. I don’t trust anyone that much, and neither should you. If you join me, we can eliminate the weak links who threaten our survival. We can live out our natural lifespans, as God intended!”
“You’re a lunatic,” said Brad with an unsettled feeling, “and someone is going to shoot you between the eyes. I’m just sorry it couldn’t be me.”
“It doesn’t have to end this way,” said Lee, brandishing the rifle, “not if we decide to work together. I haven’t given up on you, Bradley; in spite of everything, I still think you have the potential to be a decent hunter and marksman and provider.”
“And how are you planning to employ my skills, exactly?”
“We can form our own community.” The tone in Lee’s voice suggested that he had been thinking this over for some time. “When the Lord God wanted to destroy the human race, he sent a flood of waters to cover the earth. But he had compassion on Noah and his family and spared them. He started over with just eight people, and what he’s done before I believe he can do again. The four of us—you, me, Sammy, Martha—we’ll build our own ark and shelter there while we await the decay of this dying world.”
Brad fought back a feeling of nausea. He had an uncomfortable feeling that Lee had lured him into the woods so that he could make this proposition. Maybe he hadn’t been planning to kill him after all; maybe he wanted them to repopulate the earth together.
“That’s insane,” Brad said with contempt. “We’re not the new Adam and Eve. We’re not Noah. There are decent people left in this world if you’d only trust them.”
“I’m not trusting anyone except my next of kin,” Lee replied. “What does the Scripture say? ‘Place no trust in a friend; put no confidence in a companion; guard the door of your mouth from her who lies in your bosom.’”
“I don’t know what any of that means, Lee, but I can guarantee you it wasn’t written about us. There’s an entire community of scientists and librarians living peacefully just a few miles away. The only reason I didn’t freeze to death in the woods is because of their generosity. Look, I know how crazy this is going to sound, but they’ve even managed to bring back electricity! Their community has lights and running water, and no one goes hungry.”
Brad had hoped this might encourage his father to come with them, but Lee recoiled in horror at the mention of electricity.
“Just what kind of group is this?” he asked, tightening his grip on the rifle. “Haven’t you learned anything? The world we’re living in now is God’s just retribution for defying his laws—for creating a world powered by coal and oil and fossil fuels. We were never supposed to have that much power over nature. The past two, three hundred years we’ve been flying too close to the sun, and if you want to go back to that world, you’re a heretic, an apostate.”
Brad sighed in exasperation. Many people had parents who became distrustful of new technologies as they grew older; few of them had parents who thought the entire industrial era had been a mistake.
“It’s not like that, honestly,” he said. “If you come with me back to our base I think you’ll be delighted by how well they take care each of other.”
“Heretics, all of them!” Lee barked. He had the look of someone who was afraid of being hauled away against his will. “Anyone who tries to restore power is complicit in the destruction of the natural world, and is destined for a fiery damnation. If you join them, you’re headed for the same fate!”
Shaking his head in despair, Lee raised his gun. “I didn’t want it to end like this,” he said softly, aiming the gun straight for Brad’s heart. “But you give me no choice. Sometimes it’s necessary to kill a man before he damns his own soul.”
“Dad—”
“Goodbye, so
n. See you in the next life.”
Brad fell to his knees in the dirty snow. He shut his eyes and braced for the bullet’s impact, wondering how long it would take him to die and if he would still be sensible during the process. In his final moments his thoughts drifted toward Anna and Sammy and Martha who knelt waiting for him, who didn’t yet know that he wouldn’t be coming back. He hoped Lee made good on his promise to take care of them, as he had proven unable to.
All these thoughts passed through his head in the space of about three seconds. When he opened his eyes again, he was surprised to find that Lee had stepped away, ears pricked with that same intent look he had seen on his face ten minutes before.
Then—it happened so suddenly that at first Brad thought he must be hallucinating—Anna emerged silently from the bushes, hair lank and stringy, a dead-eyed look of unflappable resolve on her face as she charged full pelt at Lee. Her eyes on the rifle in his hands, she let out a primal, guttural scream.
Perhaps unnerved by her unhinged appearance, perhaps wondering how a woman he had shot and left for dead four days before had emerged from the woods like a spirit of vengeance, Lee hesitated just long enough for Anna to launch herself at him, punching, kicking, screaming, a shot ringing out as the rifle was discharged in the scuffle.
Aware that Lee would soon rally and regain control of the weapon, Brad hurled himself between them, seizing the rifle and instinctively stepping in front of Anna.
Lee let out an almost gleeful laugh.
“I see you’ve picked your side, kid. But are you man enough to shoot your old dad? That’s the real question here.”
“You’d love for me to kill you, wouldn’t you?” Brad cried, aiming the gun into the snow. “Because it would prove that I had grown up to be just like you. Not today, though.”
He pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. The rifle had already been emptied.
Of course. Brad remembered Lee once telling him, as a boy, that every man became a saint the second you pointed a gun to his head. He had been testing him to see how he reacted when faced with the prospect of imminent death. Rage burned in Brad’s breast as he realized how skillfully he had been manipulated.
“Did you really think I would give up a weapon that easily?” asked Lee. Kneeling and reaching into the leg of his cargo pants, he produced a small black pistol—the one he kept in a holster around his ankle. The one Anna didn’t know about.
Lee he aimed first at Brad and then at Anna, a look of malevolent triumph on his face. “Your little girlfriend forgot the first lesson of ballistics training: always carry a spare. And really, Bradley, I thought you would have known better, but you failed.”
“What’s he talking about, Brad?” Anna asked tightly.
“I was testing him.” Lee’s tongue was sticking out oddly, which made him look even more deranged. He seemed to relish the power that holding a gun when the two of them were weaponless gave him. “And he failed the test.”
“How?”
“By saving you,” said Lee. The tone of his voice was disappointed, almost heartbroken. “Compassion is for the weak; I’ve been telling him that for years. What he should have done is to kill you when he saw you were bleeding out. Put you out of your misery, the way I would kill a horse or a dog, as an act of mercy. But of course he couldn’t do that. He had to play the hero.”
“The community saved her,” Brad said again. “The community that you refuse to be a part of. And they taught me something that it’s taken most of my life to figure out: that there’s no point in physical survival if we lose our humanity, which you clearly have.”
Face taut with rage, Lee’s grip on the gun tightened. Before he could act, however, a second figure, hulking and gargantuan, emerged from the trees and descended on him with a speed and fury that rendered self-defense hopeless.
Brad’s eyes remained fixed on the beast even as he and Anna scrambled for safety. It was the bear they had encountered a few days earlier, still nursing the injury to its jaw that seemed to have left it in a state of permanent rage.
As Anna hid her face and Brad looked on in horror, the bear took a single swipe at Lee with her right paw that sent the entire lower half of his face, below his upper lip, flying away into the scrub.
Lee blinked back surprise; Brad couldn’t be sure, but it looked like even after this act of bloodletting his father was still alive and conscious. But even a man as practiced at survival as Lee couldn’t have survived the second blow, which dented his cranium, exposing jagged shards of white bone and gray matter.
With a bellicose roar of triumph, the bear shoved the dead man to the ground and began ravenously gnawing at what remained of his face. Brad, too preoccupied with his own and Anna’s survival to absorb the fact that his father was now dead, crept a few paces forward into the crimson snow and grabbed the tiny pistol.
Just as his hand brushed the cold metal, however, the bear paused and turned around. Inquisitively sniffing the air, its eyes soon fell on the young man who lay crouched in the snow with gun in hand. Having seen his father easily dispatched, Brad had acquired a healthy respect for the power and swiftness of the bear’s front paws. If he allowed the beast to get too close, he could be dead in less than a second.
Badly shaking from the cold and the wind, Brad’s hands worked clumsily and unsteadily to lift the gun. He wasn’t even sure he was aiming properly as he fired a single bullet in the bear’s direction just as it bore down on him. He fired a second shot and then another, thinking it would be grimly ironic if he and Lee died on the same day, and wondering if their souls would go to the same place.
The bullets did their job, however. To his relief, the bear stumbled forward two or three paces and then fell head-first into the muddy snow. Twenty yards ahead lay the remains of his father’s body, at last claimed by the very nature he had spent his life working to master.
Chapter 18
Brad found Anna crouched behind a cluster of snow-bearing dogwood bushes at about twenty yards distant. Her face looked ashen, and when he saw the relief that came over it as he walked over and lifted her to her feet he realized that she had been concerned not for her own safety, but for his.
Hugging his neck, she allowed hot tears to rain down onto his coat and chest. “When I saw the bear,” she said, “I thought it was going to kill both of you.”
“It almost did.” Brad hugged her tightly, unnerved by the thought of how close he had come to losing her, again and again, these past few days. “Lee’s gun saved my life.”
“It doesn’t seem to have done him any favors, though.” She broke away and they gazed silently on the remains of the fallen figure, on which snow was already beginning to gather.
“What are we going to do with him?” asked Brad. “Do we leave him there? Do we bury him in the woods?” He didn’t relish the thought of leaving his own father’s body to be eaten by wild animals.
“You don’t owe him anything,” said Anna. Placing her hands under his chin, she turned his face to face hers. “He tried to kill us. He made a wreck of your life. He didn’t ruin you, but that’s only because you’re probably the strongest and most resilient man I’ve ever met. You don’t owe him this or anything else.”
They returned up the trail through the falling snow. In a branch overhead a whippoorwill was singing. Brad couldn’t get the image of his father’s flying jaw out of his mind, the look of dismay and surprise in his eyes in the seconds before his skull was broken open like a ripe watermelon.
Lee knew more about survival than anyone Brad had ever met. In the back of his mind, he had always suspected his father might be un-killable. Even now his shoulders were still tense, as if waiting for what remained of Lee’s body to rise and follow them back to the campsite, firing bullets into the trees. It was bizarre to him, how easily his father’s life had been extinguished. All it had taken was two swipes of a bear’s paws to prove him mortal.
They found Sammy and Martha waiting for them back at the campsite; Anna had told
them to go and wait there while she went into the woods to assist Brad. During their absence Sammy had kept Martha preoccupied by proposing a competition to gather stones, which they had been placing in a circle around the perimeter of the clearing. Brad could tell that Sammy had been deeply worried for their safety when they had ventured off into the woods, but hadn’t wanted Martha to know. To his surprise, both kids raised a cry of distress when informed that Lee wouldn’t be coming back.
“Maybe someday I’ll tell you the full story,” Brad said. “For now I think we need to be heading back to the truck before it gets dark. God only knows what else is lurking in these woods.”
“He was your dad, wasn’t he?” said Sammy, and Brad froze in mid-stride. “He told us the other day when we were searching for a house. He said he loved you, but had never been very good at showing it.”
“What happened to him?” asked Martha in a panicked tone. “Why isn’t he coming back with us?”
Brad hesitated, debating how much it would be appropriate to tell them. “He’s gone now, and he won’t be coming back.” His eyes searched Anna’s, pleading for her help. “He can’t hurt us now.”
“He did a lot of bad things,” Anna said grimly, “but it’s done now.”
Martha looked slightly lost, but Sam’s eyes glimmered knowingly.
“How did it happen?” he asked.
Brad guessed what the boy was really asking. “We didn’t kill him, if that’s what you mean. We didn’t have to.”
“I don’t think we need to say any more than that,” said Anna warningly.
They had been standing at the edge of the clearing for several minutes now, and snow was beginning to settle on the shoulder of Martha’s coat.
“He wasn’t a bad man,” the little girl said sadly. “Not really. He never hurt us. He never hit us. He was confused, always talking to people we couldn’t see. He said he’d been given a task, and no one else could do it but him.”
“Did you bury him?” asked Sammy with childlike bluntness. “Is that why it took so long?”
Enter Darkness Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 71
