Never Far Away

by Michael Koryta

  He sighed, lifted the Remington—he was still on his back, which meant shooting upside down—and fired a single blast into the water between himself and the plane. The shell blew out of the muzzle with a pleasantly thunderous noise, water sprayed in all directions, and Randall Pollard whirled to face the threat.

  And slipped. It wasn’t bad—not a full fall into the water, like Levenseller’s, but enough that he fell forward and had to catch himself by grabbing one of the struts that held the pontoon float to the plane’s body.

  Ka-WHANG.

  Another round from Leah Trenton, and this one was placed much better; in a blink, the float was empty, and Randall Pollard was in the water.

  Hell of a shot.

  Dax slid out farther, admiring the moment. Pollard had made the slightest of mistakes, and Leah had made the finest of shots. Her success made the one she’d missed all the more baffling, but nevertheless, she’d recovered well. Pollard floundered and fought his way behind the pontoon, a sheen of blood rising around him like a gas-line leak from a boat. He was hurting, and he was very likely going to bleed out and die, but he’d kept his cool as well as anyone could, remembering to maneuver to a protected position.

  It was a pleasure to watch.

  Dax looked at the plane, waiting for Bleak. No one moved. The plane rocked in the water, thrown by Pollard’s fall and buffeted by the light winds. It was drifting farther from the sandbar, the kids, Levenseller, and the dog. It was beginning to look empty and innocent.

  Dax didn’t trust it for a minute.

  The plane was turning in the wind, though, and he watched as Pollard assessed this and realized what it meant—he was about to be exposed again, with no ability to return fire. If he was smart and physically strong enough after taking that shot, he’d at least try to swim for the shelter of the nearest rocks.

  The rocks that currently hid Dax Blackwell.

  45

  She’d made the second shot count.

  Leah slid down the rock, ejected a spent casing, and chambered a fresh round. Her hands were steady but her heartbeat was a rock drummer’s dream, had been ever since she’d seen the child’s face as her finger closed on the trigger. She’d jerked the rifle as she fired, and it had been enough—by a fraction of a second of fool’s luck, it had been enough.

  The child was alive and Randall Pollard, may he drown slowly on his way to hell, was shot and in the water. Dying.

  Her first kill. She thought she should feel something for that, but she did not. Only relief that one was down, and fear for where the other might be. She could hear the sounds of her children’s sobs and her dog’s bark and her lover’s desperate splashes. A symphony of sorrow, her world fracturing in harmony.

  Cool your mind, trust your hands. One down. You put one of them down and there will be one more to come.

  Just one? Someone else had fired. An awful shot, one that missed even the plane and kicked up nothing but water, but still, there was a second shooter in play, and she knew that it wasn’t Bleak. Bleak wouldn’t have taken a shot at Randall Pollard. If he had, he certainly would not have missed.

  So who?

  Impossible to know. What she did know: One threat was down, and one remained, and then there was an unknown armed presence. She hadn’t seen Bleak but she believed he had to be in the plane. With the child.

  Who is that kid? He looked familiar. Looked like someone…

  Bouchard. The neighbor. The recognition made her squeeze her eyes shut and grip the gun tighter. How had they gotten him? And why?

  None of it mattered. What mattered was that he was here now and had to be kept alive.

  She flexed her toes and pistoned her body up the rock, wet and cold and bleeding. The wind had shifted and she could smell the smoke from the dying campfire as its burned-out ashes were given fresh, false life from the breath of air. She put her eye to the scope. Pushed an inch higher. Watched the river take shape before her once more.

  Ed had reached the shore. He was hanging on to a broken tree limb. She could see blood trailing from his legs. He’d taken one bullet, maybe more. How badly he was wounded, she couldn’t say. The strength he’d shown just to make it this far suggested no major artery had been damaged. But how much longer could he go without medical attention?

  Tessa was with him, licking his face. Attention, though not medical. Leah pivoted left to right, found the sandbar, and watched her children. They were staying low—smart, even if largely useless, considering how exposed they were—and Hailey was sheltering Nick from the plane’s line of fire with her body. Leah felt an anguished, awful pride, seeing that.

  Good job, baby. I’ll do the rest.

  She moved the scope again. Found the rocks from which the surprise shot had come. Studied them and saw nothing, but she understood why—it was a perfect sniper’s nest, better even than her own, completely concealed. You weren’t going to force anyone out of that spot with distant gunfire. You’d have to come get him.

  She moved the scope back to the plane. Surveyed the cockpit, taking care to leave her finger off the trigger this time. She had never understood the term friendly fire in a real way until she’d seen that boy’s face in her crosshairs.

  What in the hell was Bleak intending to do?

  Nothing that required him hurrying, she realized. He was performing exactly as his legend promised—unfazed by a firefight gone bad.

  The plane was unmoored, drifting farther away, turning in the wind, and she saw that it would soon end up on the shore. Ed’s side of the shore.

  Inside, no sign of motion.

  She pivoted right once more, scanning the water, looking for Randall Pollard’s body. She passed over him the first time, and when she swung the scope back and found him, she saw a bright orange rope flicker through the air and hit the water near him. He grabbed it and was pulled toward the rocks in a swift tug, pulled just out of her firing line. She scrambled higher, found him, and fired, just barely overshooting the top of his head as he rode the rope out of sight behind the boulders.

  The water frothed red where he had been.

  He was still alive, but not for long. The same as Ed, who might not have long either. But someone was there to provide Randall with aid now, and Ed had no one. Time was running out for the parties on both shores, and out in the center of the river, a line of stillness had been created, three points on a shared thread: Leah, her children, and the plane.

  Nothing moved inside the plane.

  He will wait, she realized with sick sadness. Bleak will not care who dies and who lives out here. He will wait.

  A shadow passed overhead, and Leah jerked, rolled onto her shoulder, and pointed the Winchester skyward.

  A bald eagle, its massive wingspan stretched full, glided by, its raptor eyes seeing all below. The gunfire might have scared it into the air, but the gunfire was gone now, and there was blood in the water. A potential meal. Leah craned her neck and watched it soar, seeking a safer altitude from which to survey the excitement below.

  “Tell me what he’s doing in that plane,” she whispered, but the eagle was gone from sight then, and even its shadow went with it.

  46

  Randall Pollard was a badly wounded man. As Dax tugged him ashore with the orange paracord he’d found in Andy West’s gear, he saw that Leah Trenton’s shot had entered Pollard’s right leg just above the knee, exited out the other side, and gashed across the top of his left thigh. There was not much left of the femur above the knee.

  He was impressed that Pollard had been able to make it this far with that kind of injury.

  “Hey, buddy,” Dax said, easing the man up onto drier ground as the echo from Leah Trenton’s latest miss faded away and silence returned. “How you doing?”

  Randall Pollard’s mouth opened and closed and no sound came. A fish on dry land. Dax nodded sympathetically.

  “It’s bad,” he said. “But I’ve got a med kit.” He pointed into the pilot’s bag, where the first-aid box rested.
/>   Pollard’s eyes tacked over to the kit, then back to Dax. “Who?” he said. It took him a great deal of effort, so Dax put a finger to the man’s damp lips to keep him from trying to speak again. He didn’t need to try; Dax understood the question.

  “Take it easy. Don’t say more than is needed. I work with the kids out there.”

  Randall Pollard had eyes of two different colors. Fascinating. Dax leaned close, studied them. Tears ran with the river water along Randall Pollard’s cheekbones. Dax wiped them away.

  “I worked for Leah—or Nina—the woman with the hunting rifle? But then the girl hired me. So I work for Hailey now.”

  Pollard stared at him. His clearing mind was not prepared to handle this.

  “It’s a lot to take in,” Dax said. “But the point is, we could be on the same team now. You came for the woman, right? Only for her. Nina. Leah. Whatever you’d like to call her.”

  Pollard managed a slight nod. The idea of teamwork seemed to inspire him. Excellent. Nobody got out of this world alone.

  “Stop the bleeding,” Pollard hissed.

  “Right,” Dax said. “The bleeding is the problem. But what’s your partner going to do?”

  Pollard’s mismatched eyes flicked left and right, tracking Dax, trying to make sense of him. Struggling.

  “Is he as good as they say?” Dax asked.

  Another nod. “Yeah,” Pollard rasped.

  “Will he die for you?” Dax asked.

  Pollard looked at Dax and then down at his leg. The blood was running hot and bright. Dax had made no move for the medical kit.

  “He knows where you are, and that you’re hurt,” Dax said. “He doesn’t know anything about me other than where I am and that I can shoot. So what do you think, will he risk his own life to save yours?”

  Randall Pollard was still staring at the roadkill that had once been his right leg. He wet his lips. Spoke slowly. “Doubtful,” he said.

  Dax nodded. “I appreciate that. It’s a hard truth.”

  “You gotta let him know,” Pollard whispered.

  “Know what?”

  “That you’re…you’re…”

  “Yes?” Dax said, ever patient. It wasn’t his leg that was pouring blood onto the rocks, after all.

  “You’re help.”

  “Oh. Huh.” Dax winced, lowered himself into a catcher’s squat, and clasped his hands in front of him, the gun pointed down. “Well, this is awkward.”

  Randall Pollard looked up at him and smiled then. It was tortured and terrible, a death mask, an expression Dax had never seen before in his life and yet one that he understood: Pollard wasn’t sure what, exactly, Dax represented out here, but he knew he was not a friend.

  “You’re missing the point,” Pollard wheezed.

  “How’s that?”

  Pollard kept the smile. There was blood in the corner of his mouth now. He seemed more clearheaded than before, as if the pain was receding.

  “He won’t have to die,” he said. “She’s not beating him. Neither are you.”

  “That’s real respect for his skills,” Dax said. “Nothing false about it. And yet…” He shrugged. “I beg to differ. We’re about to settle the matter, one way or the other. A shame you won’t be here to see how it plays out.”

  Pollard’s pain-ravaged face changed only slightly when Dax shot him in the eye. The brown one, not the green one. Dax preferred the green eye. It was a pretty shade, one that conjured cool valleys in high mountains.

  “Hailey!” Dax shouted. “Hailey, do you hear me?”

  No answer.

  “Gotta communicate,” Dax shouted. “Gotta be a team player.”

  “I hear you.” Her voice trembling and tearful.

  “We have a teaching moment,” Dax cried as he grabbed Randall Pollard’s boots with both hands and shoved the dead man into the water. “In which direction is this bad man floating?”

  The river took Randall and swept him away from the rocks, and almost instantly Leah Trenton’s big rifle boomed again and a bullet blasted the corpse, a perfect shot, center mass. It drove Randall down into the river and red water rose above him.

  “Tell your mom to save her ammo!” Dax shouted. “And answer the question. Which way is that dead man floating?”

  Hailey’s voice, high but clear: “North! He’s floating north! Stop shooting! Everyone, stop shooting!”

  The final cry was an anguished sob. Dax sighed and shook his head. He liked the girl, she had unique spirit, but she had so much to learn.

  The shooting didn’t stop because you asked it to.

  He had a feeling that the man called Bleak, who still hadn’t so much as fired a round, understood that very well.

  47

  Tell your mom to save her ammo!”

  Leah lay against the rock, rifle in hand, eye to scope, watching the scarlet streaks on the surface that represented where one of the three men she’d feared most in the world had gone to die with her bullet in his belly, and the question echoed around her, rattled in her mind, the words seemingly impossible, and yet she’d heard them clearly. She knew that.

  Tell your mom.

  Your mom.

  Hailey hadn’t contradicted him. Hailey had answered him, whoever he was. She’d answered him in terror but not confusion, even his question about which direction the body was floating. He—and she—both understood the mistake Hailey had made when she’d paddled out of the pond that morning.

  They had spoken, Leah realized. Her kids had been caught by someone who knew who they were, and who she was.

  Who was he?

  Someone whose behavior made absolutely no sense. He’d rescued Randall Pollard only to kill him. He’d put the children in harm’s way out there and hid himself, then fired a shot that revealed his hiding spot in order to save a dog.

  Who in the hell was he?

  She was wondering whether she should call out to him, scream a question, because Ed was bleeding on the bank, hurt bad, and her children were trapped in the middle of the river, and if Leah had an ally behind those rocks, she damn well needed to know—but then the first motion in many minutes came from inside the plane.

  It was the child. While she watched, Matt Bouchard crawled tentatively and awkwardly out of the open pilot’s door and down onto the float.

  He’s letting him go? She couldn’t believe that. Unless Bleak had been more shaken by Pollard’s death than she’d imagined and was willing to negotiate whatever it took to simply get out of this place alive.

  Matt Bouchard inched farther out onto the float, and Leah understood then why he was moving so awkwardly.

  His hands were bound with a plastic zip tie, and there was a thin rope looped around his throat, the free end trailing back into the plane, back into the hands of a man who could send the boy into the river with a single jerk. A boy who couldn’t even fight to free himself or stay above water with his hands bound.

  Bleak was in action.

  48

  Matt wasn’t sure how long he’d been curled up on the floor of the plane, listening to—and sometimes feeling—gunshots echo around him. Time was a foreign concept now. All he knew was the sound of the shots, the smell of fuel that permeated the cockpit after one of the shots ripped through the body of the plane, and the feel of the fierce, strong grip that the man called Bleak applied to force Matt down as the gunfire intensified. Then, so fast that it took Matt a moment to recognize what had happened, the feel of the rope dropped over his head and yanked tight through a slipknot.

  “Now,” Bleak whispered, “you’re gonna go save some lives, kid. Or lose them all. Up for that?”

  Matt didn’t answer. He was fighting for tears. He wanted to sob, wanted to cry in a way he hadn’t in years, a gasping collapse of little-boy wailing, but he couldn’t draw them up. Maybe there came a time when you knew that there was no point. That even the small thing inside yourself that could be comforted from crying was no longer able to hear you.

  “Boy?” Bleak said
, and he tugged at the rope. Thin, abrasive fibers nipped at Matt’s neck.

  “Yes,” Matt whispered. “I’m ready.”

  “Walk out that door. Feet cut loose, but hands stay tight. So don’t fall in the water, right? Gonna sink fast if you do.”

  Matt nodded.

  “Climb down carefully. Don’t stumble. Walk out on that float and then start talking. Loud.”

  “What do I say?” Matt whispered. The smell of the fuel was heavier now, and he thought that he could hear dripping somewhere. A bullet had hit the gas line. Would the next one blow the plane up?

  “You say that if she comes down, everyone else stays alive.”

  The tears he’d been hunting for began to rise, finally. He said, “She won’t believe you. No one will. Because you’re lying.”

  Another tug on the rope. The slipknot tightened on his throat.

  “I do not lie,” Bleak whispered, and Matt could smell his scent intermingled with the leaking fuel. He smelled cool and clean, somehow. Smelled, Matt realized, like deodorant. The knowledge conjured a wild, irrational fear: He is not sweating! He is literally not even sweating!

  “I want her,” Bleak said. “Your job, if you want to stay alive and want those two kids to stay alive, is to be convincing.”

  A powerful hand pushed on Matt’s spine. The hand seemed as broad as Matt’s entire back.

  “Get out there.”

  Matt forced himself upright on quivering legs. He stumbled moving from the back of the plane to the front, where the cool breeze funneled in through the open door, and he smelled smoke with an undertone of copper on the breeze.

  Blood.

  Blood and smoke.

  Death waited outside, he was sure. But death waited behind him too. He’d rather be outside. The river wasn’t as terrible as the plane.

  He made it from the cockpit down to the struts that led to the pontoon float, climbing carefully, while Bleak paid out rope like he was walking a dog on a retractable leash. If he cared about the gunfire, he didn’t show it.