by TAYLOR ADAMS
Silence.
Roy chuffed. “What are you, a marine?”
“I . . . sell radio ads.”
“For the marines?”
“No.”
“Why should I listen to you?”
“You can do exactly what he expects — and die.” James exhaled, dug his fingers into the red dirt, and calmed his chattering teeth. “Or we can make a plan. A diversion. Something.”
“Like what?”
“Maybe . . . maybe someone can stand up real fast.”
“Great. I volunteer you.”
Saray was looking at James now. He wished she wouldn’t. Her eyes brimmed with tears. Her lips opened and shut like a goldfish out of water, blowing blood bubbles. He was relieved to see that she had a good grip on both wounds, although a thin line trickled between her fingers. She would certainly stay conscious for a few more minutes – long enough to think of a way to get to her, or get her to them.
Then what?
James didn’t want to think that far ahead. “Stay where you are,” he told her. “I’ll help you. I promise I’ll help you.”
She nodded and a heavy glop of blood rolled down her cheek. “If I go . . .” She spat a mouthful and it hung off her mouth in dark strings. “I can’t go because that would make all the things I said to my mom our last words. I can’t make it final. I called her . . . I called her horrible things.”
James wished he hadn’t promised. “Before we do anything else . . .” His throat lumped and he raised his voice for everyone to hear. He wasn’t a public speaker. He hated being listened to. He was uncomfortable with the way his voice rang in the open air. Everyone was waiting for him to speak and fill the silence. He wished there was someone else there, someone smarter and tougher and steadier, who could make the calls instead. A lot of things had already terrified him today, and being in charge of this little survival team was definitely in the top three.
No one spoke.
A low gust of wind came and went.
He exhaled and went for it. “Before we do anything else, we need to figure out where the shooter is. And how far away he is.”
Elle wiped her mouth and looked up at him.
Roy spat loudly. “How?”
* * *
Tapp saw a hand swoop over the Toyota’s hood and bash the driver side mirror with a tile of rock. Two soundless hits bent it and dumped a glittering shower, and then the hand disappeared.
Mirror shards. To peek over the car. Tapp ran his tongue over his bristled upper lip and tasted Cheetos.
That’s just adorable.
He was locked into his spotting scope; a tripod-mounted telescope dialed in to 100x magnification and capable of reading a newspaper at a hundred meters. Incredible image, just incredible. Right now he could feel the dusty hood of the Toyota, warmed stove-hot by the sun, and the porous texture of volcanic rock. He could smell the panic-sweat, the coppery odor of dribbling and drying blood, and he could hear all the gasping profanities, the sobbing, the futile arguing, fussing, and dick-measuring. With this powerful optic he was inside it all, holding his breath and dunking his head and immersing himself in every tiny detail. Like a video game, the entire experience waited obediently on Tapp and his input. Inside his glass world, where things were carefully posed and arranged for his pleasure, William Tapp was God. He sucked a seventy-fourth Cheeto from the bag with just his lips.
And God (crunch, crunch) needs to shoot something again.
So he rolled back to his rifle, poured himself around it, wrapped his right hand around the cozy polymer and squeezed a fist underneath with his left, and swiveled his needle-thin crosshairs to the Montana park ranger. The man was still up, still somehow half lucid after taking a glancing .338 to the skull, pacing a drunken figure-eight several meters north of the two dead cars. A walking ghost.
Years ago, Tapp had shot a transient from Portland in the temple with a jacketed 5.56 NATO. The hobo’s driver’s license had read Malton Chango or some such bullshit (generally, the weirder a person’s name, the weirder their death throes) and damn if that wasn’t in full effect. The man died – by one definition of the term – more or less instantly but his nervous system exploded into overdrive. He ran a few paces backward and somersaulted twice before collapsing in the brush, kicking up a storm of prairie dust, flopping like a retard for fifteen full minutes. The Funky Chicken, performed by a corpse. In the hot shock of the moment, Tapp had laughed giddily until his throat knotted up and he was choking out piggish little schoolgirl squeals. But in retrospect the sight had disturbed him. He didn’t know why. It was like he had crossed some line he wasn’t aware of.
This undead park ranger also made him uncomfortable.
Why?
He didn’t know. Sometimes a shot just turned icky and that was that. The human body was, after all, an endless supply of anecdotes to be crushed, splattered, inverted, or vaporized. Not all of them sat well.
Did you hear about the guy whose left side was blown off?
Yeah. He’s all right now.
He ran the pad of his index finger over the curve of the trigger, a motion he had performed perhaps a hundred million times in his fifty-six years on this earth. Trigger control, basically smooth rearward pressure, is the foundation upon which all marksmanship is built. Doesn’t matter who you ask. Squeeze the trigger – don’t you dare pull it. Apply your squeeze so gradually, in fact, that the shot actually surprises you when it comes out. Otherwise your body will anticipate the kick and unconsciously flinch, and in those crucial microseconds while the projectile races down the bore at thousands of feet per second, even the slightest twanged muscle in your forearm will blow a shot to hell. The marksman understood that a properly executed shot should strike like lightning from a clear sky, surprising the target and the shooter alike.
I do it for my shooting, not their pain.
I don’t enjoy their pain.
Their pain is just necessary for my shooting.
Nothing more. As Tapp settled into his millpond stillness and applied his trigger squeeze, he realized that in his dialogue of faraway violence, this mercy shot on Mr. Floyd was possibly the most sincere gesture of goodwill he could offer another human being. It made him feel good.
The trigger broke cleanly, and that felt even better.
* * *
Elle heard a wet slap, like a beef flank slamming against a tile wall, and saw Glen Floyd’s jacket quiver just above his tailbone. Then he folded to the earth as if invisible scissors had snipped his spinal cord. No blood, no apparent pain, very little sound, only merciful relief from this waking nightmare. His troubles were finally over, and she envied him a little for that.
She sat on her hands with her back to the Rav4’s rear panel and her feet tucked inside the vehicle’s safe shadow. She was thirsty. Her contacts burned with sand that stuck under her eyelids and scratched with every blink. Her throat was raw from inhaling the baked air, as if she had been leaning into a wood stove and breathing heavily. Her stomach still hadn’t settled and the odor of vomit lingered in the still air. It smelled like salty Chinese food.
Glen sighed.
It sounded childish, frustrated. It reminded her of James exhaling after losing an argument. The familiarity of the sound made it comforting for a split-second, until she realized it was the sound of air leaving Glen’s dying lungs.
One-one-thousand.
She counted. She didn’t know why.
Two-one-thousand.
Then she knew. She counted because she wasn’t here anymore. She wasn’t on this godless stretch of burnt earth, pinned to rock and metal by unseen eyes. She wasn’t in the Mojave. She wasn’t even in this shitty year.
She was on the roof of the stucco Whimsical Pig apartments – the first place she and James had lived together – under a violent night sky. The summer electrical storms in southern Cali were vivid but rainless, so they had scaled the cracked drainage pipe by their kitchen window and lain together on the red tile roof, wearing only a
blanket, watching the sky split open.
Three-one-thousand.
Each flash meant to start counting the seconds. Some came and went in blinks and others took their time, slithering from one horizon to the other in crackling wires. Some traced ornate patterns like tangled Christmas lights. Others were so close and so powerful that she flinched into James’ arms.
“I did this when I was a kid,” he’d said. “After the flash, you keep counting the seconds until you hear thunder.”
“Okay.”
He shifted, his leg brushed her thigh in a way that was still awkward, and he accidentally elbowed her sugary bitch-brew. The bottle skimmed the gutter and broke on the tennis court three stories down.
“It’s okay,” she giggled. “It was watermelon.”
Four-one-thousand.
“Then after the thunder comes, you divide the total seconds by five.” He interlocked his fingers with hers as another flash turned the sky purple. “Because the lightning was instantaneous, but the sound takes five seconds to travel one mile. Then the number you get – that’s how far away the lightning struck.”
“That works out to three hundred yards a second,” she said.
“Give or take.”
“Really? Three football fields.”
“Yeah.”
“Hard to believe sound travels that slow.”
He smiled. “Still can’t outrun a fart.”
She smacked him.
Five-one-thousand.
Back in the Mojave, on this bloody day, Elle Eversman heard thunder. Hollow and supernatural, it rolled through the crater like a wave, breaking and splashing on the rocks and brush and hood of the Toyota, then sweeping back out. It could have been a high-altitude passenger jet chopping the clouds, or a boulder stirring, or a gust of air thumping against distant cliffs. No one else noticed the weak and warped gunshot.
Five seconds.
One mile.
* * *
“He’s a mile away?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re sure?” James held the largest shard of side view mirror he had recovered – a triangular splinter three inches across – daintily between his thumb and finger. Then slowly, like ice crawling down a mountain, he inched the little fragment up and over the Rav4’s hood. Rolling his head back against the top of the tire, he adjusted it until he found the craggy crater ridge in his fingers. An improvised periscope.
“I heard the gunshot,” she said. “Five seconds after he killed Glen.”
“He killed Glen?”
She pointed uphill. James saw the body twenty yards up the road, facedown. He wiped dust from his eyes and waited for an emotion to wash over him – fear, shock, rage, sadness – but nothing came. Nothing changed and he felt exactly nothing. Glen was dead. They weren’t yet. That was all. He tried to remember Glen’s driver’s license, the color of his eyes, his weird comb-over-in-the-car story, anything solid, but couldn’t and was worried to discover he didn’t much care.
Elle gritted her teeth. “Rest in peace, Glen.”
He nodded. “The sooner . . . the sooner we find out where the shooter is, the sooner we know our options.” He steadied the northern ridgeline in the mirror piece. “If he’s going to relocate and shoot at us from a different angle, maybe we can read the land and guess which way he’ll go.”
The opposite end of this hellish valley – he would need to study it in cubic segments. He rotated the glimmering blade between his fingers – slowly, slowly – to pan east and then west. He would need to take a few seconds to study each spot, because somewhere out there, in all that bleached rock and bruised earth, among the talus piles and erosion gullies, somewhere in all that formless seismic violence, was an eye and a scope and a horrifically powerful firearm, staring back.
“A mile,” Elle said.
“I know.”
“That’s sixteen football fields.”
“Maybe you counted to five wrong.” He steadied his palm. His head throbbed with sinus pressure, pushing in from behind his eyes. It was too damn bright. He felt strangely hung over. He forced himself to study details, to scrutinize every cluster of shadows and creeping patch of brush, but his mind wandered. He could faintly discern dark smudges speckling the skyline and knew they were those creepy walking spirits of the desert – yucca palms. From Mosby he knew those gnarled giants were over twice the height of a standing man, but he could barely keep track of them amid all the smearing earth tones. Was it possible to see a standing, six-foot human figure a mile away? Even under ideal conditions?
He realized it was a waste of time. Of course, the killer wouldn’t be standing. He would be sitting, or lying on his belly.
A mile away.
1,760 yards.
5,280 feet.
A . . . lot of inches.
It’s like playing ‘Where’s Waldo.’ Only Waldo has a gun.
His thoughts fell out of his brain. His eyes ached and refused to align. He knew heatstroke was setting in – having been spoiled by the Toyota’s silent blessing of air conditioning, he hadn’t drunk anything since that morning. And even that had been a Diet Coke from the Reagan-era vending machine at the Gore Museum. Artificial sweeteners and sodium.
“Water,” he said. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. “How are we on water?”
“I’ll check.”
He heard her move to the back of the Rav4 where they kept a Costco forty-eight pack of bottled water. Hopefully it was accessible under the storage bins; he couldn’t remember exactly how he’d stacked them. He had loaded the rear bay on Saturday evening, under a sky of puffy red clouds, but it felt like weeks ago.
He heard rocks skitter under Elle’s knees and flinched. “Keep low. Below window-level, or he’ll see you.”
“I know.”
“And don’t lean out at all. He’s at about a thirty-degree angle to the road—”
“The potholes.”
“What?”
“Those potholes.” She opened the Rav4’s rear door and it double-creaked in that familiar way. “When we were driving up to Glen, those noises we heard. That was the sniper shooting our engine.”
“Yeah. I think you’re right.” He wished she wasn’t. He thumbed the glass another millimeter left and saw a small manmade structure nestled in the low end of the cliff. Bone-white. It looked like a single-room building. He couldn’t make out doors or windows. He squinted hard, turning the world into an oil painting, but discerned nothing else. “I see a house.” The glass nearly squirted between his sweaty fingers. “Or a shed, or something. Maybe he’s shooting from inside it.”
“That’s it?”
“It’s a piece of mirror. Not the Hubble Telescope.” He heard her thumping and banging around the back of the Rav4 for the water bottles – Jesus, please keep your head down – and he heard the bookcase settle uncomfortably. The vehicle rocked a little on its shocks, which he felt against his shoulder. He cringed at all the careless noise.
“I might have something better,” she said.
“What?”
She froze, not speaking.
“What do you have that will work better?”
“The Costco pack is empty.” She rustled loose plastic.
He sighed. He remembered the three Aquafinas in the console, minus the one they’d given Glen. “So we have two bottles,” he said quietly. “For four – no, five of us.”
“How long will that—”
Something smacked into the Rav4. It sounded like a suspension bridge cable stretched to its limit and released. As bracing as a gunshot, but strangely hollow, like a bamboo whip. The suddenness and strangeness of it turned his blood to ice water. His wife screamed.
“Elle!”
He heard crunchy bits of plastic pinging around the interior of the car. The driver side window fell out of its frame and rained gummy bits on his scalp and shoulders. He pushed forward, his hands crunching safety glass into the dirt, and saw Elle wrestle her way out of the Toyota’s rear door, h
air tangled, eyes wide, mouth agape, but unharmed. She hit the ground on her back and crawled to him.
“What was that?” she gasped.
James noticed a shard of blue polymer stuck on his collar. He recognized where it came from.
Oh, shit.
“What?”
“That was my GPS,” he said quietly.
“He shot our GPS?”
“Yeah.”
She ran her hands through her hair. “Why?”
“Because . . .” Something big, impossibly huge, occurred to him and he rolled his head back against the hot door and stared at the sky. Glass fell from his hair. The world wobbled.
“Why, James?”
He crunched a shard in half between his fingers. “Because the GPS had a satellite emergency SOS function. This whole time.”
6
Sometime around then, twenty-two-year-old Saray lost consciousness and died.
Don’t think about her.
Her passing had no drama, no pomp or spectacle. She took an otherwise unremarkable breath, and then there were no more after. Whatever awful things she had called her mother the other day quietly cemented into history. That was that.
There’s nothing you can do for her now.
James estimated it had already been an hour since Saray had taken the bullet. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth and unpeeled with a Velcro crackle. His neck and face were fiery hot to the touch and a morbid part of his mind imagined he could feel his flesh slowly cracking and blistering in the sun. Like old paint peeling off a house. The more rational part of him knew that every drop of sweat, wrung from every inch of exposed skin, was a drop he would never get back. The sun would go down in a few hours but it would return. The sniper was out there, a mile away, presumably sitting atop a mountain of food, water, and ammunition, fully equipped to outlast them. After a day or two in these badlands, he realized, catching a bullet would be the easy way out.
