by TAYLOR ADAMS
“Snakes are disgusting,” Ash said. “Not even God likes snakes.”
“I do. They’re neat pets.” Elle tried not to sound like she had delivered this speech before. “They’re not slimy, although that’s a popular misconception because of the reflective sheen on their scales. They feel . . . cool and dry to the touch, kind of like leather. And lots of species are really docile and never bite, like ball pythons, or corn snakes, or green racers. I think you’d really—”
James squeezed her shoulder, as if to say easy there.
Elle bumped the f-stops to let in more light and saw that the image, quivering with her heartbeats, was now magnified to its maximum. Five times. She was zoomed in somewhere on the far wall and saw darkened hillside, glacial talus flows, flash-flood gullies and jutting rock teeth, smudged yuccas and clusters of tangled brush, all drawing tall shadows and hued an unnatural Sesame Street orange. A small, anal-retentive part of her wanted to white-balance the Nikon to correct that.
“See him?” he whispered into her hair.
“No.”
“Anything?”
“Just desert. An overabundance of desert.”
“Okay.” Ash sighed. She sounded like she was finally smiling over there. “Okay, Elle, if we get out of here, maybe I’ll touch one of your snakes. But I’m warning you, if it bites me, I’m tying it in a knot.”
Elle felt a dagger in her gut and exhaled sadly. “I . . . don’t have them.”
“Why not?”
Then she saw something in the Nikon viewfinder. A pinprick of white light.
* * *
“Oh my God,” James heard her say.
“What?”
Then the camera exploded under her hand, into her face, a smoky firecracker of slicing shrapnel. She screamed, thrashed her arm, and twisted hard like a yanked rag doll. The snap of displaced air raced over the desert floor and suddenly she was motionless, low in the dirt, her face covered by her ponytail. He blinked – he had grit in his eyes – and saw dark drops in the dirt, arced in a blotted stream, and it registered late that it was blood.
“Elle!”
He couldn’t see her right hand. Just blood. More blood, dribbling in the sand. She clutched it with her left and hissed a mouthful of hot air. His stomach fluttered as he threw himself toward her, tugging her shoulders back against the driver door, trying to pull her vise-tight fingers away so he could see the injury, his mind racing with awful possibilities. Chunks of her Nikon click-clacked around them like hail.
“Tell me I’m okay,” she gasped.
“You’re okay.”
Her ponytail hit his face and she pulled her right hand up into view, clasped between white fingers. She peeled them away one by one to reveal the damage – a thin strip of skin had been peeled from the pad of her thumb, as if it had been caught on the blade of a cheese grater. Maybe she’d partially lost a fingerprint, but that was it. Thank God.
He kissed the back of her neck. “No more of that.”
“I loved that camera,” she said blankly, rocking back into a sitting position against the door. Her cheeks were gray, her words clipped, and she was trying to act nonchalant but he saw right through it. She held up trembling fingers: “Three paychecks at the reptile store. Three.”
“Elle!” Ash screamed from the other car. “Elle, are you okay?”
“Yeah.”
“What happened?”
“I . . .” She shrugged with chattering teeth. “Nothing much. What’s up with you?”
“I’m glad you’re okay,” Ash said. “I’m starting to like you.”
Elle smiled – a real smile – showing white teeth.
James held her shoulders. For as long as he had known her, his wife had maintained a particular uneasiness with people. She might pretend to be in her element, but she wasn’t really. She had a deep grab bag of rehearsed smiles, tension-breaking jokes, fake compliments, and all the other calculated niceties of social interaction. She only had two friends – one was her sister Eowen, and the other had moved back to Boston two years ago. Sometimes he worried for her, because he felt like he was one of only three people on earth who could make her genuinely smile. Four, maybe, counting eighteen-year-old Ash.
“What did you see?” he asked his wife.
“A flash.”
“Like a gun flash?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Like a kernel of light, in the middle of the hillside—”
“How much time passed?”
“What?”
“Between the flash and impact?”
She squeezed her bleeding thumb. “Felt like a second.”
“One second.” He stared into the badlands, letting the syllables drop off his swollen tongue. “It takes his bullet one entire second to get from his gun to us.”
His mind jumped to a ninth grade science fact; that it took light from the sun eight full minutes to reach the earth. The distance was that unfathomably vast. Something about it had always disturbed him and conjured a mental image of the earth as a lonely grapefruit floating in a Pacific Ocean of nothingness. Nothing out there for us beyond a universe of indifferent stars. He could hear his teacher’s voice now: How humbling it is, to know our smallness.
Elle was looking at him, waiting for it.
“We can use that,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
He leaned closer and grinned mischievously. “When he’s aiming at us, and he shoots, he’s not shooting to hit us. He’s shooting to hit where he estimates we’ll be. In one second.”
“That’s it?”
“We own that second. Not him.”
“That’s . . . extremely optimistic.” She opened her hand and studied the way the blood filled the cracks in her skin. “What can we possibly do with one second?”
“We’ll think of something.”
“Christ!” It was Roy again, sharp and hoarse. “Why is anyone listening to him? One second. One goddamn second. Really? This is like being trapped on a desert island with goddamn Ned Flanders.”
“Please,” Ash whispered. “Please stop.”
“So . . .” Elle sighed and looked at her husband. “We have one hypothetical second of borrowed time. He still has a sniper rifle.”
“I’m thinking,” James said.
She kicked a chunk of blue GPS plastic and looked at him sideways. “Honey, just once, can you please drop the optimism and admit that we’re so far up shit creek, we’re actually two miles up shit mountain?”
“Hey!” Roy shouted, suddenly dead serious. “Hey, hey. Car coming.”
Elle froze, her eyes turning to wax.
James leaned forward and peered around the Rav4’s left headlight, down Shady Slope Road’s plunging valley. It was the black jeep. A hundred yards down the road, lifted tires jostling, flanked on both sides by a plume of swirling dust. Coming at them fast. The Soviet Cowboy with his Hello Kitty thermos.
Elle huffed. “Not him again.”
“We need to warn him,” Ash said. “We need to signal him to stop, and turn around, and get help—”
“No,” James said. “We don’t.”
“Why?”
“He’s . . . he’s part of it.”
Roy punched something that banged like a drum. “Even though . . . Christ. I got a speeding ticket two hours ago for going seventy-four in a seventy. So this county is apparently swarming with murderers, but at least the traffic enforcement is fucking immaculate.”
James wasn’t listening. He stared down the road and imagined the inside of the Soviet’s jeep, the rotten trail duster pressed warm and clammy to his slashed leather seats, his coffee burbling in the console, his charcoal pencils and yellow paper pressed against his sweaty back, and the man himself, or itself – a bleak silhouette, a human shadow against a scorched world, racing toward them.
“Hey, Elle!” Ash shouted.
“Yeah?”
“What were your two snakes named?”
His wife forced a smile. “Gray and Iris.
”
The girl sighed airily. “I like their names.”
7
“Weapons,” James said. “What do we have?”
“Same as before.”
Pepper spray and a crappy multitool.
The black jeep skidded into a handbrake turn and an abrupt halt twenty yards down the road, throwing a wave of rocks and passing out of James’ view. He groaned with frustration. He couldn’t lean any further around the Toyota’s headlight without exposing himself. He heard the jeep’s driver door open with a velociraptor scream that echoed to the distant cliffs and back.
“Your pepper spray.”
She plucked it from her purse and tossed it to him.
The jeep’s door slammed shut and the echo cracked on the prairie. Then, crunching footsteps. Elle, lying prone by the rear tire, could see the Soviet – or at least his legs and feet. James, kneeling to her left, could not. The canister slipped in his sweaty hands. He snapped off the protective cap. “Which way is he walking?”
“He’s circling to the back of his jeep.” She exhaled, creating a puff of copper dust. “He’s . . . he’s doing something with the back end.”
A rhythmic squeal. Faint at first, but growing in shrillness and intensity like rigging cables drawn tight. Hot friction. Metal on metal. James shuddered.
“What’s he doing?” Roy yelled.
“I can’t see,” Elle shouted back.
James held the pepper spray with both hands and squinted to read the fine print. His eyes weren’t focusing. He saw shadowed doubles and blinked – Blink, damn it – until they slipped together and he could read: 10% OLEORESIN CAPSICUM. A standard lachrymatory agent. Tears, snot, coughing, itching, burning, the usual good stuff. But his heart sank hard when he read the directions for use.
“What?” Elle asked.
“Effective range of six feet.” He squeezed it. “I can piss farther than that.”
“You bought it for me.”
He pulled the Leatherman knockoff from his back pocket, retracted the two-inch paring knife, and locked the blade into place with a crisp click. “So our arsenal is . . . eye irritant and a butter knife.”
Elle nodded tiredly.
“When he’s close, you get his eyes.” He passed the pepper spray back to her and closed her fingers around it. “And I’ll use the knife.”
“He’ll need to be really close.”
“I know. Hopefully he’s made of warm butter, too.” James tucked the blade underhand and flattened the handle against his right thumb. He remembered once seeing on TV that there was a proper and an improper way to wield a fighting knife. He recalled something called a Filipino grip and a handful of cutting stances to avoid because they branded you as an amateur, which of course he was. He wished he’d paid attention. He couldn’t imagine stabbing another person with it anyway. With a tiny blade like this one, where the hell did you even stab? Two inches wouldn’t penetrate the stomach or chest far enough for immediate results. The throat or the windpipe, definitely. Maybe the forehead. Or the eyes.
The eyes?
From the Soviet’s jeep came a final snap of tortured metal, and then brisk footsteps.
“He’s walking again.” He tapped Elle’s shoulder. “Which way?”
“He turned around,” she whispered. She scooted beside the tire on her elbows, craning her neck to follow the man. Her shoe scraped gravel. “He’s . . . he’s walking to Roy and Ash’s car.”
James hit his belly beside her. He saw black trail boots and recognized them from the gas station, caked with dust and creaking as they paced up the road toward the Acura’s rear. Every calm step was somehow mechanically identical – the same stride, the same height, the same heel-first stomp on the crumbling dirt road.
“Ash! Roy!” Elle shouted, her voice quivering with fear. “He’s coming to you.”
“No shit,” Roy called back.
James pressed his chin to the road but couldn’t improve his viewing angle. “Is he . . . can you see a gun in his hands?”
“No,” she said.
“No gun?”
“No, I can’t see his hands.”
He watched the Soviet’s dark legs and swishing duster vanish behind the Acura’s rear quarter panel. With dawning panic, he remembered what had happened at the Fuel-N-Food and wondered if the Soviet was here for Elle, looking for her to take her away and—
“He stopped.” Her voice jumped. “By the . . . behind the trunk of their car. He’s looking at them. They’re looking at him. Oh, God, I think he’s gonna kill them—”
Another metallic shriek.
It rotated, deepened, and found new dimensions of awfulness like a screwdriver digging into a chalkboard. It turned into a blackened creature that crawled down James’ spine, and for some reason his mind jumped now to the stagey horrors of the morning’s Wax Gore Museum, to all that mechanical ingenuity used for the sole purpose of causing pain. Humanity hadn’t yet discovered penicillin but knew exactly how to pull a man apart while keeping him conscious for maximum agony. James could feel the hammer-pounded iron, the weathered oak, the drum-tight metal twine, all slick with Karo syrup to approximate blood. They even got the blood right, glazing the fresh splatters bright red and the older stains a dull brown.
Pacing in the lobby, he had asked Elle: How is this entertaining?
It’s not. She had smiled grimly. It’s life-affirming.
The Soviet took a knee behind the Acura and his duster skimmed the ground like a theatre curtain. He reached under the bumper – James still couldn’t see his face – and coiled in big loops in his hand was a spool of metal cable. Winching cable, attached to his jeep.
Elle grabbed his wrist. “Is he . . .”
James nodded. “He’s towing their car away.”
* * *
Tapp squeezed a fist under his right hand and settled into his cheek rest. As he logged his heartbeats and breaths he slid out of this world and into another one, a better one, where nothing could touch him. Snipers called it their bubble. Every physical distraction bled away. He no longer felt the volcanic gravel crunching under his belly, the beads of sweat on the bridge of his nose, even the wet rhythm of his heart as it fired off blasts of color inside his retinas—
A voice jolted him.
“Okay . . . Okay, each of you, Roy and Ash, run to our car—”
The caffeine in his veins turned to frigid panic. Tapp spilled his energy drink, bucked his rifle off-target and whirled to look over his shoulder before realizing – with a rush of embarrassment – that the voice was artificial, electronic, trickling from his own headset. He recognized the tinny distortion of Svatomir’s radio and remembered that the TALK button on that particular receiver was dirty and occasionally stuck while jostling in his pocket.
That was it. That was what was happening now.
Tapp let a breath curl through his teeth and forced himself to relax. His beverage leaked sideways in the dirt beside him – bloop, bloop, bloop – while he listened for more from Svatomir’s radio. He heard only static and the sandpaper scrape of oilcloth. Then footsteps, as his spotter returned to his jeep.
That voice, though. Tapp already knew that voice. It was the husband. The thinker. The one who’d told the others which sides of their vehicles to crouch behind. The one who’d broken the side view mirror and used the shards to—
The husband said something else, inaudible.
What?
Tapp freed his left hand and thumbed the headset into his earlobe, suddenly engaged and eager for more. The white noise intensified until he could feel it vibrating in his molars.
Come on.
He checked his scope (magnified by forty) and saw Svatomir pacing back along the length of the glimmering winch cable, running his fat fingers against it as he returned to his jeep. He didn’t seem to realize his radio was on and listening, flopping against his belt as he walked.
Say something else.
Tapp pressed with his thumbnail until his eardrum rang,
and then:
“We can’t wait for the car to start moving. We need to surprise the sniper,” the husband said. His voice grew smaller, more distant, as Svatomir walked. Tapp closed his eyes and strained to hear the voice as it shrank under deepening waves of electronic garble: “Both of you. Choose a different side of our car to run toward. So he has to split his attention between you. Zigzag. Change directions. Don’t let him predict your path.”
Tapp felt it approaching, teasing, the pink mist of a fatal .338 hit . . .
“Three . . .” the husband said.
He saw Roy and Ash’s shadows ducking and digging their heels into the road. He wished he could switch back to the 100x spotting scope to savor the smaller details, like the updrafts of kicked dust, the coiled nervous energy in their shoulders, the way their palms were flattened to the cooked earth. This was it. This was it. These huge moments happened so quickly that trying to appreciate all of it was like catching rain in a cup. A tiny distracted corner of his mind replayed the words of Svatomir’s young cousin, Sergei Koal: You know fast? You know slow-is-smooth, smooth-is-fast? This guy here is beyond fast. This guy is so far beyond fast that he reacts to you before you’ve acted—
“Two . . .”
William Tapp was ready. His eye melted into scope. His lungs held half a breath. His index finger held the trigger locked at three ounces. Every stray thought in his mind crystallized into a single focus. Find, anticipate, fire.
He’s a demon. He’s supernatural. He’s the speed of light, an African freakin’ swallow, a greased-up cheetah racing down a goddamn laundry chute—
“One.”
* * *
Roy swung around the Rav4 with his hand on the bumper, kicking rocks in James’ face as he slid in on his ass. “Her leg. Her leg is gone,” he gasped.
Ash had fallen just a few feet from the front of the Toyota. James couldn’t see all of her behind the passenger side tire; only her heaving shoulders and a black shadow thrashing on the dirt. Then he heard her cry, an awful teary wail, like a little girl skinning her knee on the playground and seeing her own blood for the first time. It made him weak.
“Her leg.” Roy clenched a fist to his mouth. “It’s hanging by a little string.”
