by TAYLOR ADAMS
They’re not laughing. They’re too frightened.
Probably.
He wished he could just enjoy this without brutalizing himself in pursuit of the perfect day of shooting. It was ridiculous, he knew, to flagellate himself over every minor error. Mistakes happened, winds kicked up, decimals rounded off funny. It was the nature of the craft. This was supposed to be fun. Why else would he be doing it?
This is fun. Right?
Yes. You could say I’m having . . . a blast.
He crunched his energy drink empty and chucked it downhill. He would need to urinate soon, but first he had to take three more lives.
* * *
“He’s coming back,” Roy said.
James leaned his wife on her back against his shoulder. She was breathing fast, gulping down greedy mouthfuls of air. “I can’t breathe,” she said, and her voice sounded wrong. Somehow it was too small, squished, like someone was standing on her chest. He tugged her clawed fingers but they were clamped vise-tight.
“I said the jeep is coming back!” Roy pointed furiously. “He’s maybe two minutes down the road—”
“Then we have a hundred and twenty seconds to decide how we’re going to kill him.” James fought her hands and finally found the wound. “This is right now.”
It was a small hole, just below her armpit and above the curve of her tank top. Maybe the size of a dime – the entrance wound? – flanked with a growing halo of frothy blood. It was much smaller than either hole in Saray’s stomach. He had been certain the killer’s bullet had missed Elle. Maybe it had?
“I think it’s a fragment,” he said. “From when the bullet hit the ground under her, it exploded into pieces and—”
“Are you a fucking doctor now?” Roy said.
No, but I have a hundred and ten seconds to learn.
“Can’t breathe,” she said again and grabbed his collarbone and squeezed. Her other hand closed into a fist and pounded her chest hard. Hard enough to crack ribs. With every breath she took, he heard a persistent, reptilian hiss. Like air escaping a wet balloon. And then a low gurgle, like the sound a toilet makes after flushing. She arched her back, kicked clattering rocks against the Toyota, and fought his grasp.
“Elle!”
She thrashed like she was trapped in a straitjacket, eyes wide with animal panic, and he saw her chest visibly tense as her lungs compressed further. She was in her own version of Hell. He knew this was her ultimate nightmare because she had described it to him once – that she was trapped under a capsized canoe and the chest strap of her lifejacket was tangled in deadwood and she was sucking in cold mouthfuls of green water. Here she was, drowning in the Mojave.
“Elle. Stop moving—”
She threw her shoulders back, he lost his hold on the wound, and he saw now that the blood was different. It was frothy and pink as cotton candy, bubbling like sea foam or hand soap. A big glop of it slid free and stained her shirt. She exhaled, the foamy blood sucked back into the wound, and the term – the sloppy layman’s term, because that was all he had – flashed through James’ mind.
A sucking chest wound.
The vacuum of her chest cavity was punctured. Simple physics. Her lungs couldn’t inflate because outside air was inside her, and every time her lungs exhaled, more crept in to fill the space. Every breath she took would be a little shallower until she suffocated inside her own body. If James had been a paramedic, he would have had a gadget called a flutter valve – a one-way valve that affixed to the wound and let air out but not in. James was not a paramedic. Not even close.
“James.” She threw her head back, her hair splashed across soil, and her eyes searched for his. He wouldn’t look at her. He couldn’t. He was deep in thought. She pulled his face to hers, both of her bloody hands sticky on his cheeks. Who wanted to die alone? He wanted to look at her but he couldn’t. He needed to be mechanical, to reach deep inside his skull and think.
Flutter valve: noun. A one-way valve allowing air out, but not in.
“Roy?” he whispered.
“Yeah?”
“In the back of the car, by the black bag, there’s a roll of duct tape. And there are old sandwich bags under the front seats.” He was shocked by how calm he sounded, like he was ordering lunch. “I need both of them.”
“What are you doing?”
“I haven’t thought that far ahead yet.”
“Are you serious?”
“Do it.”
Roy crawled for the Toyota’s rear door. James turned to his wife and saw her looking up at him with a strange gleam in her eyes. She had something important to say.
“Don’t talk,” he told her. “Save it.”
She shook her head.
Behind him, Roy opened the Rav4’s rear door and it made that familiar double-creak that it had made ever since he’d first opened it on the dealership lot. For some reason it hit him now, that this was really happening and that tomorrow, if there was a tomorrow, would still exist in this world. This corrupted version of the world, where Elle had caught a bullet fragment and suffocated to death inside her own body. Worse than being only real, this was permanent. Nothing would undo this.
She opened her mouth again like she was about to speak and instead made a thin, wheezy gasp, like a zombie. It didn’t sound real. It was so B-movie cheesy it should have been a joke. Why couldn’t this all just be a joke?
Her eyes widened, as if she was also horrified by the sound.
“Don’t talk,” he repeated, and his eyes clouded. “It’s a waste, because you’re just going to tell me something I already know. I love you, too. It’s redundant.”
She smiled dumbly. Her eyes were looking up at him but also beyond him, through him. All the fear she’d had a moment ago was now gone, replaced by a strange, insidious calm that he didn’t trust. She was almost smiling, which terrified James: You don’t smile when you’re holding on. You smile when you’re letting go.
“I can’t find the tape,” Roy said. “I can’t—”
“Under the cover.”
Elle parted her lips and found her voice again. It was only a shadow of the real thing, made by a few mouthfuls of scrounged air. Like a pneumonia death rattle: “I . . . I miss my snakes.”
He smiled. “Not the snakes, Elle.”
“I miss them so much,” she said. “I miss them.”
“Not . . .” He forced a scratchy laugh. “Not the damn snakes.”
“My babies.”
She’d had two. Gray was an eight-foot Colombian Redtail Boa her mother had bought for her when she was sixteen. He was a gentle giant, all mass and muscle, with a smooth dryness to his scales and an inquisitive tongue that felt like dry grass on your fingertips. Elle had sat on the patio with a horror novel in her lap and that huge-ass snake draped over her shoulders like a nightmarish scarf. He ate rabbits. Elle purchased them at her reptile store humanely pre-killed and frozen in neatly labeled plastic bags, complete with nutritional facts. He remembered laughing with her for the entire drive home after finding a fine print disclaimer underneath: NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION.
Her other one, Iris, was a corn snake. Much smaller, shorter, leaner; a shelter rescue after the previous owner left her unsupervised with a feeder mouse. We will never feed ours live prey, Elle had insisted. Almost all snakes can be trained to eat pre-killed. Mashing two animals together in a box to fight is disrespectful to both predator and prey. Ironically, in the case of Iris, it was the prey that had gained the upper hand. The mouse had chewed nasty gashes along Iris’s vertebrae that never regrew scales. They just became pale scars, like wax to the touch. She was a timid little pink snake, head-shy, terrified of being hurt again, and prone to whipping her tiny face under her coils when frightened. Elle took a special liking to Iris.
Eight months ago, she’d sold both Gray and Iris after the doctor had suggested her miscarriages were due to toxicity levels from reptile bacteria. It hadn’t helped.
“You hated my snakes,” she said slee
pily.
“No.” He brushed her hair from her cheek and lied to her. “I didn’t.”
“You never held them. Why?”
“Gray snapped at me.”
“He thought your hand was a rabbit.”
“That’s why.”
“I think I’m dying,” she said flatly.
“You’re not.”
“I feel dead already. It’s weird.”
“You’re not.” He knew his words weren’t enough anymore.
She smiled grimly and her next sentence took two breaths. “Do you really believe all the optimistic crap you say?”
Yes, he wanted to say, but he didn’t. He couldn’t. He was all out of bullshit for today. In a rare moment of naked honesty, he shook his head.
“Me neither,” she said.
It hurt. He had always known it, but hearing it hurt.
Her eyes lost focus. It was shocking how abruptly it happened. It was like a switch had flipped and her brain unplugged. She was there – Eileen Lynne Eversman, the girl who loved gory movies and hated cilantro and couldn’t quite grasp why everyone loved the Batman remakes so much – and then she sank back into her skull and suddenly wasn’t. He leaned back, the sunlight hit her face, and only then did he realize how gray she had become. The blue pallor of suffocation made her look like she was underwater and sinking fast.
“Roy!” he shouted. “Where the fuck are you?”
The guy kneeled down hard behind him and pressed duct tape and a single crumpled sandwich bag into his fingers. James didn’t know what he was expecting – he should have expected exactly this and nothing better – but his heart sank when these little objects jittered in his hands. They told him nothing new. He snapped the clear plastic taut and shook off breadcrumbs from the day before, back when the world made sense, and whispered to himself: “One-way valve. Air goes out. Not in.”
“The jeep,” Roy said. “He’s almost here.”
Please work.
“You’re okay, honey.” One side at a time, he folded the plastic into an approximate square and pressed it to the foamy wound. Then he pulled one, two, three short strips of duct tape, tearing each one with his teeth, and slapped one on the left side of the square, the right side, and finally the bottom, just above her blood-soaked tank top. His fingers were numb, barely responsive, like he was wearing gloves. He pressed each one airtight against her soft skin, but importantly, he left the top edge of the square open (very important, most important). Three sides sealed and one open.
“What are you doing?” Roy asked.
“Quiet.”
“You forgot a side—”
“Shut up.” His teeth chattered. He needed to hear it work.
Please, God, let it work.
He watched her, sleeping serenely with her head lolled against the door, and waited for her to breathe. When she did, he could watch the plastic and check his work. Only problem was, she wasn’t breathing.
Oh, no.
No, no, no.
He watched her lying doll-still. She looked used, spent, hollow. For some reason, James’ next thought wasn’t about his wife at all. He just wanted to stand up. He wanted to stand up like she had suggested, to just get up and walk like poor Glen and wait for the bullet. He couldn’t spend another second in a world without Elle.
Suicide suddenly sounded reasonable. It hadn’t, that awful time he’d found her drunk in the Subaru. He had been so furious at her then, but maybe he’d just never understood how much she hurt. He had grieved for their kids too, of course, but only as possibilities and vacant names. She had actually felt the life growing inside her, and then felt it die on a cellular level, every time. Maybe he understood now.
Then Elle breathed.
She inhaled and air squeezed through the top edge with a fluttering whistle. Air going out. Then she exhaled, her lungs relaxed, and the plastic snapped tight to the wound to form suction. No air going in. James felt a hot bubble of breath in his throat and quietly watched this timid little miracle happen again, and again, and again. If he tore his eyes away, he feared it might stop.
A one-way valve. With duct tape and a plastic bag.
Roy chewed his lip. “Did it work?”
“I hope so.”
“They say duct tape has a million uses, but I think that’s a new one.”
James was numbly aware of the drone of an engine and the chirp of tightening brakes as the Soviet parked his jeep just a few yards down the road. He ignored it. It would only be a problem thirty seconds from now. He watched Elle, only Elle, the most important thing in his world, and waited.
“Hey, James.” Roy rose to a crouch. “Blackbeard. He’s here.”
“I know.”
“We have to think of a way to fight him.”
“Give me a minute.”
“We don’t have a minute.” Roy stared at the revolver between them and made a disgusted face. “And who the hell carries an empty gun?”
James ignored him. It didn’t matter how right Roy was, that it didn’t make sense at all. Five spent cartridges, all inside Glen’s revolver, carefully tucked back inside his holster. Why would an off-duty Montana park ranger carry a weapon like that? And what was he doing in Nevada? Then he realized Elle’s eyes were open, darting and alive, scanning the bright sky and finding him.
James forgot everything and just stared back.
She grinned goofily, without the slightest trace of self-consciousness, like she had just pounded four Lemon Drops and was beginning a slow slide off her bar stool. He grabbed her hands, squeezed, and couldn’t help but laugh, too. Huge, fake-sounding belly laughs, like a sitcom studio audience. Even though they were trapped in this hellish valley and there was an armed man twenty feet away, preparing to tow away the only thing keeping them alive – one victory at a time, right? And this was one hell of a victory. He kissed her forehead.
“I dreamt you saved us,” she said.
“Not yet.” He smiled shyly. “Working on it.”
“Are we real?”
He held her, brushed her hair from her eyes and kissed the bridge of her nose, feeling her eyelashes flutter, and knowing that this incredible person had almost been deleted from the world by something as careless as a dumb-luck ricochet. “Yeah,” he told her. “We’re real.”
Down the road, the Soviet kicked his door open.
11
His heart a marching band, Tapp inserted a fresh magazine and savored the way it glided in and locked. Ten double-stacked .338 handloads on deck, golden and eager. Plus an eleventh already chambered, snug to the micrometer, waiting only for his permission and the surgical strike of the firing pin. As he watched Svatomir step out his jeep under a billow of pale dust, he unshackled his mind and allowed it to wander a few paces. He returned to some of his greatest hits; little freeze-dried memories which still offered a jolt of pleasure.
I shouldn’t.
It’s sort of wrong—
One, many years back, had been a running headshot at 1,100 meters. He spoke in numbers but for his life he couldn’t recall the angle, the crosswinds, the elevation – he only remembered the way he’d felt when he saw her head burst like a popped zit. Intense, chocolate delight. You could say it was . . . mind-blowing. Somehow the fact that she had been attractive (about an eight out of ten) made destroying her face even more gratifying. Why was that?
No more.
Focus.
Another good one had been a college student with the mop of black hair and a trunk full of social studies textbooks. Bound for law school, maybe? The kill itself had been one of those happy accidents, where a standard center-mass shot took an odd curve and instead double-jointed the kid’s arm halfway from the elbow (walk like an Egyptian!). Gnarly. Tapp had done the right thing and finished him quick.
That’s enough.
But the best one was—
Enough.
But the best shot of all had a bitter taste to it, because it had been a ten-year-old girl. It had happened la
st year. Svatomir’s reconnaissance had missed her because she was curled up in the backseat under a Navajo blanket while her parents drove. She woke to her father’s head splitting and then the Volvo rolled twice in a curtain of gravel and glass. The mother climbed out through the windshield and Tapp broke her spine. That left the girl, a fifth-grader maybe, staggering from the car and running up the hill with tears in her eyes and chunks of hamburger in her hair. She wasn’t even following Shady Slope Road. She was running just to run. Everyone runs. Even children, apparently.
Meanwhile Tapp had screamed, cried, punched rock, ground his teeth until a filling broke. Svatomir babbled excuses in his useless half-English until Tapp tore off his headset off and threw it. He’d tasted a sea tide of stomach acid climbing his throat as that little girl fled further and further into his glass world, and he was dragged violently toward that moment.
I don’t kill kids.
Why not, though? Why hold anything sacred in a meaningless universe full of dead stars? We’re all dust. It was a relic of a younger, dumber Tapp who held dying hitchhikers’ hands. He had no reason to value the life of a child over any other life. They haven’t been alive as long. Why should that entitle them to anything?
Doesn’t matter. I don’t kill kids.
But this one was getting away. Christ, she must have run cross-country or something. Already she was over two kilometers from Tapp, further than he had ever engaged a human target. She was well past the rim of the crater and was now at the point where scrubland becomes scabland. Where wiregrass and yuccas gives way to exposed rocks and bald mountains. Another thirty seconds and she would be lost in the churning land with one hell of a head start. Dumb luck or not, from there she had a chance of finding the highway. That was when it stopped being a choice.
I don’t kill kids—
He did. He blew her lungs out at 2,106 meters. His longest kill ever.
