by TAYLOR ADAMS
Alright, James. What now?
You stay in the arroyo . . . Svatomir kills you.
You run for the hills under darkness . . . I kill you.
On autopilot, William Tapp’s hands had already turned his rifle sideways, bolt-side up, to swap scopes. With a baby screwdriver he attacked the first eight screws on the cantilever, sealed with blue Loctite, and they dropped like black flies into his palm. He heard Svatomir’s jeep grumble closer but ignored it.
* * *
Under that jeep, James hung on by fingernails and prayers.
Shady Slope Road crossed the arroyo on a black trestle and then halfway up Tapp’s incline, the Soviet veered west off the road and followed a slithering horse trail over two ascending switchbacks. In the fading dusk he saw the destination over his elbow – a heap of scrap metal under Army-brown camouflage netting, and beside it, nestled snugly into the hillside like a Tibetan mountain temple, a small rectangular building. It was the building Elle had spotted in her Nikon screen. Two hours ago it had been a distant smudge in a lens, and now it was real.
His arms were clay. He couldn’t hold on much longer. Twice he let his back dip to the racing ground. Twice it bit him and he recoiled up against the undercarriage, torn and gasping. Three times now – or was it four? – he’d sworn he was at his limit, and then he’d surprised himself each time and somehow kept holding on.
Don’t. Let. Go. He pressed his cheekbone to the hot steel.
Barely glimpsed over the right tire, he saw the sun had sunk beneath the horizon and a crest of clouds had taken its place. The storm had overtaken half of the sky. Behind the left tire, he could see the very first stars pinpricking the eastern horizon. The world was falling into blues and blacks now and he hoped it would be enough to conceal Elle’s escape. With any luck, the incoming storm would choke out the moonlight. Rain, if it happened, would be terrific and cut down visibility even further. It was at least six miles back to the highway and more to Mosby, but Elle could make it if she paced herself, took unpredictable routes, and moved intelligently. But what about her injuries?
She had a hole in her chest, sealed with hardened blood and a sandwich bag. There was a pernicious little shard of Tapp’s bullet buried somewhere in her guts, drifting freely, slicing everything it touched like a razorblade. How long could she go without medical attention?
The Soviet tapped his brakes. James felt the discs squeal beside his head, slightly independent of each other. He rolled his head back to see the destination creeping closer, upside-down. Composed of maybe two or three rooms, the battered little structure seemed to be a plywood skeleton fleshed with mismatched plates of corrugated sheet metal. Some were corroded and pitted with rust and others gleamed fresh silver in the dying light. A gray door, heavy-looking and a few centimeters crooked, told him which side was the front. Dim yellow light poked through the seams. A lantern or a chemical light inside, James figured.
He pulled himself back up the moving chassis and decided this building was his objective. He supposed he could find some sort of bladed or blunt weapon in there at least, and at the very best, a gun. And if miracles did still occur on this godless stretch of Mojave, perhaps a CB radio or satellite phone. Maybe he’d be able to contact the police. If the next few minutes went truly, spectacularly well, he could distract the two killers long enough to secure Elle a head start. There was nothing better to hope for. He understood that he would likely die here, which was fine. All that mattered now was Elle. Saving Elle.
As the jeep slowed to a walking pace, James let his legs drop. They felt like noodles. His heels scraped the road, leaving tracks in the dirt. This was also fine. Acceptable.
Just keep holding on . . .
After the Soviet whined his brakes for a teasing eternity, the jeep cranked into park and the miserable ride ended. James let go and didn’t register hitting the ground. He just sort of time-traveled a second into the future, sprawled flat. Spreading warmth on his scalp. Flashbulbs on the edges of his vision. He must have banged his head on a rock. Another concussion. Sure, why the hell not?
The Soviet killed his engine. Dry silence.
James rolled on his side and waited for the Soviet’s boots to hit the ground a few inches from his face. Beyond, he saw the blackness of the scrap heap. But it wasn’t a scrap heap at all.
Cars. A junkyard row of them, parked door to door with inches between them. There were eight or nine maybe, all different locales and stories. Two pickup trucks. A sleek black Jetta, like the one his old general manager had driven. Two station wagons, one with a racked canoe on top. And more, further down and out of view, parked with the same tedious efficiency. His mind darted to Auschwitz, of all places, to haystack heaps of shoes and scrounged dental fillings and pocket change catalogued in ledgers. Such dull evil. It made him feel cold.
The Soviet kicked the driver door open, and James held his breath. He got out, kicking dirt in James’ face, and then took a gasping stumble, his duster slapping wetly against his thighs. One hand clasped to his stomach, darkened with blood. He walked straight to the building, leaving the driver door ajar but the keys jingling in his pocket, and threw the metal door open and ducked inside. He was in a hurry.
So was James.
He rolled out from under the jeep and sprung alongside the closest of the stashed cars, which happened to be Roy Burke’s red Acura. Tapp hadn’t seen him (or if he had, he hadn’t fired yet). He flattened his back to the bumper with his palms on the ground. The rapidly cooling air stung his throat. His bladder felt the size of a basketball. His joints slushed. He peeked uphill and saw there was only another two hundred yards of terrain rising up to form a jagged horizon behind the building. He knew no sniper of such expertise would ever silhouette himself against the sky. This meant William Tapp was less than two hundred yards away.
He was so close.
Better yet, the shooter had no reason to be scrutinizing this little motor pool on his doorstop because as far as he knew, his three victims were safely herded inside the dry riverbed. James was in Tapp’s blind spot.
I’m so close, and you don’t know it yet.
He looked over the Acura’s hood and estimated the strange shaggy-dog building to be twenty paces away. It was still his objective. He heard a mechanical humming from within, and the Soviet moving, pacing, huffing, opening a drawer, slamming it shut, opening another—
Something snarled beside him and he flinched. The radio! Still crammed in his back pocket through some minor miracle. He’d forgotten he had it.
Tapp’s voice dribbled in. “James.”
He said nothing.
“James? You . . . you still alive in there?”
In there. As in, in the gully.
So far, so good.
James wavered and then clicked the input button, keeping his eyes on that gray door as he waited for the Soviet to reemerge. The situation hung on a knife-edge and he didn’t want to risk speaking aloud – but Christ, wasn’t everything a risk now?
“. . . James?”
“I’m here,” he whispered through his teeth. “I’m still here.”
“Good. Quick question, James.”
“Shoot,” he said.
Tapp made a gasping, croaking sound. At first James thought the sniper was choking on something, but no luck. It was laughter. Giddy laughter, rippling through his voice in waves: “That’s a good one. That’s a really, really . . . good one.”
“Good what?”
“No one . . . ever appreciates puns.” The sniper caught his breath and sniffed, audibly grinning. “It’s like they’re toxic or something. I don’t . . . I don’t get it. Folks say puns are the mark of an infantile mind. Wordplay for retards. The lowest form of humor. Thank you, James. It’s been a long day. I needed that.”
He nodded. “I, uh, figured it was worth . . . worth a shot.”
“Not bad, James. Not bad for being under the gun.”
“Well, I aim to please.”
The killer be
lched. “I’ve always felt that a good pun is its own . . . re-word.”
That one ambushed James. He laughed. It came out like a cough.
Tapp was pleased with himself. “Gotcha.”
God help me, I just laughed at a pun. Elle would kill me.
He cleared his mind and focused on that gray door. Any second now, it would swing open and the Soviet would return to his jeep, and when he did, he would leave the building unguarded. Right under Tapp’s nose. James would then bolt inside, search for a phone, gather information, recover weapons, do something. Anything.
I’m on the offensive now, he realized. It’s my move.
Inside the shed, the Soviet slammed something. It sounded like a high-school locker, harsh and jangling.
“Know what scares me, James?” Tapp asked.
“Yeah?”
“I . . . I don’t dream. Never have, ever.” The sniper licked his lips and paused. “Why do you suppose that is? What’s wrong with my brain?”
“Do you really want me to answer that?”
“When I was a little kid, I used to worry it was because I didn’t have a soul. I couldn’t conjure up dreams, because I had zero spiritual activity inside me. I thought maybe I was born without one. Or I signed a deal with the devil when I was very young, like three or four years old, and just didn’t remember it. Who’s to say you’d remember? Maybe the devil doesn’t . . . let you. So for years, I’d go to bed desperate, eating a pound of Gummy Bears every night. Sugars kick-start dreams. I would pray, beg, hope, that that would be the night I’d dream about something. Even a nightmare. Because it would mean my soul was alright.”
James said nothing.
“It’s stupid, but it still gets to me. Because I know I’m not normal. Normal people can’t do what I do.” The killer exhaled and crackled static. “Isn’t that just . . . rich, James? I fear that I’m missing something that I’m scientifically certain doesn’t exist anyway.”
The Soviet stomped past the door. Cracks of sulfurous light shifted.
James shrugged. “Are satanic contracts binding at age four?”
“Shut up.”
“Just saying. Was there a notary present?”
“You’re teasing me.”
James was — kind of. But he couldn’t stop. “Theoretically, then. If you did sign your soul away, what would you have asked for?”
“To be good at something,” William Tapp answered immediately. “To be impossibly, superhumanly good at one thing. Whatever the cost.”
A chill breathed over the dark prairie, and it seemed to echo the sniper’s words.
Whatever the cost.
James pressed his forehead to the Acura logo on Roy’s trunk, wishing the Soviet would hurry up in there. His little adrenaline high had abruptly gone sour. He felt insignificant. Like an insect, clinging desperately to the gears of Tapp’s machinery. He was fighting back, sure, but how many victims had tried that before him? He was pushing back against a double-digit murder spree spanning decades. Resisting the momentum of history.
“What scares you, James?”
He felt obligated, too. Tapp had bared a wound, or a soft spot, and it felt oddly appropriate to return the gesture as a weird, old-timey ‘respect thy enemy’ thing while you loaded your flintlock pistol and awaited the dueling count. Because – being honest – that’s what it was now: a duel. Between a man with a gun and a man who wished he had one. So, he decided, to hell with it.
“James? What scares you?”
“I . . .” He sighed, careful to keep his voice low. “Okay. I’m nine years old. And my parents are fighting in the other room, and I’m trying to watch the TV menu channel because I like to watch the little movie previews in the corner of the screen, but the volume doesn’t go high enough to cover the yelling.”
As he spoke, he heard the Soviet fidgeting with something inside the building – delicate, hollow clicks, muffled by the door.
“He’s . . . God, my dad’s so furious I can hear his teeth chattering. Through the wall. And for a while it just sounds like another fight. A loud fight. My mom is saying something about the cops. Something about the Anti-Weathermen. She knows something. The phone kept getting picked up, set down, picked up, set down. And then they both fall very quiet, scary quiet, for a long time. It’s like they vanished. I’m confused, so I mute the TV. Then she screams.”
Tapp fed static, but said nothing.
“It was an exercise weight.” James closed his eyes and dug his teeth into his upper lip so his voice wouldn’t shudder. “Like, one of those ten-pound dumbbells with the big knobbed edges. This one was bright pink, stupid-looking. He’d grabbed her wrist and held her right hand on the kitchen counter by the stove, like an executioner’s block, and that silence must have been the disbelief. Like, are you really doing that? Maybe they’d had these moments before. I don’t know.”
“Did he?”
James said nothing.
“Did . . . did he smash her hand?”
The summer before that episode, eight-year-old James and his mother had gone to Gray Beach to stay with her sister and her kids. The house was even tinier than their farmhouse, with no electricity or running water, but it was a half mile from the ocean. A barefoot walk through the dunes, soaking up fleabites, and you were there on the edge of the world under an Atlantic sky. The sand was pockmarked with dead crab shells. They looked like bleached tombstones, dried out and rotted, and James had made it his personal mission to stomp and shatter every one he encountered on those six miles of coastline. That particular sound – the porcelain crack, the fleshy squish underneath, muffled by sand – was exactly what his mother’s right hand sounded like when the exercise weight came down.
“James,” Tapp prodded. “Did he—”
“Yes.”
From the building came the sound of a wet spring compressing and releasing. A buffalo grunt. Then footsteps on slick concrete. The steel door banged open and James snapped back into survival mode. He clicked off the radio – “James?” – and sank to his belly beside the Acura’s rear tire.
Under Roy’s muffler, he watched the Soviet stomp back to his jeep. Now he had a new gun over his shoulder – a muscular black thing with a swollen, drum-shaped ammunition device on the bottom. A blue LED light bobbed under the muzzle, burning a circle in the ground as he walked. His duster bulged with extra rounds, and underneath, white bandages were taped to his gut in sloppy loops. His nostrils hissed an odd railroad whistle. Even at ten yards, James could smell the disinfectant dripping off him, condensing in the air like a gallon of spilled tequila. The Soviet climbed into his jeep and vanished behind tinted windows, pitch black in the descending night.
Was Elle running now? James hoped so. It was dark enough.
The motor growled and the Soviet Cowboy backed out urgently, hurling bucketfuls of dirt, and flicked on his high beams. He was heading back down to the arroyo, banking into the first switchback and drawing harsh patterns with his lights. Bandaged, rearmed, ready to finish off Elle and Roy.
No more waiting.
It was time.
James pulled himself upright, shivering, and raced for the unguarded door with his heart thumping in his neck. His clothes tugged. His footsteps crunched. He thumbed the radio back on and heard William Tapp’s voice, mid-sentence: “—I like you, James. I wish you’d be the one to kill me.”
“I’ll try,” James said sincerely. He reached that mysterious metal door, pushed it open, and stepped into the yellow glow. His mind raced.
He’s coming back for you, Elle.
Run.
* * *
She watched the Soviet cross the trestle and park his jeep at the lip of the arroyo, just above where the Rav4 had crashed. Then he reentered the gully on foot. Even at a hundred yards and through a filter of thorny shadows she could discern a new gun in his hands with a mounted flashlight, throwing methodical sweeps of light as he descended. It was now or never.
She was crouched at the arroyo’s w
esternmost point. Any further and the land flattened to lose its defilade. She looked out into Tapp’s open valley, up hundreds of hopeless yards to the bowled, black horizons. The desert now appeared strangely two-dimensional, like the sort of matte paintings they used to use for backgrounds in sci-fi films before today’s age of soulless CGI. It felt vast, lonely, and utterly indifferent to her and her tiny problems – her racking breaths, the blood hardening between her fingers, the jagged shale under her knees, the itchy barbs burrowed into her clothes and skin like mites. A particularly nasty one had nail-gunned itself deep under her thumbnail. She squeezed that hand into a fist.
Run, she told herself. Tapp couldn’t see her in the dark. Right?
Somehow she kept punching the snooze button. Just a little more time, she begged herself. Another minute of relative comfort, one final whiff of safety and stillness before dashing into the open ground. A few more seconds for James to burst from the darkness – I’m fine, let’s get the hell out of here – and they could flee this nightmare together. Waiting here was easy. To run was to leave her husband behind, likely forever, and she couldn’t commit to that. So she kept waiting, while the Hello Kitty man drew closer and brighter, like they were playing some life-and-death version of flashlight tag.
Twenty seconds passed.
Thirty.
A minute.
She tried to rationalize that every second she procrastinated was a shade more darkness, but the sun was already long gone. Night had fallen. This was it – take it or leave it. The Soviet was too low in the riverbed to be visible now, but she saw his blue-white light dart up granite walls and cut jagged shadows as he scrutinized every inch in hungry sweeps, like a mobile lighthouse. In a flash of panic she wondered – had she left footprints in the packed soil for him to follow? Possibly. It’s tough to pay attention to that sort of thing when you’re being shot at and jumping face-first into plants you have no business jumping face-first into. She could cut herself some slack there.
