by TAYLOR ADAMS
Come on, Elle. Run.
She distracted herself again by taking mental inventory. Her purse had been dead weight so she dumped it – her makeup, eye drops, ballpoint pens, a checkbook, a yellowed paperback she had lost her place in – and kept only her wallet and her crappy cell phone. Between this and her heaped belongings on the side of Shady Slope Road, she felt as if she was being purified, distilled into whatever was left of a person when you rendered them homeless and hopeless. She considered setting an alarm (one of the few extra features her prehistoric flip-phone could manage) for fifteen minutes from now and hurling it somewhere in the gully to create a time-bomb diversion, but decided it was more valuable in her pocket. This signal dead zone couldn’t stretch forever and the instant she escaped it, she needed to dial 911 and summon the full force of the law down on Tapp’s little valley. There had to be a few cops out there over drinking age, right?
Elle. Stop screwing around. Run.
Still her mind wandered and wondered; how did Tapp know so much about Roy? He knew addresses, names, the age of his daughter. He knew everything. He must know something about her and James. He might have been watching them since they left California, or even before then. There was no telling what resources were at his fingertips. She wondered, with a stiletto-jab of fear, what would happen if the sniper went after her family. James had virtually none – no siblings, a reclusive mother, a dead father – but Elle Eversman was a gold mine of potential victims. She wondered if the sniper knew about her dad in Redding, or her copywriter cousins, or Eowen in Tulsa. Eowen thought she was gun-savvy enough to take care of herself but those were only power fantasies. How could anyone be prepared for a killer who could blow your jaw off from another area code?
The Soviet was coming closer. Cactus paddles crunched juicily under his boots and the shine of his light intensified.
One mile through Tapp’s line of sight. Easy, right?
She steadied herself and formed a feeble runner’s crouch, her knees bent, her shoes arched on brittle rock. One mile out of Tapp’s valley, and then another . . . what, five or six to the highway? In the dark. Dehydrated. With a collapsed lung and wrenching pain. It had subsided now, but as soon as she exerted herself again she knew the invisible dagger would return and her chest would fill with broken glass. For a few bleak seconds, she hoped the Soviet would hurry up, find her and shoot her between the eyes so she could be spared this dilemma. She didn’t actually want to die – but man, would it be easy. Much easier than running seven miles on broken lungs, being hounded by killers, and discovering the next day that they’d murdered her husband. Much, much, much easier—
James is watching me, she told herself.
Somehow this changed everything. She repeated it until it was a chorus in her mind. James is watching me . . . James is watching me . . .
This little chant had once carried her through the final curve of a hundred meter hurdles race after she had spectacularly biffed a jump and torn both knees open. White plywood pin-wheeling behind her. Blood everywhere, bright as a stop sign, running hot on her skin. So much of it, too. She knew that the human body was seventy percent water, but come on! What was the other thirty percent? Ketchup?
She hated running. She hated jumping. She hated running and jumping. She hated track and field the way she hated Republicans, slobbering dogs, cilantro, and documentaries. She had joined only because she was blessed with the lithe build of a runner and her scholarship required an extracurricular activity. So the instant she tumbled upright on that broken momentum, feeling the shame of a hundred eyes now focused only on her, she knew this was a fabulous excuse to limp over to the medic and sit down. Enough stitches to knock her out for the whole season. To hell with it. Running and jumping over things? When did that become a sport?
James is watching . . . James is watching . . .
She finished for him.
Not for herself. Not for the team. Not for the crowd. Not for the stupid scholarship, which rejected her the next year anyway. For James. And for years afterward, he spoke of that moment as if she had climbed Mount Everest or crossed the Delaware under a ray of golden sunlight with an American flag stirring behind her. All she’d done was limp over a finish line. Funny how the stupid shit we do for those we love hardens into legend.
James is watching. He’s alive. He’s watching.
Don’t let him down.
“Run,” she hissed to herself, too loud, and winced at the echo. Down the riverbed, the Soviet’s torchlight halted. Then it flashed in her direction.
Finally, Elle ran.
19
James closed the door behind him and locked the steel deadbolt. He stepped forward into a ring of yellow overhead light.
To his right was a workbench crowded with grimy tools, capped bottles, and a gaping horizontal vise. Towering gadgets of painted metal and glass rose to the ceiling like organ pipes, packed with dark powder and braced with knobbed levers and Rube Goldberg ramps. The array was workmanlike yet oddly gothic, reminding him of the skyline of some bleak future city – Chicago in the year 2050, as envisioned by H.R. Giger. Further back he saw what looked like a welding station, and two bulbous tanks rested beside it, marked C2H2. Acetylene. Flammable. Or inflammable. Same thing, right?
Plastic crackled under his shoes. He was standing on candy wrappers – a kaleidoscopic sea of them – and he noticed more heaped on the workbench, stuffed into crevices and drawers. Even more swelled from a cardboard box, which at one point must have been a trash bin. Green, red, blue, pink. He fished one out and read the joke on the back: WHAT’S RED AND BLUE?
He turned it over.
PURPLE! LOL!
To his left, a human face watched from the darkness.
His gut sank fifty floors and he whirled. His shoe squealed. Letting the overhead light fall on this thing, he let out an involuntary breath when he saw it wasn’t a person, but a rough approximation of a face, hammered into steel to pool shadows in sunken eye sockets. He saw more behind it, too. Huddled shapes crowded like World War I soldiers blinded by mustard gas, crawling and groping – some of them smoothly humanoid, others geometric with harsh edges, stacked against the far wall like folding chairs and just approaching the ringed light in fallen domino rows. Only the one at the front was fully visible; a formless torso on a stake without arms or legs. They were metal targets pockmarked with clusters of concave bullet hits. Tapp must have accumulated dozens of these, and fired hundreds of thousands of rounds into them, before graduating to the real thing.
The humming he’d heard outside was louder, deeper in here, rolling off the walls. It reminded him of a lawnmower. It came from further inside, as if luring him.
Ahead a standalone wall cut the way into an L-shape, curving around the left to form a separate room lit by a faint, radioactive green glow. He passed under the shop light and plunged back into darkness, his hands outstretched, with the yellow glow shrinking behind him and the dim green ahead. All else was black, black as eternity. It was like stumbling through a coal mine.
His fingers trembled in the air. His knees jellied. His back prickled with cold sweat. God, did he need to pee.
Be strong. For Elle.
He knew she was making a run for it now. She was a helpless little speck in Tapp’s dark prairie. Every second counted. He hadn’t yet heard any gunshots, which told him two important things: firstly, that she was still alive, and secondly, that their gamble had paid off and Tapp couldn’t see in the dark.
His cell phone chirped – LOW BATTERY – and he jolted with frigid adrenaline, nearly falling on his ass.
He rounded the corner and the noise intensified as he found the source. A shuddering generator trapped in a cage of metal. Duct-taped dryer vents clumsily mated up with the exhaust port and snaked under the wall. Four red fuel jugs rested against it and a puddle glinted on the floor. The source of that radioactive green light was also there on the floor – two tubular glow sticks discarded among the candy wrappers like ethereal c
ave worms.
Next to it, he found a metal cabinet – head-high with two swinging doors – and his heart double-clapped. It was a gun locker. He threw open both doors, one crooked and shrieking, and saw in the murky light several rifles, including a black military M-16 or something close to it, standing rigidly upright. They smelled like oil, powder, and stained wood. These weapons were kept pristine, tucked away and lubricated with little square patches the way a hobbyist might jealously guard his model trains. James grabbed the black one, but the cabinet had a restraining bar and a loop of veined polymer through the trigger guards, like a bike lock, with three numbered rollers. He tried two random combinations and gave up.
His bladder was two seconds from detonating like a water balloon, and before he went any further, he needed to address that. Considering his other options and finding none, James quickly unzipped and urinated inside William Tapp’s gun cabinet. The relief was revelatory. He made sure to target the M-16 and stepped back to avoid the back-spray. Under the drumming pressure-washer sound, he bit his lip and told himself not to laugh – James, this is serious, life-and-death, people have died today – but then he imagined the very real possibility of Tapp entering the building to grab a flashlight or something and finding him mid-stream all over his precious guns. It hurt to laugh.
He noticed a black platform thing on the cabinet roof with a Motorola logo on it. It was a recharging station, like the kind Elle plugged her iPod into. It had four radio ports where the receivers would stand upright and charge. Only one was occupied. James had one radio in his back pocket. Tapp had the other.
Who had the third one?
The Soviet, he hoped. He had just been in here, after all.
James zipped up, having already decided his next move. He knew that the snarling generator was in there for more than the shop light and radio charger. They’d gone through the hassle of buying it, maintaining it, and fueling it, so something important inside this little building required a constant supply of electricity.
Follow the electricity.
He grabbed both glow sticks, took a knee beside the rumbling generator, and found two extension cords knotted to the back. One led through a bare surge protector and crawled up the wall to that shop light clamped overhead. The other looped behind the gun cabinet now dripping with urine, under a card table, through another surge protector, and then plugged into the back of . . . something. It looked like a black plastic box, suitcase-sized, with a skinny carrying handle fattened with rolled electrical tape. Six antennas, resembling the thick plastic nubs of a wireless router, groped out the side. A tiny status light blinked a green heartbeat. On the side, stenciled in white: NETLINX.
You, he decided. You look important.
He lifted the machine and found it surprisingly light. The whirring internal fan changed pitch slightly. He honestly had no idea what this thing did – it looked like any other gadget in the control room of his old workplace, where engineers performed their arcane work under dimmed fluorescents. Could it be an internet setup? Not likely. Could it be some sort of signal encoder to mask their communication? Maybe. Or maybe the damn thing was just a cable TV box and an utter waste of his dwindling time. After an unsure moment, he unplugged the power cable and waited.
The NETLINX light flashed once, turned red, and died. Nothing else happened.
That was it?
He wasn’t sure what he’d expected. The earth kept spinning. Gravity kept working. None of Tapp’s gaudy end-of-the-world scenarios happened. He stood still in the dark for a long moment, listening to the din of the generator and the gentle pop of sheet metal contracting in the changing temperature. He considered powering the generator down as well, just to be certain, but that would kill the light and draw Tapp’s attention sooner than he wanted. Queasy panic crept over him again, and he feared he was wasting time in here while Elle fled for her life somewhere up the valley. His wife might be seconds from death, pursued by one or both killers, and so far James Eversman’s sole achievement was pissing on the sniper’s gun collection. What next?
He paced. He returned to the door and checked the deadbolt. He opened a few drawers and found tools, bullets, emergency road flares bundled like dynamite (and more candy wrappers, enough freaking candy wrappers to wallpaper a house). He poked the steel targets with his foot. He rifled through gun magazines with sticky pages. His heart sank when he found himself looking at things he had already seen – a terrible mindless habit where he would check the same kitchen counter three times for his car keys – and paused in the center of the room, his fingers in his dirty hair, the amber glow of the floor shining up on him like an inverted spotlight. This couldn’t be all. There had to be more.
What did I miss?
His cell phone bitched again – LOW BATTERY. He almost hurled it against a wall. He would later thank God he hadn’t. As he pulled it from his pocket and powered it down to conserve whatever little charge remained, he noticed something striking on that little blue screen. The signal bar was full. Five bars out of five.
Cell signal was back.
That NETLINX box was a cell phone jammer. Like the kind SWAT teams used to shut down a neighborhood before a drug raid, or the military carted around in their convoys to disable cell-triggered IED’s in Afghanistan. That was the reason for the damn generator. This entire area, Shady Slope Road and the fishbowl crater, wasn’t a dead zone after all. Tapp had created one, with this gadget, to prevent his victims from calling the police. And now that gadget was turned off.
Tapp, I’m about to ruin your evening.
His battery icon was flashing empty – only a few minutes of juice left. Maybe less. He hoped it would be enough. He thumbed the buttons hard. Nine. One. One. Then he slammed it to his ear and heard his own furious heartbeat, a soul-crushing moment of silence, and then a puff of static as the call routed.
“Paiute County Sheriff’s Station. What’s your emergency?”
* * *
Tapp saw her.
Elle knew it somehow. It was her peculiar little sixth sense. She could always tell when she was being stared at, like at the Fuel-N-Food where she had first detected the Soviet’s Cowboy’s eyes on her as a vague uneasiness. Like sinister electricity in the air, gathering before the visible lightning strike. She couldn’t describe it – it just was – and she felt it now, multiplied by a thousand. She imagined Tapp’s scope on her back with his little crosshairs crucifying her while she ran. If you could call it running.
Every breath was agony. Crackling bronchitis gasps. She wished it were some sort of CIA torture so she could simply surrender to it. Whatever men feel when they’re kicked in the balls, Elle was certain she felt it in her lungs. James had once tried to describe the sensation to her after she’d stepped on an unfortunately-placed garden rake in Home Depot, dropping him to his knees in the Yard Care aisle. Imagine the exact opposite of happiness, and then set it on fire, he had said, and now maybe she understood.
She was only three hundred yards up the prairie slope. She checked over her shoulder and saw the Soviet’s torchlight still fussing around in the arroyo, patiently scanning every crack and crevice like Elmer Fudd while his prey escaped. She had eluded him by a comfortable distance for now. But what about Tapp?
“Elle.”
She turned forward and missed a step, stomach fluttering.
It was Roy. She recognized his voice. She searched and found him in the darkness ahead. He was bent over with a hand tucked under his shoulder. A half shade of starlight glistened in his eyes but she could discern nothing else, and didn’t want to.
“Elle,” the sad silhouette said. “I’m so sorry.”
She veered left and started running again, leaving him behind.
“Elle! Wait.” Pattering footsteps.
Was he following her?
She ignored him and tried to put distance between them as slippery rage welled up inside her. She felt her cheeks burn and her throat jam up as she pumped her legs harder, her fingers tightened
into white fists—
“Wait! I’m . . .” He gasped behind her. “This is important—”
She ran faster, suddenly not minding the pain. That asshole. He’d tried to kill her husband, and he might very well have succeeded for all she knew. She didn’t want to look at him or hear him or even acknowledge him as a human presence. She wished he would not exist. And even here and now, in a darkly comic final insult, he was following her, drawing attention to her, placing two of Tapp’s eggs in a single basket.
“I’m trying to help you. Listen to me.” Even as his voice rose to a desperate hoarse shout, it shrank into the night behind her. “I had a head start and I came back. I came back and found you—”
She didn’t care. She knew she should listen but didn’t want to. She dug into a new stash of adrenaline, leaving this poor guilty wreck further and further behind. The crunch of his footprints faded.
“Stop!” Roy hollered, loud enough to draw an echo. It made her wince – even at three hundred yards, the Soviet had to have heard that. “I know who Tapp is. How he knew my name, my address, family, everything. It’s bad, so much worse than we thought, if you’ll just fucking listen to me.”
She slowed and turned.
He came wheezing to her, the white text of his I PISS EXCELLENCE shirt almost-but-not-quite readable in the starlight. In his uninjured hand she saw a small square of paper. His body was quaking with gasps, as he lumbered to within arm’s reach—
“What is it?” she asked.
He shoved the paper into her hand.
It felt like a receipt, but bigger. Thin paper, slippery and crackling. He started to say, “He—,” but his voice cut out and she felt a rush of his body heat envelop her. At first it reminded Elle of urine, a splashing hotness, and then she blinked and realized it was slopped all over her, coating her eyelids, sticking in her hair, hardening on her lips with the taste of copper. She looked up and saw Roy was still standing but only barely. Most of the letters in I PISS EXCELLENCE were now gone. His hand was still on hers where he’d handed her that mysterious paper, and his fingers now squeezed tourniquet-tight, and in them she felt his heartbeat. A slowing metronome.
