The Call of the Mild

by William Rabkin

  He was feeling around on the ground next to him for something to chuck at Shawn when he heard noises from outside. It was a rustling, followed by the sound of a zipper being undone. It took Gus a moment to realize that it was coming from the supply tent behind them. Maybe one of the servers had decided that sleeping outside was no fun and was going to make a bed among the next morning’s food.

  Or maybe it was the next morning. Gus’ heart sunk at the thought. He could tell through the sleeping tent’s fabric that it was still dark out, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t soon be time for them to be yanked out of bed. He hadn’t slept at all, and now he’d have to get up and face another endless day on the march. Nothing could be worse than that.

  Except what happened next.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  The walls of the tent lit up with blinding flashes of light, and the air was filled with gunfire. Gus could hear Jade screaming. This time there was no chance it was a cry of happy surprise.

  Shawn sat up in bed. “What’s happening?”

  Another burst of gunfire lit up the tents, tearing holes in the nylon at the top.

  “Is it the killer?” Gus whispered.

  There was another blast of gunshot, this time from the other side of the camp. And then an answering burst from the first side.

  “Not unless he’s brought friends,” Shawn said, grabbing his clothes from the side of his bed and sliding into his shorts.

  Gus grabbed his own clothes and started to change out of his pajamas. Even as he was doing it, he didn’t know why. It wasn’t like the hiking clothes would wick bullets away from his skin like water. But he felt much readier for action as soon as his shorts were zipped. “Maybe he’s fighting it out with Mathis,” Gus said, pulling his shoes on and tying them tight.

  “Mathis isn’t Melvin Purvis, and the killer isn’t Baby Face Nelson,” Shawn said. “And a tommy-gun battle seems a little out of scale for the crimes involved here.”

  “Then, what?”

  Shawn slithered out of his bed and crawled to the tent’s front flap. “One way to find out,” he said.

  “Don’t!” Gus whispered. “They’ll know we’re in here.”

  “There are three sleeping tents spread over a few hundred feet of ground in the middle of thousands of acres of wilderness,” Shawn said. “I suspect they’re going to think to look in here no matter what.”

  “Then let’s not be here when they do,” Gus said. He gestured to the far corner of the tent where two walls met the floor, then crawled over to it. He tried to lift the tent wall off the floor section, but it was so tightly sewn on it might as well have been one piece of nylon.

  Outside, the air was filled again with another burst of automatic gunfire, and now in the silences between they could hear male voices barking orders.

  “Get out of there!” one of the voices yelled from across the camp. “You’ve got one second before I blow your brains out.”

  “They’re rounding up the lawyers,” Shawn whispered as he slid in next to Gus.

  “They’ll be coming for us next,” Gus said.

  “Maybe not,” Shawn said. “We’re not lawyers.”

  “Even if that would make a difference to whoever is blowing up the camp, how are we going to prove it to them?” Gus said, still trying to tear the nylon open.

  “Good point,” Shawn said. “It’s not like we can show them the lack of a license. The bar association should really offer certificates of non-lawyerhood.”

  “We can suggest that to them if we ever get out of here alive,” Gus said, giving the nylon another yank. It was no use. A grizzly bear could probably tear this tent open, but thoughtless hunters had nearly wiped them out a century ago, and now you could never count on finding one when you needed him. And even if you did, he’d be more interested in knocking over suburban garbage cans than helping innocent people escape from insane killers. And when you came right down to it, that was what was wrong with nature.

  “Are you all right?” Shawn said gently. “Because you look like your brain is spinning out into some kind of reality-deflecting rant.”

  “I’m fine,” Gus said. “At least I would be if there weren’t people firing automatic weapons out there.”

  “Look on the bright side,” Shawn said. “Soon they’ll be firing them in here.”

  “Why do you think I’m trying to tear a hole in this tent?” Gus said.

  “I didn’t know that’s what you were doing,” Shawn said. “I thought you were using the tent wall as your blanky.”

  “I never had a blanky,” Gus said. “Or a binky or a noo-noo, or any other stupid piece of cloth to make me feel better. And if I did, it wouldn’t have been yellow, nylon, and attached to a tent that gun-wielding maniacs were about to invade.”

  “I do see how that could defeat the entire purpose of a security blanket,” Shawn said.

  “I was trying to make a way out for us.”

  “Oh, if that’s what you want,” Shawn said, reaching into his pocket. He pulled out a Swiss Army knife. “Try this. I grabbed it out of my pack. Silly me, I thought it might come in handy at some point.”

  Gus could have kissed Shawn. Or plunged one of the knife’s many blades into his heart. It all depended on whether he decided to focus on Shawn’s forethought or on the fact that he’d been sitting there for what seemed like hours watching Gus uselessly tug at the tent fabric.

  Instead he pulled the longest blade out of its slot and plunged it into the nylon, then ran it along the seam between the wall and the tent. The stitching fell away like ice cream under a blowtorch, and in a second there was an opening big enough to crawl through.

  “The supply tent is right behind us,” Gus said. “If we can get around that, we’ll be in the darkness and they won’t be able to find us.”

  “Unless they brought flashlights,” Shawn said.

  Gus lifted the tent wall and wriggled through, then rolled until he hit the soft wall of the supply tent. He waited there silently until Shawn rolled against him. There was another burst of gunfire from across the camp. Gus thought he could hear Jade crying. “We’ve got to help them,” he whispered.

  “You’ve got the knife,” Shawn said. “Go for it.”

  “There are at least two people with automatic weapons out there,” Gus said.

  “And you’ve got eight blades, plus a screwdriver, corkscrew, tweezers, nail file, and magnifying glass,” Shawn said. “I feel sorry for them.”

  There was no point in glaring at Shawn in the darkness, but Gus did it anyway. “We can’t just let them kill all the lawyers.”

  “No matter what the bumper sticker says,” Shawn agreed. “But charging into the middle of a gunfight waving a magnifying glass isn’t going to help anyone. Unless they’re really, really big and having trouble seeing us puny humans.”

  “Then what do you suggest?”

  “First thing, we’ve got to get out of here,” Shawn said. “Just far enough so it’s not worth their trouble to look for us too long. Then we follow and see where they take their prisoners.”

  “What makes you think they’re going to take them anywhere?”

  “Sometime tomorrow a helicopter is going to land here to take the cook and the waiters away, either back home or to the next rest stop,” Shawn said. “The gunmen aren’t going to want to be here when that happens.”

  “Unless their plan is to hijack a helicopter,” Gus said.

  “There is that possibility,” Shawn said. “But I can think of about a million easier ways to do that. And either way, our first step is still the same. We’ve got to get away from here.”

  It didn’t feel right. It felt like running away and leaving all the others to some horrible fate. But no matter how many scenarios Gus ran in his head, he didn’t see one that was even half as logical as Shawn’s plan. “Let’s go.”

  Gus pushed himself up on his knees, ready to crawl back around the supply tent. Shawn grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back down.

>   A circle of light, the beam from a flashlight, hit the tent’s back wall, then swept across its surface. A gruff voice shouted from inside. “They’re not here.”

  Somewhere past the tent, another voice spoke in threatening tones: “Where are they?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know!” It was Gwendolyn’s voice, and she sounded scared. After all that had just happened, it was the fear in her voice that frightened Gus the most.

  “They probably ran off.” It was a man’s voice. Savage, Gus thought.

  “Right off the mountain.” That was definitely Mathis. Why wasn’t he doing anything? Gus wondered, and then remembered kicking Mathis’ gun into the water. “They’re probably lying dead at the bottom of a ravine.”

  “Possibly,” the threatening voice said. “Or maybe they’re hiding just out of reach of our lights. Let’s find out.”

  “That’s a good idea.” It was Balowsky, and there was a mild slur in his voice that Gus suspected wasn’t entirely caused by fear. “We can wait until the sun comes up. Then we’ll be able to see for ourselves.”

  “I have a better idea,” the threatening voice said, and then spoke up loudly. “The two of you who are hiding out there. You have ten seconds to show yourselves. If you do not surrender to me within that period of time, I will kill one hostage. And then I will kill another hostage every ten seconds after that. One. Two.”

  The voice continued counting down.

  Gus got to his feet.

  “Are you crazy?” Shawn said.

  “No, but I will be if people start dying because I didn’t walk fast enough. And so will you.”

  “Six. Seven.”

  “Sometimes I hate being a decent person,” Shawn said as he got to his feet.

  “Fortunately it doesn’t come up all that often,” Gus said.

  “Eight. Nine.”

  Shawn and Gus stepped around the edge of the yellow tent. “Don’t shoot!” Shawn shouted. “We’re here.”

  The five members of Rushton’s team were huddled together by the blue tent. Mathis had managed to change into his clothes, or maybe he’d never taken them off, but Savage and Balowsky were still in their pajamas. Gwendolyn and Jade wore robes, presumably over the sheer nightgowns that had been left for them.

  Four men wearing camouflage, army boots, and black balaclavas leveled automatic rifles at the lawyers. Their leader stood in the center of the quad, aiming his own weapon at the ground where the four servers and the chef lay facedown.

  The leader glanced up at Shawn and Gus, although the long, thick red hair and beard made it hard to tell exactly where his eyes were looking.

  “Ten,” the leader said. “Too late.”

  “But we’re here,” Gus said. “We came out within the ten seconds.”

  “Did I say ten?” the leader growled. “Sorry, I’m dyslexic. What I meant to say was five.”

  He jerked his gun up slightly and fired. A spurt of red geysered up where a server’s head had been.

  “No!” Shawn shouted. He ran towards the leader, with Gus right on his heels. But before they’d closed half the distance, two of the camo-men tackled them to the ground.

  The leader fired four more bullets, then wiped the red off the cuffs of his pants and turned back to the lawyers.

  “I warned them not to trash my mountain.”

  Chapter Forty

  The march had gotten easier as the sun came up and Gus could see the rocks littering the trail instead of blindly tripping over them. But that only made him feel worse. When there was physical pain, when every step was a struggle, his entire mind could focus on the act of putting one foot in front of the other. Now his mind was free to wander, and it kept going back to the same place.

  Gus had seen dead bodies before. He’d seen people die. But this was different. The casual executions kept replaying themselves in his mind, and he couldn’t shake the image no matter how hard he tried. It seemed impossible to imagine—one second those people were alive; the next they didn’t exist. Gus hoped he had thanked the servers when they’d brought him dinner last night.

  The rest of the marchers were just as somber and just as silent and they walked single file along the trail. Two of the masked gunmen led them down the mountain; the other two trailed them. Where their leader was, Gus had no idea.

  They’d been walking for hours now. After the execution of the chef and his servers, the gunmen had corralled Shawn and Gus with the lawyers in one of the tents. They’d allowed the ones who were still in their pajamas a minute to change into hiking clothes, and then they had all set out down the trail.

  Where they were being taken, or why they were being taken there, nobody knew. Mathis had tried to ask as they were led out onto the trail, but one of their captors had informed him that the next person to utter a single syllable would be thrown off the cliff. Gus could see Mathis’ hand twitching, as if reaching for the gun he no longer had, but he backed off. Just as well, Gus had thought. He didn’t know if the kidnappers would follow through on their threat, but even if they didn’t, any altercation with Mathis might lead one of them to discover his FBI credentials, and there was no way to predict what would happen then.

  Although they’d all been ordered to keep their eyes firmly on the ground, Gus sneaked a look up at Shawn.. They were separated by Savage and Balowsky, whose march had started out as a hungover stagger and only weakened over the hours, and all Gus could see of his friend was his back. That was enough to reassure Gus—and to scare him.

  Reassure him because Shawn was a creature of habit and reflex, and for decades any order for silence, whether from an elementary school teacher, a parent, or a police detective, would trigger an avalanche of words. Even if it was in Shawn’s interest to keep his mouth shut, the command to stop talking acted on him like a rubber hammer below the knee; his response was completely beyond any physical control.

  But Shawn hadn’t said a word then, and he wasn’t talking now. His head was down; his eyes seemed to be focused, like everyone else’s, on the ground.

  What made Gus nervous was Shawn’s shoulders. Even from here he could see how tight, how rigid they were. Shawn was not someone who angered easily; his philosophy of life was that having fun is the best revenge for any ill. But Gus could feel the rage radiating out of those joints, and he didn’t know how long Shawn could keep it bottled up. When he exploded, Gus had no idea what was going to happen, but he didn’t see a happy ending for anyone.

  The trail took a hard jag to the left, and Gus saw something he hadn’t seen yet—a tree. It wasn’t much, just a scraggly, struggling little runt, but it told him they’d descended past the timberline, the edge of the habitat beyond which trees are incapable of growing. The trail went inland from the cliff, and now was surrounded on both sides by small, scrubby bushes. Up ahead, however, the bushes were getting taller and taller, quickly turning into towering pines.

  At least that meant they’d be in the shade by the time the sun reached its zenith. But it also dashed their best hope for rescue. Like Shawn, Gus had assumed that a helicopter would be arriving sometime early in the morning to pick up the servers and their gear, to bring them either home or to the hikers’ next rest stop. Once the copter landed, the pilot would see the bodies, which the kidnappers had left lying in the center of the meadow, and radio for help. And no doubt start the search for the rest of the party. As long as they were out on the open mountainside, they’d be easy to spot. But once they were under tree cover, no one would be able to see them from the air.

  Apparently that was their captors’ idea, as one of the masked men in the lead shouted an order and forced them to walk off the trail and into the tall trees.

  After a few minutes of whacking through dense brush, they stepped out into a clearing. It was an almost perfect circle of bare ground dotted with low stumps from the trees that had been cut to form it. A stone fire pit was in the center.

  One of the masked men gave a signal, and Gus was slammed up against a tree. Another
masked man wrapped a rope around him, tying him to the trunk, then moved on to do the same to the rest of the hostages. Gus risked a glance over at Shawn, who was tied to the next tree, only a couple of feet away. But Shawn was staring furiously down at the ground; Gus could practically hear him thinking.

  When the last of the hostages was secured, the four masked men took positions around the fire pit, a small circle inside the larger ring of captives. After a long moment there was a rustling in the brush, and the red-haired man stepped out from between two large trees.

  “Doesn’t this look like fun!” he said, smiling cheerfully. “Nothing like a little camping trip to build team spirit.”

  “What do you want from us?” Mathis growled from across the circle.

  “From you?” the red-haired man said. “Nothing. My brothers and I have everything we could need here. We’ve got the sky above and the ground below. We’ve got nature’s bounty all around.”

  “Then let us go, you fat freak.” It was Gwendolyn. Gus was torn between admiration for her spirit and fear that she’d get herself—and maybe the rest of them—killed.

  “I said there’s nothing I want from you,” the red-haired man continued, as if she hadn’t insulted him. “I didn’t say there was nothing I wanted at all. After all, you’re lawyers. If I were to sue Manning Timber because they illegally clear-cut thousands of acres of public land and you were to defend them, it wouldn’t be accurate to say that I wanted something from you specifically. You would simply be the vehicle through which I would address my demands.”

  “You’re doing this because you’re mad about the Manning Timber case?” Balowsky said. “Because I think most of us would agree that that case was wrongly, even criminally settled based on false information supplied to the court about various members of the environmental organizations that brought suit. In fact, many of us voted to censure the lawyer who was in charge of that case. If you let the rest of us go, we can tell you which one that was.”