“You're kidding, right?”Terry thumbed the lever that snapped the slide back into its resting position. He ejected the magazine, examined it. He slapped it back into the grip. He said, “What I care about now is that I'm out of ammo.”
“You brought only one magazine?”
“Didn't think I'd need even that. I figured maybe we'd have to scare away a bear or somethingânot stop a bunch of mad youths from blowing you to kingdom come.”
“Well, keep it,” Hutch suggested. “They don't know we're out, and we might be able to get more ammo.”
“In town?”Terry asked.
Hutch nodded slowly, thinking.“We gotta get help. And after what just happened, I don't want to be without protection until we're either back home or those guys are in jail.”
He slapped Terry on the arm. He rose, feeling every bruise and cut and mile of running, every tumble he took. He scampered down to Phil, whose sobs had subsided into hitching breaths. He was curled up in a fetal position, facedown. His head was lowered and his arms covered it, as though he expected blows from heavy fists, maybe godly fists. His glasses lay in the dirt. Hutch knelt beside him and rubbed his back.
“I know,” he said gently. He caught Terry's eyes to include him in the conversation. “Listen. I interviewed a guy who ran a survival school. I even went through itânot the whole thing, but I got the gist.”
“I remember that,”Terry said.
“Yeah. Before he started this outdoor training course, he was a federal accident investigator. Plus he wrote about these dramatic rescues and stuff for, I don't know,
National Geo
or something. He spent like years reading accident reports from all sorts of things: shipwrecks, people lost in the wilderness, hostage situations. He identified what traits survivors had in commonâwho lived, who died, and why.”
Phil lifted his head. His flesh was red, his eyes redder. Tears and sweat misted his entire face. Bits of dirt and grass clung to it. Snot soaked the three-day-old stubble on his upper lip.
Hutch nodded. “The first thing survivors do is they recognize they're in a life-or-death situation. Sounds stupid, I know, but apparently people either acknowledge it way too late, or they immediately deny it.You know, âNo, no, no, this is normal. Planes are supposed to crash on deserted islands.' That sort of thing. Doesn't work.You gotta know you're in survival mode. The sooner the better.”
He looked from Phil to Terry. “Gentlemen, we're in survival mode. These guys want to kill us. What we do from here on out,
everything
we do, will determine whether we get away alive . . . or not.”
Phil uncoiled. He sat up on his knees. “Oh, I think David would agree that we're in a life-or-death situation.” He ran the sleeve of his coat over the bottom of his face, sniffed. “But, Hutch . . . tell me what he did wrong.What did David do to not survive?”
Hutch frowned. “That's different.You can't help what you don't know about. They sucker punched us, that's all. That won't happen again.”
Phil's face reddened further, from apple to chili. “How can you say that? You don't know.” He waved a hand toward the river valley. “What was that? Do you know what that was? I didn't see them actually shoot anything, did you? So what was that?” He snatched up his glasses, stood, and glared down at Hutch.
So many emotions were raging through Phil, through all of them, that Hutch wouldn't be able to sort them out if he had an hour to do it.
Phil climbed the embankment and looked down to where David had ceased to be. He glanced at Terry, sitting at his feet, then back to Hutch. “Like you said, we can't defend against something we know nothing about.You can't say it won't happen again.”
“So, what?” Hutch said, standing. “We lie down and die? We find those guys and turn ourselves over to them? What, Phil? What do you think we should do?”
Faced with having to define action and not simply ramble about the odds against them, Phil had nothing to say. He stood there ready to spew wisdom, wanting to, but in the end, he simply sighed and sat down. He brushed at the dirt clinging to his glasses.
After a minute,Terry said, “Beth. Justin and Dianne.”
David's family. Hutch's guts twisted anew.
“How are we going to tell them?”Terry said. “What are they going to do?”
They didn't have even a body to bring back.
“We should all tell her,” Hutch said. “We all saw it.”
“If the authorities let us,” Phil mumbled, not looking up from his lap.
Silence. Hutch broke it with, “They'll be okay.We'll see to it, right?”
Phil put on his glasses. He bowed his head:
Of course
.
Terry's lips formed a pained smile. “I'd like to start by meting out some justice. I can't believe I wasted all my bullets.”
“Hey,” Hutch said. He marched to the berm. “I told you before, Ter, you saved my life. I don't think one or two bullets would have scared those guys off. If you had stopped firing, they would have pulled out their machine guns and blown us away.”
“Or redirected that thing,” Phil said. “Whatever it was got David. Did you see, the guy in the truck was holding something when it happened?”
“I saw it before,” Hutch agreed. “When they first came after me.”
“You knew they had that weapon,” said Phil, “and didn't tell us?”
“I didn't think you'd believe me, and it didn't matter.We had to leave the campsite, we had to find David, and neither of those objectives would have changed if you realized we were up against more than just hillbillies with popguns.”
“So what
are
we up against?”
Hutch shook his head.
“What I do know,” said Terry, “is they're going to come back.We chased away a monster by throwing rocks at it, but monsters always come backâusually severely ticked off.”
“So what do we do?” Phil asked.
Hutch rose to his feet, putting him at eye level with Terry and Phil, who were sitting on the low berm. “We can try hiding until the helicopter comes back for us.”
“That's
nine more days
!” Phil threw up his hands. “Don't you think people with weapons like that have ways of tracking down targets? Come on!”
Hutch was silent. Phil was right but he didn't want to say it.
Terry said, “That town is what, five miles from here?”
“Fiddler Falls,” Hutch agreed.
“Do they have cops?”Terry asked.
“I would think so.”
“And phones?”
“Satellite phones.”
“Wait a minute,” Phil said. “Where did these guys come from?” They looked at each other for a few moments.
“Maybe . . .” Hutch said. “Maybe some ritzy hunting lodge in the area. They
were
driving a Hummer.”
“Or maybe Fiddler Falls,” Phil said.
“What?” said Terry. “Like they're just living in this rinky-dink backwoods town, and they happen to have a cannon or whatever it isâsome weapon half the armies of the world would kill for? Does that mean the town's in on it, covering for them? No, I got it. They developed this crazy weapon worth a billion bucks on the open market, but they'd rather rent it out to fat cats who come up here and hunt humans for a thousand bucks a head. Something like that?”
“Look,” Hutch said. “There's a lot we don't know. But we have to do something. I say we go look at the town, and if it looks cool, we go in.”
The spot of the world
that hosted the town of Fiddler Falls, Saskatchewan, had rolled into darkness by the time the three men reached its outskirts. A partial moon threw a bluish glow into the avenues and front yards. Hutch remembered finding last night's moon tranquil and as complementary to the landscape as an art lamp was to a Renaissance masterpiece. This one made everything appear sinister: the shadows were deeper and normal objects somehow seemed unreal, as though they were painted props. In fact, much of what the three of them encountered reminded Hutch of a
Twilight Zone
episode.
Intuition got Hutch off the road to walk over yards, close to the trees and eventually the houses. Terry and Phil joined him without comment. The first house they passed, a rustic A-frame, was dark, without even the blue flicker of a television set in its windows.
“We should knock,”Terry said.
“What if the townspeople are in on it?” Phil replied.
“I just can't see that.”
“Until today, could you see your friend blowing up without apparent cause?”
“Let's move on,” Hutch said.
As they drew nearer to the town, houses appeared more frequently, and it became clear that something was rotten in Fiddler Falls. By Hutch's count, only two rooms burned with light out of the eight houses they passed.
“Have you noticed all the garage doors are open?”Terry said.
“Why close them in a town so small that everyone knows each other?” Phil said. “Till snowfall, anyway.”
“Hold on a sec.” Terry jogged into one of the dark garages. He returned a minute later, looking glum. “That truck in there, its hood is up. I couldn't see anything, but I reached in and felt a mass of wires. They'd been cut.”
Hutch glanced up the dirt road toward what he believed was the town center. Now he noticed that each of the three vehicles in view, either on the road or in a driveway, had a raised hood.
“You still think the town's in on it?” Hutch asked.
“What town? This is a ghost town,” Phil said. “I do think we should see if anyone's home. Maybe some people are hiding from whatever caused this.”
“If they are,” Hutch said, “they're not going to answer for us.They might even shoot through the door.”
“I would,” Phil agreed.
“And if they are home and do answer,” continued Hutch, “I wouldn't trust them any farther than I could throw you.”
“Hey.”
“No, seriously. If this whole town got evacuated or kidnapped or killed, how could you trust anyone
not
evacuated or kidnapped or killed?”
“Okay,” said Terry.“How about we break in, see what we can find?”
“Same problem as knocking,” said Hutch. “What if you enter the wrong house and get blown away by some poor soul who thinks you're one of them? Let's keep looking.”
“For what?” asked Phil.
“People, a phone, a radio . . .”
“Guns, ammo,” added Terry.
“Speaking of that,” said Phil, “shouldn't you get that ready?” He was looking at the bow rising up from Hutch's back.
“And do what with it?” asked Hutch, but he slung it into his hands. He gazed at it the way Terry might have at his bulletless gunâa lot of potential but of little practical use.
“Shoot the bad guys,” said Phil; he could have added,
Duh
?
“I'm thinking we're a little outgunned,” Hutch said.
“Anything's better than nothing,” said Phil. “Who would have thought a real estate agent with a six-shooter could have saved your butt, when the guy with the invisible grenade wanted to blow it off?”
“At this point I'll take a sharp pencil,” said Terry.
“That's the spirit,Terry,” Hutch said. “Survivors keep their heads. They don't get panicky. Some people keep flipping through a sort of mental photo album to remember what they have waiting for them back home; others count or do puzzles in their heads. But the number one thing survivors do, that guy said, is they keep their sense of humor. They joke about things you wouldn't think are funnyâhow they'll give a bear indigestion or how their corpse will be found with its skeletal middle finger raised to the belated rescuers.”
It was Terry's way to say things in a slightly twisted manner, but
Hutch knew he really meant that he'd take a pencil. Had Terry not had the gun, Hutch believed he would have been throwing rocks at Declan until all four friends were nothing but little bits of the circle of life in the Canadian wilderness.
As if to prove the point, Terry said, “I'm more afraid of the guy with the invisible grenades than I am of some old lady with a gun. I'll kick the doors in and take my chances.” He started for a home.
Hutch grabbed his arm. “Whoa, the noise will just draw attention to us. And besides, don't you think the people who went to the trouble of disabling every vehicle would have cleared the houses of anything that could hinder their plans?”
Terry thought about that. “Okay,” he said reluctantly. “So we hit Main Street and see what's what.”
Without a word they continued farther into town. After a few minutes, Phil stopped. He peered up at the sky. Hutch and Terry joined him. Curtains of colors rippled across the sky: David's
Revontulet
. They continued on. The houses gave way to the first public building: a school. It was dark and deserted, as it probably should have been at this hour anyway. The school was on their left. It faced the street that intersected the one they were on, but instead of dirt, it was paved and about twice the width.
“Provincial Street,Terry,” Phil said, reading a sign.
“So?”
“You called it Main Street. This is obviously their main boulevard.” He gestured toward the businesses along the street.
“Okay, listen,” Hutch said.“We came down from the north, a little west of town. Fiddler Falls sits on the northern bank of the Fond du Lac. That means the river is south, that way.” He pointed right. “Whatever commerce they have, whatever services, will be that way.”
In that direction, across the dirt road from the school, was a large Victorian house. On the front lawn beside the walkway was a metal sign hung between two wrought iron posts capped by horses' heads. The sign read KRAMER'S ROOM AND BOARD, INQUIRE WITHIN.
“A boardinghouse,” Terry said. “I'll bet the door is unlocked, at least into the common areas, the living room, kitchen.”