He raised his pistol. He held his aim on Laura's sternum, then raised it to the top of her bowed head, debating placement of the shot. Too bad Pru wasn't here. He'd have enjoyed a video memento of this.
Julian stepped between him and the woman.
Declan pointed a cautionary finger at him. “Back off, Julie. I don't need this right now.” He sidestepped to bring Laura back in view.
Julian moved with him. “Listen,” he said, “Listen . . . you can use her. Hold her until you get the rest of them, the people out here.You can use her to . . .” He paused, then said, “Get her son, get . . . Dillon.”
“No!” She yelled behind him.
“Julie, I'll shoot right through you if I have to. Get out of the way.”
The boy held up both hands in a calming gesture. “Dec, listen. . . .”
“No!” Laura yelled again.
Julian looked at her. Declan could not see his face, but he thought his brother said something. She lowered her head.
Declan said, “Julie, I'll do it.You know I will.”
“Dec, just think about it. Maybe the laser, the guns aren't enough, not for everyone. In a . . . um . . .” He was thinking, trying to find the word. “In a
tactical
situation, it might take more.The weapon and . . . and outthinking the enemy.
Bait!
Drawing them out with bait.”
“I don't need her. Bad and Kyrill will get the other stragglers.”
“We don't know that. Chasing them with the satellite hasn't worked so far.You said whatever works. Like with that . . . that sheriff.”
Laura yelled some wordless raging thing.
Julian gestured at her, as though patting the head of a large invisible dog. He whispered something.
Clenching her teeth, she said, “No! You . . .”
Julian whispered something again, emphatic.
She shook her head, closed her eyes.
Declan realized it was, in fact, this woman and her son who had drawn out Sheriff Tom.That fact made the possibility of her doing it again very interesting to him. A professional lure, the mythical siren. That would be her role, her calling. From the people came their fall. Poisoned from within.The idea intrigued him. It was game-worthy. He could not recall it ever being done in quite the same way.Yes, Zelda's objective was to save the princess. But those were straight forward quests, no different from seeking a treasure. Using the woman would be more psychological, more devious. Infinitely trickier to pull off in a video game.
Declan nodded. He gestured with the gun. “Okay. Get her in the car. She's your responsibility, Julie. If this goes bad, it's on you.” He glared at the boy, making sure his meaning was clear. “On you,” he repeated.
Julian nodded.
Cortland jumped up to kiss Declan on the cheek. She said, “That's sweet, Dec.”
Declan said, “Let's get up to that cabin and see what's what.” He started to walk around his brother toward Laura.
Julian stopped him. “I got her.”
“Knock her out,” Declan said, frustrated at having to tell the boy everything.
“Look at her. She won't be any trouble.”
Declan raised an eyebrow, cocked his head. “Better not be.” He went back to the Jeep and climbed inside.
The boy leaned beside her.
He put his hands on her shoulder and back. “Come on,” he said gently.
She swung her hand around and under the back of his shirt. She had seen a bulge there and knew he carried a gun. Startled, he simultaneously shoved her away and leaped backward.
Her fingers had brushed the grip and a tease of cold steel. She sat back hard, then got her feet under her, ready to leap at him, to claw for the weapon.
He had the gun in his right hand, pointed away from her. He raised his left hand as if to ward her off.
“Don't do this!” he whispered harshly. He glanced at the Jeep, which was angling slightly away from them. Both Declan and the girl had climbed into it. She could see them through the windshield, intent on something Declan held below the level of the dash.
“He'll kill you. He will.” His voice was strained. His eyes brimmed with tears.
She noticed the hand he extended toward her was shaking. They were in a terrible situation, far beyond repair, and he knew it. Unlike Declan and the others, he knew what they had done. He was not living in a bubble. More accurately, he recognized that they were not playing a video game. They were destroying lives, whole families, an entire town. The reality of that bore deep into Julian's soul. His eyes were at once haunted and intense. He did not want to be here any more than Laura did. And like her, he did not know what to do about it.
But he had said something, and she had to knowâ“You told Declan to use me to get to Dillon.”
“I didn't mean it. I was trying to stop him from killing you.That's all.”
“But Dillon . . . is he alive? Please.”
Julian shook his head. “We haven't seen him.” His lips were dehydrated, cracking. He moistened them now with his tongue.“We didn't kill him.”
“We can't let him do what you said. Declan wants to get him . . .” Her thoughts tumbled like jigsaw puzzle pieces falling from the sky. She grabbed at them, not knowing how they could fit together into something that would save her and Dillon. Declan had mentioned the cabin. Somehow, he knew about the cabin. No matter what they tried to do, he seemed always to be either one step ahead or so close behind it didn't matter. Grasping, grasping, she said, “Give me your gun.”
Julian considered it: she saw it on his face.
He looked at it, then at her. “I can't,” he said.
“Then what is this about?” she snapped. “Your good intentions don't mean anything.Your being sorry for what your brother is doing doesn't matter. None of it matters if you don't help now.”
His face pleaded with her. He was a child caught in a situation that would crush most adults. He did not know what to do, and his fear of Declan did not leave room to hear her. Anguish made him appear much older than he was. Uncertainty gave him much more youth. The result was not a compromise that approximated his actual age, but an awful coexistence of innocence and guilt. He was a man-child being torn apart.
He sighed deeply, heavily. He inclined his head. “Come on.”
“Julian, please.You
know
Dillon. He's going to die if you do this. Do you want that?”
Julian shook his head. “No. Of course I don't.”
“Then help me.”
The Jeep's horn blaredâtwice, long.
Julian jumped. He stared at the Jeep in thought. Without looking at her he said, “You have to come. Maybe . . . I don't know . . .”
Quietly, she said his name.
He snapped his gaze at her. “Come on,” he said more firmly. “Declan won't like us talking.We have to move.We have to go. Do you need help?”
She studied the ground, shook her head. She rose to her feet and straightened her back, feeling bruises she couldn't see. She walked stiffly to the rear passenger door. Julian fell in behind her, keeping his distance. She opened the door, sat, and slid across the bench seat to the other side. Declan was in the driver's seat in front of her. Julian got in and shut the door.
“I don't think so, honey,” Declan said, gazing over his shoulder at her. “Far back for you. Go ahead, climb over the seat.”
She did, feeling every bruise and cut on her body.
Declan watched her in the rearview mirror. He said, “I don't know if you can open the back hatch from the inside. Don't. If you do, I'll just turn around and run you over. Then I'll drag your body behind the car.”
She glared at his reflected eyes. Her fury meant nothing to him. Her white-hot anger was a spark against an iceberg. She sat back, leaning against the hatch, then shifted so her weight was against a molded spare tire cover. She did not want to risk even accidentally opening the rear hatch.
Declan presented his open palm between the front bucket seats. “Give me the gun, Julie.” The boy did, and Declan's hand disappeared with it. His eyes came back to her in the mirror. “You know, I thought for a minute Julie was gonna give you his gun. If he had . . .” He waggled a semiautomatic pistol where she could see it. She recognized it: it had been Tom's.
A chill tickled Laura's arms, lightly, like walking through fog. Her stomach tightened, but not as much as it should have realizing that it was only Julian's defiance of her request that had saved them both. She was growing numb, and that scared her. While fear could paralyze her, make her think irrationally, numbness would make her lethargic and slow to react. If an opportunity to escape presented itself, she wanted to seize it quickly and passionately.
Declan lowered the gun. He sighed, sounding bored. He plucked the walkie-talkie from his breast pocket and keyed the mike. “Kyrill? Bad?”
After a moment, a fuzzy voice came through: “It's Bad.What's up?”
“What are you doing?”
Bad: “We're looking for those guys you said.”
“In the woods?”
Bad: “Following the tree line.”
Declan said, “You're not going to find them that way. They'll stay out of sight. Go straight through.You can do it.”
Bad: “Straight through? Straight through where?”
Declan was silent. He looked out the window and said to Cortland, “It's them I should blow off the face of the earth.”
Cortland laughed.
Declan keyed the walkie-talkie: “The woods, Bad. Do you know where you're going?”
Long pause. Then Bad's voice came through: “Okay, we got it.”
Declan dropped the walkie-talkie into a cup holder in the center console. He draped an arm over the back of his seat and watched Julian return his gaze. “You ever hear the joke about the farmer and his bride?”
Julian said nothing.
“This farmer was heading back home after marrying some gal in an arranged wedding. They're in this old carriage, getting pulled by a donkey. The donkey stops to eat some grass. The old farmer whips it and whips it until it starts going again. The guy says, âDonkey, that's one.' After a while, they pass a water trough, and the donkey stops to drink.The man whips it to get it going again and says, âDonkey, that's two.' After a while, the donkey sees something interesting and stops to check it out. The man says, âDonkey, that's three.' He gets out of the carriage with a shotgun and shoots the donkey dead. His wife yells, âHow can you do such a thing!' And the man looks up at her and says, âWoman, that's one.'”
Cortland giggled.
Declan could have been carved from stone.
Julian did not respond.
Declan lifted his hand so that it was positioned between the brothers' faces. He held up one finger. “Your helping that hunter escape on the plateau was one.Your trying to grab the gun from me just now and then sticking up for the womanâI'll count both of those as number two.” He held the fingers in place for a long time.
Finally Julian slapped them away.
“You know I'm not joking,” Declan said. He sat back in his seat and got the car moving.
Cortland glanced over the seat at Julian. Even she appeared shaken.
As they walked, Hutch used
the broadhead as he would a knife, slicing and hacking away bits of wood from the sapling. He had asked Phil to keep watch for pursuers.
In tending to his duty, Phil turned and spun and jumped at every sound.
Finally Hutch said, “Listen for the big things, Phil. A car engine, footsteps crunching over the ground, gunfire. Things like that.”
“No wind in the trees? No squirrels?”
“Only if the squirrels have machine guns.”
He went back to whittling, hoping he wasn't wasting his time. Hoping more than that: if his efforts proved fruitless, it meant more than a waste of time; it meant certain deathâno more running, no more chances. It would take at least a few hours to reach the cabin. He hoped that was enough time.
As Hutch's project took shape, the sun dipped closer to the horizon, the shadows grew darker, and the two of them pressed on. On occasion, Hutch stopped to check his compass and the topographical map. He would sometimes glance around, half expecting to see some sign of Dillon's passingâsomething unintentional, like a broken branch or a sneaker print, or a clear indicator of the boy's hope for a reunion with Hutch, like a piece of cloth tied to a tree or a smiley face written with a gooey energy bar. He realized the chances of their treading the same path were more than slim. Hutch was cutting as straight a line to the cabin as the terrain would allow. Dillon most likely would have followed landmarks he recognized to get him there.
Hutch had no idea what he would find when he reached the cabin. In his mind it had become mythically important to their survival. It was their quest, and no matter how firmly or frequently he warned himself against hoping for a sudden solution to this whole stinking mess, he did think of it that way. What other place would a mother send her child in an emergency? To what other place would a child insist on going even when it meant forgoing the next town, with people and phones and shelter? To Hutch, the cabin had become a fortress, set among towering trees that provided not only seclusion but vantage points from which to guard and protect. The cabin-cumfortress would be impenetrable and contain not only a well-stocked kitchen but several satellite phones. And an armory.
Yeah. If this was not what Hutch expected, it was what he hoped for. Unrealistic, to be sure, but in the middle of a nightmare couldn't one dream?
At minimum it would be set among trees, as most hunting cabins were. And as he walked, he worked to turn that fact into an advantage.
Phil trudged along, now and then stopping to listen. “I think we're being followed,” he said.
Hutch stopped, cocking his head. “I don't hear anything,” he whispered.
Phil said, “An engine . . . sometimes. Sometimes, kind of a crunching sound, like you said. Something moving in the woods.” It had not yet become twilight, but in the woods it could have been. The distant trees and shadows became indistinct, murky, the way silt could make clear water opaque.