Authors: Stephen Hunter
He leaned back, fiddling to get it in his hand right, and then thrust the muzzle against the man’s body and pulled the trigger.
Richard heard shots. They seemed to come from out beyond, out on the prairie.
He looked around again, seeing nothingness, and then headed toward the sound. He walked in the darkness and paused for just a second, to see the farm spread behind him and before him only the darker band of the trees.
A shape suddenly appeared before him.
“Lamar?” he said, but it was only the girl, who looked at him in horror and then slipped off. He watched her disappear and wondered why she had such revulsion on her face.
He stood there for a few seconds, wondering what to do. The world had never seemed so empty to him as it did at that moment.
Then he saw a single shot coming from ahead in the trees; by a trick of fate he had been looking exactly where the flash so briefly blossomed.
It occurred to him:
Lamar may need help
.
He walked toward the shot.
I have to help Lamar
.
He took out his gun.
Bud felt his strength vaporizing, and with it all his will. He had nothing left to fight with, and Lamar had hit him so hard in the face and throat he was seeing nothing but flares of light as his throbbing optic nerves shot off. But still he clung to the Beretta, knowing it held his purchase on survival.
Lamar was above him, over him, hitting him gigantic hammer blows against which he had no defense. His face swelled like a rotten grapefruit. He saw his sons before him in the strobe effect of the optic nerve and for just a second forgot where he was. Lamar’s face was a savage mask, so rigid with hatred and power it seemed like something from ancient times. Lamar’s dark eyes glowed and his nostrils flared and Bud could smell sweat and dirt and blood and then Lamar hit him a giant clout on the nose, breaking it, filling Bud’s mind with red mist.
Lamar pivoted, and Bud felt Lamar’s other hand coming onto his wrist, Lamar’s weight still pinning him, and the gun was being corkscrewed from his grasp until it was only a second before he lost it.
Magazine button
, he thought.
He pushed it with his thumb and felt the magazine slide out, and then he pulled the trigger, the gun firing pointlessly off toward nowhere, as Lamar then seized it and with a blast of triumph broke contact with Bud and pivoted to jam the pistol against his ribs and squeeze the trigger.
Lamar must have pulled the trigger ten times before he realized the gun wasn’t going to fire. Couldn’t. No magazine.
In the interim, Bud balled his fist. He hit Lamar in the throat and felt his antagonist sag back.
He rolled just a bit and grabbed his Commander from the high hip holster and tried to bring it up against Lamar, but Lamar was too fast on the recovery and with his own left hand grabbed at the pistol.
The two men began to slide through the mud down toward the stream, hopelessly locked, each desperately seeking leverage, strength, hope as they tried to control Bud’s Commander. Bud’s thumb was over the safety, trying to get it down, Lamar’s below it, trying to keep it up. Their faces were inches apart.
Suddenly, fast as a snake, Lamar seemed to leap out. He sunk his teeth into Bud’s nose. The pain scaled the heights of his spine and he screamed, but in the same terrible second he remembered:
I shot his fingers off
.
With a jab his thumb lanced out against Lamar’s fist, hit bandage, dug through it, and felt scab yielding to blood and heard a new scream, not his own.
Bud tore the automatic free and rammed it into Lamar, but when he pulled the trigger it would not go. Lamar had got a finger between hammer and receiver.
“You fucker, you fucker, you fucker,” Lamar was saying.
Bud got the gun free and with his thumb cranked back the hammer, but again Lamar snared his wrist.
The gun in Bud’s hand was like a bayonet as each tried to gain control and drive it into the other’s heart. It rose and rose, wavering this way and that, now Bud ahead, now Lamar, the two of them locked in each other’s arms, squeezing and biting and batting at each other with their skulls.
Up and up the gun came until it seemed to touch Bud’s chin; he felt it hard and cold and saw Lamar’s merciless
eyes but from somewhere some last ounce of rage unleashed a last ounce of strength.
The gun fired.
The flash erupted in Bud’s face; the light was incandescent and unyielding and seemed to fill all the corners of the earth, and as the tide of brightness roared through his brain, it destroyed his vision. A thousand bits of powder and lead drove into his skin.
He fell backward, isolated in his blindness, seeing nothing, feeling nothing.
Bud was helpless.
He’d lost the gun, he was blind, his ears rang.
He’s going to kill me
, he thought, and waited for the next shot, almost welcoming it, for it would stop the pain that now began to throb in his head, and it would let him rest at last.
But no shot came. He blinked and groped and still saw nothing but only heard some unidentifiable sound, a rasping, a moaning, whatever.
He drove his fists into his eyes and pressed them hard, backing sightly up the bank.
He opened his eyes, waiting to die.
But ever so slowly he identified the sound. It came from a hulk just before him, sunk to the knees in the stream, hands clasped over face.
Lamar’s hands came away and another flash of heat lightning crackled in the distance and Bud saw that the bullet, a hollowtip, had blown through Lamar’s chin upward and like a plow had gouged a furrow up what had been a face. The teeth and most of the tongue were gone, the nose had been eviscerated, and as the bullet had opened and surged upward it had destroyed both of Lamar’s eyes and opened his forehead so that pulsing dark matter showed amid the bone. It had erased his face.
“Iiilmu, iiilmu, iiilmu,” Lamar moaned and Bud knew it was “Kill me, kill me, kill me.”
Bud finally found the Beretta .380, though it had slipped down almost into his underpants in the struggle. He raised it and aimed. He was three feet away. He fired twice into Lamar’s head, and he fell sideways into the creek and did not move.
Bud stared at him for just a second, then sat down as an exhaustion so total it seemed to penetrate to his heart overcame him. He felt numbness everywhere, except where he hurt. The little gun slipped out of his hand and he did not even look for it.
Holly, crying bitterly, had made it nearly all the way back to the farmhouse when she heard the roar. She turned to the west and saw them, or rather their lights; three helicopters roaring in over the tree line, lights flashing dramatically.
Then, from the other direction, she saw the vehicles—state police cruisers, vans, ambulances, a whole convoy—racing down the road to the farm. The vehicles and the helicopters reached the house almost simultaneously, and from each there poured a crowd of black-garbed men in hoods with fancy guns. It was all theater, like a movie; it had nothing to do with anything.
She walked toward them as the men completed their dramatic performance, kicking in doors, presumably racing through the house ready to hose anything that moved down with their machine guns. But there was nothing to hose down.
She reached the perimeter.
“Help,” she said.
In seconds policemen surrounded her.
“They’re out there,” she said, pointing. “Bud Pewtie
and Lamar. Over there, in the trees. I heard some shots. You’d better hurry.”
“Let’s go,” said an old man, who seemed to be in charge.
“Please hurry,” she said, but they were already gone.
We were so close
, she thought.
Bud climbed up the bank through a fog of exhaustion; he could make no sense of the rising dust, the roar of the helicopters, the flashing of their navigation lights.
His mind worked imperfectly. It closed on one thought: It was over.
A light came onto him.
He blinked.
“There he is,” shouted the pilot over the intercom.
C.D. looked, and yes, the light came onto Bud, who groped blindly, then sank to his knees. C.D. saw the blood all over him, focused a pair of binoculars on the face and saw how battered it was.
“Put it down, GODDAMMIT,” he screamed.
The bird hit with a thud.
“Listen, you get back to the house and see if there’s a goddamned doctor in the cars, or at least a goddamn paramedic. Get him here fast. That boy’s hurt bad. Then you call Comanche Shocktrauma and tell them to expect incoming.”
“Mark the place with a flare, Lieutenant, so we can find it on the way back.”
“Goddamn right I will,” said C.D. “And bring some more men to secure the area.”
He rolled from the deck of the Huey, and someone handed him a flare, which he ignited with a yank. The
flare’s red fire blossomed. Carrying it, he raced down to Bud as the helicopter roared away into the night.
He ran down the slope and came to Bud, dropping the flare.
“Bud, Bud—”
“Got him, Lieutenant. He’s down there. Blew his face off. Oh, Christ I hurt.”
“Take it easy, Bud.”
He tried to comfort Bud, holding him close, putting his hand to the highway patrolman’s chest to check the heartbeat. Bud fell forward, then caught himself. In the flickering magenta of the flare, the blood all over his face looked almost black, and the swelling had all but buried one of his eyes. The man was shivering, and saliva and phlegm ran out of his bloody mouth.
“I killed him. Oh, fuck, is he dead,” Bud was saying.
“Good work, Bud. You got him. Great goddamn job. Now settle down. Help is—”
But suddenly someone else was before them.
He thought it was another cop, but as the figure drew nearer and acquired clarity out of the darkness he recognized its size.
“Where’s Lamar?” asked Richard.
C.D. was close enough now to see how swollen the man’s face was. Had he been hit? Did Lamar beat him? But Richard sniffled and C.D. knew he’d been crying.
“It’s all over,” he said. “It’s finished.”
“Where’s Lamar?”
“Dead,” said C.D.
Richard held something up. C.D. saw that it was a Smith & Wesson .357.
Bud almost laughed. Richard! With a big gun like that! His own gun!
“Richard, boy, it’s all over. Put the gun down. You don’t want to hurt nobody. Not now,” C.D. was saying.
Richard looked at the gun, almost amazed to find it there.
Bud heard vehicles revving, roaring toward them. A chopper suddenly hovered overhead, throwing out a searchlight beam that lit the three of them and beating up a storm of dust.
Richard blinked.
“I—I—” began Richard.
“There now, Richard, it’s all over. You just put that old gun down so nobody gets hurt,” C.D. crooned.
Richard looked up at C.D. and then at Bud. In the light Bud saw huge eyes webbed with red and full of fear, trembling lips, drops of dew on the nose.
“Richard, put the gun down, those boys mean business. It’s all over. Nobody has to get hurt now, not you, not nobody. You were a victim, too. He made you do them things.”
Richard nodded numbly.
“Drop the gun, Richard,” said Bud, suddenly anguished, afraid the troopers would shoot this poor, pitiful child. Richard took a step toward them, seemed to turn and watch the men from the helicopter racing at them, and turned back to Bud and C.D. He faltered, as though he were losing his grip. C.D. reached out to help him.
Richard started to bend to set the gun down as the troopers surrounded him, and it was fine, it was great, it was the happy ending everybody dreamed about.
But something suddenly came into Richard’s eyes, from nowhere.
“Daddy!” he cried, and raised the pistol and fired.
L
ong after the funeral, which was one of the biggest in the history of the state, long after the newspapers and the television had lost interest, long after people had stopped asking about it, the Ford F250 pulled into the parking lot of a small cemetery in Kiowa county. It was November, the day before Thanksgiving, when Oklahoma turns chilly and ocher and seems somehow drained of its brightness.
The wind snapped through the air and Russ Pewtie, stepping out of the passenger side, pulled his jacket tight around him; when he breathed, ragged plumes of breath leaked from his nostrils and his eyes began to issue tears from the cold. He’d just flown in that morning from a surprisingly more temperate New Jersey.
Beside him, his brother Jeff, who had driven up to Oklahoma City to pick him up, also shivered.
“Damned cold,” said Russ.
“Damned cold,” said Jeff.
Russ was back from his first two months in the East; he hadn’t had an easy time of it and had already dropped a course; but he felt better and knew that somehow, he’d make it through. Jeff was looking good. He’d gotten his
grades up and now, a junior with a driver’s license, his own inherited truck, he even had a girlfriend, a pretty young woman who was the daughter of a colonel at the fort. He was working out every day after school to get ready for ball in the spring.
The two young men left the truck, which smelled so of their father. They looked around, shifting a little on their feet to stay warm, but without much luck.
Russ looked at his watch.
“We may as well go on out there,” he said.
“Yeah,” said Jeff. “Get it over with.”
They stepped between gnarled scrub oaks and through a frail metal gate, and walked among the gravestones on the prairie. There were so many of them. The wind rose and whipped and snapped, and the high grass bent in its force. Out here: always the wind.
There was no wind like this back in New Jersey, thought Russ. There’s no wind like it anywhere.
After some minutes of hunting, they came at last to the stone, which was one of but many in a neighborhood of stones. Like its companions, it was nondescript polished granite, about as austere a symbol of a life as could be imagined, completely without frill or sentimentality.
Russ tried to feel something but he really couldn’t. He felt phony, ridiculous, absurd.