He looked and all about him, fires burned.
But he was done.
Jesus H. Christ.
Peck drew back, astounded at what he saw before him.
A column of flame, like the detonation of a bomb, gushed upward through the trees.
Then in a second, someone was shooting tracers. They dashed across the field fast, low and ugly, snapping remorselessly at the base of a tree on the far side.
He had a terrible suspicion that Jack Preece was on the receiving end of the fireworks.
His night vision was shattered, but enough of it came back in time to see a dark shape rush from the tower of flames, cross the clearing and close on the far position and bend to probe a body.
It was enough.
Peck knew he was overmatched.
Time to get the hell out of there.
Bob found Preece in his ghillie suit, looking like a sofa that had exploded. He lay on his belly, and Bob almost put a shot into him, but held up. The body was still, the fingers relaxed.
Fuck you if you can’t take a joke, he thought.
He turned the body over. In the illumination of the fires flaring across the clearing, he saw that the man had taken at least four or five shots in the head and upper torso. Blood everywhere, the face smashed and broken.
Bob flipped the body aside; Preece was the ultimate step-on. Bob knelt to examine the weapon and saw quickly that it too was destroyed. A bullet had smashed the scope and another had shattered the lens of the infrared searchlight.
Now it occurred to him he was illuminated in the fire-light. Maybe there was someone else around.
He felt no triumph or power but only the emptiness of survival.
He moved out.
42
ow what?
It was first light and the sun had begun to filter through the black trees, turning them gray and then green.
Russ stirred painfully. His limbs were numb from the water that had washed over them all night. He tried not to look at Jed Posey, whose skull had been evacuated and now seemed like a queerly semi-deflated balloon.
He had no idea what was happening. Sometime last night, the sky had lit up for a second or so, as something huge and hot burned fast; there’d been gunfire too: a batch of rounds tapping out, almost fast as a machine gun, he thought.
But since then, silence.
He remembered his instructions. Wait until dawn. The sniper’s rifle is worthless in the light as well as awkward and heavy, so you’ll be safe. Then strike out due west, moving quickly. Six or seven hours away is the road, U.S. 71. Get into town, call the cops, tell everything to everybody.
And what about Bob?
No sign of Bob.
Possibly Bob was doing all that shooting, possibly not. Russ couldn’t imagine a world without a Bob in it. It somehow seemed impossible.
He pulled himself out of the creek and climbed up the bank. He searched for the compass in his pocket, found it, held it level and let it orient itself. Then he shot an azimuth due west, picked a landmark at its end and started out for it.
The woods, in the increasing light, were quiet, green and oddly lovely. Something about the freshness of the morning dew, the sense of a long and bloody night past and having somehow survived it. Wouldn’t this make a terrific book?
He wondered if he had the strength to write it. Maybe not now, but after a few weeks’ rest. He had an image: he’d take that job on the Fort Smith paper, get a little place and work hard in his off hours on the book. Maybe he could go up to Nashville, to Vanderbilt, and see Sam’s granddaughter Jeannie, who—
Something crushed into Russ, knocking him flat. He thought it was Bob, rescuing him, but the iron strength applied against him, pushing his face into the loam, and the sudden spasm of pain as a knee drove into his kidneys told him no.
He struggled pointlessly, as the larger, stronger man dominated him toward submission. Another knee thundered into his kidneys and sent a rocket of terrible pain up his body. He couldn’t see: he felt something hard and cold against the flesh under his ear, and he then heard a voice:
“You move, you fucking whelp, and I’ll kill you right here.”
It was Duane Peck.
Something snapped around his wrist and then around his other wrist.
He was handcuffed.
“Come on, baby boy,” said the deputy, pulling him up. Peck looked crazed, splotched with sweat, his hair a damp mess, his eyes wild with madness. “We’re going to meet your pal.”
Bob crawled from the brush at first light. He thought hard about his own next move and saw that attempting to intercept Russ in the forest was pointless. Instead, he decided to move back to the car, escape the immediate area and set up somewhere on Route 71 where Russ would probably emerge around noon. Then they could go get a good hot meal and return to base camp and figure out a next move, whatever a next move might be.
He looked at his watch. It was about 6:30 .
He had one subsidiary stop: to head back to the far side of the clearing, where he had to recover the Mini-14, a rifle that was traceable to him and whose spent shells would match the spent shells found on the roadside of the Taliblue Trail. That might lead to more explaining than he cared to do.
Warily, he looked around and in the gray but increasing light, could see nothing. There was no noise, except the occasional peeping of an awakening bird. A low mist clung to the ground, all the better.
He crawled from cover, reached back to check his .45 and then began to move low and zigzagging through the forest. Did he want to recheck the body?
No, he decided not to. If there was another man in the forest, one thing such a boy might do is set up there. He determined that there was no incriminating evidence at the body, nothing to connect him once he got rid of the Mini-14. The rifle was the important thing.
He approached from the southeast, slithered up to a fallen log and examined what lay before him. He could see no signs of human activity: only an undulating, wild clearing a hundred yards by a few hundred yards, crazed with knee-high grass and speckled with flowers. At the oblique, a scorched, blackened tree stood, where he had detonated the fireball. Lucky the forest was damp and the flames didn’t spread. Very lucky. It was something he hadn’t thought of in the craziness of the moment last night.
It’s better to be lucky than good, he thought.
Carefully, he maneuvered around the perimeter of the clearing until at last he had returned to the site of last night’s action. A few small fires still smoldered and he kicked them out. He stood in the core of the firebalclass="underline" a blackened cylinder seemed to have been cut in the trees, but it would grow out quickly.
He went to the tree behind which he’d hid, and saw the rifle lying a few feet out in the high grass. He went quickly to it and lifted it. While he was out there, he collected spent shells and seemed stuck at nineteen, but then, remembering the sense of being pronged in the face by a shell ejecting straight back (it happens), he slid backwards and found the twentieth shell far from where the others had landed and, near it, the single .45 casing that had lit the fire. Shit, he’d forgotten that one. He stuck it in his jeans pocket. Then he remembered he’d fired twice more, to attract attention, back in the trees a bit. He moved back and had a little trouble at first, but then a glint of brass announced itself and he picked up one and, nearby, the other.