Either way you don’t know where the fuck you are.
Whether Zack was close or not, I’d still be running blind. The best I could hope for would be to get back to the car and head down the road the way we’d come in. Eventually it would lead somewhere.
I turned as quietly and slowly as I could and saw Jason continuing to climb. He was about fifteen feet up, at a diagonal from me, but slowly coming back around in my direction. He stopped. Looked down the slope again. Then something flashed — a blue light — and I saw him take a mobile phone out. He had it on silent. He looked at the screen, then back towards my spot. They were communicating by text now. I glanced back in the other direction. Had Zack spotted me? Was he telling Jason where I was?
Jason’s eyes were fixed on my position now, the gun in one hand, the phone in the other. I held my breath as he took a step closer. Then another. Coming down the slope towards my position.
He can see me.
He stopped, dropped the phone back into his pocket, and put both hands on the gun.
He can really see me.
He edged even closer, padding across the forest floor, until he was about three feet from me, looking across the tangle of bushes I was hiding in. The gun drifted across my face.
He gazed across the top of my head, his eyes fixed on something beyond, and then raised a hand and pointed at himself. He was signalling.
Zack.
Jason was in front of me, up the slope.
Zack was behind, below.
Surrounded.
Jason scanned the forest, left, right, into the darkness of what was around him. He didn’t move, just stood there, listening to the sounds: the movement of the leaves, the creaking of the earth, the faint drip, drip, drip of water. A thought came back to me then of my dad, standing in the middle of the woods close to the farm, doing exactly the same thing. Dad had been an amateur tracker. He listened to the noises, took in the smells, knew what footprint belonged to what animal. But Jason was the real thing: confident enough to separate the sounds of nature from the sounds of what had encroached upon it. He knew I was close by. I couldn’t have got clear of him in the time available to me. He knew that. Now it was just a question of pinpointing my position.
A waiting game.
The smallest of noises. I turned an inch. From the darkness behind me, side-lit by a pale shaft of moonlight further down, came Zack. He looked up at Jason, Jason at him. Jason placed a finger against his lips. I watched them: they were communicating with only the barest minimum of movements. Zack nodded up the slope; Jason shook his head. They looked back down the slope, over my head. Jason made a circle motion with his hand: He’s in this area somewhere. He’d seen me go into the undergrowth and hadn’t seen me come back out. The undergrowth was thick and wild, but I hadn’t lost them. I wouldn’t lose them now. They were sure I was here — and they’d only leave again with my body.
Do something.
Slowly — so slowly it was hardly even a movement — I guided my hand to the ground and felt around again, my palm flat to the floor. Immediately around me there was nothing: just soft mud and hard snow. Zack took a step forward. I reached further out into the undergrowth, and my fingers brushed something. Rocks. There was a pile of them but only a couple felt big enough. One was larger than the other. I picked it up and brought it into me, then did the same with the second. My sleeve brushed against a branch, but the sound didn’t carry and neither of them registered it.
I wrapped my hand around the smaller one.
Steadied myself.
Waited.
Waited.
Then, slowly, I opened up my body and threw the stone as hard and as far as I could to my left. It hit the forest floor with a thud, snow spitting up, brambles crackling.
The two of them spun around. Zack was quicker off the mark, moving forward, and around the thorns, towards the noise, gun primed. Jason seemed more reticent — as if he knew it might be a trick — but followed at a distance, walking rather than running. I gripped the thicker stone, and moved on to my haunches. The hardest, sharpest end poked out the top of my hands. Jason was about six feet away from me now, the gun still at his side. In his face I could see he hadn’t been fooled by the diversion at all.
Do it now.
I squeezed the stone and sprang at him. He half-turned towards me, his eyes widening as I jabbed the stone’s point into the top of his head. It made a hollow, splitting sound, like a punctured watermelon. His blood speckled against my face, his eyes rolled up into his head, and then he fell forward, hitting the ground almost silently.
I dropped to my knees next to him. There was blood all over his jacket. When I leaned in a little closer, I realized he wasn’t breathing.
I’d killed him.
A shot rang out and a puff of bark flew from a tree about a foot to my left. I fell flat to the floor and tried to pick Zack out against the darkness. Next to me, Jason’s gun was lying on a patch of snow. I scooped it up and peered at it. I didn’t recognize the make. Didn’t have time to check it was loaded. I just gripped it and started to run.
I headed right, around the thorns, and down towards the road, parallel to the way we’d climbed. A second shot rang out, shattering the silence. I kept running. A tree loomed out of the dark and I grazed my arm against the bark, my body swerving too late to avoid it. An ache shot up through my muscles, into my shoulder. I pushed it down with the rest of the pain, and carried on running.
A third shot, then a fourth. A fifth narrowly missed me, hitting a tree as I passed it. My lungs felt like they were squeezing shut. I knew I was losing ground. I knew I was slowing down. I couldn’t keep this pace up — my feet were torn to shreds and there was still no sign of the road. I wasn’t even sure I was heading in the right direction.
Then I fell.
My left foot clipped the grasping arm of a tree root. I tumbled head first, hitting the ground hard. Collapsed on to my front and cried out in pain. It felt like I had broken my arm.
Looking up, I could see Zack, about twenty feet away to my left. He hadn’t spotted me yet, but he’d heard me and he was heading in my direction. I looked around. The gun was wedged against the bottom of an oak tree, its gnarled bark closed around the weapon. I scrambled to my feet and reached for the gun, pulling it out. When I turned, Zack was lurching towards me, his own gun out in front of him.
I fired twice.
He jolted sideways. The first bullet went through his shoulder, the second hit him in the chest — then he stumbled, his feet giving way, and hit the ground. His gun tumbled away from him, making a metallic clang as it bounced across the frozen mud.
When my eyes snapped back to him, Zack was looking at me, blood oozing out of his chest. In his eyes I could see an acceptance. That sooner or later, whatever he was involved in was going to catch up with him. He blinked once, twice, and then his eyes started to lose some of their shine. He didn’t blink again.
Zack had the car keys in his pocket. I took them out and headed back down to the road. The sky was starting to lighten a little, turning from black into grey, and grey into green. By the time I found my way back to their car, the green had finally become blue.
As I got in, I realized it was a week since Mary had first entered my office.
I was still barefoot. I looked in the mirror and saw I had a thin, deep gash right on the hairline where Zack had clocked me with the gun at the house. My face was bruised and battered, streaked purple and blue, and one of my eyes had started to close. My shoulder wasn’t broken, nor was my arm, but they both hurt right down to the bone. And I could see a knuckle imprint, close to one of my ears, where the man in charge — the man with the saccharine breath — had punched me in the side of the face.