Sitting there on the couch, feeling as he did then, Clay found he could not understand the need for such joviality. He felt an urge to strike out and kill something, anything, for his trouble; a need to balance some invisible score against all fate and the turnings of time, the motherless bastards, for having made him feel so hopelessly unmanned. It was a condition he recognized within himself and knew that for the moment at least, he should not be around others.
Clay made a circuit of the house, checking the corners of every room while insisting to himself that he was not, in fact, looking into closets for fucking monsters, and, finding nothing, went back upstairs. He blew the candle out on the landing and ripped his jacket from the door as he passed by, tossing it into the corner. He pissed into the empty toilet, his stream ringing hollowly in the bathroom. Before he crawled back into bed, he turned and stared at the open door for a moment.
He wondered how the fuck it was that he’d seen a head poking out around the side of the jam when the jacket was hanging from the top of the door’s corner.
Clay fought down another wave of chills as he climbed back into the bed. He did not remove his pistol.
Amanda sat alone in the darkness of her bedroom. She was fully alert and dressed for the night air. In her lap, she clutched a backpack containing a knife, some rope, and a small, low-output flashlight with red LEDs. She focused on not rocking in place, not fidgeting; on not bouncing her leg.
She failed.
Seconds ticked by like minutes until she heard the tap at her shutter. When she did, the pent up energy that seemed destined to bleed from her extremities in fits muted down to a subsonic hum. She crossed the small space to the window, cracked the shutter, and gave a curt nod to Samantha, who stood outside waiting. She passed her backpack through the window, then stuck a leg through, followed by the other. She felt small hands under her buttocks as she lowered herself to the dirt.
Amanda shrugged into her pack while taking a second to glance around the area. It was dark out and the trees behind her home pressed in overhead to filter any starlight that might cut through the layer of thick clouds scudding overhead; passing quickly as though they knew what was coming and wished no involvement. She looked down at Samantha to see her similarly dressed and nodded. Her clothes were form-fitting and comprised of softer materials that wouldn’t make a lot of racket as her legs pumped and her arms swung.
Amanda held a finger to her lips and then pointed to the hillside with her chin. Samantha nodded, and they cut along the bed of dried pine needles as quietly as they could manage.
The rear of Amanda’s cabin faces the northwest mountain wall of the Bowl, which was the lowest in elevation of the little range encircling them; roughly two or three hundred yards over the floor of the valley. At the foot of the mountain wall, the slope climbs gently for a spell before jutting hard into a spar of granite stretching upward to an outcrop leaning into the open air like a jagged stone knife. A hike to the top is deceptively difficult, lulling the odd traveler into an easy uphill jaunt, weaving through the cloistered trunks of Ponderosa and White Bark without too much effort, only to hit the unforgiving granite barrier beyond. Veins of dirt may stretch on through the cracks and between free-standing boulders, but the way is blocked to anyone not born a full mountaineer or at least half a mountain goat. An ignorant guest might skirt the wall along either direction in search of a passage more forgiving, if not just a conglomeration of rocks irregular enough that scaling was an option, only to find he’d eventually deposited himself on a side of the valley aligned along a completely different cardinal direction. This was, for the Bowl, a natural law, indefatigable as the principle of water’s downhill direction or the bitter snows of a Wyoming winter.
The only exception to this inevitable truth lie in exposure through time; for just as water will, through its own inexorable nature, suss out the one traversable path through a solid wall of rock (though said path might be only a hairline crack) and split it apart like Samson casting Dagon’s Temple to ruin, so too will a people living in close proximity of such a challenge strive repeatedly to subvert its primacy. So it was that Amanda and Samantha subverted the granite bones of their mountain home and, through the traversal of perilous trails, hand- and footholds—and perhaps the odd, strategically-placed rope—came to the top of the spar where the climb leveled off and proceeded in a more humane slope toward the northwestern saddle. It was here that the women felt secure enough in their remove that talking was an action housed within the realm of safety, yet here they separated; Samantha traveling southwest along the ridge while Amanda continued on within the trees hugging the rim, plunging ahead for the second duffel bag of weaponry; the collection of rifles, shotguns, a few pistols, and round after round of ammunition.
When she came to the tree that stood at an angle, leaning slightly over where the washout had exposed its roots, Amanda stopped. Some fundamental wrongness to the shadows on the ground alerted her to the possibility that things might not have been as she hoped. She stood there quietly, straining her ears, and when she heard nothing rummaged through her pack for the light. She pulled it out, pointed it at the ground, and thumbed it on. The low, dead beam bathed the earth at her feet in a flat, red haze. The dirt that had been so meticulously piled up under the tree’s roots had been scraped back as if by a great dog and spread down the slope. As to the duffel bag of guns; it sat out in the open exposed to the night air like a pagan offering.
Amanda clicked off the light and stood staring at the bag’s shadowed form; a void floating out in the sea of ebony mountainside. She worked to keep her mind separated from the jackhammering struggle of her heart; focusing her thoughts, pounding them out into a coherent line of reasoning the way she’d on occasion seen Fred flatten out a bar of cherry-hot iron.
Had the bag been discovered by Clay or one of his men, she likely wouldn’t be standing out in the open right now, free to move or run away. Unless they were the kind to toy with people; have some little bit of sport before springing the trap. She doubted this. She’d encountered such in the past, and Clay’s folk didn’t seem the type. They went about their daily tasks methodically rather than enthusiastically, and when jokes were presented, the others laughed as though they feared being caught out as the men who did not laugh.
Not them, then. And it sure as hell didn’t make any sense that one of her own had done this.
She felt something long, hard, and comfortable in the palm of her hand; glanced down to see her arm thrust into the backpack. A moment later she realized she held her knife, and then with a flash of intuition she understood how she came to find the bag exposed.
“Jake?” she whispered.
“I’d hoped you’d understand,” his voice floated up from behind her. “I was afraid that if I called to you, I’d startle you. Make you cry out, yes?”
She turned slowly in search of him but failed to locate his form; the cloud layer was thick, and light was minimal. She thought she saw a mass of shadow out beyond one of the trees; thought it might be man-shaped.