The driver’s face lit up, as much as such a skeletal face could light up. “That would be delightful! Let me see…” He began to quickly look around on the ground, and then picked up a rock. “Here’s one. No, wait, this other one seems sharper.” He ran his index finger along the edge of the rock. “Perfect.”
“You won’t even be able to clean under his fingernails with that.”
“You’ll see! Oh, I’ll be riding two days’ south of here in such luxury!” The driver seemed giddy as he went to work with the rock.
“It’s not doing anything,” said Kleft.
“It’s doing a great deal. Look right there.”
“Shoddy.”
“What do you mean, shoddy?”
The driver, it must be said, knew exactly what Professor Kleft meant by “shoddy.” The rock, sharp as it may have been, was doing a dreadful job. It simply was not the proper tool for the task. But for years he’d dreamt of riding in the coach, writing about his own adventures while Kleft dealt with the wind and the cold and the uncomfortable wooden seat and the stench of the horses, and he wasn’t ready to give up on that dream quite yet.
Professor Kleft, on the other hand, thought that using the sharp rock looked like a lot of fun, and he sort of wished that he hadn’t ridiculed the idea.
Meanwhile, Nathan had changed his mind about the horrors he was witnessing. As disturbing as the activities of his two captors were, he did appreciate the fact that they were paying a great deal of attention to the bodies of the robbers, and very little attention to Nathan. So little, in fact, that he’d been able to take several steps toward the coach without them noticing.
The first step had been a tentative one, covering minimal ground, tiny enough that if he were caught he could explain it away as stretching his leg. The next few steps were less tentative, and his leg-stretching excuse would have thoroughly strained credibility, but Kleft and his driver were still too absorbed in what they were doing to watch him.
Now Nathan knew that he had to make a big move. Being an extra six feet away from where he’d started was not a substantial advantage when dealing with enemies who had indicated a strong willingness to shoot him.
There weren’t any woods to run into. No place to hide, except perhaps for under the coach, which would have been sufficient for an extremely brief game of hide-and-seek but was woefully unsuited for a life-or-death situation.
And so, moving as quickly as he could and trying not to scream in terror at Kleft’s cry of “Hey!”, Nathan scrambled up into the driver’s seat.
FIFTEEN
Nathan frantically yanked on the horses’ reins. He didn’t know the first thing about driving a horse-drawn coach except that there was some yanking of reins involved, and if this didn’t work, he knew he’d be dead.
The horses ran.
“He’s escaping!” shouted the driver. It seemed like a strange thing to shout, since this information was almost certainly not new to Professor Kleft, but in times of great stress people often resorted to shouting unnecessary exposition.
Even though the terrain wasn’t particularly rugged, Nathan found himself bouncing all over the wooden seat. He held onto the reins as tightly as he could as he watched Kleft and his driver fade off into the…well, actually, they weren’t fading off into anything, they were still right there, running alongside the coach.
The driver leapt into the back. Nathan felt this might prove problematic in the near future.
“Stop!” shouted Kleft. “Don’t make me shoot you!”
Nathan hoped he was referring to the horses, even though he liked the horses.
In a perfect world, Nathan would have been able to suddenly slow the horses down, which would cause Kleft to run ahead of them. Nathan would take advantage of this by speeding up the horses again and steering them to the right, thus trampling Kleft under their hooves. If Nathan had the slightest idea how to slow and steer the horses, it would have been a brilliant plan.
“Don’t think I won’t shoot a child! I’ll put a bullet in you and not lose a single wink of sleep!”
Nathan believed him. Such a cruel world when a young boy could be threatened with a firearm and not automatically assume it was an empty promise!
Should he make a token effort to stop the horses?
Up ahead, the dirt road sloped downward. Not quite enough to classify it as a “hill,” and far from enough to classify it as a “mountain” or a “cliff,” but easily enough to classify it as “a dangerous slope upon which to drive a horse-drawn coach, if one has no experience with such things.” There were far worse ways to perish, as he’d seen a few minutes ago, but Nathan hoped to remain alive for at least twice as long as he’d already been alive.
“Leave me alone!” Nathan shouted back. “I’ll leave the horses behind once I’ve escaped!”
Kleft fired the gun.
Though Kleft was a murderous sort and would never admit such a thing, he did have a bit of a moral issue with the idea of shooting a child. It was a dilemma he was able to work through, obviously, but still, pulling that trigger brought no joy to his heart.
He had no intention of killing Nathan. Retrieving the boy in the first place had required a long journey, and to simply pop a bullet into his head would be a terrible waste. Not to mention that other individuals would be extremely unhappy with that decision.
“Where’s the boy you were going to get?” his wife would ask.
“Shot him dead,” Kleft would say.
“Why would you go and do a thing like that?” his wife would ask. She’d stop stirring his scrambled eggs, and Kleft would worry that they might not cook properly.
“He was getting away.”
“So you shot him dead? What a peculiar methodology.”
“Don’t judge me, woman!” he would say. “You weren’t there. You didn’t witness the circumstances that forced my actions!”
“It is only the end result that matters,” she would say, letting his eggs burn. “And the end result is that you left behind your household responsibilities for several days in order to retrieve this fang-toothed boy, who you then proceeded to murder. If you’d set out to murder him, then your trip could be considered a success, but since your purpose was to bring him back, your trip is an unqualified failure. How are you to continue making money if you’re so casual with your responsibilities?”
He would want to argue. However, he would not do so, burdened with the knowledge that his wife was absolutely correct, that it had been a poor idea to travel so far only to shoot Nathan in the head, and that despite his best efforts to convince certain individuals that things weren’t so bad, there was really no debating that propping up a dead fanged boy with a hole in his head would provide little or no entertainment value to a paying audience.
So he did not shoot Nathan in the head.
He’d been aiming for Nathan’s leg. After all, when you were shot in the leg it was much more difficult to run away from kidnappers. But Kleft was running himself, and Nathan was bouncing around, and Kleft had never been a superior marksman, so the bullet did not hit Nathan in the leg as desired.
Nathan screamed as the bullet struck him in the left arm, two inches from his shoulder.
He’d been shot! By a bullet! On purpose!
Was there blood? Of course there was. There had to be. He didn’t want to look. He didn’t need to look. The blood was a given.
Besides, he could see it on the reins.
Could you die from getting shot in the arm?
He looked at his arm.
Oh, yes, that was indeed bad. Even if he’d been shot a few times in the past, which he hadn’t, he suspected that this would rank as the worst he’d ever been shot.
He hadn’t fallen out of the coach, though.