Will saw him falling. It seemed like a minute before Lonny hit, but it must have been merely a second or two. The body landed in the loose rock and talus a hundred feet below then bounced awkwardly as it somersaulted and careened, legs and arms stretched outward down the slope, sliding to a stop amid the larger boulders toward the bottom of the cliff debris.
Will stood there staring down. One of Lonny’s arms lay behind him in strange backwards rapture, while his face looked upward and his head appeared like it had been popped and then stretched away from off his body. The skin of the neck the only thing to keep it now attached.
Will bent and lay against the edge of the ridge. He reached a hand for the rifle and came up holding it by the stock. Quickly he worked the bolt and checked the rifle over, moving it to one side then the other in a quick study of wood and metal. It seemed okay but there was a crack in the lens when he raised his eye to it and looked again down into the empty meadow he had seen Mary May passing across only minutes before.
AS HER LUNGS BEAT, PULLING AT THE AIR LIKE THE AIR ITSELF was not enough and the capillaries in her heart burst like distant stars, far away but looming ever closer—she ran. Flat out, full speed ahead, no looking back, no pause, no fucking way she was letting anyone catch her. In the checkered light of shadow and sun that came streaming down through the pines, the world bounced across her vision with the frenetic pull of some devil’s hacksaw, raking away at the earth from down below.
It was only the sheer terror and realization that each footfall and beat of her sole could be heard against rock and pine needle that caused her to pull up short. She veered to her right and stood stock-still, with her back to the thin trunk of a tall pine, trying as best she could to catch her breath. She was immediately aware of how alone she was, how very lost she was from any comfort or salvation. Out there in the wider brightness of the field from which she ran, she could see no one and she had heard nothing since the bullet flew past her and struck the ground no more than ten feet off.
She needed to get away and she needed to get away now. She looked around at the half-lit forest. She knew now why so many of the original pioneers were lost in places like this. The lodgepole pines everywhere she looked, straight as arrows, thick as telephone poles, each the same, like the makings of some carnival funhouse there was no escaping from.
WILL CAME DOWN OFF THE RIDGE, HALF SLIDING AND HALF walking through the loose gravel that lined the bottom of the cliff. When he came to Lonny, the man’s eyes were still and open and a savage gash could be seen across the side of his head that ran all the way along one cheek and up across the skin just above his ear. His neck was clearly broken and the skin had bruised and even as Will took hold of an arm, meaning to turn him over, Will could feel the lifelessness of his body and the looseness of the muscle.
Will rolled and pushed Lonny over. He was lighter than Will but he was by no means easy to move, and as Will pushed he could smell already the turning of the body and the release of all its liquids. He pushed Lonny all the way over and now he could get his hands on Lonny’s pack.
Undoing the drawstring at the top he began to pull item after item from the backpack and lay them out. Much of it Will had seen already when they’d made their camp the night before. But when he came to the wolf collar with the transmitter he was not at all surprised. He pulled it up and stood looking at it. He turned it over in his hand. It weighed little more than a few pounds and he could see where there was a little switch that could be turned on and then turned off.
For ten seconds, he stood there looking at it, then he slid the collar back inside the bag with all the rest of Lonny’s things and pulled the man over and let him rest. Up above Will could see the place he had once stood and he looked now into the field another hundred or so feet down slope. He set off in the direction he had seen Mary May heading, knowing that Eden’s Gate was not far off.
When he had made it all the way across the field he could see figures moving on the ridge. He watched them where they formed just at the lip of the cliff. Will moved under the trees now, not wanting to be seen. Once he was in the shade he raised the scope and put his eye on them, watching as they looked down on the place Will knew Lonny to be.
Will watched them long enough to see them break apart from their small group and move out along the ridge in single file. He watched them come to the place that Will himself had found to thread his way down from atop the cliff. And then Will watched them move across the loose rock and talus just as he had done. John walked out front, leading with the antenna, no doubt moving toward the transponder and the wolf collar within Lonny’s bag.
MARY MAY HAD WAITED JUST LONG ENOUGH TO SEE HOW MANY had been following her. She watched the distant shape of a single man move down and away from the far ridge as he cut through the grass almost in the same path that she had surely followed. She could see the rifle on his back and she watched him stop midway through, studying something he saw there in the grass.
Without giving any more time for the man to catch her, she removed her boots and stuffed her socks down within. Then, with boots in hand and the .38 stuck back down the waist of her pants she set out, moving fast and making her way up a small rise to the north she knew might give her a vantage of the land. She was careful with her movements as she went, knowing the man had tracked her this far and could likely track her farther.
She moved barefoot over the forest bed of pine needles and she stopped often to look back at her trail. She was leaving less of one but she could still see in places the scuff of one foot followed by the other. She had grown up in these woods. She had been trained by her father and his friends to track and hunt and she knew an experienced hunter could track just about anything over almost anything, except the smoothest rock or water.
With hands outstretched she moved onward up the slope as she made her way to the slight rise above. The slope now growing ever steeper in a way she had not calculated for, much of it hidden behind the dense trunks and underbrush of the forest. Halfway up she fell and slid four feet down and getting to her feet she saw the dark scrape she had made there in the pine needles. She could do nothing for it and she moved now, quicker even than she had gone before.
Soon she gained the rise and with a single scanning look down the way she’d come, she drew herself up and over a large outcropping of rock there. Laying herself out flat so that she could present the smallest profile. The rock on which she lay was like some backbone across the topmost portion of the rise, but unlike the ridges and ranges she had crossed through earlier it did not offer the view she had been hoping for. The rise only high enough above the forest floor to offer up the briefest view of the land beyond.
In the silence that followed, as she listened to her heart beating in her chest, she thought she heard the sound of breathing. She held her own breath, steadying herself where she hid. In the far distance, she heard the call of a shrike dusted up from somewhere on the other side of the rise. The bird’s anxious call settling in across the forest as it flapped up along the rise then came out above, moving past and then away, threading its way down into the trees beyond.
For only a second did she keep her eyes on the path of this bird. She knew maybe it had simply startled up out of some tree, called from the branches by some prey or thing it hunted. But she also knew this was only hopeful thinking, that somewhere down below there was a man tracking her with a rifle.