Deadfall Read online

  At the bottom of the gorge and to their left, where the river narrowed and calmed, stood David. He was on the far side of the river, whipping a rod back and forth, making the fly dance along the water. The line looped up, catching the wind and fluttering down again. David’s movements were those of a master choreographer; the rod and line seemed somehow poetic, artistic, a painter with his brush, a ballerina perfecting a grand jeté. He was turned sideways from them, intently watching for the strike that would land his lunch.

  Behind him lay the mirror image of the slope under Hutch’s feet. His eyes followed it up to where it plateaued at his own elevation. A glint caught his eye. He looked farther left, and his heart stopped.The Hummer was parked at the top of that opposite slope, parallel to the edge; visible to Hutch were its front grille and right side.

  The husky cameraman knelt at the front bumper, filming into the river valley, filming David. Behind him stood the black man the boy had called Bad. He appeared to be dancing in place, gyrating his hips and shaking invisible maracas. Declan was leaning as far sideways in the safari chair as its harness would allow. His head was beyond the side of the bed. The smirk Hutch had witnessed earlier had been replaced by concentration and calculation. He was holding the device he had fiddled with before the explosion that had almost taken out Hutch behind the bush.

  “No,” Hutch said under his breath.Then a loud scream: “No!” He waved his arms and yelled again.

  Declan spotted him. Now a grin stretched his lips. He returned his attention to the device and to David.

  “David!” Hutch yelled and leaped off the edge. His feet hit the gravelly slope. He slipped, landed on his back, started sliding. He gained his feet and continued his graceless jaunt down. Sand and gravel slid out from under his boots in little avalanches. Again he yelled to David, who was oblivious to the danger above him and to Hutch’s warnings.

  The iPod, Hutch thought, cursing it.

  Running-sliding-tumbling, Hutch continued to yell.

  Finally David noticed him. He smiled and waved.

  “Run, David, run!”

  David tugged an earbud out of his ear. “What?”

  “Run!”

  At the Hummer, Declan had lost his smile. He was holding the device up and looking between it and David intently.

  “Don’t!” Hutch yelled. “Don’t—”

  Whoosh-crack. David exploded.

  Water and sand and gravel flew up. Hutch covered his eyes with his arm. He slid farther down the embankment. Pebbles pelted him. Hot air washed over him, carrying the scent of scorched earth and ozone.

  The dust and smoke settled, and there was David. He was intact, half in, half out of the river. His legs and most of his torso were on the stony bank, as though he’d lain down to quench his thirst. He was lifting himself with one arm from the river, stunned, bleeding.

  “David!” Hutch leaped farther down the slope, almost there. He stopped.

  Declan was staring at that device, down at the injured man. He was not finished here.

  “Stop, no!” Hutch yelled.

  Another explosion. Water geysered up. False rain sprayed up, down—along with bits of rock and sand and what else Hutch didn’t want to know. Squinting through mist, steam, smoke, he saw the river rushing to fill the void the explosion had left.The swirling waters were opaque with mud and a rich scarlet.The boulder on which David had lain was scorched and cracked. Hutch glared up at Declan. In his heart, white-hot hate wrestled with shock and loss.

  A camera had grown the body of a man and was kneeling, watching.

  Hutch’s stomach rolled.This was beyond murder, beyond depravity. It felt as wrong as ritual human sacrifice.

  He recognized a pattern to Declan’s movements, to the way he fiddled with the device, to his facial expressions. He was still not finished here.

  Hutch was next.

  He reached behind him to unsling his bow. As he did, he glanced up to see Terry frantically rummaging through the rucksack. Phil was not visible, but his cries of anguish and bewilderment poured down from over the edge. Hutch swung back to face Declan, plucking an arrow from the bow’s quiver. He nocked it, knowing the Hummer was too far, the angle too impossible for an arrow to hit its mark. Still, he would not die without at least trying to stop his killer. If he was to join David, he wanted his last vision to be of an arrow sailing at the man who sent him there.

  He took a bead on Declan’s head as the man’s eyes snapped from him to whatever he held. He plucked the bowstring. The arrow sailed straight toward Declan. Then it dropped, thunking into the slope. It kicked up a puff of dust and loosened a trickle of gravel. The mancamera twisted to catch the arrow’s pathetic landing. After a moment, it turned its attention back to Hutch.

  Declan had paused to watch. Now he smiled and returned to his work.

  A shot rang out, then another and another. The window of the Hummer’s rear passenger door shattered. Briefly, the startled face of the girl appeared in the opening before dropping out of sight.

  Declan’s head snapped up. Hutch followed his gaze to the top of his own slope—to Terry, who held a pistol in two hands. He was screaming and pulling the trigger as fast as he could.

  At the Hummer, Declan pounded his palm on the roof. Bad ran around to the driver’s side. The man-camera suddenly morphed into a man with a camera at the end of his arm. He disappeared through the passenger door.

  Two bullets plunked into the vehicle’s metal, both on the side of the bed. Declan was rocking back and forth in the chair, secured by the harness, yelling, “Go, go, go!” In a flash, the Hummer was gone.

  20

  Shots continued to ring out. Hutch wondered if the fleeing Hummer was still in Terry’s sight. He looked up. The gun fired.

  Terry, in his rage and enthusiasm, stepped off the edge. The gun went off and flew out of his hands. He tumbled and tumbled. Finally his hands flailed out, slowing his descent. On his back, head downslope, arms out in a posture of crucifixion, Terry slid, pushing sand and gravel ahead of him. A deep groove trailed behind. When he stopped, he didn’t move. He appeared dead.

  “Terry!” Hutch called. He slung his bow. He dug and crawled up the unstable slope to his friend.

  Terry opened his eyes. “David,” he said, slow, sad.

  “I know,” Hutch said, then added, “You saved my life.”

  Terry smiled weakly. He shrugged and slid a foot before Hutch stopped him. “Least I could do,”Terry said.

  Hutch stood. He pulled the other man up by his jacket and kept holding him until his feet found a way to maneuver on earth that was as unearthlike as quicksand.Together they trudged up the slope.The climb required more steps than the distance seemed to call for because of the slope’s insistence on bringing them down one step for every two they took. Hutch broke off from the two-man team they had formed to retrieve the pistol. He rotated it in his hands. It was a Colt 911 semiautomatic. The slide had locked in the open position, meaning it had spent every round.

  When he and Terry reached the top, they collapsed in exhaustion. Down the short embankment on the other side, Phil sobbed.They were great racking cries no man should ever hear, let alone produce. Hutch felt that Phil was expressing grief for all of them. Hutch himself was numb. He ached for David and knew that a time would come when he would express it as thoroughly as Phil. But that time was not now.

  He sat up, and Terry joined him. Hutch handed him the gun. “Where did you get that?”

  “Snuck it in.”

  “You brought it into the country?” He knew he had. Except for Terry’s clandestine diversion to the tobacco store in La Ronge, when the rest of them thought he’d hit the bathroom, the four had been together since leaving Denver. “You know how serious Canada takes its gun laws?”

  “You’re kidding, right?”Terry thumbed the lever that snapped the slide back into its resting position. He ejected the magazine, examined it. He slapped it back into the grip. He said, “What I care about now is that I’m out of ammo
.”

  “You brought only one magazine?”

  “Didn’t think I’d need even that. I figured maybe we’d have to scare away a bear or something—not stop a bunch of mad youths from blowing you to kingdom come.”

  “Well, keep it,” Hutch suggested. “They don’t know we’re out, and we might be able to get more ammo.”

  “In town?”Terry asked.

  Hutch nodded slowly, thinking.“We gotta get help. And after what just happened, I don’t want to be without protection until we’re either back home or those guys are in jail.”

  He slapped Terry on the arm. He rose, feeling every bruise and cut and mile of running, every tumble he took. He scampered down to Phil, whose sobs had subsided into hitching breaths. He was curled up in a fetal position, facedown. His head was lowered and his arms covered it, as though he expected blows from heavy fists, maybe godly fists. His glasses lay in the dirt. Hutch knelt beside him and rubbed his back.

  “I know,” he said gently. He caught Terry’s eyes to include him in the conversation. “Listen. I interviewed a guy who ran a survival school. I even went through it—not the whole thing, but I got the gist.”

  “I remember that,”Terry said.

  “Yeah. Before he started this outdoor training course, he was a federal accident investigator. Plus he wrote about these dramatic rescues and stuff for, I don’t know, National Geo or something. He spent like years reading accident reports from all sorts of things: shipwrecks, people lost in the wilderness, hostage situations. He identified what traits survivors had in common—who lived, who died, and why.”

  Phil lifted his head. His flesh was red, his eyes redder. Tears and sweat misted his entire face. Bits of dirt and grass clung to it. Snot soaked the three-day-old stubble on his upper lip.

  Hutch nodded. “The first thing survivors do is they recognize they’re in a life-or-death situation. Sounds stupid, I know, but apparently people either acknowledge it way too late, or they immediately deny it.You know, ‘No, no, no, this is normal. Planes are supposed to crash on deserted islands.’ That sort of thing. Doesn’t work.You gotta know you’re in survival mode. The sooner the better.”

  He looked from Phil to Terry. “Gentlemen, we’re in survival mode. These guys want to kill us. What we do from here on out, everything we do, will determine whether we get away alive . . . or not.”

  Phil uncoiled. He sat up on his knees. “Oh, I think David would agree that we’re in a life-or-death situation.” He ran the sleeve of his coat over the bottom of his face, sniffed. “But, Hutch . . . tell me what he did wrong.What did David do to not survive?”

  Hutch frowned. “That’s different.You can’t help what you don’t know about. They sucker punched us, that’s all. That won’t happen again.”

  Phil’s face reddened further, from apple to chili. “How can you say that? You don’t know.” He waved a hand toward the river valley. “What was that? Do you know what that was? I didn’t see them actually shoot anything, did you? So what was that?” He snatched up his glasses, stood, and glared down at Hutch.

  So many emotions were raging through Phil, through all of them, that Hutch wouldn’t be able to sort them out if he had an hour to do it.

  Phil climbed the embankment and looked down to where David had ceased to be. He glanced at Terry, sitting at his feet, then back to Hutch. “Like you said, we can’t defend against something we know nothing about.You can’t say it won’t happen again.”

  “So, what?” Hutch said, standing. “We lie down and die? We find those guys and turn ourselves over to them? What, Phil? What do you think we should do?”

  Faced with having to define action and not simply ramble about the odds against them, Phil had nothing to say. He stood there ready to spew wisdom, wanting to, but in the end, he simply sighed and sat down. He brushed at the dirt clinging to his glasses.

  After a minute,Terry said, “Beth. Justin and Dianne.”

  David’s family. Hutch’s guts twisted anew.

  “How are we going to tell them?”Terry said. “What are they going to do?”

  They didn’t have even a body to bring back.

  “We should all tell her,” Hutch said. “We all saw it.”

  “If the authorities let us,” Phil mumbled, not looking up from his lap.

  Silence. Hutch broke it with, “They’ll be okay.We’ll see to it, right?”

  Phil put on his glasses. He bowed his head: Of course.

  Terry’s lips formed a pained smile. “I’d like to start by meting out some justice. I can’t believe I wasted all my bullets.”

  “Hey,” Hutch said. He marched to the berm. “I told you before, Ter, you saved my life. I don’t think one or two bullets would have scared those guys off. If you had stopped firing, they would have pulled out their machine guns and blown us away.”

  “Or redirected that thing,” Phil said. “Whatever it was got David. Did you see, the guy in the truck was holding something when it happened?”

  “I saw it before,” Hutch agreed. “When they first came after me.”

  “You knew they had that weapon,” said Phil, “and didn’t tell us?”

  “I didn’t think you’d believe me, and it didn’t matter.We had to leave the campsite, we had to find David, and neither of those objectives would have changed if you realized we were up against more than just hillbillies with popguns.”

  “So what are we up against?”

  Hutch shook his head.

  “What I do know,” said Terry, “is they’re going to come back.We chased away a monster by throwing rocks at it, but monsters always come back—usually severely ticked off.”

  “So what do we do?” Phil asked.

  Hutch rose to his feet, putting him at eye level with Terry and Phil, who were sitting on the low berm. “We can try hiding until the helicopter comes back for us.”

  “That’s nine more days!” Phil threw up his hands. “Don’t you think people with weapons like that have ways of tracking down targets? Come on!”

  Hutch was silent. Phil was right but he didn’t want to say it.

  Terry said, “That town is what, five miles from here?”

  “Fiddler Falls,” Hutch agreed.

  “Do they have cops?”Terry asked.

  “I would think so.”

  “And phones?”

  “Satellite phones.”

  “Wait a minute,” Phil said. “Where did these guys come from?” They looked at each other for a few moments.

  “Maybe . . .” Hutch said. “Maybe some ritzy hunting lodge in the area. They were driving a Hummer.”

  “Or maybe Fiddler Falls,” Phil said.

  “What?” said Terry. “Like they’re just living in this rinky-dink backwoods town, and they happen to have a cannon or whatever it is—some weapon half the armies of the world would kill for? Does that mean the town’s in on it, covering for them? No, I got it. They developed this crazy weapon worth a billion bucks on the open market, but they’d rather rent it out to fat cats who come up here and hunt humans for a thousand bucks a head. Something like that?”

  “Look,” Hutch said. “There’s a lot we don’t know. But we have to do something. I say we go look at the town, and if it looks cool, we go in.”

  21

  The spot of the world that hosted the town of Fiddler Falls, Saskatchewan, had rolled into darkness by the time the three men reached its outskirts. A partial moon threw a bluish glow into the avenues and front yards. Hutch remembered finding last night’s moon tranquil and as complementary to the landscape as an art lamp was to a Renaissance masterpiece. This one made everything appear sinister: the shadows were deeper and normal objects somehow seemed unreal, as though they were painted props. In fact, much of what the three of them encountered reminded Hutch of a Twilight Zone episode.

  Intuition got Hutch off the road to walk over yards, close to the trees and eventually the houses. Terry and Phil joined him without comment. The first house they passed, a rustic A-frame, was dark,
without even the blue flicker of a television set in its windows.

  “We should knock,”Terry said.

  “What if the townspeople are in on it?” Phil replied.

  “I just can’t see that.”

  “Until today, could you see your friend blowing up without apparent cause?”

  “Let’s move on,” Hutch said.

  As they drew nearer to the town, houses appeared more frequently, and it became clear that something was rotten in Fiddler Falls. By Hutch’s count, only two rooms burned with light out of the eight houses they passed.

  “Have you noticed all the garage doors are open?”Terry said.

  “Why close them in a town so small that everyone knows each other?” Phil said. “Till snowfall, anyway.”

  “Hold on a sec.” Terry jogged into one of the dark garages. He returned a minute later, looking glum. “That truck in there, its hood is up. I couldn’t see anything, but I reached in and felt a mass of wires. They’d been cut.”

  Hutch glanced up the dirt road toward what he believed was the town center. Now he noticed that each of the three vehicles in view, either on the road or in a driveway, had a raised hood.

  “You still think the town’s in on it?” Hutch asked.

  “What town? This is a ghost town,” Phil said. “I do think we should see if anyone’s home. Maybe some people are hiding from whatever caused this.”

  “If they are,” Hutch said, “they’re not going to answer for us.They might even shoot through the door.”

  “I would,” Phil agreed.

  “And if they are home and do answer,” continued Hutch, “I wouldn’t trust them any farther than I could throw you.”

  “Hey.”

  “No, seriously. If this whole town got evacuated or kidnapped or killed, how could you trust anyone not evacuated or kidnapped or killed?”

  “Okay,” said Terry.“How about we break in, see what we can find?”

  “Same problem as knocking,” said Hutch. “What if you enter the wrong house and get blown away by some poor soul who thinks you’re one of them? Let’s keep looking.”