Deadfall Read online

  Not today, friend, he thought.

  The Hummer’s zigzagging allowed Kyrill to narrow the gap.They were traveling fast now, and Declan felt a surge of excitement bordering on giddiness. The people in the Hummer must realize what was coming, what Declan was capable of doing to them. He checked the targeting mechanism again. This time when he released his thumb, the crosshairs remained.

  The Hummer was in range.

  Keeping the camera on the Hummer and the crosshairs directly in front of it with one practiced thumb, Declan retrieved the walkietalkie again and said, “Okay, get ready.”

  He pushed the trigger control with his right index finger. Slacker confirmed the order with a quick three-note chime.The tone was too quiet for targets to hear, unless they were close and the air was free of ambient noise. But if they did, it would be the last thing they heard, a death knell played fast because that’s the way they were about to die.

  “Stop stop stop!” Declan told Kyrill.

  They braked, sliding on the grass. The familiar visible rippling of air currents, which seemed to cocoon a green rod of radiant light, appeared instantly before them, its descent too fast for human eyes. In less than a nanosecond the Hummer stopped, pushed into the ground, and instantly superheated. It came apart. Metal that was not fused by the strike flew up with dirt and gravel and grass, appearing to explode, but without explosives. Then its gas tank ruptured and it did explode, spewing burning fuel over the hillside. The front right wheel continued on, bouncing and rolling and disappearing right over the next hill.

  The Jeep slid sideways to a complete stop. Declan hopped out and trotted toward the destroyed Hummer until a hot wind pushed him back a step. He turned to wave Pruitt forward.

  “Come on, come on.”

  Pruitt had the camera resting on his shoulder, the eyepiece in place, adjusting the focusing wheel as he approached.

  Kyrill stepped up beside Declan. He said, “Wanna put a chase like that in the game?”

  Declan thought about it. “Yeah,” he said finally. “That was pretty cool. But let’s throw in some more evasive maneuvers.” He waggled his hand in front of him. “We could put in an algorithm that makes targeting more difficult but slows them down. Kind of like what happened here, you know? And let’s bring trees in on the other side too. That’ll make it more challenging, like a slalom.”

  Kyrill looked around, scratching his head. “We could put a river right here, maybe a waterfall.”

  “Let’s not get carried away. Pru!” he called. “Pru! Get the river valley and the sunrise. That’s beautiful.” He turned to Kyrill again. “Don’t you think that’s beautiful?”

  36

  Every time Laura felt bad about violating the privacy of her neighbors, she reminded herself that Tom was dead and Dillon was in jeopardy. There was nothing she could do now for her husband. It was Dillon who drove her on and absolved her guilt. She and Terry had spontaneously developed an effective method for searching for the things they needed. They would check garages first. If there were no vehicles, or the ones they found had been disabled, they would take a quick glance for a gun rack or something that looked like a safe place to store firearms. Then they would move on. They had realized they could not search every home and felt that firearms kept inside would be too well hidden. So far they’d inspected six garages, finding three four-wheel drives, a dirt bike, and a four-wheeler. All of them had been rendered useless. In the seventh garage they found a rifle rack mounted to the bare studs, but no weapons.The hood of the old truck there was down, giving them hope.

  “This is Emmett Cooper’s. He’s a fishing guide. He’s always using this thing. I know it runs.”

  Terry told her, “Pop the latch.”

  She did and came around to the front as he lifted the hood. The spark plug wires had been sliced, the distributor cap cracked and broken.

  Laura felt her heart sink. In the hotel room she had bought in to Terry’s conviction that every vehicle could not possibly have been disabled. Now she was starting to believe that it was possible, that they would not get to the cabin.What would happen to Dillon then? Would Hutch stay with him? Would he feel come back for his friends? Would Declan and his gang find them? She had not given any of these questions much thought, choosing instead to believe that she would get there and be with him.

  Terry lowered the hood.

  He said with a half smile, “Would’ve liked to slam it.”

  She shared his frustration. She felt like pounding her fists against the hood, kicking the sheet metal until the truck looked like it had rolled end over end from the hunting cabins in the hills above town. But they did not know who of their assailants remained in town, within hearing distance. So they searched quietly. Most garage doors had been raised and left open.When Terry or Laura had to open one, they pulled slowly, though in their hearts they wanted to slam the things up, noise be damned.

  In one garage—it was Bonnie Tithly’s, the sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade teacher—they found a Jeep CJ7 thoroughly disabled. Beside it was a four-wheel ATV. Laura remembered Bonnie arriving at school on it. It appeared to have been overlooked by the vandals, but there were no keys. They looked for them in the garage, perhaps hanging on a nail or inside a cabinet, but found nothing.Terry checked the interior garage door. It was unlocked and opened into a kitchen. Next to the door was a key rack in the shape of a wiener dog, little brass hooks in a row—all void of keys.

  Laura had allowed hope into her heart. As they searched kitchen drawers, coat pockets, closets, and countertops, the diminishing of that hope ached like a sore tooth.

  “Can’t you hot-wire it?” she asked, more desperation in her voice than she had intended.

  He shook his head. “Not much use for that skill in real estate.”

  She wondered if she could do it. Movies made it look so simple. Yank a couple wires, touch them together. But she knew that wasn’t the way it really worked. If it were that simple, there would be no point to keys in the first place. She felt it would take forever just to find out she couldn’t reach any wires, let alone which two, if only two, combined to ignite the ATV’s engine.

  Disappointed, increasingly frustrated and depressed, they moved to the next house.

  37

  Flat on his stomach, in the long grass, Hutch watched. First the green Cherokee, then the red Bronco roared past. He wished he still had his camouflage makeup, but he thought the woodland foliage provided ample cover, especially with their pursuers so intent on catching the Hummer. Lying beside him, Dillon raised his head. His hair was roughly the same color as the brown grass. Every little bit helped.

  As they had traveled over the valley floor, Hutch had removed his belt. He’d looped it through the steering wheel and let it hang. Dillon had retrieved Hutch’s bow from the backseat, selected an arrow from the quiver, and handed it to him. After the woods had appeared on their right—as Hutch knew they would from the topo map—he watched for just the right place to pull over. He had adjusted the speed of the Hummer to make his lead ideal in terms of the amount of time they would be out of sight. They crested a hill just as the Jeep crested the one behind them so that the two vehicles would be near the bottom of the following dips simultaneously as well.

  Hutch’s plan had worked perfectly.

  When he pulled to a stop near the trees, Dillon immediately hopped out with Hutch’s bow and slammed the door. He ran into the trees and dropped straight down.

  Hutch disengaged the transmission and wedged the arrow between the accelerator pedal and the front panel of the driver’s seat. The engine raced. He slid out and shut the door, then jumped up to rest his stomach on the open windowsill and tied the belt to a handhold on the door, keeping some slack in it. That would limit its movement in both directions without forcing it into a robotically straight inclination.

  Finally he slammed the transmission shifter into drive and shoved himself out of the window and away. The vehicle had spun its tires, found traction, and accelerated
away. The preparations had allowed him to accomplish this feat in less than ten seconds.

  He then kicked grass over the two marks made by the Hummer’s spinning tires and was in the grass with Dillon twenty seconds before Declan’s vehicles came over the rise.

  The Hummer breached the next hill and disappeared, followed closely by the Jeep and the Bronco.

  Hutch hoped the Hummer would travel all the way to the Fond du Lac and plunge in. That would move their enemies a good distance from them; if Declan thought he had witnessed a suicide or a crazy, inscrutable escape attempt, he might not bother to come looking for them again.

  After watching the vehicles disappear over the hill, Hutch and Dillon shared a smile. Dirt clung to the boy’s face, grass made his hair look wild, but in the short time Hutch had known him, he’d never looked so healthy, so happy . . . so good. It was the first time they were not hiding or running. At this moment, they were free. That knowledge transformed Dillon into the sort of child you’d see in a Disneyland commercial: carefree and boyish. His father’s death seemed to have temporarily fallen away from his consciousness, a brief reprieve from a burden Hutch knew the boy would bear his entire life.

  “The cabin?” he asked, giving Dillon a role to play in this adventure. Dillon seemed to understand Hutch’s intentions—he pretended to think about it. Then he said, “Yeah, I think the cabin should be our next stop.”

  Hutch reached for his binoculars, but found only their lightweight harness on his chest. He’d removed the binocs in the cabinet and had forgotten them there. He hoped he wouldn’t need them. He crawled backward on his hands and knees until the trees and the shadows grew thicker, then he stood. Dillon followed. Hutch had the boy’s face squarely in his vision when an explosion reached them from the near distance. Dillon jumped a bit. His hair rose, if not actually standing on end, as his scalp tightened in surprise. His eyes flashed wide, then his eyebrows came together in a scowl. His mouth offered a silent scream. The expression may have been comical had Hutch not realized that his own face had contorted similarly, and the emotion behind it was anything but funny.

  Another explosion, much smaller.

  Hutch thought he understood what had happened. Declan had fired upon the Hummer. He had not heard the whoosh-crack this time, because at that distance, the sounds of whatever it was coming down and the resulting explosion all blurred together. The second smaller explosion must have been the gas tank or some kind of munitions that had been stored in the Hummer.

  It shocked him to realize how very close he and Dillon had been to death. Again.

  He wondered what this sudden end to the chase meant to them. Did Declan have enough experience blowing up occupied vehicles to recognize the absence of bodies? Would he even check? Did it mean the pursuit was over or that it was about to start fresh?

  Hutch had gleaned enough from his previous encounters with Declan’s weapon to know that whatever provided the firepower also enabled Declan to peer down from the sky. He was convinced this was the reason Declan’s aim had been so far off when he had gone after Hutch in the woods, and why Hutch had been able to hide in the tree limbs, then flee back to camp. Several times during that trek he had crossed open fields; Declan must have spotted him at least once when he had done so.

  He had noticed something else about Declan’s weapon—and if it were true, it would give Declan’s targets an advantage. No, not an advantage, but a chance. Even if only a small one.What he had noticed was this: Declan’s attacks came in spurts.A brief, furious, almost staccato pounding followed by long periods of cease-fire. Cease-fire at least from the cannon. It was primarily during these times that Declan’s men armed themselves to continue the pursuit.

  These respites from the cannon attacks were fact; what bothered him was not having an explanation for them.Were they self-imposed for some reason, or were they forced upon Declan by the limits of technology? Probably the latter, since Hutch did not believe Declan exercised self-control.

  With his topo map, Hutch carried a grease pencil to mark animal sightings, possible campsites, and other points of interest. Now he withdrew both and recorded the time on the blank back of the map. He returned the pen and map to his jacket pocket.

  The boy from the television commercial was gone. Fear had returned. Dillon’s eyes brimmed with unshed tears. Whether they flowed from terror, from the realization of the close call, or from the reminder of his father, Hutch could not tell. He dropped to his knees, took the boy in his arms, and hugged him. Dillon squeezed tightly around his neck, weeping quietly, his small chest heaving against Hutch.

  But in giving comfort it was impossible not to receive it, and Hutch realized he had hugged Dillon not only for the boy’s sake but for his own as well. Each of them needed to know the comfort of another human.To know he was not alone in his fright.

  Despite an urgency to put ground between them and Declan’s gang, Hutch held Dillon until the child’s tears stopped. Even then, Hutch refused to relinquish his hug. When the boy lifted his head from Hutch’s shoulder and eased his hold, Hutch unwrapped his arms and leaned back. His patience was rewarded with a sad smile, but a smile nonetheless.

  “We gotta go,” Hutch said.

  “I know.”

  Hutch had expected no more than the nod Dillon had offered so many times before. He thought these words marked a deepening of their relationship, or at least of Dillon’s trust in him—and that was good enough.

  Turning his thoughts toward the journey ahead, Hutch retrieved the map again and spread it out on the ground. He lay down before it and asked Dillon to join him.

  “If I explain the terrain to you, on this map, do you think you could show me where the cabin is?”

  Dillon scanned the map—all of its thread-thin contour lines, tiny elevation numbers, color-coded ecosystem indicators. Finally he shrugged.

  Hutch said, “We’ll do it this way . . .” He pointed into the woods, in the direction they were heading, away from the place, where the Hummer was most certainly a smoldering wreck. “Over this wooded rise is another long, shallow valley, lots of trees. From the top of this hill we should see two mountains. One to our left would have trees coming around both sides, but not joining in front, like it’s wearing a shawl or cape . . .”

  Dillon listened, nodding. His eyes stared into the woods, but he was seeing Hutch’s landscape.

  38

  Laura sat on the rear bumper of an anonymous four-wheel-drive pickup truck, yet another vehicle disabled by Declan’s gang. She had lost count of how many garages they had entered, how many cars and trucks and motorcycles and ATVs they had checked. At last count the population of Fiddler Falls was 242.The number of households was roughly eighty-five, which included half a dozen at the Kramer boardinghouse and at least two dozen small cabins and mobile homes fanning out well beyond what Laura considered the town proper.That left approximately fifty residences in town. She knew not everyone owned a vehicle, but it seemed to her they had checked at least that many in the last ninety minutes or so.Terry leaned against the frame of the garage opening.

  “So I was wrong,” he said. “It seems they did reach every vehicle in town.”

  Laura frowned. “I heard they recruited some townsfolk to help them, threatened them if they didn’t. I suppose, with eight or ten people, it wouldn’t be too difficult to find everything with wheels and disable them.”

  Terry shrugged. “Look how many we got to. It’s not like they had to start them or spend any time with them. They just had to make them immobile.”They had found a few cars with broken driver’s side windows.Terry had speculated that they had been locked and broken into so the vandals could access the hood latches.

  “They collected keys as well,” Laura said. “They got mine, and I heard them demanding them from others. Kyrill and Bad, with their rifles.”

  “Doesn’t look like they needed to. They were thorough enough destroying the cars.”

  Laura thought about it, then said, “Except they kept
a couple for themselves.”

  “The ones they used to follow the Hummer,”Terry agreed.

  “It makes sense.Why have all this going on and rely on only one truck? They would want a backup and maybe a couple if they had to go in different directions, run different errands, or whatever it is they do.”

  “Are you thinking they kept a few more for themselves, not just the ones they’re driving now?”

  Laura nodded, lost in thought.

  Terry continued. “I didn’t see any other vehicles in front of the community center.”

  “Maybe they’re keeping them somewhere else. In some parking lot or garage we haven’t got to. That makes sense too: that they would have a backup, but hidden away, out of sight.”

  “So what do we do about it?”

  “They’re gone, aren’t they? Off chasing Dillon and Hutch?”

  “I don’t know if all of them—”

  Thunder cracked the silence. But it wasn’t thunder.They had both heard it before. Laura bounded off the bumper as though it had struck her at a good clip. She ran the length of the crush-rocked driveway and into the dirt road. She looked up to the hills, scanning.Terry reached her and saw it first.

  “There!”

  She saw where he was pointing, to a ribbon of smoke high in the hills. The point of origin was masked by distance and a nearer hill. It was in one of the clear areas, one of the low valleys that had been formed by a glacier eons ago.

  Laura pulled in a sharp breath and covered her mouth.

  “No. No. No,” she thought, then realized she had spoken aloud when Terry rushed to say, “No, it’s okay.We don’t know what that is. It could be anything.”

  “Anything? It’s them. It’s Declan. And Declan was after Dillon.” Panic hit her brain like raw alcohol. She felt light-headed. Shadows crowded the edges of her vision. She reached out and grabbed Terry’s arm.