Craig Johnson - Hell Is Empty

“Shut up.”

He sighed a laugh. “Go. I will follow you very soon. Just let me sit here for a few moments and catch my breath.”

My voice broke as I lifted at his shoulders again. “Virgil, you’re going to die out here.”

He laughed again, softer this time. “Go, Lawman. I will follow, I promise.”

I stood and looked down at him and at the snow that had collected on the bear head. I tore into the pack, pulled out the sleeping bag, jerked it from the stuff sack, and then wrapped it around him.

As I started to leave, his hand came up and rested in his lap. He was holding the battered copy of Inferno. I looked at him, and he fumbled with the book. “This book… You know who the lowest ring of hell is reserved for?”

I kneeled back down. “Virgil, I don’t think you should be talking.”

“Traitors.”

I didn’t say anything at first, but the words were in my mouth, looking for a place to go. “I thought you said you hadn’t read this book?”

He tried to smile with a bunching of one of his cheek muscles. It must have hurt.

“Are you trying to tell me something, Virgil?”

He didn’t say anything more, but the smile faded and he looked sad. I glanced up the trail and then back to him. “I’m going to go up there and finish killing that son of a bitch, and then I’m going to come back with the others and get you under that overhang. Understand?”

He didn’t move, and his eye returned to the snow.

I tucked the bag around him a little closer and stood. “I’ll be back, you understand?”

I cradled the rifle in my arms Indian-style as I walked, a fresh round in place and my underlying finger on the trigger.

We had been closer to the overhang than I thought, and it seemed to move toward me like some devilishly open mouth yawning from the snow, the frozen stalactites looking like teeth.

I continued to follow the tracks that Shade and the two hostages had made, Virgil’s words echoing in my head. Traitors. Was it a confession? An indictment?

My eyes kept drifting to the rim overhead. The spot where I’d tagged Shade was disturbed, and there was no snow there. The closer I got, the less chance there was that he could hit me from above, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t waiting in the relative gloom of the shelter straight ahead.

There were a few dislodged boulders that had fallen in front of the overhang a long time ago; I stepped between them, and it was like a curtain parting. A few flakes floated like fireflies following me in, but other than a drift that had sealed the western side, it was bare underneath the granite precipice.

From the light of a battery-powered lantern, I could see there were two of them toward the back, and the man jumped when he saw me. The FBI agent, Pfaff, was tied with nylon zip cords and a bandana tight around her mouth. She was leaning against the back wall with a sleeping bag underneath her and was evidently unconscious.

The Ameri-Trans guard was seated a little away with another sleeping bag hanging over his shoulders; he was apparently neither bound nor gagged. He leapt to his feet with his hands behind his back, a little unsteady. “Thank God.”

Some of the snow slid off of me and fell to the ground as I leveled the barrel of the Sharps. “Don’t move.”

He glanced at the woman and then back to me. “What?” He took a step forward, this one a little more composed. “Hey, I’m one of the good guys.”

I raised the barrel slightly, centering it on his chest. “I said, don’t move.”

He stopped, and I studied him, especially the way the sleeping bag seemed to hang up on something at his back. He was the one from the truck, the heavyset man who had been having trouble on the ridge when I’d spotted them through the binoculars. His nose had been bloodied, and it was probably broken, the swelling overtaking his eyes that shone in the darkness like wet paint.

The stocking cap on his head was pushed up but the rest of him looked normal-except for one thing: he still wore full ammo clips on his belt.

Traitors.

He tried to distract me by talking. “Hey, we need your help.”

“Why aren’t you tied up?”

He started to say something, realized it wasn’t something he wanted to say and certainly something he didn’t want me to hear, and then settled on something else. “I am. I mean, my hands are.”

“Show them to me.”

He started moving, and it was a little too fast for my taste.

“Slow.”

He hesitated, and there was that briefest of moments where I could see him trying to make up his mind. It all came down to judging-if you were a good judge of the man in front of you, you might survive; if not, then you were the honored dead. It’s never about who’s the fastest, strongest, toughest-it’s always about who, when everyone else would pause, will commit.

“I’m really tired, and I’ve already done this drill with the convict you left in the Thiokol. He made the right choice and is still alive-you make the wrong one, and I’m going to dislocate a couple of your solid organs.”

He remained motionless, and there was a dead silence as more flakes flickered to the ground in a semicircle behind me. “What do you want me to do?”

“Just drop it.”

“It might go off.”

I felt my finger maintaining a slight pressure on the trigger. “Well, then, bring it around carefully-like your life depends on it, which it most certainly does.”

I guess he thought he could make it.

I guess he thought I was in worse shape than I was.

I guess he felt like this was his only chance. In a way, I suppose he was right, but in another way, he was terribly wrong.

The Sig came around quickly in his left hand, but he could have been Billy the Kid and there was no way he could’ve aimed and fired in the time it took me to pull the set and final trigger. I had turned sideways for two reasons, the first to aim the long barrel of the rifle, which, unlike the short barrel on the semiautomatic, would place the bullet exactly where I wanted it. The other was to provide him with the smallest target I could-an old duelist and gunfighter trick.

Maybe I was still affected by my condition, or maybe it was that I simply didn’t want to take his life, but I paused and he fired first. The round went to my left as he overcompensated and drew the Sig’s barrel past me.

I pulled the trigger, and the buffalo rifle delivered its package at a much shorter range than it had been designed for in one hell of a thunderous response.

Nobody flies backward when they’re shot; no matter how large the caliber and how close the shot, they just slump. You die falling down, which is a terrible way to die-it destroys the confidence before it destroys the body, and that must be a terrible thing to be left with in those last few seconds.

I stood there for what felt like a long time as the echoing sound of the. 45-70 subsided in my head, finally stepping across the broken rocks and around his foot. I nudged the. 40 out of his grip with the toe of my boot, bent over what was left of him, pulled off my glove, and placed my fingers at his neck. Nothing.

Must’ve been my day for it.

I looked at his eyes, hazel-green and staring at the granite ceiling, and then reached down with two fingers and closed them, completing the ritual.

The second jolt of adrenaline had produced no tremors, which told me that the surge was only enough to keep me going for a short time and get me back to barely operable condition.

I shrugged the pack off and turned to look at Kasey Pfaff, who, thankfully, was breathing. I could see that she had a monster of a goose egg at one side of her forehead, which might’ve explained why the sounds of the shots hadn’t awakened her. I remembered that I had put my old bone-handled case XX knife in the zippered pocket in my pants, so I took off my gloves, retrieved it, and reached down to cut her free.