C. Box - Nowhere to Run

Joe dropped and counted thirty.223 cartridges on the ground. A lot, he thought. More than Caleb would have dropped casually. In fact, Joe thought with a growing sense of dark unease, it was the entire quantity of a combat AR-15 magazine.

Short of breath, Joe lurched from tree to tree clutching a rifle bullet and the journal he recognized from the first time he’d encountered Caleb in the lake. It didn’t take long to find the place a few yards away where Camish had unloaded his shotgun shells. Four of them, bright with their red plastic sleeves and high brass, lay in a single pile as if dropped from beneath the weapon like metal scat.

He opened the journal and thumbed through it as his eyes swam. The first three-quarters of the book were devoted to daily journal entries. The last quarter appeared to be an antigovernment screed. Joe thought, Their manifesto . Hundreds of words that could be summed up as Don’t Tread on Me .

The last of Caleb’s entries was a spidery scrawl that read, “Please take good care of Diane. It ain’t her fault. She done nothing wrong. She just wanted to be free of you people.”

Nate had entered the trees with his gun drawn. Joe watched Nate as his eyes moved from the.223 bullets to the shotgun shells. His friend’s upper lip curled into a frightening grimace.

Joe said, “No wonder they didn’t shoot. They unloaded before they walked out there.”

“Oh, man,” Nate whispered. “It was bad before. It just got worse.”

Joe called Marybeth. She picked it up on the first ring. He said, “I’m not hurt. Nate’s not hurt. We’re done here.”

She said, “Joe, what’s wrong?”

He took in a long breath of cool mountain air that tasted like pine, and he looked out on the meadow as the sun lit up the grass so green it hurt his eyes. “I don’t even know where to start.”

At midmorning, Joe could smell food cooking from above in the rimrocks. The aroma wafted down through the sparse lodgepole copse. He clucked at his gelding and led the animal up toward the source of the aroma and thought about how long it had been since he’d eaten. Not that it mattered, since there was nothing left in his stomach at all.

They’d lifted the bodies of Caleb and Camish facedown over the saddles of their riding horses and lashed them to the saddles as if they were packing out game animals. Joe and Nate wordlessly tied lifeless hands and feet together under the bellies of their mounts to keep the bodies from sliding off. Before they guided the horses and the bodies out of the meadow up toward the rimrocks, Joe had called dispatch on his satellite phone. The dispatcher offered to route him through to Sheriff Baird or Special Agent Chuck Coon of the FBI, who were both in place and in charge at the command center that had been established at the trailhead.

Joe said, “No need. I don’t want to talk to either of them right now. Just pass on the word that the Grim Brothers-or the Clines, or whatever the hell their real names are-are dead. There is no more threat. Tell them they can stand down. We’ll be bringing the bodies out by nightfall.”

The dispatcher said, “My God. They’re going to want to talk directly with you.”

Said Joe, “I’m not in the mood,” and powered down the phone so they couldn’t call him back.

When they cleared the trees, Joe spotted Diane Shober. She was a hundred yards above them, peering down out of a vertical crack in the rimrock wall. When she saw them-and what they had strapped to their horses-her hand went to her mouth and he heard her cry out. Then she was gone back into the cave.

Joe thought that unless he’d been told specifically by Farkus and Camish where the cave was located, he never would have found it. He thought it unlikely that the search-and-rescue team would have found it, either. And certainly not the strike team building at the trailhead who, for the most part, weren’t familiar with the terrain to begin with. There was a shelf of rock on the side of the mountain, and it was striated with sharp-edged columns over ten feet high, stretching for several miles in each direction. It was as if the mountain had been shoved down by a giant hand with tremendous pressure until the top fifth of it broke and slipped to the side, exposing the wound. The striation was deceptive in its uniform geology, and its columns made stripes of dark shadows on the granite. The opening Diane looked out of could have been one of the vertical-striped shadows.

“See her?” Joe said over his shoulder to Nate.

“Yes.”

She slowly shook her head from side to side. The sun gleamed off the tears streaming down her face.

Joe called, “We’re here to take you home.”

The woman drew back a few feet into the shadow of the opening.

After a few moments, she said, “I am home.”

He said, “Diane, the reason we’re here is because your mom asked me to come. She misses you.”

Joe wanted to persuade, to cajole, and not to threaten in any way. He couldn’t bear the thought of forcing another result like what had happened with the brothers.

“We didn’t want to hurt them,” he said. “We did everything we could to talk them into coming down with us. Caleb and Camish forced the issue. In a way, they committed suicide.”

Shober nodded. It wasn’t news to her. Obviously, Joe thought, the brothers had indicated to her how things were likely to end if the first wave-Joe and Nate-wasn’t turned back by the traps.

Behind Joe, the packhorse nickered. Up on top of the wall but out of sight, a horse called back, then another. The brothers had kept the horses ridden by the Michigan men and had picketed them up in the trees.

“If it’s okay with you,” Joe said, “we’ll come on up there and get those horses and saddle them up for you. You can ride down with us.”

Diane Shober stepped out of the cave opening. Her dark hair was tied into a ponytail. Her clothing was more formfitting than it had been before, and she looked younger than she had as Terri Wade, he thought.

She said, “What if I don’t come with you?”

Said Joe, “Let’s not find out. The truth is, this mountain will be crawling with law enforcement within the hour, I’d guess. We know where you are, and they’ll find you. They might not be as sympathetic as us.”

“Sympathetic?” Diane said, laughing bitterly. “Like you were sympathetic with Camish and Caleb there?”

Joe’s voice held when he said, “They gave us no choice. You’ll have to believe me when I tell you that. They must have decided they’d rather die up here than take their chances in court.”

Diane nodded. “Yes,” she said, “that’s what they told me they might have to do.”

“Then come with us,” Nate said. “We’ll do our best to protect you.”

Again, Diane laughed. It was a high, plaintive laugh. “You think you can protect me, do you? From the government? From the press? From my father and the kind of people he works with?”

Joe said nothing.

Diane said, “Have things changed, then? Can we be free people again? Is that what you’re saying?”

Nate said, “I know people who could help you. You aren’t the only one who’s gone underground.”

Diane studied Nate for a long time, as if trying to make up her mind about something. Finally, she withdrew back into the cave. Joe waited without moving for five minutes, then turned to look at Nate. Nate looked back at him as if he were thinking the same thing.

“Damn,” Joe said, and quickly tied his horse to a stump. Nate did the same. They ran up the slope, breathing hard.

Joe threw himself through the opening. The sudden darkness made him blink. It took a moment for his eyes to begin to adjust. He and Nate stood in the entrance of a surprisingly large cavern. There were beds, a stove, handmade tables and chairs, fabric and hides on the interior walls. It smelled damp, but the food odors made it surprisingly comfortable. It reminded Joe of where Nate hid out, and he wondered how many others there were in the country in hiding. How many people had gone underground, as Nate said?