Patrick Lee - Deep Sky

It immediately slipped downward a quarter inch, its sides lightly shuddering against the frame. If he let go entirely it might stay where it was, or it might hold for five seconds and then drop, making all the sound in the world as it went.

He heard Jeannie’s voice, through the doorway and down the hall. “Is ‘Go to hell ’ too subtle for you people to grasp?”

A man replied, his tone coming from a deep, broad chest cavity. “Where are they?”

“Probably bullshitting the shop owner next door. They’re your people, why don’t you call them?”

No reply. Just boots thudding around on the ancient wood floor.

Travis leaned back inside and looked around for something with which to brace the window.

There was nothing.

He’d have to shut it, and not quickly—he couldn’t trust it to stay quiet at any real speed. There were long vertical abrasions where it’d rubbed against its frame over the decades, probably on humid days when the wood had expanded. Days like this one.

He began to ease it downward, making about an inch per second.

“You saw which way they went?” the deep voice said, still somewhere up front by the bar.

There was no audible reply. Travis pictured Jeannie just pointing, too pissed to speak. She would send them along Main Street back in the direction of their Humvee, to keep them from walking past this alley.

He had the window half shut now. Twelve inches left.

Paige and Bethany were right beside him, watching the progress with gritted teeth.

Nine inches. Eight.

“Sorry to bother you when you’re this busy,” the deep voice said. The boots clumped away toward the front door.

Six inches.

Then a bird started screaming, somewhere above Travis. He looked up sharply at the sound.

A blue jay. Right on the cornice ten feet overhead. It scolded in loud, double squawks. It probably had a nest up there. The cries went on for four seconds and then the bird flitted out of sight onto the roof.

Silence followed, outside and inside. The boot steps toward the front door had halted.

Then they began again—thumping quickly over the hardwood toward the back room.

“Shit,” Travis whispered.

He lowered the window the last six inches in the next second, risking the sound. It made none.

Paige and Bethany had already covered the distance to the back corner of the building across the alley—ten or twelve diagonal feet. Travis followed, got past the edge and stopped alongside them, his back against the old cedar siding. They listened.

At first there was only silence.

Then came the scrape and whine of the window going up. The sill creaked as heavy weight leaned onto it. Travis waited for the clamber of a body coming through, and the scuff of soles on pavement, but all he heard was a fingertip drumming idly on wood. After a moment it stopped. There was a click and a wash of static, and then silence again.

“Anyone copy at the Raines house?”

Static as the man waited.

Then a tinny voice: “Go ahead.”

“Leave three men up there, send the rest down here for a coordinated search. Bring every Humvee.”

“Got it.”

“Put the three that stay behind on lookout. Eyes on the slopes below the treeline. These people didn’t come in a vehicle.”

“You want to take Holt up on his offer? Grab law enforcement from nearby jurisdictions? We could have an army in here pretty soon, taking orders from us.”

The fingertip drummed again. Less than a second.

“Make the call.”

A click ended the static and then the window came down hard, and muffled steps faded away behind it.

The three of them ran along the row of back lots until they’d passed four more alleys. They stopped behind a building that nestled against a side street, and listened.

Far away, across and above town, the Humvees at Raines’s house fired up one by one and began to move. Then their sound was lost to the roar of the one near the Third Notch.

Travis nodded quickly and they sprinted across the street to the next block. They continued into it past the first building, then turned down an alley and moved farther away from Main Street, at last coming out between a little art gallery and the town’s post office. The street they now faced ran parallel to Main. Across it were small homes tucked close to one another, and beyond lay three more blocks of the same, the whole spread rising toward the exposed hills. Those hills could be easily climbed—the three of them had come down them fifteen minutes ago—but it would take a good sixty seconds to reach the redwoods from the concealment of the highest backyards. That hadn’t been a problem when nobody was watching. Now that at least three sets of eyes would be , an undetected crossing was pointless to even think about.

Travis thought about it anyway. If they could get up into the trees and hide, they could circle around to the mine, probably a mile away through unbroken forest.

Paige gazed up at the woods too, and the open ground beneath, clearly running all the same calculations.

“We’ve probably got three minutes before the first highway patrol units roll in here,” Paige said. “It’ll be a steady stream after that; anything we try to do will just get harder and harder.” She paused. “Three minutes. That’s not enough time to think of even a bad plan.”

Travis stared at the empty hillsides a moment longer, then dropped his gaze to the residential blocks nearer by. Dozens of homes, most of them probably empty by now. A natural gas explosion might make a nice diversion; five or six at once might even generate a smokescreen behind which they could climb. Or maybe he could hotwire a car, douse its interior with gasoline, and send it rolling down to the lake in flames. It would probably crash into something before it got there, but that in itself would be a fine distraction. It might buy them a fifty-fifty chance of gaining the trees unseen, provided they were way up at the edge of town and ready to run at the moment of impact.

But none of those things could be done in three minutes. Not even close.

“You’re right,” he said. “We don’t have time to plan anything.”

“So what do we do?” Paige said.

All Travis could think of was a panic option. It was the furthest thing from a plan. He couldn’t even properly envision how it would play out—he had yet to actually see the nearby Humvee and the number of men inside it. Probably more than one. Probably fewer than five.

He could hear it now, grumbling along in low gear, hunting the alleys that branched off of Main Street. It would pass this alley in another twenty seconds or so.

It hardly mattered that these guys had no description of their prey. The fact that the three of them were on foot would be enough. None of Rum Lake’s few remaining occupants were out for a stroll just now.

“Stay close to me,” Travis said, “but stay in the alley. And be ready to run if this doesn’t work.”

He said no more. He turned back toward Main, two hundred feet away along the alley’s length. Stared at the gap where the Humvee would soon appear. He was pretty sure he could get there first.

He ran. As fast as he could. Heard Paige and Bethany following behind, and the heavy diesel engine somewhere ahead and to the side.

One hundred feet from the alley’s mouth now. Fifty. Ten.

He burst right through it without slowing, and saw the huge vehicle in his peripheral vision. Twenty-five feet away. Matte black. Soaking up the overcast glare and reflecting away almost none of it.

Travis kicked the sidewalk with the front of his foot, and sprawled. He hit the concrete with his hands and tumbled once, scraping every part of his body that struck. He heard the Humvee’s engine throttle down hard. Heard the faint whine of shocks as the driver hit the brakes and the thing’s five thousand pounds rocked forward onto its front suspension.