C. Box - Force of Nature

HIS MOOD was very, very dark as he stood and fished around on the chair through a pile of old clothes. He pulled on a pair of baggy gym trunks and a grease-stained hooded sweatshirt. His flip-flops were side by side under the bed, and he stepped into them.

“Come back soon,” she sang from bed. “I’m wide awake now.”

“Go back to sleep.”

The. 30–30 lever-action Winchester was propped in the corner, and he grabbed it by the barrel as he walked by and shuffled down the hallway.

Maybe, he thought, the people outside honking their horn were visitors to the res, because locals would have known by now he wasn’t coming out. They’d know he meant business when they looked up and saw a big pissed-off Indian approaching the car with a hunting rifle.

He pushed through the steel door into his retail store. It was dim inside; the only lights were from the drink coolers. He paused at the front of his store and squinted, trying to see who was in the offending car. But because the bulb on the overhead pole light had been shot out recently-teenagers Darryl and Benny Edmo and their new pellet gun, he suspected-he couldn’t see much more than the outline of a vehicle in the moonlight on the other side of the gas pumps. One of the pumps blocked his view of the driver, but he could see no other occupants in the car.

Bad Bob slammed back the bolt locks and threw open the front door. Without the barrier, the blaring of the horn was louder and more infuriating than before.

“Hey!” he yelled. “Knock it off!” But his voice was drowned out.

Bob strode across the loose gravel on blacktop, ignoring the sharp little stones that wedged between his bare toes and between the soles of his feet and the flip-flops.

“Knock it the fuck off!” he bellowed, and worked the lever action on his rifle with a swift and metallic clatch-clatch sound.

The horn ceased.

Bob said, “Thank you!”

Overhead, the full moon hung fat and low over the western mountains. As he glanced at it, he noticed a distant hawk cross over the white/blue surface like a miller moth dancing across a porch light. The hawk gave him pause, and something inside of him stirred a little. What? he thought. Does it have some kind of meaning? The old folks still talked as if everything that happened in the natural world had meaning outside of the obvious, but Bob never paid any attention to that stuff. But something tweaked him inside now and he couldn’t entirely ignore it.

He squeezed between the pumps to confront the driver, when a flashlight beam blinded him.

“Hey,” he said, raising his left forearm to block the light.

“Bad Bob, right?” came a male voice. It was somewhat familiar. A white voice.

“Get that light outta my face. I can’t see. Buddy,” Bob said, “do you know what fucking time it is?”

Although the light clicked off, all Bob could see was a round green orb burned into his eyes. He heard the car door open, though, and just as quickly the rifle was wrenched out of his right hand.

“Fuckin…” Bob started to say, but he heard the shuffle of someone behind him and something icy and sharp bit into his throat and squeezed off any further words as well as his breath.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” the voice said calmly in his right ear. “But you’ll need to stop struggling. Do you understand?”

Bob tried to draw air in through his nose, but the cord-or wire-around his throat restricted that, too. He reached up involuntarily with both hands to feel what was choking him, but the man slapped his hands down.

“Relax. I’m not going to hurt you. I just need some information.”

Bob could feel his heart whumping, and a voice inside his head told him to stay still. He lowered his hands and rocked back slightly, which lessened the pressure of the thin wire noose-or whatever it was. His eyes had readjusted to the dark, and he glanced toward his store, hoping Rhonda would see what was happening at the front door. She wasn’t there.

“Do you remember me?” the man asked, his lips inches from Bob’s ear. “Do you recognize my car?”

Despite the biting pain it caused, Bob managed to shake his head. Even though he remembered the Audi Q7.

The man behind him chuckled. “Oh, we both wish it were so. Now, listen to me carefully, Bob. I’m going to ease up on you so you can talk. Like I said, all I need is information. Then, if you help me out and you don’t turn around and you walk straight back into your little store, everything will be fine. You’ll have an abrasion on your neck, but that’s all. Do you hear me?”

Although spangles were replacing the stars in the night sky, Bob managed to nod.

“Okay,” the man said, and the pressure eased, but the wire was still cutting into the soft flesh of Bob’s throat. “I’m looking for a house. Seven seventeen Farm Station Street. The street numbers here on the reservation-I can’t make heads or tails of them.”

Bob knew that to be true, and it was something he was used to. No one ever used street or house numbers, anyway. They just said, “I’ll meet you at Mary’s house” or “turn west by where Jimmy Nosleep used to live.”

“I don’t know the numbers,” Bob croaked. “Tell me who you’re looking for.”

“Alice Thunder,” the man said. “She works at the school.”

Bob felt a stab of pain in his heart. If this man would do this to him, what would he do to Alice? Everyone loved Alice…

As if the man could read his thoughts, the wire cinched tighter, and Bob groaned.

“Where does she live?” the man asked.

Bob thought, I’ll tell him. Then I’ll call Alice and tell her to run like hell and I’ll call the tribal police right after that. Then he’d call his buddies and tell them to grab their hunting rifles and meet him at Alice’s place, where they’d teach this son-of-a-bitch a lesson before the cops got there. He still couldn’t quite believe how quickly the man in the dark crossover-the man Nate Romanowski had asked him about-had taken his rifle and slipped the garrote over his head. He looked again at his store and wordlessly begged Rhonda to look out.

Then, when the noose eased, Bob said, “Go down this street in front of us about a mile and a half and turn right on a dirt road just past a big stack of hay. Her house is half a mile from that, on your left.”

“Ah,” the man said. “I was right by it earlier and didn’t see it. You people need to come up with a numbering system that makes sense.”

Because of the wire around his neck and the man’s hands on the wire, Bob felt intimately connected to this person, and he could feel it when the man shifted his weight, as if he were digging something out of a pocket.

His keys. There was a dull thunk of an electronic lock releasing. In his peripheral vision, Bob saw the trunk of the vehicle lift on its own and an interior light come on inside. Until that moment, he’d thought he had a chance. No longer.

“We’re going for a ride now,” the man behind him said, and steered him toward the open trunk. Bob saw that thick clear plastic sheeting had been laid down inside.

“I thought you said…”

Bob never finished his question before the wire was cinched tight and his world went black and the last thing he saw was the after-image of the hawk flying across the surface of the moon and he wished he’d understood earlier what it foretold.

Nate Romanowski reached the outskirts of Colorado Springs as the morning sun lit up the fresh snowfall on the western slope of the mountains in a brilliant green and white palette. There had been a light snowfall during the night that was melting away in the high-altitude sun, and wisps of steam wafted up from the asphalt. His tires hissed on the wet surface. It was Tuesday, October 23.