Stephen Hunter - Black Light

No. Stay put. Be patient. You have the great advantage. Do not squander it. Be strong, keep the heart hard. Keep scanning.

Then, at the far end of the trench, back toward the cabin, he saw a target. The cross hairs came onto him. Head shot, he thought. Very carefully, Preece began to take the slack out of the trigger.

Russ watched Bob slither away down the creek bed, totally animal now, feral, intense, driven. Bob was out of sight quickly in the dark, and he moved so expertly he made no noise. It was his gift: he vanished.

Now Russ was alone. A great aching self-pity came over him. He did not want to be here, he did not want to be alone in the dark, with a world-class sniper with world-class gear hunting him. He looked up and down the creek bed, feeling the numbness of the cold eat into him, looking desperately for at least the energy to obey his meager instructions, which were only to position himself farther up the bed, wait for Bob to make his move, then slip away.

He moved tentatively along, discovering in his twenty-second well-fed year what every infantryman learns in his first week of duty: that crawling along the ground, particularly through mud and water, over rough stones with somebody trying to kill you, is quite unpleasant. It is in fact sheer misery.

Russ shivered as the water bubbled and frothed against his face. He slithered noisily through it, fighting for leverage, slipping occasionally. He scraped his numb fingers raw on the rocks. He was so cold!

At one point he lay, gasping for air. He looked back down the waterway and saw only the glint of the liquid and the claustrophobic walls of the creek bed. Ahead: more of the same. An immense depression came and sat upon his shoulders. He just wanted to curl up in a little ball and go to sleep. He wanted Mom and Dad and Jeff to tell him he was all right. He wanted to be in that beat-up little house on the outskirts of Lawton, with his fat old dad on the sofa watching football and drinking beer and his mother in the kitchen working like a dog and his brother just come in from hitting a home run, and he himself upstairs, reading Nietzsche or Mailer or Malamud or whomever, and feeling infinitely superior but also infinitely connected to them.

Fuck, he thought. I am turning into Dorothy. There’s no place like home.

He clicked his heels together three times but it didn’t work: he was still in the Oz of the Ouachitas, alone, with a wicked witch with a rifle trying to track and kill him.

He squirmed ahead another thirty or forty feet. Suddenly, he realized: I am out of creek bed. This is it. This is where I ought to be.

He gathered himself for a rush and someone spoke to him.

“Time for some cappuccino, motherfucker, heh, heh, heh.”

It was Jed Posey, with his shotgun.

Bob looked at his watch. The minutes hustled by. Three minutes thirty, three forty, three fifty.

From where he lay, half in and half out, he could see nothing, though to a sniper the dark itself has textures and may be read like a map. He knew where the hill was across the path because the black there was dense and impenetrable; there was enough illumination in the sky that he could read or sense the horizon at the top of the hill. To his left, the forest rolled away, essentially downhill, the path zigging off.

Bob knew he had about two hundred naked yards to go, uphill, then over the crest, moving through a screen of trees. It was too far. It was too damned far.

Fifty he might make, a hundred at the farthest reaches of luck. But two hundred to the point where he could fade into the forest past the crest and in its protection beeline north to intersect the logging road where the car was hidden: no, too far. Nobody would be that lucky.

Three fifty-five.

It was a lousy plan. It was a terrible plan. Why had he committed to it? He now saw it made better sense to go to hide right here, at this end. Then maybe, in the dawn, Preece or whoever would have to come and investigate. He might get into range with the .45 and Bob could take him.

But he hated that plan too. Preece would come at night, and he’d come with his black light blazing, and there was no place Bob or Russ could hide and he’d see them, cowering in the water, and from fifty yards out he’d do them both, easy as pie.

You have to move or you’ll die.

He tried to remember. Was he this scared in Vietnam? Was he this scared ever?

Everyone thought he was such a hero, such a cool hand in the insanity of a gun battle. He didn’t feel heroic. He felt like a little boy when Major Benteen comes and tells you your daddy is gone and the loss sits upon you and you face the universe totally alone.

I am alone, you think, and it scares you.

I am so alone , Bob thought: then he thought of his wife and his daughter.

I will get back! he thought, and with that he launched himself, screamed “Preece” loud as he could and started to run.

“You know what’d happen to you in prison, puppy? Them old cons’d use you like a gal. You’d be a gal, in prison.”

Russ cowered at his feet, still in the rushing water, freezing, trapped.

“Please don’t hurt me,” he begged. It wasn’t The Wizard of Oz anymore. It was Deliverance .

“‘Please don’t hurt me,’” laughed Posey.

“I never did anything,” whimpered Russ.

“Damn, ain’t that the way it always happens?” said Posey, scrofulous and old, so rancid of odor that Russ could smell him even now.

“Bye, bye, Maryjane,” said Posey, lifting the shotgun. “Here comes both bar—”

An interesting thing happened. As he was speaking, the upper half of Posey’s head, that is, from the nose up, simply vaporized into a cloud of mist, as if it had been somehow squirted away by a giant atomizer. There was no sound, there was no agony or death spasm, it was simply that in a nanosecond a living man became a totally dead one, the instant rag doll, as Jed Posey imploded like one of those poetically rigged buildings where the explosives knock out all the weight-bearing girders and the thing dissolves downward into its own rubble.

So it was with Posey, who melted downward (“I’m melting,” Russ thought incongruously, returning to Oz), spun and in a second had fallen with such loose-limbed thunder that when his crownless skull hit the ground, it sent a spray of brain gobbets and plasma spattering into Russ’s face. It was raining brains!

Ycccch!

He bolted backwards and puked for several seconds.

Then he cowered in the water.

No way he was going anywhere .

Preece knew from Nam what it looks like on the green scope when you hit. He saw the exact second the shot hit the brain and blew it out, noted the instant of utter stillness that came across a body from which life has just been ripped. A white, glowing spume expelled from the stricken skull; the body fought the inevitable for a split second, then yielded to death and collapsed into the creek bed.

One down.

Bob?

Probably the boy.

At that moment came the call “Preece” from the other end of the creek bed and Preece cursed, recognizing Bob’s tone in it, and pivoted swiftly to track the man down. But Bob was outside of the field of fire of the hide— dammit!— and Preece lost a valuable second deciding what to do and another one or two in the actual doing of it; with a stout elbow, he punched aside the plastic roof of the hide and sat upright, dragging the rifle with him. It took still more seconds to reorient as his target now lurked in the range of forest and slope just beyond the hill.

He brought the rifle to his shoulder and the scope to his eye and through its lens began to scan. He pivoted back and forth, in and out, listening intently, waiting for the device to yield a treasure, for surely Bob was out there, running crazily outward, toward the crest of the next low ridge.