C Box: Blue Heaven

What happened next was terrifying.

The Driver circled the group of men, as if returning to the car, then he suddenly wheeled and jabbed a finger into the chest of a wavy-haired man and said something harsh. The wavy-haired man stumbled back a few feet, obviously surprised. As if a signal had been given, both the Ball Cap Man and a tall, dark man stepped back, and stood shoulder to shoulder with the Driver, facing down the wavy-haired man, who pitched his beer bottle aside and held his hands out, palms up, in an innocent gesture.

“Annie…” William pleaded.

She saw the Dark Man pull a pistol from behind his back, point it at the Wavy-Haired Man, and fire three times, pop-pop-pop. The Wavy-Haired Man staggered backwards until he tripped over the fire pit and fell into the mud.

Annie caught her breath, and her heart seemed to rush up her throat and gag her. She felt a sharp pain in her arm, and for a second she thought that a stray bullet had struck her, but when she glanced down she saw it was William’s two-handed grip. He had seen what happened in the campsite, too. It wasn’t like television or the movies, where a single shot was a deafening explosion and the victim was hurled backwards, dead, bursts of blood detonating from his clothing. This was just a pop-pop-pop , like a string of firecrackers. She couldn’t believe what had just happened, couldn’t believe it wasn’t a prank or a joke or her imagination.

“Annie, let’s get out of here!” William cried, and she started to backpedal blindly, toward the creek.

At the water’s edge, she looked over her shoulder, realizing they had lost the path and could go no farther.

“No,” she yelled at William. “Not this way. Let’s get back on the trail!”

He turned to her panicked, eyes wide, his face drained of color. Annie reached for his hand and tugged him along, crashing back through the brush toward the path. When they reached it, she looked back toward the campsite. All three men stood over the Wavy-Haired Man, firing pistols into his body.

Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.

Suddenly, as if Annie’s own gaze had drawn him, the Driver looked up. Their eyes locked, and Annie felt something like ice-cold electricity shoot through her. It burned the tips of her fingers and toes and momentarily froze her shoes to the ground.

William screamed, “He sees us!”

SHE RAN like she had never run before, pulling her brother along behind her, yelling, “Stay with me!”

They kept to the trail that paralleled the lazy curves of Sand Creek. The stream was on their left, the dark forest on their right. Wet branches raked her face and tugged at her clothing as she ran. She could hear her own screams as if someone else was making them.

Pop-pop. A thin tree in front of them shook from an impact, and half-opened buds rained down. The men were shooting at them.

William was crying, but he was keeping up. He gripped her hand so tightly she could no longer feel her fingers, but she didn’t care. Somewhere, she had lost a shoe in the mud, but she never even considered going back for it, and now her left foot was freezing.

How far were they from the road? She couldn’t guess. If they got to the road, there was the chance of getting a ride home with someone.

William jerked to a stop so suddenly that Annie was pulled backwards, falling. Had one of the men grabbed him?

No, she saw. His fly rod had been caught between the trunks of two trees. Rather than let go of it, he was trying to pull it free.

“Drop it, William!” she cried. “Just drop it!”

He continued to struggle as if her words hadn’t penetrated. His face was twisted with determination, his tears streaming.

“LET GO!” she screamed, and he did.

She scrambled back to her feet and as she did she saw a shadow pass in the trees on their right. It was the Ball Cap Man, and he had apparently found a parallel trail that might allow him to get ahead so he could cut them off.

“Wait,” she said to William, her eyes wide. “We can’t keep going this way. Follow me.”

She pushed herself through heavy wet undergrowth, straight at the path she had seen the Ball Cap Man running on. She hesitated a moment at the trail, saw no one, and plunged across it between two gnarled wild rosebushes, pulling William behind her. This time, she didn’t need to prompt him to keep running.

They were now traveling directly away from the river through heavy timber. Annie let go of her brother’s hand, and the two of them scrambled over downed logs and through masses of dead and living brush farther into the shadows. Something low and heavy-bodied, a raccoon maybe, scuttled out of sight and parted the fronds in front of them.

They left the roar of the river behind them, and it got quieter in the forest. At one point they heard a shout below them, somewhere in the trees, one of the men shouting, “Where did they go, goddammit?”

“Did you hear that?” William asked.

She stopped, leaned back against the trunk of a massive ponderosa pine, and nodded.

“Do you think they would shoot us if they found us?”

She implored him with her eyes not to talk.

William collapsed next to her, and for a few minutes the only sound in the forest was the steady dripping of the trees and their winded breath. Even as she recovered from exertion, the terror remained. Every tree looked like one of the men. Every shadow looked momentarily like a man with a gun.

She looked down at her brother, who had his head cocked back on the trunk, his mouth slightly open. His clothes were wet and torn. She could see a cut oozing dark blood where a bare knee was exposed by an L-shaped rip. His face was pale white, streaked with dirt.

“I’m sorry I brought you here,” she said. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“They killed that man,” William said. “They shot him and shot him again.”

She didn’t say, They’ll do the same to us. Instead: “If we keep going in this direction, we should find the road.”

“What if they’re already up there?”

She shrugged, sighed. “I don’t know.”

“How will we get home?”

“I don’t know.”

“They just kept shooting him,” he said. “I wonder what he did to make them so mad?”

THEY DIDN’T SEE the road so much as sense an opening in the canopy ahead. Annie made William squat down in the wet brush, and they remained still for a few minutes, hoping to hear the sound of a car or truck.

“We’re like rabbits,” he said, “just sitting here scared.”

“Shhh.” She thought she heard a motor. “Stay here.”

She pushed through the low brush on her hands and knees. She could no longer feel her bare foot, which was cut and bleeding. The grass got thicker as it neared the road, and she crawled on her belly to the edge of it. For the first time since the initial pop , she felt a twinge of relief.

Then she felt a tug on her pant leg, and gasped.

“It’s just me,” William said. “Man, you jumped.”

She hissed, “I told you to stay back there.”

“No way,” he said, crawling up next to her. “What are we doing?”

“We’re going to wait until we hear a car,” she said. “When it gets close, we’re going to jump up and try to get a ride to town.”

“What if it’s the white car?” he asked.

“Then we keep hiding,” she said.

“I thought you heard something.”

“I thought I did. Maybe not.”

“Hold it,” William said, raising his head above the grass, “I hear it too.”

ANNIE AND WILLIAM looked at each other as the sound slowly rose, the baritone hum of a motor spiced by the crunching of gravel beneath tires. The vehicle was coming from the wrong direction, from town instead of toward it. But Annie figured that if someone was likely to stop for them, they would be just as likely to turn around and take them home. And if the vehicle was coming from the direction of town, it was unlikely it could be the white SUV.