Си Бокс - Dark Sky

“Move your ass,” Kirby hissed to his brother.

At that second, Joe glanced in Price’s direction and they made eye contact. A message was exchanged.

Now .

Joe bent his knees, grasped the shoulder strap of his daypack, and came up with it as he wheeled around, surprising Kirby, who was distracted and watching his brother.

While Joe frantically unzipped the side pocket, Kirby recovered and stabbed at him. Joe raised the pack to intercept the blade, although he saw a flash of the knifepoint emerge through the nylon skin of it inches from his bare hand.

Joe yanked the canister of bear spray out of the side pocket, gripped the red plastic safety mechanism with his teeth, and pulled it free. He let the pack drop a little and he hit Kirby point-blank in the face with a blast from the canister.

Kirby screamed and backpedaled away until he tripped on a tree root and fell to his butt. His eyes were clenched tightly and his face was crimson.

Joe turned quickly toward the camp to see that Earl had heard Kirby and was now raising his carbine away from Price on the log and toward him. Joe raised the nozzle of the bear spray until it covered Earl’s upper body and he squeezed the trigger. A huge plume of red spray shot across the distance between them and engulfed Earl’s entire face and neck.

Joe didn’t let up. He kept the spray going full-blast while Earl spun, cursed, and fired without aiming in the direction where Price had been sitting just seconds before.

Price was no longer there. He was running toward Joe with his arms up over his head to shield it and to avoid the plume.

At the edge of the campsite there was another concussive boom . Brad had caught up with Rumy. He turned to check out the commotion near the tent and no doubt saw Joe and Price break for it, going in the other direction. To the west. And both his dad and brother were writhing in the grass.

“Hey!” Brad called out, running back toward the camp with his shotgun. “They’re getting away!”

“ Go, go, go, go ,” Joe barked at Price, who sprinted past him. Joe followed.

As they penetrated the tree line, Joe heard another boom and the angry whap of buckshot pellets tearing through pine boughs and smacking into tree trunks behind him. He wasn’t hit, and Price, who was ahead of him, didn’t break stride.

—

The two of them ran until Joe’s lungs were on fire. Price had fallen back, but he stayed with Joe every step of the way. He was in good physical shape, Joe was pleased to find out.

Tree trunks shot by them and Joe made no real attempt at stealth. They ran generally west, but not in a straight line. All he cared about was putting as much distance as possible from the Thomases. He assumed Brad was back in camp trying to help his dad and brother, and wasn’t pursuing them at the moment.

That would come later.

Joe had to finally stop and catch his breath. Price seemed grateful as well for the pause. They again exchanged glances, but no words were said. Too tired, Joe thought.

They’d chosen to rest on the cusp of a vast stand of aspen. The forest floor was colored gold and vermilion with fallen leaves in various stages of death.

Heaving for air and with his hands on his knees, Joe thought:

No horses.

No weapons.

No food.

No way to communicate.

Leaving an easy-to-follow trail in the dirt.

Finally, Price recovered enough to say, “Are we fucked?”

“Yup.”

ELEVEN

Marybeth was in a feisty mood and she tried to work her way out of it by concentrating on the budget presentation she’d have to deliver to the county commissioners in two days. She’d started the morning by having a tense exchange with Evelyn Hughes, the front desk librarian, for forgetting to make sure the exit doors had been locked the night before, which they hadn’t been. It was Evelyn’s responsibility to check them.

“I thought I had,” was Evelyn’s response.

“Please make sure you do so in the future,” Marybeth had snapped.

“I really thought I had,” Evelyn said before looking away.

So Marybeth scrolled through the spreadsheets and graphics on the monitor of her library computer and tried to anticipate not only the questions they’d ask her, like, Do people even go to the library anymore? and Do you have porn filters on the computers available to the public? but what her answers would be.

There were five commissioners. Two were reliably pro–library funding. Two were adamantly against any taxpayer expenditures that weren’t devoted solely to infrastructure, although they had pet causes such as funding the county fair and spending money on lawyers to advance a county-wide wolf eradication policy in opposition to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The fifth commissioner, Laura Beason, could go either way. Beason was the swing vote, and Marybeth had learned to tailor her answers to her. Beason had married into a third-generation ranch family, and although her husband was squarely with the two anti-spending commissioners (except for his pet projects, of course), Laura enjoyed defying him when she could. Marybeth would play to Beason’s soft spot for culture and the arts in the community. It had worked in previous years.

Satisfied that she could respond to even the most hostile questions from the commissioners in a cheery and informative way, Marybeth saved the presentation to her laptop so she could go over it at home, then cautiously opened the ConFab app on her phone.

Since she hadn’t heard anything from Joe the night before, which was the reason she was in such a foul mood to start the day, the only way she could assure herself that he was still alive and well up in the mountains was to monitor Steve-2’s posts.

The last post he’d made was from late the night before. Obviously, someone else had taken the shot and had posted it on Steve-2’s behalf. It was a photo of him sitting on a log in the firelight looking satisfied and very content as he gazed at the campfire near his feet. The caption simply read:

Home, home on the range,

Where the deer and the antelope play.

Where seldom is heard a discouraging word . . .

What she’d noticed, though, was that to the side of Steve-2, leaning back out of the firelight, was Joe. His head was turned away, but she knew the profile. He obviously didn’t know the photo was being taken at the time.

She scrolled through Steve-2’s previous posts and photos to find there were many discouraging words aimed at him. There were a number of user threads denouncing Price and threatening to delete the app because he was in the act of hunting. Others defended him, but they were overwhelmed by animal rights activists and others who thought a man of his wealth and intelligence should be spending his time on more beneficial pursuits. Marybeth thought several of the users made very good points.

She wondered if Steve-2 cared either way what some of his users thought. She sensed that he had such supreme self-confidence—and so many millions of users around the world—that their arguments would wash right over him.

But there was Joe, she thought. He looked fine. So why hadn’t he called her as promised and filled her in? And why did she have to resort to checking social media to know that he was still alive and well?

Marybeth was mulling this over when Evelyn Hughes stuck her head through the open door and cleared her throat.

“Yes, Evelyn?”

“Your daughter is here and she asked if you had a few minutes.”

“Sheridan?”

“Yes.”

“Of course.”

She gathered herself and placed her phone facedown on her desk. It was rare when Sheridan showed up without texting.