Си Бокс - Dark Sky

The crunch sounded and felt like a muffled thunderclap and that was it.

Just like a pigeon.

TWENTY-ONE

An hour later, Earl Thomas surveyed a large clearing that glowed light blue on the snow from the moon and stars. He’d paused his horse and grunted as he dismounted and stepped heavily to the ground.

“Got to piss,” he said to his sons as they caught up with him. Brad pulled up on his right and Kirby on his left. One of the horses in Brad’s string blew its nose and whinnied.

Earl relieved himself between his boots and the odor of warm urine splashing on cold rocks was sharp. He turned his head away.

After burning the cabin to the ground, they’d been riding west down the mountain along a small and intermittent creek bed clogged with round rocks. They’d followed the two sets of tracks left by Joe and Price through the heavy timber and it had been a difficult journey. While the two men they pursued were on foot and could climb over downed timber and dodge through closely packed tree trunks, the caravan of horses weren’t as nimble and it had slowed them down.

Finally, though, the timber cleared and the trees became more widely spaced. The tracks they’d followed were clear in the snow until they veered out of the forest to the tiny stream. Then, because the smooth rocks in the creek didn’t capture the snow the way the grass and pine needle cover had, the tracks had become harder to follow. Earl assumed Joe would keep to the creek as he went west, and eventually down out of the mountains to the foothills, but for the last fifteen minutes he’d detected no sign that confirmed it.

Earl could also tell that the morning was going to dawn much warmer than the day and night before. He could tell by how it felt on his exposed skin and by the fact that the condensation clouds from the nostrils of his horse were getting harder to see. The sky was clear and the stars were hard. Soon, he knew, the sun would rise and melt the dusting of snow that covered the ground.

Keeping right on the tracks of Joe and Price would get harder by the hour.

Earl zipped up. This wasn’t working out as he’d planned it. If everything had fallen into place—if Joe hadn’t screwed everything up—he and his sons would have been down the mountain by now and loading their horses into trailers. They’d be back in their homes long before anyone realized Price and his party were missing. It would take days and possibly even weeks or months for investigators to come up with a theory of what happened—if they ever did. All evidence of Price and the hunting party should have been buried or obscured, and the winter weather would bury the terrain in heavy snow within a month. Predators would feed on the bodies and scatter the bones. All the physical evidence that the hunting party had even been up here—the gear and supplies—were all packed away on the string of horses that Brad led.

Eventually, somebody might find some exposed human bones. Or maybe not.

Earl knew he and his sons had only a few hours left to catch Price and take care of him once and for all. Joe didn’t know these mountains as well as Earl—no one did—but Joe certainly knew if he kept well ahead and continued to the west that he’d eventually hit a logging road or the trailhead itself.

Kirby moved his horse closer to Earl and said, “You know, we probably ought to do a post from Price. His followers are going to start to wonder what the hell happened to him.”

Earl made a face. “I wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to do that.”

“Well, give me his phone and I’ll do it.”

“I don’t have his phone.”

“Shit,” Kirby said. “We must have left it with Joannides. That was a dumb move.”

Earl said with irritation, “I wish you’d said something back then. It don’t help much bringing it up now.”

“He put the phone in his pocket just before I cut him.” Kirby shrugged. “I just now thought about it.”

“Fuck—another complication. We’ll have to go back and find the body later and get that phone back,” Earl said. “We can’t leave evidence like that around.”

Kirby grunted and sighed.

—

As Earl pulled himself back up into the saddle, Brad moaned. It was a plaintive cry. Earl thought he sounded like an exhausted or severely wounded bird dog.

“ Muh fuggin’ mouf huts ,” Brad said.

“What?” Earl asked. “I can’t understand you.”

“He said his fucking mouth hurts,” Kirby said, translating. Kirby had always been able to understand the words his older brother said, especially when they were very young and Brad had a speech impediment that later was improved by therapy. Translating for Brad came naturally to Kirby.

“Ah,” Earl said. Then to Brad: “Suck it up. You’ll be fine.”

Brad moaned again and Kirby said, “He sounds like Chewbacca from the Star Wars movies. You know, the Wookiee.”

Earl reached into his parka and pulled out his headlamp and turned it on. He kept it in his hand and raised the beam to Brad’s face.

His older son winced at the light and painfully turned his head. Earl could see the tiny hole in Brad’s face through his dense beard. The bullet had entered two inches below his left cheekbone and obviously shattered his jawbone on that side.

Brad leaned forward in the saddle and spit out a gob into the snow that consisted of dark blood with fragments of shattered teeth or bone.

“ It huts ,” he said.

“Well, hang in there,” Earl said, clicking off the lamp and dropping it back into his pocket. “I’ve seen worse.”

He turned in his saddle toward Kirby. “How are you doing?”

“I’m okay,” Kirby said through clenched teeth. He rode hunched over, with his arms tight to his sides and his head bent forward. “It hurts to breathe, though.”

“Where’d he hit you?”

“The lungs, I think. Or maybe just short of the lungs. I taste blood every now and then. It’s hard to breathe.”

“Can you keep going?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Not really,” Earl said. “I’ve got to say, Joe surprised me. He’s feistier than he looks. Where do you suppose he got that gun?”

Kirby shook his head. “I don’t know. Probably found it somewhere in that cabin.”

“Did you see it?”

“No.”

“ I seed id ,” Brad slurred. “ Id was a fuckin’ siggle-shot dwendy-doo . A piece of shid .”

“What did he say?” Earl asked Kirby.

“He said it was a fucking single-shot twenty-two. A piece-of-shit gun.”

“Ah, well. It did the trick, though,” Earl said. “It sounds like the first rifle my daddy—your granddaddy—gave me. It’s a good thing he didn’t have a real weapon.”

Brad moaned something.

Earl said, “You don’t need to try to talk, Brad. You sound simple when you do.”

“He is simple,” Kirby said. “He should have let Brock come out on his own. If he had, this would all be over.”

“ Fug you ,” Brad said.

“That I got,” Earl responded. “He’s got a point.”

Brad looked sharply away. Earl was familiar with the gesture. Brad was angry and hurt.

“ Jus’ cuz you cain’t fug her no mo’ ,” Brad said.

Earl froze. “What did you say?”

“ She’s god. Your liddle Princess. You’re puddin’ us frew dis ’cause you cain’t fug her no mo ’.”

Earl turned to Kirby.

Kirby hesitated a moment. His face was ashen, and Earl was pretty sure it wasn’t from his injury.

“Kirby, what did he say?”

“He said, ‘Just because you can’t fuck her anymore, you’re putting us through all of this.’”

Kirby’s tone wasn’t sarcastic or mocking like it usually was, Earl noted. Kirby said the words cautiously.