Джо Горес - Dead Man

He plunged away after her.

But it was harder now, the moon was lower, its light dimmer. He stopped, listened. He didn’t know that Vangie was sitting on the ground a few yards ahead of him around a bend in the track, also listening. She had been hard-pressed to keep from losing him. She was poised for flight, but there was nothing to flee from. She couldn’t hear him moving around. She took her big Bowie knife from the sheath, nervously, put it back.

It was time. Life or death. She wondered how Dain was. Out of sight of each other, they still were fighting in tandem.

She picked up a rock from the trail, hesitated, then heaved it back the way she had come.

Trask’s head jerked around toward the crashing from the undergrowth. He had been concentrating all of his attention in the wrong direction, but now he had that little bitch!

Gun in hand, he charged around the bend in the track.

Vangie was half-sitting a few yards beyond, one leg drawn up, massaging her ankle with an agonized look on her face. She screamed in apparent surprise and fear.

“I did your folks, now I’m gonna do you!”

And he charged her. There was no way she could escape him. Oh, she tried. She leaped up but cried out, fell, rolled, holding her ankle, trying unsuccessfully to scrabble away from him. Not this time. He was upon her...

But just a yard short of Vangie, in shadow that made it even more invisible, was one of Papa’s tight lines — eight feet above the ground where Trask would never see it unless he was looking up. Instead of the original hooks on the stagings, now at their three-foot intervals were strung the muskrat traps Vangie had been greasing, each one open and set.

Trask, charging, yelling, gloating down at his prey helpless at his feet, ran face-first right into one of the gaping traps. She had led him to it as carefully as a mother bird feigning a broken wing will lead a fox away from her nest.

The trap’s powerful spring snapped jagged steel teeth shut on his face with a vicious metallic snap. He screamed and danced, jumped and jerked — and his wildly swung gun hand smashed into a second trap, which snapped shut around it, crushing the fingers, piercing the wrist. The gun fell.

Vangie came up off the ground in a lithe drive of piston legs, right at him with her huge gleaming Bowie knife in both hands, cutting edge down, held the way a Mayan priest might hold the knife to rip open the chest of a blood sacrifice. He was the one! The one who had killed her folks!

Her face distorted with the killing lust, she slammed the blade down into the center of the screaming man’s belly in a long disemboweling slash like a hunter gutting a hung deer. She cried out formlessly as she did it; a splash of hot blood hit her across the face as her attack carried her right past the flopping, shrieking man.

Vangie dropped her knife and staggered a few steps away into the woods exactly like a drunkard, then collapsed. She slumped there in a huddle, unmoving, sobbing.

For ten years her life had been without consequence, without meaning. Now she had killed two men. She had stolen $2 million. Her folks were dead because of her and she had mourned them with a knife. She could never again be whoever she had been for those ten years.

She cried for who she had been and for who she had become. She cried for Dain, for her folks, for Jimmy.

She didn’t cry for Trask.

Finally cried out, she fell silent. After a time, animal, bird, and insect noises began again, tentatively at first, then soaring in a triumphant discordant chorus to greet the first predawn lightening of the forest.

There was the faintest of pale gold horizontal slashes drawn on the utmost horizon. Everything below was a cold gray blanket of ground mist, the big cypresses rising from it here and there like sentinels. In the woods, just the woolly polls of the overstory trees stood above it like tight-packed heads. On the bayou a flatboat drifted in the gray world where air and water were barely separate, as if floating in a dream.

Inverness came abruptly erect on the seat. Looked around in an almost dazed manner. Splashed water in his face. Even the splashes were muted, distant, dreamlike. He began to row.

Vangie appeared at the mouth of the road walking listlessly, shoulders slumped, face innocent as a sleepwalker’s. Trask’s pistol dangled from one hand by the trigger guard. Overlaying the scents of the morning swamp was the sweetish smell of barbecued meat, not entirely pleasant. She shuddered when she realized what it was.

Dain was limping toward her across the open ground past the rectangle of ash and charcoal, still faintly warm, that marked her father’s cabin. He looked pale, drawn, dragged off center by pain, bloodstained from his reopened wound. She knew she couldn’t look much better.

They stopped three feet from each other, not touching. Vangie finally reached out to lay a hand on his good arm. Only then did they come together, clasp each other fiercely with nothing of lovers in it, only the intimacy of warriors who have survived the battle. They finally stepped back. An uncontrollable shudder ran through Vangie, somewhat like the sudden diminishing little gasping intakes of breath after a fit of hysterics.

She said tentatively, “You ought to see the other guys?”

“What other guys?” he said in the same tone.

Wonder was in her voice. “It’s... over? Truly all over?”

“Yes. For you it’s all over.”

A final shudder ran through her. “Inverness?”

“Strategic withdrawal. He’ll be back.”

Vangie made an aborted gesture back toward what she had left hanging from the tight line in the woods. “I... I don’t know if I can... again...”

“If I could get out of it, I wouldn’t either,” he said. “But you can get out. You must get out. I couldn’t stand it if after all of this you...” His voice had harshened; now he said in softer tones, “Go bury your dead, Vangie.”

They started walking slowly down toward the water, Dain limping, his good arm around her shoulders for support.

“Will you be all right?” he asked.

She didn’t answer.

“Please. Take the bonds and run.”

“I’ll have to,” she said finally. “If I’m still here when he comes back, he’ll have to kill me, won’t he?” Right along with you, she seemed to be implying, though she didn’t say it. “But if I’m back in civilization, shocked, explaining that I was camping out in the bayous, I didn’t know my folks had been murdered, I’ve never heard of any of you... Then I’ll be safe.”

“Take the gun.”

“I have the gun.” She gestured with it. “You hid the pirogue with the bonds in it. He can’t follow me in a flatboat, he has to go the long way around. So don’t worry about me.”

Couldn’t you worry about me? he thought. Just a little? He’d wanted her to leave, but hadn’t really expected that she’d do it.

It was dawn but the sun had not yet broken through the haze. At the rear of the island, where the bayou had cut its ancient channel, Inverness’s flatboat drifted soundlessly out of the fog to ground with only a whisper of keel against mud. With an almost incredible swiftness, Inverness was up over the gunwale and into the bushes.

He kept going swiftly but carefully, slipping from cover to cover, stopping often to let the birds tell him what or who might lie ahead. Totally alert, he was the hunter in his element.

As they shambled down toward the water, Vangie was shocked at how much weaker Dain was. How was he going to stand up to Inverness? He might already be dying; he’d sustained a terrible amount of damage.

“What about you? You can’t just stay here and wait for him.”

“He has to end it. End me. To him I’m a nightmare that isn’t over when you wake up.”