Christian Kiefer - The Animals

We triggered the alarm, Rick said from the ground. The cops are already on their way.

Then I guess we don’t got much time, the man said. Despite the cold, he wore an unbuttoned collared shirt with the sleeves torn off, and he pulled the shirt out of the way to reveal the grip of a pistol extending from the front of his pants. You think you can shoot me before I draw? he said.

Shoot him, Rick said from the ground.

The man laughed again. He’s not a killer, the man said, and neither are you, Mr. Medium Security. He smiled. Then he said, But I am.

And that was when Rick came at him, his body nearly parallel to the earth as he dove, crashing into the man sideways and both of them coming down. Nat could not see anything in the headlight glow, there were only bodies, hands on the bat, a kind of furious dissolve of flesh as if they had become one man with four arms and four legs, one man gone wild, striking at himself, predator and prey all at once.

He thought he could hear distant sirens now and he called his friend’s name again and again, the rifle still held in his hands, the car behind him, his own shadow cast as a long straight arrow pointing down to that crazed and multiarmed figure. And when the shot rang out he jolted backward, staring for a quick moment at the rifle before realizing that he had not accidentally pulled the trigger on his own, that the shot had come from below.

Ah shit, the tattooed man said, smiling gleefully. Look what I did. He moved the pistol from one hand to the other and then looked up at Nat and turned toward him, the weapon pointed uphill now but not firing. Instead, the man simply advanced, walking quickly and with purpose up the slope, his shadow weaving out behind him to where Rick lay sprawled on the asphalt beside the El Camino, his shinbone bent at an impossible angle and a bright red mushroom of flesh bulging up through a rent in his jeans from where he had been shot, this shadow strung out behind him in the glow of the dealership lights like the shadow of some huge desert tarantula. You fucking shot me, Rick said, his voice a howl of impotent and impossible rage.

Nat stepped backward toward the Datsun’s open door and as he did so, perhaps in direct response to the sound of the gunshot, a siren chirped twice, not so very far away, and then came blazing into full volume. Nat felt his heart clutch in his throat and all he could think, the only word that would come to him, was no no no.

Ah shit, the man said. You fucking dipshits. He looked up at Nat, then at the Datsun, perhaps thinking in that moment that it might be easier to take Nat’s tiny car, but instead he simply said, Next time you won’t be so lucky, and turned and ran back down the slope, past Rick and into the driver’s seat of the El Camino, Rick’s voice calling up at Nat all the while: Help me. Jesus fucking Christ. He shot me. I’m fucking shot.

The lights were coming along the street now, blue and red and illuminating everything, and Nat could not tell if there was one car or a hundred. The sirens loud and screaming. The tattooed man sat behind the wheel of the El Camino and its engine was roaring and roaring but the car did not move and Nat could see that its wheel well was crushed into the front tire from where the Datsun had hit it.

Jesus Christ, Rick called out to him. What are you doing? Come on!

The lights and the sirens. The tattooed man leaping out of the El Camino now, the pistol in his hand, running out beyond the lights, out into the darkness of the town and the desert that held it, the first of the police cars passing the stranded El Camino, sirens blazing, lights flashing everywhere.

Nat had backed to the door and slid now behind the wheel. I’m sorry, he said, his voice quiet, calm, and when he pulled forward it was not into that blaze of rotating police lights but instead to the right, the Datsun following the long stretch of the building toward the far exit, Rick’s voice following him as he drove: What are you doing? Don’t leave me! Don’t fucking leave me here. But he was already out amidst the rows of new cars glistening under the white glow of a quarter moon. He could hear Rick’s voice calling to him long after he was on the road, long after the casinos disappeared in the mirrors and the desert blew out all around him, empty and endless and as black as an ocean, a voice that called and called and called his name and would not stop.

HE CAME DOWN THE ROAD AT A DEAD RUN, THE RIFLE IN HIS hands and the zippered case flapping over his shoulder, thirty or forty yards and already panting, his feet slipping every few steps against the icy surface of the plowed asphalt. When he turned and leaped for the embankment he was not sure if he would be able to get through it at all, his body a heavy, floundering shape against the slope, but somehow he managed to scramble through and up and over, snow-covered and heaving for breath, his heart a hammer in his chest. Beyond him, the road was dark and the forest darker still, but in the glow of an approaching pickup, he could see Rick a few dozen yards away where he stood just at the edge of the trees, his body silhouetted for a brief instant as the lights swung out through the forest and the swirling snow as if rotating on some vast dish, that slash of illumination reaching Bill just as Rick looked up in his direction, the pistol already raised before Bill had even managed to regain his feet, trying to stand now and fumbling with the rifle, pulling the trigger only to realize he had not yet levered a shell into the chamber and propelling himself, in a staggering crawl, into the downsloping branches of a black fir as the pistol barked and its bright sharp light bit the air, all the while his own voice like a crazed whine in the darkness.

The shots came quick and fast now, thwacking against the trunks all around him. His own finger pulled the trigger but he was not aiming anymore, had stopped aiming when he saw the flash of Rick’s pistol. His own shot seemed to fly up into the air like some bright yellow flower and he stumbled backward toward the darker forest, pulling the bolt to bring another cartridge into the chamber and then knowing that the rifle was empty. Another shot came as he ran, low and dim through the snow, and then another, Bill’s breath coming in gasps, his feet sinking everywhere into the frozen earth as he stumbled behind a tree. He thought he might break apart, or that he was breaking apart already. And yet he knew he could not simply stand there, that doing so would mean death, and so he breathed in two quick sharp lungfuls of the frozen air and looked around the black trunk, the rifle held tight in his grip. There was nothing there now. No dark figure. What he stared into was a stretch of dim and endless forestland swirling with snow and an angular patchwork of tenebrous shapes that fell into a Möbius strip of distance. No sign of movement anywhere.

He thought of Majer then, of Majer and the animals, and all he could muster for them was an apology for their collective deaths and for his own and a question he could not answer: What good had he been to them? The bear had stared out at him from his cage with eyes that clearly knew him, that recognized him, but what circled through the bear’s mind he would never know. But did he even know what circled through his own? Everything he had done seemed utterly foolish, running out into the storm like a madman. He should have gone with Grace and Jude. He knew that now, and he also knew that he should have understood that from the start.

But it was too late and maybe it had been too late since the beginning. Everything beyond his sight mere abstraction — memory, history, perhaps even love — and the time for such things had ended. Instead there was only his motion as he turned around the trunk and stared into the storm. This time he could see Rick once again, his figure limping and struggling through the snow, not away from him but toward, some fetch or wraith or grim doppelgänger come to end him, and the fear that clutched at his heart held him there, watching in terror for a long, trembling moment until, at last, he turned and began an erratic, panicked stumble uphill, each step postholing up to his thighs, his feet numb but his body pressing forward in desperation. He could not remember how many shells remained in the case but knew that there were not many.