American Elsewhere (60 page)

Five seconds.

Someone shouts. They are looking for her.

Do not give away your position.

Six seconds.

Time is a knife easing into her rib cage, seeking her heart.

Wait. Wait. Wait…

Then the sky bursts blue with lightning, and the queer electrical light filters through the forest.

She sees a pair of hands floating in the shadows beside the tree trunk.

She puts the scope to her eye, brings the crosshairs in, and thinks, all in one second:

Slight breeze from the north—cold barrel—will dance right if I fire in this wind—wait I’m close enough for that not to matter—forty yards—arc will be negligible—just drop a touch—if this fucking thing is sighted right—is he moving—am I really going to kill him—instinct will
be to get low—just—just—will I really—fire already—fire—fire—pull the trigger—fucking do it do it—just

Fire.

Boom.

It is a cannon. A howitzer. It is world-shatteringly loud. At first Mona only thinks:
Fucking tinnitus. I am deaf for the rest of my years.

Then she dives to the right, away from her attackers. Because now they know exactly where she is.

The world is so silent as she falls. Is she really deaf, or was the shot so loud it has deafened all the world?

But as she slides down away from her roost, she learns she is wrong, because the woods light up with screams.

She has heard screams like this only once before in her life, when she had her vision of the past in the lightning-struck bathroom. Only those screams, screams of such blind terror and agony, can possibly compare to what is echoing across the valley right now, screams so loud and so terrible she cannot understand how a human can make that noise and keep making it, not without breaking his own throat.

Well
, she thinks.
I got him.

A second voice shouts: “Jesus! Jesus Christ!”

As if it has its own agency, the rifle barrel swings back up, nosing out the shouts and screams, hungry to lay the burden of its crosshairs on fresh meat.

Then a third voice, the mush-mouthed voice: “I know that… that’s my Mossberg. That’s my… my motherfucking Mossberg!”

She recognizes this voice. It’s the cowboy from Coburn, the one whose face she caved in.

“You fucking bitch!” howls the cowboy. “You fucking goddamn bitch!”

“Stay down!” shouts the second voice. It’s older, and it sounds a lot more clearheaded.

“I’ll kill you, you fucking slag!”

He starts shooting. A large pistol, it sounds like—he must have
gotten a replacement for his Desert Eagle. She can see flickering lights on a group of tree trunks at the base of a hillock, but she cannot spot more than this.

The cowboy shoots his gun empty.

“Quit your firing, goddamn it!” growls the second voice. “And stay the fuck down!”

The screams persist. Someone rushes to them through the undergrowth, but she sees no movement: it is too dark.

Then the second voice: “Oh… oh fuck.”

The third: “Fucking cunt!”

“Dee, are you just gonna sit there and mouth off or are you gonna come help me?”

“Fuck you, Zimmerman! That cunt stole my fucking rifle, my fucking truck!”

“Norris has nearly had his foot blown off, and you have sand in your ass over a
truck
? Kindly shut your fucking yap and stay down, at least!”

Dee, who she guesses is the cowboy, has given up on coherent threats altogether: “Fucking… skull-fuck you! Cut your… fucking bitch!”

The screaming is slowly turning into whimpering. There is the tinkling of what sounds like a belt buckle in the darkness. Then a
thwip
as the belt is pulled tight around what she presumes is her victim’s femoral artery.

Two left
, she thinks.
But really only one to worry about.

She does not hear any more movement. Dee, her failed paramour and kidnapper, must still be hunkered down in the same place. She fixes her sights back on that spot.

He keeps talking: “Bitch! I will… I will goddamn fuck you up something good! I will…” Little brass bells tinkling—bullets in the palm of his hand? Reloading? “Can’t believe this sort of thing could ever,
ever
… do you hear me? Do you hear me?! Fucking answer! Say something goddamn you!”

Mona does not oblige him.

“Do you know what I will do to you?” he screams. “Do you understand what’s going to fucking happen?”

Zimmerman, who must be tending to whomever it is she shot, stays silent. She now feels that he is the real threat. She gets the impression that he’s had actual training, and he’s been quiet for a long while.

Dee is active. She has a feeling he will soon make himself a very good target. But while she could definitely take a shot at him, that would give away her position again for Zimmerman, who she now guesses is the guy who tagged Parson.

There’s another cry of pain.

Unless
, she thinks,
he’s busy with the guy I hit
.

There is a twitch in the branches where Dee is hiding.

She thinks:
Fuck, I hope there aren’t any more of them I didn’t see.

“You bitch!” says Dee. “Won’t even…”

The big pistol starts going off again. The rounds hammer the slope above her. Some of them are rather close: little shards of rocks rain down on her shoulders and hair. But Mona does not move.

“She’s dead, ain’t she?” says Dee. “She’s dead already. I got you, didn’t I! I got you!”

The branches move a little more.

“We got you! We shot your fucking ass!”

And then Dee’s head, swollen like a rotting pumpkin, pops up into view. His cheek is clearly defined by the moonlight; she can see exactly where he is and what he’s doing.

Right now, he is screaming at her. Mona is so far inside herself that she cannot hear his words. She does not put the crosshairs in the middle of his face, but just above his right eyebrow, at the very edge of his skull; she does this thoughtlessly, as a well-oiled machine would.

She can feel the impulse running down her arm to her finger, telling it to fire.

As it does, she thinks,
You know, I haven’t really killed anyone yet.

But this is followed by,
Well. He’s a good one to start with.

She is so in the moment she does not even register the sound of the gun; she feels it kick, sees the scope spin, and brings it back just in time
to see a curious halo swarm up to surround Dee’s head, which is not snapping back but is staying perfectly still; the halo dissolves; Dee appears to look down and to the side, as if he sees something in the grass; then he falls from view.

He does not shout again.

Mona starts moving, rolling farther down the hillside. She goes about thirty yards, then finds a new roost.

She expects another salvo. None comes. There is just silence, and sometimes a whimper.

So, just like when she hunted, she waits.

And waits.

And waits.

Which is most of any action, really. Be it hunting or fighting, the most important part is the waiting.

The minutes stretch on.

Killing
, thinks Mona,
is such a goddamn boring job
.

Then there’s a shout: “Hey, lady!”

Mona’s rifle swivels to the north as she tries to guess where it came from.

“Hey, listen, lady.” It is the second voice, Zimmerman. “I know now might not be, uh, the best time to try to appeal to your better nature, what with us having shot at you and all, but… this kid here is really hurt, and he’s had a bad string of luck for a while and I think it’d be a shame for him to have to die up here. You agree?”

Mona does not answer.

“Okay… well. I am going to come right out and say what my plans are. I plan to pick this kid up and carry him back down the hill to my truck. Then I will drive him out of this fucking town to a hospital, where he will be treated. Please observe that absolutely none of that—
none
of it—includes me taking more shots at you. Okay?”

Mona is silent.

“Okay. Because there might be a lot of reasons worth dying for, but I just don’t think this is one of them, and I really just want to go home. So I’m going to pick this kid up, and stand up, and leave my gun behind, and… well. I guess you can shoot me down if you want. I
don’t have a lot of say in that. But… that’s what I’m gonna try and do. I don’t
think
you’ll shoot me, because I’m pretty sure I’ve talked enough for you to draw a bead on me”—which is true, Mona notes—“but, well… I don’t know. Whatever you gotta do, I guess. Okay?”

Mona says nothing. She hardly moves.

“Yeah,” says the man. “Yeah. Okay.”

There’s a grunt. Then she sees a bulky figure rise up and begin hobbling down to the road.

She follows him with the scope every step of the way. She can see limbs lifelessly swaying in his arms. She feels kind of bad about that. But she just keeps following him. She follows him until she can’t anymore.

She waits. Then a horn honks twice from somewhere way down the slope. There’s the sound of wheels spinning—
He’s spinning them because he wants me to hear him leaving
—and then only silence.

She waits. Again. And she keeps waiting.

She waits for over forty minutes, not moving, hardly breathing.

There might be others he’s left behind—any ones who are waiting on her, in turn, to move or speak and tell them where she is. Yet with each blaze of lightning she peers through the dark forest, and she sees nothing.

Finally she begins to crawl down the slope to where they hid.

She sees bent branches, spent rounds twinkling in the grass. She sees footprints and disturbed stones and, eventually, blotches of blood.

Not much else.

That is, until she finds Dee. His ostrich-skin boots, which have been so impeccably shined, gleam brightly from underneath a bush. Mona goes to investigate.

She peers around the bush, and grunts.

She hit him in the mouth. Square in the roof of the mouth.

Jesus.

She looks at him for a long time. She has seen dead bodies many times before but the causality of it—
I did this, I made this happen
—escapes her. She cannot link that desperate, cold moment at the bottom of the hill, when her whole world was reduced to the dark spotlight of her scope, to this dead man lying on the forest floor.

She wonders who told him to be here. Did they come to kill her and Parson? From the way the second one, Zimmerman, acted, he was surprised to find her. Hence why they shot Parson first, and why Zimmerman was so willing to abandon it after she wounded Norris and killed Dee. They must have been here for some other reason.

She sees there is something silver below Dee’s body.

She squats to see. It looks ornamental, a clasp to a box—and the rest of the box is underneath him, as if he fell on it.

Wincing, she reaches forward and pulls it out. It is covered in the man’s blood, but she can see it is a very nice wooden box with a silver clasp; yet evidently the owner didn’t think this was enough security, for it’s also fastened with string and tape of all kinds.

She holds it up to one ear: she hears no ticking.

She shakes it: it sounds hollow, but something is rattling around in there. It’s not a bomb, then.

She looks back up at the canyon. Were they simply bringing this box here? Why?

Mona unties the string, which is now quite sticky from the blood. Then she flips up the clasp.

She wedges her finger into the crack, and slowly eases it open, certain she is about to be ripped apart by an explosion.

It never comes: the interior of the box is simple red velvet, and resting in its corner is a very strange item that is certainly not a bomb.

It is a skull. A little rabbit skull.

Mona stares, and shivers. Because she is uncomfortably familiar with rabbit skulls, and the mere sight of this one sends old, gray memories howling up the hallways of her mind.

When she was in junior high, Mona, like a lot of kids in her country-ass school, participated in 4-H. While most kids preferred the larger animals, the ones they’d learned about since kindergarten—pigs, cows, etc.—Mona instead opted to raise meat rabbits for a judging competition, mostly because she’d assumed it’d be easier, because what were rabbits besides slightly larger, cuter guinea pigs?

She only did it the one time, for she found the whole process to be one of the most awful experiences of her young life: not only did many of her rabbits die—an experience she was unprepared for, and she is still quite angry at her father for not warning her about—but the first of them was intentionally killed by its mother. There had been something wrong with it—something twisted in its neck and front leg—and in the evening its mother had pushed it out of the nest and allowed it to starve.

Mona knew she should remove it from the rabbits’ pen. But when she first found the baby rabbit, with lines of ants marching to it across the barn floor in a gruesome little pilgrimage, and its tiny, rotting eyes swarming with blackflies, she was so horrified she could only bear to kick it into the corner. And she forgot about it until many days and many dead rabbits later, when the whole horrible thing was over and she removed the straw from the pen, scraping it up with a pitchfork, and with one scrape a desiccated, eyeless little rabbit body popped up from the straw, scraps of fur still clinging to its tiny bones, and it stared at her accusingly, as if to say:
You forgot about me. You wished me hidden and so I hid, but I was never gone.

She had nightmares that night, and for the rest of the week. How she wished she had buried it, respected it, given it the love no one else had—it was as if she had chosen to kill her own child.

It is so strange to find a rabbit skull now, in this bloody red velvet box. Mona almost wonders if they were trying to send a message to her. The mere sight of it fills her with unexpected guilt.

Frowning, she reaches out, and picks it up.

“Where did you come from?” she asks it.

And then the lights go out.