Dead Reckoning (26 page)

             
“You see a clock around here?” asked Jimmy sarcastically.

             
“Sun went down about two hours ago,” said the woman as she frowned at Jimmy.

             
I remembered my solar powered watch and pulled up my sleeve to find an empty wrist. I looked at Jimmy accusingly, but Kevin looked toward the ground and kicked at the dirt.

             
“Kevin?” queried his mother.

             
He reached into his pocket and pulled out my watch. He handed it to me without looking up.

             
“I’ll deal with you later,” said his mother.

             
“But I thought he was de...”

             
“Never mind,” she snapped.

             
My watch said 8:30 pm.

             
“Listen, I have to go find my family over near Langley, so I can’t help you now. But…”

             
Kevin howled: “See, I told you he wouldn’t help!”

             
“No, no, no. You didn’t let me finish. I will try to come back here when I find out about my family. I will really try, but I can’t promise anything. I don’t know what’s going to happen—only that I intend to try. But if something better comes along, don’t wait for me.”

             
“You don’t have to,” the woman began a controlled sob.

             
“I know I don’t, but I’m not sure how many good people are left. You seem like good people. What is your name, anyway?”

             
“My name is Karen, Karen Blackman. This is Jimmy, she said pointing to the older boy. And this is Kevin.”

             
I told them my name. “I am glad to meet you. I just wish it were under better circumstances.”

             
“We do too,” said Karen. “We’re really sorry about tying you up, but we just didn’t…”

             
“I know,” I cut in. “I understand. I’d have probably done the same thing in your shoes.”

             
I opened my pack, pulled out three of the MREs I had taken from the boat, and placed them on the table.

             
“Just add hot water,” I said.

             
“No really,” said Karen. “Two is enough.”

             
“No it isn’t. I don’t need them. I still have two days’ worth for myself and my family. Please just take them.”

             
I also took the granola bars I stole from Paul’s house from my pocket and placed them on the counter. I took out my knife and picked up a slick piece of wood. I scratched the address to Paul’s house on the board.

             
“This is the address to an old friend of mine. He’s dead, but he’s got a couple of weeks’ worth of food in his cupboard if you can get over there. It’s only a couple of miles, down at Bush Point. I didn’t see anybody along the way, so if you stay off the road, it should be pretty safe.”

             
Jimmy propped the gun against the wall and came over to me. His face softened, and he extended his hand.

             
“Thank you, mister,” he said. “Thank you so much. I’ll go over there tomorrow.”

             
“Don’t mention it,” I said. “And, you know, you don’t have to be afraid of everyone. We’re not all bad people.”

             
He smiled apprehensively and then nodded.

             
Kevin ran up and hugged my leg.

             
“How old are you?” I asked.

             
He held up four fingers and said: “Five.”

             
“Do you know how to tell time?” I asked.

             
“Yep, when the sun goes down it’s time for bed.”

             
“You’ll learn,” I said as I stuck my watch into his hand.

             
I turned to leave.

             
“I should look at your head,” Karen said. “I’ll put the boys to bed and look at your head. I feel like it’s the least I can do.” She ran her finger down the collar of her blouse and hooked it on the first clasped button. Jimmy looked away, embarrassed. Kevin stared at us oblivious. “You shouldn’t go out at night,” she continued. “Just stay the night and I’ll get you fixed up….for all your trouble.”

             
My left thumb instinctively traveled to the inside of my ring finger and began working the gold ring over. “You don’t have to,” I said, pretending to have missed the overture. “You really don’t. I will come back if I can—to help you.”

             
I opened the door and stepped out.

             
“I hope you will,” she said, as she closed the door.

2
1

Whidbey island, wa

             
I walked carefully through the dark and found the road. Once on the pavement, the going became easier. I’d heard that people who lose one of their senses experience compensatory increases in the others but had never experienced it. However, practically blind due to the pitch blackness, I felt as if I had super hearing. I noticed many things I might have never heard before: the clicking of a single bug deep in the bushes, a dog barking miles away, a slight increase in the wind coming through the trees. I had no idea until that night, that you could actually
hear
rain changing to snow—the tapping sound of the drops became more intermittent and hollow as flakes began to outnumber them. Once the change to snow was complete, all sound dulled and faded except the ticking of snowflakes hitting the shell of my coat. As a meteorologist and attentive observer, you might think I would have noticed that before.

Normally, it gets lighter out when it snows at night. Snow is a very effective reflector of light and usually amplifies any ambient light. But in the virtual absence of light, the opposite can be true, and the heavy snow allowed me to experience total blindness firsthand. I didn’t care for it. Afraid of bumping into something, I walked slowly and carefully down the road. I came to sense the crown of the pavement and managed to stay roughly in the middle of the road thanks to that single practice of civil engineering.

Just as I began to feel comfortable and increased my stride, I ran into something solid. Luckily, I hit it just right and only bloodied up my shin before falling onto the hood of what turned out to be a car. I felt my way along the vehicle and then to an attached trailer. The combination smelled faintly of cheap barbeque. 

I trudged on through the growing cushion of snow, which froze my feet but helped my knees. The snow came down harder and began to make a sound discernible over the ticking on my jacket and crunch of snow under my feet. The wind picked up, whipping the fat, stinging flakes into my face and up under my hood. I veered to the ditch and felt along for an evergreen tree. I found one and tugged at one of the branches, but it wouldn’t come loose. Dragging it probably wouldn’t cover my tracks anyway.

Light came earlier than usual because of the snow cover. I reached highway 525 and turned right toward Freeland. Now able to see and given the increased danger of travelling on the main north-south route of the island, I kept mostly to the shoulder and close to the safety of the woods. To conceal my tracks, I walked in the ditch when practical.

I crested a hill, and just on the other side, a road led off to the left. My heart skipped as I noticed a man standing motionless next to the stop sign. I dropped to a squat and drew my gun. My right hand shook as I held the pistol, so I slowly reached over with my left hand and steadied it. Butterflies raged inside me.

“Hey!” I yelled. “Hello?”

The man just stood there. I yelled at him again, but he ignored me.

I stood up and approached carefully, my trembling gun hand trained on him. I got within about ten feet of him and finally noticed snow on his hatless head. Then I saw the rope around his waist and around the sign pole.

I walked up to him and pushed his arm and touched the hole in his forehead. He felt like fossilized wood. His feet and legs had been gnawed at, post-mortem judging by the lack of blood. Severe exposure made him look ancient, but he couldn’t have been more than twenty five. He stared straight ahead, a ghostly statue guarding the intersection. I don’t know why I tried to close his eyelids, but they wouldn’t move.

My curiosity exhausted, I walked on, keeping my gun drawn until safely out of sight.

The snow fell more heavily as I walked. There was a burst of snow that dumped an inch very quickly, then the snow stopped and the wind picked up from the south. Within an hour or so, the snow began melting from the road. While it had been light enough to see for two hours, it hadn’t made it out of twilight. By late morning, the snow completely melted off the road, so I went back to walking on the pavement in an effort to dry out my feet.

I stopped and filled my canteen with snow and placed it under my coat. I didn’t care much for the foul water that resulted, but it didn’t seem to harm me. I walked on.

I reached the top of another hill just in time to see a vehicle coming over the next hill toward me, lights still on. I scrambled into the bushes to wait for it to pass. It crossed my mind to flag the vehicle down and see if they knew anything. But I was afraid they knew too much, so I stayed put.

About a half mile before it got to me, the vehicle stopped. I could see that it was some sort of van—like one of those hotel shuttles. There is a hotel still operating? A man got out and opened the hood of the vehicle and looked inside.

Damn it! They’re broken down. Now I’ll have to walk through the woods—and quietly. That was just what I didn’t need. I decided to get closer so I could see what they were doing.

Just then a small person, perhaps a woman, came out of the door and began running up the road. Her long hair whipped as she ran, and her adequate bosoms flopped violently under the threadbare undergarments she wore. The man under the hood raised a large stick and pointed it at her. I saw a flash and then a puff of smoke. The woman dropped into a heap in the road. A couple of seconds later, the crack of the rifle reached me and echoed through the woods. I slipped deeper into the forest and started picking my way south, quietly.

It took me half an hour to travel the half mile to the van in the thick underbrush, and another fifteen minutes to close the final hundred yards on my
belly. I passed the heap in the road and stopped to take a look. Definitely a woman and not well cared for—and shot in the back, to boot. Her head was turned toward me and her eyes stared.

I quietly moved to approximately even with the front of the van. I saw seven other women sitting on my side of the van, sullen and fearful. The other woman was probably better off heaped in the road than still in the van. I didn’t recognize any of them, which would have been a relief, except that that is like being glad that a tornado struck your neighbor’s house instead of yours.

The women sat obediently, staring straight ahead, apparently without much thought of going the same route as their dead counterpart now cooling in the road, a hundred feet to the north.

I looked back down the road at the dead girl and then at the girls in the van. I thought about my wife and d
aughters and fought against emotion. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up and my balls crawled again as I realized what I must do.

The only sounds were of the man tinkering in the engine compartment and his labored breathing. Then he suddenly seemed pleased with himself. He stepped down, backed away from the van, and went around and got back inside. Remorse crept over me. He tried the ignition, and it started. He got back out and came around to close the hood.

I drew my gun, ejected the magazine and looked inside—still full of bullets. I don’t know why I would have thought otherwise. I replaced the magazine and quietly pulled back the slide and looked down inside as a bullet shifted upward and into the barrel. I had never fired at a human being. In fact, the only shots I’d fired in years were a couple of practice shots from the RY. I was skeptical whether I could even hit him. But even if I missed, he’d duck for cover, and I could easily outrun that fat slob. I’d never have been able to live with myself if I didn’t try.

I lifted the gun, braced it with my left hand, and drew a bead on his chest. I knew not to go for the head except a point blank range—too small a target and much higher chance of missing. With the rifle in his left hand, he reached up and grabbed the hood with his right, exposing his chest to me fully. I lined up the sights and squeezed the trigger.

The gun kicked much less than I expected, but the sound stunned me. All external sounds ceased as a loud ringing rose in my ears. The spent shell casing tumbled end-for-end in front of me and passed slowly through my field of view.

The fabric of his overalls tore open just under his armpit. He slumped forward and then staggered backward in slow motion and fell to the ground on his back. His arms flew over his head as the rifle cart-wheeled just out of his reach. A red circle formed on the side of his chest and then grew and then began to drip onto the pavement.

My first thought as time sped back up was that the women could be restrained in the van. I slipped further under cover and waited to see what they did. If they couldn’t get out, I’d have to think of something. A woman stood and looked out the front. She turned and said something to the others. Then they all stood.

One woman came to the front and then stepped out of the van and approached the still man. He reached lamely for the rifle, but she grabbed it. All the women poured out of the van and surrounded him. I scanned nervously through the faces—unfamiliar all. One woman jumped on the man, grabbing him around the neck, choking him. They all began yelling and kicking him like wild animals. They tore at his face and spit on him. Finally, the woman with the rifle yelled: “That’s enough!”

The women all stepped back. The woman stepped over to him and placed the muzzle of the gun to his forehead. She pulled the trigger, and all the women jumped as half the man’s head vaporized and stained the street red.

The women began looking around. One pointed to the bullet hole, and then they turned in my direction. I bolted. Fear set in and I ran with everything I had. Branches slapped at my head, poking and scratching my face, and the gray snow whipped into my eyes as I dashed blindly through the forest. Then I heard yelling. “Wait!” They shouted. “Thank you!” shouted another one. I dropped back to a walking speed, panting. They wouldn’t come for me. And now they were free, their destiny back in their own hands, for what it was worth. More importantly, they weren’t my problem anymore.

I stopped to rest against a tree. My hands trembled as I thought of what I had just done. Killing a man is much more shocking than I would have imagined. I vowed to avoid doing that again at all costs.

Within an hour, I had Freeland in sight, just across an isthmus. The strip of land was about a half mile long, most of its length barely wide enough for the highway. Driftwood logs lay scattered throughout the strips of tall sea grass that lined both shoulders. Sand sloped down from the grass to the water’s edge.

I waited and watched nervously for a few minutes. Nothing moved. The lone house on the other side showed no sign of life. The only other way around would have added ten miles to my walk. I might have walked on the beach to limit my conspicuity, but I decided that the less amount of time spent on that exposed cape the better. So, I took off running down the pavement.

Maybe it was shorter than I remembered, because I reached the half-way point in just a few minutes. That’s when a bright, orange truck squealed around the corner and onto the road in front of me. Without breaking stride, I veered onto the shoulder and dove into the weeds. I scrambled lower on the slope and settled down amongst the grass. I tried to pull sand over me, but I had nowhere near enough time to bury myself as the truck rumbled down the road. At the last moment I took off my back pack and tossed it into the weeds behind me. I took out my gun and checked it. Safety off.

The high pitch squeak of brakes pierced the air as the truck decelerated in my vicinity.

“Who’s in
‘ere?” came a voice from the truck as it ambled in close.

The truck stopped, and the doors opened.

As always, they could have been good people or bad. Intuition told me that it was likely the latter. I nuzzled further down into the grass—a snake couldn’t have gotten lower. I listened as boots clicked on pavement and then gravel crunched under the men’s feet. They stopped at the edge of the grass.

“Come on up outta there.”

I struggled for an idea. I calculated the odds of each of my limited options. Scenes from action movies flashed through my head. Start shooting and hope to get three of them before they got me? I knew it wouldn’t turn out like that. Run? I had no valid option.

“Don’t shoot,” I said.

“We ain’t got no guns.”

I slid one knee under me and edged up to where I could see. All three men held guns pointed in my direction. I quickly ducked back down and cursed. The men laughed.

“Come up outta there or we’ll just open up on ya.”

I nestled my gun back into the waistband in the small of my back and stood up, hands in the air. I pleaded with them not to shoot. They ordered me up to the road, and I complied. All three had long, ratty hair and beards and were dressed in filthy work clothes. They looked like hobos. They ordered me down to the pavement, and the man to my right moved in and patted me down. He quickly located my gun and relieved me of it. At that moment, I knew I was dead.

“Stand up.”

“Please don’t kill me,” I pleaded again.

I heard two distinct clicks as the man to my left repositioned himself to get a better angle. I closed my eyes.

“Come on! What’s the point of killing me?”

“Less fuckers eating what food’s left,” the man to my left said.

“What the fuck you want
yer life for in this shit hole?” the man in the middle asked.

“Just do.”