EYESHOT: The most gripping suspense thriller you will ever read (11 page)

He pressed his forehead to hers. She was laughing now – she tried to hold it in but blew a nasal snort – and shuddered with giddy chuckles, her hot breath on his face, a buoyant hymn of
holyshitthatworked
. He kissed her again and held her while the world bled away, and he whispered something in her ear almost beyond words, half-formed syllables floating in a sea of gasping breath, that only they understood.

I’m lost without you.

“Get the gun?” Roy asked.

She flashed a goofy smile and cradled the weapon in both hands. It was a revolver, blued steel and checkered wood battered with scrapes and dings. She pressed it toward James. He took it and was surprised that the weapon felt at once heavy and light. Maybe just dense. Or maybe its power made it feel heavier. Suddenly it all seemed within reach, the situation still fluid, the world still alive and thumping with possibility.

James looked at Roy’s shirt. “Did you piss some excellence in your pants?”

“I . . . can’t believe I did that.”

“It still worked.”

“I once jumped a thirty-foot creek on an Enduro bike.” Roy’s lip curled and he stared at the road between his knees. “I’ve never . . . I don’t know, frozen like that before.”

James immediately felt bad. “I’m sorry—”

“No.” Roy beamed a signboard grin and forced a laugh. “It makes sense. I’m not afraid of hurting or dying, but I finally found something that truly scares me. I had to go all the way out here, in this asshole’s personal shooting range to find it. Liza and I won’t work, I’ve accepted that, but I can still be a dad to Emma. That’s still on the table. And I want so badly to fix it. And I can’t, because I’m stuck here, and if I die, it’s all erased.”

James touched his shoulder.

“I’m not afraid of dying,” Roy said. “I’m afraid of dying an asshole.”

“You won’t. Alright?”

“Alright.”

“We’ll get out of here.”

“Man,” he sniffed. “Your wife has
balls
.”

James hesitated. “That’s . . . please word that differently.”

Roy laughed uncomfortably.

“Here.” James handed him the revolver and gladly let the burden shift. “I hate guns.”

Roy grabbed it with his finger on the trigger and aimed up the road, scrunching one eye and sticking out his tongue as he aligned the stubby little sights. Then he lowered it and thumbed a button on the left (guns have their own language, and the initiated seem to be able to pick up any model and intuit its operation) and the central cylinder rotated a few inches out. In it, he saw five golden bullets seated in a circle, gleaming in the sun. Five?

Roy made a sour face.

“Don’t they usually hold six?” James asked.

“I wish that was our problem.”

“What’s our problem?”

Roy huffed and threw the gun back.

James caught it with both hands. “What?”

“You tell me.”

Uncomfortable with it in his possession again, he studied the five brass circles. He noted the smooth twirl of the cylinder, the .38 SPECIAL stamped on the perimeter of each bullet, and . . .
Oh, no
. A tiny metallic ping impressed in the center of each one.

“See?”

James nodded numbly.

One of his earliest memories was of a party in his parents’ farmhouse. He had crawled on a blotted carpet through a forest of legs, searching for his mother. He couldn’t have been more than six, but he knew that when his father was with his friends that he’d be ignored. That was the way it was. The Anti-Weathermen were serious business. The Tip-over was coming, ready or not.

There was one man in particular at this gathering – tall, skeletal shoulders, dark as ebony, with a polished head – that all the others, even James’ father, seemed frightened of. Everyone watched and hushed when the Tall Man was near because something about him, or something he had recently done, made him dangerous and toxic. When he walked through the crowded living room, Diet Coke in hand, the others parted like water breaking off the bow of a ship. And he was walking toward James.

At that age he didn’t like to look adults in the eye, but the Tall Man took a knee to his level. The crowd spread in a circle around them, voices lowered to a murmur. The man gently took James’ hand with knuckled fingers and opened it, palm up. Then with a smile of piano-white teeth, he produced a single brass bullet casing and placed it upright in his hand. The Tall Man said something too quiet to hear, closed James’ tiny fingers around it, and then he was gone. James had studied the tiny ping in the center of the shell for a long time before his father noticed and snatched it away without a word. He never learned the story behind it. By the time he was old enough to ask meaningful questions, his father had been dead for years, and the Tip-over had never happened anyway.

What did it matter? You can’t rationalize evil. Like the Tall Man, or the Soviet Cowboy, it just
is
.

“Is it—”

Roy nodded.

Five spent cartridges. Elle had risked her life for an empty gun.

“Oh, no.” He stared at the weapon. “Elle, we—”

He noticed something on the heel of the gun’s grip, a sidelong brushstroke of blood, and immediately knew it wasn’t Glen’s. The old man’s blood had long ago browned and cracked under the sun. This was fresh, oxygenated, pulsing with bright red life, and had only been spilled in the last minute.

He turned to Elle.

She had fallen silent. He realized that she hadn’t spoken at all for the last few moments. She held both hands out as she had when she presented the revolver to him, and stared mystified at them. There was suddenly much more blood, a thin stream running down her wrist and beading between her fingers. He followed it up her arm to her chest, to just below her armpit, where her shirt was clinging and soaked.

The sniper hadn’t missed her after all.

She sighed and it sounded wet and thick, like water running down a plugged sink drain. “Well, this sucks.”

10

Tapp stacked his .338 casings in a tidy, single-file row, toppled one, and realized his fingers were trembling.

How had they learned so much, so fast? They knew the bullet’s flight time. They knew where he was. They knew how fast he could fire. And they had used all of these factors against him and misdirected his attention twice. He had been humiliated by three strangers cowering behind a disabled car. Nothing would undo that. Like shooting paper targets, that hole was there forever.

He strained to replay Sergei Koal’s awed words about him being a demon but didn’t feel any better because, of course, there were no gods or demons. There was only this charming little accident that is the universe, expanding to its heat death. Life existed only here on this rock, only by chance, not for long (atheism: the ultimate non-prophet organization). And on this godless little rock, William Tapp had just screwed up.

Are they laughing at me?

Laugh all you want. You’re still going to die.

His naked eye saw Svatomir’s jeep as a tiny dot following the hairline Shady Slope Road, chugging up the valley wall to the survivors. He tried to muster some shivery excitement – he’d tow the Toyota away and then they’d all be his, three easy little squeezes, gouts of red, joints flopping unnaturally, bodies pirouetting under spurts of gravel – but realized this simply wasn’t fun anymore. Somehow it had become work. It was worse than work, he decided, because now his emotions were tangled up in it and he had something to lose.

They’re not laughing. They’re too frightened.

Probably.

He wished he could just enjoy this without brutalizing himself in pursuit of the perfect day of shooting. It was ridiculous, he knew, to flagellate himself over every minor error. Mistakes happened, winds kicked up, decimals rounded off funny. It was the nature of the craft. This was supposed to be fun. Why else would he be doing it?

This is fun. Right?

Yes. You could say I’m having . . . a blast.

He crunched his energy drink empty and chucked it downhill. He would need to urinate soon, but first he had to take three more lives.

* * *

“He’s coming back,” Roy said.

James leaned his wife on her back against his shoulder. She was breathing fast, gulping down greedy mouthfuls of air. “I can’t breathe,” she said, and her voice sounded wrong. Somehow it was too small, squished, like someone was standing on her chest. He tugged her clawed fingers but they were clamped vise-tight.

“I said the jeep is coming back!” Roy pointed furiously. “He’s maybe two minutes down the road—”

“Then we have a hundred and twenty seconds to decide how we’re going to kill him.” James fought her hands and finally found the wound. “This is
right now
.”

It was a small hole, just below her armpit and above the curve of her tank top. Maybe the size of a dime – the entrance wound? – flanked with a growing halo of frothy blood. It was much smaller than either hole in Saray’s stomach. He had been certain the killer’s bullet had missed Elle. Maybe it had?

“I think it’s a fragment,” he said. “From when the bullet hit the ground under her, it exploded into pieces and—”

“Are you a fucking doctor now?” Roy said.

No, but I have a hundred and ten seconds to learn.

“Can’t breathe,” she said again and grabbed his collarbone and squeezed. Her other hand closed into a fist and pounded her chest hard. Hard enough to crack ribs. With every breath she took, he heard a persistent, reptilian hiss. Like air escaping a wet balloon. And then a low gurgle, like the sound a toilet makes after flushing. She arched her back, kicked clattering rocks against the Toyota, and fought his grasp.

“Elle!”

She thrashed like she was trapped in a straitjacket, eyes wide with animal panic, and he saw her chest visibly tense as her lungs compressed further. She was in her own version of Hell. He knew this was her ultimate nightmare because she had described it to him once – that she was trapped under a capsized canoe and the chest strap of her lifejacket was tangled in deadwood and she was sucking in cold mouthfuls of green water. Here she was, drowning in the Mojave.

“Elle. Stop moving—”

She threw her shoulders back, he lost his hold on the wound, and he saw now that the blood was different. It was frothy and pink as cotton candy, bubbling like sea foam or hand soap. A big glop of it slid free and stained her shirt. She exhaled, the foamy blood sucked back into the wound, and the term – the sloppy layman’s term, because that was all he had – flashed through James’ mind.

A sucking chest wound.

The vacuum of her chest cavity was punctured. Simple physics. Her lungs couldn’t inflate because outside air was inside her, and every time her lungs exhaled, more crept in to fill the space. Every breath she took would be a little shallower until she suffocated inside her own body. If James had been a paramedic, he would have had a gadget called a flutter valve – a one-way valve that affixed to the wound and let air out but not in. James was not a paramedic. Not even close.

“James.” She threw her head back, her hair splashed across soil, and her eyes searched for his. He wouldn’t look at her. He couldn’t. He was deep in thought. She pulled his face to hers, both of her bloody hands sticky on his cheeks. Who wanted to die alone? He wanted to look at her but he couldn’t. He needed to be mechanical, to reach deep inside his skull and
think
.

Flutter valve: noun. A one-way valve allowing air out, but not in.

“Roy?” he whispered.

“Yeah?”

“In the back of the car, by the black bag, there’s a roll of duct tape. And there are old sandwich bags under the front seats.” He was shocked by how calm he sounded, like he was ordering lunch. “I need both of them.”

“What are you doing?”

“I haven’t thought that far ahead yet.”

“Are you serious?”

“Do it.”

Roy crawled for the Toyota’s rear door. James turned to his wife and saw her looking up at him with a strange gleam in her eyes. She had something important to say.

“Don’t talk,” he told her. “Save it.”

She shook her head.

Behind him, Roy opened the Rav4’s rear door and it made that familiar double-creak that it had made ever since he’d first opened it on the dealership lot. For some reason it hit him now, that this was really happening and that tomorrow, if there was a tomorrow, would still exist in this world. This corrupted version of the world, where Elle had caught a bullet fragment and suffocated to death inside her own body. Worse than being only real, this was permanent. Nothing would undo this.

She opened her mouth again like she was about to speak and instead made a thin, wheezy gasp, like a zombie. It didn’t sound real. It was so B-movie cheesy it should have been a joke. Why couldn’t this all just be a joke?

Her eyes widened, as if she was also horrified by the sound.

“Don’t talk,” he repeated, and his eyes clouded. “It’s a waste, because you’re just going to tell me something I already know. I love you, too. It’s redundant.”

She smiled dumbly. Her eyes were looking up at him but also beyond him, through him. All the fear she’d had a moment ago was now gone, replaced by a strange, insidious calm that he didn’t trust. She was almost smiling, which terrified James:
You don’t smile when you’re holding on. You smile when you’re letting go.

“I can’t find the tape,” Roy said. “I can’t—”

“Under the cover.”

Elle parted her lips and found her voice again. It was only a shadow of the real thing, made by a few mouthfuls of scrounged air. Like a pneumonia death rattle: “I . . . I miss my snakes.”

He smiled. “Not the snakes, Elle.”

“I miss them so much,” she said. “I miss them.”

“Not . . .” He forced a scratchy laugh. “Not the damn
snakes
.”

“My babies.”

She’d had two. Gray was an eight-foot Colombian Redtail Boa her mother had bought for her when she was sixteen. He was a gentle giant, all mass and muscle, with a smooth dryness to his scales and an inquisitive tongue that felt like dry grass on your fingertips. Elle had sat on the patio with a horror novel in her lap and that huge-ass snake draped over her shoulders like a nightmarish scarf. He ate rabbits. Elle purchased them at her reptile store humanely pre-killed and frozen in neatly labeled plastic bags, complete with nutritional facts. He remembered laughing with her for the entire drive home after finding a fine print disclaimer underneath: NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION.

Her other one, Iris, was a corn snake. Much smaller, shorter, leaner; a shelter rescue after the previous owner left her unsupervised with a feeder mouse.
We will never feed ours live prey
, Elle had insisted.
Almost all snakes can be trained to eat pre-killed. Mashing two animals together in a box to fight is disrespectful to both predator and prey.
Ironically, in the case of Iris, it was the prey that had gained the upper hand. The mouse had chewed nasty gashes along Iris’s vertebrae that never regrew scales. They just became pale scars, like wax to the touch. She was a timid little pink snake, head-shy, terrified of being hurt again, and prone to whipping her tiny face under her coils when frightened. Elle took a special liking to Iris.

Eight months ago, she’d sold both Gray and Iris after the doctor had suggested her miscarriages were due to toxicity levels from reptile bacteria. It hadn’t helped.

“You hated my snakes,” she said sleepily.

“No.” He brushed her hair from her cheek and lied to her. “I didn’t.”

“You never held them. Why?”

“Gray snapped at me.”

“He thought your hand was a rabbit.”

“
That’s
why.”

“I think I’m dying,” she said flatly.

“You’re not.”

“I feel dead already. It’s weird.”

“You’re not.” He knew his words weren’t enough anymore.

She smiled grimly and her next sentence took two breaths. “Do you really believe all the optimistic crap you say?”

Yes
, he wanted to say, but he didn’t. He couldn’t. He was all out of bullshit for today. In a rare moment of naked honesty, he shook his head.

“Me neither,” she said.

It hurt. He had always known it, but hearing it hurt.

Her eyes lost focus. It was shocking how abruptly it happened. It was like a switch had flipped and her brain unplugged. She was there – Eileen Lynne Eversman, the girl who loved gory movies and hated cilantro and couldn’t quite grasp why everyone loved the Batman remakes so much – and then she sank back into her skull and suddenly wasn’t. He leaned back, the sunlight hit her face, and only then did he realize how gray she had become. The blue pallor of suffocation made her look like she was underwater and sinking fast.

“Roy!” he shouted. “Where the
fuck
are you?”

The guy kneeled down hard behind him and pressed duct tape and a single crumpled sandwich bag into his fingers. James didn’t know what he was expecting – he should have expected exactly this and nothing better – but his heart sank when these little objects jittered in his hands. They told him nothing new. He snapped the clear plastic taut and shook off breadcrumbs from the day before, back when the world made sense, and whispered to himself: “One-way valve. Air goes out. Not in.”

“The jeep,” Roy said. “He’s almost here.”

Please work.

“You’re okay, honey.” One side at a time, he folded the plastic into an approximate square and pressed it to the foamy wound. Then he pulled one, two, three short strips of duct tape, tearing each one with his teeth, and slapped one on the left side of the square, the right side, and finally the bottom, just above her blood-soaked tank top. His fingers were numb, barely responsive, like he was wearing gloves. He pressed each one airtight against her soft skin, but importantly, he left the top edge of the square open (very important,
most
important). Three sides sealed and one open.

“What are you doing?” Roy asked.

“Quiet.”

“You forgot a side—”

“Shut up.” His teeth chattered. He needed to hear it work.

Please, God, let it work.

He watched her, sleeping serenely with her head lolled against the door, and waited for her to breathe. When she did, he could watch the plastic and check his work. Only problem was, she wasn’t breathing.

Oh, no.

No, no, no.

He watched her lying doll-still. She looked used, spent, hollow. For some reason, James’ next thought wasn’t about his wife at all. He just wanted to stand up. He wanted to stand up like she had suggested, to just get up and walk like poor Glen and wait for the bullet. He couldn’t spend another second in a world without Elle.

Suicide suddenly sounded reasonable. It hadn’t, that awful time he’d found her drunk in the Subaru. He had been so furious at her then, but maybe he’d just never understood how much she hurt. He had grieved for their kids too, of course, but only as possibilities and vacant names. She had actually felt the life growing inside her, and then felt it die on a cellular level, every time. Maybe he understood now.