Shot Down (3 page)

Still gripping the lean-to's heavy crossbar, the Captain and I tugged toward the end of the ledge. The wood poles of the lean-to dragged the hounds along with it. Again I heard the dogs' legs scramble, pushing in the other direction.

At a foot's length away, I stared down the long drop-off. The height of ten men, maybe fifteen.

“Alright now,” the Captain shouted. “Heave!”

The lean-to slid off the ledge, the dogs dangling with it in the air. And then—“Ack!”—the Captain fell to the ground and started to slide toward the ledge's rim too. The limp balloon envelope, burner inside, was tangled around a bar on the lean-to's frame. Still tied to the Captain's shoulder, it dragged him forward.

“Your coat!” I shouted. “Take off your coat!”

Below my line of sight I heard one dog slip from between the lean-to bars and start the drop. It howled until it hit the next stretch of ground, crumpling.

I grabbed at the Captain's skidding feet, which carved crooked lines in the dirt as they moved along. He wriggled on the ground, wide-eyed and with arms stretched out, until the heavy coat slipped out from under him.

I fell backward against the ledge's rock wall in time to hear the second dog hit the ground below. And then a bursting—the burner blowing open. The treetops before me rattled, shaking off leaves.

The Captain peered over the ledge with caution. “Ah jeez,” he whispered, panting, then went quiet. Any hope we'd had of flying away was destroyed in the drop beneath that ledge.

CHAPTER FIVE

T

he burning smell seemed to follow us in every direction. We stood stalled on the ledge after failing to pick a path out.

“You know what the worst part of this is?” the Captain said, pink-eyed again. “I'm a dog person.”

“That's the worst part?”

“You know what I mean.” He sighed. “I had a dog in Iowa, you know. For a while. A little Yorkie. His name was Petey.”

“Those dogs were gonna kill us. Or hold us 'til those...guys with guns came.”

The Captain fanned himself with his cap, then used it to shake away a trail of rising smoke.

“I know that. Come on, kid. I know that. 'S not the point. Remorse is important. Keeps ya human.” He tugged his hat back on and took it back off as the sun got higher and glared. “You practically grew up in the woods, Malik. You never had a pet?”

I shook my head.

“See? That's yer problem. Lotsa valuable lessons there.”

I rolled my shoulders and tightened the straps on my bag. “You can tell me what kinds later. What are we going to do about the men out there? The manhunters.”

“Unsentimental. Too unsentimental,” the Captain murmured. His face turned serious. “The balloon's gone. That explosion got the burner, burned the envelope. They might've shot us down again anyways. Gah! You don't know how many nights I spent workin'...” He sighed again. “Anyways, that's a bust. Maybe unsentimental's the order of the day. What do you think? What'll that survival book a' yours recommend for putting together some mode of transport?”

“I can look through it. But—I mean, for now—do we hide? If they were still chasing, I think we would've heard them—”

The Captain squinted at me. “Do we hide or what, Malik? I'm not sure what yer gettin' at. We hide until we can get outta here. Or preferably get out of here, hide, and then go even farther, in that order. You heard what they did to that man who was running. We can't think even a camp deep in the hills is safe for that long.”

“If there's no easy way out, though...don't you want to know what we're up against?”

The Captain got red in the face and forgot about keeping quiet. “These are men with
guns
, Malik! If we're lucky enough to figure out which way they went off to, we go the opposite direction, fast!”

“I can track them,” I said. “If we get back up the hill, I know I can. Don't you want to know why they're killing people?”

“No!”

I looked up, deep into the mess of rocks and treetops. “We're lost. We got almost nothing. If we can know them—anything more about them—it could help us.”

“Malik, I respect you. You know I do. I think you are a bright young man. But as the only adult here, I'm sorry, but I'm makin' an executive decision—”

But by then I had started up. The Captain scowled, folded his arms, and waited for me to turn around. When I didn't, he began to follow behind. I think the fear that sound would travel was the only thing that kept him from yelling curses at me.

At what felt like the start of afternoon, we neared the overhang where the hounds had sniffed us. Both of us moved forward an arm's length at a time. I climbed up a few rocks and raised my eyes even with the overhang, then above it. The short climb we had left to the top of the hillside looked open—no hunters in sight.

As I stepped past the overhang, further into the woods, a blinking light caught my eye. A red dot, on and off. I reached down and picked up a black disc. Small but heavy. The red light blinked from one corner. Around the disc's rim were
N
and
S
and
E
and
W
.

“I know what this is,” I whispered to myself. “Captain! I found a compass.”

He trudged up the hill behind me, past the overhang. I held the compass toward him.

“See? It's a good sign,” I said.

“Terrific,” he said, not looking at it, and walked past me, shaking his head.

CHAPTER SIX

A

t some point in the afternoon the long hill flattened out. The hunters had left a trail of broken twigs and bent plant stems most of the way to the top. What looked like maybe wheel tracks, too. I had spent the last stretch of our climb up paging through the Matterhorn guide.

I sat down on a rock and held out two handfuls of wild tubers to the Captain when he reached me.

“Thanks,” he said, quiet, glancing from side to side. “Starved.”

I took a lot of eating to feel full on foraged food. Sometimes more food than it was easy to find. But Kentucky seemed like anyplace else I'd been—a little bit of knowledge meant you wouldn't starve.

For a while we'll have to stick with plants
, I thought. The Captain and I had hunted before. But with meat we would've ended up leaving traces of the kill or the prep or the meal behind—bones, blood, fur. That wasn't even thinking about starting a fire, or the smoke that comes from it.

The Captain wiped his mouth, and we kept walking. Not long after the ground flattened out we saw a building. Built from logs, boxy—not a house. A smooth gray walkway led up to one of its doors.

“‘Nature Observatory,'” the Captain said, reading the yellow letters on a post nearby. “We must be in a public park or sumpthin'.”

Soon after that we saw the start of a paved road.

“It's gotta lead out at some point,” I said. “Maybe if we follow it, we'll get a sense of where the hunters came from. We won't have a trail to follow like in the woods, but it could work. The man I saw at the overhang—his clothes didn't look beat-up like the man running's. They could've come from a house, or—”

“Alright,” the Captain said. “But let's walk
alongside
the roads. Between the trees. That'll give us
some
protection, anyway.”

That wasn't an option for very long. The trees started to thin as we followed the road. The path led to another road running across it and stopped. We could turn right or left if we wanted to follow the blacktop for longer. I took out the compass and tried to see which direction matched up with the each turn, but the blinking dot seemed to stay in the same place.

On the other side of the road in front of us was a short fence. Wood, dotted with chipped white paint. I looked from left to right and walked over to it. The boards creaked as I leaned against them.

“Holy moley,” the Captain said from behind me. “I guess this is horse country, huh.”

Green fields rolled up and down on three sides of me, nothing like the woods we'd just left. The shaky fence we stood by went on for a long stretch, bordering the grass. As far as we could see, long fences boxed in other parts of the fields too. Near the horizon a horse appeared, then two of them.

“Wild. Gotta be,” the Captain said, pointing to a gap in a large section of fence in the distance.

The horses had shining coats, both of them. They stopped and seemed to nod at each other, then took off toward different places.

“This whole area's full a' horse stables. Or used to be,” the Captain continued. “People used to race 'em. Never really understood the appeal, myself. I was more into stuff that had a guy behind the wheel of sumpthin'. The occasional demolition derby, maybe, although that's really a different sort of—”

“This mean you're feeling better?” I asked.

“No,” he huffed. “I still think this is the riskiest, dumbest thing we could do right now.”

I looked across the green fields in front of us as the sun took its first dips back downwards. No telling which way the hunters had gone or what they were heading to.

“I hope you got a plan movin' forward,” the Captain said. “We get out there any farther and we're exposed. No shelter out there in the fields. You understand that?”

I nodded, then crouched down and squinted at the paved road. “They must've taken something away from here, but it didn't leave any tracks.” They could have been miles away.

The Captain stared at me, arms folded. “So...? Are we headed left, right, or aimlessly into some fields of bluegrass?”

I had no idea, but I thought saying so could only make things worse.

“We'll go left,” I said, waving toward the stretch of road in that direction. “But if we don't find anything, we can double back into the woods before nightfall.”

The back of my head started to ache as we walked. I realized I hadn't had any water since the day before. I could tell from the weight of my backpack that my thermos was empty, but I unzipped the top of the pack anyway, sorting through spare shirts and the Matterhorn guide. Only a drop inside the steel container.

Not long after we started down the road, I heard the Captain breathe out deep and plunk to the ground. I turned to see him resting against a roadside fencepost.

“Don't look at me like that,” he said, trying to smile but sounding worn-out. “I'm not as young as you, you know. Need more breaks.”

So far that day I'd been running mostly on fear. Fear and the urge to know what might be out there. But looking at the Captain's large frame leaning on the fence, I felt something else: guilt. I started to say sorry for dragging him up the hill, that we should've tried to agree first. And then I saw it.

“Turning left might've been the wrong choice,” I said, gazing past the Captain. What looked like a thin trail of smoke rose from somewhere far in the other direction. “Wait here.”

I hopped over the nearest fence and dashed into the field behind it, toward the top of a tall slope between dips in the fields. Beneath the smoke trail was the rare, almost unreal-looking glow of a lit-up house.

I hurried back to the Captain.

“I think...” I gasped, “I spotted them.”

He turned his head toward the source of the smoke. “Back that way?”

“Yeah.”

He looked the way I felt. Scared, not sure of what was next.

“We'll probably be out of sight for a while longer. I bet we can walk until the point where we turned.”

“An' then, lemme guess,” the Captain said. “Hands and knees the rest of the way?”

I nodded. If we didn't want someone to see us coming up on the house, we were better off crawling. “Hands and knees.”

“If they have more dogs, Malik, I'm gonna be very upset.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

I

dragged myself forward along the grass until I reached the fence that surrounded the glowing house's massive lawn. The fence was a bold red color, I could tell even in the dusk, and it looked newer than the others we'd seen, or at least more looked-after—no peeling paint. I scanned the yard slowly as the Captain finished his crawl behind me. The sunlight had nearly faded by the time we got there, and the glow from the house got brighter.

I couldn't remember ever seeing a house so big. It was like three homes end-to-end. On the side of yard opposite us there was another house, or maybe a stable. Had to be a stable. A wide wood carriage was parked near to it, with four tall wheels. A stone walkway stretched out from the front of the main house, twisting like a small river. The house was a bold red, same as the fence.

“No dogs,” I whispered to the Captain. “No guards of any kind that I can see.”

We slid between the slats of the fence, the Captain muffling his grunts as he went.

From the edge of the yard I could see different walls and corners through open windows. Inside were rugs, framed pictures, long candles on candlesticks. The place looked warm, calm, safe.

The Captain and I followed voices around a back corner of the house. As we edged along the back wall, it got easier to tell that one was a woman's. The voice dangled above our heads from out of a window, and we ducked down.

“Eat your mushrooms please, Kyle.”

“No, thank you,” said the boy we'd heard earlier.

“Carter, tell your son to eat his mushrooms,” the woman said.

“Kyle, listen to your mother,” said the man who'd been out with the boy.

“Your pop-pop ate all of his,” the woman added.

“Hrrrnnhh”—an even older voice drifted through the window, grunting or mumbling words I couldn't make out.

A fork or a spoon scraped slowly across a plate. The father, Carter, raised his voice like he was speaking to everyone at once. “We had a sad day today. Maybelle and Maggie were good dogs. The finest dogs I've ever hunted with. More importantly, though, they were a part of this family. And what do we say about family, Kyle?”