Shot Down (6 page)

I took a step toward the raft and glanced a yellow feather in front of my feet. The family had been close enough for one of them to pick off a bird above my head, I thought. Why did they leave the raft where it was, intact?

“Malik? We ready to depart?”

“Wait,” I said, taking a sip from the canteen around my neck. “There.”

A small red light flashed off and on in the shadow of a tree we'd cut logs from. One of the trackers.

“They hoped we'd come back here, if we'd joined up again! So they'd know where to find us—the tracker would lead them back!” I leapt over to the tree, reaching for the blinking light. “I'm gonna take the tracker, throw it up above, and try and lead them off cou—”

Something wrapped tight around my left ankle, brushing like a ring of fire against my skin and dragging my feet off the ground. My spine smacked against the knotted trunk of a tree, and the top of my head brushed the grass below. I was upside down, hanging by a thick rope.

“They booby-trapped it!” the Captain said. “Hold on, I'll getcha down! Un-freakin'-believable...”

“Careful!” My head spun and I tried to hurl myself upwards, toward the knot by my ankle, but I flipped back down. As the Captain moved to grab the rope, a shrill whistle pierced the air. The Captain stepped back out from underneath the shade of the tree and looked up.

“Ah jeez—up in the hills—the old guy's made us!”

“What?” I said, still spinning.

“The grandpa, the one in the chair! He's up on the hillside with a pair of binoculars—”

The whistle sounded again, and I shut my eyes 'til it stopped.

The Captain shouted upward, “Thank you! We get it!” and started scanning the ground for the saw we'd stolen.

“A-ha!” He waved it in the air and turned to face a path where the clopping of horse hooves had started to rise. “The saw will hafta do. Come on, you over-tanned psychos! We're right here!”

“Captain!” I said. “Could you cut me down before they get here?”

“I'm embarrassed to say that didn't occur to me,” the Captain replied, then shouted one more time toward the pathway: “Do yer worst!”

Before he put the saw to the rope around my foot, they were on us. I saw them charging from upside down: the young boy, Kyle, on a small brown horse. And his father, Carter, riding the double-headed Roman, his rifle cradled in his free hand.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

T

he father's face was calm, but his eyes seemed to sparkle. Or at least that's how it looked from upside down. When he spoke, after he'd steadied his horse, his voice sounded warm, controlled: “Put this back in your saddlebag, son,” he said, and tossed Kyle the other tracking disc. The boy did as he was told.

Carter spoke to the Captain with the same sunny confidence. “I said it before: I admire your spirit, you two! For the amount of time, that little boat you've made over there is impressive.”

As he spoke, I tightened up my stomach, moving my hands slowly up the back of my left leg, toward the knot at my ankle.

The Captain spat, and Carter pointed the gun toward his chest.

“This was a good hunt!” Carter continued. “Not our longest hunt, right Kyle? But this is a hunt we'll remember. We're going to have to...let Dennis go, unfortunately, for allowing you two to escape. Again, though, evidence of your ingenuity! It's a rare thing. Now, if either of you would like to say a prayer, any kind of last words, go ahead.” He said to the boy, more quietly, “And why, again, do we hunt, son?”

The boy gripped the strap of his saddlebag and said nothing.

“Kyle?”

“B-because the world's only fit for the strong now,” he said. He kept his head turned away from me.

“Aw, fer cryin' out loud, you creep,” the Captain said. “Why not just admit to the boy that you
enjoy
it?”

The father's face went flat. “For that,” he told the Captain, “we'll change the order up. You get to watch your young friend die first.”

I couldn't see the Captain's face during what happened next. The end of Carter's rifle shifted my way, and the Captain said nothing more. He just stomped in between me and the gun and charged.

I shut my eyes and prepared to hear the Captain cry out. Instead I heard a
whulp!
and saw him slide under the front legs of Roman the horse. Roman neighed in alarm and jumped up, both heads confused. Carter was thrown off the animal's back. I saw him hit the ground with a thud. His rifle landed on its butt and fired off into the trees.

I jerked my head left and saw, right side up, the Captain scrambling. He'd stepped into another booby trap.

The gunfire scared Roman even more than the snagging of the Captain, and the horse ran off into the trees. Kyle struggled off the smaller horse—his animal had also started to panic, and it sprang away before Kyle touched the ground.

In the tree next to mine, the Captain grunted and hacked away at his rope with the saw still in his hand. I scanned the ground for Carter, who rose up in the cloud of dust the horses had left.

“Come back here!” he shouted, but they were gone. He scanned the ground himself until he spotted the rifle.

“Kyle!” the father said. “In the bag—I need bullets, now!”

By that time the Captain had plopped from the tree. He pounced and broke Carter's uneasy grip on the gun. The two men tumbled past the raft into low water. The young boy looked on, nearly still. One of his hands dug through the saddlebag.

I picked at my knot, the metal canteen swinging back and forth from the strap around my neck. Hanging there sideways, I saw the Captain tackle Carter, holding him in the water until Carter kicked loose.

The men moved back and forth, kicking up a spray of water in every direction. The father had to be younger by years, and he was leaner, too, but the Captain seemed to absorb the man's blows, pressing his weight. Before he sank the father's head under again, Carter cried out, “Kyle! The gun!”

When the Captain lifted him back out after dunking him under, Carter sank an elbow into the Captain's groin and the Captain went big-eyed, gasping. Water dripped from his beard while he stumbled backward.

“Now, Kyle!” Carter shouted, tightening one arm around the Captain's neck.

The Captain moaned and let his body drop back, thrusting Carter headfirst into the stream.

The boy pulled a round from his bag and skittered toward the rifle, glancing with each step at his father.

Blood swirled around in my head as I set my feet back on the ground and leaned against the tree. For a moment both men in the water rested a length apart on their hands and knees. Fighting for air.

Kyle kept his back to me and held the men in his sight. He might have been spooked, but he was practiced—he loaded the gun with a few swift movements. A click sounded once the round was inside the rifle.

Both the Captain and Kyle's father stood soaking in the stream. Their eyes jumped to Kyle at the sound of the click, then jumped back to each other. Another spray of water rose between them as they locked hands, pushing back and forth.

“Any sorta help you can provide right now, Malik,” the Captain said, “would—be much—”

The father shouted again at his son, “
Shoot
him, Kyle!”

Kyle pointed the rifle the Captain's way. Everything seemed to slow as I stepped to Kyle's side, then in front of the gun.

“Please,” I said. “Just please hold on.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

M

y hand shook as I rested it on the snout of the gun. The boy looked scared, and I'm sure I did too. Feet splashed in the water behind me as the Captain and Carter struggled to hold their ground.

“This is ugly,” I said. “Yeah? And stupid. We don't want to hurt your dad. Believe it or not. We—”

“Don't listen to him, Kyle!” the man said from the water. “Be strong!”

“Look, you've probably seen more awful things than a kid should've, than anybody should've. And the only way this'll end safe and not be another awful thing is if you hand me that gun. Trust me. Trusting people—it's another way to be strong.”

The boy slid his finger off the gun's trigger, then slid it in again.

“But,” he said, “
I
enjoy this too,” and—
snap
—pulled the trigger back.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“I

can't believe you socked a kid,” the Captain said.

“He tried to
shoot
me,” I replied. “If the canteen hadn't stopped the bullet, I would be dead.”

“Oh, I was there! Not sayin' you weren't justified. He was a vicious little dude, when you total everything up. But—if his dad hadn't had me in a death grip at the time, I think I woulda fallen over giggling when you socked little Kyle.”

“You're the one who decided how to dispatch those hunting dogs.”

“Do. Not. Bring up the dogs. That kid made a choice. Those poor dogs didn't have a say in the matter.”

I sat next to the Captain, arms around my knees, as our raft drifted creakily downriver. We would float until nightfall, then find a place to sleep, to forage.

We had left the man and his son tied up by the shore. Once I took care of the boy, the Captain and I were able to hold down Carter. The man shouted and spat in the shallow water as we roped his wrists together. As I made my way onto the raft, the old man above us began to blow into his whistle again and again in anger. I watched him get smaller and smaller on his spot on the hillside until I couldn't make out the scowl on his craggy face.

“Yer pretty darn lucky you had that canteen around your neck,” the Captain said. The woods around us looked the same as those where we'd left from, but the sun was getting low. “Maybe a luckier person would've gotten this raft moving a little earlier, or wouldn't have got shot down by a family of Kentucky manhunters in the first place. You might have a net total of bad luck, all things considered. But you got pretty lucky with respect to not getting shot.”

I rubbed my thumb along the dent left in the heavy canteen. After Kyle had fired the rifle, I'd thought, for a few breaths, that I was gone. And maybe Kyle had thought he got me. Or maybe he stood still from shock—had never shot at anyone from that close before.

I had stumbled back, my ears ringing, my arms spinning in circles. And then I had stopped, patted my chest, and felt no blood, no bullet wound—just dirt and sweat and the stinging hot cavern the round had put in the hunk of metal around my neck. Then, like the Captain said, I socked the kid.

I removed the canteen, looping its strap around one of the raft's bindings, and started to tell the Captain more about earlier. When the boy had pretended to be hurt. How I thought I might've got something through to him.

“Maybe you did. The kid'll probably be thinkin' about today for a while, anyway. Might dawn on him sometime down the road that his dad's nuts,” the Captain said. “Oooh—maybe it's
karma
you didn't get plugged, 'specially considering it was the boy's canteen.”

“I don't know what that is.”

The air filled with cricket chirps and the coos of owls as the night came on, muffling other, faraway sounds. Every so often I'd think I heard horse hooves, never knowing for sure. I pictured Roman the horse clopping on through the woods, keeping pace with our raft.

When it got dark, we figured we were far enough away to start a fire. Even if Carter or Pop-Pop saw the smoke somehow, they had a long enough walk back to their house. The Captain and I nudged the raft toward shore, then both collapsed for a while before looking for tinder.

That night by the flames the Captain went on predicting mutations to come in the family of manhunters. Extra eyes, suction cups on their palms. I began to drift off, half-hearing him, into a heavy sleep overrun by strange and winding dreams.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jonathan Mary-Todd is a dream weaver from the Twin Cities.

AFTER THE DUST SETTLED

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	Pig City Malik and his friends try to avoid cities, but they look for shelter in downtown Des Moines once a winter storm hits. They're quickly trapped in the middle of a struggle between the city's two biggest gangs: the peaceful members of the Coalition and the forces of Pig City, who want to turn everyone else into hog food.
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	Shot Down Malik and the Captain, a gruff inventor, are on a hot air balloon tour of apocalyptic America—until a bullet sends their ride to the ground. A crash landing is just the beginning of their troubles, as the two travelers discover a family that hunts people for sport and begin a run for their lives across the hills and fields of Kentucky.
	Snakebite Beckley's crew has made its way from Montana to South Dakota, living off the land and staying out of trouble. But trouble soon finds them. First, a snake sinks its fangs into the moody Hector. Then a clan of savage kids runs off with Beckley's sister. Will the group's survival knowledge be enough to get her back?