Nowhere to Run

the damned saddle. We should have tied him in it, like he asked.”

Smith said, “There’s something sticking out of him.”

The way he said it made Farkus hold his breath.

“It’s an arrow,” Parnell whispered. “Those fucking brothers found us.”

Farkus couldn’t see Parnell, Smith, or Campbell, but he could sense from the leather-on-leather creaking that all three men were turning in their saddles trying to get a panoramic view of what might be out there in the trees.

“This is when we could have used those gen fours,” Campbell muttered.

CAPELLEN WAS ALIVE, but the arrow was buried deeply into his chest. His breathing was harsh, wet, and heavy. The shot had been perfectly placed in the two-inch gap between the ceramic shoulder pad and the armored strap. Farkus stayed on his horse while the others tried to lift the wounded man back onto his mount. As they pushed him up, his arm flopped back and knocked Smith’s goggles off his face. In the sudden pool of bouncing green light from the eyecups, Farkus watched as they shoved Capellen onto the saddle like a sack of rocks. Capellen simply fell off the other side of the horse into the dirt, snapping off the shaft of the arrow in the fall and possibly driving the projectile farther into his chest. In the glow of Smith’s goggles, Capellen’s bloody clothing under his armpit looked like it was soaked in black motor oil and his open eyes showed white from rolling back in his head.

“Oh, shit!” Campbell cried, and reached up to readjust his goggles. As he did so, the light blinked out and doused the macabre scene.

Farkus said, “Put him behind me. This old horse is stout enough to carry us both. I’m sure he can hold on.”

The men didn’t pause or talk it over. They gathered Capellen up, and Farkus felt the weight and heat of the man behind him. Capellen leaned into Farkus with his arms around his ribs and dropped his face into his back.

“Get his gun,” Parnell said. Smith pulled Capellen’s weapon out of his holster, and Farkus fought an urge to mouth, “Damn.”

There was a wet cack-cack-cack liquid sound when Capellen inhaled. Farkus recognized the sound from hunting. The arrow had pierced a lung, and probably collapsed it. Capellen’s chest cavity was filling up with blood. He would drown from the inside, like an elk hit in the same place. It was a miserable and drawn-out way to die, Farkus guessed. If Capellen was a game animal, there would be no question but to stop the suffering with a bullet to the head or a slit across his throat.

Farkus thought: This is just like hunting and these men are just meat and organs, sacks of bones, like elk. It’s time to quit being scared of them.

But he didn’t feel the same way about whoever had shot the arrow and had taken them all by surprise.

“Let’s move back to where we’ve got an advantage,” Parnell said, turning his horse around and riding past Farkus and Capellen, back down the trail they’d come on.

“Are we headed back to the rock face?” Smith asked, turning his mount.

“Absolutely,” Parnell said.

Farkus remembered it well, and it made sense. Just below the summit, the trail had switchbacked through a massive rock slide where it looked like an entire wedge of the mountainside had given way and fallen like a calf from an iceberg, leaving a long treeless chute of rubble and scree. And a few room-sized boulders. It would be a perfect place for them to go: treeless so they could see for half a mile with their night vision goggles. And well beyond arrow range from an archer in the trees.

Parnell had kicked his horse into a canter, and they retreated quickly.

Farkus had his reasons to take Capellen. The first was his hope they’d forget about the handgun, which they didn’t. But Capellen still wore his night vision goggles, and Farkus reached over his shoulder and snatched them off. After fumbling with the straps, he managed to pull them on. The pitch-black night turned ghostly green and he could see everything! The clarity was astonishing, even though the color scheme was largely green and gray. When he glanced up at the sky, the few stars that peeked down between the clouds looked like Hollywood spotlights. He was shocked how dense the forest was as the trees shot by on both sides. Up ahead, he could see Parnell and Smith pushing their horses, and he could see the big butt muscles of their mounts contracting and expanding with their new gait. When he saw how tight the trees were that he’d come through earlier, he wondered how it was he hadn’t been knocked off.

“When we get to the rocks,” Farkus said to Capellen, whose head bounced on Farkus’s back as they rode, “we’re trading pants. You look like my size, and why should you care if your pants are clean or dirty?”

The fourth reason he’d volunteered to take Capellen was still forming in his mind, Farkus thought. But by taking their buddy, they might decide he, Dave Farkus, was all right after all. He was on their side. And they might forget about him and quit telling him to shut up every time he spoke.

And he could work the new angle and get the hell away from them before the Grim Brothers killed them all.

“THEY MUST HAVE SPLIT UP,” Parnell said, a note of puzzlement in his voice. He adjusted the dial on his equipment. “One of them has the sat phone and has finally stopped moving. The other one is down there somewhere.” He motioned toward the dark wall of trees. “They split up so we’d march right toward the guy with the sat phone while the other one waited for us here.”

“Do you think he’s still there?” Campbell asked.

“I doubt it,” Parnell said. “He knows we have the high ground and a clear field of fire. He’s not stupid enough to try to take us on up here in these rocks.”

Smith nodded. “He waited until we left Capellen alone before he attacked him. That way, he had the odds on his side as well as the element of surprise. I wonder how long he’s been tracking us?”

Parnell shrugged.

“Maybe all night,” Smith said.

Campbell turned. “Farkus, what the hell are you doing back there?”