“The first mile or so is just a little hilly. I can cover that stretch fast enough. Eventually, it starts to get pretty steep, up toward the ridge. That’s where I lose a little time, but I’m getting better at the climb.
“Theoretically, I could drive in from the other side, but that’s only going to happen once. By the time you’re done reading this, you’ll understand why.
“Meanwhile, I hike in the long way. Hell, maybe I’ll even lose some weight in the bargain. You can appreciate the efficiency in that, can’t you?”
The book was coming along well. It was practically writing itself these days. Anyone with a pulse could tell you this was a huge story. Even bigger than he’d thought it was going to be at first. Interesting times, these.
He pocketed the recorder again and traded it for the recurve bow on his shoulder. The ground was getting scrubbier. It didn’t usually take long to spook something around here. He loaded an arrow while he walked and started kicking at the bushes, watching for prey, any movement at all.
Sure enough, just past the crest of the first hill, an eastern cottontail darted out.
It came right at him, God bless its tiny little brain, but then turned and bolted off in the other direction.
He let it get a good head start. Anything less than twenty yards was just fish in a barrel.
But then he raised the bow, drew back to the corner of his mouth, and let it fly.
The cottontail stumbled hard, ass over whiskers. It came to a stop in some tall grass and was still quivering when he got there. A quick snap of the neck finished it off. It took only a minute after that to truss it up with some twine, and he was moving again.
Going faster now, he jogged down the next slope and across a small ravine.
It took another twenty minutes to climb back up to the other side, where he stopped just before a line of giant spruce growing along the ridge.
“You’d never know it to look at these trees now, but they probably marked a property line at some point. Back when this was dairy country and not woods. Now it’s just our own little home away from home. It can’t compete with the White House, of course, but lucky for me, it doesn’t have to.”
He stood among the trees for several minutes, scanning the area down below.
After he’d satisfied himself that it was safe to move out into the open, he broke through the line of evergreens and started down into the hollow, where the old farmstead sat moldering away to nothing.
THE FENCING WAS long gone. the whole back half of the old house was sagging right into itself, almost like it was taking a final bow. And the driveway — what used to be the driveway — was just a long patch of goldenrod and buckthorn, with two ruts in the ground you couldn’t even see from a distance.
The barn was still standing, though. More or less. Thick brush and vines had made the back of the place nearly impenetrable. In front, someone had torn off the big double doors a long time ago, and the flap to the hayloft above that. With a few pieces of missing siding near the peak, the whole thing looked like a face with black gaps for orifices. He always thought of the entrance as the mouth.
Just inside, he untrussed the fat little rabbit and let it roll out onto the floor, right next to the last one. From his pack, he took a plastic travel container of granular lye and a small Poland Spring bottle he’d filled from the tap at home. He sprinkled both over the animal. The lye sped up the breakdown of tissue, and the water sped up the lye. It was an old farm trick, and a half-decent little insurance policy, too. Nothing said
Not that anyone ever came back this far anymore — but just in case.
At the back of the barn, in the last stall, he moved aside the stack of rotting wooden pallets and lifted the layers of moldy cardboard away.
There was no handle on the trapdoor anymore, but just enough gap in the floorboards to get a grip. He raised the flap and let it rest against the stall wall. Then he climbed down the ladder inside.
The root cellar — if that’s what it had been — was no more than six by six in the antechamber, and then maybe twice that on the other side of the door.
There was just enough light from above to show him the sliding panel he’d installed a long time ago. He opened it now and dropped in the granola bars and the juice boxes.
Neither of the two inside spoke to him. They’d stopped trying after the first few days. But he heard one of them stir, and a soft scrabble across the floor.
Then, “Ethan? Ethan, here.”
There was the crinkle of plastic wrappers, and the sound of them gobbling down the food. If they’d figured out what was in the juice by now, they didn’t much care.
He sat crouched with his back against the door, listening. It never took too long once the juice was gone. Their breathing slowed and became regular. Within a few minutes, they were both out cold.
“Everyone’s going to want to know what I was thinking. They’re going to wonder what kind of monster could do something like this, and they’re going to make a lot of assumptions.
“But maybe — just maybe — this is all for a reason that you can’t see right now. Did that ever cross your
