When they reached Gene he was on his knees sobbing, grabbing at the ground as if he were trying to dig into the cold dirt with his clawed hands. Before him was the body of a boy. Scrubby jeans, dark jacket now sprayed with blood and brain matter. His hands and neck were pale white, his hair black and slicked down. His face was broken like a porcelain doll. The bullet moving at 3,000 feet per second entered his skull, fragmented and released all its energy. Where his left eye had been was a star-shaped hole the size of an orange that reached arms and cracks across the rest of his face.
He couldn’t have been more than ten years old.
Steam rose from the red-and-black opening in his head, twirling in the light of their electric torches, and all around them the Gulch came alive with the sound of movement as if a stampede had suddenly been loosed. Dead leaves crunched under hooves, saplings bent and snapped, the ground itself seemed to shake, the air electric as seemingly every living thing in Coombs’ Gulch stirred to life and ran.
Their attention shifted from the boy to the swirling maelstrom throughout the surrounding forest. The force was overwhelming. They clutched their rifles.
Jonathan turned the spotlight out toward the tree line, but there was only darkness.
Chapter Four
Two weeks later, Gene pronounced Jonathan and Mary husband and wife as Conner and Michael, dressed in tuxedos, watched on, standing beside him like sentries. Mary’s eyes lit up when Jonathan said, “I do.” His heart was consumed with guilt when she slid the ring on his finger.
They panicked the night Gene shot that boy. They were drunk. It was pitch black – not even a moon – and they were in the middle of nowhere, living out every hunter’s worst nightmare. The whole Gulch was filled with movement and they were terrified. Looking back, Jonathan wasn’t sure what he’d been more terrified of – the fact they’d just killed a child or that someone might be there in the woods who’d witnessed it. But the sound was too great to be any one person – it was like a fast-moving river and the four of them a small rock in the middle.
Gene was still crying, pulling at the boy, trying to revive him, trying to check him for a pulse until Michael decided to end the lunacy and dragged him away from the body like a man handling a small dog.
“Where did he even come from? What the hell is he doing out here?” Michael was screaming, raising his voice over the din of Gene’s breakdown.
Conner was talking about calling 911 and what to tell them. “It was an accident! We saw the eyes!”
“Those eyes were eight feet off the ground! A kid’s eyes don’t light up! It was a moose or something, it had to be!” Gene sat on bloody grass, rocking back and forth, his voice trembling “I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it. It’s not right. It can’t be…”
Jonathan stood staring down at the boy with a star-shaped crater where his eye should be. Michael searched the tree line and the creek bed with the spotlight, trying to find where the boy had come from and what he was doing there. Conner weighed the possibilities, how this might all turn out.
The boy was dead. There was no one else in Coombs’ Gulch. Michael searched high and low that night, but there were no other people, campers, hunters – nothing.
And there was nothing that would bring the boy back from the dead. Involving the authorities, at this point, would be futile. Decisions had to be made. There was no life to save other than their own. It would be irrational and unreasonable to ruin their lives and futures by going public with the accident. No good could come of it.
“We would be on the hook for murder, manslaughter, whatever it might be, but it would certainly mean careers ending, relationships ending, public shame and prison.” Conner was exasperated, his voice growing louder with each breath. “And why should we have to face that? Where are this kid’s parents? What the fuck is he doing out here in the freezing night miles and miles from the nearest town? We saw the eyes in the spotlight! It was a clean shot! Where the fuck is the goddamned deer?”
The world would have no sympathy for them. It isn’t just hunters who shoot to kill; courts and newspapers can sometimes do worse than a gun. Gene was still too distraught to think, but Jonathan, Conner and Michael stood in the night staring at each other and knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this accident would ruin their lives. There was no one else for miles around. It was the middle of the night and they were alone. It seemed the best thing for everybody.
“This is the only way we’ll still get to live our lives,” Conner said.
“It’s not our fault,” Michael said.
“What would Mary say?” Jonathan said.
“Mary isn’t going to know. Two weeks from now, you’ll get married and go on to live your life the way you’re supposed to. This is a fucking fluke. It’s not our fault. What is he even doing out here?”
“Don’t they always say the cover-up is worse than the crime?”
“Not this time,” Michael said. “And only if you get caught.”
Michael and Conner hiked back to the cabin while Jonathan waited with
