followed the line of trees with my eyes, all the way around the lake.
That’s when I heard the first gunshot.
Chapter Fourteen
Vinnie was down. That was the first thing that came to me. I ran over to the front porch and said his name, saw blood on the side of his face. I heard another shot. Wood chips flew from the side of the cabin.
I grabbed him by the coat and pulled him to his feet. There was another gunshot, and then another. Everything after that was a mad rush of fear and adrenaline. We ran like animals, tripping over rocks and roots, pine boughs lashing our faces. There was nothing left but running. No thought. No sanity. No reason. Just running through the trees with our hearts pumping in our throats.
Vinnie tripped and went down hard. I picked him up, just as we heard a branch snapping somewhere behind us. We kept running. He went one way around a great rock, I went another. I thought I’d pick him up on the other side, but he wasn’t there.
There was a stream here, maybe the same stream we had seen before, maybe not. I had no idea where the hell I was. I almost called his name out loud, then realized how suicidal that would be. I stopped and listened. I could hear nothing but my own breathing and the soft sound of the water on the rocks.
Something moved in my peripheral vision. I ducked instinctively, waiting for the rifle blast. Vinnie’s face appeared around the trunk of a tree. He was holding his right ear, the whole side of his face painted in blood. He was leaning against the tree like it was the only thing holding him upright.
I went to him, pushed his hand away, and looked at his face. He brushed me away and pointed at the ground. I looked down and saw my own footprints. We were making it pretty damn easy for them to find us.
“Come on, this way,” I said. I was about to take him up the stream but thought better of it. That’s exactly where they’d expect us to go. Instead, I led Vinnie downstream for a good hundred yards, cutting back against our original direction. The water was cold and it soaked my boots again, but what the hell.
We jumped out of the stream and hit the woods again. We couldn’t run anymore. But we kept moving. There was no trail here. We didn’t want a trail. We squeezed our way between trees and climbed over rocks. I don’t know how long we kept going. I don’t know how far away we got from them, or how hard we made it for them to find us. When Vinnie started to slow down and stumble, I figured we had gone about as far away as we were going to get.
We came to a large ridge of exposed rock. I peered down over it and saw that there was an overhang. “Vinnie, down here,” I said.
I helped him crawl down over the ledge. He collapsed right there, his back against the wall of rock. I grabbed the trunk of a big pine tree that had fallen down and muscled it over, leaning it against the overhang. When I ducked inside, I saw that I had showered Vinnie with brown pine needles.
I brushed him off and finally got a good look at his face. There was a long furrow in his cheek, where the bullet had grazed him. His right earlobe was gone.
“Ah, fuck, Vinnie,” I said. “God damn it all.”
He was breathing hard, a long line of mucus hanging from his nose.
“Give me your arm,” I said. He was losing blood a hell of a lot faster from his face, so I rolled up his sleeve and untied his bandage. I took it off and pressed it against his cheek and his ear. He struggled, but I held on tight. Finally, he gave up and went limp against me. I leaned back against the rock. He slid down with his head in my lap. I kept the cloth pressed against his face, closed my eyes, and listened.
Every sound in the forest, every mouse running over a leaf, every breath of the wind-it all made me wonder if they had found us yet. They could be standing on top of the ridge right now, looking down at us, waiting for us to move so they could shoot us.
It’s just a matter of time, I thought. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, just how fucking hopeless it was. You’ve got no food, no water, no weapons, no way out. You’re gonna die here, just like Tom and those other men.
Those other men. They have to be the reason for all this. Somehow, they got hooked up with something bad, and Tom went down with them. And now us.
Fuck that, I thought. We’re not dead yet.
We are not dead yet. Five words. Keep saying them to yourself, over and over.
We are not dead yet.
Vinnie shivered. He tried to say something, but I couldn’t make any sense of it.
“You’ve got to hang on,” I said. “For God’s sake, just hang on, okay?” I tried to huddle up closer to him, to keep him warm.
“Don’t give up,” I said. “Please, Vinnie. We’ll get through this.”
I hung my head down. I was so exhausted, I felt myself sliding into a half-awake dream. I felt pine branches hitting me in the face, felt my legs running, my lungs aching for air.
I saw dead bodies in the ground. I smelled the burned flesh.
Minutes passed.
Hours.
The shadows grew longer all around us. I kept slipping in and out of the dream.
Running. Running away from the men in the ground.
The hand reaching out like a claw.
The smell. God save me, the smell.
Something woke me up with a start. A sudden noise above us. I held my breath and listened.
Nothing.
I looked down at Vinnie. His eyes were open. “Alex,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Is this really happening?”
“Yes,” I said. I was still holding the cloth against the side of his head. The whole thing was stained red. “We’ve got to figure out what to do.”
He took the cloth from me and pushed himself up. Blood dripped down his neck.
“Keep holding that,” I said. “You’ve got to keep the pressure on.”
He winced as he put the cloth back to his face. “I think we’re having ourselves a bad day,” he said.
How he could make a joke like that, I couldn’t even imagine. But it made me feel better. Somehow, the Vinnie I knew was back. It made me feel like we still had a fighting chance.
“This might be a dumb question,” I said, “but why would they leave us out here overnight and then come back the next day? Why didn’t they just kill us yesterday?”
“Alex, that wasn’t Guy and Maskwa shooting at us.”
“They’re the only people who knew we were up here.”
“It couldn’t have been them.”
“Why not?”
“They would have found us by now, for one thing. And they wouldn’t have shot at us from so far away.”
“Why is that?”
“Guy and Maskwa knew we weren’t armed.”
“They knew we’d run away as soon as we saw them.”
“They could have still gotten a lot closer. Anybody else would have had to be a lot more careful.”
I thought about it. “Okay, so who is it?”
He took the cloth off his face, turned it over, then put it back. “God only knows, Alex. Whoever did that…” He pointed in the general direction behind us. I didn’t have to wonder what he was talking about. “Whoever that was, I think that’s who we’re talking about here.”
“If it’s not Guy and Maskwa,” I said, “then where are they? They were supposed to be here today.”
“Maybe they already got to them,” he said. His voice was drained of all emotion. “First them and now us.”
“If that happened, then there’s nothing we can do about it. We’ve got to think about getting ourselves out of
