Once he had reached the safe side of the cabin, Richard got to his feet and shambled wearily into its front door and, in the sudden darkness, tripped over something soft that turned out to be the dead body of Erasto. Flies were already getting to it. Where did flies come from in situations like this?
Controlling a powerful urge to throw up, Richard patted the corpse down looking for weapons. But someone had already done this and relieved his departed comrade of everything except one ammunition clip for a pistol that was no longer here.
Richard knee-walked over the rotting remains of the building’s collapsed roof to a vacant window, popped his head up for a moment, and withdrew it. Jones had altered his course and was walking directly toward the cabin now, holding the rifle up at his shoulder, ready to fire.
“Another Forthrast holed up in the ruins of another log cabin, waiting to die,” Jones said. “You people are consistent, I’ll give you that. Unfortunately I don’t have an RPG, like the one we used on your brother’s place, but the results are going to be the same: a pile of dead meat in a ruined shack.”
Richard, as a younger man, might have been powerfully moved by this sort of talk. As it was, he was largely ignoring the meaning of the words themselves and using them mostly as a way to keep track of Jones’s position. He had pulled out the revolver, checked its cylinder, verified that it was loaded with the full five rounds. He got his thumb on its massive hammer and drew it back until it cocked.
“You see,” Jones said, “when you make the mistake of letting me get this close, the grenade doesn’t need to be rocket propelled.”
Richard was sitting on the floor beneath the window, gazing up into the shaft of light coming in through it, and saw an object fly in, bounce across the opposite wall, and tumble to the floor—which was actually the former roof. It bounced and came to rest almost within arm’s reach. Richard rolled toward it. His hand closed around it at the same moment as his conscious mind was understanding what it was: a grenade. It would have been clever, he later supposed, to toss it back through the same window at Jones, but the easy and obvious—and quick—throw from here was out the cabin’s vacant doorway. So that was where he threw it, and he was relieved to see it disappear from direct shrapnel line of fire beyond the poured concrete front stoop. It went off, and for a few seconds afterward, Richard’s life was all about that.
But only for a few seconds. He had waited too long, been too conservative; he had escaped the effects of that grenade only through dumb luck. He got to his feet, a little unsteadily, not just because of the ankle but the brain-stirring effect of the blast, and stood with his back to the wall next to the window. Through the opening he could see a narrow swath of what was out there, but Jones wasn’t in that swath. Getting the revolver out in front of him, he pivoted around his good foot and presented himself in the window opening long enough to get a wide-open view outside the cabin.
Jones was at about ten o’clock, and lower down than Richard had been expecting, since he had apparently thrown himself down to await the results of the grenade. He was just clambering to his feet, and when Richard caught his eye, he made a sudden sideways dive toward the cabin. Richard swung the revolver laterally, trying to track the movement, but his elbow struck the frame of the window at the same moment as he was deciding to pull the trigger. The revolver made a sound that would have seemed loud, had a grenade not just gone off, and a bullet drew a trace through weedy foliage about a foot away from Jones’s head. Jones was bringing his rifle up to return fire, but Richard was already withdrawing from the window. He pulled back so quickly, in fact, that he lost his balance and tumbled onto his ass.
He and Jones were now no more than four feet apart, separated only by the log wall of the cabin.
Richard could squat there and wait and hope that Jones would move into just the right position so that Richard could fire through a gap between logs. Or he could go out the way he had come in, move around the side of the cabin, and try to shoot around the corner. Or he could present himself in the window again and just fire from point-blank range.
He was cocking the revolver again when Jones opened fire with his Kalashnikov. Richard’s whole body flinched, and he very nearly let the hammer slip. But no rounds seemed to be passing through the cabin. Nor could they, really, given Jones’s location. So what the hell was Jones shooting at?
It came to him then that he was overthinking this.
This was a shoot-out. Nothing could be simpler. But he was making it too complicated by trying to use his wits to work the angles, figure out some clever way to dodge around the essential nature of what was happening, to get through to the other side without getting hurt. His opponent, of course, simply didn’t give a shit what happened to him and was probably a dead man anyway—which gave Jones an advantage that Richard could match only by adopting the same attitude. It was an attitude that had come naturally to him as a young man, taking down the grizzly bear with the slug gun and doing any number of other things that later seemed ill-advised. Wealth and success had changed him; he now looked back on all such adventures with fastidious horror. But he had to revert to that mind-set now or else Jones would simply kill him.
All of this came simply and immediately into his head, as though the Furious Muses had chosen this moment to give up on being furious for once—perhaps forever—and were now singing in his ears like angels.
Richard stood up in the window, holding the revolver in one hand now, and swung it out and down.
Jones was right there, sitting on the ground, leaning back against the wall of the cabin, aiming his rifle, not up at Richard, but out into the open space beyond. He had been shooting in that direction for some reason.
He glanced up into Richard’s eyes.
“It’s nothing more than a great bloody cat!” Jones exclaimed.
Richard pulled the trigger and shot him in the head.
He cocked the revolver again and stood poised there for several seconds, looking at the aftermath to make sure he was not misinterpreting the evidence of his eyes, out of wishful thinking. But Jones was unquestionably dead.
Finally he raised his gaze from what remained of Jones and looked up and out over the field of weeds and overgrown scrub beyond. It was by no means clear what Jones had been marveling at in the last moment of his life. For fresh green leaves had not yet begun to bud out, and the hue of the place was the tawny umber of last year’s dead growth. Finally, though, Richard’s eyes locked on something out there that was unquestionably a face. Not a human face. Humans did not have golden eyes.
The eyes stared into Richard’s long enough for Richard to experience a warm rush of blood to his cheeks. He was blushing. Some kind of atavistic response, apparently, to being so watched. But then the eyes blinked, and the cougar’s tiny head turned to one side, ears twitching in reaction to something unseen. Then it spun around, and the last Richard saw of it was its furry tail snapping like a whip, and the white pads of its feet as it ran away.
THE FORTHRAST FARM
Northwest Iowa
Thanksgiving
Richard had been spending a lot more time at the farm lately, mostly because he had been named executor of John’s will. Since Alice was still alive, this was much less complicated than it might have been—he didn’t have to sift through all his older brother’s property, only the bits that were of no use or interest to Alice. This meant tools, weapons, hunting and camping gear, and some clothing. Richard distributed all of it among John and Alice’s four sons and sons-in-law. Only a few odds and ends remained. Of these, the most difficult for Richard to deal with—speaking here of emotional difficulty—were the artificial legs. Owing to Richard’s habit of buying John a new pair whenever he read about some fresh innovation in that field, there were a lot of them, piled up like cordwood in a corner of the attic. During a weepy afternoon of sorting through them, Richard hit on an idea: an idea that might not really make that much sense on a practical level, but somehow felt right. He got in touch with Ol
ivia, who said that she “knew how to reach” Sokolov. A few emails passed back and forth containing measurements and photographs. The finding was that Sokolov’s height, weight, leg length, and shoe size were a close match for John’s, and so by the end of the day Richard was down at the local UPS depot shipping several very expensive carbon-fiber right legs to an address in the United Kingdom. Custom stump cups and other modifications would, of course, be needed, but the result was that Sokolov got something a bit nicer than what he would have been issued by the National Health Service.
At eleven in the morning, after they had all come back from the memorial service—a ceremony honoring not only John but Peter, Chet, Sergei, Pavel, the bear hunters, the RV owners, and two of Jake’s neighbors—Zula hooked her laptop to the big flat-screen on Grandpa’s porch, and they made a Skype connection to Olivia in London. She had just returned to her apartment after work and was looking every inch the smartly turned-out intelligence analyst. Once the connection was made, she insisted that Zula put her face up to the little camera above the laptop screen and display her new artificial tooth, which was indistinguishable from the one that had been knocked out, and the lip in front of it, which bore a hairline scar and a little notch. The notch, Zula explained, was fixable, but she had decided to keep it. Olivia heartily approved and pulled back her hair—which she’d been growing in—to show off what she described as the “Frankenstein” scar that had been incised on her scalp in Xiamen.
These preliminaries out of the way, Zula backed away from the camera. Olivia made some approving remark about her church dress. Zula responded with a mock-demure curtsy, then smoothed the garment in question under her bottom as she settled into the couch right next to her grandfather. “My goodness, who are all these fine gentlemen?” Olivia exclaimed. “What company you keep, my dear!” For sitting on Zula’s other side was Csongor, dressed up in a hastily acquired black suit from the big and tall section of Walmart. With the timeless awkwardness of the suitor embedded deep in enemy territory, he reached one arm around and laid it on the back of the couch across Zula’s shoulders. A slapstick interlude followed as his hand came down on Grandpa’s oxygen tube and knocked it askew. Fortunately Richard had had time to read all the instruction manuals for Grandpa’s support system and get trained in how to make it all work, so he jumped up in mock horror and made a comical fuss of getting it all readjusted and then offered to perform CPR on his dad. It was unclear just how much of this Grandpa was actually following, but his face showed that he understood that it was all meant to be amusing.
“How about you?” Zula asked, when things had calmed down a bit. “What sort of company are you keeping, honey?”
Olivia seemed to have set her laptop up on a kitchen table. She rolled her eyes and sighed as if she had been caught out in a great deception. Her hands got big as they reached for the laptop. Then her apartment seemed to rotate around them, and they were greeted with the sight of Sokolov, dressed in a bathrobe, drinking a cup of coffee and reading a book through a pair of half-glasses that made him seem oddly professor-like. This elicited a cheer from the group in Iowa. He lifted up his coffee mug and tipped it toward them, then took a sip.
“Isn’t it a bit late in the day, there, to be getting out of bed and having your shower?” Richard asked lewdly. Sokolov looked a bit uncertain, and off-camera they could hear Olivia feeding him some scraps of Russian. When he understood the jest, he looked tolerantly into the camera and explained, “Just came back from gym.” He then leaned back in his chair and heaved his leg up onto the table. It occasioned a moment of silence from those watching on the sofa. Finally Richard said, “It suits you.”
“Is small price,” Sokolov said. “Is very small price.” The workings of the video chat linkup made it difficult for them to know who he was looking at, but Zula got the sense that the look, and the words, were intended for her.
“We all had some things to pay for,” Zula said, “and we paid in different ways, and it wasn’t always fair.”
“You had nothing to pay for,” Sokolov said.
“Oh,” Zula said, “I think I did.”
The silence that followed was more than a little uncomfortable, and after giving it a respectful observance, Olivia edged around into view, standing behind Sokolov, and said, “Speaking of which, what do we hear from Marlon?”
“We’re going to Skype him later,” Csongor said. “It is early in the morning, yet, in Beijing.”
“He doesn’t work all night anymore?” Olivia said wonderingly.
“Nolan has him on banker’s hours,” Richard said. “Oh, he was up as recently as a few hours ago, playing T’Rain, but we’re going to let him catch a little shut-eye before we confront him with this.” And he made a gesture down the length of the couch.
“I think it’s a very nice lineup to be confronted with,” Olivia said, “and I’m sorry H. M. government doesn’t observe Thanksgiving, or I’d be there.” She glanced down. “We’d be there.”
“Immigration,” Sokolov said darkly.
“We’ll get that sorted,” Olivia assured him.
Gunshots were heard from outside. It was difficult to know how the sounds came through the Skype link, but the expression on Sokolov’s face changed markedly.
“It’s nothing!” Zula exclaimed. “Here, I’ll show you!” She got up, picked up the laptop, carried it as close to the window as its cables would allow, and aimed it out in the direction of the crick.
To Richard, in truth, it was quite a bit more than nothing. He’d been dreading it for half a year. It was impossible for him to hear the sound of guns being fired without thinking of things he didn’t want to remember. In Seattle, he and Zula had been seeing the same doctor for treatment of posttraumatic stress.
But lurking in the house all day wasn’t going to make that better, and going out to participate was unlikely to make it worse. And so after they wrapped up the Skype call with fond words and promises of future transatlantic visits, all of them except for Grandpa put on warm clothes and ear protection and shuffled out toward the crick. Jake was there, and Elizabeth, and the three boys. They had taken a week off from the cabin-rebuilding project to drive out from Idaho and check in with the extended family and lay flowers on John’s grave. The boys, homeschooled in the wilderness, had been an awkward fit with the crowd of mostly affluent suburban midwesterners who made up the re-u, but here they were in their element, moving up and down the line assisting their cousins with jams, giving them pointers in marksmanship. It was a relatively still day, which was a blessing for outdoorsmen, even though it meant that the wind turbines were not doing much.
Richard was examining one of those—he’d learned a lot more about them, now that he was handling some of John’s residual business affairs—when he saw an SUV turning off the highway into the gravel drive that led to the farmhouse. About a hundred feet in, it stopped at the checkpoint that the state patrol had set up, nominally to stop terrorists from coming here to wreak revenge on the Forthrasts, but also to keep media from coming in and making nuisances of themselves. Richard could not see through the windshield at this distance, but he could tell from the body language of the state trooper that the driver was one deserving of respect. The gate was opened and the SUV waved through. It came down the driveway with a searing noise, a plume of dust rising in its wake.
“They’re here,” Zula told him, her voice muddy through the earplugs. For she had apparently seen the same thing.
“I have to warn you,” Richard mentioned, “that he’s the most outspoken and cheerful colostomy patient who ever lived.”
“That’s good, right?”
“Cheerful is good. Outspoken can be a bit of a problem. Especially if he can’t keep his mouth shut about it during Thanksgiving dinner.” He looked at his niece. “His mouth, and his other orifices. See, now I’m doing it too.”
“Maybe he’ll be better behaved when he’s sitting next to Yuxia,” Zula suggested. “It’s just temporary, right?”
“What? Him and Yuxia? Who knows?”
“I was actually thinking of the colostomy.”
“That’s temporary,” Richard agreed. “The jokes about it, however, are eternal.”
They were strolling, side by side, toward the road. “How about you and Csongor?” Richard asked, glancing over his shoulder at the Hungarian, who was squeezing off rounds from a pistol while Jake critiqued his form.
“It might be permanent,” Zula said. “Who knows? If he can make it through today, and he still wants to have anything to do with me and my family, then maybe we can talk.”
“He’s made it through harder things than today.”
“This is differently hard.”
The SUV pulled off the road a few yards away, and the driver’s-side window rolled down. “That’s a relief,” Seamus called. “I was afraid my bag had overflowed, until Yuxia pointed out that we were driving past a hog confinement facility.”
Yuxia had jumped out of the passenger side before the SUV even came to a full stop, and now engaged in a full body-slam greeting with Zula and an exchange of squeals so loud that it actually caused the noise-canceling electronics in Richard’s ear protectors to engage. Richard exchanged a look with Seamus and pantomimed reaching up with both hands to turn the knobs on the device all the way down.