American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,183

shot.

Five seconds.

Someone shouts. They are looking for her.

Do not give away your position.

Six seconds.

Time is a knife easing into her rib cage, seeking her heart.

Wait. Wait. Wait…

Then the sky bursts blue with lightning, and the queer electrical light filters through the forest.

She sees a pair of hands floating in the shadows beside the tree trunk.

She puts the scope to her eye, brings the crosshairs in, and thinks, all in one second:

Slight breeze from the north—cold barrel—will dance right if I fire in this wind—wait I’m close enough for that not to matter—forty yards—arc will be negligible—just drop a touch—if this fucking thing is sighted right—is he moving—am I really going to kill him—instinct will be to get low—just—just—will I really—fire already—fire—fire—pull the trigger—fucking do it do it—just

Fire.

Boom.

It is a cannon. A howitzer. It is world-shatteringly loud. At first Mona only thinks: Fucking tinnitus. I am deaf for the rest of my years.

Then she dives to the right, away from her attackers. Because now they know exactly where she is.

The world is so silent as she falls. Is she really deaf, or was the shot so loud it has deafened all the world?

But as she slides down away from her roost, she learns she is wrong, because the woods light up with screams.

She has heard screams like this only once before in her life, when she had her vision of the past in the lightning-struck bathroom. Only those screams, screams of such blind terror and agony, can possibly compare to what is echoing across the valley right now, screams so loud and so terrible she cannot understand how a human can make that noise and keep making it, not without breaking his own throat.

Well, she thinks. I got him.

A second voice shouts: “Jesus! Jesus Christ!”

As if it has its own agency, the rifle barrel swings back up, nosing out the shouts and screams, hungry to lay the burden of its crosshairs on fresh meat.

Then a third voice, the mush-mouthed voice: “I know that… that’s my Mossberg. That’s my… my motherfucking Mossberg!”

She recognizes this voice. It’s the cowboy from Coburn, the one whose face she caved in.

“You fucking bitch!” howls the cowboy. “You fucking goddamn bitch!”

“Stay down!” shouts the second voice. It’s older, and it sounds a lot more clearheaded.

“I’ll kill you, you fucking slag!”

He starts shooting. A large pistol, it sounds like—he must have gotten a replacement for his Desert Eagle. She can see flickering lights on a group of tree trunks at the base of a hillock, but she cannot spot more than this.

The cowboy shoots his gun empty.

“Quit your firing, goddamn it!” growls the second voice. “And stay the fuck down!”

The screams persist. Someone rushes to them through the undergrowth, but she sees no movement: it is too dark.

Then the second voice: “Oh… oh fuck.”

The third: “Fucking cunt!”

“Dee, are you just gonna sit there and mouth off or are you gonna come help me?”

“Fuck you, Zimmerman! That cunt stole my fucking rifle, my fucking truck!”

“Norris has nearly had his foot blown off, and you have sand in your ass over a truck? Kindly shut your fucking yap and stay down, at least!”

Dee, who she guesses is the cowboy, has given up on coherent threats altogether: “Fucking… skull-fuck you! Cut your… fucking bitch!”

The screaming is slowly turning into whimpering. There is the tinkling of what sounds like a belt buckle in the darkness. Then a thwip as the belt is pulled tight around what she presumes is her victim’s femoral artery.

Two left, she thinks. But really only one to worry about.

She does not hear any more movement. Dee, her failed paramour and kidnapper, must still be hunkered down in the same place. She fixes her sights back on that spot.

He keeps talking: “Bitch! I will… I will goddamn fuck you up something good! I will…” Little brass bells tinkling—bullets in the palm of his hand? Reloading? “Can’t believe this sort of thing could ever, ever… do you hear me? Do you hear me?! Fucking answer! Say something goddamn you!”

Mona does not oblige him.

“Do you know what I will do to you?” he screams. “Do you understand what’s going to fucking happen?”

Zimmerman, who must be tending to whomever it is she shot, stays silent. She now feels that he is the real threat. She gets the impression that he’s had actual training, and he’s been quiet for a long while.

Dee is active. She has a feeling he will soon make himself a very good target. But while she could definitely take