American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,185

spinning them because he wants me to hear him leaving—and then only silence.

She waits. Again. And she keeps waiting.

She waits for over forty minutes, not moving, hardly breathing.

There might be others he’s left behind—any ones who are waiting on her, in turn, to move or speak and tell them where she is. Yet with each blaze of lightning she peers through the dark forest, and she sees nothing.

Finally she begins to crawl down the slope to where they hid.

She sees bent branches, spent rounds twinkling in the grass. She sees footprints and disturbed stones and, eventually, blotches of blood.

Not much else.

That is, until she finds Dee. His ostrich-skin boots, which have been so impeccably shined, gleam brightly from underneath a bush. Mona goes to investigate.

She peers around the bush, and grunts.

She hit him in the mouth. Square in the roof of the mouth.

Jesus.

She looks at him for a long time. She has seen dead bodies many times before but the causality of it—I did this, I made this happen—escapes her. She cannot link that desperate, cold moment at the bottom of the hill, when her whole world was reduced to the dark spotlight of her scope, to this dead man lying on the forest floor.

She wonders who told him to be here. Did they come to kill her and Parson? From the way the second one, Zimmerman, acted, he was surprised to find her. Hence why they shot Parson first, and why Zimmerman was so willing to abandon it after she wounded Norris and killed Dee. They must have been here for some other reason.

She sees there is something silver below Dee’s body.

She squats to see. It looks ornamental, a clasp to a box—and the rest of the box is underneath him, as if he fell on it.

Wincing, she reaches forward and pulls it out. It is covered in the man’s blood, but she can see it is a very nice wooden box with a silver clasp; yet evidently the owner didn’t think this was enough security, for it’s also fastened with string and tape of all kinds.

She holds it up to one ear: she hears no ticking.

She shakes it: it sounds hollow, but something is rattling around in there. It’s not a bomb, then.

She looks back up at the canyon. Were they simply bringing this box here? Why?

Mona unties the string, which is now quite sticky from the blood. Then she flips up the clasp.

She wedges her finger into the crack, and slowly eases it open, certain she is about to be ripped apart by an explosion.

It never comes: the interior of the box is simple red velvet, and resting in its corner is a very strange item that is certainly not a bomb.

It is a skull. A little rabbit skull.

Mona stares, and shivers. Because she is uncomfortably familiar with rabbit skulls, and the mere sight of this one sends old, gray memories howling up the hallways of her mind.

When she was in junior high, Mona, like a lot of kids in her country-ass school, participated in 4-H. While most kids preferred the larger animals, the ones they’d learned about since kindergarten—pigs, cows, etc.—Mona instead opted to raise meat rabbits for a judging competition, mostly because she’d assumed it’d be easier, because what were rabbits besides slightly larger, cuter guinea pigs?

She only did it the one time, for she found the whole process to be one of the most awful experiences of her young life: not only did many of her rabbits die—an experience she was unprepared for, and she is still quite angry at her father for not warning her about—but the first of them was intentionally killed by its mother. There had been something wrong with it—something twisted in its neck and front leg—and in the evening its mother had pushed it out of the nest and allowed it to starve.

Mona knew she should remove it from the rabbits’ pen. But when she first found the baby rabbit, with lines of ants marching to it across the barn floor in a gruesome little pilgrimage, and its tiny, rotting eyes swarming with blackflies, she was so horrified she could only bear to kick it into the corner. And she forgot about it until many days and many dead rabbits later, when the whole horrible thing was over and she removed the straw from the pen, scraping it up with a pitchfork, and with one scrape a desiccated, eyeless little rabbit body popped up from the straw, scraps of