“It’s all yours, Peter,” Fallows whispered. “I loaded your gun myself.”
“Nail the big one,” Stockton said.
Peter stared out at the targets with inquisitive, thoughtful eyes. “If I shoot the kid, they’ll stop to look after him, and we can nail all three.”
“Oh, that’s thinking,” Stockton said. “You got a good head on your shoulders. And in a minute you’re going to have an even better one for Charn’s wall.”
“Do it,” Christian said.
Peter pulled the trigger.
The Hunter Racks Up His First Kills
The gun made an unsatisfying clack.
Frustrated and confused, Peter threw back the bolt. The rifle was empty.
“Fucking thing,” Peter said. Behind him a chair fell over. “Mr. Fallows, this isn’t loaded.”
He looked back over his shoulder. His face darkened, then went pale, and Christian tore his gaze away from the fauns to look for himself.
Peter’s father had toppled over in his chair, the black rubber handle of a combat knife in his chest. His red, heavy, souse’s face was perplexed, a man reading a bank statement that suggests somehow, impossibly, his savings have been wiped out. Christian had a distant, distracted thought, that it was the knife Peter had been unable to find in the morning.
Peter stared at his father. “Dad?”
Fallows stood over Stockton, his back to the boys. He was tugging Stockton’s rifle off the dying man’s shoulder. Stockton didn’t make a sound, didn’t gasp, didn’t cry out. His eyes strained from his head.
Peter lunged past Christian and grabbed for Fallows’s big CZ 550, which was leaning against the wall. His fingers were stiff and clumsy with shock, and he only knocked it over.
Fallows couldn’t pull Stockton’s rifle away from him. The strap was still snagged over his shoulder, and Stockton himself was clutching the butt, in a last, failing effort to resist.
Fallows glanced back at the boys.
“Don’t, Peter,” he said.
Peter finally grabbed the CZ. He slid open the bolt to make sure it was loaded. It was.
Fallows stepped over Stockton and turned to face them. Stockton still had the strap of the rifle over his shoulder and was clutching the butt, but Fallows had one hand under the muzzle and a finger on the trigger and the barrel pointed at Peter.
“Stop,” he said again, his voice almost toneless.
Peter fired. From so close the blam of the gun was deafening, a great roar followed by a deadening whine. A chunk of blazing-white wood exploded from the tree trunk to the right and just behind Fallows. As the splinters flew past him, Fallows slapped Stockton’s hand away and squeezed the trigger of his gun. Peter’s head snapped back, and his mouth dropped open in an expression that had been common to him in life: a look of dim-witted bewilderment. The red-and-black hole above his left eyebrow was big enough to insert two fingers into.
Christian heard someone screaming, but there was no one left alive in the blind except for Fallows and himself. After a few moments, he realized he was the one making all the noise. He’d dropped his sketch pad and held up both hands to protect his face. He didn’t know what he said or promised, couldn’t hear himself through the ringing in his ears.
The trapdoor rose about a foot, and Charn looked in on them. Fallows wrenched the rifle free from Stockton at last and turned the barrel around to point it at the old man. Charn fell, just as quickly, the trapdoor slamming behind him. Christian heard a leafy crunch as the tall man hit the ground below.
Without a look back, Fallows flung open the trapdoor, dropped through it, and was gone.
Christian in Flight
It was a long while before Christian moved. Or at least he felt it was a long while. In that half-lit world, the passage of minutes was difficult to judge. Christian did not own a watch and had left his phone, by command, in the other world. He knew only that he’d had time to dampen his crotch and then time for that dampness to grow cold.
He trembled in convulsive bursts. He lifted his head and peered through the lookout. The fauns had long disappeared from the steps. The hill was silent in the gloaming.
It came to him, with a sudden, sickened urgency, that he had to get back to the little door. He picked up his sketchbook, hardly thinking why—because it was his, because it had his drawings in it—and crawled across the plank floor of the blind. He hesitated beside the corpse of Mr. Stockton. The