You Only Die Twice - By Christopher Smith Page 0,15

sinking in mud. She heard a man say, “Hey!” She heard the moose shift its body around. A gunshot sounded and Cheryl Dunning knew she was finished.

Only she wasn’t.

The earth began to tremble beneath her feet.

With an effort, she flipped over and spun away from the water and the mud. She landed on a piece of reasonably dry ground, and turned to watch the bull charge toward the man who was hunting her.

He shot again, but he missed because he didn’t get it. To kill a moose―especially a bull moose rushing toward you at full throttle―you didn’t aim at the head when you’d likely hit an antler instead of the animal’s considerably smaller forehead, as he just did. Instead, you aimed for the heart, the liver or the lungs. That’s how you brought down a moose, but generally only if you had a powerful rifle, and not the Glock he possessed.

That’s what she was raised to know. That’s the knowledge her father and grandfather instilled her with because they knew that when you chose to live in Maine, it was a trade-off. Maine offered a beautiful coast and only a trace of crime, but finding a good job with a working wage was difficult, if not impossible.

Because of the latter, families came together, as hers had for generations. To survive, you learned things. You learned how to grow your food in the summer and you learned how to kill a deer or a moose or both in the fall so you had meat to eat in the winter, a skill this man, thank God, lacked.

She watched him fire his gun again, but with the moose nearly upon him, he was so rattled, he missed it entirely and instead turned around and started to run away from it―and her. It was like a scene from some bad dinosaur movie, only the dinosaur was a moose and it was hurtling forward to take the man down.

This was her chance and Cheryl wasted no time in seizing it. She stood, shook the mud off her arms and waited for the man to recede from sight before she bolted to her right in her rotten high-heeled boots and tapped into old instincts as she ran. Her father and grandfather had taught her how to survive if she ever was lost in the woods, which sometimes happened with hunters and often with hikers.

The woods were a sensible habitat. She first needed to get to a place where she could stop, listen and collect herself. Panic also was her enemy, so she needed to avoid it. She needed to find or build the sort of shelter that wouldn’t just protect her, but also act to conceal her from him, should he find her. It wasn’t starvation or dehydration that would kill her first. It was either hypothermia or, if he did find her, her death would be delivered by him.

But she refused to allow either to happen. Cheryl Dunning already had died once. She died at the hands of Mark Rand and she was damned if she was going to die twice. At least not now. Not this soon. Not at thirty-one. Not when she hadn’t met the man of her life and married him, not until she had children of her own and watched them grow, not until she had her grandchildren around her, and not until she and her husband, whoever he turned out to be, grew old together so they could appreciate all they had accomplished at the end of their lives.

She had her entire life in front of her. And right now, she was going to secure that life. She was going to fight for that life because in spite of everything she’d been through, and especially because of the death she’d already been dealt once, her life was worth a fight. It was worth a battle. She didn’t know who this crazy motherfucker was, but she was going to take him on and she was going to win because she was worth the fight.

And in her soul, even though she didn’t know where she was, because of her history of exploring the Maine woods with her father and grandfather, she bet she knew these woods better than that bastard ever dreamed he did.

Game on, baby, she thought as she ran. Game on.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Patty Jennings arrived at Cheryl’s apartment house on Maple Street in Bangor just past ten-thirty. She parked her Jetta in front of the house, stepped out into the cool