Deadfall (32 page)

He picked up the heavy beam, angled one end into the hole, and rested the other against the door. The beam fit perfectly into the rubbed-off area. The other door had been fitted, evidently when the mine was new, with bolts that slid into the floor and ceiling.The door he had used was latchless, probably locked with some device the former tenants had taken when they left.Whoever was using the mine for shelter apparently suffered from security issues.They wanted to enjoy their rest without fear of interruption, so they had created this brace for the door. That it perfectly suited Hutch and Dillon's needs was just another sign, along with the lantern and blankets, that Someone was watching out for them.

With the door shut, the ambient temperature started to rise. Still, a brisk breeze slipped in under the doors. Hutch looked around at the

trash. Everything seemed to encourage their staking out a different place to spend time. Aside from the draft and the trash, Hutch did not want the lantern light to reveal their presence from outside the door. He explained his rationale to Dillon, and they agreed to make camp deeper within the tunnel system.When they returned for the sleeping bag, blankets, and beef jerky, Hutch suggested calling the room theirs. Dillon did not look pleased.

“What's the matter? You don't like it?”

Dillon shook his head slowly. “It's okay, but . . .”

“We don't have to stay here. It's a big place.”

“It's just . . . it's kinda like the storage room where they kept us.”

“I understand. Let's go somewhere else.”

They found several other rooms, all empty, but decided to bed down in the tunnel itself. It seemed less musty than the rooms, and Hutch liked being able to hear if someone attempted to enter through the metal doors. He unrolled the sleeping bag for Dillon and gave him a blanket to use as a pillow. For himself, he spread out another of the rough army blankets to dampen the chilliness of the concrete floor. That left two blankets to cover him when it was time to sleep.

He sat on his floor blanket, leaning against the wall. Dillon faced him against the other wall. The camper's lantern burned as brightly, though infinitely less warmly, as a campfire. After twenty-five feet in each direction, the darkness of the tunnels reclaimed its domain.

Dillon peered one way, then the other. “Creepy,” he said.

“Yeah, but I'd rather be in here than out there.” He leaned beyond the blanket to where his bow stood against the wall and his utility belt lay on the ground. From a pouch he retrieved the last of his butterfly bandages. He walked on his knees to Dillon. The boy's face appeared clean and dry, but the wound still glistened, not ready to mend.

“These will help,” Hutch said. He applied the bandages, gently pinching the edges of the cut together.

Dillon grimaced but said nothing.

Returning to his blanket, Hutch said, “How'd it happen?”

“That man . . .”

“Declan?”

Dillon nodded. “He . . .”

“That's all you need to say, Dillon. Not a nice guy, is he?” Immediately he regretted the words. Calling the man who'd killed a child's father “not a nice guy” was like saying hell was a tad warm.

Dillon pulled his lips in and let his eyelids lower almost imperceptibly. The effect was an expression of both sadness and resignation. Hutch didn't know what to say, so he said nothing. The boy settled into the silence he seemed to prefer. Hutch wondered if this was his natural disposition or one forced upon him by the circumstances.

Finally Hutch asked, “Want a PowerBar?”

Dillon nodded.

He held up two PowerBars. “Chocolate or cookies and cream?”

Dillon shrugged.

Hutch raised his eyebrows. “Cookies and cream?”

Dillon held out his hand, and Hutch tossed both energy bars into it.

“One for later.” Hutch took the last one in the pouch for himself.

As he tore open the packaging, Dillon said, “Thank you.”

Hutch bit into the gooey wafer. “You're welcome.”

Dillon was staring at him; he was holding the energy bars in his lap.

Hutch said, “Wanna try the jerky instead?”

“I meant thank you for everything.”

Hutch smiled. “You're welcome for everything. I'm only sorry we couldn't have met in . . . happier times.”

Dillon opened an energy bar and took a bite. He chewed slowly, watching Hutch, and said, “Do you have a family?”

“A son and daughter.”

“What about your wife?”

Hutch skewed his face in one direction. “Not anymore,” he said.

“Why?”

Hutch shrugged. “She decided she didn't . . . I guess, love me anymore. She didn't want to live with me anymore.”

“Did you want to live with her?”

“Oh yeah.”

“You still love her?”

“She's been really mean lately, you know? Not a nice person to be around. She . . . uh . . .”

“But you still love her.” Not a question.

Hutch thought about it. “Yeah, I guess I do. Not a lot I can do about it though.”

Dillon took another bite. “What about your children?”

Painful territory, but to Hutch there was nothing prying or out of line about Dillon's curiosity. For some reason it felt right. Among all this craziness, in the chaos of death and the struggle for survival, this topic mattered. He didn't know why—maybe it anchored him or contextualized Declan's evil. Hutch's life, back in Colorado, crappy as it was, was nevertheless his to live. To change, if he could; accept it, if he couldn't. Being so far from home, geographically, emotionally, being in such an alien environment, made David's death and all the rest of it surreal, but it
wasn't
surreal. It wasn't a fantasy or a nightmare or merely the events of future headlines. It was real and it mattered. Dillon's questions brought that home.

His
children
. Hutch smiled despite everything. Half of the energy bar was still in the wrapper. He pulled at the packaging, making it straight, twisted it, watching how the foil caught the light. Not really watching—fiddling, occupying his hands while his mind opened a scrapbook.

“Macie is seven,” he said, seemingly to the energy bar. “Cute as any kid I've seen on TV, but of course I'm going to say that, right?” He smiled, glanced up at Dillon, continued fiddling with the wrapper. “Really, she is. Blonde hair, green eyes, freckles, no front teeth.” He ran the tip of his index finger along his own teeth. “I always figured if I had a daughter, she'd be a tomboy. I'd get her out there playing catch, camping, being as rough as I was as a kid. But that's not Macie.” He shook his head. “She likes frilly pink dresses and tea parties and putting on makeup when her mother lets her. I don't know if she's that way despite me, or if I let her go with her girliness because I got my masculinity quota met through my son.”

The wrapper started to rip and he let it, slowly peeling it away from the sticky bar.

“What's his name?” Dillon said.

“Logan.” He smiled up at Dillon, crunched his eyebrows. “He's older than you, eleven.You're what, nine?”

Dillon nodded.

“You remind me of him. He's handsome . . . and a lot smarter than I am.”

Dillon blushed.

“He has blue eyes, like yours. Really dark hair, longer than I'd like it to be. He says he wants to be a writer—I think because that's what I am.We used to spend a lot of time together.We like the same kind of movies. I used to read to him every night, and last year he started reading to me. I miss that.”

“Why doesn't he read to you anymore?”

Hutch shrugged. “He lives with his mother. He gets to come over only once a week.”

“Why?”

“I guess his mother loves him as much as I do. She doesn't want to share him.”

“What does he want?”

“He wants his mother and father back together. He doesn't want to choose.”

“Could he see you more if he wanted to?”

Hutch shook his head. “He wants to. His mother kind of . . . made it so he can't. And it doesn't matter what I want either.”

After a moment, Dillon said, “You're right.”

“About what?”

“Your wife
is
mean.” He looked pained. “Sorry.”

“Well . . . she's just trying to find happiness, I guess.”

“My dad says if getting what you want hurts other people, you don't deserve it.”

“I think I'd have liked your dad.”

They fell into silence again, Hutch thinking about how lives can unravel at the whim of other people, Dillon undoubtedly missing his father.Whatever pain Dillon felt inside, he kept it there this time. He seemed to find his sneakers fascinating. He blinked at them and frowned. Hutch felt selfish and petty. He had considered the previous nine months the worst of his life. And perhaps they were. But next to what Dillon had suffered in the last two days, and what he would experience in the days and months and years to come, Hutch's problems were nothing. A splinter next to amputation.

Some people had no problem saving themselves. Their sense of self-preservation was adequate to get them moving. Others performed better as rescuers.That survivalist he had interviewed told him about a man lost alone in the wilderness. This guy had imagined—actually
pretended
—that he was saving a beautiful woman, getting her out alive.

He would talk to her, reassure her. A week after he'd been given up for dead, a hunter found him alive.

“It has to do with personality, not heroism,” the survivalist had said. “Some people can simply do for others what they wouldn't do for themselves.”

Hutch wondered if that was what was going on here. He was rescuing Dillon, and in doing so saving himself. Did that mean he was using Dillon? As quickly as the thought had entered his head, he dismissed it. If it got them both out alive, so be it.

He watched the boy's eyes grow heavy and close. Before long, his chest rose and fell steadily. His mouth drooped open. Hutch went to him and laid him on top of the sleeping bag. Getting him inside would wake him, so he unfolded one of his own blankets and draped it over him, tucking it in around his legs and arms.

He switched off the lantern.

45

Terry leaned over the handlebars.
Laura knew he had to be squinting and blinking to see past the water constantly rushing into his face. She had shared this torture until she realized that such a sacrifice from her was unnecessary. He had wanted to drive; she was a mere passenger, sitting behind him, her arms wrapped tightly around his waist. She had lowered her head against his back, which kept the spray on her face to a minimum.

The dirt bike whined over ruts and rocks. It admirably found traction even in the slickest mud. Terry drove like an expert motocross rider. He would pull back on the handlebars to assist the bike's climb over a particularly steep hill or to maneuver out of a dirt bike–eating crevasse.What impressed Laura most was his counterintuitive ability to apply more gas when the bike felt as though it wanted to flip backward. Early in their marriage, she and Tom tore up these hills on twin 240s.While she had ridden her whole life,Tom had learned only after moving to Fiddler Falls. He had dumped the bike at least a couple dozen times before her instruction stuck: more gas meant more power, and with more power the bike could climb almost anything.

Terry had obviously ridden before.

Between the driving rain and the gray light, they traveled halfblind. She had told Terry the general direction of the cabin. He was getting them there, though with no regard for the niceties of smooth terrain. Sometimes the front wheel would plummet straight into a ditch or hole, and he would expertly pull it out. Other times it felt as though he would ride head-on into a sheer cliff face or some other impassible obstacle. He would rear back and maneuver around the problem. More than once the rear wheel found a steep upward slope that it wanted to fully experience, only to have Terry pull it back onto the arbitrary route he treated like a well-planned itinerary.

With each yard, mud climbed their legs. By the time they had hit the grassier hills well above town, earth caked Laura's clothes up to her armpits and the back of her head. When they stopped, the rain would wash some of it away, but more than likely, this coating was hers until her next opportunity to change her clothes and shower.

To the east, the gray mass of clouds had broken away from the horizon, like an ice shelf in the Arctic. Over there, yellow beams dropped in glorious splendor; she was certain a choir of voices ushered in that far-off sunlight, but here, now, the soundtrack was stuck on the deafening static of rain.

How wonderful it would be for a golden sky to illuminate her reunion with Dillon. A dark thought scampered into her consciousness before she could slam it out: there would be no reunion because the smoke she had seen on the hill had been his last wave good-bye. If the day brought her to that truth, she would run with this weather forever, always drenched, never to behold the sun again. She knew God would somehow let her do this, to be a phantom of the storm, because He understood grand gestures and deep sorrow. Her mental protector finally gave that scampering beast the boot, and she imagined, once again, the reunion of mother and child.

She felt Terry's back lift under her chin, and she realized that they had stopped.The rain and the memory of the bike's jarring ride made her feel, even now, as though they were still in motion.

Terry yelled back over his shoulder. “Are we getting close?”

“Not even.”

“Feels like we've been riding all day.”

“Rough stuff, but we'll get there.”

Terry gunned the engine. “Okay! Hold on!”

The sky cleared as
quickly as it had filled with clouds. Declan watched the last fat drops strike the windshield of the Jeep Cherokee. Kyrill turned off the wipers as they crested the hill immediately before the burned wreck of the Hummer. He coasted toward it.