Scott Free (17 page)

F
IVE MINUTES BECAME TEN
, and Scott passed the halfway mark on the hill.
You gotta keep going now. It's longer to go back than to go ahead.
Yeah, but downhill was a helluva lot easier. What he wanted to do—what he
needed
to do—was sit down and rest. Maybe take a little nap. He owed himself a little rest. He could afford that much.

After the crest of the hill.

Fifteen minutes. One foot was barely clearing the other now, and he'd fallen three more times, opening a cut on his forehead. He didn't care anymore. At least the blood was warm. Until it froze.

Can't do this.

Gotta do this.
He chose to look only behind him this time, to see just where he'd been, and the view of the forward progress lightened his heart, even as it pounded behind his breastbone. His lungs hurt. His head hurt. And his legs. Oh, God, his legs.

His stomach churned, too, and inexplicably, he found himself thinking of bacon. Honest to God, he swore he could smell it.

How weird was that? He didn't even
like
bacon that much. Not that he wouldn't eat a dog shit sandwich right about now if someone offered it.

But why fantasize about bacon? Why not french fries? Or a cheeseburger. McDonald's cheeseburger. Better yet, the Number Two Value Meal: two cheeseburgers with fries and a drink. Supersized. Keep your flame-broiled, have-it-your-way square hamburger patty crap and let him have the real thing. The original.

And a glass of orange juice, freshly squeezed with lots of pulp.

Left foot, right foot. Good leg, bad leg…

As he climbed, he kept his head down, watching his shins dig their trenches through the powder. He found his mind wandering back to a soccer game from eighth grade. He saw himself up against some tall Mexican kid who had the skills of a pro, but only three-quarters of Scott's speed. It was late in the fourth quarter, and the Mexican was making his break for the tying goal. The kid had blistered the halfbacks, and all that remained between him and the score was Ryan in the goal box and Scott, who came out of nowhere to level him.
Bam!
The kid hit the ground like a crash-test dummy. The ref gave Scott a yellow card for rough play, but it didn't matter. The ball stayed out of the box and Smurf was a hero to his team-mates.

He reached the top. He couldn't believe it. He whirled to look behind him, and sure enough, there was the endless, unbroken path of his footsteps through the woods, zigging and zagging around trees and rocks. And if he focused really hard, he imagined that he could see his tracks for another half-mile beyond the base of the hill.

“Yes!” he cheered, but it came out as a raspy croak. He looked toward the sky and nodded his thanks. Only now it was time to cut another deal, maybe this time for thirty minutes instead of ten.

Ahead of him lay the down slope, equally long, but a little steeper, and not nearly as heavily treed. Beyond that, the ground flattened out and he could see the river again. He stood there at the crest of the hill for a long time, wobbling on unsteady legs as he willed himself to move on.
Come on, downhill is easier than up. Ten more minutes. That's it, just ten more minutes…

But his legs wouldn't work. Suddenly, Scott knew that if he tried to take another step—if he so much as lifted one leg—the other would crumble under him. He needed to rest. God, he needed to sleep. Just a few minutes, no more. Just a ten-minute nap, and he'd be up again and refreshed. He knew he would.

You sleep, you die.

Sven's voice returned, but for the first time, Scott truly didn't care.
Fine, then, I'll die. Take me. I'm ready.

And his knees sagged. He was done. This was his spot. This was where they'd find him, whether the searchers were human or animal. This was it, atop the last hill, at the end of the walk that killed him.

It felt good, too, propped up there against a tree, his knees drawn up nearly to his chest. If only there were a way to lie down without jamming snow into his frozen face, he swore that he could fade away and sleep forever. This dying stuff wasn't all that difficult, after all.

Bacon
.

There it was again, stronger than ever. He could almost taste it. Unsure whether he'd been in his spot for a minute or an hour, Scott forced his eyes open just a crack. Something out there wasn't right. Down low like this, the world looked different, a tableau of random vertical slashes that were the trunks of towering pines, but without the visual clutter of the low-hanging branches, which were mostly at head height or above. The tree trunks stood like silent sentries, guarding the patch of ground that had been theirs for centuries.

What was that at the bottom? A line of uniformly stubby trees crossed his vision horizontally, way at the bottom of the slope, where they just almost couldn't be seen. Scott shielded his eyes and squinted even harder. What the hell was he looking at?

Jesus, it's a fence.

Of course! A fence! A man-made fence!

He'd made it. Yes! By God, he'd actually made it!

His wind-chapped lips broke and bled as they pulled back into a smile. He wasn't going to die here, after all.

Rolling to all fours, he used his tree for support as he rose to his knees, and then willed his legs to take his weight. They felt dead, as if they belonged to someone else. They were totally spent.

“This is bullshit,” he told himself, and he clawed his way up the trunk until his feet were flat against the slope and his knees were locked.

Bacon. God, they're having breakfast!

The thought of food and a warm blanket drove him forward, caroming from one tree to the next as he fought to control his downhill speed. Left foot, right foot. Good leg, bad leg. He didn't care anymore. In five minutes, maybe ten, he'd be done. He'd have food in his belly, and he'd be sound asleep.

Where's the fence?

Suddenly, it was gone. How could that be? Scott stopped himself against a tree and jammed his eyes shut. He shook his head and reopened them, but still it was gone. A mirage?
Please, oh, please…

He pressed on, and a few seconds later, there it was again, hiding, it turned out, behind those low-hanging branches.

He could see the house now. It was a big sprawling thing, leaking a wispy trail of smoke from its chimney, rising only a few feet before the wind wrestled it back to the ground.

Come on, God. Ten more minutes. Really. This time for real. Just ten more minutes.

Left foot, right foot. If he fell, he flat-out didn't know whether he'd be able to pick himself up.

Good leg, bad leg.

 

I
SAAC PULLED THE PAN OFF
the burner and set it aside. In the forty-odd years that he'd occupied the planet, he'd yet to stumble upon the right recipe for bacon. There was a very fine line between crispy and burnt that he'd never quite been able to nail down. The bacon and eggs were a treat for himself. His life in the near future would be a succession of hotels and flophouses, so today would be his day of self-indulgence.

Setting the pan on the counter, he reached for the tongs and he froze. Something moved out on the hill.

Isaac darted to the window. As he squinted through the snowfall, his right hand instinctively moved to his holster. This wasn't possible, was it? They wouldn't possibly move against him in this kind of weather. What would be the point? Isaac would have all the advantage.

There it was again, bouncing from tree to tree on the slope nearest the river. Only one, but where there was one, there was always another. This bozo was hardly the professional that he'd been expecting. He wandered like he was drunk, like he didn't give a damn who saw him.

Moving quickly now, Isaac holstered his pistol and grabbed his MP5 on the way out the door. Standing in the open, in the snow, he shouldered the weapon and peered through the scope.

What he saw surprised the hell out of him.

 

T
HANK
G
OD SOMEBODY WAS THERE
. Scott saw a man standing in his snowy yard, his stance a little awkward, as if he were holding something on his shoulder.

Scott tried waving, but his arms were too heavy.

“Help!” he shouted, but the vocal cords didn't work either. “Please help me!”

The man was waving, too, but it wasn't a gesture of friendship as much as it seemed to be a gesture of urgency. He seemed to be yelling, but Scott couldn't decipher the words.

Scott smiled and tasted blood. He'd made it. Finally, the nightmare had ended. He'd be warm again, with food in his belly—

Was that man holding a gun?

He saw the muzzle flash and the puff of smoke. He actually had time to understand that he was dead before the bullet arrived.

 

T
HE RIFLE'S SUPPRESSED REPORT
barely made it past the muzzle before it was lost to the wind. When the boy fell, Isaac couldn't believe it. It was supposed to be a warning shot, for God's sake, just close enough to get his attention.

Lowering the rifle, Isaac scanned the hillside for signs of the boy, but he was gone.

How could that be?

He stood there, riveted in place as he tried to put it together. When he raised the scope back to his eye, he clearly saw the stripe his bullet had cut in the bark of the nearby tree.

He couldn't possibly have hit him, so where did he go?

Then he understood. “Oh, shit.”

 

F
OR AN INSTANT
, Scott thought that he was flying. It was a wonderful feeling of weightlessness, and he wondered if this was what it meant to die.

Then he hit the ground, his shoulder first, triggering a flailing, ass–over–tea kettle tumble that never seemed to end. It was a nightmare of impacts; head, back, knees, shoulders. Trees and sky became snow and then trees and sky again as he slid and tumbled out of control down the river side of the embankment.

When he finally hit the water, he landed back first, and he was instantly immersed. The pain of the frigid water was excruciating; he might as well have landed in boiling oil. He tried to scream, but his mouth filled with water. It raced up his nose and down his throat, and when he tried to gag, he only brought in more.

Struggling to find the surface, he kicked hard and the current coughed him up. He saw a brief flash of sky before he saw nothing more at all.

S
OMEWHERE IN THE DARKNESS
, in the far reaches of Scott's mind, a voice prattled on about something, but he couldn't quite make out what it was. A news report, maybe? The noise sounded as if it were coming from the end of a galvanized tunnel. His awareness of his pain blossomed more quickly than that of his surroundings. Everything hurt—his back, his neck, his arms and legs.
Everything.
But his stomach especially. Even through the fog, he recognized the need to eat.

His eyelids resisted his efforts to open them.

Finally, his left eye cooperated. He lay on his back in the middle of a large room, and his vision sparkled a bit on the periphery. The light in the room danced, as if from a fire. He was on somebody's sofa, buried under a thick layer of blankets. Beyond the lumps that were his feet, a fire blazed in a stone fireplace. That noise he'd heard was someone talking about the weather.

He dared move only his head, trying to figure out where he was. A living room, he supposed, rustic and a little worn down.

“So, you're alive!” boomed a voice from behind. A man stepped into his field of vision. “I was wondering there for a while.”

Scott cleared his throat. “Who are you?” It was like licking sandpaper.

“You first,” the man said. As his host sat on the coffee table opposite the sofa, Scott couldn't help but notice the pistol on his hip.

“You shot me,” Scott said.

“Evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, eh?” The man laughed, but Scott didn't get the joke. “Who are you, son? And why are you wandering around in this weather? With blue hair.”

Scott shifted his position under the blankets and felt skin against skin. He had no shirt on. As if to verify it, he pulled his arm from under the blanket and looked at it. He was naked. He shot a look to the man with the gun.

“Your clothes are drying in the other room,” Isaac explained, reading the look for what it was. “I went fishing in the river and reeled in a blue teenfish.” He laughed again.

Scott rattled his head, hoping to shake something into place that would make sense. Oh, yeah, the fall. The water. “You rescued me?” he croaked.

Isaac half-shrugged. “Rescue is too heroic. I sorta just snagged you as you floated by.”

“Thanks.” Scott buried his arm under the covers again and drew the blankets tight. He didn't know that he'd ever be warm again.

“You were going to tell me your name,” Isaac prodded.

“Scott O'Toole.”

The man cocked his head. “Scott O'Toole,” he mused aloud. “Why does that name ring such a—” Then he got it. “Holy shit, boy, what are you doing all the way over here?”

Scott hated being this addled. Nothing this guy said made sense.

“You're one of the plane crash kids, right?”

Scott nodded.

“Well, criminy Jesus, you're supposed to be forty, fifty miles from here.”

The way he said it, Scott wondered if he was supposed to apologize. “Who are you?”

“Isaac DeHaven.” Isaac offered his hand, and Scott again pulled his arm from its cocoon to shake it. “How long have you been walking?”

Scott shook his head. “I don't know. I started at about three in the afternoon.”

Isaac did the math. “Jesus. How far, do you know?”

“I figured it to be about ten miles. This place was the only building on the map.”

“What map?”

“In my pocket. Wherever my pocket is.”

Isaac thought about this. “The news said there's two of you.”

Scott looked away. “Not anymore.” The words sounded awful, so permanent. “Do you have anything to eat?”

“What does ‘not anymore' mean?”

“It means he's…not alive anymore.” Scott didn't want those images to return.

“He's dead, then,” Isaac said. “Is that what you're telling me?” The thought seemed to please him somehow.

Scott nodded. “Killed in the crash.” He thought about mentioning the wolves but decided not to.

“Too bad.” The words were meant to be sympathetic, but the tone didn't quite sell them. Isaac stood abruptly and headed off, out of Scott's field of vision. “You must be starving. When was the last time you ate?”

Scott had to think about that one. As he struggled to a sitting position, he noted that Isaac was heading toward a kitchen. “Tuesday morning, I guess.”

That stopped his host cold in his tracks.

“What?” Scott asked.

“This is Friday,” Isaac said. Then, as if to drive the point home, “Late Friday.”

Jesus. No wonder he was hungry.

“Anything in particular you'd like?”

Now there was a good question. “Got any Froot Loops?”

Isaac laughed. “No, I'm afraid not.”

“How about bacon?” Scott asked, remembering. “Bacon and eggs?”

Isaac smiled. “How do you like them?”

 

I
SAAC'S CLOTHES NEARLY FIT
S
COTT
. A little baggy, especially across the shoulders and chest, but serviceable. It was slow-going at first, weakness and nausea threatening each step. His muscles and joints all felt as if they'd been manufactured from melted glass.

Despite the lure of the sofa, Scott sat at the table in the kitchen to eat.

“How many eggs can you handle?” Isaac asked.

Scott answered without thinking. “Four.” He quickly caught himself and added, “Please.”

Isaac smiled. “How about I start you with one and we'll work up from there.” He served the egg fried, over easy with two strips of bacon and a piece of toast.

In less than a minute, it was all gone and Scott handed over his plate for more. Nothing had ever tasted so good. A second egg followed, with more toast. God, it was wonderful. Isaac returned to the stove for one more, and just like that, it wasn't so wonderful anymore. In fact, it was an emergency. Scott barely made it to the sink in time to upchuck all of it. The heaving brought tears to his eyes, and the crushing disappointment made them real. When he was empty again, he felt a hand on his back, rubbing him gently between his shoulder blades.

“Too much too fast,” Isaac said gently, handing him a towel.

Scott wiped his face. “But I'm
hungry.”
His legs felt wobbly.

Isaac walked with him back to his chair at the table. “This time, we'll start with some toast. Your stomach's shrunk.”

It wasn't the meal he'd fantasized about, not by a long shot. But it stayed down. After four slices, he felt full. “So, now I'm a super-model,” Scott quipped. “Thank you.”

Isaac smiled. “You're welcome.” He gathered up the boy's plate and carried it to the sink.

“You seem like a nice guy,” Scott said. “So, why did you shoot at me?”

Isaac continued to clean as he replied, “That's a long story. I'm just glad I didn't hit you.”

“Were you trying to?”

Isaac took a deep breath, as if he were considering an answer, then said, “Your mother's famous, isn't she?”

Scott snorted out a chuckle. “She thinks she is. She wants to be.”

“You don't approve?”

“I don't
care
. There's a difference.”

Isaac acknowledged the point with an eyebrow. “Sounds like home is not the happiest place in the world.”

Scott regarded his host for a long moment. Lean and clean-shaven, he had a powerful look about him, despite his unremarkable size. His hair—a military buzz cut—had a certain home-inflicted quality to it. The eyes were hard to miss, though: dark brown laser beams.

“How come you won't answer me about the shooting?” Scott pressed.

Isaac answered slowly. “Let's just say that I don't like visitors all that much.”

“So, you shoot them?”

Something in Scott's expression made Isaac laugh. “Well, no, not always.”

“How come you're carrying a gun now?”

“Does it make you nervous?”

Man, you'd think it would, wouldn't you? But something about Isaac's demeanor actually put Scott at ease. “More curious than nervous,” he said.

Isaac finished at the sink and helped himself to the chair opposite the boy at the table. “Well, curiosity can be a dangerous thing, Scott. If I were you, I'd keep that in mind.” The words sounded more like advice than a threat. “I carry the gun because I need to. Now, tell me about your mother. On the news, I keep hearing references to her being a famous author.”

Scott dismissed the notion with a one-shouldered shrug. “She's a psychologist who writes books on how people should live their lives.”

“And you don't like that.”

“I told you, I don't care.”

Isaac just waited for the rest.

“Okay, I think you should learn to live your own life before you start telling other people how to live theirs.”

“She doesn't do that?”

Scott took a deep breath. “You know what? I'm tired. I don't want to talk about this.”

Isaac held up his hands in surrender. “Okay, then we won't talk about it.”

“Good. Thank you.” Nobody moved for a long moment. “How can I get word to my dad that I'm okay?”

Isaac stood and led the way back to the living room. “Well, now, that's something of a dilemma.”

“Can't we just make a phone call?”

Isaac laughed. “Maybe you need to step outside and take another look where you are. I don't have a phone. No lines run out this far.”

“You've got electricity,” Scott observed. “Don't they run together?”

“I've got electricity because I've got a bank of batteries out there in the shed and a windmill to recharge them. I've got running water because another windmill keeps the storage tanks full. Those flames you see on the stove don't run from underground pipes, they run from a big tank out back. This is the country, my friend.” He laughed again. “In fact, you don't get a whole hell of a lot more country than we are right now.”

“So, how do I tell him? I need to tell people about Cody, too.”

“I guess when the storm settles down, and the roads get cleared, I can take you to a phone.”

Scott thought about that. He hated like hell to think of his dad enduring any more than he had to. “I heard you talking to somebody,” Scott said.

Isaac's head came around at that one. “How's that?”

“Before I completely woke up. I heard you talking to somebody. I don't remember what it was about, but I remember it just sounded like a conversation.”

Busted. “That was a radio,” Isaac said, finally. “Short wave. Sometimes, when I get a little loopy from the quiet, I turn it on to chat.” Isaac sat in a chair near the fire and gestured to the sofa for Scott.

“Well, why can't we put out a message on the radio that I'm okay?”

Isaac sighed. He really didn't want to get into this. “You are a nosy son of a bitch, aren't you?” he said, shaking his head. He gestured to the sofa again. “Please, take a seat.”

Scott sat.

Isaac took a long moment to collect his thoughts, then rubbed his face vigorously before beginning. “You put me in a spot.”

Scott just waited for him to get to it.

“Okay, here it is. I'll tell you, and then we'll deal with what to do about it later, okay?”

The boy nodded, but something in the tone put him on edge.

“Do you know what the witness protection program is?”

The gasp escaped Scott's throat before he could stop it.

Isaac saw the recognition and nodded. “Well, there you go. A few years ago, I testified in court against some really bad people who did really bad things. I broke confidences, I tape-recorded conversations, and then I sent them to prison for the rest of their lives, plus a good chunk more.” He paused for a moment, then stood. “Do you want some whiskey?”

Now
there
was a question he'd never been asked before. “Sure.” Scott shrugged. “Why not?”

Isaac continued to speak as he walked to the kitchen and poured two shots of Jack Daniel's, one three times larger than the other. “These bad guys—”

“What are their names?” Scott interrupted.

“You gonna talk or you gonna listen?”

Scott sank back into the cushions.

“I'm not gonna tell you their names, and I'm not gonna tell you what they did, because that's none of your concern. All you need to know is that they and their friends promised to kill me. The operative word there is
promised.”
He paused to let the concept sink in as he brought the drinks back to the living room. “There's an open-ended contract on my head. Five hundred thousand dollars to the man who does me in.”