Four Live Rounds by Blake Crouch Read Free Book Online Page B

saw you diddling around in that Silverton
saloon, you struck me, of all the people in it, even the beat-eatin
pelados, as a jackleg, and I thought how much fun it’d be to take
you apart.”
    Oatha’s heart pounded under his coat, his
windpipe constricting, the reality sinking in that he was trapped
in this barely adequate shelter with two men who’d intended to kill
him and perhaps still did, out of food, and colder than he’d ever
been in his life.
    “But you had a change a heart?” he asked.
    “Way I see it, we caught this rough piece a
luck, we’re in it together now.” Nathan unsheathed his bowie knife.
“Ya’ll think this leg’s fit to carve?”
     
    Two days hence, their eleventh in the
shelter, the hunger returned, Nathan’s bowie insufficient to the
task of cutting cookable portions out of the horses that had frozen
straight through. He took his hammer shotgun, spent half a day
wandering through snow deeper than he was tall, McClurg and Oatha
waiting in the shelter, listening for a gunshot, talking of their
last warm meals in Silverton, what they intended to eat upon their
reentry into civilization.
    Nathan returned at dusk, doused in snow and
shivering uncontrollably.
    Growled, “Not even a fire to come home
to?”
    “I’ll make one,” Oatha said.
    “You can hunt tomorrow, too.”
     
    The weakness and hunger made negotiating the
snow nearly impossible, but Oatha ventured out anyway, lightheaded
and cold.
    He spent two hours fighting his way downhill
under the bluest sky he’d ever seen, verging on purple, following
Nathan’s tracks from the previous day, the snow melting off the
trees.
    At lunchtime, he stopped at the edge of a
glade, tried to scale a blue spruce for a better vantage but his
strength was sapped, settled for beating down a spot in the snow
instead.
    The afternoon was almost warm, especially
sitting in direct sunlight, but he couldn’t shake the chill.
Exhausted from the hike down, he leaned back and shut his eyes, and
when he woke again, it was getting dark, the nearest peaks already
flushed with alpenglow.
    In the dusky silence, he thought about what
Nathan had said, how he’d spotted his weakness out of everyone in
that Silverton saloon, how he was in this predicament because of
some deep virus in the fabric of his character.
    Sometimes, lying in bed late in the night
with the room spinning—those moments of drunken introspection when
he feared and believed in God—he’d admitted to himself that he was
headed for something like this, that the shell of a man he’d become
since the war was going to get him killed one of these days.
    Damn if he hadn’t been right about
something.
     
    Next morning, Nathan left again, and Oatha
lay in the shelter’s dirt floor all day, in a fog, too weak to
build a fire, the world graying, his thoughts running back to
childhood in Virginia and those long summer days in the field
behind his home, filling baskets with blackberries, hands stained
purple from the fruit, swollen with thornpricks, and the hum of
bumblebees and the scent of honeysuckle and cobblers baking in the
humid evenings and his mother’s face and his three brothers, long
dead on a Virginia hillside.
     
    After a night of fever dreams, Oatha found
himself stumbling down the well-worn hunting trail, the morning
bright, the snow soft. Sat hours in the glade, the shotgun across
his lap, pulling out clumps of hair, eating snow to quench his
thirst, though the ice only chilled him down and intensified the
agony behind his eyes.
    There passed periods of sleep, stretches of
consciousness, bouts of bloody diarrhea, and he kept hearing birds
fly overhead, wings beating at the air, but every time he looked
up, the sky stood empty.
     
    The next day, no one left the shelter, the
men sitting around the cold fire-ring, faces grim and squandered of
color.
    “We’re dyin, boys,” Nathan said.
    Oatha sat leaning against the spruce, staring
at McClurg, whose brow had furrowed up in