Nowhere to Run by C. J. Box Read Free Book Online Page B

He was a poor pistol shot. Although his scores on the range for his annual recertification had risen a few points in the past two years, he still barely qualified. He knew if it weren’t for the sympathy of the range officer who’d followed his exploits over the years and graded him on a curve, he could have been working a desk at game and fish headquarters in Cheyenne. Joe’s proficiency was with a shotgun. He could wing-shoot with the best of them. His accuracy and reaction time were excellent as long as he shot instinctively. It was the slow, deliberate aiming he had trouble with.
    As he staggered from tree to tree toward the meadow, he vowed that if he got off the mountain alive he’d finally take the time to learn how to hit something with his service weapon.
    He felt oddly disengaged, like he was watching a movie of a guy who looked a lot like him, but slower. It was as if it weren’t really him limping through the trees with holes in his leg and his best horse bleeding to death on the side of an unfamiliar mountain. Joe seemed to be floating above the treetops, between the crown of the pines and the sky, looking down at the man in the red shirt moving toward what any rational observer would view as certain death. But he kept going, hoping the numb otherworldliness would continue to cushion him and act as a narcotic, hoping the pain would stay just beyond the unbearable threshold so he could revel in the insentient comfort of shock. And he hoped the combination of both would keep at bay the terror that was rising within him.
    Now, though, there were four things of primal importance.
    Find Blue Roanie’s body and the panniers. Recover his shotgun. Return to Buddy with the first-aid kit. Get the hell off the mountain.
     
    THE PINE TREES thinned and melded into a stand of aspen. He couldn’t remember riding Buddy into aspen at all, but at the time he’d been addled and in furious pain. He recalled gold spangles in his eyes and realized now that they’d been leaves that slapped against his face as Buddy shot through the trees.
    Aspen trees shared a single interconnected root system that produced saplings straight from their ball of roots through the soil. They weren’t a grove of individual trees like pines or cottonwoods, but a single organism relentlessly launching shooters up through the soil to gain territory and acquire domination, to starve out any other trees or brush that dared try to live in the same immediate neighborhood. A mountainside of aspen was enjoyed by tourists for the colors and tone, but it was actually one huge voracious organism as opposed to hundreds or thousands of individual trees. Joe had always been suspicious of aspens for that reason. Additionally, the problem with aspen for a hunter or stalker or a crippled game warden was their leaves, which dried like brittle parchment commas and dropped to the ground. Walking on aspen leaves was akin to walking on kettle-fried potato chips: noisy . Joe crunched along, left hand on a tree trunk or branch and right hand on the polymer grip of his Glock, when he realized how loud he was, how obvious. And how silent it was, which meant the brothers were still there.
     
    ON HIS HANDS AND KNEES, Joe shinnied over downed logs to the meadow. With each yard, the lighting got brighter. His wounded leg alternated between heat and cold, pain and deadness. When his leg was hot, he knew he was bleeding. He could smell the metallic odor. When it was cold, his leg felt better. But it scared him, because dragging his leg felt like pulling thirty pounds of cold meat through the leaves. If it was cold, it was gone. So in a way, he welcomed the waves of heat.
    Trees thinned. The meadow pulsed green and bright in the sunlight. Joe heard one of the brothers laugh like a hyena: Cack-cack-cack-cack-cack . The sound made the hairs on the back of Joe’s neck prick up, as if he were a dog.
    And he thought: This is as basic as it can be. I’m a dog. They’re animals as