The Americans Are Coming by Herb Curtis Read Free Book Online Page A

them – quickened their imaginative young hearts. Every shadow, every form, seemed a potential threat, and sometimes what they knew was only a tree or shrub seemed to actually move. Dryfly checked out his surroundings with the flashlight about every ten seconds. Shadrack didn’t complain.
    “What’s that?”
    “Where?”
    “There!”
    “I don’t see anything.”
    “There. I heard a thump.”
    “Where?”
    “Listen!”
    Dryfly couldn’t hear anything, except his heart beating, but he wasn’t sure. There might have been something. He might have missed something . . . he wasn’t sure. “I think we should go home,” he whispered.
    “Why?”
    “It’s gettin’ awful late.”
    “Shh!”
    “Mom’ll kill me.”
    “Wait a few more minutes.”
    Another deep sigh escaped from Dryfly.
    A bird sang, its song piercing the silence, crisp and clear. Dryfly could not identify it – he hadn’t heard it before. “Indians,” he thought.
    Palidin had read a book about cowboys and Indians in which the Indians had used the songs of birds as a form of communication. Dryfly remembered Palidin’s reference to the tale.
    “I hope they’re dead Indians,” he thought.
    The bird sang again and somehow sounded mournful and forsaken. “No,” thought Dryfly, “I hope they are alive.”
    A Gander-bound plane rumbled far up amidst the stars, its flicker somehow reassuring as it crossed the Dipper.
    A mosquito hummed by his ear. The bird sang once more.
    “What bird is that?” whispered Dryfly.
    “What bird?”
    “That one.”
    “Don’t hear it.”
    A few minutes passed and Shad decided he’d had enough. “Let’s go,” he whispered. The words “let’s go” came like poetry to Dryfly’s ears.
    They followed the flashlight beam out on the trail, their feet thumping the ground and swishing the bushes as they hurried along.
    Dryfly counted to himself, “One less step, two less, three, four, five, six . . .”
    When a rabbit has lost the chase and finds himself cornered by a hungry fox, a strange phenomenon occurs. The rabbit gives up, goes into a trance-like state, a fear-induced state ofparalysis, and sometimes even dies, robbing the fox of the thrill of the kill.
    When Shadrack and Dryfly heard the honk from no more than a hundred yards off to their right, they stopped in a trance just short of death. The flashlight dropped from Dryfly’s hand to the ground and went out at his feet. Darkness reigned supreme.
    Thump, thump, thump, went a heartbeat.
    Dryfly wasn’t sure if it was his own heart or Shadrack’s. Shadrack wasn’t sure either.
    BEEP-BARMP-BARMP! went the noise in the forest. The brief silence that followed was disrupted by a fart. Both boys knew that it had been Dryfly’s release. For a moment it was impossible to say if, or if not, they were smelling the devil.
    Shadrack gripped the .303 so tight that he might have been attempting to leave finger dents in the wood.
    “What do we do now?” asked Dryfly in a tiny voice that seemed not to be his own.
    Shadrack didn’t know. He couldn’t think. To run seemed to be the logical move, but in his confusion he prayed instead, silently. “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray to God my soul to keep . . .”
    Thump, thump, thump, went a heartbeat Dryfly identified as his own. “Hail Mary, full of grace, blessed art thou amongst women . . .”
    BARMP! BARMP-BARMP, BEEP-BEEP! went the noise that sounded like a sick car horn, an elephant, perhaps the scream of an eastern cougar, or all three.
    “Got the gun, Shad?” asked Dryfly, his voice still very tiny in the great dark forest.
    “Right here!” said Shadrack. “Want it?”
    “You know how to use it?”
    “Just pull the trigger, I think.”
    BARMP, TWEEP, BLEEP!
    “You scared?”
    “What’d you say?”
    “You scared?”
    “No. I don’t think so.”
    BARMP-BARMP HONK! BEEP-BEEP, BARMP-BARMP! As their eyes adjusted to the darkness, they were able to make out the trail before them – a navy line in