At first, Jessica thinks it\u2019s the darkness that her body needs to escape. Their tent\u2019s air pocket of darkness. The forests\u2019 surrounding miles of darkness. She is scrambling away from the darkness. Not the explosions opening wounds into that darkness. Explosions that she is beginning to understand are gunshots. Though her mind has caught up with what her ears are hearing, the rest of her body is a writhing animal, and, in the darkness, she is blind.<\/p>\n
\u201cClay,\u201d she whispers. \u201cYou hear that? Clay!\u201d<\/p>\n
He grunts. Below the pulsing gun blasts, she hears him swiping things into their backpacks.<\/p>\n
Other hikers whimper and trip as bullets rip through their tents\u2019 nylon shells. A zipper opens. A heavy blast, a wet cry. Someone screams until they drop to the sound of a rifle\u2019s heaving, sadistic exhale.<\/p>\n
\u201cClay!\u201d she cries and pushes him. He shushes her. Her hands grasp and claw as the hard cracks of the pistol start up again.<\/p>\n
Zippers cricket-chirp open. Feet thud away and mouths move with the meaningless flutter of moth wings. The beat of the pistol shot gives way once more to the scything reports of the rifle. Each time the rifle calls, there is a cry. A choked moan. A crash of a body into the undergrowth.<\/p>\n
Oh god, oh god, oh god, goes Jessica\u2019s mouth as her shivering hands go for the tent flap\u2019s zipper. She feels Clay\u2019s fleece instead, and he pulls her down to where he crouches.<\/p>\n
She pushes against him, then stops. His beard bristles at her cheek as he says, \u201cIt\u2019s the zippers. That\u2019s how he finds them.\u201d<\/p>\n
How did he know there was only one shooter?<\/p>\n
Clay shoves a headlamp into her hands. \u201cPut it on.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019ll see!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s got night vision anyhow.\u201d<\/p>\n
As she paws furiously at the tent floor\u2019s ripples for her boots, she hears the hand work the bolt between shots and smells the spent powder. The shooter is hunting them like animals loosed from their pens.<\/p>\n
\u201cHurry!\u201d she says, though as he clicks her headlamp on, she sees it\u2019s Clay who stands ready with his knife.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve got a second,\u201d he says and brings the blade down with a hiss through the side of the tent.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn three, we\u2019ve got to run. Doesn\u2019t matter where. Just away! Stay low.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI know!\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne, two, three\u2026\u201d And out they charge into the night.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
As her limbs blunder through the bracken, her heart seems to throb in her face. Her vision is a purple haze between two palpating walls and her body thunders and wheezes in clumsy zigzags scored by her ragged breathing and the exclamations of rifle fire, that despite her stumble-filled flight, are dimming.<\/p>\n
She still hears the gun riving the air, but a more immediate threat assaults her in the form of snags, rasping webs, and thorns that thwart her pell-mell struggle.<\/p>\n
The silvery bark of the firtrees conducts star and moonlight. And she has the frantic, skipping light of her headlamp. Yet the night remains a network of roots that seem to grab at her feet, forcing her to eat dirt and curse.<\/p>\n
Still, the folk wisdom supposing that without a trail, you go in circles proves untrue. Though unique in their hectic navigation of creek and hillock, they run a similar route. Even after a fall, she rises in an amble up to find she\u2019s still tracking with Clay. He\u2019s not far ahead, having just risen from a fall of his own. Though he doesn\u2019t turn around to check on her, she knows he\u2019s not running as fast as he could, practically sheep-dogging her into following him, his shoulders and hips sauntering at a pace she\u2019s capable of matching. And match it, she does, though each time she falls, she hopes to rise to find he\u2019s vanished. Gone. Lost to her. Finally.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s following Clay despite herself. It\u2019s like she\u2019s connected to him by some tether of spirit, woven by their relationship and their current flight primed by shared fear and revulsion of the shooter. The shooter\u2019s an unseen controller of sound and breath who, despite his trigger-tight command of life and death, has not been able to distract her from her nearly three-year quandary: how to get clear of Clayton Kelley Monfort.<\/p>\n
The thought disquiets her more now than the continued cracking of the gun, which though still local, has not followed them. Her thought about Clay disquiets her more than the reality that she\u2019s wishing for her father. A wish blossoming in her like the serrations of a hollow point bullet opening against the tissue of its target. A wish opening in her despite the miles and years she\u2019s put between them.<\/p>\n
If her father, Blaine, were here, he would know what to do. He would know how to kill him. Yet she wonders who this shooter is. Is it someone like her father? And is she running away from him the same way she ran away from her dad, towards Clay?<\/p>\n
Running away, running away. Unwittingly towards Clay.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a familiar feeling.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The place Jess ran away from was Burley, Idaho\u2014a town at the vertex of the Snake River\u2019s parabola between Idaho Falls and Boise. Her father, Blaine, owned Babe\u2019s Outdoor Sports and Shooting Range. Babe as in Paul Bunyan\u2019s blue ox. Not \u201cbabe\u201d as in the kind her mother had been. Babe\u2019s was the place where she learned to count a till, work a register, settle a batch, and shoot a gun. Most types of guns.<\/p>\n
Blaine taught her at age 13 how to stand square, slightly forward, arms out. He taught her how to put the beavertail of the gun-butt deep into the meat between her thumb and forefinger. Working with a prop gun made of solid, blue rubber, she improved her grip so that by the time she got her first period, she took her first shot. By her 14th birthday, she could clean, load, and fire a Glock 19. She could get the ten bullets in a neat cluster around the 10-point bullseye of the paper figure, about where a person\u2019s liver would be.<\/p>\n
Rifles came next, though because of the recoil she was skittish. To anticipate the kickback, she would seize on the trigger, so all her shots were off. Her dad tried replacing the factory-make with a 2-pound trigger\u2014lighter so she couldn\u2019t anticipate the blast and wouldn\u2019t clench down.<\/p>\n
When her shots didn\u2019t improve, Blaine had her go back to the basics, working on her grip and her stance.<\/p>\n
\u201cButtpad in your chest, just below your collar bone. Then you bring it up to your eye and thumb around the neck of the stock. Right there! Good. Remember that, muscles. That\u2019s home,\u201d he said. \u201cDon\u2019t ever leave it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Too bad her mom hadn\u2019t taken that advice. She\u2019d left by the time Jess was five for suburban life in Boise. She\u2019d burned out after fifteen years of living with Blaine, his guns, and his store. The place smelled of dusty cedar, heavy rubber, and gunpowder. She could no longer stand his desert rat friends, all prone to conspiracy theories and junk food.<\/p>\n
Jess visited her mom\u2019s two-story cookie-cutter house twice a year. They\u2019d go to The Cheesecake Factory and her mom\u2019s new husband\u2014a programmer at Hewlett-Packard\u2014would pepper her with questions, working overtime to sound interested. Everything was neat squares out there: lawns, garages, her mom\u2019s new Element. All of it was so safe, it made life seem abstract and eked out in a petri dish. None of it was hers, and it all reminded her that she and her mother had never been close. Every minute she stayed felt like a slap in the face to the father who raised her, never spoke a bad word about her mother, and always got misty-eyed when Jess left for a visit. Jess always felt her presence in Blaine\u2019s life was a poultice over a mortal wound that could never heal.<\/p>\n
But things were changing for Jess. Though she had fulfilled her spunky tomboy role beside her brothers well enough, things in Burley were losing their luster. For one thing, she turned sixteen and started liking boys. She got tired of tugging her hair back into a greasy ponytail while she lugged around the heavy black weapons of war with her dad and his fat friends in their camo-colored baseball hats. Between river rafting trips, she wanted her hands to smell like fresh flowers instead of fireworks.<\/p>\n
Her rifle shots were still shit, leading Blaine to suggest the AR-15. Less recoil, less time spent relocating the target. But at school, she\u2019d been taking advanced classes taught by that Maoist the school district hired from Missoula who was sure to undermine their Second Amendment Rights every chance he got, enlisting her in self-righteous, bleeding-heart campaigns.<\/p>\n
After the Aurora, Colorado Movie Theater shooting, Jess sat her dad down and asked him to please, for the love of God, stop carrying AR-15s in the store.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t do that,\u201d Blaine said, looking at the grey hairs coming into his ponytail. \u201cI\u2019m a bolt-action man myself. But that rifle\u2019s a big chunk of my business. Not to mention I\u2019d lose customers who would protest my protest. It\u2019s what busybodies of all persuasions do nowadays.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople are dying, Daddy,\u201d she said and showed him the pictures of the people killed. \u201cWho really needs these things? Except to kill people.\u201d<\/p>\n
He looked at the pictures and shook his head, \u201cI am so sorry for these people. And their loved ones.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThen do something,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf sick, lonely losers are going to get it in their heads to kill, then they\u2019re going to kill,\u201d Blaine said. He gave a hard sniff, the way he did when confronting a cold, hard fact of life. \u201cAnd anyhow, you and I both know how many shots you can get off from a semi-automatic pistol in seconds. Well, ban them too! But then what happens if someone gets elected and starts taxing everything we own, and taking our land? It could be someone from either side, Jess. Right or left. Look at Hitler. Look at Castro. We\u2019ve got to stay armed and dangerous, so the bigshots stay within their bounds. Had more people in that theater been armed, there would have been fewer victims. That shape right there. That rifle. That\u2019s our freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n
The fact that Jess, like the rest of the country\u2019s lib-tards, didn\u2019t get it, got her pegged by the locals, not as wild or crazy, but as pityingly average. In a family of smalltown wonders, she was regular. Not like Caleb, who could size up anyone with a blink and could command their respect with a quip. Not like Gil, who trimmed, spliced, and stacked everything in his life into a strict and ordered system. Not like Wyatt, who yodeled even as he aimed and sunk bullet after bullet into the bullseye.<\/p>\n
Of course, she could chalk her separateness up to the whole gender thing. But even the thought would invoke Blaine\u2019s words:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe only reason being female can get you down in this world is if you let it.\u201d He gave another hard sniff.<\/p>\n
His words could have a straightjacketing claustrophobia to them that fixed you stiller than a pin through the thorax of a dead insect on a corkboard.<\/p>\n
But she was still just Jess. Okay at everything. Just okay, in part, Caleb claimed, because she lacked confidence and bothered to question in the first place, her standing in the Machle tribe. She couldn\u2019t just accept the auto-part-smelling den of death their father called a store. Couldn\u2019t just accept her place on the food chain as a canine-sporting predator created to use violence to solve its problems. Couldn\u2019t just accept the fact that bullets were freedom seeds and couldn\u2019t just be happy that they\u2019d been born into a clan that could claim such tools as birthrights.<\/p>\n
So ingrained was gun culture to Machle family life that when Jess turned eighteen, her rite of passage wasn\u2019t graduating, which she did with honors, or buying a pack of cigarettes, which she did with reserve. It was the hunt. Her brothers had done it. Now it was her turn.<\/p>\n
They geared up and lit out. Ruger had just released the American Predator; Blaine had gifted it to her for her birthday. The thing was made of olive-colored synthetic plastic and looked like a super-sized accessory off an army man toy. And though the guys at Babe\u2019s all chortled about what a lightweight pop gun it was, after miles and miles of hiking through Ponderosa pine in 90-degree heat with the rifle at her chest, it got heavy. Blaine insisted them carry muzzle down for safety purposes. It made her arms burn. Made her want to ditch the gun and hitchhike back to Burley\u2019s burger stand where she\u2019d let a guy buy her a chocolate shake.<\/p>\n
On the second day, they found her a buck. They tracked him and set her up at the tree line of his herd\u2019s favorite feeding meadow at the base of a gully. Throughout the day, they fanned out in a wide perimeter, closing him off from other food sources. When he stalked out into the meadow, she could take her shot.<\/p>\n
Around sunset, he stepped out from behind a pine tree, upwind at the meadow\u2019s other end. He raised and lowered his head as he chewed; he stopped and started, gingerly moving his feet. With antlers no longer than her hands fully extended, he was a teenager too. From the tip of his pulsing nose to his droopy black tail, he was alive, and from her sideways view of him through her scope, she knew he wanted to stay that way. It wasn\u2019t fair. Cradled in her arms was a finely engineered, mass-produced machine by one of the biggest firearms manufacturers in the country.<\/p>\n
As she clicked the safety into the black, the buck lifted his head. His eyes bored into her, heat coming from their dark centers. His nose glistened and flared. With a shake of his head, he gave a snort. Then, just as she was about to click the safety back into dead-red, the buck wheeled around as if possessed, antlers aloft and crashing into the cover of the chaparral.<\/p>\n
When she stood up, she saw Blaine standing above her, atop the gulley wall. He stared at her with his grey eyes and gave a sniff.<\/p>\n
The next few weeks made her wish she would have capped that buck\u2019s ass. Not because of anything Blaine said. But because of those long looks he kept boring into her. She guessed he was studying her to make sure she was still straight and still his, not a host for Ho Chi Minh\u2019s restless spirit. It was clear to Jessica that she\u2019d passed up her opportunity to prove herself to him and that the rest of her life, if spent in Burley, would involve tiptoeing in Blaine\u2019s sights.<\/p>\n
Boise was out of the question. Jess didn\u2019t want to live with her mother and betray her father. She just wanted to get clear of them all and find something of her own where she wouldn\u2019t have to be locked into the false binary of kill or be killed.<\/p>\n
So, she looked up a high school girlfriend on Facebook who graduated the year before and was now living in Issaquah\u2014a town somewhere in Western Washington. She punched \u201cIssaquah\u201d into her GPS and left Burley. The blue ox on the marquee of her dad\u2019s gun store shrunk in her rearview mirror until it became a thing of memory.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Compelled by exhaustion and thirst, Jessica plunges into a creek. She tears off her headlamp and throws her face into the stream. Between gasps of sucking at the water\u2019s surface, her eyes gulp in the predawn light glowing off the stream. She drinks until she can no longer taste the back of her throat or hear her heart pumping blood to her head.<\/p>\n
She looks up and there is Clay, bankside, drinking from cupped hands, pack unslung, and neatly resting on a tree trunk.<\/p>\n
Both are slurping though. No Steri-penning, no Jet-boiling. All know-how-fueled ritual abandoned. Thoughts of likely Giardia contraction are as far as the stars which in her panic-dizzied vision, spin above the jagged teeth of the trees.<\/p>\n
She is alive. They are alive. And still together.<\/p>\n
She clicks off her headlamp and watches the stream flow down towards the Sol Duc River.<\/p>\n
They should be dead.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat if\u2026 Why hasn\u2019t he\u2026 He could have\u2026,\u201d she murmurs.<\/p>\n
Clay chews a piece of gum that isn\u2019t there, the way he does when he feels cornered. His eyes are small. His gaze, absent.<\/p>\n
She plays alternate scenarios of their getaway, all easily ending in their deaths. The night-visioned shooter could have run them down with his pistol, then returned to finish off their fellow campers. If there are multiple shooters, one could have charged off after them, followed their trail, and mowed them down in seconds.<\/p>\n
Clay is taking stock of what he rummaged into his pack in the moments before their flight: compass, a water bottle, a bag of food, map, a pair of pants, one of their bowls with lid-cuttingboard combo, and a spork. And of course, his knife.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy? Did he\u2026Did they\u2026 Did whoever\u2026 Did they let us go?\u201d Jess asks.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe saving us to hunt,\u201d Clay replies.<\/p>\n
A single, distant shot bores into the world of soft, squirming targets.<\/p>\n
Jess starts off in the direction they\u2019d been going, through the ferns, upstream. In two strides, Clay\u2019s ahead of her, pinning her again into the spiteful tagalong role of a little sister. Having grown up with three brothers, she\u2019s used to this role and wonders if it\u2019s habit that is keeping her with Clay. Not just the habit of the last three years, but the habit of her life, which seems to her like a mucus-lined throat she\u2019s unable to wriggle out of.<\/p>\n
As she follows Clay into the purple-dark of the untrodden forest broken only by his strobing headlamp, she doesn\u2019t ask where they\u2019re going. She knows he doesn\u2019t know and that it doesn\u2019t matter, so long as they keep away from the trails. So long as they can keep the sounds of the gunshots as far away and firecracker-like as possible.<\/p>\n
If they use the trails, they\u2019ll be exposed because the shooter can use the trails as he likes, as he\u2019s the only one who\u2019s armed. Clay has come to this conclusion about the trails in a silent second\u2014the same way he understood about the zippers and the headlamps. Clay is thinking neater and more cleanly than her brother Gil now. How is it that he can think so adroitly like this now? This guy who can\u2019t even cook himself a meal. Who can\u2019t buy groceries for a week. Who can\u2019t make, let alone stick to a budget.<\/p>\n
Gunfire! They fall forward. Their packs fly off and open. A flush of heat fills her face. It\u2019s an AR-15\u2019s demon sprinkler that huffs and pants now. All knees and elbows, they crawl around a tree, their gear scattering everywhere. Then they wait to find out if they\u2019ve positioned their bodies behind or in front of the tree trunk and the gun.<\/p>\n
No ricochets sound. The flurries of fire are far away. Yet, she can imagine the hand tapping the new magazine in with a whack before it strafes again.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe they got him,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cMore likely he got them,\u201d Clay answers.<\/p>\n
Right again. Rangers in Washington State can\u2019t carry firearms, let alone rifles.<\/p>\n
They rummage in the ferns for their shit and continue on.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Jess drove her Geo Tracker into Issaquah on fumes. The gunshot carom of her father\u2019s indoor range still echoed in her ears despite the miles she\u2019d put between them. Though Issaquah\u2019s name sounded enchanting, the town itself turned out to be an uppity suburb. The only thing special about it was that neither of her parents lived there. But her friend from high school came through\u2014not only giving her a place to sleep, but also getting her a job at REI. It would only be temporary. Jess planned on it lasting no more than a year. Just so she could make some money. Then, she\u2019d go to Bellevue College for nursing, after which she\u2019d get a job at a sleek Seattle research hospital where she\u2019d meet and marry a surgeon.<\/p>\n
Three years later, she was still working at REI and telling herself she had to get clear of Clay.<\/p>\n
Clayton Kelley Monfort. Name like an outlaw. Look of a dog who\u2019d just bitten someone. When Jess first saw him on her first day at work, she figured he had a record. He was the furriest man she\u2019d ever seen. Scratchy-looking black hair stretched down both the front and the back of his neck, letting only a little of his dun-colored skin come through. She wanted to touch that skin and do something to turn those sad eyes over. Wanted to no matter how often she told herself not to. Looked at him no matter how she tried to focus on learning the layout of the store. She said yes to the ride into the hills in his raised Isuzu pick-up. She laughed when Clay sent the truck\u2019s ridged tires rumbling down an old logging spur on the backside of Cougar Mountain and a wall of mud splattered her window blind. He told her it was why his truck was white. So it could show the mud better.\u00a0 She said yes again when he invited her out to burgers at Triple X Rootbeer Drive-in. Cried yes, yes, yes so loud beneath him on his futon that she had to tell everyone at work she was hoarse because she\u2019d gone to karaoke with friends she didn\u2019t have.<\/p>\n
What could she do? She\u2019d grown up outdoors. She\u2019d been tour-guiding rafting trips for tourists on the Snake River before she was sixteen. Her boyfriends had all been fellow guides mostly like her brothers\u2014scruffy, farmer-tanned risk-takers. Only Clay was better. He seemed somehow more familiar than all of them. Regular. Nothing special. Like her. She felt safe and comfortable around him somehow, maybe because she knew he needed her.<\/p>\n
Clay didn\u2019t have a record. But his parents did. Throughout his growing up, his mother had been in and out of drug treatment centers, leaving Clay to be raised first by a string of boyfriends, then by foster parents. Though Clay no longer speaks to any of his parental figures, he had visited his father in prison throughout his boyhood, and maybe this nearness to iron bars was what made him have that shady, guilty-conscious look. That and his dark brows. A grandmother he\u2019d never met was Portuguese. Clay never showed his teeth when he smiled, which was almost never. He clammed up around people he didn\u2019t know, especially ones that were friendly and educated like the people Jess wanted to fit in with and occasionally tried to, early on in Issaquah.<\/p>\n
While running the gauntlet of classes to qualify for nursing school, she organized after-quarter get-togethers with members of her cohort. Kids who she thought were going somewhere. Kids who seemed rich, smart, and beautiful. But few ever came to her tailgate parties, cookouts, or outdoor movie nights. The more they ignored her, the more intense her desire became to befriend them, and the more she wondered if Clay was to blame for how they had brushed her off.<\/p>\n
She wondered if Clay was to blame for her dropping out.<\/p>\n
Once, she had re-drawn a textbook diagram of a hand from memory. As she was comparing her version with the original, confirming her near-perfect recall, Clay walked in.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou going to need to remember all that?\u201d Clay asked. \u201cJust asking because when a guy\u2019s bleeding out and you\u2019ve got nothing but compresses and a few seconds, what use is all that anatomy going to be?\u201d<\/p>\n
She\u2019d lit into him. His remarks weren\u2019t helpful. Were they his way of asking for more attention? This saddened and annoyed her. Couldn\u2019t he find something to study? She, for one, wasn\u2019t going to work retail all her life. But he\u2019d slunk off before she could finish.<\/p>\n
Things weren\u2019t all bad. Clay\u2019s tastes were simple and easily satisfied. The sex was good\u2014long, slow pressings that pumped her into a frenzy so fierce she thought at times she would firework herself out of existence. \u201cCome on, come on, come on,\u201d he\u2019d say. To himself, maybe. Or to her. As if she was an engine he was trying to turn over. But she\u2019d follow the feeling and after she came, she could come down and settle on his warm, wet pelt of chest hair for as long as she wanted. Which usually was only for a few minutes until she got too hot and sweaty. After she came in from her shower, Clay would be staring at the ceiling, breathing calmly with a blank expression on his face until he\u2019d fall asleep.<\/p>\n
At least Clay didn\u2019t talk as much as her dad. And never about guns. Nor did he carry or own. It was only once in a blue moon that he went shooting with buddies from high school. She knew without asking that they shot AR-15s. She worried about Clay getting hurt. It would make it that much harder for her to get out.\u00a0 She didn\u2019t think even the strongest woman could leave an injured guy. Not long after she had this thought, she woke in the night with a realization spiraling down into her through the rifling grooves of her biology. She wanted to quit Clay.<\/p>\n
Yet life events kept slamming her out and yanking her back, intertwining her further around him, as if she were a tetherball.<\/p>\n
The backpacking trip to Sol Duc had been her idea. A present to him to make nice after a fight. She wonders what he thinks of their current situation and how it\u2019s not such a bad arrangement for him. She didn\u2019t have anything to do now but trudge after him through a wood bewitched by bullets and blood.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A few slow-going hours of bushwhacking later, Jess and Clay crash in a grove of spindly alders. They rest and then start arguing in whispers over the map as the midday sun shines through the sawtooth leaves.<\/p>\n
Clay wants to retrace their steps. It\u2019s the one place the shooter likely will not be. Once back at their campsite, they can pick up more supplies\u2014theirs and those of the dead.<\/p>\n
But Jess won\u2019t do it. She doesn\u2019t want to see the bodies\u2019 mouths and eyes open like fish out of water. Why not set up a little camp here, she thought, looking around.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause,\u201d Clay explains, \u201cWe\u2019ve left a trail the shooter can follow.\u201d<\/p>\n
Clay says that they need to keep moving, decreasing the chance of intersecting with the shooter\u2019s warpath. Staying put meant surefire death. Clay can\u2019t throw his knife worth shit, and rushing the shooter would only buy her a few seconds. His body won\u2019t do dick against that rifle. Those rifles. However many the shooter has stashed away. There are probably weapons caches hollowed out all over these hills. He\u2019s a planner.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou don\u2019t just wake up one morning and decide you\u2019re going to go massacre a bunch of backpackers,\u201d Clay says.<\/p>\n
He murmurs out his rationales unequivocally as if he\u2019s discussing strategy in a video game. In some ways, this is the certain, confident man Jess has always wanted him to be back in Issaquah, where he hemmed and hawed, hedged, and wavered\u2014his actions betraying his unease.<\/p>\n
Hell, even on the way up here, they had gotten breakfast at a diner. Clay had tossed his truck keys onto the countertop between them. When they\u2019d finished eating, Jess made a playful paw for the keys. Clay\u2019s hand clapped down on them so hard it made her, the waitress, and all the other diners jump. With a shaky hand, he stuffed the keys into his pocket and gave her one of his dark, guilty looks. He\u2019d done something like it before. Once she\u2019d snatched for the remote and he\u2019d wrenched it from her hand. He left her wondering what red-mawed animal waited beneath his silences.<\/p>\n
But now in the thick of the wilderness, with the gunshots of an unknown maniac still echoing in their ears, Clay seems relatively calm. Irrevocability has settled over him. In his red fleece, he leans against the lichen-blanched trunk of an alder, studying his map and the compass, and watching how the long shadows stretch in the light. He looks good. She tells him so, though that color makes him a perfect target.<\/p>\n
He snorts a laugh out of his nose, knowing if he takes off the fleece, hypothermia might kill him before a full-metal jacket can.<\/p>\n
When they arrived at their Port Angeles Airbnb\u2014some guy\u2019s basement\u2014 Clay realized he\u2019d left his black fleece on the hook of the door of their apartment back in Issaquah. Jessica felt like ribbing him\u2014the way her brothers would have done with her. But she didn\u2019t dare due to the violence that she\u2019d never seen but sensed simmering beneath his skin like a squib load in a gun\u2019s muzzle.<\/p>\n
Not wanting to wait in a line around the ranger\u2019s cabin with a bunch of rubes, they\u2019d gotten there the night before. They got their tags and scored a bear can ahead of time so they could secure their food stashes at night. That gave Clay plenty of time to go get himself another top half. While he was gone, Jessica\u2019s thoughts buzzed around the problems of her relationship. She fantasized about slipping out the door of their Airbnb and hitchhiking her way onto a new life with nothing but her backpack and regret. But what would it mean if she left Clay? What would it say about her? She could see her dad staring at her and giving a sniff. It\u2019d mean she was the quitter he thought she was.<\/p>\n
The red fleece was the only thing on the clearance rack. When Clay came back wearing it, all Jessica said was she was happy he\u2019d found something. She stroked his arms and found herself saying that she liked him fluffy and red like this. Like her big red dog.<\/p>\n
From the alder\u2019s mossy back, Clay lowers himself and sits down next to her. They don\u2019t hear any more shots. It\u2019s getting late. Fewer hikers entering the area means fewer targets to shoot. The shooter is probably saving his ammo, laying low, waiting for the big assault of Army Rangers that is no doubt on the way.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe could walk south till we reach Mount Bogachiel,\u201d he says. \u201cIf all stays quiet, we can turn northeast and go to Sol Duc where the cavalry will be gathering. Marines maybe. Or Seals. Hopefully both.\u201d<\/p>\n
She shakes her head. \u201cI\u2019m tired. Don\u2019t want to move. I just want this to be over. So I can sleep.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cK. Well, I\u2019m staying too. We can die together.\u201d<\/p>\n
There it is! The passive aggression he uses to get his way. She sighs and gets up, telling him she\u2019ll go with him to Bogachiel.<\/p>\n
\u201cJ-Mac,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat?\u201d she huffs.<\/p>\n
\u201cSouth is that way.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
J-Mac. Jessica has hated it since the first time he used it. It sounds like a rapper. Or a truck. Something masculine. She doesn\u2019t want to be J-Mac. She wants to be Jessica.<\/p>\n
As they slosh through a swale, she tells Clay to not call her that anymore.<\/p>\n
\u201cSure thing. But then you\u2019ve got to stop calling me Clayboy.\u201d<\/p>\n
She hasn\u2019t called him that since they\u2019d first started dating.<\/p>\n
While maps, nicknames, and basically every other topic is little more than an invitation to argue, the only safe subject turns out to be the shooter\u2019s identity. They agree to assume there\u2019s only one shooter for the sake of their sanity, though they concede there\u2019s no way to know for sure.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo silencer on his barrel,\u201d Jessica observes. \u201cHe wants to be heard. To scare us.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cProbably why he popped off all those rounds first,\u201d Clay said. \u201cTo get us out of our tents. So he could hunt us. He gets off on the thrill.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou sure can think like a sicko.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTakes one to know one?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI wasn\u2019t saying that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Little birds flit in the canopy as the light ambers toward dusk.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s got to be a marksman. To drop all those people with a bolt action.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou think he\u2019s ex-military?\u201d she asks.<\/p>\n
\u201cOr some laid-off logger who does nothing but shoot all day. I bet he thinks he\u2019s getting revenge on all us yuppy hikers for taking his woods.\u201d<\/p>\n
Clay proceeds to spin an elaborate tale of how the shooter\u2019s father was a logger-turned marksman, who, on a lone hunting trip, injured himself and bled to death, leaving the shooter to grow up bitter and vengeful.<\/p>\n
Before she can complement Clay on his imagination, he marvels at it himself.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know, when I was a boy, I was boss at drawing designs. Logos, cars, motorcycles. Parts for them. You name it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then his dad got sent away. He no longer had anyone to show his drawings to. There just didn\u2019t seem to be any point anymore.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The trees give way to the lavender sky of early evening. At the tree line, they catch sight of Mount Bogachiel\u2019s unimpressive collection of rock stacks and the grassy swaths it wears as a tunic. A waning crescent moon hovers overhead.<\/p>\n
In the shelter of the trees, Jess and Clay eat a hiker\u2019s supper of trail mix and strips of jerky. They eat in nibbles to make it last. There\u2019s only a quarter bag left.<\/p>\n
They agree to sleep, back-to-back in the shadow of Mt. Bogachiel, shooter be damned. Clay has his knife ready. When they wake up\u2014if they wake up\u2014 they\u2019ll decide how to proceed. Neither wants to go up to the ridge along High Divide, where they\u2019d be exposed. If the shooter\u2019s still at large, he could pick them off like marmots. It makes sense then to follow the edge of the trees east to Heart Lake Basin where they will be able to listen and see what\u2019s going on. But in the open, they need a plan for where to run if they take any fire. Clay returns to his back-track idea. Jessica wants to keep heading east in retreat to Cat Basin.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s the most remote place in the Seven Lakes,\u201d she argues. \u201cThere are caves in the hillsides. We could hole up and wait it out. If it\u2019s a sheer number of people he wants to kill, he\u2019s not going to follow us there.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHunger could get us first,\u201d Clay says, shaking their near-empty bag of food.<\/p>\n
They agree to sleep on it.<\/p>\n
She has two dreams. One dream is of the hand diagram she had studied. The bones: the phalanges, the carpal. They are tightening into a fist. The other dream she has is of her face, eyes wide and iridescent in the crosshairs of the shooter\u2019s night-vision scope. She wakes up just before he makes her skull explode.<\/p>\n
She hears Clay\u2019s regular breathing and what could be an owl. She can get clear now, she thinks. She\u2019s going to do it. Slip away now. Into the darkness. At least she\u2019d be free of him. In just another second, she will do it, she says to herself as she slips back into sleep.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
From their vantage point at the edge of a scarp to the south, Heart Lake looks like its name\u2014an upside-down heart shape drawn by a toddler. At the north end, the point of the heart bleeds out in a slow rivulet that becomes the Sol Duc River. The wind chills them and blows the morning fog down with the waters toward the valley.<\/p>\n
They creep down, following the fog into the cold, glacier-scooped cauldron of the basin. In their downward creep, their boot heels catch on stones, sending them downward in rainmaker noises. As the fog dissipates, they see the trail descending in steps toward a valley floor pocked with dark lakes, ashy shores, and snowy berms. They keep boulders and trees between them and whatever lies beneath.<\/p>\n
Halfway down, Clay stops.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow what?\u201d she asks.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe wait.\u201d<\/p>\n
The sun comes out and lines the ridge with silver, getting in their eyes, turning the mountainous terrain behind them into a shapeless mass.<\/p>\n
After what must have been a half hour, they decide to proceed.<\/p>\n
The shot comes like a crack in the earth. Jessica hears a rock behind her split as she slides. She somersaults behind a rotten log. Wood sprays to her left as a bullet tears through. She crawls to a copse of trees that sprawl into forest cover, up the valley\u2019s eastern wall. She looks behind for Clay, but he\u2019s nowhere to be seen.<\/p>\n
She thinks the shot came from a glade of firs, over a rock scramble. But she can\u2019t be sure. There\u2019s the sound of scramble somewhere. Clay? Another earth-splitting shot reverberates up and through the world. Then silence.<\/p>\n
She runs. When she reaches the trees, curses escape her in jumbled bursts, half-English, half the language of rage.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
She wanders. She has nothing with her. The rifle cracks the skies open and punctures flesh. Screams carry through the air and up to her ears like spirits writhing in an inferno. The thunderous rage of the gun fills the world, louder and more persistent than any storm she can remember on the plains of the Snake River. Yet she stops flinching. The blood ceases flashing to her face. She starts feeling the gashes in her skin that the rocks tore open. She gets hungry despite never wanting to eat again.<\/p>\n
Where was Clay? she wonders. She remembers that last image of him. His nose pointed to the ground, his sideways look. His inscrutable ex-con face hidden in his black, scratchy pelt.<\/p>\n
Helicopter blades hum overhead. Rifle-shot punches through aluminum and a wheeling chaos chops at the air until an atonal crunch of metal sends everything silent.<\/p>\n
Through her directionless stagger, gnarled trees crowd her. Tall, dark, uncaring scavengers of the spirit, the trees watch her hopeless sojourn and hear her thoughts, which burble out in back ward fits. Her father\u2019s speeches, Clay\u2019s complaints, his theories about the shooter, her fantasies about killing him with nothing but what she has: her fingernails.<\/p>\n
Of course she\u2019s never questioned the shooter\u2019s gender. Neither had Clay. The shooter has to be a man. What woman would do this? Unless surrounded by admirers or doting wives or drinking buddies, men turn toxic. Women bereft of love or success, just die, exacting no revenge, leaving no manifestos or kill counts.<\/p>\n
She collapses and dozes off singing \u201cCarolina in My Mind,\u201d a song Blaine sang to her when he would tuck her in. \u201cGone, I\u2019ll be gone. I\u2019m gone\u2026 Say nice things about me. I\u2019m gone,\u201d Blaine would sing. Then he\u2019d sniff one of his prodigious sniffs not, she realizes now, out of indignance, but to keep back the tears of the private pain he hid behind his mustache, his gospel of gun safety, his hunting rifles. All armor he thought could protect him against the disappointingly complicated and cruel world.<\/p>\n
She wakes with red columbine dangling overhead. The sun descends, flagging into the enormous black failure of night. And she just lays there, pawing at the star-shaped flowers like a house cat. She shivers her way through the dark hours, bugs crawling over her, a doe passing by.<\/p>\n
Her eyes snap open. She stands. Her eyes see the sun glinting off an undulant surface. Drawn by the water, she comes out of the trees to the shores of a lake. She laps at the water, staring at its murky bottom interlaid with the red and wild eyes of her reflection.<\/p>\n
On her knees, she pops snowberry puffs into her dry mouth and stomachs the sour Oregon grape that will probably give her a belly ache. She hears a hurried zipper and a buckle jingle. Motion from the ridge catches her eye. What she sees makes her mouth hang open until the berries fall out to stain her shirt.<\/p>\n
Just below one of the clefts in the rock on the slope of a switchback, a dark figure is raising a rifle at her. A flash of red and a scramble of rocks and feet skittering down and another figure wrenches the rifleman backward. It happens before he can react. Before she can blink. It\u2019s Clay. Clay has torn out from the cleft in the rock and pulled the shooter backward, sending him reeling down onto the altar the trail has become. One of them shouts. Clay falls upon him with high ground advantage and fury. The sun catches on Clay\u2019s knife sending it shimmering like a tear in reality before he plunges it down into the shooter. As he plunges the blade down, again and again, his other hand and legs are grappling against the shooter\u2019s weak efforts to swing the long barrel in Clay\u2019s direction. It doesn\u2019t matter. The horrible tune of the knife\u2019s wet wrenchings in and out has sent the shooter\u2019s trigger finger limp as a lullaby. The rifle now rests cold and still on the ground.<\/p>\n
Clay is catching his breath and shaking, both hands holding the knife hilt-deep into the body. There\u2019s blood on both sides of his face, running into his beard like the dye of a bygone anointing. He\u2019s looking right at her, eyes barrel-round with intent. His red fleece\u2026Her big red dog.<\/p>\n
Though she tries to not look at the shooter\u2019s body, she sees how Clay has manhandled the guy\u2019s torso into a killing floor like the one below a botched field dressing of a deer. Shreds of gore curl out from the red-soaked disaster. Instead, she looks at the cleft in the ridge. One of many. Clay hid there in that womb of rock. She smells feces and urine. Clay caught that asshole doing his business and lunged, catching the moment in his hands, releasing in an instant everything he\u2019d ever pushed down, hidden, bottled up. As if he\u2019d been made for just such an action.<\/p>\n
Each bone in her aching body becomes a lightning rod frozen with an electric fear. All the designs he used to make\u2026 What design could come from him now?<\/p>\n
He\u2019s grasping at the rifle. He clutches it fiercely in his arms like a beloved hunting dog mortally wounded in a hail of friendly fire. She hears the chlock chlock as he tears the bolt back and rams it forward. He wedges the butt of the rifle into the meaty home base of his chest. In the same place Blaine taught her. Home\u2026Don\u2019t ever leave it. Clay\u2019s hands tremble at first, then calm until the rifle is an appendage barreling out of him.<\/p>\n
\u201cCome on up here,\u201d he says just above a whisper.<\/p>\n
She doesn\u2019t move. She can\u2019t imagine putting her arms around him any more than she can imagine ever picking up a gun again.<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t be scared, J-Mac.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a good vantage point. With a cliff wall behind him, he\u2019s got a 180-degree sweep of the ridge above and valley below. He\u2019s got his eyes through the shooter\u2019s tricked-out scope and is scanning the tree cover. He takes his eyes off sight and looks down at her. \u201cGet up here! There could be another one.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cClay,\u201d she says. Her throat is a swamp her voice has to push through. \u201cPut the gun down.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s another shooter. At least one. Maybe more. We could be in the crosshairs right now!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe\u2026 the cavalry,\u201d Jessica says, heaving out the words.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can wait it out up here. Just like you said.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey could be on their way,\u201d she says. But there\u2019s nothing. No scuffing of a heavy-booted battalion. No helicopter reinforcement. No lasers crisscrossing down-valley. Just silence behind, above, and all around them.<\/p>\n
\u201cGet up here,\u201d he says sternly. \u201cCome on.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPut it down,\u201d she says, even as she feels herself backing away.<\/p>\n
\u201cCome\u2026onnnnn,\u201d he says through his teeth.<\/p>\n
Branches and ferns fold over her.<\/p>\n
\u201cCome on!\u201d His shout echoes through the cave of his throat and reverberates through the caves of the cliff behind him leering at her like a skull. \u201cCome on!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At first, Jessica thinks it\u2019s the darkness that her body needs to escape. Their tent\u2019s air pocket of darkness. The forests\u2019 surrounding miles of darkness. She is scrambling away from the darkness. Not the explosions opening wounds into that darkness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17965,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2431,2809,110,2810,2808,1350,135],"class_list":["post-17789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","tag-gender","tag-gun-culture","tag-guns","tag-mass-shootings","tag-mens-fiction","tag-toxic-masculinity","tag-women","writer-shaun-anthony-mcmichael"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17789"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17789\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18022,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17789\/revisions\/18022"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}