Death Benefits (37 page)

As Walker emerged from the car, he said, “Are you all right?”

“It’s all going as I’d planned,” she said. “Except that I always hoped I’d get to die in my prom dress.”

“You still might,” said Stillman. “But first we have to get through the hard part.” He walked toward the front of the barn, looked out at the road, flung the car keys into the field, and began to run.

42

They ran across a broad field that afforded no cover, not even variation. The ground had been tilled and plowed and leveled two centuries ago, and now it was covered with clover and grass that could not have been taller than four inches. Directly ahead of them the sky ended in a dark smear of thick foliage, and below it, the shadowy trunks of trees began to emerge from the darkness.

Stillman was a generation older than the others, but as he ran, Walker watched the broad back straighten, the thick, heavily muscled arms pumping, the legs pounding the ground like pistons. It was hard to imagine him moving any faster. Mary ran with her teeth clenched in a hot, ferocious determination, as though she were not merely straining to use the little time that was left to get herself out of the sight of enemies but trampling them, trying to get each foot to hit as many times as she could. Walker gradually built his speed as he ran with her, trying to keep himself a half step ahead to make her run faster. The strategy seemed to nettle her, and she responded as he had hoped, stretching her strides to make her small, light frame come abreast of him, her feet seeming barely to touch the ground until she and Walker caught up with Stillman, then split apart on either side of him, dashing into the woods.

They did not stop until they reached a low thicket that impeded their forward motion and made them pause to search for an opening. In a moment, Mary had found a way around it, and Walker and Stillman followed her into a small, weedy clearing. They crouched to keep their heads below the top of the thicket and looked back through the upper branches.

Walker had expected to see the headlights of police cars bouncing along across the field toward them, or at least spotlights like the one mounted on the car they’d stolen, sweeping back and forth to light up the three running figures for the rifles. There was nothing. The cars had vanished. “Where are they?”

Stillman said, “Looks like they went ahead to wait for us. What do you suppose we ought to know that we don’t?”

Mary said, “Everything. They’ve been living here for two hundred years. They probably know what we’re going to do before we think of it.”

“I think we have to assume that’s close enough to the truth,” said Stillman. “Let’s try to do something irrational, that doesn’t fit.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. . .  . They must know we turned off on this side of the road. Maybe we could get on the other side of it and swim the river on the upstream side of the bridge.”

Walker said, “That’s irrational, all right. We just went to a lot of trouble to make it to the woods, where they couldn’t see us. That would put us in plain sight for forty feet.”

“Only if they’re looking at the road. They’re all in the woods, and probably on the downstream side of the bridge, watching for us to try to cross here.”

Stillman stared into Walker’s eyes for a moment, his face close in the darkness as though he were trying to read something behind them. “What do you think, Serena?”

“I think . . . I think it will kill me to go across that open road.”

Walker said, “Well, then—”

“But,” she added quickly, “I think they’ll know that. They’ll take one look, and think no sane person would do anything but get into the deepest part of the woods and crawl until he reached the river. I think we should do it.”

Stillman subjected her face to the same scrutiny he had turned on Walker. Then his eyes squinted. “You know, this could be the last time the three of us get to talk like this—maybe the last time any of us gets to talk to anybody—so we’d better agree on how this is going to work.”

“Okay,” said Walker.

“I go first, then Serena, then you, single file along the edge of the woods”—he pointed—“that way. I’ll stop for a bit to be sure my theory doesn’t have any obvious holes in it, then cross. If no guns go off when I do, you cross. When we get far enough from the bridge, we’ll cut into the woods toward the river. If anything goes wrong—”

“We run into the woods,” said Mary.

“Right,” said Stillman. He began to turn toward the road, then stopped. “If we get separated, forget the other two and concentrate on getting yourself out. That’s our only hope: that one of us gets out. You’re not abandoning us, you’re saving us.”

He looked at the others, waiting for a word that never came. Reluctantly, Walker nodded, then Mary.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s get started before they have time to get comfortable.”

He set off, moving toward the road at a fast walk, still just inside the edge of the woods, where their silhouettes would be lost among the dark shapes of the trees. When he was close to the road, he stopped and waited for the others to catch up. They squatted and remained still, listening. In the distance they could hear the chirping of frogs along the river, but it did not escape Walker that there should have been some much closer: the frogs were silent because there were men along the river near the bridge.

Stillman slipped off without warning. Walker could not tell whether it was because he was satisfied that no one was near or he was responding to some sense that the moment was right. Walker strained to hear, but there were no new sounds as Stillman drifted silently across the road. He listened for ten breaths, then patted Mary’s shoulder, and she hurried across too. Walker waited again, but he began to have the uneasy feeling that his chance was about to pass. He crossed as quietly and quickly as he could, not stopping until he found the others in a set of low bushes just inside the woods a hundred feet beyond the road.

Stillman instantly stood and moved off, still keeping them under the trees. They continued toward the south for at least ten minutes. Now and then Walker would fall behind and look back, letting the others move ahead so he could be sure that any sound he heard would not be theirs. When he was satisfied, he would turn again and let his longer strides bring him up within a few feet of Mary’s back. As they went, he began to lose the uneasy feeling that they were being watched. The noise of the frogs had been constant for a long time now, and he had seen nothing in the woods to indicate that anyone had come this way recently.

Stillman made the turn toward the river. When Walker reached the place where he had turned, he saw what Stillman must have been waiting for. There was a path. It seemed to be an old one, because there were sparse tufts of weed growing in it. Most of the bare spots were hard, with the tops of big rocks just at the surface. The path was deep, but it was narrow, only a foot wide at its extreme. He bent low to study it, trying to make his eyes discern what they could in the dark. He wasn’t sure it was even a path. It could have been the bed of a small stream that emptied into the river during heavy rains, because its incline seemed relentlessly efficient, diverging only to go around the small rises and then straightening again toward the river.

He remembered paths like this from when he was a boy in Ohio. He and his friends had come across them frequently when they were in the woods, making their way to the remote fishing spots that were reputed to be the best. The boys had never been able to agree on what the paths meant or how they had gotten there. Walker had always argued that they were deer runs, on the grounds that if he had antlers he wouldn’t want to get them caught crashing his way through bramble bushes and thickets. His real reason was that he had wanted to believe that he was penetrating forests that were still wild and alive.

Walker stopped again beside a big tree to watch and listen. He heard nothing, and silently ratified Stillman’s judgment. He had probably chosen this path because there was nothing on it: no dry leaves to crackle, no twigs to snap under their feet. As he moved forward again, a cloud of mosquitoes began to whine around his ears and bounce against his face. He felt the irritated, panicky sensation they always provoked, but he resisted the urge to swat them. He gently waved them out of his eyes, zipped his stolen jacket to the neck, and kept going. The mosquitoes meant they were getting close to water, probably a low, swampy area where there were standing pools.

He could see that Stillman and Mary were under attack too, because they were moving faster, occasionally fanning their hands near their faces. They kept going, and then they abruptly stopped. Beyond the trees just ahead there was the silvery glow of moonlight on water.

Walker cautiously came up to them, and they all crouched beside the path to watch and listen. The night was still and hot, the air barely moving the upper leaves of the trees along the other side. The river here was wider than it had been in town, maybe fifty feet across, and it looked slower. The bed of the river was wider too, with weed-tufted banks about three feet high and then about ten feet of muddy flats that must have been covered after a rain.

There was no need for speech. If there was such a thing as safety tonight, a chance to see the sun again, it lay on the other side of that wide, sluggish stream of water.

Stillman moved forward two paces, sat on the grassy spot above the mudflat, turned his head to look up and down the river, and remained still for thirty seconds. Then he slipped off the edge and walked across the mudflat, his feet sinking in and making soft sucking noises when he pulled them out, leaving deep tracks. He walked until the water was at his thighs, then lowered himself into it, giving a little shiver. He pushed forward, half-swimming, half-walking, until he was in the middle of the channel. Walker could tell when the bottom fell off below his feet and he began to swim, because the current had been deceptive. Stillman was still moving toward the far bank, but the water was pushing him along with it to the right, in the direction of the covered bridge.

It was Mary’s turn. Walker turned to look for her, but she was invisible. He was leaning forward to be sure she had not somehow gone already when he heard a swishing, rustling sound behind him and to his right. The sound made him cringe—she was making so much noise. But he saw that it was a shape bursting through the thick brush, and somewhere in the sight he caught a glint of dark metal. He dodged to the side.

The man seemed not to emerge from the bushes but to form out of shapes that Walker had already looked at and failed to put together. The man had stepped into the path, but Walker saw that the attitude of his silhouette was wrong: he was facing away, looking at the river, where Stillman was swimming.

The man made a hasty, jerky move to raise the shotgun to his shoulder. Mary came out of the bushes behind the man already running, and threw herself into the small of the man’s back, bending his body like a bow. The shotgun pointed straight into the air, and for an instant, the man was looking at the sky.

He pivoted, trying to bring the butt of the shotgun down on Mary, but Walker pushed off on the balls of his feet with his head down. He caught the man in the stomach, felt the air huff out of him as they left the edge of the bank and, for an instant, flew.

They came down together, then slapped into the mud at the edge of the river, so that the man’s head and shoulders made a splash but his back and legs were in the mud. Walker was aware that the shotgun had not come with them, but he could not free himself to find it. The man swung at him, and Walker’s vision was jolted as the half-clenched fist knocked the side of his head. Walker endured a jab in the stomach, then brought his elbow and forearm down into the man’s face, throwing the weight of his upper body into it.

The man’s legs were working as he struggled to flip over, then straining to bend enough to bring a knee up to Walker’s groin as he flailed at Walker’s head with his arms. As both men grappled and sought to plant their feet, they moved deeper into the water, where Walker’s weight was not enough to hold the man down.

The man rolled in the water; Walker brought his arm around the man’s neck from behind, and sensed with revulsion what he could do, and realized that it was what he must do. He tightened his arm muscles, climbed higher up the man’s back to get his knee onto the man’s spine, and pushed him under.

The man fought, bucked, tried to roll again, but his efforts took him down into deeper water. The muddy bottom gave him no solid place to plant his feet, and Walker kept the pressure on him so the head never came to the surface. There were bubbles, great wrenching movements. Walker felt horror and shame as he clung to the man, sensing by touch the desperation and fear in every movement.

The man stopped. His body went limp. Walker clung to him. There was one final fit of kicking, twisting, bucking, and then the man’s body did what Walker had known it would do, and gasped in an irresistible reflex to get air. The lungs filled with water, and the man lost consciousness. Walker waited, counting the seconds, until thirty had gone by and it was impossible that the man was alive. Then he let go and raised himself in the water.

Mary was at his shoulder. She hugged him, and he could see that her eyes were clenched shut and tears were coming, but they were not tears of relief. She was filled with regret, mourning with him for the horror and shame of what he had just done. Then she pulled away and walked with difficulty through the mud to the bank, bent over, lifted the shotgun out of the grass, and held it out to him with both hands.

Walker took it, and they moved together into the river. They kept going, leaning to the left against the steady weight of the current, and then they were waterborne. Mary swam with an awkward breaststroke, the clothes and shoes making her movements slow. Walker imitated her, holding the shotgun above the water with his right hand and stroking with the left. He was tired, and his arms were heavy, but he kept himself moving by telling himself lies about resting as soon as he made it to the other side.

His toe hit mud and he kicked again, and this time it held. He reached out for Mary, grasped her wrist, and pulled her toward the bank until he could tell that her feet were on the bottom too. Together they began to walk toward the bank. There was an eye-searing flash of light from his left as a flashlight beam passed over them, then a glare as it came back and held on them.

Mary ducked under the water, and a gun went off across the river. The splash of the bullet rose in a thin vertical column four feet up, and before it came down, Walker felt Stillman snatch the shotgun out of his hand. Stillman aimed quickly and fired, a report that slapped Walker’s eardrums and made his diaphragm vibrate in his rib cage. The flashlight fell to the ground, bounced, and lay in the grass, its beam on the twitching hand and wrist of the man who had been holding it.