Past Tense

Chapter 39

Shorty’s pants leg was soaked with blood. Patty couldn’t tear the fabric. Too wet, too heavy, too slippery. She ran back and got an arrow. She used the edge of its head to widen the slit the first arrow had made. The new arrow was sharp. It was as good as a kitchen knife. She opened a length about six inches either side of the wound. She peeled back the sticky fabric. She took a look. The wound was vertical. The arrow had come in with one tang up and one tang down, and it had hit above his knee, about a third of the way up his thigh. Dead on central. It had speared through muscle and hit bone. She wasn’t a doctor but she knew the words. Through the quadriceps to the femur. Ninety degrees from the femoral artery. Not even close. He wasn’t going to bleed to death. They had been lucky.

Except she was pretty sure the impact of the arrow had broken the bone.

She felt around. There was a ledge-shaped lump on the back of his leg. Like a displaced fracture. His hamstrings were pushed out of place. He was gasping and groaning, muted, teeth clamped, and moaning, partly with pain, partly with fury. He was pale green, in the night vision. In shock, but not all the way. His heartbeat was fast, but steady.

She studied the arrow she had used to cut the cloth. The head was a simple triangle. Two wicked edges came together at the point. The body thickened gracefully in the middle, to seat the shaft. To add weight and momentum. The edges were like razors. They would slice through anything. But there were no barbs. The edges would slice right back out again just as easily. Not even slice. No further damage. The pathway was already cut.

Except Shorty’s muscle had spasmed and clamped down hard. It was gripping the arrow like a vise.

She said, “Shorty, I need you to relax your leg.”

He said, “I can’t feel my leg.”

“I think it’s broken.”

“That can’t be good.”

“I need to get you to the hospital. But first I need to pull the arrow out. Right now you’re gripping it. You need to let it go.”

“I got no control. All I know is it hurts like hell.”

She said, “I think we really need to pull it out.”

“Try rubbing the muscle,” he said. “Like I had a cramp.”

She rubbed. His thigh was cold and wet and slippery. Thick with blood. He groaned and gasped and whimpered. She squeezed both sides of the wound, inching the web of her thumb closer and closer to the arrowhead, and then she pressed a little harder, both sides, gaping the wound, opening it like a mouth. Blood welled up, and spilled out in little green rivers, some one way, some the other.

“Tell me where we’re going,” she said.

“Florida,” he said.

“What will we do when we get there?”

“Windsurfers.”

“What else?”

“T-shirts,” he said. “Where the money is.”

“What kind of design?”

He paused a moment, thinking, maybe something elaborate, and she gripped the arrow’s shaft, and jerked it as sharp and hard as she would getting a stuck two-by-four out of a rack at work. The arrow came out and Shorty shrieked between grinding teeth, with pain and outrage and betrayal.

“Sorry,” she said.

He gasped and he panted.

She slipped off her jacket and used the clean arrowhead to cut off the sleeves. She tied them together, end to end, with a generous knot. She folded the body of the jacket into a tight little pad, as small as she could get it. She pressed it down on the wound. She tied it on with the double sleeves. As good as she could get right then. A pressure dressing on the front, to stop the bleeding, and a splint of sorts on the back. The big knot would hold things steady. At least for a while. She hoped.

“Wait there,” she said.

She ran back to the first nightmare figure. The one Shorty had hit. The crack behind the ear. She pulled off his night vision device. Its rubber straps were slick with blood. She took another arrow from the quiver. She ran back to Shorty. She gave him the headset to wear, and the arrow to hold. For security. As a last-ditch defense.

“Now I’m going to find us a quad-bike,” she said.

She took the working flashlight in one hand, and the clean arrow in the other. She ran back to Shorty’s guy. She stood where she had stood before. She replayed the scene in her mind. The guy had loomed up ahead of her. The nightmare vision. Face to face. In other words, he had been walking in a southerly direction. Coming from the north. From somewhere near the mouth of the track.

She stepped over the guy, and moved on to where the voice from the dark had spun them around. Damn right about that, little girl. They had turned and seen him. Face to face. He had been walking in a southerly direction, too. Also coming from the north. From near the mouth of the track. They were a pair. Working together. Common sense said they would have left their bikes behind them. They would have parked way back, surely, and then ranged ahead on foot.

She stepped over her guy and set out walking, north.

Mark saw her go. He was all set to follow, but then at the last second in the corner of his eye he saw what she was stepping over. A dead man. Two dead men. Which put things in a whole different perspective. Burning the motel was bad enough. It was insured, ironically. But obviously he wouldn’t risk a claim. Even a cursory inspection would call it arson. Because it was. At the time Steven hadn’t understood what he was watching. To be fair, none of them had. At that point the radio was still working, and Steven had described the pads of towels, and he had described Shorty’s mysterious mechanical work, under the rear end of each of the vehicles in turn, but the camera angles were bad and he couldn’t see exactly what the hell he was doing, and no one else had any suggestions either, until suddenly the towels were all on fire, and he was throwing them around.

It had never happened in any of their brainstorming sessions, or simulations, or war games. Now he saw it should have. It was inevitable. If customers pushed for better specimens, this was bound to happen. Sooner or later. A really bold move would come about.

But still, no insurance claim. The cops would come, and they would sift through the wreckage, and they would find all kinds of weird shit. But rebuilding with cash would eat up half of what they were making that night. Which would be a severe blow. Although he supposed they could tell themselves they would earn it back later. And more.

But still, a blow. Were there alternatives? Suddenly he thought so. Suddenly he thought, why rebuild at all? The motel was a dump. It was nothing to him. It was a junk part of some weird old title passed down from a dead guy he never knew. He didn’t care about the motel. Then and there he decided to leave it in ruins. It would be much cheaper to convert a single room in the main house. It would be much cheaper to change the signs from MOTEL to B&B. Six new plastic letters, a little gold paint. A different kind of invitation. Should work fine. They didn’t need more than two guests at a time anyway. The customers could sleep in tents. Part of the whole rugged experience.

But dead people were a whole different category. Mark prided himself on being realistic. He felt he wasn’t blinded by emotion or ruled by sentiment or misled by cognitive bias. He felt he made purely dispassionate judgments. He felt he was good at foreseeing consequences. Like speed chess in his mind. He felt he knew what would happen next. If this, then that, then the other thing. And right then he foresaw a whole lot of dominoes about to fall. The dead people would be missed, questions would be asked, data would be traced. If Robert could find people, so could the government. Probably faster.

He thought, time for plan B.

Unsentimental.

He walked back to his bike and rode it slowly to the house. The motel had burned to the ground. Only the metal cage around room ten was still standing. It was glowing cherry red. The heat was fierce. He could feel it all the way across the lot. The embers rippled in the ghostly nighttime breeze, red and white and shimmering.

He rode past the barn and made it to the house. He gunned the bike up the steps and parked it on the porch. He went in the front. Straight to the parlor. Steven said hello before he stepped in the door. Without looking up. He was watching the GPS. He knew Mark was in the house.

Mark looked over Steven’s shoulder. At the GPS screen. Only one flashlight was showing. Peter and Robert were still static on the flanks.

Steven said, “Four of the heart monitors failed.”

“Four now?” Mark said.

Steven switched screens and showed him the data. It was laid out as four separate graphs. Heart rate versus time. Each graph looked like a pencil sketch of mountainous terrain. All of them showed basically the same thing. First elevated and consistent excitement, then a brief plateau of extreme stress, then nothing.

“Might be an equipment fault,” Steven said.

“No,” Mark said. “I saw two of them dead already.”

“What?”

“Their heads were bashed in. By Patty and Shorty, I guess. Who are clearly better than we thought.”

“Where was this?”

“South of the track.”

“What happened to the other two?”

“I don’t know,” Mark said.

Steven switched back to the GPS screen. The surviving flashlight was moving down the track, in the trees, close to the edge. Peter and Robert were still stationary. In a separate window the two surviving customers were showing elevated but consistent heartbeats. Excited. The thrill of the chase. But no sudden spikes. No contact yet.

“Which ones are they?” Mark asked.

“Karel and the Wall Street guy.”

“Can we tell where they are?”

“We know where their bikes are. They seem to have taken up a middle position.”

“With the front two and the back two already gone. It’s up to them now.”

“Who got the back two?”

“I don’t know,” Mark said again.

“This changes everything, you know. It’s not the same now.”

“I agree.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Plan B,” Mark said. “Watch carefully where the flashlight goes.”

Steven kept his eyes on the screen.

Mark pulled a boxy black handgun up and out from under his jacket. His elbow went high, because the gun was long, because it had a suppressor attached. He shot Steven in the back of the head. And again, when the body came to rest. To be sure and certain. Plan B required a lot of both.

He took the bags of cash from the closet, and set them down on the hallway floor. He opened the closet’s back wall and took out his escape kit. Cash, cards, a driver’s license, a passport, and a burner phone. A whole new person, zipped in a plastic bag.

He threw Peter’s and Steven’s and Robert’s on the closet floor.

He carried the bags of cash outside and set them down in the dirt a distance away. He came back to the porch and opened the front door wide. He sawed the quad-bike back and forth in front of it until it had room to fall over. He removed the gas cap and threw it away. He squatted down like a weightlifter and grabbed the frame. He jerked the bike up and toppled it over, on its side. Toward the house. Right next to the open door. Gas gurgled out of the open tank. It made a stain, then a miniature lake.

Mark threw a match, and backed away, and grabbed the bags, and ran. To the barn. Halfway there he stopped and looked back. The house was already alight. All around the front door. The walls, the porch boards. The flames were creeping inside.

He turned again and ran on forward. In the barn he put the bags in his Mercedes. He backed it out and parked it a distance away. He ran back to the barn. To his right the house was burning nicely. The flames were up to the second floor windows. In the barn he hustled over to where the lawn tractor was parked. To the shelf above it, where the gas cans were kept. Five of them, all lined up, filled every time someone drove the pick-up to town. Always ready. The grass had to look good. Curb appeal was important.

Plan B. No more of that.

He emptied the cans on the floor, under Peter’s Mercedes, under Steven’s, under Robert’s. He threw a match, and backed away, and turned and ran to his car. He set the hazard flashers going. For Peter and Robert to see. A panic signal. They already knew their radios were dead. They were looking at two brand new fires. They had no idea what was going on. They would come running.

He drove toward the mouth of the track, at a stately speed, past the glowing ruins of the motel, through the meadow, flashing orange all the way.

He stopped in the center of the meadow.

Robert zoomed in from the right side, a wide curve out of the woods, flailing the seed heads, flattening the meadow grass under four fat tires. He bumped up on the edge of the blacktop and maneuvered next to the passenger side. Mark buzzed the far window down. Robert looked in. Mark shot him in the face.

Mark buzzed the window back up. Peter was approaching on the left-hand side. The same wide swooping curve through the meadow. Exactly symmetrical. Aiming to arrive at the driver’s window, not the passenger’s. Which meant the Mercedes itself was between him and Robert’s empty bike, and the slumped figure on the ground.

Mark buzzed his window down.

Peter maneuvered alongside.

Face to face.

The gun was too long. Because of the suppressor. Mark couldn’t maneuver it. It snagged on the door.

Peter stopped his engine.

He said, “How bad is it?”

Mark paused a beat.

“Really couldn’t be worse,” he said. “The motel burned down. Now the house and the barn are on fire. And four customers are dead.”

Peter paused in turn.

Then he said, “That’s a whole new ball game.”

“I agree.”

“I mean it’s the end of everything. You understand that, right? This is going to be no stone unturned.”

“No doubt.”

“We should get out,” Peter said. “Right this minute. Just you and me. We need to do it, Mark. The pressure will be heavy duty. We might not survive it if we stay.”

“Just you and me?”

“Robert and Steven are useless. They’re a burden. You know that.”

“I need to open my door,” Mark said. “I need to stretch my legs.”

Peter checked.

“You have plenty of room,” he said.

Mark opened his door. But he didn’t get out. Instead he stopped the door as soon as the handle moldings were clear of the suppressor, and where Peter was still nicely framed in the now-angled window. He shot him once in chest, once in the throat, and once in the face.

Then he closed his door again, and buzzed his window up, and turned off his hazard flashers, and drove on, down the track, toward the woods.