Reamde

“It’s about one click from here,” John said. “Descending steep slopes is not my strong suit. I suggest you healthy young ladies proceed together and I’ll bring up the rear.” Slung over his back had been a hunting rifle of the old school, with a brown wooden stock and a telescopic sight. Zula knew he had carried it along only in case he needed it to deal with an enraged bear. He now stripped this weapon off his shoulder and held it out to Zula. “Pump action,” he said. “Thirty ought six, four rounds in the magazine.”

Some part of Zula—the small-town upbringing—wanted to say, Oh no I couldn’t possibly, but she stifled it; the look on the face of her uncle—who, for all practical purposes, had been her father for the last fifteen years—said that he would not brook any argument. She remembered, just for an instant, the day that the meth heads had come to the farm to steal their anhydrous ammonia.

So she only uttered a single word, which was “Thanks.”

OLIVIA TURNED OUT to be pretty spry—more than a match, anyway, for Zula in her current condition. They hewed mostly to the trail and occasionally crossed tracks that had been carved across it by Jake in his impetuous plunge. Zula’s expectation that Jake would soon get far ahead of them turned out to be wrong. When the ATV moved, it moved faster than they could run, but he seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time hung up on obstacles or working his way around slopes too steep for it to negotiate. Its sound was always there, just a bit ahead of them, occasionally drowned out by gunfire. Some sort of weird, inappropriate family-competitive instinct made Zula want to catch and surpass it. But before this happened, they came in view of the cabin itself, its green sheet-metal roof nestled among the peaks of the surrounding trees, and then it became all about getting there as fast and as directly as possible.

Jake and his family had gone through the forest within a hundred-meter radius of the cabin and removed all small scrubby undergrowth and pruned away the dead, ladderlike branches that tended to project from the trunks of mature conifers. This was supposedly an anti-forest-fire measure; it would prevent blazes from storming through the dry understory and consuming the house. It had the side effect of vastly increasing visibility. In the natural woods of these parts, you couldn’t see farther than a few dozen yards because of all that clutter, but from the windows of Jake’s cabin you could see all the way to the edge of the zone they had cleared. Which made Zula suspect that it was also a tactical measure, making it more difficult for people to sneak up on them through the woods. Whatever its purpose, the upshot was that when Olivia and Zula burst into that zone, they suddenly had a clear view all the way to the back of the cabin, where Jake had just finished jumping off the ATV. He made straight for the cellar door, a pair of heavy-gauge steel hatches mounted on an angled frame of reinforced concrete. Zula watched as those doors opened and Elizabeth, strapped with a shotgun in addition to her usual Glock semiautomatic, came out to throw her arms around her husband and give him a kiss.

But it was not a long, fond sort of reunion, for her next act was to grab Jake’s face between her hands and tell him something that looked very important. As she spoke, she turned her head significantly toward the front side of the cabin.

Jake nodded, gave Elizabeth a peck, and stepped back. Elizabeth backed down the steps and hauled the doors closed on top of herself. Zula, now sprinting through the trees no more than fifty paces away, had an impulse to call, No, wait for us! But she was too out of breath to make any sounds other than gasping, and—on second thought—being trapped in a bomb shelter with Elizabeth and the boys did not actually sound that appealing.

Jake meanwhile had unslung his rifle and chambered a round and gone into a style of movement that he must have learned by attending a tactical rifle combat seminar or else by watching DVDs of action films. The gist of it was that he kept the rifle aimed in the same direction as he was looking, and he tended to go very cautiously around corners.

Zula managed to call out, “Coming at you from behind, Uncle Jake!” since there was something in his body language that suggested he might not take kindly to being surprised.

He turned back and made a shushing gesture, then ventured around the corner of the building and disappeared from their view.

Zula was trying to make sense of it. Lots and lots of armed bad men in front of the cabin would call for Jake to go down below with his family and to gather Zula and Olivia with him. So whatever was in front couldn’t be that bad.

“I want to see what is there,” Zula said, breaking stride, and making a lateral move, swinging wide around the same side of the cabin up which Jake was creeping. “I might be able to help.” She swept the rifle down off her shoulder.