I saw his dark shape through a drifting white tide, fifteen feet away, stationed in the road facing north with his back to me. He’d parked the truck diagonally to serve as a barricade. A rifle with a scope was propped on the tonneau cover. The butt of the rifle was pulled into his shoulder. His left hand, the hand he used to aim, cradled the walkie-talkie receiver. He was staring at it, wondering why it had blipped and fallen silent.
I had a shot.
Firing and alerting the other twin was too risky.
I unsheathed my knife and rushed from the weeds.
He turned. He was wearing a baseball cap with a camouflage pattern and a dark shirt and camouflage pants. A camouflage neck gaiter covered his nose and mouth. Over its top his eyes flew open. I saw them change, from surprise to shame and then to fury. For two years he and his brother had been cultivating their hatred, sharing it between them, anticipating this moment. He’d pictured the outcome often enough that it had calcified into inevitability. In a thousand simulations it had never happened this way. It couldn’t. His cause was righteous.
His left hand still held the walkie-talkie. He lacked the presence of mind to drop it, and when he tried to take hold of the rifle to shoot me the barrel knocked against plastic and bobbled up. His eyes, now full of fear, left me to follow the barrel’s errant path. He let go of the receiver, almost reluctantly, as if it were glued to his palm.
By then I had reached him. Knife out I crushed into him, pinning him against the truck with the rifle between us. The blade went in, slick warmth flooded out of him, he made a guttural sound. I clamped my hand over his mouth and hammered the base of his skull against the tonneau cover. His hat flew off and he thrashed, straining to head-butt me, to bite my fingers, to knee me in the groin, to work the rifle loose. His gaiter had slipped down. He was the one with a beard. His cheeks were distended with effort. His fallen walkie-talkie blipped on the ground.
“D’you see him yet?” it said.
The boy’s bulging eyes rolled toward the receiver, as if to communicate without speaking. A scar bisected his left eyebrow. I wondered how he’d gotten it. Wrestling with his brother. Whupped with a belt. He was not far from childhood. He was strong. I thought about Billy Watts and his two sons. I thought about my brother, about my wife and my daughter.
I dragged the knife through the boy’s abdomen till it hit bone.
The rifle clattered down.
I stepped back. My shirt adhered to his for a moment before peeling away and slapping against my skin, heavy and cold and wet.
The receiver blipped again. “Ty?”
The boy, Ty Dormer, looked down at his opened body.
He fell to his knees and onto his face.
I searched him. I did it efficiently, I had ten years of experience turning out the pockets of dead men, to preserve and protect their property. His legs twitched senselessly.
Ty Dormer’s property consisted of a wallet, an iPhone with a Bay Area Therapeutics logo on the case, a set of keys, four zip-ties, and an unopened teriyaki-flavored Slim Jim.
I took the rifle. I took everything except the Slim Jim. I never wanted to eat jerky again.
I got into the truck and turned hard toward the ranch, speeding along the tree corridor. The blaze of the headlights was worse than nothing, reflecting in the smoke and whiting everything out; I killed them. Two splintery posts rose like the pillars of a destroyed palace. I passed beneath a large rusty M. Shapes solidified: wormholed sheds, a barn more air than wood, ravaged machinery, a paddock.
I steered between them on dirt paths, SIG Sauer pressed against the wheel.
Atop a shallow rise sat the dilapidated farmhouse. A long low structure stuck out its snout behind.
I rolled up at a crawl. The structure was a cattle shed with open sides and a wavy roof and stalls of tubular metal.
A figure came strutting out of the shadows.
Jace Dormer thought I was his brother. He was carrying his walkie-talkie, coming to help. Looking forward to dealing with me. He jogged toward me and then he stopped. He knew his brother’s form; it was his own, and mine was different.
I threw on the brights, blinding him.
He scrambled backward.
I stamped the pedal and drove at him.
He hurled himself clear. I crashed into an exterior stall railing. The front end of the truck kicked up. The airbag exploded in my face.
I clawed it away and shoved open the door.
Jace had run into the shed and was stumbling up the center aisle striped in the headlights’ icy glare. I squeezed off a shot that went wide and ran after him. My shirt, drenched with his brother’s blood, swung like some obscene piece of meat. He turned into a rear stall and fell on a heap of rags with my brother’s face. His arm pumped, driving a short knife repeatedly into Luke’s body. I couldn’t fire again without fear of hitting Luke. I burst into the stall and grabbed Jace around the throat and hauled him off, and we staggered around, bashing into railings. He was taller than me and stronger than his brother. I could smell his unwashed neck. He had to realize that if I was here, his brother was dead. The point of the knife had broken off, leaving a sawtooth. He swung it wildly over his shoulder, I blocked his arm with my gun hand. He swung again and I jerked my head to avoid getting gouged in the eye and the jagged end of the knife incised a six-inch line through my scalp. Hot blood streamed over my ear and down the side of my face and down my neck. I held on to him. He brought the knife down and back in an arc and the blade punched deep into the meat of my thigh.
I let go.
Jace pulled out the knife and rounded on me.
Lunged.
The sawtooth hit the vest and bounced off.
He tottered back, bewildered. Then he lunged for my throat.
His front foot slipped. He tumbled past me, limbs flying. I saw the thing he had slipped on, a paperback novel with a creased spine. My brother was on the ground, not moving. Jace Dormer rose on one knee, knife in hand. His body rotated through a quarter turn. I buried the SIG Sauer in the soft tissue of his flank below his ribs and fired four times. The other side of him blew out in a red cone. He went to the dirt.
I put an insurance shot in his head and crawled to Luke.
He was bleeding freshly from numerous stab wounds to his gut and chest. One hand was cuffed to the stall railing. I took off my bloody shirt and stuffed it against his torso.
“Hold this here. Put pressure.”
He clutched at me, don’t go.
“I need to find the cuff keys. I’ll be right back.”
There was nothing in Jace Dormer’s pockets but a coil of wire.
I sprinted, limping, to the truck. My right leg was numb from the waist down. My right shoe was full of blood.
When I returned with the keys Luke’s eyes had closed. I uncuffed him and eased him up against the stall railing. He blinked lethargically.
“Stand up. Can you stand up? Luke.”
I got my shoulder into his armpit. He let out a wet sough. His breath stank of blood, his body of waste. I stood up with him and started out of the stall and into the aisle. He wasn’t walking right, his feet dragged. His ankles were bound with zip-ties. I picked him up under the knees. He was hideously light. I carried him to the truck.
I lifted him into the passenger seat and buckled him in and limped around to the wheel.
His eyes had closed again. His chest cycled shallowly. Strands of red saliva stretched between his lips.
“Hey,” I said. “Luke. Open your eyes, bud.”
I started the motor and tried to back out.
The truck strained, caught on a railing.
I swore and shifted into drive and floored it. The tires spun. I threw it into reverse. Luke drooped forward and I pinned him against the seat with a forearm, not thinking about what damage I might be doing to his insides as I plunged the truck forward and back and wrenched the wheel from side to side till the bumper sheared halfway off and we shot free over the lumpy dirt.
Luke’s head bounced and rolled.
“Luke.”
I reached the ranch entrance and hurtled up the tree corridor through smoke, bumper scraping, narrowly avoiding Ty Dormer’s body splayed in the road.
My unattended car was at the intersection. The truck’s gas gauge was a third full. The nearest hospital was in Tracy, ten miles to the east. Ash snowed down softly. Luke slumped against me, I eased him straight again and started to make the turn. Vehicles were approaching from the west. They had their sirens off but their flashers on, red and blue diffusing in the smoke. I put the truck in park and got out, waving my arms.