“FRIENDS!” THEY SCREAMED, HUGGING the earth. “We’re unarmed!”
The firing stopped. A voice called down from a trench near the summit. “Hands up!”
Sparkes opened his eyes. His face was smashed down in the dirt. The ground shredded around him, bullet-pocked, the mist swirling. His vision was blurred, his head rocked—it felt like he’d been clubbed. He lifted a hand to the side of his head. A wet furrow in his scalp. His fingers returned bloodied, trembling, covered in shreds of skin and hair.
“I’m shot.”
“Don’t touch it.” Mildred’s voice. She came belly-crawling toward him like an infantryman and took his wrist, holding his hand aside so she could inspect the wound. “Only grazed you, thank God. Though you might have to part your hair differently from now on.”
Another cry from atop the slope: “Hands up or we start shooting again!”
They lifted their hands slowly from the brush, struggling to their feet. Sparkes felt a squishy sensation in his right boot and looked down. From the knee down, his trouser leg was sopped with blood. No pain yet.
He looked around. Among them were two miners who’d fallen in as they climbed, acting as escorts. Everyone daze-eyed, their hands raised in strange wonderment, as if they’d risen unexpectedly from the grave.
“I’m shot,” said Sparkes. “Anyone else?”
One of the miners raised his hand slightly higher. His other hand palmed his hip. Sparkes didn’t see the big miner who’d been leading them up the slope.
“Where’s the one named Frank?”
No answer. He could be hiding in the tall grass or bushes. He could be dead.
Sparkes looked at the hip-shot man. “Can you walk?”
“With high-powers throwed down on me, reckon I could jump bobwire.”
Sparkes looked at the rifles bristling from the trench above them. “You’re in luck then, my friend.”
They started up the hill. Mildred looped his arm over her shoulder, holding his wrist with one hand and grabbing the back of his belt with the other, while the second miner helped his injured comrade. Together they hobbled their way up the slope, breathing together, fast and loud. The sky was turning a darker gray, lowering, crouched heavily over the summit. The air was going cold, the sun masked in cloud. An Army bomber crawled across the sky, following the ridgeline.
At the top, they found a squad of state police lying in a fortified trench, each man squinting down the long barrel of a military rifle. Behind them, stitched across the summit, were bulwarks and slit trenches and machine-gun nests. The trees were strung with telephone wires and cartridge belts, canteens and jackets and neckties.
Their small party stood awkwardly in front of the troopers, slightly to the side. Sparkes touched his hand to his chest. “I’m Boyden Sparkes, on assignment for the New York Tribune, and these are my comrades, Miss Mildred Morris of—”
A belt of gunfire erupted from the trench, ripping just past them. When it ended, they stood clinging to one another. One of the troopers raised his head from his rifle, watching the shattered leaves flutter down from the shot-up trees, as if reading signs in them.
“You get one?” asked another trooper.
“Ain’t for sure. Thought I saw a big’in.” He cocked his chin back to Sparkes, keeping his eyes downrange. “Who’d you say you were?”
“I’m Boyden Sparkes, on assignment—”
“Listen, I don’t care if you’re the Great Bambino. On that side of this line, you’re a Redneck.”
“Isn’t there a challenge you’re supposed to give, a password?”
“Oh, you didn’t hear it?” The trooper grinned and patted his gun. “Sounds like a Springfield rifle.”
The troopers took them into custody, marching them at gunpoint just behind the defense line. They saw trenches full of the spent brass, powder-blacked and misshapen, along with soda bottles, mason jars, tobacco boxes. Magazines and lunch pails, headache powders and used matchsticks. The troopers led them to a telephone box pegged to a tree. The wires ran down the back side of the mountain, zigzagging through the woods. The lead trooper cranked the magneto and set the receiver to his ear, his elbow cocked high and sharp. “Send up the paddy wagon, just caught us another party of Reds up here on the line.”
He squinted an eye at the voice on the end of the call, as if it might help him hear better. “Say what? Oh, yes, they’re still alive.”
The paddy wagon was a commandeered grocery truck. When it came rolling up behind the trench, they were loaded into the slat-sided bed, their wrists locked into iron manacles with chains secured to a ring in the floor.
The troopers were watching the truck pull away, seeing off their prizes, when Sparkes glimpsed a shadow rise from the tall grass behind them, sprinting back down the slope they’d just climbed. The man was hunched for speed, making for the cover of the trees, for some kind of freedom. Frank. He vanished into the woods just as the rifles cracked behind him.