Jess hurt. She still wasn’t sure if Pruitt had hit her when he’d shot at her, but she was in pain nonetheless. She lay in the scree at the bottom of that bare face of rock and tried to stand up and couldn’t quite make it work.
She’d toppled over the side of the face as she’d tried to duck away from where Pruitt was swinging his rifle. Squeezed off an answering shot with her Remington, and then it was like the whole lip of the face gave out, and she was sliding off the edge and then falling and hitting hard, twenty feet below, the shotgun falling away somewhere and her body coming to rest against a piece of jagged rock.
Jess could hear Pruitt groaning somewhere, out of sight. So maybe she’d hit him, or maybe he’d just fallen, same as she had. She supposed it didn’t matter. None of this mattered. She was probably going to die on this mountain, and that didn’t matter either.
The violence, the unending violence. The only thing she’d ever been good at. Afia. Ty. Scores of nameless Taliban. Kirby Harwood and both Whitmer brothers and their accomplice, Mr. Joy. Shelby Walker and her mother. Charlene Todd and Chris Jordan and Doug Bealing. Logger Fetridge and Dax Pruitt.
Mason Burke.
A noise from around the side of the rock face, the tumble of pebbles and baseball-sized rocks, and then Dax Pruitt appeared, sliding on his ass, kicking up a sturdy cloud of dust. Jess looked around for her shotgun, found it lying a few feet away, leaned over and grabbed for it, everything seeming to move in slow motion again, like in some kind of bad dream.
“Relax,” Pruitt said. He coughed, wet. “I ain’t going to shoot you.”
Jess gripped the shotgun anyway, lifted it and labored to swing it around in his direction. Pruitt lay on his back where he’d come to rest at the base of the cliff face, propped up slightly on his right arm to look across at her. He was bloody, his face and chest, and he was covered in dirt, and she could see how the buckshot she’d thrown at him had perforated his clothing in multiple places, how he was hurt bad enough to no longer pose a threat, and maybe even worse than that.
His eyes were wide open, though, and a startling blue she didn’t think she remembered from seeing him before, his hair a tangle of mud and more dirt and matted blood besides, everything about him dirty and injured and worn.
“I’m sorry,” Pruitt said, every word an effort. “What I did to your dog.”
She didn’t know what he meant at first. Thought he was referring to some new evil, something he and Logger Fetridge had somehow done while up on this mountain, after she’d left Burke and Lucy in the motel room this morning. She felt her heart clench and her finger tense on the Remington’s trigger, and Pruitt watched her and didn’t say anything.
Then Jess remembered the ambush at the beach, how he’d shot at Lucy.
“She survived,” Jess told him. “You didn’t get her.”
Pruitt blinked, and she could see his mind struggling to compute this.
“It was a ricochet,” Jess said. “She caught a chip of rock in her paw, but she’s fine.”
Pruitt nodded. Inhaled, deep, and closed his eyes, and she thought he might die then and there, but he didn’t. “I’m sorry anyway,” he said. “All of this.”
She believed he was sorry, and she believed it wouldn’t do him, or anyone, a lick of good. She was sorry, too, for a lot of things, and none of her apologies would change the plain facts.
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” she told him. “Just hush.”
Pruitt looked at her like maybe he knew she was right, that his own reckoning was coming and soon. He laid his head back and breathed wetly some more, and she listened as each breath seemed to come tougher and tougher, and he didn’t say anything else.
And then the mountain was silent again, until gradually it seemed to awaken, the sound of the water and the wind and the birds in the trees, the rainforest coming to life in the aftermath of the violence.
Jess lay there and listened, and wondered how the forest would sound when she, too, was gone.