Child, Lee – The Enemy

‘A little, maybe,’ Summer said, on my right.

I didn’t look at her. I kept my eyes on the ground.

‘On his gloves,’ she said. ‘Maybe on his shoes.’

‘Less than he might have expected,’ I said. ‘Unless he was a

doctor he would have expected some pretty bad bleeding.’

‘So?’

‘So he didn’t use a pool car. He expected blood and didn’t

want to risk leaving it all over a vehicle that someone else was

going to drive the next day.’

‘So like you said, with his own car, he’ll have thrown it in the

back. So we aren’t going to find anything out here.’

I nodded. Said nothing. Walked on.

We covered the whole of the middle section and found nothing.

Two thousand yards of dormant organic material and not one

single man-made item. Not a cigarette butt, not a scrap of paper,

no rusted cans, no empty bottles. It was a real tribute to the post

commander’s enthusiasm. But it was disappointing. We stopped

with the main post buildings clearly visible, three hundred

yards in front of us.

‘I want to backtrack,’ I said. ‘I want to do the middle part

again.’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘About face.’

She turned and we switched positions. We decided we

would cover each three-hundred-yard section the opposite way

around from the first pass. Where I had walked inboard, I would

walk outboard, and vice versa. No real reason, except our

perspectives were different and we felt we should alternate. I

was more than a foot taller than she was, and therefore simple

trigonometry meant I could see more than a foot farther in

either direction. She was closer to the ground and she claimed

her eyes were good for detail.

We walked back, slow and steady.

182

Nothing in the first section. We swapped positions. I took up

station ten feet from the track. Scanned left and right. The wind

was in our faces, and my eyes started watering from the cold. I

put my hands in my pockets.

Nothing in the second section. We changed positions again. I

walked five feet from the track, parallel to its edge. Nothing in

the third section. We changed yet again. I did math in my head

as we walked. So far we had swept a fifteen-foot swath along a

2,340-yard length. That made 11,700 square yards, which was

a hair better than 2.4 acres. Nearly two and a half acres, out

of a hundred thousand. Odds of 40,000 to one, approximately.

Better than driving to town and spending a dollar on a lottery

ticket. But not much better.

We walked on. The wind got stronger and we got colder. We

saw nothing.

Then I saw something.

It was far to my right. Maybe twenty feet from me. Not a

yogurt container. Something else. I almost ignored it because

it was well outside the zone of possibility. No lightweight

plastic unaerodynamic item could have gone that far after being

thrown from a car on the track. So my eyes spotted it and my

brain processed it and rejected it instantly, on a purely preprogrammed

basis.

And then it hung up on it. Out of pure animal instinct.

Because it looked like a snake. The lizard part of my brain

whispered snake and I got that little primeval jolt of fright that

had kept my ancestors alive and well way back in evolution. It

was all over in a split second. It was smothered immediately. “Fhe

modern educated part of my mind stepped in and said no snakes

here in January, bud. Way too cold. I breathed out and moved on

a step and then paused to look back, purely out of curiosity.

There was a curved black shape in the dead grass. Belt?

Garden hose? But it was settled deeper down among the stiff

brown stalks than something made of leather or fabric or

rubber could have fallen. It was right down there among the

roots. Therefore it was heavy. And it had to be heavy to have

travelled so far from the track. Therefore it was metal. Solid,

not tubular. Therefore it was unfamiliar. Very little military

equipment is curved.

183

I walked over. Got close. Knelt down.

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