that was mostly free of brush. She stayed close behind him. Sparse
brown grass, crisp as paper, lightly stroked their legs. They had to
take care to avoid stepping on some loose stones deposited by last
spring’s runoff of melting snow, but they made somewhat better progress
than they had outside the wash.
The flanking walls of brush presented the only drawback to the easier
new route. The growth was thick, some dry and brown, some dark green,
and it pressed in at both sides of the shallow wash, with only a few
widely separated gaps through which Benny and Rachael could look into
the woods beyond. She half expected Eric to leap through the bushes and
set upon them. She was encouraged only by the brambles tangled through
a lot of the brush and by the wicked thorns she saw on some of the
bushes themselves, which might give a wouldbe attacker second thoughts
about striking from that direction.
On the other hand, having already returned from the dead, would Eric be
concerned about such minor obstacles as thorns?
They went only ten or fifteen yards, before Benny froze again, half
crouching to present a smaller target, and raised the shotgun.
This time, Rachael heard it, too, a clatter of dislodged pebbles.
Reeeeee, reeeeee.
A soft scrape as of shoe leather on stone.
She looked left and right, then up the slope, then down, but she saw no
movement associated with the noise.
A whisper of something moving through brush more purposeful than mere
wind.
Nothing more.
Ten seconds passed uneventfully.
Twenty.
j As Benny scanned the bushes around them, he no longer retained any
vestige of that deceptive I’m-just-an0rdinaryeverydayrealestatesaleSma
look. His pleasant but unexceptional face was now an arresting sight,
The intensity of his concentration brought a new sharpness to his brow,
cheekbones, and jaws, an instinctive sense of danger and an animal
determination to survive were evident in his squint, in the flaring of
his nostrils, and in the way his lips pulled back in a humorless, feral
grin.
He was spring-tense, acutely aware of every nuance of the forest, and
just by looking at him, Rachael could tell that he had hair-trigger
reflexes. This was the work he had been trained for-hunting and being
hunted. His claim to being largely a past-focused man seemed like
pretense or self-delusion, for there was no doubt whatsoever that he
possessed an uncanny ability to focus entirely and powerfully on the
present, which he was doing now.
The cicadas.
The wind in the attic of the forest.
The occasional trilling of a distant bird.
Nothing else.
Thirty seconds.
In these woods, at least, they were supposed to be the hunters, but
suddenly they seemed to be the prey, and this reversal of roles
frustrated Rachael as much as it frightened her. The need to remain
silent was nerve-shredding, for she wanted to curse out loud, shout at
Eric, challenge him. She wanted to scream.
Forty seconds.
Cautiously Benny and Rachael began moving uphill again.
They circled the large cabin until they came to the edge of the forest
at the rear of it, and every step of the way they were stalkedr believed
themselves to be stalked. Six more times, even after they left the dry
wash and turned north through the woods, they stopped in response to
unnatural sounds. Sometimes the snap of a twig or a
notquiteidenflfiable scraping noise would be so close to them that it
seemed as if their nemesis must be only a few feet away and easily seen,
yet they saw nothing.
Finally, forty feet in back of the cabin, just inside the tree line
where they were still partially concealed by purple shadows, they
crouched behind upthrusting blocks of granite that poked out of the
earth like worn and slightly rotted teeth. Benny whispered, “Must be a
lot of animals in these woods. That must’ve been what we heard.”
“What kind of animals?” she whispered.
In a voice so low that Rachael could barely hear it, Benny said,
“Squirrels, foxes. This high up. .. maybe a wolf or two. Can’t have
been Eric. No way. He’s not had the survival or combat training that’d