Джеймс Фрей – Feed (страница 3)
I walked to the supply tent—it wasn’t so much a tent as it was a waterproof shelter built of tarps—and got a couple of boxes of 7.62 ammo. Ever since the gun-store robbery, I hadn’t been able to sit still. I needed to be doing something, and sitting around camp wasn’t one of those things.
Shooting helped, sometimes. I practiced almost entirely to fire at long range; the precision and concentration that it required helped drive thoughts of the sheriff out of my mind. I could hear someone coming up behind me.
“Hey, Mike.”
“Mary,” I said, and smiled for the first time all day.
“I caught the tail end of Henry’s rant. Can’t take these bullets on the plane. Well, not as carry-on, at least,” she said, with a quick smile.
She set down a box of 9 mm hollow points and pulled her Beretta from her hip.
I pulled the ear protection down into place. I picked a target at 200 yards, and took the straight-forward stance that Walter had recommended to me months ago. I made sure Mary had earplugs in before I let off my first round. The target was a one-inch sheet of steel. I’d hit it hundreds of times by now. It took me about five minutes to go through each shot: gauge the wind, adjust for the falling bullet. Mary, on the other hand, emptied her magazine into a target at 30 yards.
When we were out of ammo, she pulled her earplugs off and draped them around her neck like a necklace. She put her arm in mine, interrupting my reloading of the magazine. I set the M14 onto the hastily constructed plywood table.
“I’m still not happy we’re not going to the same place for these invitations,” I said. “I don’t care what Walter and John say.”
“I know, Mike. I know,” Mary said, exasperated.
“Do you think the thermite will work?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Barbara told me about it. Supposed to light up like fireworks. So I guess we’re going to the Olympics, huh?”
“I don’t think we’ll have much time to watch anything.”
“We might,” she said. “Once the Players are stopped, we’ll have won. We can do whatever we want.”
Mary took the binoculars from the table and spotted for me while I shot at the 300- and 400-yard targets. I was getting so much better with the rifle—I was one of the best in the group, beating everyone except the recent war vets: John, Walter, Bruce, and Henry. In all honesty, I was better than Bruce, but I had decided not to talk about it, as cranky as he was. He’d learned to shoot during Vietnam, but he’d served in the Navy, in the engine room of a destroyer, and never had the need to use his shooting skills after basic training.
I took aim at the 300-yard target through my scope, exhaled slowly, and squeezed the trigger.
“Hit,” Mary said. “Upper left shoulder.”
The target was just a chalk outline drawn on the trunk of a thick pine tree. I adjusted my aim and fired again.
In the instant I pulled the trigger, my mind was back in Redding, in the gun store where Tommy had been killed. The chalk outline on the tree was no longer a chalk outline but the image of the sheriff, his blood spouting forth from his chest, neck, and head. I closed my eyes to get rid of the image, but it was still there—it was always there. I hadn’t told anyone about it, but Mary had to know, right?
“Hit,” she said. “Center of the chest. Kill shot.”
My heart was pounding, and I began to sweat as I sighted the target once more. I could feel my hands trembling, and the crosshairs on the sight were dancing around the tree. I blinked and the sheriff was back.
Tommy was lying on the floor. The huge blast of buckshot that had come from Morris’s sawed-off shotgun had killed him immediately—no time to suffer, or move, or speak. I had been hit in the shoulder, and I could still feel the dribble of blood.
I fired the gun again.
“Whoa,” Mary said with a smile in her voice. “Way off to the left.”
I tried to hold my hands steady. I didn’t know how Bruce and Eugene were able to shrug it off. Bruce had killed Morris, and the guy who shot Tommy.
I fired again, and a chip of bark blew away two feet above the outline’s head.
“I can’t do it, Mary,” I said, dropping the gun onto the ground and standing up.
“Now you’ll have to resight the scope,” she said, picking up the rifle.
“Didn’t you hear me? I can’t do this!”
“Just practice,” she said. “You can do it. You’ve been beating everyone in camp for weeks. You’re beating me, and I grew up with guns. I had my first twenty-two when I was ten, and my dad had been teaching me to shoot his guns since I was seven. And as of our last competition, you came in third place out of twenty.”
“That was a fluke. So what if I shoot like this when we’re in Munich? What if I’m shaking so hard I can’t even look through the scope? I’m supposed to be a sniper. At this rate I’ll kill our own people who are down on the ground.”
“Two bad shots don’t make you a bad sniper. You probably just need water and something in your stomach.”
“I see him every time I shoot,” I said.
Mary was quiet. She was looking down at the rifle in her hands, checking the scope to see if it was damaged.
Without looking at me, she said, “I know you do.”
“How am I supposed to live with that? And don’t tell me that it’s better to kill one person than lose billions, because I’m so sick of John saying that. The Players are legitimate targets—we need to stop them. Even kill them if they don’t listen to us. That sheriff was one of the good guys. He didn’t need to die. He shouldn’t have even been there. Damn Eugene.”
“I agree,” she said simply. “It was Eugene’s fault. I worry every day about you and Kat. Kat’s smart, but Eugene is a screw-up. He’ll get you killed if something doesn’t change.”
“Well, we’re out of time for things to change. The meteor can’t be postponed, and that means that we have to send the invitations.”
“We have time. The Olympics don’t start for another two weeks.”
I took the rifle back from her and aimed at the closest target—a white fir with a big red dot spray-painted on the trunk. It was only 25 yards away. I fired.
“Wide right,” Mary said.
I fired again, aiming to the left of the tree trunk.
“Hit,” she said.
I fired again. And again. And again until the magazine was empty.
It didn’t take long to break camp and load our equipment. We left the tents and the rest of our camping gear—our Coleman stoves, sleeping bags, coolers—and just took what we thought we would need. One day Mary was going to come back and return to her old life, maybe. But for now the camp was secluded in a place where no one should stumble across it until hunting season. And if they did, they wouldn’t necessarily know it was us. The only thing she insisted we clean up was the thousands of brass shells at the gun range. She wasn’t worried about her family finding a shooting range—they were all shooters, and there was another range somewhere else on the ranch—but the sheer quantity of spent shells made it obvious that this range was not for casual use.
It was nearly three in the afternoon when we started driving to Reno. Mary and I rode in the Suburban, the second vehicle in our little convoy. We wanted to leave the van behind—it was what we used to rob the gun store, and it might have been seen by someone—but we just had too many people and too much gear. We planned to ditch it as soon as we found something else.
We had pooled our money together as soon as we got to the ranch. We didn’t have enough, though; it had cost Lee and Lin quite a bit to secretly obtain enough C4 and thermite for our invitations. We’d have to find another business to rob to get the kind of cash we’d need for plane tickets: traveling to Munich was expensive in itself, but first we had to fly people to all kinds of unusual places. My squad was going to Istanbul for the Minoan Player and then Baghdad for the Sumerian. Lee and Lin had to get into China, which was almost impossible. We had to get to Syria and Ethiopia and India, and all those flights would be pricey, not to mention the hotels we’d need, and food, bribes, and tickets to Munich.
No one had made plans for anything after Munich. No one had even brought it up. I think we were all too nervous.
Our caravan of vehicles—the Jeep, the Suburban, the van, and the Skylark—stopped at a grocery store in Susanville. Douglas and Barbara, who had spent much more time out of camp than the rest of us, went inside to buy dinner.
“Everybody else stay in your vehicle,” Walter said over the walkie-talkie. “Molly, can you find a new license plate for the van?”
She was in the Jeep, ahead of us, and jumped out. She walked confidently into the back of the parking lot.
“How long is it to Reno?” Bruce asked from the driver’s seat.
“Ninety minutes,” Mary said. “And I don’t care what anyone else says: I’m taking the first shower.”
“Tired of washing in the stream?” Kat asked. “I may fight you for that shower.”
“How many rooms are we getting for the twenty of us?” Jim asked. “I vote we splurge. I want a bed.”