A face I do not recognize.
FIVE
I go for my gun. The guy lunges to the side and hits the ground.
Dalton yells for the guy to stop, stay where he is or we’ll fire. The man scrambles into the underbrush, and even a warning shot from Dalton doesn’t slow him. The guy
disappears in the bush, and I’m racing after him, gun in hand, but by the time I get there, he’s on his feet, a distant shadow in the twilight. I don’t aim my gun. From here, there’s no chance of anything except a potentially fatal shot. Instead I run. I get about twenty feet before a hand grabs the back of my jacket, Dalton saying, “No.”
Adrenaline pumping, I spin to knock his hand off, but I stop myself before I do. I take a deep breath and holster my gun. Dalton’s right. It’s nighttime in the forest. Tearing after a fleeing man is a very stupid idea.
Dalton holsters his weapon and gives his arm a shake. It’s still weak from last week’s injury, and he’s been too busy to bother with the sling. When I point at his arm, he waves me off and scowls into the forest. Then he looks toward town. Wondering whether we should track the guy ourselves or call out the militia.
He doesn’t glance over for my opinion, which means there’s no real question in his mind. He gives an abrupt nod and starts circling around the border.
I don’t ask what he’s doing. “Equal partners” can’t apply to our professional lives. He’s the sheriff. He’s in charge.
Dalton actually has a harder time with that than I do. I’ve always frowned on supervisor-and-underling relationships. If a guy is your boss at work, isn’t that going to carry over at home? For Dalton, the discomfort goes in the opposite direction—he’d rather be partners across the board. But Rockton requires a leader. One leader.
Dalton still only gets about twenty steps before he glances over his shoulder and then lowers his voice, saying, “We’ll get Storm and track him. Leave the militia out of this for now.”
I nod. By not chasing the guy, we let him think he got away. Let him slow down. Let him get careless.
“He’s definitely not a hostile,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“A settler?” I ask. “Not from the First Settlement—his clothing’s too new for that—but has anyone left recently?”
Dalton shakes his head.
Rockton has been around since the fifties. That means thousands of people have passed through, and almost all complete their stint and go home. Some, though, choose the forest instead.
Rockton was born as an exercise in idealism—a place for people who needed refuge, and in those earliest years, it was often their ideals that brought them there, when they fled McCarthyism and other political witch hunts. But as with so many lofty humanitarian ideas, eventually the coffers ran dry and someone saw the opportunity for profit. When capitalism moved into Rockton, a group of residents moved out and formed the First Settlement, which is now in its third generation.
There are also smaller settlements, plus people who chose not to join one, like Dalton’s birth parents. They were twenty-first-century pioneers, living off the land, hunting and gathering, building shelters, and sewing clothing from skins.
Then there are the hostiles. People who have left Rockton and reverted to a more … I want to say primitive form. They are tribal. They are also ritualistic—painting and scarring themselves and setting out totems to mark territory. But in no way should they be confused with tribal societies. The hostiles are a grotesque stereotype of that, as if someone read too many National Geographics as a child. I used to think they’d lost what makes us human, but that implies they’re animalistic, and the hostiles’ sheer capacity for violence is far more human.
“His clothes were clean,” I say. “Dark jacket. Jeans. Boots. He didn’t have any more beard stubble than you do. So he likely hasn’t been out here longer than a week.”
“Yeah.”
Dalton opens the back door to our house. Storm races into the kitchen and skids to a stop, knowing better than to barrel through an open door. Dalton goes inside and returns with two flashlights and a Newfoundland on a leash.
“His clothes seem to rule out a miner or trapper,” I say, picking up where I left off. “I don’t think he’s a hiker either. Those weren’t hiking boots, and that jacket was too heavy. Dark hair. I couldn’t make out eye color. I think brown skin, but he didn’t seem indigenous.”
I’m running through all the possibilities because I don’t want to jump to the paranoid conclusion. I’m hoping Dalton will find an angle I’ve missed. Instead, as we head into the forest, he says, “You think it’s connected to Brady.”
I don’t answer. I’m hoping not. We both are. Oliver Brady was the serial killer foisted on us two weeks ago. He’s gone now, but I suppose someone could have come looking for him.
“That’s possible, but it doesn’t feel right.”
“You think it’s a new problem.”
“I hope not.”
God, I hope not.