There were more footsteps. Mallon could tell that they were coming from behind him. There were three, four, five crunches, and then the person stopped to listen. Mallon gripped his rifle and waited, using the sounds to judge the man’s position. As soon as he heard the next crunch he threw himself back, rolled to his belly at the side of the stump, saw the shape and fired into it, rolled back and cycled the bolt. He could see the body was horizontal, but he could not tell more than that, so he rose to one knee and fired at it again, then trotted to get past it.
Mallon reached the spot and stopped involuntarily to stare down at the body. It was-had been-a woman. She had been tall and thin, her red hair in a ponytail and covered by a baseball cap. With the dark grease she had smeared across her face, he could not tell what she looked like, but she seemed young. He looked up and forced himself to move on.
He stopped at the edge of the woods and peered up the hill at the spot where he had hidden to fire at the main lodge. None of the hunters seemed to have reached it yet. He raised the night scope again and scanned the hillside. There was no sign of hunters in the open, so he moved up a few yards to try for a better view. As he climbed the hill, he remained inside the edge of the forest. Every ten or fifteen steps, he would stop beside a tree where his silhouette would not stand out, and spend ten seconds listening and studying the landscape with the night-vision scope. Near the top of the hill he moved deep into the woods and continued slowly. This time, when he raised the scope to his eye, it was dark.
He had drained the batteries. He closed his eyes in a pained wince. The scope had been an enormous advantage, the difference between seeing at night, like a cat, and being night-blind, like a bird. The loss was a huge one that made him frightened and sad at the same time. He lifted the strap from around his neck and placed the scope on the ground, made a mental note of where it was, then moved on cautiously. Mallon began to get used to moving without the night scope, but he could not get it out of his mind. His must have been the only one at the camp. If it had not been, then someone else would have seen him and killed him by now.
Suddenly, he knew something. Somebody else would have begun thinking about the night-vision scope by now. They would have thought of it at the very beginning, when Mallon had shot the man behind the barracks, and the hunters had looked out the window of the lodge at the dark woods and weedy hills, and seen nothing. There would be somebody in that group who had, at that moment, decided to make his way over the first hill and across the narrow valley to the dry streambed where the firing range was. It would have to be a person who had keys to the steel door of the cinder-block building, because without them there was not much chance of retrieving the night scope. The person who could do that was somebody Mallon needed to kill if he wanted to survive.
Mallon no longer tried to skirt the edge of the open ground. Now he moved deep into the woods, where he could move quickly with less fear of meeting hunters. In a few minutes, Mallon was descending the far side of the hill. He could see, ahead and off to his right, the observation tower and, beside it, the low, square cinder-block building he had broken into. From here he could not see the steel door, because it faced the observation tower and the firing range. If people had reached the building, they weren’t making enough noise to carry this far.
Mallon watched and waited. He knew that a man’s sense of time became terribly inaccurate when he was crouching in the dark, waiting anxiously for something to happen. But it had now been a very long time since he had seen his last hunter.
Now and then he took a deep breath and let it out to calm himself, but he tried to remain still. He heard a sound. He listened for a few seconds, but it did not come again. He was almost certain it had come from the direction of the observation tower. Mallon watched as one of the shadows under the roof of the observation tower moved. He lifted his rifle, rested his elbow on his bent knee to steady it, stared through the telescopic sight, and watched the shadow resolve itself into a person. Somebody had climbed the tower to see if he could make out where Mallon was.
Mallon very slowly and quietly cycled the bolt of the rifle once more, placed the crosshairs on the person, held them there, and squeezed the trigger. There was a click. He released the magazine, and the lightness of it in his hand told him it was empty. He groped in his pockets for any loose bullets that he had not loaded, but he found none. He looked up at the tower again. The person was climbing down the ladder.
Mallon gently placed the rifle in the weeds, took the pistol from his right jacket pocket, and crawled through the brush toward the building. He crawled until he could tell that the man was on the other side, where the door was. Then he stood and walked quietly to the nearest wall of the structure. He was careful not to touch the wall, because any small sound would carry to the inside. If the hunter was already in, he might hear it. Very slowly, Mallon came around to the side of the building, listening as much for any sounds he might make as for the hunter. He heard the key slip into the first lock. He heard it turn and the dead bolt snap back, then heard the second one. There was a pause, and Mallon was not sure whether he had made a noise-maybe just his breathing would be enough-or if the third lock wasn’t the same. He waited, then heard the lock snap back. There was a rustling, and a clank as the person turned the handle. The door hinge creaked.
Mallon stepped around the building toward the doorway and saw the man standing in the threshold. The man raised the hand that held a pistol and turned toward Mallon just as Mallon fired.
Mallon knelt beside the body. He hoped the man had a flashlight so he could use it to search the building for more rifle ammunition. Maybe his night scope had not been the only one after all. If not, there could be more batteries in boxes on the shelves that he had missed. He held his pistol under his left arm and dug into his trouser pocket for the box of matches. He found it, struck a match against the box, and a sharp pain hit his hand so hard that he released it into the air. A second blow exploded into the side of his head.
He was on the floor already when he saw his match fall toward the cement surface a few feet away, the flame at the head just a streak of blue, the small aura of light it threw below it growing wider and brighter. It hit, bounced once, and kept burning a yard from his face. He only recognized that what had hit the side of his head had been a kick when he saw what was coming at him from the darkness beyond the small, dying flame.
It was a young woman, her hair cut as short as a man’s. She was wearing a pair of gray sweatpants, black shoes that were not sneakers but thin-soled like racing shoes, and a black pullover with a tank top over it, as though she had been in the middle of a workout of some kind. The expression on her face was emotionless, her eyes not on his face but trained on his hands and feet in intense concentration. He realized that he had lost the gun. He tried to roll out of her reach, but the next kick caught the back of his leg above the knee, and he felt pain shoot through it up to his back, and down to his heel.
Behind him, he heard her say, “My name is Debbie. I want it to be the last thing you hear: Debbie.”
He kept his body still until he got his left hand into his jacket pocket and around the second Beretta pistol. He heard her shoe squeak as she shifted it slightly on the concrete, and he knew that he had to ignore the pain and act now. He abruptly rolled toward her and fired through the fabric of his pocket.