20 MINUTES LATER. THE BRIDGE ON COUNTY ROAD 250 BETWEEN THE FORMER WINAMAC, INDIANA, AND TIPPECANOE RIVER STATE PARK. 8:20 PM EST. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2025.
“All right,” Larry
said. “Time. Jason, ready?”
“Ready.”
Jason crouched to
spring up onto the bridge; he’d rechecked his gear a dozen times
and knew nothing was loose. He looked at deck level along the
bridge to where a Budweiser truck sat crosswise in the black
puddles of its rotted tires, a bulky, dark shadow in the
twilight.
Gaze locked on that
truck, he felt but didn’t see Larry moving into a comfortable
firing position on the bank beside him. He heard Chris roll up onto
the road and plunge across to the far ditch.
“Chris, ready?”
Mensche’s voice seemed too soft to carry.
Chris’s voice came
back soft and clear as one of Jason’s own thoughts.
“Ready.”
“Jason.
Go.”
The run to the beer
truck was not quite as far as the hundred meters Jason had
regularly run in high school track, but he had not run it wearing a
full pack, or in heavy rawhide moccasins—or worrying about catching
an arrow. He seemed to run forever until he bounded up into the
truck bed, dropped to his belly against the steel plates and board
floor, rolled over once to place his shoulder gently against the
truck wall, and swung his black-powder rifle around. He whistled
the bobwhite sound, the signal to Larry.
With the hummocks
covered, Larry raced across the bridge, his steps soft slaps and
scrapes, till a faint thud indicated he was in position behind the
concrete abutment. He chirruped like a squirrel with a
nut.
Chris rushed across
the bridge, surprisingly quiet for a big man, and continued beyond
them to the place they’d picked out, a U-haul trailer tipped on its
side; Jason rushed to an overturned bread truck as soon as Chris
was in place.
The alternation
continued until finally they were all at a shed deep in the trees,
with the Tippecanoe just a whispering splash and gurgle behind
them. After the moon rose, by its dirty blue light, they moved on.
Jason thought, Back when I believed I was a
poet, I’d have made such a deal about the soot in the stratosphere
and the bomb launcher on the moon. Now . . .
meh.
Concentrating on the
roads, trails, woods, and prairie, if Jason had another poetic
thought before they camped at dawn, he didn’t notice.