FORTY-THREE

Outside, gusts of wind rocked the tin-roof shanty. Inside, grateful for the cooler air, bare from the waist up, Mason rolled onto a lumpy, thin mattress, supported a few inches off the floor by a slatted frame. He’d carefully placed his Taser and his shirt directly beneath him, in easy reach.

Mason shivered. Not necessarily from anticipation. From memories of his time in the cave he had just escaped.

Mason was terrified of the dark. Always had been. When he was a boy in Appalachia, his mother had locked him in a root cellar every time she needed to punish him. He never knew what act might deserve punishment. Something she’d laugh at one day would throw her into fits of rage the next. She’d strip him naked, drag him to the root cellar, and throw him down the steps. The door would close, leaving him on a clammy dirt floor, waiting for spiders and centipedes to begin to crawl toward him, and he would feel a scream start to build, knowing she was outside, listening, waiting to punish him further if he made noise, punishing him by adding extra time in the pitch-black root cellar among the molding vegetables and the smell of his own stale urine from the hours and hours he’d spent as prisoner of the hated darkness.

Here, while there were enough cracks in the walls to send sharp beams of light in horizontal lines across the narrow shanty, it was dim enough to trigger that irrational claustrophobic fear, and the slashes of light barely kept those emotions at bay.

His wandering eye was greedy—for the light and for what the woman was about to reveal, for she was still in the loose skirt and the shirt that had drawn him to this moment, and he could see enough to anticipate the next moments.

Slowly and awkwardly, she moved to the bed, reaching out with her hands to find the edge of it.

She sat beside him.

“Can you close your eyes?” she asked. “If you watch me as I undress, it will seem dirty…”

She drew a deep breath. “It’s just that I don’t do this. Other women take money, and I know you offered me money and I have to take it because that’s how my life is. You don’t understand how hungry I am and what it does to a person, but I don’t do this for money. I have my bowl. I have my spot there, near the path. There’s another area, where women stand, to sell themselves. I don’t do that.”

“I’ll close my eye,” Mason said. “My other eye, remember, has a patch.”

She reached for his face. He took her hand and guided it toward his patch. Her scent was slightly sour, but it made her seem more real. Her fingers touched and explored his face, stopping first at his eyes, then his lips.

On his back, Mason discovered he was holding his breath, hoping she would not stop stroking his face. He realized what it was that had softened him toward her.

Dark was her world. She was blind. She lived his terror.

“How do you do it?” he asked her.

“Maybe this isn’t a good idea,” she said. “I don’t want to talk either.”

“No, no, no,” Mason said. Why did he expect her to read his mind? “Living without sight, I mean. No light. Ever.”

She didn’t answer.

Mason felt a need to fill the silence. “I couldn’t. I’ve got this eye. I lose it, and I lose everything. I don’t believe in God, and I don’t believe in mercy. But if something were to take away my eye, I’d be in hell. I’d beg for mercy.” Mason hadn’t ever confessed a weakness to anyone. There was a certain buoyancy now, like the sensation of freedom.

“I guess you live blind,” she said. “Or you decide not to live. What other choices are there?”

“You asked if I was lonely,” she murmured. “Yes. Hold me first. Just for a little while.”

He did, mentally exploring what tenderness was like. Maybe it was all right. Maybe it was a way to push back the dark. He closed his eye. He didn’t count the seconds.

When she shifted and pulled away, it didn’t seem to break the spell.

She stood and moved away from the bed. He was holding his breath again, waiting for the sound of her clothing falling softly from her body. Ridiculous, he knew, because she was blind, unable to know if he was, but he was keeping his promise. He did have his eye closed.

But the sound he heard was the creaking of the shanty door.

There was brightness against his eyelid.

He turned his head, looking now, opening his eye, and saw silhouettes in the doorway, moving toward him. Lightning fast, because he was still a hunter, he twisted on the bed and reached down for his Taser.

And couldn’t find it.

Frantic, he swept his hand in all directions.

Too late.

Bodies fell upon him. Hands dragged him from the bed. Other hands rose, and against the light, he saw the outline of clubs. Now coming down.

The blows, across his chest and head, drove the air from his lungs. Instead of fighting, he slumped. Didn’t resist.

More hands against him, like the crawling of spiders long ago in the root cellar. The roughness of hemp. Until his hands and feet were bound. He kept his head down, letting it loll against his chest. Anything to give him an edge. And if it arrived, he’d erupt. Savage. Hateful.

“It’s all under the bed,” he heard the woman say. “I pushed it back. Out of his reach.”

“Lots, you think? I found a good one, didn’t I, Mommy?”

Mason recognized the voice immediately. The little girl. They’d been working together. And the woman wasn’t blind. Not if she’d seen where he’d placed the Taser.

“Whore!” Mason shouted. “Whore!”

His anger wasn’t at her. But at himself.

Nothing he could do. She’d warned him earlier that if he had anything of value, he’d be dead.

Eye open, he counted five of them. Sunlight from the door was too bright a backdrop to make out any features.

“He’s afraid of blindness,” she told them. “Take out his good eye. Let him live. Thinking he can come into our world and buy what he wants.”

Snickering from the men who had him surrounded. One brandished a short knife and reached toward his face.

Mason bucked against his bonds. A wild animal in a frenzy. He was fighting so hard that it took him a few seconds to comprehend that not all the screaming was his. And a few more seconds to realize he was no longer fighting anyone, only the bonds.

He stopped his useless flailing and sat back, heaving for breath.

The five men were on the floor. The woman and the girl gone.

And someone tall and large standing above him with a Taser in one hand.

The large man picked up the knife that had fallen from the hands of one of the attackers.

“Let me cut the rope,” the large man said. “I’m here to help.”

Mason rolled back, not trusting.

“Everett sent me to follow you,” he said. “Told me to watch your back. Looks like you needed it. What were you thinking? Letting yourself get trapped like this? No tattoos on your face. There’s places you just don’t go out here.”

Mason relaxed. Everett. This man wouldn’t know Everett’s name unless he was telling the truth.

“I smell burning,” Mason said. “That was a Taser?”

“When the setting is strong enough, it’ll torch hair,” the man said. “Might need a solar recharge after zapping all of them. A couple hours should do it. Not a lot of electrical outlets out here.”

Mason accepted the man’s help with the bonds. When the rope was cut, he rolled over and searched under the bed. Found his shirt and wallet. Found his Taser.

When he stood, the man Everett had sent was shaking his head. “They’d have cut you up and cooked the choice pieces by midnight. Old trick out here, putting in contacts that make it look like cataracts. I can see I’m going to have to stay pretty close.”

Mason’s response was simple. He flicked the switch on his own Taser as he shoved it into the man’s chest.

The crackling result was instantaneous.

Mason had shot plenty of men before, and more often as not, it would take a couple of seconds for the body to fall. He’d see it in their eyes. A split second before comprehension, then another couple of heartbeats as the brain tried to fight the body, until shock overwhelmed the nervous system and the body collapsed.

Here, the electrical charge exploded through the synapses, and the man in front of him had become nothing but meat, unguided by any thoughts or impulses.

The man simply dropped.

Nice weapon, Mason thought. And it had been a good situation to test it.

Mason leaned down and tapped the man’s chest. Everett’s man was far beyond hearing, but Mason spoke anyway.

“I hunt alone,” Mason said.

He scooped up the knife as he left the shanty. After he’d found Caitlyn, who’d made him lose one eye, he’d come back and look for the whore who’d wanted to take the other and leave him blind.

This knife, he vowed, would cut out both of her eyes. But not until the same knife had worked its way across her body and delivered the justified punishment for fooling him into a weakness that would never occur again.