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His game had fallen when she had dropped him to the balcony. The back was open. One of the batteries had rolled away. And now Little Pete was trying to make it work and it wouldn’t.
Astrid almost sobbed out loud.
Drake stopped cursing.
She looked up and there he was, leaning far out over the railing. The shark grin was wide.
The gun was in his hand, but he couldn’t quite get an angle on them, so he swung one leg over the railing, crouched just as Astrid had done, and now he could see them quite clearly.
He aimed.
He laughed.
And then he bellowed in pain and fell.
Astrid leaped to the railing. Drake was on the grass below, sprawled on his back, unconscious, lying on his rifle with the pistol beside him.
“Astrid,” Sam said.
He was above her, still holding the table lamp he’d used to smash Drake’s hand, leaning out over the railing.
“Sam.”
“You okay?”
“As soon as I get Petey’s battery I will be.” That sounded stupid, and she almost laughed.
“I have a boat down on the beach.”
“Where are we going?”
“How about not here?”
TWENTY-FIVE
127 HOURS, 42 MINUTES
IT HAD BEEN two days since Lana had survived the coyotes. The talking coyotes. Two days since her life had been saved by a snake. A flying snake.
The world had gone crazy.
Lana had watered the lawn that morning, careful to keep a sharp eye out for coyotes and snakes. She paid close attention to Patrick’s every bark, growl, or twitch. He was her early warning system. They’d been owner and pet in the old days, or, maybe you could say, friends. But now they were a team. They were partners in a game of survival: Patrick’s senses, her brain.
It was a stupid thing to do, watering the lawn, since she couldn’t be sure there would be water enough for her. But the man who had owned this tumbledown desert abode had loved the few square meters of grass. It was an act of defiance against the desert. Defiance, even though he had chosen to live out here in the middle of absolutely nowhere.
Anyway, in a crazy world, why shouldn’t she be crazy, too?
The man who owned the cabin was named Jim Brown. She found that out from papers inside his desk. Plain old Jim Brown. There was no picture of him, but he was only forty-eight years old, a little too young, Lana thought, to leave civilization behind and become a hermit.
The shed behind the cabin was stacked to the roof with survival rations. Not a single fresh thing to be found, but enough canned crackers, canned peanut butter, peaches, fruit cocktail, chili, Spam, and military-style meals ready to eat to last Lana and Patrick at least a year. Maybe longer.
There was no phone. No TV or any electronics. No air-conditioning to soften the brutal afternoon heat. There was no electricity at all. The only mechanical things were the windmill that turned the pump that brought water up from the aquifer below, and a foot-powered grindstone used to hone picks and shovels and saw blades. There were
more than a few picks, shovels, saws, and hammers.
There was evidence as well of a car or truck. Tire marks led through the sand from a sort of carport that sagged against the side of the house. There were empty oil cans in the trash and two red, twenty-five-gallon steel tanks that smelled like they were full of gasoline.
Out back was a stack of railroad ties, neatly formed into a square pile. Beside this was smaller lumber, a lot of it used two-by-fours scarred by nails.
