His ear hurt now, and when he touched it, his hand came away with an amount of blood that made him focus. He had no gun himself. There had been reasons, good ones, why he was only armed with knives and blades, plus it had been thought the level of counter-aggression he might face was too low to need his own gun.
Too late to complain, he supposed.
The firing stopped, and for a moment, the only sounds were the engine again and one angry, distant crow expressing its displeasure at being woken.
“There’s no way out of this, Malcolm,” a man’s voice called from the road.
Malcolm. One of the names he had been given to use from a list of a dozen, to cycle through should they be needed. It was a very early one, which probably meant something about who these men were, but he didn’t know what that was.
“Throw down your weapons,” the man continued. “Believe it or not, Malcolm, we want you out of this alive.”
“You shot me in the ear,” he called back.
“Throw down your weapons,” the man said again.
“I don’t have a gun.”
“Now that, I don’t believe.”
“Then we have a problem.”
“Not we, Malcolm,” the man said. “I don’t have any problem at all.”
Malcolm—he embraced the name for the moment—pulled his bag onto his chest, hoping it contained a surprise or two, knowing it didn’t. He heard a branch snap over to his right, almost certainly another man coming around to flank him. Another man with another gun.
The bag held nothing he didn’t expect. The only thing different about it from two minutes ago was the bloody handprint he’d added to the cloth.
“This cannot be,” he whispered. “This cannot be the end, so soon after the start.” He looked up into the rising gray of the morning. He put his hand back to his throbbing ear and whispered again, a plea, a prayer, a wish: “Mitera Thea, protect me.”
He held his breath and listened again. The walker to his right had either stopped or gotten better at disguising his steps. The man on the road was quiet now, was perhaps advancing, too.
There was a new sound. One the men wouldn’t have heard yet. But Malcolm did, because he had been listening for it.
“I surrender,” he called out.
A pause. “You do?” the man on the road said.
“If you give me a moment,” Malcolm said, “I’ll lay down my weapons and step away from them. No one needs to get hurt.”
“I agree with you, Malcolm,” the man said, “but how do I know you’ll keep your word?”
“I can only guess you know where I come from? What I Believe?”
“We have an idea, yes.”
“Then you know I cannot, will not lie to you. Even though you shot me, I’ll still surrender to you.” He turned his head so his voice would carry back better to the first man. “It’s a matter of principle.”
Malcolm could almost hear the man thinking.
The second man, clearly sensing the same thing, shouted, “It’s a trick!” to the first man, his voice contemptuous. “You know what these people are like. They’re fanatics. And the intel says—”
“Yes, I know what these people are like,” the first man said. “Which is why I know what they mean by that word. Principle.”
“As if there aren’t ways around principles,” said the second. “As if you and I don’t know how every principle and its opposite can be justified.”
“Are you philosophers?” Malcolm asked, genuinely curious.
For answer, a bullet struck the tree trunk above his head. “Philosophical question,” said the second man. “Was that a warning or was that a miss?”
“The philosophical part would be wondering if those were the same thing.”
“They’re not.”
“And there you are,” Malcolm said. “Your philosophy.”
“Will you shut up, Godwin?” the first man snapped.
Godwin shut up.
“I’m going to count to ten, Malcolm,” the first man said. “At ten, you’d better be standing where both of us can see you with your hands up. Understood?”
Malcolm closed his eyes and whispered a prayer of thanks, before saying, “Understood.”
“I mean it. One false move, and the philosophical questions will end. And that is a matter of my principle. Now . . . One.”
Malcolm breathed, pulling his senses away from his throbbing ear.
“Two.”
He exhaled through his mouth, watched the enormous cloud of steam that erupted from it.
“Three.”
Malcolm sat all the way up.
“Four.”
He pushed himself to his feet. He could see Godwin now, a stout man altogether different than Malcolm had expected.
“Five.”
“Quit staring at me and get a move on,” Godwin said.
“Six.”
“I’m sorry for this,” Malcolm said.
“Seven.”
“Sorry for what?” Godwin said, and exploded in a wash of fire and blood that Malcolm stepped back behind the tree to avoid, not incidentally stepping out of the line of sight of the first man’s gun. He still caught a wave of blood across the side of his face, Godwin’s mixing with his own and spattering Malcolm’s bag. Flames clawed at the tree trunk, scorching it but not catching.
The bag, of course, was fireproof.
“What the hell was that?” the first man shouted. “You said you’d surrender.”
“I am surrendering.” Malcolm pressed himself back into the tree trunk for what he knew was coming. “I can, however, be overruled.”
The screaming began a second later and ended two seconds after that, so at least the man did not suffer long. Malcolm waited until the roaring stopped, until the great lunging of wings quieted in the sky and all that was left was the tick of cooling metal and the pop of boiling rubber.
“Thank you,” he breathed, in unfeigned amazement. “Thank you.”
He gathered his bag, Godwin’s blood already drying. He didn’t look at the blackened circle of forest where Godwin had died, just headed quickly for the road.
The Oldsmobile was now a philosophical question all on its own: Was it still a car if most of it had ceased to exist and what was left fit into a shallow puddle? Was there a spirit to the Oldsmobile that could be said to still live if Malcolm remembered it?
He crossed the road ten meters down from it lest the heat in the tarmac melt his shoes. He entered the trees that led to the riverside, hoisted his bag onto his back, and continued his walk, not looking back.
He would rest later.
For now, there were a good hundred and eighty miles to go to the American border.
Three
“WHERE DID YOUR father find a blue?” Jason Inagawa asked Sarah as they walked the dirt road back from school.
“From the broker your father recommended,” Sarah replied, surprised.
The sun was out, but it was still near freezing. They kept their steps quick to stay warm; the school bus never seemed to make it out to the farms of the school’s only mixed-race girl and one of its very few Asians. Funny that.
“Yeah, but he never mentioned a blue,” Jason said. “I’ve never even heard of a blue around here before.”