Empty Promises

for them.
    At dawn on Saturday, July 24, they awoke to Tom pounding on the hood of their car. They’d slept in their clothes, and now they hurriedly pulled their shoes on. The three of them agreed they would fish before breakfast and Tom drove them in his truck deeper into the woods to a large clearing. He had trouble finding the trail, and Robin found this odd since he’d told them that he came here to hunt every weekend.
    They finally found the path and headed up the overgrown trail. Robin ran ahead with Rusty and waited for Tom and Hank to catch up. The sun was shining now, and there were field daisies and wildflowers growing everywhere. The night’s dread began to recede.
    They had to climb over logs and rocks to reach the riverbank. Once there, Robin and Hank sat on a rock, and Tom stayed behind them. They all threw lines in, but their luck was no better here than it had been anywhere else. None of them caught anything.
    Suddenly Robin felt prickles running up and down her spine and she sensed that Tom was pointing his gun at them. But when she turned to look, he was staring elsewhere, his gun cradled carelessly in his arms.
    They decided to go back to camp and fix breakfast. They wouldn’t have the fresh fish they’d counted on, but Robin would manage to throw something together. They were tired from tromping through the thick woods and climbing over deadfalls, and so they rested on a log along the trail. Robin whistled, and a bird flew close to them, checking to see if she was a bird, too.
    She started to make a joke about her name being appropriate when Tom’s rifle roared. He fired repeatedly at the birds all around them. Eerily, the more he fired, the closer the birds came.
    “Why do they do that?” Robin asked. Tom seemed to have some weird aura about him.
    “They’re curious about the sound,” he explained.
    “Haven’t you got better things to do than try to kill poor little birds?”
    Tom didn’t answer. In the sunlight when he squinted, he had eyes like a fox or a ferret; they seemed to see everything between his half-closed lids. He finally stopped firing at the birds, but he held his gun so that it appeared to be pointing at Hank, who didn’t notice. Now Tom looked at their Rusty. He was stroking the dog as he said, “There’re only two things wrong with Rusty,” he said. “He’s alive and walking.”
    It was a sick joke, and neither Hank nor Robin laughed.
    Robin studied Tom. She couldn’t figure him out. When he’d first seen her, his eyes had practically undressed her and he’d smiled broadly. She recognized male interest, but he’d barely glanced at her since, talking only to Hank.
    Still, Hank told her he didn’t trust Tom around her. When they got back to the truck in the thick early morning heat, Robin unbuttoned her blouse, revealing her bikini top, and Hank quickly told her to button it up again. Then Hank gave her a kiss, smiled, and walked away with Tom. They each carried a gun and were headed back toward the clearing.
    Robin was alone now. She could hear the birds chirping and Rusty panting in the heat. She knew she should fix breakfast, but she was immobilized with a dread that was much worse than before. She tried whistling loudly but no one responded, not even the birds.
    And then she heard the shot. Only one shot. It reverberated through the woods until the echoes diminished into dead silence.
    She waited, wondering what the men had shot at. After a time, Tom came strolling back. “We got us a deer,” he said laconically. “I need a knife to gut it out.”
    Something wasn’t right. Hank would have been the one to come back and tell her. He wouldn’t have sent Tom back. With Rusty close beside her, she began to run toward where she’d heard the shot.
    Tom’s gun roared again behind her and she looked back to see Rusty falter and fall dead in the path, his blood staining his silky sable fur. Horrified and sobbing, Robin turned toward Tom with a question on her lips. But now Tom was leveling the rifle at her.
    “You shot my dog!” she screamed.
    “Yeah, I know,” Tom smiled. “I shot your husband, too.”
    Tears coursed down her face, and she pleaded, “Oh, God … please don’t hurt me!”
    She believed Hank was dead. She knew Rusty was dead. Robin Marcus was sixteen years old, and she was alone in the wilderness with a killer. She fully expected to die, but it didn’t seem to matter much at that point; she had lost the two beings who were closest