False Memory

in her ability to control such a powerful weapon.
    Her hands were cold, too. Fingers growing numb.
    She closed the rear door and leaned with her back against it, studying Zachary. He remained motionless, facedown on the ground. If he was faking unconsciousness, waiting for her to lower her guard, he was supernaturally patient.
    Before she could concentrate on Kevin, she had to know whether this man was still a threat.
    After consideration, she approached him boldly rather than with caution, moving in fast and poking the muzzle of the machine pistol against the nape of his neck.
    He didn’t move.
    She pulled back the collar of his quilted ski jacket and pressed her cold fingers against his throat, searching for a carotid-artery pulse. Nothing.
    His head was turned to one side. She thumbed back his eyelid. Even in the poor light, his fixed stare was unmistakable.
    Guilt sutured her heart and mind together, so that the thought of what she had done caused stitches of pain to pull in her breast. She would never be the same person again, for she had taken a life. Although circumstances had given her no option but to kill or be killed, and though this man had chosen to serve evil and to serve it well, the gravity of Martie’s action weighed on her nonetheless, and she felt diminished in more ways than she could count. Gone was a certain innocence that she would never be able to regain.
    And yet, cohabiting with the guilt was a sense of gratification, a cold and keenly felt satisfaction that she had acquitted herself so well thus far, that her and Dusty’s odds of survival had improved, and that she had shattered the gunmen’s smug assumptions of superior power. A thrill of righteousness filled her, and she found it simultaneously heartening and terrifying.
    To the car once more, to the front door on the driver’s side, slowly rising until she could see through the window. The door open on the passenger’s side. Kevin gone. Blood on the seat.
    Crouching below the window again, she thought about what she had seen. At least one of the four rounds she had fired through the seat must have struck him. There hadn’t been a lot of blood, but any at all meant that he was hurting and at a disadvantage.
    The keys were in the car ignition. Switch off the engine, open the trunk, free Dusty? Then it would be two against one.
    No. Kevin might be waiting for her to go after the keys, might have a clear line of sight on the interior of the car, through the open passenger’s door. Even if she obtained the keys without being shot, she would be an easy target when she stood at the back of the car, fumbling at the lock and opening the trunk lid.
    Although she loathed the idea, the safest thing seemed to be to retreat across this clearing into the ruins to the south. Use the cover of the crumbling structures and the cottonwoods to circle east, then north. Get around to the other side of the car, where Kevin had gone. If she made a wide enough loop, she might come in behind the northern position from which he was covering the BMW.
    Of course, maybe he wasn’t hunkered down and watching the car from a fixed position. He might be on the move, too, doing the same thing that she was doing, just in reverse. Using the long-abandoned village and the trees to travel east, then south. Circling in search of her.
    If she had to stalk him through the adobe-and-cottonwood maze, while he, too, was on the prowl, her chances of being the one to come out alive were dismal. She no longer had the advantage of surprise. And though he was wounded, he was the pro, skilled at this, and she was the amateur. Luck didn’t favor amateurs.
    Luck didn’t favor the hesitant, either. Action.
    Action would be Kevin’s motto, as well, drummed into him by whatever military or paramilitary specialists had trained him, and probably also by hard experience. She suddenly knew that he would be on the move, and that the last thing he might be expecting from a video-game designer and a housepainter’s wife would be for her to follow him boldly, seeking him out by as direct a route as she could possibly take.
    Maybe this was true. Maybe it wasn’t. She convinced herself, nevertheless, that she should neither circle behind him nor lie in wait for him to appear, but aggressively pursue, tracking him by whatever spoor he had left in the fresh snow.
    She didn’t dare cross through the headlights. Might as well just shoot herself and save him the ammunition.
    Instead, she retreated in a