The Bodies Left Behind

another fifty or sixty feet.
    Brynn whispered, “I think it’s climbable. Tough, but it can be done.”
    If they could make it to the forest floor they’d have an easy direct walk to the ranger station.
    The odds of a working phone and gun and ammunition?
    Brynn couldn’t say. A roll of the dice.
    She decided that breaking in wouldn’t be a problem. If they could get to the building, even the strongest lock in the world wouldn’t keep her out.
    “I hate heights,” Michelle whispered.
    I’m with you there, baby. . . .
    “Are we going to try it?” the young woman asked in a shaky voice.
    Brynn grabbed a birch sapling and leaned out into space, studying the rocks below.

    THEY’D MANAGED A fast walk, breaking into a jog occasionally.
    Lewis pulled up, gripping his side. He leaned against a tree.
    “You all right?”
    “Yeah. I quit smoking last week.” He inhaled deeply. “Well, pretty much a month ago but I had one last week. Then stopped for good. But it catches up with you. You smoke?”
    Wincing at a pang from his shot arm, Hart kept looking from side to side. “Nope.” He’d grown convinced that the women weren’t armed but he didn’t like that damn dog or wolf or whatever it was nosing around. People were predictable. He’d made a study of human nature in the extremes and he was comfortable taking them on, however dangerous they were. Animals, though, operated with a different mind-set. He recalled the paw print near the Feldman house.
    This is my world. You don’t belong here. You’ll seethings that aren’t there and miss things that’re coming up right behind you.
    But then he inhaled hard and leaned against another tree. The men’s eyes met and they shared a smile. Hart said, “I haven’t run like this in years. I thought I was in shape. Man.”
    “You work out?”
    He did, regularly—his line of work required strength and stamina—but it was mostly weight-lifting, not aerobic. That wouldn’t’ve been helpful; Hart rarely chased anyone, and he didn’t think he’d ever run from anybody, not once in his life. He told Lewis, “I don’t do much jogging.”
    “Nope. Health clubs don’t figure much in the Lewis family. But I work construction some. Was working for Gaston on that tower near the lake.”
    “I don’t know it.”
    “Gaston Construction? The big tower? Other side of the expressway. The glass is up now. I hired out with the concrete sub. That’ll keep you in shape. You handy?”
    Hart said, “Some. I’ve done plumbing. No patience for painting. And electricity I stay away from.”
    “I hear that.”
    “Carpentry’s my favorite.”
    “Framing?”
    “More furniture,” Hart explained.
    “You make furniture?”
    “Simple things.”
    Measure twice, cut once.  . . .
    “Like tables and chairs?”
    “Yeah. Cabinets. It’s relaxing.”
    Lewis said, “I built my grandmother a bed once.”
    “A bed? Come on, let’s keep going.” They started walking again. “How’d you happen to build her a bed?”
    Lewis explained, “She started going crazy, getting older. Maybe that Alzheimer’s thing, I don’t know. Or maybe she just got old. She’d walk around the house singing Christmas carols all year round. All the time. And she’d start putting up decorations and my mother’d take them down and then she’d be putting them up again.”
    Hart picked up the pace.
    “So she’s pretty flaky. And she starts looking for her bed. The bed she had with my grandfather. It musta got thrown out years ago. But she thought it was somewhere in the house. Walking all over the place trying to find it. I felt bad for her. So I found some pictures of it and made her one. Wasn’t all that good but it looked close enough. I think it gave her a good couple of months. I don’t know.”
    Hart said, “Like ‘making’ a bed. Only you really did make one, not with sheets and blankets.”
    “Yeah, I guess I did.” He gave a laugh.
    “Why’re you in this line, Comp? You could be making union scale.”
    “Oh, I’m in it for the money. How can you score big at sweat labor?”
    “You score big doing this?”
    “I score bigger. Now my mother’s in a home too. And my brothers, they contribute. I can’t do less than them.”
    Hart felt Lewis’s eyes on him, like he wanted to askabout his family but remembered the story about the brother and the parents being dead.
    “Anyway, I’m good at this. What I do. Hell, you heard my rep. You checked, right? People vouched for