Chapter 6

CHAPTER 6

T he forest became quiet as I stood there, balanced on one foot. The good news: I hadn't been killed immediately by an explosion because I hadn't broken the wire since I'd spotted it a fraction of a second before my right foot touched it. My momentum, plus my fifty-pound backpack, caused me to stretch the wire, but my combat-honed, peace-dulled instincts stopped me before breaking it. I remained frozen in place, foot a couple of inches above the forest floor pressing against the wire, and considered my next move.

The bad news was that I was going to have to do something about this.

Looking left and right, I saw that the wire extended to trees on either side, went through green metal eyebolts screwed into the trees, made turns, and continued on as far as I could see, which explained why there'd been no big bang. It was an alarm, not an ambush.

There's a limit to how long I can stand on one foot. I started to wobble. I slowly, very slowly, brought my foot back. I wondered about Maggs, but she was trained, having gone to school for a heck of a long time topped with a lot of real-world experience, to avoid such things as tripwires and stupid owners .

Technically, I didn't own Maggs. It was more that she tolerated my existence. I took a quick glance to the left, and she was perfectly still just before the wire, staring at me with a look in her eyes I interpreted as "Nice move, genius."

"A warning would have been nice," I called to her.

She ignored that. She was a retired working dog, so she probably felt warnings were part of her old life.

Clear of the line, I looked about a bit more closely and spotted the reason for the alert line.

Ahead of me were swaths of cannabis, aka weed, sprouting where the undergrowth had been cleared out of a couple of acres hidden under the trees. It appeared most had been harvested, although a few plots remained. The plants were not there due to nature's whims. Someone had planted them, and whoever it was probably didn't want me wandering through. There were PVC irrigation lines painted in camouflage running through the vegetation.

Great. Now I was in Narcos .

I considered turning back, but that would mean going back to the road and making an even bigger detour from the Appalachian Trail than I already had. I was tired and grouchy and hungry, and there were a lot of weapons back in that town.

I stepped over the wire and continued on, a bit warier. Maggs lightly hopped over the line, which she hadn't hit in the first place. Because.

I envision my innate warning system like a Geiger counter, and right then it was doing a slow, low clicking in my head. I didn't think weed was legal in North Carolina or Tennessee. I hadn't bothered to check the news since starting the trail months earlier, so maybe something had changed and pot was legal in one of those states. Maybe aliens had invaded. Maybe world peace had broken out and everybody was high.

I was doubtful on all three, particularly the last one. I just wanted to keep my own peace.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm living in some sort of sadistic simulation and whoever was running it liked to mess with me because as soon as I thought about peace, two young men, almost boys, appeared to my right front at twenty meters, one of them carrying an AK-47, the silhouette of the assault rifle unmistakable and one I'd seen far too often in my past. Carrying one was legal in both states, as opposed to growing weed, which is a head-scratcher if you think about it. They saw me at the same time I saw them.

They appeared related, solidly built with the same thick black hair, probably brothers. I sighed, debating whether to turn back to Rocky Start. I glanced over and saw Maggs on alert. I gave her a quick hand signal to lay low and remain in place because people often mistook her for a wolf. She crouched down and disappeared from sight in the undergrowth.

"Hey, you!" the one with the AK called out.

I turned around, ready to backtrack, resigned to a big loop around.

"Hey, I'm talking to you! Stop!"

He was yelling at me. I'd walked away from people yelling orders many years ago, so?—

A shot rang out and I froze. I felt, more than heard, the snap of a bullet going by, supersonic. It wasn't close. I knew what close was and, worse, what too close felt like, but still, it was a bullet.

I turned around, not drawing the pistol inside my light coat because once you draw a weapon you use it, and when you use it, you kill, and I wasn't in the mood to kill at the moment. Or die. It was just weed, after all.

Plus, I'd sort of made a promise to myself that I would never kill again. I'd spent too many nights along the trail with just Maggs at my side reflecting on my life, and my ledger was too long and too bloody, no matter what the justification had been. Honestly, there were times that if I hadn't had Maggs there and hadn't been afraid of leaving her all alone in the wildness, I might have eaten my gun.

The two stopped about ten meters away. The guy with the AK looked a little surprised, as if he hadn't meant to pull the trigger, which really didn't matter because he had. His buddy was slightly behind him, apparently not armed. AK guy was holding the rifle at hip level, approximately aimed in my direction. Worse, his finger was still inside the trigger guard. They both were dressed in dungaree coveralls with t-shirts underneath.

"Geez, Reggie," the unarmed one said, shaking his head. "Why'd you do that? You could have hit him."

A genius at work. I held up both hands. "Sorry. I wandered off the A.T. Got lost. I'll leave."

"You a Fed?" Reggie asked, trying to regain some bluster.

Sure, a Fed just wandering around in the woods with a rucksack on his back. "I got lost," I repeated.

Reggie was shaking his head. "No way, dude. Can't have you going around telling people about the farm."

The other boy looked at him. "Come on, Reggie, just let him go."

After all I'd been through over the years, the concept of dying over a field of pot in the middle of bumfuck nowhere because a kid named Reggie was a paranoid moron seemed ludicrous. Then again, I'd seen people die over much less in much worse places. It would probably give the entity running my simulato a good chuckle before it moved on to tormenting someone else.

I tried once more. "I'm through-hiking the trail. I'll be out of the area before you know it."

Reggie looked back at his buddy. "He'll rat us out, Marley. We aren't nowhere near the trail."

"Dude, he's a stranger," Marley said. "He got lost. Chill out."

Reggie was uncertain, and uncertain people are more dangerous, especially when they have their finger on the trigger. A person who was certain would have already killed me or let me pass through without raising the stakes. Reggie was lost in a marijuana fog on a middle road that didn't exist.

Reggie and Marley, the Weed Brothers.

"I don't know, man," Reggie said. "What do you think Pike would say if we let him go? He'd want us to protect the farm, and he said we should be extra careful now. "

Pike.

The local law grew pot. Pike had a weed farm and I'd just walked into it.

Great.

"We don't tell him," Marley was saying, which seemed reasonable to me.

Marley must have forgotten that his brother had fired a warning shot. Someone like Pike would notice the missing bullet. Details make all the difference.

"We'll tie him up and see what Pike wants to do," Reggie said. "He's been real upset since Oz died. And you know what he says about Outsiders."

He made the last word seem like a profanity and definitely capitalized. I half expected a banjo to start playing. I didn't want to see what Pike wanted to do, I'd had enough of Pike, he'd made it very clear he didn't want to see me again. And no one was going to tie me up.

I started walking toward the two, which surprised both. "I don't want any trouble," I said.

Five meters.

"Stop," Reggie said uncertainly, waving the barrel of the AK back and forth as if it were some sort of magic warding stick, and Marley took a step back, watching me.

"Let me just do this," I said, which further confused both of them. But Reggie still had that gun, finger twitching inside the trigger guard, and I knew I was going to have to get Maggs involved.

I whistled a two-tone note.

Maggs came fast and hard from the left, a big blur of fuzzy black streaking through the forest. She scared even me a little bit and we'd been together for two years. She was the fastest dog I'd ever seen; one second she was there, then next she was going for Reggie because she knew what a gun looked like and if it wasn't in my hands, then it was a bad thing.

Maggs didn't like bad things.

She leapt and that was when the Weed Brothers became aware of her, some latent caveman survival gene kicking in, though way too late. Maggs hit Reggie in the shoulder with her chest, her jaws clamping on his neck but not closing as her sixty-five pounds of muscle and bone and claw and tooth took him down before he was halfway turned toward her.

She whined in pain as she did so, which upset me.

Marley said, " No," and ran to help his bud, but by then I was moving forward and had the Glock out, so I tapped the barrel hard against the side of his head, and he crumpled to the ground, out cold.

Reggie was on his back, whimpering in fear, or as much as he could with Maggs' teeth on his throat, a command away from having it ripped open, and I slowed down.

They were just kids. My training and experience said to kill them, but common sense said they were idiots, not enemies.

Worried about Maggs' whine of pain, I knelt next to Reggie.

"I didn't want trouble," I said in what I considered a reasonable tone. "I don't want any more. There's no such thing as a warning shot, son. If you remember that, you'll be a better person for this encounter. I'm taking the gun because I don't want to be shot in the back and you don't know what you're doing with it. If I see you again, I'll kill you. No warning, no hesitation. Just stone-cold dead. Understand?"

He wanted to nod but was too afraid of Maggs, her mouth clamped over his throat.

"Blink twice if you understand," I said.

What was he gonna do with fangs pressing on his carotid? He blinked twice.

"Blink twice if you agree." Because understanding wasn't necessarily assent.

He blinked twice.

I stood. "Release," I said in a command voice and Maggs let go. She looked up at me with those big brown eyes that could make the stoutest heart melt, even while she was ripping out a throat. "Good dog." I knelt and checked her while Reggie stayed down, watching, wide-eyed.

She'd caught her paw on the button of his coveralls, and it had dug in under her pad. There was some blood. Nothing major. I stood, hefting the AK, and walked past them toward the gravel road they'd been coming up since it headed in the right direction, hoping my day was going to get better.

I figured it couldn't get much worse.

Yeah. I know. Silly me.