HE HAD TO FLY FOR HIS LIFE.
The son of a fanatical survivalist, Wilder spent his childhood learning to destroy institutions and people, a foot-soldier drafted into his father’s fictional war by the age of fifteen. When he started asking questions, however, his father exiled him, driving him off into the Alaskan wilds.
Ten years later and Wilder is just a regular guy, a straight-and-narrow member of the society his father feared and hated. Working as a charter pilot in San Diego, he’s finally free of the chaos that once defined his life. He’s married, and his wife is expecting. The only real problem is paying the mounting bills that come with a baby.
Enter Charlotte, Wilder’s old flame from Alaska. She has the perfect job that will solve all of Wilder’s problems. Take some rich investors up, tip the wings, and pocket triple the normal fee. It sounds too good to be true–and it is. Wilder soon finds himself blackmailed, his family threatened, and everything he’s built crashing down around him.
That’s when the old WIlder comes out.
That’s when the killing starts.
THEY THREATENED HIS FAMILY. HE’LL TEAR THEM APART.
An excerpt:
Marcus, my fourteen-year-old brother, is trying to kill me. He’s already yanked the bolt back from the first shot, the one that rattled scant inches short of my skull. We’re thirty yards apart, somewhere in the thick foliage that lines the rear of the property.
“Run, Maximo,” he says, nodding off toward the distance, where all of Alaska waits, a happy hunting ground. He slams the bolt forward.
I run.
I have to be mindful of Dad’s traps. I may know where they are, but that doesn’t put any daylight between me and the next bullet. The pit on the right is easier to skirt than the Viet Cong-style tripwire explosive five feet to the left. I feel the seconds tick past.
This has been written in wet leaves and cold nights for months now, in every backward glance he’s been giving me since mom left us.
Left us. That’s how Dad put it.
I don’t actually know what to do. Running for the house is out. These days, more than likely the old man would help Marcus finish the job. The wilds make some sense, I know them, but that’s forty, fifty miles to civilization. Survival on nothing. Conjured shelters. Things I know, things I can do, yes, but the utility of such things go out the window when two people that know what they’re doing are tracking you on ATVs.
My life is forfeit.
It’s the way of blood. Marcus and I, we have brotherly love, we’re closer than close, but it’s not half as important to him as the approval of the old man. If he kills me, everything I’ve ever done better is forgiven and forgotten. Every failed test. Every humiliation. It won’t be questioned. I had the love of blood, now I’ve earned its scorn, because like Dad always says, blood doesn’t question.
I’m alive and I’m running. That’s a choice on his part. Giving lead to the leash, that’s all. Or waiting for the shot he likes.
The second bullet spits chunks of bug-chewed brown from the big rotting fir in front of me. The shot is wide. Too far in front of me. That’s intentional. He’s trying to turn me, run me into that nice open area between the spruces. I won’t give him that.
I’m offended he’d think that I would.
The smaller tree to my immediate left splinters and cants west, held to the trunk by only the thinnest sliver of wood. Kind of thing that kills loggers on the bigger ones. Cutting up the deer path, even if he’s walking toward me, he has no line of sight until I break for that wide spruce we practice throwing knives at. I know a trick. It probably won’t work, but it’s worth a try.
I throw out a quick hand at head-height to feint the shot, give him a target, then I tuck and roll. He takes the bait. The shot is high. It slows me a little, makes me rake my back on a broken bed of twigs, but that’s better than dead.
All things are when you’re sixteen.
Sixty, maybe seventy yards between us now. You’d think that would give me hope. But you’ve never seen him shoot.
He has to choose between taking the longer shot and following me. I’m a bird on the wing that knows his tricks, and I have two years of experience on him, but he can sink a nail at five hundred yards. I expect he’ll take the shot.
Footfalls. Crashing greenery. He’s sprinting after me. He thinks he can catch up because I’m slowed. Good. Now he’ll have to follow me all the way up. That’s my only hope. I’ll round the ridge to stymie any potential shots. This could work.
Explosives. Deadfalls. Snares. It’s like a museum of hell. He closes, to my surprise. I’m faster, generally, but he’s more determined. We crest the hill on the end of the property, neither of us winded, really. We both run six miles every morning, uphill then down. We are young and in great shape, if lost and hopelessly damaged. Perfect in every flawed respect.
My brain screams to keep running on down the slope, to the forest freedom past the summit. I should. But Marcus. He has to know. I stop.
His feet plant. He levels the rifle. His eyes are dead set, full of cold calculation. It’s almost like looking at a stranger. I never thought it would be like this.
“You win, brother.” My hands creep up. My chest heaves, more from terror than exhaustion. “I give up.”
Marcus walks the gap, stopping at twenty yards. “I told you to run.”
“You did.”
“You’re not stupid. Don’t die stupid.”
“I’m not stupid,” I say.
“Then run.”
“I could. But you’ll just keep coming. I can’t run forever. I know that. If I’m going to die, I want to die with Mom.”
The rifle lowers. Not much. He’d take out my neck now. Just as lethal.
“You want to die with a lie on your lips.”
I look down, at the ground around my feet. The dirt was higher, before. Almost to my knees. That which displaced the earth has gone. Eaten by worms. Alone in the dark.
This angers me. My tone is snide. “Go on, Marcus. Kill me.”
I mean it.
My rage is his fear. The rifle trembles. Lowers. His lip mimics the rifle, but he doesn’t cry. Carter men don’t cry.
“I was trying to let you get away, you dipshit.”
“I wasn’t lying.”
“You were.”
“He did it right in front of me,” I say.
“He didn’t kill her. You weren’t there. You’re a liar.”
“It was too cold up here. We needed a pickaxe. He made me go back to the house in the dark and find it. The digging took half the night. I didn’t sleep. You remember how exhausted I was. He sat over there.” I point. “Right by those ferns, he watched me dig. He had beer.”
Over in the ferns, I bend down and probe around until I find what I’m looking for. I hold the can out to Marcus, showing it to him before dropping it to the ground.
“Anyone could have had a beer out here,” I say. “That’s what you’re thinking. Right? Sure. It’s his brand. But it’s a lot of people’s brand.”
“Stop it.”
My fingers rustle and feel. “The ferns are a little higher now, but they’re still right here. Look.”
A shovel and a pickaxe. One for each hand. Rusted from the weather, but irrefutable.
“Fuck you. You put them there.”
“You think I’m that smart now?” I drop the pickaxe next to the can. “You were just calling me stupid.”
Marcus pales, stepping back, shaking his head.
The blade of the shovel enters dirt and sticks. It’s easier this time. It’s not warm, not this month, but it’s warmer than it was then. The handle is an exclamation point where I leave it. It’ll be fine. Still five and a half feet to go. I step back.
“Say you’re right. Say this really is some story to turn you against Dad. Blood against blood. If it is, if Mom really did run off to Anchorage to be with Them, then this will just be a hole in the ground, right? Good exercise.”
Marcus doesn’t know what to say, so he says nothing.
“If I dig down six feet here, I won’t find a rotting corpse. I’ll find an empty hole, and that’ll give you a convenient place to put me. What do you say, brother? I’ll even stand still and let you, if this hole is nothing but a hole. You can go on and shoot me.”
“Run.”
“I won’t.”
“It’s not true.”
“It is.”
Marcus lifts the rifle. He takes the breath, that breath you inhale before you exhale in a slow, controlled way squeezing a trigger.
“I love you, Marcus. Always did. You should know th—”
He fires.
###
I watch him stumble to her grave, the rifle forgotten on the ground.
The graze is neat. Precise. It will leave a clean scar on my left arm that will haunt me for the rest of my life whenever I look in a mirror with my shirt off. Now, then, as you like, I apply pressure to the wound and walk to the foot of the grave.
Marcus lowers the first clump of dirt to the side.
“I’m sorry.”
He’s crying. I haven’t seen him cry since the apple.
“Run!” he screams. “I don’t ever want to see you here again!”
He digs for everything he ever held sacred. A boy that desperate, he won’t hesitate to kill. A man, I should say, but when you grow up too fast, you never know where the line begins or ends. I still don’t.
That’s the last I see of him. The last I hear of him is the raw scream that echoes through the canopy as I set my camo and bed up for the night in a tree, miles away. With the traps, it’s hard to get far, but with enough lead time, I can mask my scent, hide my trail.
It’s not perfect, but I have a chance.
In the dark that precedes morning, when I haven’t heard the dull motors of death, I climb down and move at a medium lope for hours and hours. Even past the perimeter of the property I watch for traps, pits, anything that can keep me here or bring me back.
Once I’m past the point where I know that my father can’t threaten me any longer, I up my lope into a jog. The jog becomes a run. I sprint through the open forest like my brother told me to.
I run fast. I run hard. I run well, in the prime of my youth.
I run for my life.
I’ve been running ever since.
###