Testament (31 page)

He sighted on Kess, but that would be too easy. Kess would be dead, and he’d never know the agony he’d caused, and the only way to do this was to do it the way Kess had started. But he wouldn’t take the cat, not at first at any rate, that would give some of them too much chance to reach the house. He’d start with the people, youngest to oldest, take the cat when he couldn’t take anything else, and if in working up he gave Kess a chance to get away, well that would be all right too. He would hound Kess then, hunt him just as he had been hunted, let him know the way it felt, and his only question now was which one was the youngest.

The girl on this end to the right looked to be about twelve, which left the girl and the boy beside her, and the boy looked older than the other girl, so he centered on the farthest girl. Perhaps five or six years old, she had long hair that was fine and sandy. She had freckles. Impossible to tell from this distance, but he was certain that she had blue eyes. The way she smiled reminded him of . . .

Sarah.

He was aiming at Sarah.

No. He looked away and shook his head,

No.

He aimed again.

Again he saw the same thing. The little girl blurred into Sarah. He switched to the boy, but all he could think of was Ethan if he’d grown, and the woman suddenly looked like Claire, and through the telescopic sight, he saw them all down there, Claire, Sarah, Ethan, eating, laughing, and he couldn’t do it.

He told himself that he was being foolish. So what if the little girl down there reminded him of Sarah? So what if the family reminded him of his own family? All the more reason to continue.

Tears streamed down his cheeks.

Forget the family. Shoot Kess, he told himself. There had been no sense of seeing himself when he sighted on Kess. It wouldn’t be like he was shooting himself.

Or would it? All he could think of was the agony of shock and grief that Claire and Sarah would suffer if they saw him shot in front of them.

He told himself that if he didn’t pull the trigger, Kess would just keep sending men after him. He told himself that if he didn’t end it now, he would never feel safe, never stop running.

A bottle of milk was on the table.

He blew it apart, glass and white liquid spraying. He emptied the rifle, bullets shattering the glass table as the family dove for cover. He heard screams from down there.

Screams of fear, not grief.

He crawled back from the ridge. When he couldn’t be seen, he stood and ran through a field as frantically as he possibly could, the dog racing with him. He didn’t run to escape but instead to release the unbearable frenzy in him. He couldn’t stop sobbing.

3

He sits in his room in a remote town, sometimes goes out, mostly doesn’t. The dog stays with him, wondering why he scribbles endlessly on sheets of paper. As he shoves one page away and hurriedly starts another, he remembers his passage up through the graves from Ethan to Claire and Sarah and then back down again, sprinkling dirt over them, waking from nightmares about them, and sometimes it seems those specks of dirt falling through his hands, like these words, will never end.

If you liked this harrowing thriller, check out the disturbing stories in NIGHTSCAPE.

Acclaimed author David Morrell (
First Blood
,
Creepers
) is praised for his riveting short fiction as much as he is for his best-selling thrillers. His stories appeared in many Year’s Best anthologies and received prestigious awards. In his second collection, Morrell leads you through an adrenaline-charged
Nightscape
of serial killers, third world revolutionaries, a policeman stalking a murderous cult, a son obsessed by his cryogenically frozen father, a psychology professor forced to suffer intense confinement, and a doctor combating an epidemic that he fears will destroy the world. Complete with autobiographical introductions in which Morrell links the stories to painful incidents in his life,
Nightscape
includes a mini-novel, “Rio Grande Gothic,” set in Morrell’s home of picturesque Santa Fe, New Mexico, where mysterious shoes appear day-after-day in the middle of a road. Soon it becomes shockingly evident that the shoes are the aftermath of ritual murders.

You can buy NIGHTSCAPE
here
!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Morrell can be contacted at his website, www.davidmorrell.net. He is the award-winning author of
First Blood
, the novel in which Rambo was created. He was born in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. When he was seventeen, he became a fan of the classic television series,
Route 66
, about two young men in a Corvette convertible traveling the United States in search of America and themselves. The scripts by Stirling Silliphant so impressed Morrell that he decided to become a writer.

In 1966, the work of another writer (Hemingway scholar Philip Young) prompted Morrell to move to the United States, where he studied with Young at the Pennsylvania State University and received his M.A. and Ph. D. in American literature. There, he also met the esteemed science-fiction author William Tenn (real name Philip Klass), who taught Morrell the basics of fiction writing. The result was
First Blood
, a ground-breaking novel about a returned Vietnam veteran suffering from post-trauma stress disorder who comes into conflict with a small-town police chief and fights his own version of the Vietnam War.

That “father” of modern action novels was published in 1972 while Morrell was a professor in the English department at the University of Iowa. He taught there from 1970 to 1986, simultaneously writing other novels, many of them international bestsellers, including the classic spy trilogy,
The Brotherhood of the Rose
(the basis for the only miniseries to be broadcast after a Super Bowl),
The Fraternity of the Stone
, and
The League of Night and Fog
.

Eventually wearying of two professions, Morrell gave up his academic tenure in order to write full time. Shortly afterward, his fifteen-year-old son Matthew was diagnosed with a rare bone cancer and died in 1987, a loss that haunts not only Morrell’s life but his work, as in his memoir about Matthew,
Fireflies
, and his novel
Desperate Measures
, whose main character lost a son.

“
The mild-mannered professor with the bloody-minded visions,” as one reviewer called him, Morrell is the author of thirty-three books, including such high-action thrillers as
The Protector, Testament
, and
The Spy Who Came for Christmas
(set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives). Always interested in different ways to tell a story, he wrote the six-part comic-book series,
Captain America: The Chosen
. His writing book,
The Successful Novelist
,
analyzes what he has learned during his four decades as an author.

Morrell is a co-founder of the International Thriller Writers organization. Noted for his research, he is a graduate of the National Outdoor Leadership School for wilderness survival as well as the G. Gordon Liddy Academy of Corporate Security. He is also an honorary lifetime member of the Special Operations Association and the Association of Intelligence Officers. He has been trained in firearms, hostage negotiation, assuming identities, executive protection, and car fighting, among numerous other action skills that he describes in his novels. To research the aerial sequences in
The Shimmer
, he became a private pilot.

Morrell is an Edgar, Anthony, and Macavity nominee as well as a three-time recipient of the distinguished Stoker Award, the latest for his novel,
Creepers
. The International Thriller Writers organization gave him its prestigious career-achievement Thriller Master Award. With eighteen million copies in print, his work has been translated into twenty-six languages.