Read Online Four Live Rounds by Blake Crouch - Free Book Online

forward, her big black
eyes shining in the firelight.
    “Yours, free a charge, you tell me what you
been through.”
    He hesitated, then said, “Rode out from
Silverton three weeks ago. Got waylaid by an early snowstorm. I
been walkin three days to get here.”
    “Was you alone?”
    He shook his head, poured another shot of
whiskey.
    “Where’s the rest a your party? Where’s the
men these wallets belong to?”
    “They didn’t make it.”
    “But you did.”
    “Maybe I should just pay you for the bottle,
‘cause this line a questioning is gettin pretty old.”
    “You ain’t gotta worry. I’m on the scout
myself, and this ain’t the worst town for layin low.”
    “That right.”
    “For a fact. So, how’d you make it when your
friends didn’t.”
    “I et ‘em.”
    Jocelyn threw back her head and laughed as
hard as she could remember since arriving in this dying town, a
fugitive in her own right, the man wondering if she was laughing
because she thought he’d made a joke, or because she was crazy, and
on the fence as to which reason he might prefer.
    He drank the whiskey, poured himself another
shot, said, “Care to hoist a glass with me?”
    Jocelyn set up a tumbler for herself, and
they raised their glasses, the man feeling better already. Maybe it
was the hunger and the thirst, exhaustion bordering on madness, but
he felt a surge of something, and though he couldn’t name it
outright, having never known it, he suspected it was peace, the
embracing of a thing he’d had his back to going on thirty
years.
    He said, “To you—what’s your name?”
    “Joss.”
    “To you, Joss.”
    And he made a quiet toast to himself also, to
finding his good, red road, to Dan and to Marion, and to Nathan of
a now crushed skull, having brained the man in his sleep with a
still-warm stone from the fire-ring upon which they’d roasted
Marion.
    He wondered what Sik’is would’ve thought of
this new thoroughfare he’d found for himself, then realized he no
longer cared.
    As he swallowed his whiskey, the glow
spreading through his stomach, to the tips of his filthy fingers,
dulling the pain in his shoulder, he was overcome by a joy that
sheeted his cloudy irises with tears. He felt thankful for every
painful second of those twenty-one days in the wilderness, for the
starvation and the thirst. He regretted nothing. If he’d never met
Nathan and the boys, he’d have rolled into Abandon right on
schedule, that weak, miserable fuck of a man he’d been for thirty
long years since he’d watched his brothers die on Malvern Hill.
    “You all right?” Jocelyn asked.
    Oatha reached for the whiskey bottle.
    “Strange to say, but I believe I just woke
up.”
     
     
    An introduction to “Shining Rock”
     
    When I was a boy, I did a lot of backpacking
with my parents and younger brother, and one of our favorite places
to go was Shining Rock Wilderness in the North Carolina Mountains.
One summer evening as we were setting up camp in a remote area of
the wilderness called Beech Spring Gap, a gentleman came over to
our camp and introduced himself. He was a burly fellow in his
fifties wearing blue shorts and a vest brimming with camping
accessories and various patches. He also had a machete lashed to
his back and mentioned in the course of small-talk that he’d fought
in Vietnam. The interaction was unsettling and more than a little
awkward. I was twelve at the time but found out years later from my
father that he’d been terrified, so much in fact that he and my mom
had whispered in their tent late that night, debating leaving
because they were afraid this man was going to come back and murder
all of us while we slept. Obviously, that didn’t happen. My family
struck up a friendship with the man (who turned out to be a gentle
soul) and we accompanied him on future backpacking trips. But the
strangeness of that initial encounter and the fear my parents must
have felt never left me, and the experience inspired a short