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Their pockets were empty: pants pockets, shirt pockets, empty, and, indeed, emptied. He had actually taken everything. He took everything, even housekeys. He didn’t know what he was looking for.

Several more gunshots echoed into his little cockpit chamber. “Abe!” That was Sano’s voice!

He shouted, “I’m here! I’m—” the little space of the cockpit amplified his voice, and he deafened himself, surprising him. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes!” Sano shouted. “Abe! Hurry!”

In his anxiety to make an exit, he rested his hand on the shoulder of the pilot. He felt metal in the epaulette adorning the captain’s uniform shirt. Aha! That’s it! He didn’t know what his subconscious had calculated, but he knew that he had to tear off the epaulettes, all four of them, the two shoulders of each corpse. He gritted his teeth, apologized to the dead men, used his foot to brace their corpses, then snapped and wrenched each epaulette, stuffing them into his pockets. He made haste to go toward the gunfire.

What are you doing, stoic? Wait here until your friends are dead. It won’t matter in the end. How long can you possibly survive? And why would you want to? Here’s your opportunity to succumb to the fate of every living thing. Don’t fight the long quiet. Anticipate it with joy! Stay here! Let them die, then let their murderers have their way with you!

Abe heard thunder.

“Come on!”

“Ume?”

“Come on, Abe! You have to help us carry some of this stuff!”

More gunfire drowned out Umezawa’s voice. He continued, “You know I hurt my wrists playing Call of Duty! Would you hurry up?”

“Coming!” So very disappointing, getting excited by all this meaningless activity. Why don’t you just relax and take it as it comes? For the adventure! For the adventure! For the tale to tell to mine and Sano’s children! Sano? Sano knows you’re a dum-dum, you doofus. “Coming!”

Abe abandoned prudence, leaping from light shaft to light shaft, then up the emergency exit, a leap, a swing of the legs, then up, head over the threshold, then one leg up, and a roll down the side of the fuselage. Gotta catch something before you roll off the ledge.

A gunshot.

I’m prone. I’m prone. Don’t throw up. I’m prone. Let’s go.

“He won’t show himself, Blake!” Lars was saying from behind him, toward the remaining aft section of the wreckage. “He’s a smart cookie, he is!”

Across the chasm Abe saw Blake sighting down a rifle toward the first bend of the path. Behind Abe, Lars was jumping up and down, waving his arms over his head like a madman, screaming, “Shoot! Shoot me! You’ve got the angle! Shoot me!”

When Lars saw Abe, he threw a pistol toward him. “If you see him, shoot him. He’s got us pinned.”

More thunder.

“That there’s a helicopter, looking for the plane. It ain’t found it, yet, but we don’t wanna be here when it does. Don’t know if it can get up to this altitude. I done forgot my avionics.”

Abe eyed the pistol. But I’m still in juku. This isn’t at all like The Morose Alpaca. Wait, no, this is like that odd standalone episode toward the end of the third season, where Nami left Abigail when Abigail fell in love with the Russian policeman. Man, they never drew her better than in that episode, how desperate she was, in Siberia, for love. Pick up the pistol, stoic, and disappoint yourself even more.

Abe picked up the pistol, trying to understand how best to hold it.

“Handguns are awesome, aren’t they?” Lars said. Abe could see his grin, now, without looking at his face. “Welcome to the American frontier!”

“I want to go home to Kyoto.”

“Sure, kid, we all do; now try to shoot the bastard.”

“Cover me, Lars!” Blake shouted. “I think he’s retreating.”

Lars stopped waving his arms and picked up his rifle, bringing it up with a snap right under his cheekbone. Suddenly his glib countenance was entirely erased by a set jaw and a steely forehead. His upper body melded completely with the rifle.

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“I don’t see him,” he said.

Blake eased his way down the path, pistol drawn and at the ready. When he reached the spot where the path took a turn around the rock face, he glanced back at Lars, measuring the angles. With a nod, he continued a slow ease around, then a sudden leap forward, followed by just as hurried a leap back.

“He ain’t there!” he shouted back to Lars.

“I think he retreated,” Lars said. “We got three guns covering his one.”

“Well, come on, then,” Blake commanded.

“Let’s go, Abe,” Lars said, brushing by him lightly. “Unless you want to hand that pistol over to Jason, and he can do it for you.”

“No way,” Abe said.

“Good man,” said Lars, but when the sapling delivered them over to the party, Lars bent over, opened a metal flight box and produced another pistol, handing it to Jason, who was delighted to be armed. He offered another one to Umezawa, who shook his head. Likewise, Sano refused. Lars stuffed the extra pistol into his belt, reaching into the flight box to produce yet another pistol.

“I’ll take that one,” Abe said. Lars handed it to him, and still another pistol to Jason.

“Who are you?” Umezawa exclaimed. “Batman?”

Lars shrugged. “What can I say? I like handguns. Let’s roll.”

So armed, the party eased around the path and down. There was no sign of their adversary.

After tracking him for some time, Blake halted the posse, sitting down. “None of this is right,” he said. “I don’t like it. I’m one for tracking game in the wilderness, but when it comes to tracking a man, I don’t know that I’ve ever tracked one trained in wilderness assassination. None of this is right. I’m going to get us all killed.”

Lars crouched, sitting on his haunches. “How do you mean?”

“I think that airplane is a rabbit trap,” Blake said. “He knows all about us, made accounting for us.”

Abe spoke up, “Yes! He went back through and made sure the pilots were dead. Shot their corpses twice, in the back of the head.”

Lars stared in surprise. “How do you know?”

“Their bodies were mangled by the crash,” Abe said. “That much was clear, all contorted, controls poking through their bodies, and laid out like they died from the crash, not like the others, the ones he shot while they were still alive. They had a different look.”

Blake shook his head. “I’m telling you, Lars, we don’t know what we’ve survived to be in.”

Lars replied, “I figure, then, he didn’t know what he was in, not with us. He didn’t figure us for SHTF survivalists, complete with an arsenal of our own. I figure, then, he’s trying to figure us, and how we fit in to those missiles.”

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“Missiles?” Jason asked.

“It was missiles that brought us down, like a turkey on a TV show,” Lars said. “Someone shot us down. What I can’t figure is whether it was surface-to-air, or air-to-air.”

“Huh?”

Lars explained, “Three or four missiles were fired on us. We all saw the one. We heard the two. Did someone on the ground shoot at us? That would be one thing, meaning the pilots crossed us into some airspace we weren’t supposed to be in, or—”

“That would explain why I can’t determine our location,” Blake said. “I can’t get a read on the landscape.”

“Right,” said Lars. “If it was ground-based fire, then we have one sort of problem. If another plane shot us down, then the pilot was tracked, tricked, or whatever, and that’s a problem of another sort. Speaking of which…”

The thunder returned, this time much closer.

“We’re fairly high up,” said Blake. “A helicopter isn’t going to be the best means to find that wreckage.”

“How high up do you reckon?”

“Maybe ten-thousand feet, judging by the distance between spruce trees.”

“Aren’t you worried they’ll see us?” Jason asked.

“A little,” Blake said. “But we’re protected by the mountain here, and there’s not much a helicopter can do to us. There’s no place to land. I suppose they could shoot us, but then again, we can return fire. No, I think they’re looking for that plane, and at a minimum, for that man. But I do worry that we’re collateral salvage, as Jason here put it, and whoever stumbles upon us might dispense with us in a hurry. The fewer eyes, you know…”

“I’m hungry,” said Abe. “And thirsty.”

Umezawa handed him a sack of ginger cookies. Sano gave him a bottle of water. Abe devoured the cookies and guzzled the water in seconds.

“While you were playing around in the cockpit, Lars was tossing us boxes of food,” Umezawa said. “We’re set with calories for a while.”

“For a short while,” said Blake. “Now that he knows we came back for food and water, he has some idea of our circumstances. What we need to know is whether he has someone he’s trying to communicate to, or not, or trying not to be observed—but he shot at us—”

“How did he miss?” Abe said. “We saw him shooting with precision while the plane was coming to pieces.”

“I don’t really know,” Blake said. “I felt like he had the drop on me. My guns were still in boxes at my feet. Maybe I broke his concentration by shouting at him.”

Jason tried to say something, but when he opened his mouth, he found no words to say. He shrugged.

“Still hungry,” said Abe. Umezawa and Sano repeated their ministry.

“I already ate six of them,” Umezawa said to Abe. “I started to feel better, but all the sugar made me feel woozy.”

“Well,” said Lars. “Let’s get down off this mountain and try to do some figuring of our own, before this fellow figures us, or calls in some pals to do us in.”

“Lars is right,” said Blake.

The party took some time to tear open boxes of food to redistribute them into duffel bags Lars had found and emptied. Abe marveled at how fast Lars must have worked. He wasn’t in the cockpit that long.

They were each overburdened, but with plenty of sunshine, plenty of water, and a downhill traverse from bitter cold to manageable cold, they managed to descend to the tree line without further incident, even though they all had the distinct sense they were being watched and followed.

“He’s on us,” Lars whispered. “But he ain’t about to risk anything, knowing that we’ve got guns and ammo. We gotta make like a elk, and disappear into the alder brakes.”

When they entered into a grove of spruce trees, Abe played a hunch, speaking to the trees, “Make a safe place for us, please.”

When he spoke, the entire grove snapped awake. A great sigh passed through the environs, as though a lively breeze were disturbing a moribund dell. Roots came up from the ground behind them, boughs linked themselves into hopeless tangles, bracken and briar joined forces to make any approach miserable for trespassers, and the treetops leaned over to provide canopy, protection from prying eyes of hawk, drone, or Airwolf.

“I like this,” Lars said. “I can live like this.”

“Well, all right,” said Umezawa. “I think it’s high time we take inventory. I claim all the Mountain Dew. Uh, unless anyone else wants any.”

“Ume,” Lars said, “have you ever seen Mountain Dew on an airliner?”

They sat together to see what they had.

“Vegan, vegan, vegan, vegan,” Umezawa said, tossing one frozen dinner atop another, like discards in a game of Hearts. “Vegan, more vegan, this is horrible, vegan, vegan, vegan.”

“Don’t be so cavalier,” Blake said. “Those are real calories there. Real protein and fat, to make them taste edible. Don’t be so cavalier.”

“Give me chicken, or give me death,” Umezawa said.

“Death,” Abe said. “That reminds me. I recovered these off the pilots. I think he was looking for something on them, but he didn’t think to look for these.” He rustled around in his pockets, pulling out the four insignia epaulettes he’d harvested from the pilots.

Blake’s mouth dropped open. He glanced over at Lars.

“What?” Lars said, striking his ferro rod to start a fire. Jason took up the cinder on the kindling, and thereby took over the task of nursing the fire. Lars nodded approval and replaced the ferro rod around his neck.

“Why did you send him to the cockpit? That was none of our business.”

“What? I wanted to know why we were shot out of the sky.”

“Why? Why not just leave well enough alone?”

“Well enough? Well enough?!?” Lars said. “I should be dead, less some miracle or another I don’t understand.”

“All of us, Lars,” Blake said. “Likewise all of us. We should all be dead less one miracle. Isn’t that good enough? Now we’ve got these…these…beacons of evil…”

“What?” Abe asked.

“Yes,” Blake said. “You outsmarted him. But he’ll figure out his mistake soon enough, and when he does, which I would say is right about now, knowing where we are, and doubling back to the plane to see what you found—when he does, he is going to make it his life’s work to put us all to an end.”

“How do you know?”

Blake sighed, looked around at the party, rested his eyes on Lars, and began to speak.