Black Bird

Jack Terrington ran blindly, wheezing heavily, and stumbled down a small grassy hill, barely ducking in time to avoid crashing into a low-hanging tree branch. 

Heavy rain pattered to the soggy ground all around him, making the mud even more slippery, making each step more dangerous.  He could easily hear the labored breathing of the dogs not far enough behind him. 

He reached the bottom of the small hill and splashed into a shallow, muddy creek that traced a path along the base of the hill.  Turning, he ran upstream in the water for fifty yards or so before crossing to the other side and starting up another hill on the opposite bank.

That should stall them, Jack thought. 

Or at least slow them down a few minutes. 

Even though it was a tired trick, overused bad movies, he knew that it actually did have some grounding in the world of non-fiction: dogs, even trained bloodhounds, often lose the scent of anything they are tracking when that scent-trail hits water.  It had something to do with their ability to track scents only on solid ground, or something like that.  That creek, and the rain, would help mask the trail he left behind. 

He ran, hitting the top of the second hill at a dead sprint, continuing up, over, and down the other side, weaving his way through a thick stand of trees.  Above him, a small group of birds circled, dark against the sky. Jack wanted to look back, to see if the dogs had made it to the creek yet, but he didn’t have time.  Blood from his forehead tried to get into his eyes, and he angrily wiped it away with one arm of his green coat. 

Jack was heading due east out of town, no looking back.  

Beyond the hill was a large open area, and he ran through a large muddy field that looked like it had been freshly plowed, his boots sloshing in the muck, kicking up mud and water.  The short silver chains that looped beneath each of his boots usually clinked when he moved, but now the boots were silent, caked with mud.

The dogs, their handlers, and the deputies were chasing him, but the creek should give him a little more breathing room.  Jack had managed to elude them and avoid capture for several days now, but he had found out the hard way that the sheriff of this little town was smart.  The sheriff had put the clues together much faster than Jack had thought possible, and now the little voice inside Jack’s head, the same little voice that sometimes gave him ideas and suggestions, that voice was wailing, shrilly screaming so loudly inside Jack’s head that it hurt. 

Find a way, ANY way out of this stupid little town. 

Liberty, Virginia was a quiet town about 60 miles southwest of Washington D.C., nestled into the rolling foothills east of the Shenandoah Mountains.  Highway 132, the main road through town, ran west, curving and twisting up into the foothills and mountains before reaching Shenandoah National Park; the road also ran due east out of town through intermixed forests and farmland to Interstate-95, which in turn ran north to Washington D.C. and south to Richmond.  Like many of the other small towns that he had been through, Jack had seen Liberty as just another wide spot in the road, full of stupid, sightless people. 

And the cops were usually the most blind.

In Jack’s experience, it usually took the small-town cops at least a week or two to realize something was happening.  This was the eighth or ninth little town Jack had been in in less than three years, and usually he came and went, no problem.  But this time, things had been different.  Jack had never seen anyone catch on to what was happening so quickly.  This guy, this Sheriff Beaumont, he was smart.

Now Jack was running.        

He’d spent the last 12 hours or so holed up in a grimy storage shed behind an abandoned house on the eastern edge of town.  Jack had heard that the sheriff had formed several citizens’ search parties to search for him; Jack had guessed that Beaumont would assume he would head west, towards the safety of the Shenandoah Mountains and the expansive valley beyond.  Guessing this, Jack had figured the smartest thing to do would be to travel due east, planning to take Highway 132 the fifteen miles or so out to Interstate-95, the main freeway, and catch a ride either south towards Richmond, or north to D.C.  Usually he traveled the long distances by hitching from one small town to the next, catching rides with motorists and truck drivers that frequented the expansive stretches of lonely blacktop.  Not only was hitching rides a terribly cheap and easy way to travel, but the people he caught rides with were usually just passing through the area and had very short memories.