Read Blind Panic for Free Online Page B

with the Remington 700 hunting rifle that he had borrowed from his uncle. He slid back the bolt to check that there was a round in the chamber and it was ready to fire, and then he propped it against the boulder next to Cayley. “You happy now?”
    “You didn’t tell me there were going to be mountain lions.”
    “We’re in the mountains, babe. The mountains. What did you expect, sharks?”
    “You still didn’t tell me. I wouldn’t have come if you’d told me.”
    “If I’d told you there were going to be mosquitoes, you wouldn’t have come, either.”
    “No, I wouldn’t. I hate mosquitoes. And I don’t like sharks, either.”
    Remo put his arm around her and held her tight. “Youdon’t have to worry. We’re safe; we’re going to be fine. When you hear a helicopter fly over your apartment building, you’re never worried that it’s going to crash on top of you, are you?”
    “Yes.”
    Remo looked over Cayley’s shoulder at Mickey and Charlie and made a face that meant “girls—what can you do? “ Mickey shook his head and stifled a laugh, and Charlie waved a wiener at him.
    “Come on, sweet cheeks,” said Remo. “Sit down and help yourself to something to eat. There’s nothing to be scared of.”
    They sat around the fire. Charlie had heaped even more brushwood on it now, and it was burning up fiercely—so fiercely that it scorched their faces. He had impaled a dozen wieners on sticks, and they were sizzling and popping, and he had arranged eight chicken drumsticks on a wire rack from the Winnebago’s galley.
    They passed around bags of taco chips and pretzels, and swigged Michelob Amber out of the bottle, and Remo said, “The Emperors of IT! This is the life, dudes and dudette! As Teddy Roosevelt once said, give me the sunset and give me the sausages, and you can keep your palaces and your peacock pies!”
    “Teddy Roosevelt said that?”
    “Well, he would have done if he had been here.”
    “Yeah, but he’s not, is he?” Charlie retorted. “For starters, you forgot to invite him.”
    The sky grew intensely black and thousands of stars came out; they could see Andromeda and Cassiopeia. They traded jokes and campfire stories, and Remo passed around a large, untidy joint.
    Charlie was telling a horror story. “So, it’s pitch-dark, right? And the guy stumbles back into bed. But after a couple of minutes he feels something tickling him. He tells the woman to stop it, but the tickling goes on. He feels a tickle on his back and a tickle on his neck. He even feels a tickleright inside his ear. He hates being tickled, and in the end he loses his temper and he reaches across and switches on the bedside lamp. And there she is, lying close beside him, but she’s a heaving mass of white maggots. Wrong bedroom. Wrong sister. He’s climbed into bed with the dead one instead.”
    “That is so gross,” Cayley protested.
    “I know. But it gets even grosser than that. He screams, and he jumps out of bed. He knocks the lamp over, so that he can’t see where he’s going. He’s groping around in a panic, but after a while he finds a door, and a doorknob.”
    He stopped abruptly and frowned, and then he raised his left hand to shield his eyes from the glare of the fire.
    “He finds a door and a doorknob,” Cayley prompted him. “What then?”
    But Charlie kept on frowning into the darkness.
    “What is it, man?” Remo asked him.
    Mickey turned around. “Something out there?”
    Charlie pointed toward the edge of the river. “There’s somebody there. No, just there. See him? Just left of those tules.”
    It was hard to see anything, because the smoke from the fire was blowing in front of them. But they could just make out the figure of a man in a black wide-brimmed hat. He was standing not more than seventy feet away, not moving, but obviously watching them.
    Remo picked up his rifle and stood up. “Hey, man! What you doing there? You’re not spying on us or nothing?”
    The man didn’t