Free Effigies by Mary Anna Evans

wings.
    Faye put her head down and ran harder. She could hear Joe behind her, but now, just this once, she might be able to outrun him, because she was on the side of the angels. Come hell or high water, she was going to save this magnificent bird built out of earth. Presuming it was really there. But how would she ever know if this man destroyed it before she got a chance to see?
    “Faye, it’s not worth getting killed over.” Joe’s voice came closer. “He’s mad, and he’s high. He might be sorry later, but you’d still be dead.” She kept running. When she felt Joe’s arms wrap around her chest and slam her to the ground, she was mightily perturbed that he could overtake her and tackle her, with enough wind left over to talk to her while he was doing it.
    The tractor ground to a halt a few feet from the mound’s wing, and Faye was jubilant. He’d seen them and he didn’t want witnesses to the destruction. Then the headlights swung around and the beast started rolling in their direction.
    “Get up, get up, get off me!” she chanted, shoving at Joe. “He’s coming this way.”
    The tractor was moving at four times the speed Calhoun had used to intimidate the archaeologists only a day before. This was not simple intimidation. He was announcing his intention to roll right over them.
    Jumping up in one motion, Joe grabbed Faye by the hand and yanked her onto her feet. By stumbling and sliding and taking impossibly long strides, she managed to keep up with him, but where would they go? Oka Hofobi’s house lay across the road, hidden in the dark. Its cozy safety beckoned her, but Joe had other ideas. A dense forest was his notion of safety, not a homey brick house. If she could have gotten a breath, she would have reminded him that Calhoun’s tractor could eat trees for breakfast, but Joe was in no state to listen to reason. They plunged into a forest so dense and dark that only Joe’s sharp eyes kept them from slamming headfirst into a waiting tree.
    A tree crashed to the ground behind them. Still, Faye was beginning to feel some hope. They were moving a lot faster than the tractor now, since it took a considerable amount of time for Calhoun to pause and batter down the trees in his way.
    Joe kept dragging her deeper into a sheltering thicket that she couldn’t see. When he stopped, she crashed hard into his back. Only then did she realize why their flight had ended so abruptly. The tractor had stopped moving.
    A flashlight beam wavered in the air, swinging back and forth in a search pattern that said Calhoun didn’t know where they were. Joe firmly pushed her behind a tree, but he did it slowly, so that she wouldn’t put a foot down on a twig and give them away with a dry, wooden snap. Then he vanished behind a tree located precisely between her and danger, because that was simply who he was.
    Don’t breathe so hard , she told herself, as if she believed that her mind could control her body’s autonomic nervous system. When her breathing quieted, she wondered what other powers her mind possessed that she didn’t know about.
    Her vision and hearing and sense of smell sharpened in response to danger, obeying prehistoric instructions buried in her DNA. Things that she would never ordinarily have noticed assaulted her now, sometimes painfully. This must be how Joe, with his woodsman’s gifts, felt all the time.
    She could hear the creak of the fabric in Calhoun’s pants every time he bent a knee and took a step. She couldn’t smell him—only Joe had senses that refined—but she could smell something acrid. What was it?
    Smoke. It was smoke. Was she smelling the remnants of the pot that Calhoun had been enjoying a few hours before, still clinging to his clothes? No, it was simple wood smoke.
    Calhoun’s boots continued to crunch through the underbrush.
    How long he looked for them Faye couldn’t say, though she did know that the flashlight’s beam played more than once over the bark of the tree that