Eli McMorn and the Strange Case of Kill Devil Hill – Part 17

The Beretta roared in my hands and before the echo of its morose report faded, red pain lanced across the side of my head, just below my right ear. Ignoring the raw pain, I sighted down the length of the gun’s barrel again and squeezed off another round. This time, hot lead struck the copperhead snake just behind its head, nearly severing it from its tumescent body.

Both women atop Kill Devil Hill squawked in mirthless surprise and spun on their heels as a thin cloud of mephitic smoke from the discharged gun wafted away on the acrid breeze towards old Claiborne. The trembling woman in the pumpkin-orange shirt was too stunned to speak but jumped back, startled, an instant later when she saw the dead snake near her booted foot. I holstered my sidearm and said the first thing that came to mind.

“Eli McMorn, ladies. At your service.”

No sooner had I put my gun away, orange shirt drew a gun of her own. It was a small Ruger SR 22. It wasn’t the first time that I’d been on the wrong end of one.

The woman’s pallid hands shook, and the gun’s menacing muzzle jiggled slightly. Watching it made me nauseous. “You mind pointing that in another direction? I’d hate for it to go off.”

I touched the right side of my face with my left hand, and it came away bloody. My first shot not only missed the venomous snake, but the round had ricocheted, nearly taking my head off. I unslung my pack, knelt and dug around for my first-aid kit.

“Who are you?” orange shirt asked, gun raised.

I glanced up. I could read the distrust on their haggard faces. Not that I blamed them. They were in the middle of these ominous, wild woods with an armed stranger. Women in Claiborne were smart to remember that the murder rate here is six times the national average and that people go missing all the time. For all they knew, I was the Claiborne Ripper.

The other woman, the calmer of the two, was closer. She was thin and tall, almost elvish in appearance. She wore a faded Black Sabbath t-shirt over Levis and hiking boots.

I handed her my press badge. “Eli McMorn, The Claiborne Herald,” she read from the laminated card.

In an attempt to put them at ease, I gave them my best smile, a hapless, toothy grin that said I was harmless. “Now that you know who I am, why don’t you put the gun away, so we can all be friends?”

Orange shirt gave her companion a dubious look. Orange shirt was the older of the two girls and the one in charge. Her short black hair was covered mostly by an old Claiborne Colonels baseball cap.

“What are your names and what are you doing here?” I asked as I began to patch up the cut below my ear. The hilltop pebbles beneath my right knee dug into the skin of my bony kneecap. I stood up to relieve the discomfort and that’s when orange shirt worked the slide to chamber a round.

“I’m Kat Corwin, and this is Abby Armitage,” she said, nodding towards her friend. “We’re Claiborne State researchers, and you’re in our camp. This is your invitation to leave.”

She thumbed off the gun’s safety and leveled the barrel at my chest.

(All rights reserved. This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.)