Page 50 of Dark Sky

“When he came back and got down into the brush with me, he said he thought he’d heard something out there. My first thought was the elk were coming, just like you said they might. So I strung an arrow and got ready. I hoped it would get light really fast so I could see better. Zsolt was right behind me looking over my shoulder to help me spot a bull. It was a pretty cool moment. It was like when you’re coding and you start to realize something huge—a breakthrough—is about to happen.”

Price cursed as he tripped on a rock and pirouetted into a nice recovery, Joe thought. It barely broke his concentration, though.

“That big one, Brad, snuck up on us and was standing rightover the top of me before I even realized he was there,” Price said. “He scared the shit out of me and he took Zsolt by complete surprise, which until that second I didn’t think possible. It’s like he wastransportedright on top of us.”

“They know how to walk quietly in the woods,” Joe said. “They were watching us set up the whole time. I found their tracks, but I didn’t know who it was.”

Price said, “No shit about walking quietly. He was just there and I saw he was holding a shotgun on us. Since he was only a few feet away, I didn’t think there was much we could do. Then I realized the smaller one, Kirby, had also come up behind us. He had a gun in one hand, a pistol, and a big knife in the other. For some reason, I was more scared of the knife.”

Joe grunted. He understood.

“Brad ordered us to stand up, which we did. Then he said, ‘All of your electronic shit. All of it—give it to me.’ So we dug everything out of our pockets and handed it over. I’ll tell you, Joe, it was a really weird feeling. It was like being stripped naked in front of strangers.”

“So just the two of them?” Joe asked.

“Yeah. I didn’t meet Earl until we got to the camp. Anyway, they gathered up all of our phones and devices and Zsolt’s weapons. He had three pistols on him and two knives. I never knew he had that much hardware on him. I kept thinking he’d make a cool move like in the movies, you know? Like he’d be in the act of handing his gun over but he’d spin the pistol around upside down on his index finger and start blastingthose guys. But hedidn’t. He didn’t make a move to protect me. He just handed everything over, just like I did.”

“Rumy wasn’t in on it, was he?” Joe asked.

“No,” Price said with a sigh. “He just wasn’t as tough or loyal as I thought he was. What a disappointment he turned out to be.” Then, after a few seconds, Price said, “May he rest in peace.”

Joe asked, “Did you have any idea at the time why they were there?”

“Not at all,” Price said. “I mean, I asked them. I thought maybe we’d trespassed on their space, you know? In fact, I sort of threw you under the bus. I told them Joe Pickett had stationed us there while he went out to look for elk. I told them if they had a problem with us being there, they should take it up with you.”

“Wish they would have,” Joe said.

“Not that it mattered,” Price said. “They took my bow and arrows and all the stuff they made us hand over before they told us to start walking back to camp. They had their horses tied up about a quarter mile away and mounted up and herded us back to the camp like we were a couple of stray cows. Again, I kept thinking Zsolt would do something, like whip around and spook the horses or jump on those guys. But he just walked alongside with his head down.

“I kept thinking, ‘What do these rubes want with us?’ I thought about all kinds ofDeliveranceshit. ‘Squeal like a pig, Steve-2,’ I thought.”

Price said it in a faux southern accent that Joe thought offensive.

“What about Tim Joannides?” Joe asked. “You acted like you weren’t very surprised he turned on you.”

“No,” Price said, “Iwassurprised when I saw him standing there with Earl. But when I thought about it, well, I should have known better. I should have been more ruthless with him. I let sentiment overtake me, and that’s one thing that will kill you in Silicon Valley.”

“Meaning what?” Joe asked. He was mildly curious, but he was also cognizant of the very dire situation they were in. It continued to snow, and the temperature had dropped into the mid-twenties. It would only get colder as the day went on, and the night might be brutal. They had no food and no weapons. They had very little survival gear and few tools to make a shelter. Their heavy winter gear was back in the camp or stuffed into gear bags on Brad’s string of horses.

If he could keep Price distracted and talking—not a tough thing to do, he’d learned—he might be able to stave off the inevitable disorientation and panic. To have any chance of getting away, Joe thought, he had to keep Price engaged and moving forward. Not doing so might slow them down or get them killed.

“Do you know anything about Aloft, my holding company?” Price asked.

“Nope.”

“Everybody knows me for ConFab, which is a division of Aloft. But ConFab came later. I founded Aloft with Tim back in our dorm room at Stanford. We were fifty-fifty partners and our brilliant idea was to write software that would lift people up—hence the name—and that would help end users to createnetworks of friends and relatives that everybody involved could access easily on their phones...”

For twenty-five minutes, even as they crawled over and through downed and twisted trees that had been destroyed by a microburst and left a landscape that looked bombed, Price kept talking.

Joe understood parts of it and the rest wafted away over his head. When Price finally paused to grimace at a bloody scratch on the back of his hand from a sharp branch, Joe broke in.

“So the idea was that on a single screen on your phone you could see the exact locations of all members of your group wherever they were at the same time.”

“As long as they had their phones with them, yes,” Price said.

“It sounds intrusive,” Joe said.

Price’s face reddened. “No,” he said with force. “It wasn’t designed to be intrusive. It was designed to create a richer community among friends and family members. Everyone in each circle had to opt in, after all.

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