“There’s only one way to find out, but I’m not leading you and Tucker down there.”
“It’s crazy to go down there at all, Vicky. We know where they are now. We’d better get out of here while we can and try to find Eric.”
“We don’t really know until one of us sees if there’s a camp. Look, it’s not as steep here, so I won’t use their road. Sneaking down there on foot, I can find a way through the woods. But you and Tucker need to wait over there in those trees and stay out of sight.”
“Dammit Vicky, I don’t like this one bit!” Jonathan whispered. “If this is the entrance to their camp, they’ve probably got a guard posted, watching this road and all of their perimeter. They may have already seen us, for all we know.”
“Then it’s too late to worry about it, isn’t it? Look, we’ve got to know where they’ve taken Shauna, so we can tell Eric if we find him. Just trust me, Jonathan. I’ll be all right.”
Jonathan wasn’t convinced but agreed to wait when she made it clear that she wasn’t going to change her mind. Vicky then picked her way through the woods off to one side of the rutted two-track. She didn’t have to go far though to discover that it came to an abrupt dead-end. There was no camp, no vehicles and none of the men she’d seen taking Shauna away. But she knew for sure that they’d been here, because the horses they’d taken were all lying dead in the grassy turnabout. Vicky was both heartbroken and furious as she made her way over to them. The animals had all been shot in the head, no doubt simply because those bastards that took them had no more use for them once they got here. The story told by all the tracks in the road was clear now. The men had left their vehicles hidden here when they raided the cabin, and after bringing Shauna and the things they’d taken back with them, they had loaded up and driven away. Vicky knew even as she understood what had happened here that there was no way she and Jonathan could ever hope to find Shauna now. There was no telling how far they would take her, and now that they were in vehicles and on the road, it was impossible to follow their trail. Seeing what they were capable of right here before her eyes, in the senseless slaughter of those innocent animals, Vicky could only fear the worst for Megan’s mom. She turned away from the disgusting scene and walked back to where she’d left Jonathan and Tucker.
“That’s some sick shit right there, Vicky. It really is! They had no reason to kill those horses. Why didn’t they just leave them there and let them fend for themselves if they didn’t need them anymore?”
“I don’t know, Jonathan. The same reason they burned the cabin and barn, I guess. I don’t think those men are soldiers, but I may be wrong. Whoever they are, it doesn’t look good for Shauna. What are we going to do, Jonathan? There’s no way we’ll be able to find her.”
“No, you’re probably right about that. It sucks, but I don’t see how we can help her. We’d better focus on finding Eric, because at least we know where he was headed. If we can find him and tell him what happened, maybe he’ll have an idea of what to do. We need to try, because there’s no sense in him coming all the way back here only to find the cabin gone, especially if he really does find Megan and has her with him.”
“What are we going to do about food and shelter though, Jonathan? How are we going to travel that far with only one horse and nothing to eat, not to mention blankets or sleeping bags or anything to help us survive the cold?”
“We’ll figure it out, Vicky. While I was waiting on you down there, I just remembered something Bob mentioned one time when he was still at the cabin with me and Shauna. I was in a lot of pain at the time, and probably forgot half of what he said, but he was talking about all his mountain man stuff and how those old-timers used to live up here back in the day. One thing I do remember was that he said something about keeping a cache nearby.”
“A cache? Like what?”
“Just a small cache of supplies. He didn’t say for sure, but I got the impression he was talking about food. He said the mountain men and prospectors and other folks sometimes did that if they were worried about having to take off in a hurry because of Indian attacks or something.”
“Oh wow! That could be good! Do you know where it is?”
“No. At that time I couldn’t think about walking or even riding a horse. Bob said he would show me later, when I was able. That’s all he said about it, other than that it was at the base of a cliff nearby. He didn’t say, but I got the impression it might be in a small cave or something. Don’t count on it, Vicky, because it may have just been another one of his stories he made up. The old guy actually thought he was a mountain man, I think.”
“Well, it’s worth looking for anyway.”
“Yeah, but first we should go back up to his place and see if there’s anything we can salvage from the fire. Maybe everything didn’t burn. If we hurry, we can get there before dark. At least we have Tucker, so you won’t have to carry me all the way up there on your back,” Jonathan grinned.
Returning to the site of the cabin was the place to start, even if this cache Bob had spoken of was a product of his imagination. They might find nothing left there, but at least they’d be back on familiar ground, and it was probably safer there than anywhere else, as it was unlikely those men would return after completing what they came for.
“I’ll ride with you on Tucker again if you don’t mind being crowded. We won’t have to worry as much about being quiet now.”
“Sure, I don’t mind at all, and I doubt if Tucker does. He’s a big, strong horse,” Jonathan said.
“Yes, he is, and I am so glad we brought him with us this morning! If we hadn’t, he’d be dead like those other poor babies. That just makes me so sad. Why are people so mean?”
“Because they can be, Vicky. They don’t think they’ll have to answer for it now, so they do whatever they want. Killing innocent animals for no reason is about as low as it gets, I guess, and I reckon if they’ll do that, they’ll do anything.”
Vicky knew Jonathan was right, and it sickened her to think of Shauna’s fate in the hands of men of that ilk. She and Jonathan would be right there with her if not for the simple fact that he’d wanted to get out of the cabin that morning and work on rehabilitating his leg. But because the two of them had escaped capture, Shauna had one small glimmer of hope, and it was what Jonathan had suggested. They needed to find Eric Branson, and fast, and tell him what happened. From what Jonathan had told her of the man, if anyone could do the impossible, it was Megan’s father. He’d been gone far too long for them to ever catch him, but at least they knew where he was headed, and going there to look for him was the only logical thing to do.
It took the rest of the afternoon to make it back to the site of the destruction at Bob Barham’s place, and by the time they arrived the sun was going down and the wind was already starting to get chilly. Smoke still rose from both structures, but the flames had mostly burned down, allowing them to approach quite close. The all-wood cabin with its cedar shake roof had been consumed quickly, but there was a pile of rubble remaining that Jonathan said would be worth going through once it had cooled down sufficiently.
“We may be able to salvage some of Bob’s tools,” Jonathan said. “Maybe an axe head or something useful like that. No chance of any blankets or extra clothing though. It’s going to get really cold out here tonight, Vicky. I hope we don’t freeze to death!”
Vicky knew Jonathan had little experience with cold weather, especially the extreme cold of high elevations in the Rockies. He was right that it was going to get cold fast, but at this point, it was still survivable, and at least the weather was clear, so they didn’t have to worry about a blizzard. “We need to find a place to shelter from the wind, behind a big boulder or something, and then we’ll pile up some rocks opposite of it and build a fire. It will reflect some of the heat and make the fire more effective. We can pile up some spruce boughs around us and under us for insulation.
They did all that and it was far better than being out in the open, but whenever th
ey tried to sleep, they soon found themselves shivering each time the fire burned down, and keeping it punched up was going to keep them awake all night.
“We need to get closer,” Vicky said.
“If we get any closer to the fire than we already are, we’re going to start roasting.”
“I don’t mean to the fire, Jonathan. I mean to each other. It’s a survival technique to prevent hypothermia. Sharing body heat. It’s more effective without clothing between the bodies though.”
“For real?” Jonathan looked at her with an expression of disbelief.
“Yes, for real! Unless you’d rather sit up all night shivering and putting wood on the fire.”
Seven
BEFORE THEY STRIPPED DOWN to their underwear, Vicky made it clear to Jonathan that this was strictly about sharing body heat for the purpose of survival, and that she wasn’t interested in fooling around. Jonathan couldn’t deny his own interest, but he did his best not to let it show and said nothing, enjoying the close contact with her for what it was, and thankful that she had thought of it. She was certainly right about the effectiveness of the technique. The skin-on-skin contact while wrapped together in their outer garments to keep the warmth in made an amazing difference, maybe even the difference in life and death as the temperatures plummeted during the night. Despite all they’d lost today, they still had each other, and Jonathan felt especially lucky to be stranded there with someone as caring, smart and beautiful as Vicky Singleton. He was learning new things from her every day, and he knew without her help now, he wouldn’t survive out here.
Jonathan was warm enough snuggled there with Vicky, but he still had a hard time falling asleep, even after she dozed off. He couldn’t stop thinking about what Shauna might be going through that night and it was agonizing knowing he was powerless to help her. Jonathan had developed a lot of respect for that woman over the past several weeks, especially after the two of them had to make their way out here alone when Eric didn’t return from his mission for Lieutenant Holton. It sucked that she hadn’t been able to evade those men today like he and Vicky had, and Jonathan felt terrible that he hadn’t been there with her to try and intervene when it happened. Shauna was a fighter and had already saved his butt when they were attacked on the way into Boulder while riding the bicycles. It made him feel like crap that he couldn’t do the same for her and thinking about all that kept him awake for hours. He and Vicky would go and find Eric, but Jonathan didn’t have a lot of hope that it would do Shauna much good. A lot of time could pass before Eric found her, if he ever did.
Jonathan finally fell asleep sometime in the early morning hours, but it seemed like only minutes before he woke up shivering again. When he opened his eyes, he saw why. Vicky was no longer close against him, but was up and gathering more wood for the fire that she’d already punched up from last night’s coals. It was daylight, but the sun hadn’t cleared the ridge to the east of them yet and wouldn’t for another hour. Jonathan pulled his clothes and jacket back on and warmed his hands near the fire.
“Did you finally get some sleep?” Vicky asked.
“Yeah, not much, but some. I’m sorry if I kept you awake.”
“You didn’t. I had a hard time sleeping too, but at least we didn’t freeze to death.”
“Thanks to you we didn’t!”
“That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“Sleeping nearly naked with you? Heck no, it wasn’t!”
She blushed and then smiled. “It could have been a lot worse if you were stuck out here with Eric instead, huh?”
“We’d probably both just have to freeze to death in that case.”
“It’s amazing what a difference one day can make isn’t it?” Vicky was staring over at the site of the cabin now, reduced to a pile of blackened rubble. “Yesterday we woke up in a cozy warm cabin, making coffee and breakfast on a wood stove. Now, all we have is the clothes on our backs, and no breakfast, and no coffee.”
“Now that you mention it, yeah, I’m pretty hungry. And you don’t want to know what I’d do for a hot cup of coffee. No telling when we’ll get that again. Dang, I wish you hadn’t reminded me!”
“Sorry! Hey, before we get any hungrier, we’d better get to looking for that cache you were talking about. If it is real, it might take a while to find it.”
“Yeah, and if it isn’t, then we’d better find something to shoot pretty fast. We won’t last long up here without food, especially as cold as it is.”
“Bob said it was at the base of a cliff? Did he say which direction it was from here?”
“No, he didn’t go into any details because he said he was going to show it to me himself. I was in no shape to go there with him though before he left with Shauna to go to the ranch, so he never got the chance. You’ve explored some around here with her though. Have you seen any cliffs that might be the one?”
“That’s just it. I really haven’t. There’s plenty of steep slopes around here, but not an actual cliff that I know of. I’m trying to think of where one might be. Looking at the way that drainage runs, it’s bound to be somewhere off to one side of that, but we don’t even know if it was upstream or down from here.”
“Well, we didn’t see anything like that yesterday, and we went all the way down to that road and back. Maybe it’s upstream, somewhere between here and up on the Divide Trail.”
“That’s what I’m thinking, and I believe that’s where we ought to start looking.”
Once Tucker was saddled up, Jonathan mounted him with Vicky’s help and they headed up the steep slopes of the drainage towards the Continental Divide. The springs feeding the creek were only a short distance up, and beyond them the basin widened, and it was in that area that it seemed more likely they would find this “cliff” that Bob spoke of. They explored several frustrating dead ends, but it wasn’t until they were almost up to the saddle of the ridge, near the place where Jonathan broke his leg, that Vicky spotted something high up on a steep slope to the south that looked promising. It was more of a small rock wall than a “cliff,” but it was the closest they’d seen to one, and it seemed to overhang beyond vertical, indicating there could be a cave at the base.
“Tucker can’t get up there, so you’re going to have to wait here,” Vicky said.
“Yeah, yeah. I know the drill. Just be careful, okay? Take the .44 Magnum with you and if there is a cave, make sure it’s not a bear or mountain lion den!”
“Not likely, but I’ll make sure nothing’s home before I go in.”
Jonathan didn’t like the idea of poking around in caves out here himself. It would really suck to crawl into one and corner a big pissed-off animal like that. Thinking about it reminded him how lucky he was to have Vicky and Tucker. He figured if he’d been left alone out here in the shape he was in, it would just be a matter of time before something came stalking out of the woods and made a meal out of him. Predators always preferred weak or crippled prey, given a choice, and he figured being eaten alive would be about the worst way to go he could imagine. It made him so nervous thinking about it that he wanted to call out to Vicky to make sure she was still okay. She was out of sight from where he waited, but they were also close enough to that trail up on the ridge above that he didn’t want to risk it. There was no way of knowing who might be passing through the area, and keeping a low profile was essential. But she was gone so long that he was almost ready to break that rule when he finally spotted her coming back down. Vicky was carrying something balanced across her shoulder that looked like a wool blanket, tied up into a bundle. In her free hand, she was carrying a short rifle.
“I hit the jackpot! Old Bob wasn’t just telling a tall tale, Jonathan! I found his cache!”
“No shit? What was in it?”
“Food, like you said! And check out this rifle! It’s a .22 Magnum, like the varmint gun my grandpa had! There were two 50-round boxes of cartridges for it. There was also a nice hunting knife, a compass, a map and a couple of pencils, a box of waterpro
of matches and this blanket. We’ll be warmer at night wrapped up in this, Jonathan!”
“You’ll share it with me? Do we still get to take our clothes off?”
“That depends on whether you behave,” she laughed.
“I will! But right now, I’m starving! What is there to eat?”
Vicky put down her load and untied the blanket. Jonathan grinned when he saw what old Bob Barham had stashed in there. It was certainly an emergency survival cache, stocked with high-energy rations that included freeze-dried backpacker meals, high energy bars, and vacuum-packed jerky that he’d probably made himself. It wasn’t a huge amount, but used carefully, there was enough to see him and Vicky through a few days, and the .22 Magnum carbine would be ideal for hunting smaller game to supplement it if needed.
“This is awesome, Vicky! Did you get everything he had in there?”
“I think so. It was dark, of course, and the cave was really small. He’d piled rocks and brush in front of it to hide it, so that’s what took me so long. It was just big enough for a person to crawl inside and I had to feel my way around.”
“No freakin’ way I’d do something like that! You’re a lot braver than I am, Vicky!”
“Well I knew a lion or bear couldn’t have gotten in there the way he had it closed off, and it’s too high and cold up here for rattlesnakes, so what was there to worry about? It paid off, right?”
Jonathan gave her a big hug and told her it sure did. Then they opened a couple of the energy bars and shared them before heading back down to the cabin. There were two things Jonathan wanted to do there; one was to look through the cabin rubble for anything else they might need, and the other, now that they had something to write with, was to leave Eric a note somewhere that he’d find it. It was as likely he’d arrive here first as it was they’d find him—probably more so, actually—and Jonathan wanted him to know what happened to Shauna and where the two of them had gone.
They left the note at the base of the marker Eric had erected for Bob Barham’s grave. Vicky had the better handwriting, so she wrote it on the back of part of the map that had been in Bob’s cache. The map itself was a national forest map showing hundreds of thousands of acres of the surrounding federal lands. After looking it over they tore off a section that they knew was far from their route and therefore unneeded, and it was big enough to write a detailed note. Vicky worded it so that if the men that had done this or anyone else with bad intent found it, they wouldn’t be able to make sense of where the two of them were headed, but Eric would know. She also described the location of the place they’d followed the trail of the raiders to, which was Shauna’s last known location. If the same men came back and read that, they would know they’d been followed, but Jonathan and Vicky thought that was unlikely anyway and that it wouldn’t make a difference if they did. But if Eric read it, that location would be crucial information to him, even though they doubted he would be able to follow the trail from that point any better than they could have. It was going to be heartbreaking for Eric if he had indeed found Megan and returned here only to discover her mother had been abducted in the meantime. But they left him as much information as they could and that was all Jonathan and Vicky could do unless they found him first, either at the reservation or somewhere along the way back from there.
Feral Nation Series Box Set 2 [Books 4-6] Page 40
