She decided to risk it.
Turning away from the ditch, she hoisted her pack on her shoulder and began to jog in the direction of the park.
In twenty minutes, I’ll be a third of the way there, she told herself. If it gets dark at nine, then I can be in the park and bedded down by ten.
She checked that her gun was still snugly fitted in the small of her back and held the slim blade in her hand and picked up her pace.
With no moon to go by, she tried to count the minutes but decided that was too distracting when she needed to be on the lookout for people. Her experience with Correy’s group had told her that when they came, they would come noisily. She assumed they wouldn’t bother with carts for this errand, nor would they come on foot. She was banking on the fact that she would hear—she would literally feel—mounted riders coming down the road toward her well before she could see them.
The gun she took off Gil was a semi-automatic pistol. It had a full clip of 15 rounds. As far as Sarah was concerned, if she had to she could take out at least a dozen before going down herself, especially if she was in a good strategic position when they found her, like in a tree. Problem was, they knew she was armed. They would probably dress accordingly. Nonetheless, the gun gave her strength. No matter how my story wraps up, she found herself thinking, I’m not quitting without taking a good many of them with me.
Winded and distracted by thoughts of which direction they might come from, the sound of a branch snapping jolted her out of her near complacency. Silently, she slid into the ditch on her stomach and pulled out the gun. She tried to soften her panicked breathing—the only sound in the night for miles. Her eyes darted down the highway and into the brush across the road. It sounded like a branch, so that meant the woods. Was someone in there? Someone watching her? Following her?
She lay without moving, her fingers growing slick with sweat around the handle of the gun, but she was too afraid to risk wiping her hands on the ground or her jeans. Had she imagined the sound? If it didn’t come again, did that mean whoever it was had seen her jump in the ditch and was now waiting for her? She blinked and tried to see in the gloom of the darkest part of the night, but the trees and bushes across the road remained impermeable and solid.
She knew she had all night to make a distance of what now was probably only a little more than a mile. All night to wait this guy out, whoever he was, and not do something crazy impatient like jump up and try to run the rest of the way to the park entrance.
All night.
She took a steadying breath and was about to stand up and chance that it was her imagination after all when she saw him. He materialized out of the shadows from deep within the woods. At first she thought she might be hallucinating. He stepped quietly, almost gently, onto the vacant highway and lifted his nose high up to catch the scent.
Catch her scent.
Sarah’s heart pounded in her chest at the sight of the sheer size of the black bear. How could something so big creep so silently? She aimed the gun at the animal’s head. She’d read that some bears have skulls so hard that bullets fired from terrified hikers just ricochet off them, serving only to enrage the beast and prompt it to charge.
Could it smell her? Could it smell her fear?
Frozen and determined not to move unless she had to empty the entire clip into the animal, which she was fully prepared to do, Sarah fought not to allow the whimpers of terror escape her trembling lips. The bear rose up on his back legs and staggered to the middle of the road. The odor from his foul-smelling pelt reached Sarah like a slap. When it hit her she jerked and the gun, slick with her perspiration, slid out of her grasp. She gasped and lunged for the falling gun just as the beast snapped its head in her direction, its eyes roaming, flashing and scanning the ditch until it found her.
Groping desperately for the gun that had skidded to the bottom of the ditch, Sarah scrambled further into the ravine. She looked back over her shoulder just in time to see the monster standing at its full height, roaring in fury. And then he charged her.
17
Angie saw the bear first. Because she was on foot and because the bear was clearly distracted by something else, it hadn’t noticed her. And that would have been fine. She could have just waited and let the animal go on its way.
Obviously, Jeff and his lot had other ideas.
“Cor, blimey, it’s a fucking bear!”
The first shot whistled by Angie’s ear and she dove into the dirt along the side of the road to avoid being what she was sure would laughingly be referred to as collateral damage by those assholes should she get accidentally shot in the back. She stayed down while the air blistered with what sounded like a fusillade of bullets tearing into the bear, the bushes, the ground and, as they would later discover, even one of their own horses.
Angie waited patiently for the slaughter to stop. It had been her idea to look for the Yank at night. After three full days of no trace of her, Denny was murderous in his intention to kill someone if she wasn’t recaptured soon. It seemed an obvious solution to look for her by night. That’s when the stupid bitch was sleeping, right? That’s when they’d catch her napping.
Unfortunately, it also meant going out with these idiots in conditions even less manageable than when she was faking being a kidnapped victim in the wilds of Ireland. And because she insisted on walking point, the clods seemed to be having trouble remembering that she was in charge.
She stood up now. “You bloody idiots!” she yelled to them. “Do ya think you’ve told everyone within a fifty kilometer radius that we’re here? So much for sneaking up on her!”
The men laughed. “Don’t get your knickers in a wad, Ange,” Jeff said. “Or if you do, I’ll be happy to help you unwad them.”
The other men laughed again.
“Was that my horse you daft feckers killed?” Angie said, walking toward the bear carcass. She looked at the mountain of steaming, brown, bloody fur. She put her hand to her nose. “God, he stinks.” She turned on the others as they rode up to where she stood. “Where did he come from? I thought we killed ‘em all off back in the Middle Ages. And you nearly killed me in the process.”
“We had to kill ‘im, Ange,” one of the men said as he dismounted. “He coulda gone for us or killed the horses.”
“So by all means, let’s us kill the horses before he can,” she muttered. She snatched the reins out of his hands. “No sense in trying to tip-toe around now. You lot have made it clear we’re here.”
“Hey! That’s my ride!” The man pulled the reins out of Angie’s hands and raised a hand to her, but before he could take a step, a stunned look came into his eyes and he dropped to his knees. The reins fell from his fingers as he smacked face-first into the asphalt of the highway. Angie looked over his body at Jeff, who sat on his horse directly behind the man on the ground.
“What did you…?” Angie looked at Jeff and then the body on the road in front of her. “Shit, Jeff. Did you just knife him?”
“It’s called maintaining order, Ange, and I’m surprised I have to tell you about that. What kind of respect you think you’ll have with the men if you don’t enforce it? You can thank me later. Bill, grab the reins and hand ‘im to Angie. Good lad.”
The young man named Bill, his face white at the sudden murder of one their number, literally jumped to grab the horse’s reins, causing the already agitated animal to shy violently and bolt away from the group.
“Go get ‘im, ya daft bugger!” Jeff yelled at him as the boy turned and raced after the panicked horse. Angie shook her head and walked over to the ditch by the bear’s carcass. She pulled out a flashlight and directed the beam into the ravine.
“Find something?” Jeff walked his horse over to her.
“I don’t know, but the bastard was looking at something before you guys came roaring up. Something in the ditch.”
Jeff swung down from the saddle and the two of them peered into the ravine. “Nothing but a couple of corpses down there,” he sa
id.
“Go down and check it out.”
“Aw, shit, Angie. We can’t check every dead body we find in every ditch from Hereford to the coast.”
“You want to tell that to Denny if we have to explain why we didn’t find her? You want to explain how there was one ditch you were too much of a pussy to go down into and maybe that was the one ditch she was in?”
“Those bodies are fucking dead down there, Angie. Jesus, you can smell how dead they are from here.”
Angie looked at him and he sighed and handed her the reins. “Speaking of pussy,” he muttered. “I must be barking to think this’ll lead anywhere but me picking maggots outta my hair.”
Angie directed the flashlight onto the pile of bodies. It looked like two but might be more. It was hard to tell where one set of arms and legs ended and more began.
“Aw, Christ, it’s revolting! This one’s fecking head isn’t even attached. Are you happy? Both are dead in the most disgusting, rotting, possible way that any poor bastards can be dead. Or would you like me to bring some bits up to you to prove it?”
Angie glanced back at the dead man in the road. If Jeff still had his knife on him she’d have him make sure both bodies were dead. As it was…she was tired and the night was a complete balls up. One lost horse. One dead horse. One dead man. And another night where the bitch was still free.
“Never mind,” she said to Jeff as he climbed out of the ditch. “The night’s a disaster. We’ll start again in the morning.”
* * *
Sarah waited until she could only hear the mourning doves herald the new dawn, and still she waited. Finally, she pushed the decaying corpse off her from where she’d pulled him so many hours before and scrambled up the side of the ditch, snatching up the gun from where she’d dropped it. In the half light of the new day, she could see that the corpse she’d slept with last night—and she had actually fallen asleep at one point—was a decayed and rotting lump of flesh that could be either male or female. She said a silent prayer of thanks to whoever it was and climbed up to the highway.
It was not yet quite light, but nowhere near as dark as she needed it to be. She ran, slapping at the things that still crawled in her hair and down her shirt, trying to remind herself as she had for the hours she’d endured their tickling last night that their very revolting nature had saved her life.
She ran as if she were outrunning wild horses on her trail. She ran as if John were at the end of the road. She ran knowing she was racing the light to stay alive. When she saw the exit ramp to the park she didn’t hesitate, but veered down it and never stopped until she saw the park entrance, a large sign that spanned the four-lane that led into it, weeds and bushes flourishing from the cracks in the pavement.
As soon as she entered the park, a feeling of peace descended on her. She slowed her run to a jog and tried to remember what Declan had told her about finding her way inside the Beacons. It was five hundred miles of rough terrain and it wouldn’t do for her to wander all five hundred of it and not come out the other side any closer to her destination.
She found a wide elm tree and pulled herself into the first layer of steady branches. She was still close enough to the entrance that she didn’t trust Angie and her gang wouldn’t follow her in, but she wanted to rest and she needed to think. From where she sat she was surprised to see a considerable amount of animal activity. This place must be deserted if the rabbits and hedgehogs were roaming about without fear, she thought. She felt in her bag for the slingshot but decided she needed to get further into the park before trying her hand at it.
From what Declan told her, she needed to travel due west as much as she could for as long as she could. If she found a cliff or some other natural impasse, she’d take the time to find her way around it. Until then…she looked up in the sky to see the sun was nearly at its apex. She climbed down and moved deeper into the park. There was a walking path but it had been overgrown since The Crisis, as clearly nobody was keeping up the maintenance on it. That suited Sarah just fine. The fewer people, the better.
When she came to a little creek, she prayed it wasn’t polluted and dropped to her stomach to drink and wash her face. The sun was directly overhead, but in just a t-shirt it was still too cool. Shivering, she searched the area for sticks and kindling. She thought she was probably a good three hours inside the park and she hoped that was enough. When she piled the sticks on the ground, she took the longest one and dug the end of it into the ground. John had showed her how to find true north back in Jacksonville when he was working on a badge for his Scout troop. She saw the shadow it made was on a level spot and she brushed it free of debris. She placed a tiny pebble at the tip of the shadow it cast.
She had water at this spot and she thought she was far enough in. There didn’t appear to be any trees wide or tall enough to sleep in though, and that worried her. It felt good to be walking around in the daylight after two days of hiding by day.
Did she really feel safe enough to build a fire?
Her stomach growled and she pulled the slingshot out of her bag. She’d seen evidence that there was plenty of small game in the area. Just the thought of cooked meat made her mouth water. She hid her bag under a bush and walked down the overgrown path a bit until she found a large rock she could climb on to hunt from.
Thirty minutes later, she came back to her campsite empty-handed. She examined the pebble on the ground to see that it was now several inches away from the tip of the shadow. She put another pebble down on the new tip of the shadow and drew a line in the dirt with a stick between the two pebbles. If she had done it right, and that might be a pretty big if she realized, and she stood in front and between the two pebbles, the first on her left, then she should be facing true north. That meant that due west was to her left in a straight line. That also meant that she had travelled the last three hours going north instead of west. But it couldn’t be helped and at least now she knew.
Hopefully.
Gauging by the sun that it was about two or so in the afternoon, Sarah decided to dedicate the whole rest of the day to finding food. If she could get at least one meal under her belt, she’d travel a lot farther the next day.
She shivered again and considered running in place to try to warm up, but decided it wasn’t wise to deliberately wear herself out. She took the slingshot and gathered up the sharpest stones that would fit in the pocket and practiced hitting a tree near her camp. She was a terrible shot, throwing the sling down in frustration at one point. Maybe she should try to find fish in the creek instead? But she had no line or hook or bait. She sat and stared at the slingshot and felt the possum bone from last night’s meal with the gypsies poking her through her jeans. With more hunger and weariness than she ever remembered feeling, she got up and filled her pockets with stones and retrieved the slingshot.
It was nearly nightfall before she returned to her campsite, but she came back with two decent sized rabbits. It was all she could do not to gut them with her bare hands and eat them raw. She was hungry enough she thought she could do it without gagging. The long afternoon of hunting had been punctuated with many hours of worry and fear and thoughts of John and David and Mike. It had been thirteen days, nearly two weeks, since David’s murder. Two weeks of mindless terror for Sarah and relentless worry and sadness for her boy.
13 Days after the attack, she thought, wishing she had a journal to write it down in. As long as she used her brain to remember where she came from and how long it had been, she felt there was hope and she could stay sane, or at least grounded. She knew that didn’t make sense but somehow it helped.
And now the fire. She had never made one herself from just flint and sticks, and tonight she didn’t even have the flint, just rocks. She put a slim stick against a rock in a nest of dry leaves and rocked it back and forth in her hands, alternating the tempo in hopes of creating the necessary friction to make the spark she needed.
An hour later, her back aching and damp with sweat in spite of t
he dropping temperature, she still hadn’t succeeded in catching the leaves on fire. She tried to remember how John did it for the Scouts or how David did it on at least a half dozen occasions at the cottage during their first year after the lights went out. She remembered seeing him use a stick as a spindle and rubbing it between his hands—his large, capable hands. She tried to emulate how she remembered him doing it. And as she worked, the bodies of the two rabbits seemed to mock her.
Dear God, would she really have to eat them raw?
She kicked herself for not figuring out the fire question earlier, because now it was too dark to go looking for berries, and unless she was going to eat the meat uncooked she had another hungry night ahead of her.
And a cold one.
Night fell quickly once the light started to go. She dropped the sticks and the spindle and the rock and went to wrap up in the thin blanket from her pack. She hated to sleep out in the open but there was no other option. There were no trees big enough to hold her in this section of the park. Declan had said there were caves, but after her run-in with the bear, Sarah felt better about her odds sleeping out in the open.
She pulled the gun out and dropped it in her lap and wrapped the blanket tightly around her shoulders and leaned up against a large rock. It still held a tiny bit of warmth from the day’s sun. It was hard to believe she had spent all day hunting for food that she now couldn’t eat. She was angry and frustrated with herself but she knew it couldn’t be helped. She had made it this far and she was alive.
Tomorrow would bring another day of opportunities. Tomorrow she would eat. One way or the other.
She slept badly, awakening at every creak in the earth, every hoot or peep from any of the forest’s birds and creatures. Every time she awoke, she gripped the gun in her lap as if she might need to defend herself against monsters in the dark, and every time she was soothed back to sleep by the calm, normal sounds of a forest just going about its business.
Going Gone, Book 2 of the Irish End Games Page 11
