by Neil Mcmahon
Then he traded the bolt cutters for the big pipe wrench, clenching his shaking hands around its steely shaft and hefting it to gauge its balance.
Everything was going to have to go right the first time.
The driving rain slashed at his face, blurring his vision as he eased out the lodge’s door. He stared into the night, crouching, waiting for his eyes to adjust. The bathhouse was about forty yards away. Within half a minute, he could see two entwined figures. Hammerhead was shoving Marguerite up against the wall, his hands working at the waist of her jeans, revealing her pale skin as he pushed them down. His rifle was slung over his shoulder.
The wrench handle was getting wet and slippery. Monks wiped it under his arm and moved forward, quickly closing the forty-yard gap. The rain helped to cover the sound of his steps, and there was no doubt that Marguerite was right about Hammerhead’s mind being far from anything but her just now.
Monks slowed, taking the final steps in a mincing prowl. He was close enough now to hear the big man’s grunts as he worked to rid her of her jeans. He rose out of his crouch, planted his feet, and cocked the wrench like a medieval executioner with a mace. The blow might crush Hammerhead’s skull, but mercy was something that Monks could not afford.
Then he realized that Marguerite had frozen in place, and was staring fearfully at him over Hammerhead’s shoulder.
With ferocious speed, Hammerhead shoved away from her and started to turn, head lowering and hands rising.
Monks swung with all the strength in his arms and shoulders, but it was not the well-placed slam that he had counted on. The wrench caught the side of Hammerhead’s thick skull above the right ear, glancing upward and almost flying out of Monks’s grip.
Hammerhead reeled back but stayed on his feet. With a blood-chilling sound that was part roar and part snarl, he charged at Monks, coming in low with outspread arms like a linebacker.
Monks pivoted off his left foot in a boxer’s slip, and brought the wrench down hard across Hammerhead’s shoulders as he lumbered past. This blow drove him to his knees. Incredibly, he kept slogging forward, clawing at his rifle to unsling it.
Monks leaped after him, boots slipping in the mud. This time, he swung the wrench at Hammerhead’s right upper arm. He felt the snap of the humerus all the way up in his teeth.
Hammerhead roared again and fell onto his side, the broken arm flopping. Monks stepped in and yanked the rifle off his shoulder, then made a quick 360-degree sweep of the camp. Nothing else visible was moving.
His fingers traveled over the rifle’s breech, identifying safety and selector switch. It was similar to the AK-47s he had seen in Vietnam. The only times that he had ever fired assault rifles were a few sessions with AR-15s in basic training. Weapons expertise was not a high priority for medical officers on hospital ships. But after treating enough wounds from larger-caliber weapons like this one, he had familiarized himself with them out of some sort of superstitious dread, as if the guns themselves were the enemy.
Marguerite was still against the wall, eyes wide with shock and jeans pushed down to her hips. Her last-second panic might have saved Hammerhead’s life.
“We need a place to lock him up,” Monks snapped at her. “Come on, quick.”
She started to move like someone coming out of a dream, pointing at a dark shed another twenty yards away, then fumbling to button her pants.
Monks stepped back to Hammerhead and pressed the muzzle against his head.
“All I need is an excuse,” Monks said. “Get up and drop your gear belt.”
Hammerhead got heavily to his knees, then to his feet. Clumsily, with his left hand, he unhooked his web belt and let it fall. Besides the radio, it had a survival knife and extra clips of ammunition. Monks scooped it up and slung it over his shoulder.
“Now get inside there.”
Hammerhead staggered toward the shed, left hand clasping his dangling right arm. Marguerite hurried ahead, unhooking the door’s hasp and swinging it open. Monks could just make out the ghostly shapes of workbenches and machinery inside.
Hammerhead stopped, his face tight with rage and pain.
“You’re dead, motherfucker,” he muttered, and Monks’s meth-charged brain almost ordered his trembling finger to tighten that final quarter inch on the trigger.
Instead, he said, “Turn around.”
Slowly, breathing hard, Hammerhead turned to face the shed.
Monks stepped up behind him, raising the rifle as he moved, and slammed the butt into the back of Hammerhead’s skull. He crashed to the ground like a fallen oak and lay still.
This time, Monks had not had the slightest hesitation. In fact, it had been thrilling.
He dragged Hammerhead into the shed and slammed the door shut. Marguerite dropped in the half-inch bolt that secured the hasp. Her rich black hair was slick and shining with rain like a wet animal pelt, and her eyes shone with an unknowable range of emotions. Monks gripped her shoulders and hugged her hard.
“Let’s get Mandrake,” he said, and sprinted toward the lodge.
19
Monks jogged along behind Marguerite, the warm inert weight of Mandrake bobbing gently on his back, like a child who had fallen asleep in his carrier. She led them to a steep, narrow ravine a quarter of a mile from the main camp. It looked like a giant ax split in a cliff face-the kind that was usually dry, but could become cascades during storms.
“The sensors don’t work when it floods,” she said into his ear, half yelling to be heard over the rushing water.
He shined the flashlight on the muddy, frothing stream, looking for a place to ford. It was about ten yards wide, the depth hard to estimate. The banks were slick and steep, but there were small trees that would serve as handholds.
“What happens when we get across?” he yelled back.
“There’s a trail. But we have to be careful, they’ve got ATVs.”
“Do you know the country out there?”
“Not really. Just right around here.”
Monks decided to worry about that when and if they got that far. He slung the rifle over his shoulder, easing it beside Mandrake’s head.
“Hang on to my belt,” he told her.
They made their slippery way down the near bank, bracing themselves against the trees. At the bottom, he took a tentative step into the stream. It tore at his boot, filling it instantly with a powerful drag that tried to pull his foot out from under him. He crouched, hands outspread in case he fell, then started across.
There was plenty of tangled deadfall underwater that tripped their feet, but gave them more handholds. At midstream, Monks realized with relief that the water was only thigh deep. They floundered the rest of the way across and pulled themselves up the far bank. In the shelter of a big fir, they dropped to the ground, soaked, panting-
But out of the camp.
Monks emptied out his sloshing boots, wishing bitterly that he’d at least had had the intuition to put on lug-soled hiking boots when he’d left his house.
He checked his watch. It was 7:28 P.M. Hammerhead would be missed when he failed to call in at 8 P.M.-maybe earlier, if he came to and his shouts attracted someone, or he managed to kick his way out of the shed. With luck, the sentries would spend some time trying to figure out which way they had gone, but that could not be counted on. Monks figured that they had half an hour at most before they would have to abandon the road and strike off into the wilderness. The going would be much rougher then.
He took the small jar of meth and the paper tube out of his jacket’s zippered inside pocket and handed them to Marguerite. He was acutely aware that their head start was dwindling fast, but an energy charge was worth the extra minute. The next hours, however they turned out, were going to be brutal.
When she was finished, he took his turn. With the drug’s harsh fire piercing his brain, he gave her the flashlight, unslung his rifle, and followed her at a jog. The path was overgrown with weeds, barely visible, but he could see the vestiges
of tire tracks.
His sense of direction was utterly blotted out. He could have been heading toward the moon.
He slogged along at his half-run, working to keep up with the younger, quicker woman. The meth told his brain that he could lope like a wolf all night, but his body, with the days of cumulative fatigue and his clumsy boots and wet clothes and the extra weight he was carrying, was already laboring hard. His ears strained to pick up the sound of an approaching engine over the driving rain.
If the heavily armed, night-goggled maquis caught up with them, it would mean a firefight.
A short one.
When the half-hour was up, Monks guessed that they had gone about two miles. He was starting to get a feel for the terrain. The trail was cut into a mountainside, running at a slight downhill grade. He watched the faint luminescent tunnel that Marguerite’s flashlight opened up in the blurry night, hoping for a flat stretch to one side or the other, but the going was steep, both uphill and down. His body heat from the first strenuous exertions had evened out, and he was noticing that tonight was quite a bit colder than it had been. The raindrops pelting through the flashlight’s beam were taking on the thick, splayed look of turning toward snow. So far, whatever tracks they had left would be hard to follow. But in fresh snow, footprints would be unavoidable-another reason to get off the road.
He decided to head uphill. It might help throw off their pursuers, who would expect them to take the easier course. And downhill was likely to lead them to another flooded ravine like the one they had crossed getting out of camp, but potentially larger and impossible to ford. He watched the light beam intently for the next couple of minutes, and finally settled on a rockslide as a takeoff point.
He slowed to a walk, pulling in deep rasping lungfuls of wet air, and called hoarsely to Marguerite to stop.
“Turn off the light, and don’t turn it on again unless I tell you,” he said when he caught up to her.
But before she clicked off the beam, he caught a glimpse of her eyes. The earlier euphoria was gone. She looked scared and tense, and while it was impossible to tell in the rain, he thought she might be weeping. He realized that with all of his own concerns, he hadn’t thought about the hurricane of violence and emotions that she had been going through.
He put his arm around her shoulders.
“Look, we’re doing great,” he said, speaking forcefully, close to her, as he would to a green ER resident or nurse losing her nerve. “You’re saving this little boy’s life, remember that. Now come on, we’re going to make it.”
He wondered if, in the instant before the light beam vanished, she saw the madness in his own eyes.
20
By midnight, there were two inches of new snow on the ground and the air was thick with big wet flakes, swirling around in a near-blizzard. The going was increasingly harder and colder. They were long past trying to run-now they were just trudging soddenly and blindly in the hope of gaining distance. His feet were aching and at the point of numbness.
He tried not to think about how easy it was to get turned around in these kinds of conditions.
They had made it up the rockslide and onto a ridge, then gradually downward into what seemed to be the floor of a broad valley. The pressing claustrophobic canopy of trees had thinned, yielding to a sense of open space. It was getting to be time for Mandrake’s hourly check, and Monks was looking for a sheltering tree, when he saw Marguerite’s form, barely visible a few yards off to his left, stumble and fall.
He hurried to her side, expecting her to scramble back to her feet. But she lay where she was. He knelt and put his hand on her, feeling her racking shivers. Her clothes, like his, were soaked through. He pulled the flashlight from her pack and shined it on her face. Her eyes were dull and unfocused and her teeth were chattering.
Hypothermia. She needed to warm up, fast. Stopping might cost them their lead, but there was no choice.
Monks turned in a circle, staring futilely into the night for some sign of shelter. The flashlight’s beam, like headlights, showed nothing but the whirling snow. He didn’t dare leave her and scout on his own-he might not be able to find her again.
“Okay, honey, come on,” he said, clicking the flashlight off and stuffing it in his coat pocket. “We’re going to get someplace and warm up. Just a little farther.”
“I can’t feel my feet,” she whispered.
He stood, gripping her wrists, and pulled her upright. She was not a small woman, and it took everything he had. He realized that he also was on the edge of collapse.
With his arm tight around her waist, he walked facing into the driving snow, hoping to run into cliffs at the valley’s edge that would provide a lee. The shapes of trees appeared like specters, and Monks got the dizzying sense that the branches were clutching at them. They stumbled on, slipping and panting, in a nightmare fantasy where all that mattered was the next step toward a goal that they would never reach.
Then he started seeing rocks among the trees-at first stumpy granite boulders thrusting up from the valley floor, then outcroppings and piles of sharp talus. They had come to the base of a mountainside. Up close, in its shelter, the driving snow lost its force and fell as gently as on a Christmas card. Now he could see dimly for ten or fifteen yards. With the dark line of rocks to follow, he decided to take the chance of going on alone to scout for an outcropping that would get them out of the wet. He eased Marguerite back, sitting her down against the slope, then unslung Mandrake and settled him beside her.
“I’ll be back in a couple of minutes,” he said, then added sternly, “Don’t move, you understand?”
She nodded faintly, eyes closed. It was unlikely that she would try, but she might be hallucinating by this point and stumble off toward some imagined safety.
Monks stood for a moment, breathing deeply, trying to gather whatever strength he had left. Then he walked, fifty yards, a hundred. There were dry patches under cliffs that would be better than nothing, but no real shelter. He pushed on for another hundred yards, aching to collapse, and fearing that if he went much farther he wouldn’t be able to make it back.
Then he saw a break in the cliff face, a darker splotch the size of a car. He got out the flashlight. Its beam showed a cavity ten feet deep, where the cliff base sloped back in. Boulders lay tumbled to the sides like buttresses.
He set the flashlight on a rock, leaving it on so he wouldn’t miss it on his return, and started back to get the others. A fierce giddy elation pierced the numb shield of his fatigue. Now they had a chance to make it through this night.
Monks trudged back to the cave with an armload of firewood, dry branches that he’d snapped off a dead tree. Crouching under the low stone roof, he dumped them on the ground and broke them into shorter lengths under his boot, then built a small circle of brick-sized rocks and filled it with pine duff.
Marguerite lay huddled up, shivering and chattering, watching him through glazed eyes. Mandrake was sprawled in his rucksack like a lifeless doll.
With stiff, shaking hands, Monks lit a match. The pine needles glowed briefly, but didn’t catch. The match went out. So did the next one.
He clamped his teeth tight, concentrating, and pawed through the duff for the driest clumps.
This time, the bristles flared up and stayed lit. He fed the flame with other clumps, then with small twigs, and finally layered bigger sticks onto the rocks in a grid, making sure there was plenty of air flow.
When the fire had built to a crackling blaze that gave off real warmth, he knee-walked to Marguerite, unlaced her boots, and pulled them off.
“Get undressed,” he said.
She started working dully at the zipper of her jacket.
Monks lifted Mandrake out of the pack. The rain had soaked through the back of his snowsuit. That would be another blow to his resistance. Monks pulled the wet clothes off and rubbed him down quickly with his pajamas.
Marguerite had managed to get out of her jacket and was struggling to pull her s
weatshirt over her head. Monks freed her from it, then unbuttoned her jeans and pulled them off. He had expected that she would be wearing warm underclothes, but she was not, or even a bra and panties, maybe because of her assignation with Hammerhead. He took her by the hands and pulled her to sit close to the fire. Then he picked up Mandrake and laid him in her lap.
“Put your arms around him,” Monks said. “It’ll warm you both up. I’m going for more wood.”
He made three more trips, scouring the dry areas under trees and overhangs, stoking the fire each time he returned to the cave. Finally, he decided that they had enough firewood to last another couple of hours.
He sank back against a stone wall and pulled off his own sodden clothes. Marguerite was cradling Mandrake like a Junoesque Madonna with child, her long black hair spilling down over both of them. Her eyes were closed, her head still sagging in lethargy, but her skin was starting to take on the flush of returning warmth. The lure to warm his own half-frozen flesh was too much to resist. He knelt and clasped her-just for a few seconds, not long enough to risk that the chill might set her back.
Then, astoundingly, he felt the tickle of arousal in his groin.
He moved away in quick embarrassment and got to the other side of the fire.
It brought a whole new level of meaning to the term survival instinct.
Monks squatted at the cave entrance like a savage, gazing out into the quiet night, the rifle resting across his thighs. It was just past five A.M. The fire was subdued to embers, which he kept at a careful level, evenly filling the space with warmth and helping to dry the clothes that he’d spread out on rocks and sticks. Marguerite was more animated, helped by the heat and a couple of candy bars that he had coaxed her to eat, the high-sugar fuel that her depleted body needed. He hadn’t been hungry himself, although he should have been ravenous, and he realized that his appetite was killed by the methamphetamine. But he knew he needed food, and forced himself to chew the tasteless bread and baloney.
