“My God…what happened?”
“Garland’s knife.” She said it simply but sadly. “Go on now, dear. And be careful.”
“Both of us.”
“No.”
“Violet…yes! When he wakes up, he is going to kill you.”
“Perhaps. But this is my fate, dear. I’ve been on a long, strange road to get here. I can’t leave. I think you can, though. I think you should.”
Sabrina didn’t pause to argue. Outside the gunfire had begun again, and she didn’t know how long Garland Webb would remain unconscious.
“Thank you,” she said.
Violet nodded and said, “Yes, dear,” for the last time as Sabrina went to the stairs. She stepped over Garland Webb’s inert form. He was facedown, the dart no longer in his throat but trapped in his massive fingers.
At the bottom of the steps she turned back, prepared to ask Violet to join her, but she was nowhere to be seen.
65
Jay had completed a second climb, secured another cable, and was on his way back up with a third when he heard the first creak from the steel.
It wasn’t a menacing sound, not like the corona discharge. Inside his hooded suit, it sounded muffled and almost friendly, a low moan with a high, whining finish, like the yawn of a sleeping dog.
Then the tower began to move.
At first, the sensation was so subtle that he almost didn’t believe it. Chalked it up to dizziness again; the world had been reeling around him plenty up here.
The dog’s yawn turned into a scream then, the shriek of torquing metal, and Jay had a tenth of a second to think, Oh shit, it’s real, before the angled upright closest to the tracks tried to pull apart from the rest of the tower.
It was the highest spot Pate had reached to remove bolts. Jay saw the brace shifting as he began to fall, watched it lean from sky to earth like a palm tree in gale-force winds, and then he lost his footing and plummeted down.
He hit the steel before the air, landing on his chest on the crossbar he’d been standing on an instant earlier, a feeling like catching a pull hitter’s bat at the end of his swing.
The pain saved him. Pain powered instinct that his brain hadn’t been able to conjure earlier, and he reached for his chest as his feet swung free. The steel crossbar was between his hand and his chest. He hooked it with his left arm and caught himself with a jarring impact, the crossbar pinned under his armpit. Beneath him he saw his booted feet kicking impotently at the air, searching for nonexistent purchase, and the distant ground below.
His aching arm was squeezed tight as a python around the steel, so tight that it pressed into the meat of his biceps like a dull knife.
Right arm, right arm, right arm! he thought frantically, but when he swung to grab with his right, it forced his left loose, and for a moment he was sliding again. Then his right hand clamped over the crosspiece and held.
Beneath him, the tower groaned again as the wind freshened and the loose brace, which had to weigh several thousand pounds, strained to adhere to gravity’s demands.
The overhead lines didn’t let it. They’d given all the slack they intended to give, and now the loose brace was held up by their strength.
Jay took three quick but deep breaths, then heaved himself upward, like a man trying to pull himself out of the water and over the stern of a boat. He got his chest onto the crossbar and then wrapped his arms around it and clasped his left wrist with his right hand.
The tower holds you up, bud, not the other way around. Stop squeezing her so tight.
He laid the side of his face against the steel and gasped in air, blinking sweat out of his eyes. His chest and arm ached and he felt a strange pressure along his spine and thought, I’ve broken my back, before he realized that it was the hot stick, still slung in place over his shoulder and still attached to the cable Pate had anchored below.
When the voice came over the radio, he thought the sound was from the tower again, and he tightened his grasp, ready for the inevitable fall. Even after he realized the source of the sound, it took him a few seconds to process the words.
“Don’t look like police. But the woman is running toward them.”
Jay lifted his head. The tower didn’t shift; the steel was solid again beneath him. Only seconds ago it had occupied his every emotion. Now the radio summoned them elsewhere.
The woman? Were they talking about Sabrina? But then the update came from a man named Garland: “Right here. With the other one. Baldwin. She is secured.”
A hundred feet below, Eli Pate lowered the radio and shouted to Jay in a calm, cold voice.
“You just heard the man! Sabrina is in capable hands! Time to get up, Jay! Back on your feet!”
Jay pushed up slowly but didn’t rise to his feet. He shifted into a sitting position astride the crossbar, his feet dangling free, and adjusted the hot stick. The ground cable was still secure, unbothered by the excitement. Jay wasn’t even sure if Pate had been aware of it or if he’d been distracted by the men on the radio. Did anyone have any idea how close it had been?
Doesn’t matter. You’re alive. Sabrina may not be for long. Get the hell up.
Baldwin, they’d said. She is secured.
Secured by this man Garland. Jay’s instinct said it was terrible, but the other woman, the unknown woman, was on the run between groups of armed men, and Pate had instructed his men to take out the others, the armed intruders. That meant that the woman who was not secured was in a lot more danger than the one who was.
Didn’t it?
He inched out on along the crossbar until he reached the upright. Then he got both hands around it and pulled cautiously to his feet. The tower didn’t shift, which shouldn’t have been a surprise. Jay’s weight was insignificant when dispersed amid all that steel. The loose brace had hopefully shifted as much as it could, or would, unless it had some powerful help.
As if in answer, a new sound joined the mix, far off but audible.
A train whistle.
There was the help. Hustling westward, unaware of the trap, and guaranteed to pull down the towers. Jay began to climb again, into the darkening sky. He was vaguely aware that on his next trip he would need a light. He was vaguely aware of the pain in his chest and arm. He was only vaguely aware of anything.
He’d just gotten high enough to swing the hot stick free, ready to crimp the second cable into place, when the radio came to life again, the same voice as before but sounding anything but composed now.
“We are taking heavy fire!”
Pate said, “Then return it,” cool and indifferent. Jay wondered if the men on the other end were Pate’s followers or if they were more like Jay, pulled in against their will.
“Garland, report, please,” Pate said.
The radio was silent. A few seconds passed. Pate said, “Garland?”
Again there was only silence from the radio, and, all around Jay, the humming chorus of five hundred thousand volts.
“Get to work, Jay!” Pate shouted, and for the first time his voice had lost its detached cool.
Jay looped the cable. He had the hot stick in hand, ready to crimp the cable, when his radio chirped.
“We have a runner. The second woman is out. Both women are out!”
A hundred feet in the air, Jay froze and stared down at Eli Pate, who held the radio to his lips but didn’t key the mike.
For once, something had silenced him.
66
Mark and Lynn were still in the gulch when Larry ran to join them. Mark’s tracks had disappeared as the sun descended, a fringe line of blackness that kept working higher up the mountain.
Larry gave no warning he was coming. Mark and Lynn heard the sound when he was almost on them. He made it across the steep pitch without a fall, better than Mark, and used a tree to aid his drop into the gulch, landing on his feet, rifle at waist-level, pointed at Lynn.
“That didn’t look like a real warm reunion you all had. How’s your throat?”
Mark said, “Mom’s up there. With Garland Webb.”
“Violet is up there?”
“Yes.”
Larry looked up the slope. He was quiet for a moment, then said, “We wait long, and we’ll be pinned down here.”
“How many left for the Winchester?” Mark said.
“Four.”
“Shit.”
“Yup.”
“Any more rounds in the truck?”
“No.”
“How many for the handgun?”
“Two handguns, two clips each.”
“Give one to her.”
Larry looked at Lynn and hesitated, but she extended her hand and made a gimme gesture, curling her fingers in toward her palm. He drew a Ruger semiautomatic from his pocket and gave it to her.
When she closed her hand around the gun, she looked at Mark. He turned his palms up. “Got enough trust yet? I’m the only one without a weapon. You want to kill me and figure out you were wrong later, there’s nothing stopping you.”
She knelt, picked up the .38, and passed it to him.
“Thank you,” he said. “Now tell me what I’m running into up there.”
“A high fence that may or may not be electrified at the moment. A cabin. I don’t know if they took her back there. I don’t even know if…if she’s alive. They got her as she was going over the fence. She shut it down long enough for me to get over, but they got her.”
“How many are there?”
“Four. Three men and your mother.”
Larry swore under his breath and spit into the snow, then scrambled to the high side of the gulch and peered up at the shrinking pool of sunlight where the telephone poles stood.
“You take her down to the truck. I’ll go see about your mother.”
I’ll go see about your mother. How many times had Mark heard that? In the past, it had meant that they were going to pull her out of some bar or flophouse or con’s bedroom. Now it meant that Larry intended to head up the gulch alone toward three armed men.
“Not happening, Uncle,” Mark said. He gestured to Lynn. “We’ve got to take her down.”
“You’re not taking her anywhere,” Lynn snapped. “Until I know what happened to Sabrina, I am not leaving.”
“That’s a stupid choice,” Mark said. “We need to leave and call for help.”
He was watching the ground shadows seep down the mountainside, deepening the darkness. Any chance of reaching the truck depended on moving now, while enough visibility remained to get down the gulch in relative quiet. They were outgunned above, and if their trek was pinpointed by clattering stumbles over rocks and snapped branches underfoot, they’d be shredded.
“She’ll die in that time,” Lynn said. “Once they know we’re gone, they’ll kill her.”
“I’ve got no interest in leaving my sister up there either,” Larry said. He turned back to them when he said it, so he was facing away from the woods when the shadowed slope gave birth to something bright and white. A man dressed in white camouflage like a 10th Mountain Division soldier spun around a tree not twenty feet from them and lifted his rifle.
Mark saw it all with strange clarity, a neat, clean line: Larry, the lip of the gulch, a downed tree, a shooter. The tableau was stamped into his memory instantly and forever.
The shot he fired, though, he would never remember.
He wasn’t aware of it until the man dropped, shooting as he fell, peppering a line of bullets into the sky, ripping apart pine boughs that fell with a peaceful whisper. Larry and Lynn both hit the ground, but Mark just stood there, the .38 still extended.
“Son of a bitch!” Larry scrambled up and stared at Mark. “You put him down?”
“Yes.”
“Lord, son, you must’ve fired faster than you saw him. Who taught you that?”
Mark looked at the gun as it if were unfamiliar. He had never been the best shot. Not the worst, but certainly not the best. Both of his uncles had been better. So had his wife.
“I guess it was Ronny,” he said.
Before his uncle could answer, they were interrupted by the crackle of a radio and a voice. It was coming from the dead man’s belt, but his body muffled the words.
Mark said, “Cover me, will you? I want to get a look at him.”
Larry snapped at him to stay down, but Mark climbed over the lip of the gulch. He glanced back once and saw Larry standing waist-deep in the gulch, braced against the earth, panning the gloaming forest with the scope.
“You see the other one?” Mark asked.
“No, but hurry up.”
Mark crawled to the dead man and saw a face he didn’t know. Not Garland Webb. That was a shame. Lord, was that a shame. If it had been Garland Webb, he could have gone on back down the gulch and out to the truck and driven out of here.
No, you couldn’t.
The voice made Mark jerk, because for an instant it seemed to come from the dead man himself. Just a trick of the mind. Adrenaline was cooking in Mark’s veins now, and if he wasn’t careful it would overrun him. You had to stay cool under fire, and he was doing anything but that. Not only his focus was slipping; his whole damn mind seemed to be.
He took the dead man’s rifle, then rolled him over. As he did so, he heard the voice again.
You’ll die here. All of you.
Again Mark jerked back.
“What the hell’s the matter?” Larry whispered behind him.
Mark didn’t know how to answer. Adrenaline, that was all. You felt crazy things in crazy moments, and this moment was about as crazy as they got.
He grabbed the dead man’s radio in a hurry, tugged it free, and then crawled back to the gulch with the radio and the rifle, heading right toward Larry, who was still scouring the trees through his scope, finger on the trigger. He wasn’t all the way back when the radio came to life in his hand, and this time he could hear it clearly:
“We have a runner! The second woman is out!”
Lynn jumped to her feet. “Sabrina!” she called. More of a shout than Mark would have liked, but even as she said it, she moved sideways and deeper into the gulch, wisely anticipating that she’d risked giving up their position. No shots came, but an answer did, a woman’s voice shouting without Lynn’s restraint. “Lynn! Lynn, where are you!”
Mark turned and started to tell Lynn not to answer, that shouts would get them killed, but Larry’s shot silenced them all. Lynn took a stumbling step back, Mark stopped crawling, and Sabrina Baldwin’s shouts ended. For a few seconds, the forest was absolutely still.
Then Larry lowered the rifle.
“Had to take it. She wasn’t even into the trees yet, and he’d stopped to fire. With that AR spitting bullets, he was going to kill her fast.”
Mark stared up at the pink-tinted peak where Larry had fired, and though he couldn’t see anything, he could hear something now. Someone was crashing clumsily through the woods. He scrambled to the base of a tree and lifted his revolver, but Larry didn’t move at all, just stood with the rifle lowered and waited on whoever was running out of the daylight and into the darkness.
A minute later, they saw her—a woman, slipping and stumbling down the slope, falling every few feet but bouncing up so fast it all seemed part of the plan.
“Sabrina!” Lynn climbed out of the gulch and ran toward the other woman and Mark made no move to stop her. Instead, he looked at his uncle.
“We’ve got two. Lynn said there were three men.”
“That’s all that have been shooting, at least. I’ve found four people with the scope since we got here. Two are here, and two are dead.”
Lynn Deschaine and Sabrina Baldwin met halfway up the slope. Sabrina fell into Lynn’s arms, and Lynn tugged her down immediately, pulling her to the ground and guiding her behind a fallen tree. Mark watched them and wondered what horrors they had shared and how they’d managed to get loose in a place like this.
“Nice shooting, Uncle,” he said.
“Shit, son, that was tar
get practice. You were the one who went Wild Bill Hickok.”
It wasn’t much of an exaggeration. The bullet had punched through the other man’s heart before Mark knew what had happened.
For some reason, that bothered him.
He wiped sweat from his face and said, “Lynn? Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Lynn got to her feet and helped Sabrina Baldwin to hers and they came down the side of the mountain together, arm in arm, as if neither of them wanted to risk letting go again.
“You okay?” Mark asked the new woman. Sabrina Baldwin was shaking, but she nodded.
“We need to get out of here,” Mark said. “Is there anyone left to stop us?”
“I don’t think so,” Sabrina said. “Not if we hurry. He’ll be down for a while longer.”
“Who will be?”
“One of the men who works for Eli. Garland Webb.”
“Garland Webb,” Mark echoed. His voice had the same flat crack as Larry’s killing shot.
She looked at him with wide eyes. “You’re him,” she said. “You’re the one. Novak.”
“Yes.”
“Violet…I think she’s your mother? Violet shot him with a dart.”
Lynn said, “What? She did?” and she seemed stunned when Sabrina Baldwin nodded.
“She saved me,” Sabrina said.
“Where are all the ATV riders?” Larry asked. “We saw plenty of tracks coming in.”
“I don’t know. There was a large group this morning, but they left. If they come back, though…”
Lynn said, “She’s right—we need to get out of here fast. There are enough of them that we’ll be outnumbered, badly.”
Sabrina said, “My husband…do you know anything?”
“He was alive,” Mark said. “And I gave him his chance to play it the way he wanted. He didn’t want to risk doing anything that might threaten you.”
He thought about that and then looked at the radio in his hand and said, “You know, I just might be able to get a report on Jay.”
He put the dead man’s radio to his lips. Keyed the mike and heard static.
Rise the Dark Page 31
