by K. T. Tomb
“You know those old commercials that say I’ve fallen and I can’t get up?”
Mary nodded.
“That’s my whole life, Mary. I have spent my whole life trying to recover from fall after fall.”
“I’m sorry for you,” she said.
Zack said, “Lean on me and while we walk, you must tell me how to get to the miner’s shack where you think they are. Just in case you can’t keep going.”
“I can make it. I want to negotiate with Bobby to save Cassidy.” Ira stumbled and almost fell again.
“You can’t keep going, dammit! You’re only half-alive now! I’m calling for help!” Zack said. “I’ll get you back down to the parking lot to wait for the EMTs, and Mary can stay with you. I’ll go on alone.”
“Please, no.” The tears began to flow down his cheeks in earnest.
“I have to get you an ambulance!” Mary said.
“No. Help me lean on something. I have to negotiate with Bobby so he doesn’t kill Cassidy and then himself.”
She pulled with all her strength and was able to lean him against the boulder he had been sitting on.
“I’m calling an ambulance,” Zack said again.
“You can’t. You need me for this. Like it or not, I am in for a penny, in for a pound.”
“Fine,” Zack said.
Mary’s sharp eyes caught a glimpse of something that made her freeze. She bent close to the bush at the edge of the trail and saw something familiar. She carefully plucked a Little Mermaid hairband from a thorn bush. She remembered that Cassidy had been wearing when she was kidnapped. “This is hers! She’s leaving breadcrumbs for us! Like Hansel and Gretel!” The tears began to flow.
“She’s alive. She’s alive!” Ira cried and he was thus renewed. “Take the left fork.”
Zack smiled. “Come on, junior FBI agents. Let’s get this little girl back home safe!”
The release that came to her in that moment was like opening the floodgates of a reservoir. All of the worry and tension that she had been struggling with was suddenly being released and she sat down on the trail, pulled her knees up to her chest, and sobbed heavily. When the deepest sobs had subsided, she heard a quiet voice from the direction of Ira Rabb.
“Are you okay, Mary?”
“I will be when I see my daughter. Aren’t you burning up with all those clothes on?”
After a moment, he began to chuckle. “Come to think of it, I am.”
“Well, we could probably peel off a couple of layers and get some air in there. I’ll just stay upwind a bit if you don’t mind.”
“Very funny. I can’t help the smell. It’s the smell of sickness, of impending death. I can’t smell like a daisy with one foot in the grave.”
“Sorry, Ira,” Zack said and took his sleeve. “Let me just pull off a layer at a time. We don’t want to go too far and make you freeze to death.”
“All right.”
Mary got on the other side and took a sleeve. “Lean forward a little and let me help you, too.”
She peeled off the heavy leather jacket and Zack started to unzip the lighter hoodie underneath, and then paused.
“Just unzip it,” he said. “I’m not quite ready to go all the way.”
“Okay, we’ll leave it there for now.”
Her mind began to search down the dim trail. She could see a ridge not far away and assumed that the trail would lead over it. What was on the other side? Was her daughter on the other side or were there more ridges and valleys still between them? Would their trail branch off in onto another that she would pass without a clue?
She had been lucky to find the Little Mermaid hairband.
Zack stopped for a pee break and disappeared into the brush while Mary waited with Ira.
Ira interrupted her thoughts. “Mary?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve changed my mind.”
“Huh?”
“You need to call for help. Call the FBI. Without me being able to go with you, it might be better if you had some help. Not just Zack. What if he gets killed?”
“I thought you said Bobby wouldn’t hurt me or Cassidy.”
“He won’t, but he’s hard-headed and you might have a devil of a time getting him to listen to you and let Cassidy go home with you. What if our only FBI agent becomes incapacitated and we have to take Bobby down on our own? Then we risk Cassidy’s life.”
“I hope I don’t have to take Bobby down, if he is as big as I remember. I’ll think about it,” she replied.
He paused for a long moment as he formed the next few words. “If I don’t make it, I don’t want to think that he will do something like this again. I couldn’t rest easy, knowing that I had let my son become a monster.”
Mary pondered the statement for a moment. She was so close that she certainly didn’t want to have to wait for the rest of the FBI to show up in order to be with her daughter. Maybe she would call them afterward. If she called them before, they would just advise her to stay put and she’d have to deal with that smug Agent Calder.
Zack came out of the bushes, zipping up his fly. “I heard all that. Don’t call Agent Calder. Just don’t. He will slow us down and mess up the rescue.”
“Fine. Help me take this thing off,” Rabb said, leaning forward and pulling on the hoodie.
It wasn’t long before the flannel shirt was too much as well.
“How you feeling?” Mary asked.
“I’m beginning to feel like you’re taking advantage of me,” he said weakly, grinning.
She had to laugh. She realized that she had somehow grown rather fond of the old man, but she certainly wasn’t ready to strip him down to his skivvies.
“This is something new for you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not cold.”
“No, actually, I’m a little warm. It must be the exertion.”
She remembered the different theories for his condition.
“Then it was the psychiatrist who was right.”
“Huh?”
“Now that you’ve relaxed and let go of your son, you’re feeling warm again.”
“Hmmm. You may have something there. I do have some sort of autoimmune disease, though. They just don’t have a name for it.”
Mary started to respond, but she was interrupted when an unmarked black helicopter passed over them at a low altitude and went over the ridge.
Zack swore a blue streak.
“Who is it, Zack?” Mary asked.
“Speak of the devil, it’s Agent Eric Calder and his henchwoman, Emily ‘Cruella’ Graves.”
“That doofus has a girlfriend? I’m impressed. What’s he doing here? By the way, I sort of like Emily Graves,” Mary said. “She can’t help it if her frosted hair looks cartoonish and she has the figure of Jessica Rabbit. Don’t judge.”
Zack conceded, “I suppose she is more gullible than she is evil. But Calder? He’s the worst of us at the FBI. And somehow, he tracked us here. I don’t understand how.”
“You don’t want him here, right?” Mary asked.
“Hell, no. He always makes sure to stir up a situation with teargas and rubber bullets. Just in case you think I’m exaggerating, he thought Waco was fantastic. He especially loves that kind of violence when he’s the one doing it.”
“Oh, my God,” Mary said.
“You see my dilemma? Damn it, I just want to get your daughter out of there safely, which means I have to get there before Calder does. And he has a chopper.”
Ira asked, “How did he find us?”
“I only have one electronic device on me. My cell.” Zack took it out and examined it. He opened the battery housing and saw a black sticker on the black battery. He pulled it off. “I don’t even know what the hell this is, but I’m pulling it off. It’s the size of a tick, for God’s sake.”
When he removed it, he saw wires as thin as hairs that had touched the battery to draw energy from it that powered the tiniest tracking device h
e had ever seen. He threw the sticker in the dirt.
“Come on, troops. Rally for me, one last time.” He paused. “Ira, you still good?”
He nodded. “This way! Help me up the hill, you two.”
They each took an arm and hurried Ira uphill and deeper into the wilderness.
Chapter Sixteen
Zack, Mary, and Ira had already crossed two ridges and a shallow valley and were starting down the slope of the next.
She was tired and she was frustrated. They had walked several miles and she wasn’t certain that she was any closer than she had been before. They could have turned off on any number of side trails and she would never have known it. Not knowing what else to do, however, she stubbornly stuck to the game trail and continued on her way, the way that Ira told them to go. The bottles of water that they had brought had long since been used up and she was hoping to find a stream to fill them.
She had no understanding of the woodlands beyond the few times that she had gone camping with her father and had no idea whether the trail was leading her to anything important or not. The game trail led off of the ridge and she was soon in the valley below and could hear the soft trickling of a stream. In a few more minutes, she and Zack were dipping the first of the two water bottles into the clear stream, filling it and then feeling the cool, fresh water slide down her throat.
“Hang on,” Zack said and handed them each some sort of filtered straw to put in their water bottles.
“What is this LifeStraw thing?” she asked.
“A gadget so you don’t get sick from whatever might be in the water. It pretty much strains out almost everything that will make you sick, from cryptosporidium to giardia.”
“What are those things you mentioned?” Ira asked as he drank through the straw filter.
“Protozoan parasites. You don’t want them in your body. After you finish drinking, blow through it to unclog it and hang it around your neck by the lanyard.”
“Thanks. Cool!” she said, impressed.
After finishing the first bottle of water through the LifeStraw, she felt much more refreshed. She filled both bottles and moved over to sit in the shade of a tree in the thick grass. It reminded her of those few sweet summer days that she had spent with her father.
Where had all of that gone? Things had been simple and sweet and her expectations had been so few. She began to think more about Cassidy and the type of future that she wanted for her. She wanted something simpler for Cassidy.
Even though the emptiness of missing her daughter was still present, she felt the relative peace of nature and even felt that she had a greater sense of hope. She was close. She knew that she was close. The thought suddenly hit her. She and her father had always camped near a clear, flowing stream, just like this one next to her.
Were Bobby and Cassidy camping beside the stream? Something inside her stirred. She stood up. Her daughter was very close. She felt her. The only question in her mind was: upstream or downstream? She decided that if she went downstream first, she would lose the energy to go upstream later. It was best to go upstream first and then down. After walking a quarter mile upstream, she discovered another advantage to going upstream: a vantage point.
Suddenly, Zack was next to her. “Ira found it. He can’t make it the rest of the way up the hill, so his plan to negotiate with Robert falls to me now. I had to leave him about a thousand steps down. I can’t wait any longer. We’re going in!”
“Oh, my God! We’re here?” Her heart was pounding.
“Yeah. Shhh!” He took her right hand in his left, leaving his gun hand free. “Come on!” he whispered. “I’ll show you.”
As they trotted through the woods, she thought she caught sight of a corrugated metal rooftop. Rusty iron. Was it even possible that someone hauled building materials here with mules and wagons?
They moved further upstream and a little bit to her right to see if she could get a better view. It was a rooftop. It looked old, but it also seemed promising, especially as she considered that the sun was moving lower toward the horizon and a glance at her watch revealed that late afternoon would be turning to dark before too many more hours passed.
They started back downstream toward the rooftop. Before she reached what she assumed was a cabin, she discovered a small pond, with a thick growth of cattails along the edge of it. At one side, there was a small ditch leading through the trees around the slope. She continued downstream and saw the rooftop begin to take shape much closer.
She thought she heard a small voice, but when she paused to listen, she convinced herself that it was just her hopeful imagination. She continued downstream and let go of Zack’s hand, She broke out into a run, heading toward the clearing.
“Mary, stop!” Zack said softly. “Stop! Bobby is right there near her!” he said in a stage whisper.
But she didn’t stop. She ran faster and faster.
He swore softly as Mary had only one thing on her mind: making a beeline for her child.
He hung back and knew that if he showed his face right now, Robert Rabb would get spooked and kill Cassidy.
In the clearing stood a cabin and a small garden on the slope beside it. Down along the stream was the very top of a small blonde head.
Cassidy!
Mary dashed across the clearing toward the bobbing head, playing along the edge of the stream.
“Cassidy! Cassidy! Baby! I found you!”
Tears of joy were already flowing and her heart and feet were as light as feathers as if she would soon be able to leap into the air and fly them home. As she drew closer, all doubt began to fade and the answering cry of her daughter made it vanish completely.
She had found her daughter.
“Mommy! Mommy!” Cassidy cried. “You came!”
“Yes, I did, baby. I did.”
In an instant, Cassidy had her arms and legs wrapped around her in a tight squeeze. She had never been so elated in all of her life and never felt an embrace so completely enrapturing. It was her baby. She was in her arms. Her Cassidy was in her arms.
“Uncle Bobby, look!” Cassidy called out in a shrill squeal over her shoulder. “It’s my mommy! She’s better now!”
Mary had forgotten all about Bobby. She turned around slowly to face him. He was a younger, slimmer replica of his father. Seeing him brought a confusion of emotions. She hated him for taking her daughter, but she had begun to have a sweet spot for his father.
He did not look in the least pleased by her presence.
“Hi,” she managed. “I come in peace.”
“How did you even find me?” he spat.
“Your father helped me,” she said. “He needs you, Bobby. He’s on his last legs, physically.”
She hoped that he would rush to his father’s side immediately and she wouldn’t need to try to convince him to let her take her daughter home.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
“I had to come. I had to come get my baby and take her home.”
“She’s not yours anymore.”
“Huh?” The very idea that the person who came out of her own body could no longer belong to her made absolutely no sense.
“You don’t deserve her. You will only kill her. Slowly, yes, but you’ll poison her and ruin her. She won’t have a chance.”
“No. Bobby. You’re wrong. I love her. I would never hurt her.”
“You say that, but you make her live in the toxic smog of the city. You feed her chemical-laden junk food, waste her mind with television and bathe her in chemicals. Everything you do shortens her life and destroys her chance at being happy and healthy. You don’t deserve her.”
She saw him reach behind his back and bring out a pistol. Mary gasped at the sight of the weapon aimed at her. Had she come all of this way, endured everything and felt the embrace of her baby in her arms once more, only to be gunned down?
She began to sob once more. She had believed Ira. She had believed him when he told her that his son would not hurt her o
r Cassidy. She could tell that so far, Cassidy had been unharmed, but with the sight of the pistol in his hand, she realized that she had too easily trusted Ira Rabb.
“Into the cabin,” he demanded.
He waved the gun and motioned them toward the open door of the cabin.
“Bobby. Listen to me. Your father is dying. He needs you.” She tried one more time as she slowly moved toward the door. “Listen to me.”
“I don’t give a damn about the old man!”
“Yes. Yes, you do. Bobby, he loves you. He wanted to find you as much as I wanted to find Cassidy.”
“Shut up! Get in the cabin!” He waved the gun at her.
Mary had little choice. Still clinging to Cassidy, she moved toward the cabin and stepped inside the door. Once inside, the door was slammed shut behind her and she heard a heavy bar being dropped in place outside. She looked around the room, looking for another way out. There were no windows. There was no way out.
The walls were dense logs, but thought she heard a helicopter coming.
Chapter Seventeen
Zack got on his cell and phoned Agent Calder.
Agent Calder answered his phone, “Fancy meeting you here.”
“We’ll talk about the tracking device in my phone later. Just stop buzzing the miner’s cabin with that damn helicopter. Calder, I really don’t care about the collar. I just want the girl back alive. Her mom, too. Now Robert Rabb has them both.”
“That was mighty careless of you.”
“Mary ran in because she is just that brave. A steel door couldn’t have stopped her. She confronted Bobby Rabb, face to face, and said, ‘I come in peace.’”
“Impressive, yet corny. You fucked up royally, Donovan. Bringing her with you.”
“Shut up. This isn’t over. So, do you want the collar or not?” Zack asked.
“Yeah, you say that now, golden boy of the FBI. What do you want in return?” Eric Calder asked.
“You know me too well. You can have the collar on one condition,” Zack said.
“What’s that?”
“Ira Rabb collapsed on the trail about a thousand feet down from the miner’s cabin. Bring me Ira on that chopper. Now. I don’t care if you have to put him in a corpse basket hanging from a cable. I need him to negotiate with his son. And if you drop tear gas or start shooting, the deal’s off. No bean bags either. You could kill a child with one.”
