Survive or Die

by Catherine Dilts

  Aubrey could take her chances with the bear, or follow fleeing humans. She caught up to Madison. Veronica raised her duct-tape mended shoe higher than the other, running in a jerky hop. Aubrey’s galloping wasn’t any more graceful. The three women didn’t stop until the bear sounds faded. Madison leaned over, resting her hands on her knees and breathing hard.

  “Are you okay?” Aubrey patted Madison’s back.

  Her shoulders shook and she made distressing hicuppy noises. Aubrey thought she might be crying, or having an asthma attack, but when she straightened up, she was laughing.

  “You think that was funny?” Veronica asked.

  “After all this,” Madison wheezed, “this entire miserable week, what if it ended with Bender being eaten by a bear instead of murdered?”

  Aubrey couldn’t help it. She laughed, too.

  “Murdered?” Veronica wasn’t even winded by their uphill sprint. “Do you know something I don’t?”

  “Remember when Rankin showed Bender the death threat note?” Aubrey asked.

  “Bender acted like it was a joke,” Veronica said.

  “I suppose we can tell her.” Madison glanced at Aubrey. “It’s unlikely we’ll make it out of the woods alive. Jeremiah wrote the note, but he claims he was just trying to scare Jack. And then there’s Stewart.”

  “What about Stewart?” Veronica asked. “He died from anaphylactic shock.”

  Aubrey shivered. “We can talk while we walk.”

  “Which way?” Madison asked. “We’re not going back toward the bear.”

  “Like we could find our way back to the trail,” Aubrey said.

  “I didn’t totally lose my wits, unlike some other people,” Veronica said. “I was watching for landmarks, like Rowdy taught us. We need to angle back that way.”

  Aubrey didn’t have any better ideas, so she followed while Madison spun a tale of murder. Veronica expressed her doubt every so often. As she finished, Madison stopped.

  “Are you sure about this? We haven’t hit the trail or the river.”

  “Don’t be such a whiner,” Veronica said. “We haven’t been walking very long.”

  “Twenty minutes, by my watch,” Aubrey said. “That means we probably hiked a mile.”

  “Aren’t you precise,” Veronica said. “I run under eight minute miles, but I’m sure you’re right. We’ve been crawling at a snail’s pace.”

  Madison powered up her phone. “No signal. We’re on our own.”

  “We need a break,” Aubrey said.

  “You might need rest. You are older than me.” Veronica glanced at Madison. “And, well.”

  Madison jumped up from her seat on a damp rock. “I’ve had enough of you, Veronica Prevost. You’ve been nothing but snotty this whole week, hanging on Grant and humiliating anyone not as perfect as—”

  Aubrey was enjoying Madison’s rant, but the IT geek paused, tilting her head to one side.

  “I hear something.”

  Droplets slipped loose from pine boughs and pattered on beds of fallen needles.

  “There it is,” Madison said. “It sounds like a lamb, bleating for its mother.”

  “There aren’t any mountain sheep in the area.” Veronica frowned. “It doesn’t sound like a lamb to me. Wait. It stopped.”

  All Aubrey could hear was the wind sighing through the pines. She held her breath, listening.

  A scream pierced the silence.

  They charged through a thick stand of trees and underbrush, where bears could easily be lurking. It seemed like a bad idea, but Aubrey wasn’t about to be left behind.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  While it was the recommended course of action, or inaction, Sotheara was not about to sit and wait for rescue. There was no telling how far she’d run in her panic to escape the bear. How could Search and Rescue find everyone, when they fled in ten different directions?

  Sotheara aimed her flashlight on the map, trying to determine her location. If she was reading it correctly, in one direction the trail intersected with the county road leading to Lodgepole. In the other, it dwindled to a deer path. Heading to town had to be safer than bushwacking through the thick forest.

  She zipped the map inside her pack. Parallel lines scratched through dirt, while grasses and saplings sprouted in the center. She imagined old-timey wagons rolling through the meadow. Maybe she’d slipped through a portal into a different era. Heavy fog covered the earth like a wool blanket. Sotheara couldn’t see ten feet. She trudged onward, shivering with cold and dread.

  Then she heard noise that couldn’t be explained by water dripping off pine trees. Sotheara unfolded her pink-handled pocketknife and gripped it in her fist. It might be useful against a chipmunk, but would just make a bear angry.

  As she crouched motionless on the logging road, she watched a dark form take shape in the mist. Approaching slowly, it solidified, until the diminutive receptionist fully materialized.

  “It’s me!” Sotheara threw her arms up, hoping the tiny knife clutched in her fist didn’t appear threatening. “Don’t shoot!”

  “I’ve been watching you for ten minutes. I’m no danger to you.” Berdie frowned. “So it’s just you. What happened to the rest?”

  Sotheara told Berdie about the bear, and people running and screaming.

  “Must have been the same she-bear,” Berdie said. “The sow barrelled into the A-frame. Everyone panicked. I stayed a while, but when it was obvious the bear wasn’t leaving, I decided to hike out. Haven’t seen anyone else. Any idea where we are?”

  Sotheara dropped her pack and pulled out the map again. After a brief moment of study, Berdie nodded.

  “We should stay on this logging road.”

  They trudged alongside a creek. The fog muffled the tramping of Berdie’s boots. Sotheara’s bare feet were nearly soundless.

  “That must be east.” Sotheara pointed at a yellow glow above the horizon. “Dawn.” Her heart swelled with relief. “We made it through the night.”

  Berdie squinted. “No, that’s the light from Lodgepole.”

  “We’re that close to town?”

  “We’re in the wilderness,” Berdie said. “You can see light out here for miles.”

  Sotheara tried to hold the image of the map in her head, but as the road twisted through the hills, she figured they could have been walking in circles all night. Then the logging road widened. Tire treads gouged water-filled ruts.

  “We’re getting close now.”

  The receptionist had said the same thing an hour ago. Sotheara didn’t complain. It was easier following someone than trying to make her own decisions.

  The road climbed gradually, hugging the side of a gravelly hill. On the left was steeply sloping rock dotted with yucca and sparse scrubby grass. The right side of the trail dropped off. When Berdie stopped abruptly, Sotheara ran into her.

  “Whoa,” Sotheara whispered. “This is nothing like the pits on Gold Hill.”

  The crumbled ruins of a mining operation poked through the mist blanketing a narrow valley. Several rooftops tilted at crazy angles, half the shingles gone. Mounds of yellowish tailings streamed down the opposite hillside. Sluice boxes snaked across the earth, the wood slow to decay in the dry Colorado climate.

  And in the middle of it, gleaming modern earth-moving equipment.

  “I would say that’s an abandoned mine,” Berdie said, “except for those.” She pointed at the half dozen machines.

  “It’s obvious what they’re doing.” Sotheara waited a beat, perhaps thinking Berdie would agree. She continued with a touch of impatience in her voice. “They’re filling in mines. The bats will die. We have to stop them.”

  She rushed downhill, generating avalanches of pebbles. Sotheara hit the bottom and splashed across a creek flowing with rainwater runoff. When Berdie caught up with her, Sothea
ra swept the beam of her flashlight across a bulldozer and a dump truck. She jogged to a shed. The flimsy door was unlocked. The arrogance was astounding. Sotheara tugged it open.

  “Sage was right.” She smiled and waved an open hand at a shed full of barrels like a game show hostess displaying the top prize.

  “So it’s true,” Berdie said. “This is a toxic waste dump.”

  Berdie frowned as she approached the tumbledown shed. Obviously modern fifty-gallon drums rested neatly on wooden pallets.

  “That’s the Bender Clips logo.” Berdie held the beam of her light on one barrel. “Bender couldn’t be that stupid. To dump illegally with his name on the barrels?”

  Sotheara pointed at a bulldozer perched at a precarious angle near an open mine shaft. “The evidence will be gone soon. Buried. Who else but Jack Bender would be hiding the barrels?” She snapped photos with her phone. There was no cell signal in the old mining camp, so sending them to Sage would have to wait.

  “I sort the front office mail.” Berdie nodded slowly. “A few months ago, brochures for vacation paradise start filling Jack’s inbox. I’ll bet he halted the disposal service, then diverted the funds to a Caribbean condo.”

  “And here’s his bright idea of how to get rid of the toxic waste.” Sotheara jabbed a finger at the shed. “I’ll bet he pays Rowdy a fraction of what the disposal company charges. They’re both creeps. We use dangerous plating chemicals. The barrels look new, so I doubt they’ve leaked. We’ll know after Sage runs tests of the water samples I sent.”

  “You’ve accomplished your mission,” Berdie said. “So what do we do now?”

  “I need to document the evidence before it’s buried.” Sotheara held up her smart phone.

  “Those photos won’t do any good unless you get them out of here,” Berdie said. “What if Rowdy shows up?”

  “He’ll realize the jig is up,” Sotheara said.

  “And how do you propose to defend youself if he doesn’t appreciate being caught?” Berdie asked. “Through the power of peaceful negotiation?” Berdie snorted. She reached inside her jacket and retrieved her pistol. “Guess I’d better stick around, too.”

  Sotheara’s protest against Berdie’s gun died on her lips when a black cloud of bats fluttered into the mine entrance, done with their nightly feeding. Someone had to defend the bats.

  Branches cracked, signaling the exit of something large, as Aubrey followed Veronica and Madison into a clearing. Aubrey hoped the whimpering sound wasn’t the bear, disappointed with the paltry quantity of food it found in the backpacks. Madison swung her flashlight back and forth until the beam landed on a huddled form.

  “Oh, thank God.” Twin trails of tears streaked down Shirley’s ghostly white face. “You scared him away! I’ve been waiting for someone to find me for hours. Wait, let me clarify. Someone not out to kill me.”

  Aubrey and Madison helped Shirley rise from her seat on a log. She threw herself at the women, grabbing them in a hug.

  “I thought you were one of the smart people,” Madison said. “You stayed in the shelter. How did you end up out here?”

  “A bear chased us out.” Shirley released her hold on the two women. “Ellen and Omari took off without so much as a backward glance. I don’t know what happened to Berdie. The bear probably ate her. Or maybe she ate it. I was running through the woods with that creepy wrangler Bud. When I screamed, I really didn’t have any hope I’d be rescued, and then you showed up.”

  “Rescued?” Madison asked. “You were with Bud. He knows this ranch inside and out.”

  “That’s the problem,” Shirley said. “He was leading me away from camp.”

  “Why would he do that?” Veronica’s eyes opened wide, and she lowered her voice to a husky whisper. “Was he planning to rape you?”

  Shirley wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. “If only that were the limit of his depravity. The man intended to roast me for dinner. He’s a cannibal!”

  Aubrey couldn’t stop herself. She laughed.

  “I’m not making this up!” Shirley said.

  “Everyone thought Berdie was the cannibal,” Veronica said. “Are you sure? Old people get confused sometimes.”

  Shirley screamed, shaking her fists in the air. “What does it take to make you dimwits understand? Bud told me in plain English that I was going to meet the same fate as Wilson.”

  “Who’s Wilson?” Veronica asked.

  “The guy whose ex-wife called looking for him,” Madison said. “The abandoned car in the parking lot? That was his.”

  Aubrey grimaced. “Are you saying Bud ate Wilson?”

  Shirley rolled her eyes. “Are you slow? I was nearly Bud’s next victim.”

  “I don’t remember anyone named Wilson,” Veronica said. “Are you sure he works for Bender Clips?”

  “Gawd, I hope I’m more memorable than that!” Shirley said.

  “Trust me,” Madison said. “You are.”

  “Where’s the rest of the group?” Shirley asked.

  “This is it,” Aubrey said. “We’re trying to find the trail or the river.”

  “We found you instead,” Veronica said.

  “So sorry to disappoint.” Shirley pointed. “The river is over there.”

  Aubrey heard rushing water. Veronica sprinted ahead, the beam from her flashlight illuminating obstacles briefly as she wove her way through the increasingly dense trees and bushes. The duct tape had worked loose. The sole of her shoe flapped with every step.

  “Be careful!” Shirley yelled. “The rocks are slick.”

  Veronica stopped running, but continued moving in an uncontrolled slide. She screamed, then disappeared.

  Aubrey crawled to the edge of a dropoff and peered over. Veronica looked up, her model-pretty looks contorted in fear. She gripped a tree root with one hand, while the other clawed at air. Aubrey dropped her flashlight in the wet grass and grabbed Veronica’s free arm. The river was a twenty-foot drop, littered with boulders.

  “I tried to warn you.” Shirley grabbed Veronica’s other arm.

  They pulled while Veronica scrabbled with her feet. They fell in a heap at the top of the cliff. Madison ambled up. She stood over them, her hands planted on her wide hips.

  “Well, isn’t this nice? Veronica spends all week trying to steal Aubrey’s husband, then Aubrey saves her life.”

  “That fall wouldn’t have killed me.” Veronica brushed mud from her hiking slacks.

  “Ha!” Shirley struggled to stand. “If landing on the rocks didn’t do you in, trying to survive in the cold and the wet while you’re injured would’ve finished you off.”

  “You’re right.” Veronica sighed as though annoyed. “Thank you Aubrey, if not for saving my life, at least for saving me from an even more miserable night.”

  “Personally,” Shirley said, “if it had been my husband she chased all week, I’d have let her go over the edge.”

  “While we’re on the subject,” Madison said, “you owe Aubrey an apology.”

  Aubrey almost felt sorry for Veronica, until the woman flipped her sodden hair over her shoulder with a smirk.

  “Why should I apologize? I didn’t catch him.”

  “You made me uncomfortable.” Aubrey knelt to retrieve her flashlight. “You made me doubt my marriage.”

  Veronica stopped her preening to look at Aubrey. “Seriously? Your husband is one of the last of the good guys.”

  “Even a good man can falter,” Aubrey said. “How would you feel if our roles were reversed, and I was chasing after your man?”

  Veronica started to laugh, but seemed to think better of it. She was outnumbered.

  Shirley shook an accusing finger at Veronica. “Your problem is, you need a man of your own. Then you’d leave other women’s men alone.”

  “You know Ted adores you,” Madi
son said. “He’s a nice guy.”

  “You and Sam looked pretty cozy in the A-frame,” Aubrey added.

  “Maybe I don’t deserve a nice guy,” Veronica said. “How else do you explain the losers I always end up with?”

  “I get it.” Madison snapped her fingers. “You see how married men have their wedding vows erased from memory when you walk by, flipping your hair.” Madison pushed her hand under her own damp shoulder length curls and flicked her fingers. “Flip, flip, flip. You think that’s how it would be if you got married. He’d be lusting after other women instead of loving you.”

  Veronica’s lip trembled. Madison had hit a nerve.

  “What do you know about men?” Veronica asked.

  “I read women’s e-zines. There’s a lot of wisdom in those articles.”

  “Maybe some of what you said is true.” Veronica sniffed. “I am sorry if I hurt you, Aubrey, but I couldn’t take it anymore. Aubrey and her perfect husband and her perfect children.” She stuck a finger in her open mouth as though she would gag.

  Madison laughed. “You obviously haven’t met their kids. Sorry, Aubrey.”

  “Veronica,” Aubrey said, “I admire you.”

  Shirley and Madison both objected, but Aubrey held up a hand to silence them.

  “Grant and I overheard Bender make a pass at Veronica in the museum. She turned him down. That shows character.”

  “Good grief, girl,” Shirley said. “You could have won the game then and there.”

  “How difficult is it to turn down Bender?” Madison asked. “I mean, ick.”

  Shirley stared at her feet, quiet for once. Doug’s hint must have been true. Shirley had been one of his father’s past conquests.

  “I still say Veronica is a better woman than Candace,” Aubrey said.

  Veronica grimaced. “How could you even compare me to that skank?”

  “If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck.” Madison shrugged. “With your shoe flapping, you definitely walk like a duck.”