Darkness

by Karen Robards

  “So what do we do now?” She grabbed the boots, then snatched Bob’s insulated snow pants and gloves from the hooks.

  “Get the hell out of here.” He was trying to jam Ivanov’s arm inside the dryer with the rest of him as she ran back toward him.

  “Here.” Gina plopped the boots and other things down beside the dryer.

  Ivanov’s arm now safely inside, Cal covered the corpse with a blue towel.

  “Did you make that call for me?” He was doing his best to force the dryer door closed.

  “I didn’t get a chance.”

  He shot a look at her over his shoulder. “The satellite phone somewhere you can grab it?”

  “It’s gone. They took it.” Gina snatched two of the survival backpacks from the cubbies.

  He swore. “You sure?”

  “Yes.” She pulled the redundant items—the tent and the ground cover—out of one of the backpacks.

  Kneeing the dryer door viciously, he finally got it to latch. Looking through the dryer’s round glass window, Gina would have sworn that it held nothing more sinister than a load of laundry.

  “That should keep them from finding him for a while,” Cal said with satisfaction. Hopping from foot to foot, he pulled off his makeshift shoes and grabbed the snow pants. Gina stuck the things she’d pulled from the backpack in the other dryer along with his discarded “shoes” and ran back to the kitchen. Behind her, he was slamming his feet into the boots.

  Seconds later he followed her into the kitchen. He was wearing the boots and snow pants now, she saw. They appeared to fit him well enough.

  “You say there are two dead in here? Where?”

  Busy throwing food and water into the backpack she’d half emptied, Gina nodded and pointed.

  “In there.” Her chest tightening, she did her best not to think about Mary and Jorge. “There may be more dead. Elsewhere in the building.”

  He strode across the kitchen to disappear into the common room.

  He came back almost at once.

  “You saw . . . ?” She couldn’t help but ask when he didn’t say anything. Having finished filling the backpack, she zipped it shut while keeping her gaze on what she was doing. She didn’t want to witness whatever effect seeing the bodies might have had on him in his face. With some difficulty, since it was now considerably heavier than before, she hoisted the backpack to her shoulder, still without looking at him.

  “Yeah. I got this. Let’s go.” His voice sounded tight as he took the backpack from her, slung it over a broad shoulder. Refusing to think about anything other than the need to get out of there, she hurried after him as he strode through the kitchen into the mudroom.

  The fact that the gun was in his hand now told her that he thought more trouble could break out at any moment. It jacked her fear level up to the roof. It also made her feel slightly—only slightly—safer.

  “I locked the door,” she said to his back.

  “I saw.”

  As they neared the back door, she snagged the second backpack and lugged it along by its top strap, prepared to shrug into it as soon as she got the chance. Getting out of this alive was the goal, and if they were stuck outside for any length of time Attu’s weather would kill them as surely as a bullet. Grabbing the backpacks and the extra food was her contribution to making sure they didn’t die.

  Cal was already at the door, hesitating in front of the solid panel exactly as she had done earlier.

  The door and the windowless mudroom walls took “see no evil, hear no evil” to a whole new place.

  There was no way of knowing if someone was right outside, or where Heavy Tread or anyone else was.

  Opening that door required nothing short of a leap of faith.

  Glancing at her over his shoulder, Cal said, “I’m going to take a look outside. When I give you the all clear, run as fast as you can toward that mountain you came down off of earlier. I’ll be right behind you. Don’t stop for anything.”

  Gina nodded, suddenly breathless. Her stomach clenched, and it felt as if her heart, which was already racing, had just received a jolt of speed. She hauled the backpack up and slid an arm through the strap.

  “Give me that,” he said. Hooking a hand in the other strap, he took the backpack from her and slung it over his shoulder along with the first one. “Did I mention you need to run really fast?”

  She didn’t argue. Even if she’d wanted to—she didn’t—there wasn’t time.

  He unlocked the door—she tensed at the soft click—and eased it open.

  The sudden blast of cold, damp-smelling air reminded Gina horribly of Ivanov bursting through the door. The roar of the tractor, the rumble of the generator, the knowledge that armed murderers were out there, the thought of her dead friends, all came together in a nearly paralyzing rush.

  “Move your ass,” Cal growled.

  Gina realized that she must have missed his signal. Taking a tentative step forward so that she could peek out the door, casting a single hunted glance around outside—because of the fog she could see maybe ten feet in all directions—she bolted across the stoop. Plunging into the fog, welcoming the billows of gray mist that swallowed her up and hopefully hid her from anyone who might happen to look her way, she flew back the way she had come, toward the mountain she had walked off earlier. Down in the depths of the fog she couldn’t see it or the path, but she knew where they were, knew the way.

  Head down, heart pumping like a piston, she ran across the crackly ice as fast as she could. With every step she took she was conscious of the treacherous surface beneath her feet and thankful for the slip-resistant, rubber-soled boots that several times arrested an incipient slide and saved her from falling. She ran so fast she got a stitch in her side, but, pressing a hand to the place that hurt, she kept going without slowing down. The crunch of her feet in the ice-crusted snow terrified her. The sound of her own breathing terrified her.

  She was mortally afraid of being spotted, and shot. What was it they said about the bullet that killed you? You never even saw it coming?

  Jacked on terror, she ran like she’d never run before in her life.

  Cal stayed right behind her. She could hear his footsteps crunching through the snow, too, could see the dark bulk of him looming between her and the buildings whenever she glanced back. If shooting started from that direction, he would almost certainly take the first bullet. She wondered whether he was staying behind her for just that reason.

  Reaching the path that was really no more than a rut carved into the bare, rocky face of the mountain, she leaped up it like a mountain goat and kept going along the twisty trail with no thought of slowing down. Gina was so intent on putting distance between herself and the killers that she jumped with surprise and cast a startled look over her shoulder at Cal when his hand clamped around her arm and he pulled her to a stop.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Hold up,” Cal said. “Let’s take a break.”

  He was breathing hard, and Gina realized that she was, too. Gasping for air, actually, and still troubled by the stitch in her side. She grimaced and bent over, rubbing the place where it hurt.

  “You all right?” he asked.

  She nodded, too winded and in too much pain from the cramp to speak. They were in an area that she’d passed through on the way down, when her biggest concern had been making his phone call and she’d had no idea of the horrors awaiting her. This part of the mountain had apparently experienced a landslide at some point, because large boulders lay all around, partially blocking the path and also, she saw now, blocking them from the view of anyone who might be looking their way from above or below. Of the same near-black, volcanic composition as the mountains themselves, they were dusted with snow.

  Good choice of location if they had to stop, Gina thought, then sat down abruptly on a boulder that was the approximate size and shape of a low bench. She had no choice: now that she’d stopped, her legs had turned to jelly and were refusing to support her.


  You are not going to lose it.

  It was an easy thing to tell herself. She was light-headed, though, and wobbly, and the boulder and the path and the steep, snowy slope behind her suddenly seemed as insubstantial as the drifting feathers of mist. Some eiders were nesting in the rocks nearby. She couldn’t see them, but she could hear and identify them from the soft rrr, rrr sounds they made.

  Closing her eyes, Gina hung her head, breathing in the thin blue air, waiting for the dizziness to recede, for the stitch in her side to pass.

  Cal didn’t say anything, simply sat down beside her. Never mind that she’d just seen him kill a man with a butcher knife, which officially made him the scariest person she’d ever met: he was big and solid and armed, all good things. Plus she was pretty sure they were on the same side. The warmth of his body so close against hers made her feel anchored, grounded. An instant, involuntary flashback to the way he’d kissed her heated her blood. That brief moment when their eyes had connected in the kitchen told the story—somehow in the midst of chaos and horror they had formed a bond. Despite everything—her uncertainty about how much she could trust him, the inescapable truth that if he hadn’t fallen out of the sky on top of her, none of these dreadful things would be happening—she took comfort in his presence.

  She opened her eyes, saw that he’d put the backpacks on the rocky ground near his feet, and was relieved to discover that the backpacks, and his feet, and the path, and the mountain, and everything except the fog, remained stationary. The wind had picked up. Cold and damp, it blew in gusts from the bay, smelling of the sea, sending clouds of fog scudding past them like sailboats in a regatta.

  “What are you doing here?” Her question emerged as a gasp as she fought to catch her breath.

  His reply was a sardonic “Saving your ass.”

  Gina frowned at him impatiently. “I’m serious.” Her still-ragged breathing created a hitch in her words. “How did you wind up in the kitchen?”

  “I followed you.”

  “What? Why?”

  “To make sure you were safe.”

  She must have made an interrogative sound to go with the look she threw at him, because he added, “Not long after you left, a boat showed up to check out the crash site.”

  “A boat?” she interrupted on a hopeful note, because it was fixed in her mind that Arvid and Keith Hertzinger—if they were the two other survivors; oh, God, she still could not wrap her mind around the idea that the rest of her colleagues were dead—might be out in a boat looking for her.

  “Believe me, it wasn’t your friends. This was a fishing trawler. A big one. It stayed at the crash site, along with two of its dinghies. Another dinghy with four men aboard went on around the point. I’m assuming that’s where your killers came from.”

  The thought of that made her stomach sink. “What makes you think so?”

  “I saw it when I came after you. First thing I did when I got off the mountain was check out the bay to see if the dinghy was there, and sure enough it was, tied up at the dock. So I got a little worried and came looking for you. And that’s how I wound up in the kitchen.”

  She was sure there was a lot more to the story, but they could talk specifics later, Gina decided. At the moment, she had more pressing concerns.

  “They could find Ivanov—at any minute.” Stark terror twisted her insides at her next thought. “Then they’ll come looking for us.”

  “They’ll come looking for whoever killed Ivanov. At this point, they don’t know who that is. I don’t think.” While Gina tried to work out whether that was supposed to make a difference, he added, “Anyway, unless we’re really unlucky it’ll be a while before they find him.”

  The look she gave him was wry. “You know, I’m feeling pretty unlucky right now. Just sayin’.”

  That earned her a glimmer of a smile. As another gust of wind blew past, he reached out and tugged her hood up over her head with the clear intention of protecting her from the icy blast. Nodding her thanks at him, she secured her hood in place, then retrieved her gloves from her pocket and put them on as he unzipped a backpack and rooted around for a bottle of water. She knew what he was looking for because he found it almost immediately, pulled it out, unscrewed the cap, and passed it to her. Until that moment she hadn’t realized how parched her throat was. She drank thirstily and passed the bottle back. He took a drink, then screwed the cap on and stuck the bottle in the backpack. Then he produced a protein bar, which they shared.

  By the time they’d finished that off she was breathing more or less normally and the pain from the stitch in her side had gone away. The base of her spine and her left elbow hurt from hitting the kitchen floor, horror at the fate of her friends lurked in the back of her mind like a malevolent shadow, and she was cold and queasy and afraid of dying, either at the hands of the killers or from exposure: they had nowhere to go and the clouds that were rolling in on the wind were low and the color of lead, which she was afraid meant more snow.

  On a positive note, she was still alive.

  “Better?” he asked, and she nodded. She happened to be looking down at the camp just as the wind disturbed the fog enough so that she could see the buildings, as well as headlights moving away from them in a jerky, stop-and-go fashion. The headlights could only belong to the tractor, and as she watched, the vehicle chugged into a relatively clear patch of air so she could actually see it. A cross between a Caterpillar and a farm tractor complete with a small, enclosed cab and nine wheels in sets of three on each side that had been wrapped in tank treads, the thing was the canary yellow of a school bus and about as long. Right now it had its snowplow attachment down. Hard at work, it moved busily back and forth, scraping snow and ice off the asphalt.

  Gina frowned. “They’re clearing the runway.”

  Cal followed her gaze.

  “Shit.” He stood up abruptly. Picking up the backpacks, he slung them over his shoulder. “Come on, let’s go.”

  Gina stood up, too, but she was still staring down at the tractor. “Why would they be—” She broke off as the answer sent cold chills sliding down her spine. “They’re expecting a plane to land.”

  “Looks like it.” His voice was grim. He started walking and she followed. Every instinct she possessed screamed at her to put as much distance as possible between herself and what was going on below.

  They were maybe halfway up the mountain, high enough so that she could see but not hear the tractor, and at this point the trail was wide enough for them to walk side by side, with about five feet on the other side of it before a sheer drop-off plunged some three hundred feet into a snowy ravine. As it curled around the mountain, she knew from experience, the trail got narrower, and steeper.

  “That can’t be good,” she said, catching up and falling into step beside him.

  “Nope.”

  “Unless a plane’s coming to pick them up and take them away from here?” She knew it was a forlorn hope even as she said it.

  “I’d say they’re bringing in more people.”

  “Why?” Her voice was full of trepidation. She looked back down at the camp. Except for the glow of its headlights, the tractor once again had been swallowed by fog. The light spilling from the windows of the main building created yellow rectangles in the mass of gray, keeping her oriented. She and Cal were above the dense blanket of fog covering the low-lying areas now, and as they climbed higher it was like looking down on a rolling bank of storm clouds from the window of an airplane. Up where they were, the mist was lighter and finer, more lacy tendrils and a less solid block of condensation. The honks of a formation of Aleutian cackling geese as they flew past overhead were the only sounds other than the wind and the sea.

  Cal said, “They’ll be concerned about possible witnesses.”

  Gina digested that. “They can’t afford to leave anybody alive.” Her voice was hollow with realization.

  He said, “We’ve got some time. Nobody’s landing anything in this fog.”

 
At that indirect confirmation that she was right on with her deduction, the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach intensified. “Oh, goody. We just have to worry about the killers who are already here. For now.”

  A corner of his mouth quirked up in response. He slanted a glance at her. “How well do you know Attu?”

  “I’ve studied a map: I know the layout and where things are generally.” Glancing back down at the industriously moving headlights, she shuddered. “I’ve walked some of the trails, although the farthest I’ve gone is about half a day’s walk from camp.” She flicked a look at him. His head was bent slightly, to hear her better over the blowing wind, she thought. Seen in profile, his features looked as hard and unyielding as the craggy black mountain rising behind him. “I’ve gone around the eastern tip of the island in a Zodiac.”

  “Big mistake, huh?” The hint of humor in his voice caught her by surprise.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  He smiled at the fervency with which she said that, and once again she found herself thinking what a great-looking guy he was. Good-looking, good with his hands—the memory of their kiss and his subsequent feel-up of her body sent a reminiscent pulse through her—why, if she hadn’t been on the run for her life and he hadn’t been a dangerous stranger that she not only knew nothing about but didn’t want to know anything about and, oh, yeah, if life hadn’t smashed her romantic tendencies like a glass at the end of a Jewish wedding ceremony, she just might have been interested in him.

  But given the above conditions, not a chance. Even if he was an excellent kisser.

  He said, “You know of anyplace where we could hide out and still keep an eye on that runway?”

  Gina frowned, considering. “There’s a lookout post near the top of Weston Mountain.” She pointed. The peak loomed to her left, its summit wreathed in fog that hid the tiny, tumbledown cabin on sky-high stilts that was the lookout post. “Well, the remains of one. You can see the whole camp from there. When it isn’t so foggy, that is. Artillery Hill”—she pointed toward the west, where fog obscured the lower-elevation knob near the bay—“has some old Quonset huts still standing. Plus there are storage sheds all over the place. And caves.”