by Aaron Pogue
She barely made a sound. And slow or not, she was still covering ground. She climbed toward the ridge, toward the one easy access she knew of to the bunker's valley. The darkness hampered her, but it gave her cover. Same as the SpectreShield had done. She had to slow further when her path suddenly turned up steeply, but she was feeling some real confidence.
She leaned forward, feeling the way with her hands, and found the path a little easier off to the left, away from the stream's bed. She headed that way, and stuck her foot right down into a dead, dried old sticker bush. Faye's jeans did a decent job protecting her from the thorns, but the plant clung to her leg. She jumped back, startled, and the dried branches scraped with a clatter on the rocky ground. Head whipping left and right, listening for some sound of alarm, she tried frantically to shake the thing loose, but it clung tenaciously and rattled like a maraca.
In the stillness of the night it seemed like a raucous noise. She stomped with her other foot, pinning it to the ground, and tried to pull free, but that just drove half a dozen vicious barbs on the other side deep into her leg. She bit her lip to keep from screaming and dropped on her rump. She jabbed at it with the butt of the shotgun, but couldn't see well enough to connect. At last she bent forward and scrabbled at the vines with both hands and her free foot. Close to a panic, she tried to ignore the thorns tearing at her palms until she finally shoved it and her shoe free. Then she bloodied her left hand even worse when she reached for the fallen shoe and brushed the bush once again.
She pulled the shoe back on gingerly, and then sat there, curled forward around her knees, gulping down her fear and trying to catch her breath. She could feel the seconds flying away, but she couldn't move. The scratches on her leg and hands weren't too deep, but they burned. No one was hunting her—surely they'd have shot her already if they were anywhere close—but she'd done everything she could to give herself away.
All because of a plant. What chance did she have of getting through this? She let her eyes close. Her breathing slowed as she clung to her knees. She didn't even know where she was going. It took ages for her calm to return.
Eventually, though, her breaths were slow, regular, and she could feel a soothing calm creeping along her back and down her arms. It pressed gently on the backs of her eyes, too. Sleep. More dangerous than panic and harder to shake. She shook her head and forced her eyes open. It didn't make much of a difference in her vision, but it dispelled the deadly sense of peace.
She took three quick, rough breaths to brace herself, then pushed up onto her feet. She wasted another thirty seconds finding the shotgun by touch in the dark. Then she started forward, and her foot fell four inches farther than she expected. Soft grass gave under her step and she barely caught herself short of falling.
Downhill. She was turned around. She mouthed a furious curse and finally pulled the handheld out and used its light to orient herself. She found the slope she'd been trying to scale, and her heart sank even further. It was barely three steps up. She wouldn't have even noticed it in daylight, but in darkness it had almost done her in.
She sighed and pushed on. Up the slope and back to her right, back to the bed of the creek, and back on her path. She needed to put the handheld away, now that she knew where she was, but she couldn't make herself. She was being as stupid as Jim now, but she needed it.
And then she stopped. The toe of her right shoe was in the water. Her left was up on a stone that rose above the water level, and her body was tensed to spring off that step and across to the other side. But a sound in the air froze her in place.
Buzzing. It was a low hum, just across the creek, low to the ground. And then the stench registered. And then the thin pink haze of blood staining the water in front of her. She closed her eyes, trying to picture the scene in her head, the roll of the terrain, and then she nodded slow understanding. She swallowed her revulsion and jumped.
On the other side, the faint gray light of her handheld flowed across the gruesome corpse and bathed it in a funereal glow. It roiled with the motion of flies, and she could see the damage where a larger scavenger had gnawed at the right arm and tried dragging it back toward the trees. The worst of the damage wasn't from teeth marks, though.
She didn't have to look for the bullet hole in the collarbone or the one in the center of his chest. She could picture them with perfect clarity. And she didn't have to wonder if they'd done the job. He'd been dead before he hit the ground.
But he'd hit the ground on his face. He was on his back now, and it wasn't a coyote that had turned him over. It certainly wasn't a coyote that had blown away his face with a shotgun. She swung the tip of her own shotgun to chase away flies just so she could be sure and her stomach roiled at the sight, but there was no doubt about it. Someone had found the corpse of Jim Dade out here in the woods, shot him in the face, and left him. Why? Was it a message? Was it Faye?
She shook her head. If it had been Faye's doing, Katie would have heard the shot. She would have heard Faye out here in the woods. Right? And this didn't look quite that recent.
She shooed more flies away, trying to puzzle it out, and found his jacket ripped open, the pockets turned out. The pants pockets were out, too. And then she moved to his left arm, tucked up close beside his body, and saw the black stain at the end of it.
They'd done the same thing to his hands—blown them away at the wrists. A glance back at the outstretched right arm confirmed it. She shuddered and backed away. First a step, just getting away from the angry swarm of flies, but then another, faster, until she was scrambling frantically backward.
She kept going until her back hit the jagged rock ledge she'd climbed just before he found her. Both palms slapped against the stone, her whole body pressing into it with a need to be away. For several tense heartbeats she stood there frozen, then she blinked, and breathed, and bent her knees.
The air was clearer. The trickle of the little waterfall at her right drowned out the buzz of the flies, and it hid the sound of her hot panting breath, too. She cleared her throat, closed her eyes, and sighed.
Face and hands. She nodded slowly. Headset and watch. Retinas and fingerprints, maybe, if they were feeling really paranoid. They'd been trying to obliterate his identity. They'd probably gone through his pockets for the handheld—
No. She cursed softly, the sound of it lost in the babble of the brook, but her eyes flashed with rage. Not the handheld. The keys. They'd come up here for Jim's corpse because Jim had the keys to the bunker.
He'd been the last one there before Katie's visit. He'd left the doors unlocked, and that had allowed her to get in. As soon as they returned, he'd come straight after her, and died here on this slope with the keys still in his pockets.
She hadn't even thought to search him. Avery had known, though. He'd called Wade in to do it—that shotgun work had to be Wade's doing—and Avery had sent Ken and an injured Eddie down into the bunker to do what had to be done while he went off to kidnap Faye.
"What had to be done." Katie shook her head at the thought. What was it that had to be done? They'd reworked the SpectreShields to set themselves free. They could go anywhere in the world now, undetected. With those things broadcasting they didn't need to carry them anymore. Even if they abandoned this bunker, they could set them up anywhere relatively secure, leave them, and wander the world.
But what did they want with Faye? The easy answer was that they were trying to tie up loose ends, to kill off everyone with any evidence against them, but what about Paul? He probably knew far more than Faye did, and he was well outside their reach. So why take her? And what about Katie?
She shook her head. That was the answer, of course. It was all about Katie. They had nothing to fear from Faye. She was just a tool to bring Katie out into the forest. Avery had said as much. Still, that brought her back to an earlier question. Why let Faye go? Why give her two hours, instead of keeping her right in hand?
Her chin snapped downward, bobbing almost to her collarbone, and sh
e shook her head. She blinked a few times and forced her eyes wide, trying to shake off the drowsiness. It was too heavy now. She stretched her arms, stretched her legs, careful to stay under the shelter of the stone cliff but moving as much as she could manage.
She scooted over to the waterfall and stuck her face in the cool water. She jerked back against the shock of it, then took a slow breath and forced her face back into the water. Then she pulled back and scooped a handful of water to her parched lips. The cool water felt good on her hands, too. She washed them clean, dried them on the folds of Faye's hoodie, and then slipped back to her earlier hiding spot. She felt better.
She yawned, and it was a long one, but when it passed she blinked again and nodded. She felt better. Her mind was clearer.
Her vision, too.
She stared off toward the east. She couldn't yet recognize the golden glow of impending dawn, but the black blanket of night was thinning in the air. She could see shadows in the darkness, and she knew day would be here soon.
She checked her watch. Five nineteen. She'd lost the cover of darkness, or nearly, but she still had some small amount of reprieve from the recorders. She needed to go, but she had to know where.
And then she understood. They weren't scared of Faye. Not at all. They'd let her go, because she would prove a distraction for Katie. She'd keep Katie busy. Because it didn't really do Katie any good to rush to the bunker if Faye wasn't there. Avery had released her precisely to keep Katie away. He wanted her here in the woods, but he didn't want her at the bunker.
She frowned. Why? Why not? She thought of the keys. That bunker was a fortress. Avery could lock the doors and seal her out forever. It would be pointless for Katie to even try. If Faye wasn't there, she had no reason to go there at all. She blinked, but her train of thought was running in circles now.
She had no reason to go to the bunker. It was tempting to go there just because Avery wanted to keep her away, but even if she did, she couldn't imagine what she might achieve. She shook her head. She didn't want to play into his game, though. That was a quick way to end up dead.
So what was left? He wanted her tracking Faye, trying to find her, but Katie had no way to guess where the other woman might have gone. Did she? She didn't know this land the way they did. She bit her lip. Not without Hathor. And then her hand shot to the back pocket of her jeans, and she tugged out the map Timmy had made. She hadn't even glanced at it this time, but now...
Now she looked at it in a way she never had before. She looked at the lines and curls, the thin black whorls decorating the whole page, drawing every curve and flow of the land. She didn't have much experience with topographical maps, but this one had enough points of reference for her that it was easy for her to match it against the land. She'd spent so much time wrestling with the land's topography, she had a pretty solid feel for it.
Thinking of it that way, comparing the lines on the map to the terrain she knew, she was able to work it out pretty quickly. She recognized the broad, flat bowl of the valley—one of the largest empty spaces on the whole map, apart from Timmy's notation. She could trace the path she'd taken down to it, too, all the way back up to the steep slope she'd slid down on her back.
The lines were packed tightly there, bunching up to show the grade, and she nodded. She could trace the same thick band almost all the way around the bowl. It only broke in two places: at the ridge on the southeast corner that she had escaped up, where it evened out to a much smoother slope, and nearly opposite that on the northwest end of the valley, where the ridge that ringed it plunged down on both sides to create a narrow pass even with the valley floor. That one looked like the neck of a bottle, long and narrow, and stretched up past the fold in the map.
She tried to picture what it would look like in real life. She saw steep cliffs on both sides, a narrow passage out of the valley, almost like the logging road out east, but here it would be the mountain itself hemming her in on both sides. She shivered at the thought. It was a perfect place for an ambush.
It didn't matter anyway. It was way too far for her to travel undetected. Her only point of access was the slope she'd used to get here. That one was barely a hundred yards away, and she knew the path. She could see the top of the ridge from here.
She nodded to herself, sure. That was her path. She needed to get up there and find some sign of Faye. If Faye had run, she would end up there eventually. There or at the pass on the other side, and Katie could only help with one possibility. She felt sure Faye would come the same way Katie had, for the same reason Katie had. The terrain would push her there.
That thought stopped her. She could feel the weight of it, some important implication that she couldn't quite place, but it kept her from moving up the hill. Then she felt the echo of it in her memory. She kept ending up in the creekbeds because the terrain pushed her there. No matter where she wanted to go on the mountain, she always ended up in one or two places.
She looked at the map again, searching it, and saw it confirmed in the expansions and contractions of the lines. Timmy's colored ink traced helpful paths on the map, but knowing what to look for, she could recognize it in the topography lines. They lined up almost exactly. The mountain was bent into easier paths, harder paths....
Chokepoints. She didn't see any other points of access to the valley, and she didn't see any other paths to the ridge than the two she had taken. Her eyes kept drifting again to the spot she'd noticed before, too. Due north of her now, a little west of where Eddie had been shot, northwest of the tree where Timmy had died.
Knowing what to look for, she suddenly understood it perfectly. And it wasn't a general area, now. Knowing three points it had to cover, she could triangulate pretty precisely. Wade's tree stand. He had a vantage point that gave him clear sight over the only two routes up the mountain, and the only path down into the valley on the other side. He was their lookout.
And in all likelihood, Katie realized, he was there right now. Gun trained on the top of the ridge, knowing Katie would get there eventually. Knowing the mountain would send her there, even if she didn't go deliberately. He would have gotten Faye, too, if she'd ever found her way out.
Katie closed her eyes. Of course. She hadn't heard a shot, though. She could have missed one. It was possible. But she didn't think it was likely. She didn't want to, anyway. The other woman was probably gone, out the pass on the far side and way beyond any help from Katie. She might be lying low, though, terrified, just waiting for dawn.
Dawn. Katie looked at the map, focusing hard on the area in her immediate vicinity. Two hundred yards. Maybe three hundred. Through rough terrain, with growing light and fading strength. It wasn't very promising, but it was her only shot.
She jumped to her feet and into a flat run. Her shoulders and neck were tensed against expected pain, her ears straining for the boom of the shot that would kill her, but it never came. If Wade was up there, he wasn't watching her position. Or maybe he hadn't seen her. It was still dark.
Dark enough that she tripped as soon as she got to the cover of the trees. It was six paces from the edge of the stream, across the slope, and then back into the safety of the thick woods, but as soon as she breathed a sigh of relief her right foot hit a rock too big to kick aside and she pitched forward.
Her right shoulder hit a tree trunk and she careened off it, smashing her left arm into another. She caught onto that one with both arms, hugging it close, and waited for the rustle of the trees to die away.
She remembered leading Jim down this hillside, remembered hiding in the shadow of a tree trunk, then stepping out into moonlight and giving herself away. If Wade had noticed the sound, he'd be searching for her now.
She remembered Jim's trick, too. She decided to try a variant. If she was right—and she was making a lot of decisions based on a pretty thin web of guesswork at this point—but if she was right, Wade probably had a lot more interest in guarding that one part of the ridge than on policing every noise in the forest.
She bent her knees in a slow, careful dip, and felt with her fingers until she found a stone a little smaller than her fist. Then she raised back up, twisted her body to hide as much as possible from the vantage she imagined Wade to be watching from, and heaved it like a shot put, as far toward the valley ridge as possible.
It flew thirty feet before it made a noise, arcing high up, then it began to sink down, and it snapped two or three branches with loud, popping cracks that rang in the night. An instant later it fell into the bracken closer to the ground and gave a great rattle and rustle that continued for some time as it rolled a little way back downhill.
The effect was everything Katie had hoped for, and far enough away in a separate stand of trees that it should have worked.
She didn't wait to find out. As soon as the first branch snapped, she was moving due north, following the downhill side of a little five-foot ridge she'd traced on the map. It carried her fifty yards before she reached another one, lower down, and she jumped lightly down to follow it back north and west. Toward Wade.
She spotted a jumbled pile of stones some distance off to the right and recognized it from her first night in the woods. It froze her in place, cowering in a crouch beneath the ledge she was following, and she remembered so recently (and so long ago) hiding from the same gunman right there.
She could picture the path she'd followed to get there from the stream where Eddie was shot. She shook her head. The wilderness seemed so massive, but it kept bringing her back to the same old places.
She was ready to be done with all of them. She risked a peek, lifting her head up above the ledge, and cast her eyes straight up into the trees, but she saw nothing. It was still too dark. There were rays of light touching the highest leaves, and a honey tint in the gray sky beyond, but the canopy itself was still a dense black shadow.
No one shot her, though, which meant he wasn't watching her. If he was even there. She pushed that thought away. If he wasn't, she had nothing to fear. She glanced at her watch, and swallowed some fear. Not for twenty-one minutes anyway.
