Chapter 14
Of course, it started to snow. Hadley sat back against a shaggy evergreen, in the perfect spot for surveilling the militia encampment.
She’d layered some pine straw beneath her and topped it with the stadium seat she’d gotten last fall as part of the Millers Kill track team fundraiser.
She’d done one year of Girl Scouts in her peripatetic childhood, and they’d made something like it at a meeting.
What was it called? Sit-along? Sit-around?
The troop was going to take theirs camping that summer, but by the end of the school year, her mother had met yet another guy and they were off to Oregon.
Hadley had always been so mad she’d missed that trip. Well, she was making up for it now.
Her perch was surprisingly comfortable, which was why her heart sank when the first flakes began drifting down.
She would be well protected beneath the tree’s drooping limbs—but if it started to pick up, there was no way she would still be able to see the camp.
Heavy snowfall was worse than fog for visibility.
And, unlike the chief, she had no confidence in her ability to crawl a lot closer and stay hidden.
Hadley pulled her cap farther down and jiggled the branches above her.
Snow showered her and her backpack. She brushed herself off.
Better. If it stayed light, she’d be okay.
And having to clear off the spruce boughs would at least give her something to break the monotony of watching nothing happen in the part of the campsite she could see.
The most exciting moment so far had been when the guy on kitchen duty walked to the edge of the clearing and tossed a basin of sudsy water into the trees.
She reminded herself boring was good. It wasn’t like she could call on her radio and have the rest of the MKPD show up.
She unsnapped the side pocket of her backpack and dug out a granola bar.
She wondered where Paul was. He should have made it back to where they’d left his uncle’s truck by now, but driving it out was going to be a bear.
No pun intended. Even he had said he didn’t know how the older man had gotten his truck so far off-road.
Part of her wanted the ranger to get off the mountain and back to civilization as quickly as he could, and part of her wanted to keep the rest of the world away as long as possible, to up their chances of hauling Flynn out of the stupid mess he’d gotten himself into.
Part of her just wanted the ranger back here, with her, with his wood lore and his chill demeanor and his rifle.
He seemed like a genuinely nice guy. Maybe after she’d finished tearing a strip off Flynn, she’d ask Paul out.
She snapped off a piece of the granola bar with a satisfied crunch.
Noise from the camp. And men moving. Crap.
She shoved the rest of her snack in her pocket and leaned forward.
She was too far away to hear anything distinctly, but something had gotten them stirring.
A whole cluster of them appeared from what must be the far side of the camp, and holy God, there was Flynn’s red hair, visible even through the thickening snowfall, and she tried to count the men around him against the chief’s estimate of their numbers and one of them shoved another forward—
—and it was the chief.
For a breath, everything stopped. Snow hung motionless, sound vanished, the men surrounding the chief froze.
Another breath, and the world sped up again.
A handful of guys broke away and headed for their tents in response to an order she couldn’t see or hear.
When they came back in heavy parkas, carrying rifles, she knew what the directive had been.
They disappeared toward the far side of the camp, where they must have found Van Alstyne.
Looking for fellow travelers. Looking for her.
The plan was to keep eyes on, in case the militia broke camp and moved, but she couldn’t stay here.
Hadley had no doubt they’d work their way around the whole site and then keep searching to the trip wire or beyond.
She wiggled out of her hide, folding her seat pad and scattering the pine straw.
She moved behind the tree, shoving the seat in her pack and shrugging it onto her shoulders.
Guilt turned her back toward the campsite—was she really just going to walk away and leave the chief there? Alone and unprotected?
For God’s sake, she could hear the chief say. Don’t be a hero.
She turned away and headed back. The snow wasn’t falling fast enough to hope her footprints would be covered by the time the militia search party reached this area, but she figured she could make it even harder if she carefully chose where her boots came down.
She kept her eyes moving, up, to follow Van Alstyne’s blazes marking the path, down, to step close to low-hanging boughs and overgrown brush where snow hadn’t accumulated yet.
Up, down. Up, down. The snow was coming faster now, still windless and light, but worrying.
She just needed to stay calm and get to where the three of them had camped last night.
The chief and Paul had picked it because it was well away from the alarmed perimeter.
She didn’t have to make a plan right now.
She didn’t need to panic about being stuck alone in the woods in the snow with a bunch of fanatics looking for her.
Jesus Christ, girl, get a hold of yourself.
She kept her head up, wiping her face, searching for the double blaze marking the location of the trip wire.
There. There? Yes, thank God, no mistaking those two peeled strips of bark.
She twisted back to see that her passage was, as she’d hoped, already blurring, then faced forward again, eyes focused on the wire.
She never saw the tree root that caught her toecap, twisting her ankle and sending her thudding onto the forest floor, scattering snow and snapping the trip wire.
The shrill alarm she heard was only in her imagination.
She didn’t waste time cursing or crying or screaming at her always-bad luck.
No hope now they’d waste their time on the inner circle; the militia men would be headed straight for the perimeter.
And beyond, which meant last night’s campground was useless—they knew somebody was out here, and they’d keep looking until they found her.
She had one sidearm with eight rounds, she was crap in the woods—her only advantage was a few minutes’ head start.
She scrambled up from the snow and took off, no thoughts of hiding her trail now. Snow whipped in her eyes, blinking and watering, as she kept her face tilted up to spot Van Alstyne’s blazes marking the trail to the bluff.
She tried running, but only went a few strides before her boot landed on something slick that turned beneath her. She flailed wildly, grabbing a pine branch and hanging on until she got her balance and righted herself. Walking, then. Fast walking.
The scrub snagged and caught in a way it hadn’t when they’d slowly and cautiously marked this trail yesterday.
She pressed on, constantly searching for the next peeled mark, then the next, then the next.
She pushed her hat above her ears to better hear what might be coming behind her, but the only sounds were the crunch of her boots and the dried-paper crackle of dead leaves and the barely there breath of snow falling.
She almost wished she could hear shouts and footfalls and …
and klaxons and dogs baying. The sense they were creeping up on her was like ice water dripping straight down her spine.
She told her imagination to shut the hell up. She would not waste time looking back—she had seen enough of Hudson’s cross-country races to know where that got you.
The next blaze was different; a straight peeled strip with a bit of bark dug out on either side, roughly cross-shaped.
What did that mean? She bent over, shielding her face for a moment from the relentless snow, trying to slow her racing brain enough to picture the chief making the marks.
She could envision him peeling a little bark off a tree, a strip on each side, but they’d been walking a ways before she really noticed.
Paul had been trying to download his wilderness skills for her, and she’d been focused on that.
So now she remembered everything about finding the North Star and f-all about why this mark didn’t match the rest.
It was reliving that moment that dropped the clue into her head.
It’s the first one he made. They had come up the long, steep slope of giant pines and climbed over a stone lip.
Van Alstyne had said something about marking the trail while Paul was writing directions on her arm.
Which meant the edge was right in front of her, a stone’s throw away.
She strode forward. If she could just get over that bluff and start heading down the mountain, the militia would have at least two directions they’d have to search.
When she got to the bottom and turned onto the old creek bed, they’d have to split their search again.
Every turning would force more choices for them, and less chance of being caught for her.
Of course, there was the matter of her being able to tell east from west when she couldn’t see more than a couple feet—
She stepped onto air.
She screamed, cartwheeling wildly, tipped forward and went down, back leg dragging behind her, thudding, rolling, pounding. She hit a massive tree with the force of a woodsman’s axe, all the breath exploding out of her lungs. She lay there for a time, sucking in air and crying and hurting all over.