Chapter 14 #2
Eventually, she rolled to her stomach, got her knees and hands beneath her, and clambered to her feet. Her hat had flown off somewhere along the way, and when she gingerly shrugged free of her backpack, she saw the two side pockets were empty. Her water bottle and the gun, gone.
Shit.
A head start. That’s your only advantage. A head start.
Okay, the gun didn’t matter. The water bottle …
one way or another she was headed back to the truck, she could do without for a while.
She opened her pack and dug around until her hand closed over a long-sleeve thermal tee.
She yanked it out, draped it over her head, and tied it beneath her chin like a Russian doll. A bruised, wet, shaking Russian doll.
The downward slope made her thighs tremble and ache.
The feathery pine branches far above screened out the sky; she could see much farther, and in patches the ground beneath her feet was more pine straw than snow.
Useless now to count the number of steps Paul had written on her forearm; she staggered slowly down, trusting she would find the stony creek bed sooner or later.
At least she wasn’t so blinded by snowfall she’d dive into it headfirst.
The stretch of tall pines and the steep slope ended at the same point, the ground leveling out and turning rockier. Hadley took a few steps back and forth, brushing snow off the stones in places, until she satisfied herself this was their trail. She shoved her parka and sweater up to her elbow.
The snow hitting her bare skin felt like small stings, but Paul’s assurance held true: the directions stood out, bold and black, unsmudged by her misadventures.
She took a moment, envisioned the three of them deciding to head up the hill she’d just descended, and turned right, hoping hard she wasn’t blowing it again.
If she got lost on the mountain … well, at the very worst, she could start yelling and wait for the bad guys to find her.
She trudged along the dry creek bed—not so dry now—her arms stretched out for balance against the uneven footing. She counted steps under her breath.
Despite the twinges and aches from her fall, she was feeling better. Even if some of the militia boys had managed to track her from where she’d set off the alarm, she had definitely widened the gap when she fell halfway down that slope. Ha! Take that, savvy woodsmen!
Crap. She had lost count. She picked up the last number she could recall, added ten, and moved on.
As a hat, her thermal shirt left a lot to be desired, and her hair’s growing dampness was one more pain in the ass, along with the literal pain in her tailbone.
She wondered if Paul had blazed a trail, or if she could follow the marks left by his uncle’s truck after it had been moved.
Should she try to go after him at all, or trust she’d be able to make it all the way back to the chief’s truck?
And if she got there, would she be able to get off the damn mountain with all this damn snow piling up?
What was the count again? She stopped for a moment.
Christ. She pulled her sleeve up again and stared at the marks, which were beginning to look more and more like Japanese kanji or hieroglyphics.
She remembered reading one of the early signs of hypothermia was mental confusion.
Though except for her head, she wasn’t feeling too cold.
Maybe hypothermia made you warm up somehow?
She stripped off her gloves and wiped her face.
Put them back on. Added ten to her last remembered count. Stepped forward.
When she entered the glade where they had found Pierre Laduc’s truck, she nearly wept with relief, which was stupid, because as long as she stuck to the creek bed, how could she not have wound up here?
Still. She checked her arm, and sure enough, Paul had included the number of steps to the truck.
It took her another six strides to get close enough to see through the veil of snow that it was gone.
She continued to the spot where the pickup had stood.
Any tracks Paul might have left had already been buried, but she could see a raw scrape on one side of a tree heading downslope from the clearing.
Okay. She made it this far. Now she actually had to come up with a plan.
Should she play it safe—sort of—and stick with the directions to where she and Paul and the chief had stashed the trucks what felt like a week ago?
Keeping in mind they might be snowed in?
Or should she try to follow Paul, in the hopes he hadn’t gotten so far ahead since leaving this morning that she’d be unable to catch up?
Either way offered lots of uncertainty, topped with a healthy dollop of possibly freezing to death.
If she hadn’t been staring so hard, she would have missed the faint shape, like a collection of smoke and darkness, taking form between the trees. She glanced over her shoulder, in the direction she had come from. It couldn’t be one of them, could it?
“Freeze!”
It was the ranger. The sense of relief made her light-headed for a second. “I’m already freezing, Paul.”
“Hadley?” He sluffed through the snow until they were close enough to see one another clearly. “What the hell are you doing here?” he asked, at the same moment she said, “Why aren’t you off this mountain?”
He shook his head. “I tried to drive out the way Pierre had come in. I don’t know what I was thinking. I might have been able to figure out his route if it had still been clear. Maybe.”
“Where’s the truck?”
He cleared his throat. “I hit some scree and slid sideways. It’s wedged between a couple of trees.”
She didn’t want to ask, but she had to. “Your uncle?”
“Still there. I swear I heard him laughing at me.” Paul shielded his eyes and looked up toward heaven. “He always did have a wicked sense of humor.” He dropped his gaze to her. “Now you.”
“Van Alstyne’s been taken by the militia.”
“What? You should have led with that! What happened?”
She relayed the events of the past—what was it now, an hour? Ninety minutes? Paul gave her a look when she described losing her gun and water bottle. “Now you know why the map is on your arm.”
“Yeah, I got that part. What I don’t know is what we should do.”
“We need to get somewhere with either a landline or a working cell signal and alert my people and yours.”
She paused. “You want to … hike out?”
He leaned to one side to peer at her backpack. “You don’t have a tent or a tarp, do you?”
She shook her head.
“Then no. We’ll head to where we parked our trucks. We can make it to the road well before nightfall.”
“What if they’re snowed in?”
“If we can’t power through the snow, then at the very least, we’ll have heat and shelter.”
She nodded. “It feels so … just awful. Leaving the chief behind.”
“I hear you.”
“I’m sorry I’m so inept at all this.” She waved a gloved hand to encompass the woods, her backpack, and the outdoors in general.
He caught her hand. “You’re doing great. And even if you were completely kitted out and we both had weapons, it would still be two against the whole pack of right-wing nutjobs.” The smile fell off his face. “We already know they don’t have any qualms about killing law enforcement.”
She pressed her lips tight together. Thinking of the chief. Thinking of Flynn.
Paul resettled his knapsack. “Ready?”
She nodded. “I’m ready.”