Close To Death (Kari Blackhorse #11)

PROLOGUE

Jennifer Hayes had always believed that running would save her life.

Running had pulled her out of the darkness after her divorce, had given her a reason to wake up at four-thirty in the morning when the rest of Phoenix was still asleep, had transformed her from a woman who defined herself by her failures into someone who could stand at a starting line and know—truly know—that she was capable of extraordinary things.

And now, as her lungs burned and her legs screamed and the Sonoran Desert stretched endlessly in every direction, she realized she would have to count on her training and conditioning to save her.

She glanced over her shoulder without breaking stride. The figure was still there. A quarter mile back, maybe less. Moving with that same relentless pace that had terrified her for the past—how long had it been? Two hours? Three?

She'd lost track somewhere around the time her phone battery died, leaving her GPS watch as her only connection to the outside world. A watch that was recording every desperate zigzag of her flight but couldn't call for help, couldn't summon the rescue that might be her only chance of survival.

Her water had run out forty minutes ago.

She could feel the dehydration setting in—the thickening of her thoughts, the way her vision seemed to shimmer at the edges.

She'd trained for this, of course. Every ultra-marathon runner knew the signs.

But she'd always trained with support crews and aid stations, with the knowledge that help was never more than a few miles away.

Out here, in this brutal landscape of rock and cactus and unforgiving sun, there was no one.

No one except the shadow behind her.

Jennifer veered left, scrambling up a rocky incline that would have been challenging even fresh.

Her foot slipped on loose gravel, and she caught herself with her hands, feeling the skin tear on her palms. The pain barely registered.

Pain was just information now, just data to be processed and filed away.

What mattered was distance. What mattered was staying ahead.

She'd been so excited about this training run.

That was the bitter irony that kept circling through her oxygen-starved brain.

After eighteen months of preparation, she'd finally felt ready for the Sonoran 100—ready to push herself beyond anything she'd ever attempted before.

One hundred miles through the desert is the ultimate test of endurance and mental fortitude.

She'd imagined crossing that finish line, imagined the medal around her neck, imagined calling her daughter in Seattle to share the triumph.

I did it, she'd planned to say. Your mother did the impossible.

Now she just wanted to see her daughter again. Period. Full stop. The medal didn't matter. The race didn't matter. Nothing mattered except surviving the next hour, the next minute, the next step.

The terrain here was different from that of her usual training routes.

She typically ran the groomed trails north of Phoenix, paths that challenged her endurance without threatening her safety.

This was something else entirely—an unforgiving wilderness of washes and ridgelines, of hidden drop-offs and treacherous footing.

She'd been pushed steadily eastward, away from anything familiar, away from roads and cell towers and the thin veneer of civilization that separated survival from catastrophe.

Pushed. That was the word. Because whoever was behind her wasn't just chasing her. They were herding her.

Every time Jennifer tried to angle back toward the highway, the figure would appear on her flank, forcing her to change direction.

Every time she thought she'd found a route to safety, another adjustment would push her deeper into the wilderness.

The work of someone who knew this desert far better than she did.

She crested the ridge and allowed herself a moment to scan the horizon. Nothing but more desert. More rock. More emptiness. The sun hung low and brutal in the western sky, painting the landscape in shades of copper and gold, a sight both beautiful and indifferent.

The desert didn't care whether she lived or died. It would be here long after her bones had bleached to white and crumbled to dust.

Stop it, she told herself. That kind of thinking is how you die.

She'd learned mental discipline during her first ultra, a brutal fifty-miler in the mountains of Colorado that had pushed her to the edge of quitting a dozen times.

Her coach had taught her to compartmentalize, to focus only on the next milestone, the next aid station, the next step.

Don't think about the finish line when you're at mile twenty.

Think about mile twenty-one. Just get to twenty-one.

But there were no mile markers out here. No aid stations. No finish line except the one her body would eventually force upon her.

Jennifer started down the far side of the ridge, her pace slowing despite her best efforts.

She was operating on fumes now, her glycogen stores depleted, her muscles beginning to cannibalize themselves for fuel.

She'd pushed through walls before—every ultra-runner had—but this wasn't a race where she could slow to a walk, refuel, recover.

This was survival, and every second she slowed was a second her pursuer gained on her.

She thought about her ex-husband, briefly and without the bitterness that had defined those thoughts for so long.

Mark had never understood her running, had seen it as an escape rather than a calling, an avoidance of their problems rather than an attempt to become someone strong enough to face them.

Maybe he'd been partly right. Maybe she had been running away from something, at least in the beginning.

But somewhere along the line, she'd started running toward something instead.

Toward strength. Toward self-knowledge. Toward the version of Jennifer Hayes who could look in the mirror and be proud of what she saw.

That woman felt very far away right now.

Her foot caught on something—a root, a rock, she couldn't tell—and she stumbled, barely catching herself before going down.

The near-fall cost her precious seconds, and when she glanced back, the figure was closer.

A hundred yards, maybe less. Close enough that she could make out details she'd been unable to see before: the lean build, the economical stride of someone who had spent years—decades, perhaps—running through terrain exactly like this.

Someone who moved through the desert like they belonged to it.

Jennifer pushed harder, finding reserves she hadn't known she possessed.

Her vision was graying at the edges now, her heart hammering so hard she could feel it in her temples.

This was dangerous territory, the kind of exertion that could trigger cardiac arrest even in a trained athlete.

But stopping wasn't an option. Stopping meant—

She didn't let herself finish the thought.

The wash she dropped into was deeper than she'd expected, the sandy bottom grabbing at her feet and slowing her even further.

She waded through it like a nightmare, each step an agony of effort.

On the far side, the bank rose in a steep scramble that would have been nothing an hour ago but now seemed insurmountable.

She climbed anyway. Hand over hand, feet scrabbling for purchase, the taste of copper in her mouth. She'd bitten through her lip at some point without noticing.

At the top, she allowed herself one more backward glance.

The figure had reached the wash. Was crossing it with that same inexorable pace, neither hurrying nor slowing. Patient. So terrifyingly patient. Like someone who knew exactly how this was going to end and saw no need to rush the inevitable.

Jennifer ran.

Or tried to run. Her legs were refusing to cooperate now, the signals from her brain arriving delayed and distorted.

She was staggering more than running, a drunk's lurching progress.

The terrain blurred beneath her feet—rock and scrub and the bleached bones of some long-dead animal that made her think, irrationally, of her own skeleton baking in this merciless sun.

She thought about her daughter. Melissa was twenty-three now, living her own life in Seattle with a boyfriend Jennifer had only met twice and a career that involved working with some kind of software that Jennifer didn't fully understand.

Jennifer and her daughter talked every Sunday, an hour of connection that had become the anchor point of Jennifer's week.

This Sunday, Jennifer had planned to tell her about the Sonoran 100, about the months of preparation finally paying off.

I love you, she thought, pushing the words out into the universe with whatever energy she had left. I love you, and I'm sorry I didn't tell you more often.

Her right leg buckled.

She caught herself, somehow, and kept moving. But she could feel the end approaching now. Her body was shutting down, system by system, conserving whatever resources remained for the vital organs. Soon her legs would stop working entirely. Soon she would fall and not get back up.

The ground ahead rose slightly—just a gentle incline, barely noticeable under normal circumstances.

It might as well have been Everest. Jennifer's pace slowed to a walk, then to a stumble, then to something that was barely forward motion at all.

Each step was a negotiation, a desperate bargain with a body that had nothing left to give.

She made it another fifty yards. Maybe less.

Then her legs gave out entirely, and she fell.

The impact with the hard-packed earth drove the air from her lungs. For a long moment she just lay there, her cheek pressed against the ground, watching a beetle navigate the obstacle of a small stone with single-minded determination.

Lucky beetle, she thought distantly. Lucky, stupid beetle with its simple beetle problems.

She tried to push herself up. Her arms trembled, buckled, dropped her back to the dirt.

Footsteps behind her. Unhurried. The crunch of gravel under feet that had covered this same brutal distance without apparent effort.

Jennifer rolled onto her back, wanting to see. Wanting to understand. The sun was directly behind the figure now, transforming them into a silhouette, a shadow given human form. She couldn't make out features, couldn't see the face of the person who had run her to ground like an animal.

Just the shape. The outline. The idea of a person.

She opened her mouth to speak—to beg, to curse, to ask why—but no words came. Her throat was too dry, her body too depleted. All she could do was lie there in the dirt, watching the shadow grow larger as it approached.

The figure stopped, looking down at her.

Jennifer closed her eyes.

She thought about the thousands of miles she'd covered in her life, the hundreds of sunrises she'd witnessed, the moments of pure transcendence when her body and mind had merged into something greater than either.

The finish line she might never cross, and the daughter she might never see again, and the life she'd been building, step by step, mile by mile, from the wreckage of everything that had come before.

All that work hadn't saved her.

But it had made her into someone worth saving.

The shadow fell over her, and Jennifer Hayes stopped running.