Chapter 30
Jack
The rev of the engines was much too loud and much too close.
Jack tracked the sound as they pushed through the timber, calculating the angle, the speed, and the distance. This wasn’t the searching circles from last night when they thought someone was out there and were trying to learn the truth.
This was fast and full of intention.
They knew where Jack and Steph were, or at least they thought they did. The meadow would be too exposed, which meant getting the sleds was no longer an option.
“This way.” Steph turned sharply to the right.
His feet paid the price for every step. The cold had long ago seeped through the two pairs of wool socks and into his skin. The frozen ground found every nerve ending it could and made use of them. He kept moving. Pain meant his feet were working, and working was what he needed them to do.
The circulation had returned to his hands in full, painful and welcome in equal measure. His wrists burned where the twine had bitten into them, but he could deal with it. And he had the rifle.
He kept up with Steph and didn’t ask where she was going.
She was taking them deeper into the timber, angling away from the open ground, away from the meadow, toward the densest section of trees.
Smart. The snowmobiles couldn’t follow in tight timber.
Every trunk between them and the snowmobiles was a problem the poachers had to solve. She was multiplying the problems.
He watched her move through the trees and tried to find the words he hadn’t found before the engines started.
I need to tell you about Celeste.
Now they were running again, and talking about Celeste wasn’t going to happen. Talking about anything but what they had to do to get out of this alive wouldn’t happen. But it would at some point. At some point, he needed to tell her why he overreacted the way he did.
You were dumb, Swisher. Dumb, and the cost might be losing Steph.
Not that he really had her to start with, but he couldn’t deny his feelings and knew she was feeling things too. Deep down, Jack knew Steph wasn’t the type to kiss someone unless she meant it.
Being with Steph isn’t an option, anyway. You’re broken, Jack, and she deserves better. He hated to admit that, even to himself, but he knew it was true.
Whether they had a future or not, explaining why he was dumb—why he was a total jerk—was important. He’d been terrible to her. What kind of person did something like that? What kind of man? If Jack looked at her now, he was certain his embarrassment would show.
Steph wasn’t looking at him, though. She was running. Not quite a sprint, but close to it. Jack struggled to keep up, but keep up he would.
Becky had been right all along. Steph was truly a winter warrior. He knew that now. And that was part of the problem.
He couldn’t be with someone who ran toward danger instead of away from it.
He knew it the way he knew most things that were simply true about himself. Not as a choice. As a fact.
A branch caught his shoulder, and he pushed through it, coming up even with Steph.
She didn’t look at him. Her eyes were on the trees ahead, reading the terrain, moving with the efficiency she brought to everything out there. Definitely a warrior.
A stubborn warrior. The stubbornness had shown through since their first conversation.
Not the day he’d saved her from the out-of-control car, but from a phone call a couple of months earlier, when he’d reached out to introduce himself and suggest their respective running clubs plan an outing or two together.
That first conversation told a lot about Steph and her stubbornness and dedication, not to mention her loyalty to her running club and to herself.
If he’d remembered that conversation before telling her to go hide and let him play the hero, he would’ve known she would do what she thought was right. What she thought was best. She didn’t see herself as wrong.
Viewed plainly, without all the emotion clouding things, her actions were justified. Steph assessed the situation, put a plan into motion, and it worked.
And what did he do? His “thanks” came in the form of calling her careless. Jack knew why she was furious. He’d treated her like a foolish child.
She was anything but.
The engine sounds shifted. Both machines had moved west, which put them between the timber and the road. He tracked the change without breaking stride and looked at the back of Steph’s head and understood she had already read it.
She adjusted their direction, heading deeper into the trees. The engines were still loud but no longer gaining. The timber was doing its work.
He wanted to talk to her, tell her he understood why she was angry and that she was right to be angry, but now was certainly not the time. Maybe that was convenient. He wasn’t sure anymore what was convenient and what was cowardice.
Their speed wasn’t an all-out sprint, but it was still fast. Too fast for the condition of his feet and the closeness of the trees.
She slowed as the ground climbed and the trees grew denser, the canopy closing overhead.
His feet found a section of bare ground under a stand of large pines where the canopy had kept the snow thin, and for a dozen steps, the cold eased. Not enough, but noticeably.
He took inventory. The rifle held six, and he had nine extra rounds.
Steph had used the entire canister of bear spray on Todd, dropping the container before going at him with the limb.
She’d cut him loose with a pocketknife, which he assumed she still had, and she wore her backpack.
Maybe it held something they could use. He could only hope the beacon was transmitting their updated position clearly.
They needed something different than what they were doing.
Running worked when you had somewhere to run to. They didn’t. Not yet. The poachers were keeping them pinned in the heavy timber, but how long until the cover ran out?
He didn’t know these woods like Steph did, but he knew enough to understand there were open areas at regular intervals, either meadows or fire roads. Every direction they moved, the men on those machines could cover more ground faster.
“Hold up,” he said.
Steph stopped, breathing hard. She looked at him, her expression guarded in the way it had been ever since he’d said the wrong things in the wrong order, and definitely in the wrong tone, after she freed him.
“The trees will eventually end.”
She nodded once. “I know.” She scanned the trees around them as she took several deep breaths.
“The rescue team is coming. They have to be getting close. They’ve had the time they said they needed, and the GPS should be transmitting.
We need to stay alive long enough for them to get here.
That means not giving them a shot at us by getting out in the open. We have to . . . to . . . ”
“Evade?” he suggested.
“Yeah, evade.” She paused and checked her watch. “While we can. The dark helps. We’ve still got about two hours until it’ll start getting light enough to see. After that . . . ” She shook her head. “The rescue team should’ve been here by now.”
Her voice held little hope.
“What do you need from me?”
Something crossed her face, brief and not quite readable. “Don’t get captured again.”
He almost said something but stopped himself. “I won’t,” he said instead.
She gave a nod. “Ready?”
They set out again. He should’ve asked her what the plan was, but he didn’t want the question to suggest he didn’t trust her. He wanted to trust her and wanted her to know he did.
The ground leveled off, and the trees thinned at the edge of a long, narrow depression in the terrain, shallow enough to cross but wide enough to matter.
Steph picked the crossing point without hesitating, finding the section where the snow was wind-packed hard.
He followed, and they crossed without breaking through.
On the far side, she paused, listening.
The engines were loud. He could track them both, the positions clear in the timber, and the positions were not good. One was running almost parallel with them. Every once in a while, he got a glimpse of the snowmobile through the trees.
He thought the younger one, Graham, was operating it. The main reason was that there had been no shooting. Somehow, he believed if Rick was near them, he’d take potshots whenever he thought he had an opportunity. Not so much to hit them as to scare them.
Rick’s machine was somewhere ahead, no doubt to get in front of them and find the spot where the timber ended and Steph and Jack would be in the open. They needed to not play into his hand.
Where was Todd? Was he still on the ground where Steph had left him?
He’d looked pretty rough. Jack held a minor worry that Todd might somehow pull himself together and fire up the third machine, coming after them for revenge if nothing else.
But an obviously broken leg and broken wrist made that unlikely.
Steph was still running at a steady pace but searching for something.
Her head angled in the direction of the road.
Was she thinking of crossing? The bank was steep in this area, at least thirty feet from where they were in the woods up to the road.
It was the kind of section that looked as if they’d need to be part mountain goat to even make the climb.
As they moved, his feet screamed. He put his weight on the outer edges where the cold was marginally less.
The machine running parallel sounded louder than it had thirty seconds ago.
He turned to look through the trees.
The timber here was dense but not impenetrable. Between the trunks, fifty yards out, the snow was open enough to travel, and he could see movement. Dark shape, headlight throwing pale light through the trees, moving in a line that was going to intersect with their position in less than a minute.
He could see the driver clearly enough, definitely Graham, rifle on a sling across his back. Graham had looked like a man in over his head earlier. Like murdering people was not something he signed up for. Yet here he was, willing to, at the very least, funnel Steph and Jack into Rick’s trap.
Rick wouldn’t hesitate to kill them.
And as much as Jack hated to admit it, he was counting on Steph to keep them alive.
The trouble was, they couldn’t keep running. Rick was up ahead somewhere. Waiting. Planning the trap, communicating with Graham via walkie-talkie. Rick knew exactly where they were and what was happening. Graham may be squeamish, but he was a company man. He’d do what the boss said.
Running was done.
He touched Steph’s arm. “We can’t keep going.”
“Just a little farther. I have an idea.” She met his eyes. “Trust me, okay?”