Chapter Fifteen
Scott lay prone in the snow, fighting to breathe, heart drumming painfully in his chest. He braced himself against the pain he expected—but felt nothing.
With one hand he probed at his chest, but found no exit wound.
No blood. His back hurt as if he had been punched.
Careful to stay low, he felt at his back.
His fingers found a hole in his backpack, the coffeepot beneath it, dented now.
There was still no pain, and he could move freely, now that he had caught his breath.
“Are you all right?” Lily asked from her spot, prone in the snow a few feet to his left. Jackson lay beside her—the dogs were nowhere in sight.
“I think so.” He rose up on all fours. “I think the bullet struck the coffeepot in my pack. I don’t think I’m bleeding.”
“There’s a hole in your backpack,” she said.
“Yeah.” He started to his feet, intending to remove the backpack and examine it more closely, but another shot rang out, sending him flat to the ground once more.
A quick glance around told him they were in a terrible position—pinned down on the side of the ridge, easily standing out from the snow.
But just downslope was a grove of small trees, and below that even deeper woods.
All they needed was a chance to get to cover.
“On the count of three, I want you both to jump up and run as fast as you can for that grove of trees just below us and to the left,” he said. “Can you do that?”
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“I’m going to fire in the direction I think those shots came from. The shooter will focus on me instead of the two of you and you can get away.”
“Scott!” she protested. “They’ll shoot you.”
“No they won’t.” They might, but he wasn’t going to think about that. “I’ll stay down. You and Jackson have to get away. Promise me you’ll run.”
“All right.” She didn’t sound enthusiastic, but he was counting on her putting the boy’s safety first.
“Jackson?” he asked.
“Yes,” the boy said, his voice a little shaky, but clear. “I’ll run.”
Scott found the gun, checked that it was loaded and clicked off the safety.
“On the count of three,” he said. “One, two, three.” He fired twice up the slope.
A shot immediately answered, striking the ground to his left.
He army-crawled a few feet upslope and fired again.
More return fire, though again only a single shot. Was the shooter conserving ammunition?
Scott looked over his shoulder to where Lily and Jackson had been huddled together. They were no longer there. He waited, counting to a hundred. Time to get himself out of here.
He slid the pistol into the waistband of his pants, snugged against the small of his back.
Then he grabbed the pack firmly by the sides.
“One. Two. Three.” He hoisted the pack over his head.
Another bullet tore the pack from his hand.
He flung the pack to one side, shoved to his feet and ran.
He fully expected to feel a bullet slam into him at any moment, but no impact came.
He stumbled through the thick snow in his boots, scrambling for purchase, trying to stay low, aiming for the grove of trees.
He crashed into the copse of trees, snow flying from the branches of pinion trees. “Over here!” Lily cried.
She was crouched at the base of an ancient juniper, the trunk two feet in diameter, feathery branches weighted down by snow forming an umbrella over her. He moved in beside her. “I had to leave my pack,” he said, gasping for breath.
“Better your pack than the rest of you.”
“Where’s Jackson?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He was ahead of me, and then I couldn’t see him anymore.” She raised her head. “Jackson! Jackson, where are you?”
No answer. “Hunter!” Scott shouted.
“Shelby!” Lily called. She whistled and clapped, but the snow absorbed all sound before it went very far.
“We can’t go on without Jackson and the dogs.” Her voice was tight with fear.
He gripped her arm. “Jackson probably just ran ahead of us. Maybe the dogs are with him.” He was trying to comfort her, and himself, too. After all the trouble they had gone to to find him, surely they couldn’t have lost the boy now.
Snow continued to fall, hard. Lily turned a complete circle, peering into the wall of white. “How are we ever going to find them?” she asked, sounding as if she might burst into tears.
Scott nudged her. “We need to get out of here before someone comes looking for us. It won’t be difficult for them to find us.” Even with the heavy snow, they were close enough to the top of the ridge that it probably wouldn’t be that far for whoever had fired those shots to come after them.
“What if they have Jackson?” she asked.
“Then we can’t help him if we let them find us, too.”
He reloaded the gun, then led the way down the slope, moving in a zigzag path from the cover of tree to tree.
Periodically they stopped, and he strained his ears, listening for sounds of pursuit.
But the woods around them were silent except for the occasional soft “whump” as a tree released its burden of snow.
At least the continued snowfall did a good job of erasing their tracks.
They headed steadily downhill, stumbling and stopping to help each other up. Scott searched for any sign that Jackson and the dogs had come this way, but found nothing.
“Stop!” Lily called when they had been trudging along for a quarter of an hour. She pulled her pack to the front and began rummaging in it. “I’m going to call the sheriff and let them know what happened, see if I can find out where our rescuers are.”
“Good idea.” Scott looked around them, seeing nothing in the swirling snow. He felt half naked without his pack. Maybe he’d made a mistake, sacrificing it that way. He hadn’t had any food left in it, but he had first aid supplies and his sleeping bag.
“I can’t find the phone.”
Lily’s words jerked him out of his stupor. “What do you mean you can’t find it?”
“It’s not in my pack. I swear I stowed it back in here after I spoke with Mike.”
“Where did you put the phone?” Scott asked.
“In the outside pocket.” She indicated the pocket.
“Was it unfastened like that?” Scott asked.
“I thought I closed it, but it was open when I went to look for the phone.” She met his gaze. “I fell a couple of times. Maybe it came out then.”
He looked back the way they had come, at an expanse of smooth white, their tracks already buried under fresh snowfall. Finding a phone that had fallen in all that could take hours, or even days. And they still might never find it.
“What are we going to do?” Lily looked at Scott, her expression bereft.
“I don’t think we can risk going back to Pandora,” he said. “I think the kidnappers were probably the ones shooting at us. They probably figured Pandora was the closest place for us to seek shelter and stationed a guard on the ridge to watch for us.”
“But the sheriff and his officers should be in Pandora soon,” Lily said. “They should be able to deal with the kidnappers.”
“Maybe the snow has delayed them,” Scott said. “They could be waiting on a SWAT team or other reinforcements.”
“I’m not sure I want to find them if we have to tell them we lost Jackson,” she said. “What if the kidnappers found him first? What if they hurt Jackson? What if they hurt the dogs?”
He put his arm around her. “The only way we’re going to get out of this is to stay calm,” he said.
She leaned into him, head on his shoulder. She was trembling slightly—was that from cold or fear, or something else? After a moment, she looked up at him. “When you were in the army did you ever feel scared and hopeless?”
“I was afraid plenty of times,” he said. “Anyone who says they aren’t is lying. But I never let myself feel hopeless. I had too many other people depending on me for that.”
She pressed her lips tightly together, then nodded. “Right. Jackson is depending on us. Denny and Mike and all the people who care about Jackson, too. And Hunter and Shelby are depending on us.”
She gripped the straps of her pack and looked around them. The snow had let up a little, but was still falling steadily, the blanket of white obscuring most features of the landscape. “Can you even tell which way we’re headed?” she asked.
“If we keep heading downhill, we’ll reach the bottom of the ridge,” he said.
“Then what?” she asked.
“Then we’ll decide what to do next.”
She said nothing, but set off again. He hurried to catch up with her. “I don’t think anyone is following us,” she said.
“It doesn’t sound like it, no.”
Scott’s back hurt, they were almost out of food, and it was only going to get colder as the day wore on. “We’ll have to head back toward the ski resort,” he said. “The kidnappers are probably counting on us coming back to Pandora, since it’s closer. But if we can reach SkyCrest, we should be safe.”
“We don’t have to go all the way to SkyCrest,” she said. “We only have to get to the avalanche site at Axis Ridge. My car is parked near there.”
“And Brian’s truck is beside your car.” At her puzzled look, he added, “I borrowed it from him.”
“How long is that going to take?” she asked.
He tried to calculate. They had been out here almost two days already, but part of that time they were unsure of their destination.
The terrain and the weather had been against them.
He still had his compass, and they would be traveling over territory they had covered before.
They would have to stop when darkness set in, but they could set out again at first light tomorrow.
“We should be able to make it tomorrow,” he said.
“We’ll push on in as straight a line as possible. ”