One hundred fourteen of the inhabitants of Rimlight left the next morning, following a graveled trade road across the valley and into the mountains. They stayed on that route for a week before Pierce struck off cross-country toward a forbidding barrier of cloud-swathed peaks. Though Morgan protested vigorously, Pierce insisted the manual clearly said to leave the road and head for a canyon called the Devil’s Cauldron. There a slit in the rock would access a safe zone where they could rest and restock. When Morgan continued to object, Pierce merely walked away, ending the argument.
Maybe it was the fifty Watchers clinging to the roadside cliffs, or maybe people weren’t ready to reject Pierce’s leadership outright just yet, or maybe the participants who were reading the manual confirmed the fact that it was pretty clear about the instructions. Whatever the reason, everyone continued to follow Pierce—but not cheerfully. As Callie had predicted, many believed he’d left Rimlight to save face and saw his abandonment of the road as just another attempt to prove his courage.
The increasing signs of mutant presence did not help matters. Along with tracks and warm campfire ashes, they found shriveled, feather-trimmed human hands dangling from tree limbs, a freshly decapitated stag’s head set dead center in a pass, and eerie lines of skulls standing guard over lakes and waterholes. Whether these were territorial markings, offerings to the gods, or totems of cursing, no one knew. But they made everyone uneasy.
Pierce said the Trogs wouldn’t attack so great a force as themselves, and so far he’d been right. Nevertheless, he routinely chose strategically defensible campsites, always set up the perimeter alarms and electronic fencing, and insisted on backup shifts of flesh-and-blood sentries. Thus far, however, the only things that tried to crash their perimeter had been the ubiquitous mites.
Three weeks out of Rimlight, they stopped for the night beside an ice-fed lake in a glacial moraine overlooking a long, spruce-filled valley. The valley was to have led them to a passage through the spine of lofty, snowcapped peaks blocking access to the south—until they saw the columns of smoke arising throughout it.
Morgan threw a fit, insisting they return to the road at once. Pierce refused. If worse came to worst, they would try a mountain route, but they were not going back. Alarmed and angry, and in defiance of Pierce’s command otherwise, Morgan took a party to scout out the mutant camps, apparently thinking additional evidence would change things. Meanwhile the others set up their three-man tents, rigged and readied the alarm system and perimeter shields for later, gathered firewood, and scraped out latrines. In less than an hour, a blanket of domed tents arced across the basin’s lower, flatter portion, and cook pots roiled with steam.
When Callie went down to the lake for water, she thought the campsite looked like a geothermal area. Hardly discreet, but Pierce figured the mutants would count them as more of their own, en route to the intertribal religious rites held each summer in this wilderness.
It was nearly dusk, and the lake mirrored the surrounding peaks and sky in a breathtaking fire of pink and peach. In the stillness she could hear the hissing of the cookstoves, the murmur of voices, and occasional laughter from up the hill behind her—a peaceful, quiet moment. But as she squatted on the granite bank and dipped her first bottle into the icy water, a sense of being watched drew her gaze to four Tohvani, pale against a backdrop of dark spruce, on the opposite bank.
Watchers had dogged them in increasing numbers since they’d left Rimlight, and several people had had encounters with them similar to what Callie had experienced. Was their presence tonight just more of the same? Or was it an omen of approaching disaster?
Uneasily she finished filling her bottles, then turned to find Meg on the slope above her. Like everyone else Meg wore the camo-patterned breastplate and belt over a drab olive undershirt and baggy camouflage trousers. The matching helmet hid her black curls. She held a couple of her own bottles, already full, and as Callie met her gaze, her green eyes slid away. They’d not spoken to each other at all during the three-week trek.
“Hullo, Meg.”
“Hi.” Meg’s gaze darted back to Callie’s. “How ya doing?”
“Fine.”
Again Meg’s eyes danced away. Then she drew a breath, as if to nerve herself. “Listen, uh, I, uh . . . well, some of us are going back.”
“To Rimlight?”
“To the road.” Meg gestured with a sloshing bottle toward the smoke-threaded valley beyond the lake. “If we go marching into that, we’ll surely be caught.”
“Not if that’s the way Elhanu wants us to go.”
“Big if.”
Callie hugged her water bottles to her chest and said nothing.
“We’ve passed a lot of natural fire curtains the last few days,” Meg went on. “And, well, Brody saw Pierce at one last night.” She met Callie’s gaze evenly. “Said he just stood and stared at it.”
“So?”
“Come on, Cal. With his history he’s got no business going near one of those things. If the Watchers get to him”—she held up a hand, stopping Callie’s protest—“if they get to him, he’d lead the rest of us into their hands.”
Her words were so close to what the Tohvani had said on the hill above Rimlight that Callie shuddered. Unfortunately, she had to admit she’d harbored the same suspicions. Worse, she wasn’t close enough to Pierce anymore to know for sure—if one ever knew for sure. “Did Brody see him walk through it?”
“Callie—”
“Being tempted is not giving in. And the manual says we’re to go to this Devil’s Cauldron.”
Meg scowled. “I don’t think it says that at all. And I’ve seen too many vids of Trog prisoners screaming and begging. There’s no way I’m committed enough to resist that.”
“Well, I guess it’s your choice to make.”
“Come on, Cal. Be reasonable.”
“I am. And if—”
Meg stiffened. Her eyes fixed on something across the lake. Alarmed, Callie turned to find four more Watchers had joined the group on the bank.
“In the trees,” Meg whispered. “It wasn’t a Watcher.”
Callie searched the shadows. All this time, all these miles, and they had yet to be attacked. It couldn’t last. Had Morgan stirred up trouble? Carefully, she shifted the bottles to her left arm, felt for her belt’s control, pressed it on. She felt the vibration sweep up through her breastplate and into her helmet.
Something was out there. Something dark and evil. Something that wanted to hurt her.
It’s the Watchers, she assured herself. Trying to unnerve you. That’s all.
She stood rigidly, watching the trees. Beside her, Meg switched on her own belt.
A stag crashed out of the copse to the right, and Callie jumped so violently she dropped her bottles. The beast bounded across the rose-lit basin, zigzagged up the steep slope, and disappeared over the pass, leaving an eerie silence filled only with the camp stoves’ hissing in its wake.
Gradually voices and actions took up again, and Callie finally released her breath, chagrined to find she’d drawn and powered on her SLuB. So had Meg. No doubt the Watchers were having a good laugh. Grimacing, she knelt and fished her bottles from the icy lake.
“We’ll leave when Morgan comes back,” Meg said as Callie stood. “Please think about coming, okay?”
Callie stared at her. Grim faced, Meg turned and climbed the bank.
On the way back to her own tent, Callie detoured by Pierce’s, wondering if he was sensing anything unusual. Something had spooked that stag, and it wasn’t the Watchers. Animals always ignored them.
Pierce sat with Evvi on a rock near his tent. They were bent over, the manual spread across their laps. As Callie approached, Evvi leaned against his shoulder, laying her hand on his back. Annoyed, Callie changed course. Clearly Pierce was relaxed, so either he could no longer sense the Trogs or the stag had spooked at something insignificant.
She found LaTeisha sitting yoga style by their tent eating macaroni casserole out of an aluminum trail cup.
“You seen Ev?” she asked as Callie walked up.
“Yeah. Why?”
“She threw this macaroni together and barely stirred it before she lit out. I wondered what was up.”
“Pierce is what’s up.” Callie unhooked her own cup from the front of her pack. “Every waking moment.” She straightened, sniffing the air. “What is that wonderful smell?”
LaTeisha groaned. “Tuck’s beef stroganoff.”
“Does he have to spread the smell around like that?” Callie squatted beside the cook pot, where a pan of cheese macaroni and beef sat scorching over the flame. “We oughta make him camp on the other side of the lake.”
“Or else cook for all of us.”
“Now there’s an idea.” With a grimace Callie slapped gooey yellow pasta into her cup. “Eyugh! Why does she always burn it?”
“She doesn’t always. Last night it was hard in the middle, remember?” LaTeisha frowned into her cup, then pulled out a long hair. “I’m getting awfully tired of this.” She draped it over a tiny plant. “If I thought she could set up the tent, I’d take on the cooking.”
“I don’t even want to think about her and the tent.”
In the last weeks, Callie’s aversion to Evelyn Albion had blossomed into full-fledged dislike. Not only was Evvi all thumbs and heedless of everything in her periphery, she had launched an all-out pursuit for Pierce’s attentions. Every night she sat at his side, draping herself over him, patting his legs and arms and shoulders until Callie had to remove herself to some other part of camp. It wasn’t just embarrassing, it was deeply annoying, and she had no idea what to do about it. For days she’d tried to ignore it, but lately she’d had to acknowledge, at least to herself, that she was not merely annoyed. She was hurt. And, Lord help her, she was jealous.
Abruptly the macaroni’s scorched, spoiled-cheese taste gagged her. “I can’t eat this.” She dumped the stuff on the ground. “Is there any more soup in the bag?”
LaTeisha rummaged through the food sack and drew out two brown packets. While they waited for the water to boil, Callie took out her sketchbook. Today had been another twenty-miler, but after twenty-one days, she was getting used to it. Her blisters had healed, and the agony of overused muscles and joints had eased into the simple ache of fatigue. She no longer wondered with every step whether she’d make it to camp without collapsing.
Now she roughed in a sketch of the camp, Whit and Mr. Chapman perched on rocks in front of their tent, with Wendell and Gerry crouched before them eating from the ubiquitous trail cups. Behind them, others gathered in similar circles—eating, washing dishes, cleaning weapons—the perimeter alarm system poles gleaming over all in the fading light waiting for dark—and the return of Morgan’s party—to be activated. Her eye caught on a familiar pair not far away. Evvi had her hand on Pierce’s shoulder as she whispered into his ear. Frowning, Callie flipped to a clean page and turned to face the shadow-cloaked mountain looming over them.
“Here’s your soup.” LaTeisha handed Callie her cup. She set it on a rock to cool and returned to sketching.
They didn’t have mountains like this around Tucson—bursting out of the tree line and jabbing into the sky. This was all barren slopes and steep, angular planes, thousand-foot drops and bulging overhangs. Callie imagined clinging to that high, almost vertical face, slipping on iced rock, surrounded by mind-boggling space—
She swallowed and made herself start drawing, concentrating on shape and line, on light and shadow and form.
“Found a route up yet?” Mr. C asked, looking over her shoulder. She chuckled.
“Ask Gerry, not me.”
“Oh, Gerry’s already lined out his choice.” He traced along the rock faces she had sketched. “He thinks we could angle across these slopes to get above the cliffs, then head up this chute. After that I’m not sure.”
Gerry was now standing over her, too. “We’ll decide when we git there.” He pointed at the drawing. “But you’ve skipped some things, Cal. There’s a jag here and a drainage here.”
“I’m summarizing, Gerry.”
“Oh. Anyway, looks like the hardest part’s up top.”
She twisted round to peer up at them. “You really think we’re going up that?”
Mr. Chapman shrugged. “We need to get to the Cauldron. The mutants can’t take the heights. Sounds like a solution to me.”
“Why do ya think they had a rappellin’ cliff back at the base?” Gerry drawled, eyes twinkling. “Looks like an outstanding climb, if you ask me. Can you imagine the view?”
Callie shuddered.
Mr. C patted her shoulder. “You’ll do fine, lass.”
John strode up, looking peeved. “Well, it’s finally happening, just like Pierce said. A group’s going back to the road soon as Morg returns.”
“Idiots!” Whit rumbled. He sat beside the cookstove he shared with John and Mr. C, cleaning the pan they’d just used. “We’ll be lucky if he doesn’t bring back a pack of Trogs.”
“I can’t believe he was stupid enough to go down there,” John said. “Stupid isn’t the word,” Whit said, dumping the dirty water from his pan. “He can’t sense ’em, and he’s had no real experience with ’em. What does he think he’s gonna do?”
They went on grousing, and Callie returned to her drawing, assuring herself that the mountain route would be okay, that she’d do fine, just like Mr. C said. But she kept remembering that horrible moment on the trail up the Canyon of the Damned when she’d turned and run. This was that canyon turned inside out. Maybe worse.
She was adding the final touches when a sense of malevolent presence hit her so powerfully she dropped her pencil. Her mouth went dry, and her heart knocked against her ribs as the sensation swept over her in smothering waves. Everyone around her went silent and still, all of them scanning the gloom-shrouded trees across the lake, and nearer, to the left of camp. The compulsion to run seized her—it didn’t matter where, just out, away. Fast. It took all her willpower to calmly stand, step to her pack, and slide the journal inside.
When she straightened, she glanced at Pierce and Evvi. The girl babbled on, focused on the book in her lap, but Pierce sat ramrod straight beside her, staring into the nearer grove of trees.
Suddenly certain that an attack was imminent, Callie snugged up her helmet and reached for her long-barreled SI–42 as LaTeisha did the same. She had just pulled a handful of extra E-cubes from her pack when Morgan and his company raced out of the trees.
“They’re right behind us!” he gasped as he reached them.
“What happened?” Pierce strode up with his SI.
“They surprised us. We took a few of ’em down, but another group came to help. We gave ’em the slip for a bit, but I’m sure they’re following.”
“Get the perimeter shield turned on now,” Pierce shouted, starting toward the control box.
“No!” Morgan seized his arm. “There’s too many of them. They’ll surround us and wait for our energy supplies to give out.”
“We’ll go over the mountain,” Pierce said. “Take it easy. Panicking isn’t going to help.”
“I’m not panicking,” Morgan snarled. “And to blazes with the mountain. There’ll just be more of them on the other side. Our only chance is the road.” He whirled to address the others, now congregating around them. “Move out, people! Fast—or we’re Troggie toys!”
He strode toward the rear of the encampment, where his supporters waited, the crowd parting before him. Silence fell in his wake. He yelled at them again. “You heard me! Get your stupid carcasses moving!”
The people jolted free of their shock. Three-quarters of them ran to their things, tearing down tents and stuffing gear willy-nilly into their packs. The rest milled uneasily, arguing among themselves. Pierce, Whit, and John went to move the perimeter lines inward, and before they were done, Morgan’s followers were climbing out of the basin.
Callie and LaTeisha were just setting the final perimeter pole into its relocated socket when a rain of quarrels flew down from the mountainside, zinging by like bullets and bouncing off the granite. One plunged through Ian’s breastplate into his heart. As he toppled backward, Callie dove for her SI and rolled behind a knoll.
But the Trogs were well hidden in the rocks, difficult to see, impossible to aim at, and the perimeter lines needed to be on now. Crouching, she zigzagged through the tents toward the control box, the twilight flickering bright blue as her companions returned fire. She reached the box a step ahead of Pierce and found it swarming with red mites. As he covered her, she jerked them off with her bare hands, her efficiency compromised by the need to dodge their snapping pincers. Frustrated, she looked around for a stick and spied movement up the hill under the trees just as a line of Trogs burst from the copse. They carried clubs, scythelike blades, and heavy, studded maces.
Pierce stepped in front of her, his steady fire dropping mutants one after the other. It made little difference. He yelled something at her, but she’d already abandoned the box, scrambling sideways, crablike, searching for cover and firing her SI continuously. With her friends screaming on every hand, and with crossbow quarrels plunging into one armored body after another, Callie could hardly control her rising panic. At length she found herself crouched behind a granite hummock, shaking violently and sucking in deep draughts of air as she sought the calm that would enable her to reactivate her belt.
The sense of something bearing down upon her made her glance up just in time. Both her shots hit the attacking mutant, but as she rolled away, she knew she’d missed the kill spot and braced for the inevitable blow to come. Instead, a third beam drilled out of the darkness into its head, and the thing collapsed backward into the gloom.
Another deep breath, and Callie shoved up, firing at the attackers coming in from the flank. Behind her Whit was shouting. Pierce answered from somewhere above. LaTeisha yelled for her to come back down, where a group of them were retreating around the lake.
Callie squinted up the slope where Pierce had gone to ground behind a swell of rock, the flashes of his SI betraying his position. She waved Teish on and raced up the hill but was only halfway to Pierce’s position when two figures bore down upon her. Dropping to one knee, she took one out. The other crashed into her, slamming her backward onto the granite and exploding her world into a kaleidoscope of colored starbursts. She glimpsed something dark and smelly bending over her and kicked at what seemed to be its legs. It staggered back when she connected, and then a blue lance shot out of nowhere, blinding her yet again. When she regained her sight, the Trog was gone.
She staggered upright, her helmet falling away in two pieces, as another score of mutants burst from the trees. Blue fire peppered them, originating from Pierce’s granite hummock. Hunching her shoulders, she sprinted toward him, quarrels zipping by her, and was still ten feet away when the outcropping exploded, slamming her to the ground and raining rock upon her.
She lay gasping, pain stabbing her chest, a red haze filling her head. It took longer to recover this time, and when she finally pushed herself up, a fog of dust hung in the air and three lifeless figures sprawled on the slope above her. What had happened? Had the Trogs acquired grenades?
Someone fired from a position upslope, aiming at the mutant flank as it engaged with Morgan’s group, now spread out along the rim to capitalize on higher ground. In daylight, they might have prevailed, but Trogs saw better at night than humans—even Changed humans—a fact Morgan evidently realized, for the flashes marking SI positions were retreating rapidly over the brow of the pass.
Callie’s immediate periphery, meanwhile, had quieted. She ran to where Pierce hunkered on the slope behind a grassy hillock. As she dropped belly down beside him, his SI flashed, illuminating the dark form of a mutant as it crumpled to the ground. A few of its fellows ransacked the camp below and searched for the wounded, who would become their prisoners.
Pierce tugged her backward. Quietly they retreated up the hill to a grove of wind-sculpted spruce. In the pass above the basin, Morgan’s combat line had disappeared, but occasional distant flashes told Callie the fight continued.
Abruptly four Trogs clambered over the ruined rock in front of them. Silhouetted against the pale backdrop of the basin and lake, they milled around, grunting and laughing. Hidden beneath the prickly evergreen, Callie felt Pierce’s fingers bite into her arm, warning her not to move. As the mutants poked and prodded at her dead—or stunned—companions, she barely breathed. Two of them picked up bodies and went back down, but the other pair turned to the mountain, facing Pierce and Callie. They seemed to look right through the twisted branches into Callie’s eyes. Any minute she expected them to lift their crossbows and shoot, or else charge up the hill and rip them from their hiding place. One stepped toward them, muttering.
Then rough voices from down in the camp claimed their attention. They turned, one yelled a reply, and both went back down.
The sounds of their passage soon silenced, but Callie knew better than to be impatient. Moments dragged by. Her forearm ached where Pierce still gripped it. A branch poked into her hip. Her hand beneath the SI had gone to sleep, and her head throbbed where it had struck the granite. No more flickerings showed in the pass now. Trogs moved around them occasionally, the ground thumping with their passage, their guttural voices echoing in the night, but more and more, the sounds grew distant and finally dwindled to silence.
At length Pierce released her arm, told her to stay put, and eased out of their sanctuary. He returned with a pack, two parkas, and a new helmet. Wordlessly she slipped on the helmet, then the parka. Pierce donned the pack and they set off. Darting from one group of spruce to the next, they ascended the mountain. Eventually they ran out of trees, and with the starlight reflecting brightly off the pale granite surrounding them, Callie felt horribly exposed. But if the Trogs were aware of them, they didn’t appear to be following.
According to the manual, mutants avoided heights. Not only was the mountain daylight too strong for their sensitive eyes, but their rapid metabolisms and increased brain tissue also made them susceptible to severe bouts of altitude sickness in the thin air. Perhaps the risk was not worth the capture of just two people. Especially when they had so many on lower ground to chase.
Callie’s headache worsened, but they couldn’t stop to dig out the med kit, so she endured, counting her steps as she trudged after Pierce. They crossed a small moraine, passed a row of stunted spruce clinging to the banks of a lakelet, then climbed across more granite domes. Through it all, the wind never died, varying from a stiff breeze to a gale that nearly plucked them off the mountain.
At length Pierce suggested they go to ground. Though Callie’s heart pounded from exertion and her breath burned in her throat, her fingers and toes were numb from the cold. Even with the parka, the thought of huddling under some rock did not appeal to her. If they kept walking, at least they’d stay warm.
“But the slope’s getting steeper,” Pierce said. “We need to see where we’re going or we’ll fall.”
She acquiesced without further protest.
They found a hollow under a fallen slab that was roomy enough for them and the pack. Animals had nested here in the past. One corner was lined with a mattress of dried plants—thick stems with fuzzy leaves, wide-bladed grasses, and an occasional dried flower. The insulation extended along the back of the space, some of it stuffed into the chinks where the slab rested on support rocks.
Pierce left, and Callie stripped off the stiff, rubbery breastplate of her armor, then redonned the parka, shivering from just that brief exposure. She stood the neoprenelike plate in the opening to block the wind, braced it with her helmet, then dug out the med kit, muttering heartfelt blessings on her companion when she found it. She gulped down two red pain pills as he returned with a pan of snow. While he set up the stove, she went to relieve herself.
When she returned he had the field lamp lit, the water boiling, and was dumping chocolate pudding mix into their aluminum cups. As she maneuvered into the back of the chamber, he set up the pack frame and his own breastplate in the doorway alongside hers. Already the hollow was much warmer than the outside air.
He’d unrolled the single sleeping bag he’d been able to salvage from the campsite and one of the light plastic sheets that were the Arena’s version of space blankets, reserving the latter for himself and leaving the bag for Callie. She considered arguing with him about it, but only briefly. She’d probably be colder than he, anyway, and the plastic sheet was plenty warm.
As she settled in her corner, Pierce poured hot water into the cup and handed it to her with a spoon, then served himself. She would have prepared tea, but the chocolate was better—hot, thick, and fragrant. They ate without speaking, and when they finished, he made the tea, too, pouring it into the used cups. As she sipped the calming brew, he removed the pot from the stove, turned the dial to its lowest setting, and laid the device on its side. Its red coil pointed toward them, radiating heat directly into their faces. It felt wonderful, but Callie disliked the glowing head’s proximity to the dried grass. As she drew breath to mention it, he pushed the grass aside.
Now, with nothing left to do, he sat staring at the coil. The pain pills had done their job. Callie’s headache had eased to an ignorable background throb. She’d been eyeing a gash on Pierce’s forehead ever since they’d stopped, and now she said, “That cut on your face is still bleeding. You want me to look at it?”
He touched the trickling blood, frowning as if he hadn’t noticed it. “I’ll do it.”
“It might need stitches. At least a butterfly bandage.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
He dug through the pack and pulled out a coil of turquoise rope, then the med kit and a sock. As he set up a pan lid for a mirror and dipped the sock in some of the warm water, Callie said, “That’s a climbing rope.”
“Yeah.” He surveyed his face in the lid, tilted his head to see the cut, and daubed at the blood.
“So we’re not going back down to the valley?”
“You have a problem with that?”
“What if I did?”
He stopped what he was doing and studied his reflection. “Then I guess we’d have to go down.” Annoyance colored his voice. “Is that what you want to do?”
“You think there’s a way over this mountain?”
“Yeah.”
She hugged her knees, frowning. “What does the map say?”
“You tell me. You drew it.”
“I don’t remember. We were planning to go down the valley.”
“Well, unfortunately, memory’s all we’ve got.” He set the sock aside and grabbed a tube of antibiotic.
She gaped at him. “You don’t have the map?”
“They ransacked the camp, remember? And it wasn’t like I had a lot of time.”
“You don’t have a map and you’re planning to. . . ?”
He put the tube down and finally looked at her. “You want to go back?” Anger, frustration, and a vein of despair warred in his expression. “You think I don’t know what I’m doing now, too?”
“No! I mean, yes. I mean—I thought you did. But now—everything’s changed.”
“You’re darned right everything’s changed.” Savagely he tore open one of the butterfly bandages and turned back to his reflection in the pan lid. “I don’t think it could be much more changed. Or much worse.”
He taped the cut with two butterflies, then sat, looking into the pan lid. After a time he sighed. “So what do you want to do?”
“Go back. Find some of the others. They didn’t all go with Morgan.”
“Is that objectivity or fear speaking?”
“We don’t have the map, Pierce. We don’t know if we can get over this mountain.”
“I think we can. In fact, I think this might be the way we were supposed to come all along. The map wouldn’t have helped anyway. There wasn’t much about the mountains. Besides the Trogs won’t be bothering us up—”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“Well, there’s a lot less of them up here than down there.” He packed up the med kit.
“But what if there are others who got away? Whit or Teish.”
He did not answer at first, but when he did, the angry edge had left his voice. “How would we know which way they went? I’d never be able to track them over all this rock. Besides we’re supposed to go to the Cauldron, and they know where it is as well as we do.”
“What if they’ve been captured?”
He stared at the kit in his hands for a long time before he spoke. “Then they’ll be brought to the Cauldron, and we can rescue them there.”
“The Cauldron? You think the Trogs are—”
“The Tohvani don’t want us to reach that slit. Of course it will be guarded.” He slid the med kit into the pack. “In the morning I’ll go up with the binoculars and see if I can see anyone, any sign. Then we can—”
A deep thumping reverberated through the ground, cutting him off.
They both went rigid, listening to the wind’s thin whine.
Slowly Pierce reached for his SLuB while Callie turned off the field lamp, leaving only the red glow of the stove’s coil. The thumping came again, rapid, rhythmic, as of running steps. With their daylight-sensitive eyes, if the mutants were going to do any tracking, now would be the time for it.
A chill skipped up Callie’s spine, as if she had brushed up against something cold and evil. Again she felt that sense of malevolence, stalking her.
She glanced at Pierce. “Can you . . . ?” she whispered. “Are they . . . ?”
He nodded and turned off the stove. The red light faded to darkness. The coil ticked erratically. Outside, the wind keened, and down the mountain the thumping sounded again, definitely coming closer.