Mark and Lynn were still in the gulch when Larry ran to join them. Mark’s tracks had disappeared as the sun descended, a fringe line of blackness that kept working higher up the mountain.
Larry gave no warning he was coming. Mark and Lynn heard the sound when he was almost on them. He made it across the steep pitch without a fall, better than Mark, and used a tree to aid his drop into the gulch, landing on his feet, rifle at waist-level, pointed at Lynn.
“That didn’t look like a real warm reunion you all had. How’s your throat?”
Mark said, “Mom’s up there. With Garland Webb.”
“Violet is up there?”
“Yes.”
Larry looked up the slope. He was quiet for a moment, then said, “We wait long, and we’ll be pinned down here.”
“How many left for the Winchester?” Mark said.
“Four.”
“Shit.”
“Yup.”
“Any more rounds in the truck?”
“No.”
“How many for the handgun?”
“Two handguns, two clips each.”
“Give one to her.”
Larry looked at Lynn and hesitated, but she extended her hand and made a gimme gesture, curling her fingers in toward her palm. He drew a Ruger semiautomatic from his pocket and gave it to her.
When she closed her hand around the gun, she looked at Mark. He turned his palms up. “Got enough trust yet? I’m the only one without a weapon. You want to kill me and figure out you were wrong later, there’s nothing stopping you.”
She knelt, picked up the .38, and passed it to him.
“Thank you,” he said. “Now tell me what I’m running into up there.”
“A high fence that may or may not be electrified at the moment. A cabin. I don’t know if they took her back there. I don’t even know if…if she’s alive. They got her as she was going over the fence. She shut it down long enough for me to get over, but they got her.”
“How many are there?”
“Four. Three men and your mother.”
Larry swore under his breath and spit into the snow, then scrambled to the high side of the gulch and peered up at the shrinking pool of sunlight where the telephone poles stood.
“You take her down to the truck. I’ll go see about your mother.”
I’ll go see about your mother. How many times had Mark heard that? In the past, it had meant that they were going to pull her out of some bar or flophouse or con’s bedroom. Now it meant that Larry intended to head up the gulch alone toward three armed men.
“Not happening, Uncle,” Mark said. He gestured to Lynn. “We’ve got to take her down.”
“You’re not taking her anywhere,” Lynn snapped. “Until I know what happened to Sabrina, I am not leaving.”
“That’s a stupid choice,” Mark said. “We need to leave and call for help.”
He was watching the ground shadows seep down the mountainside, deepening the darkness. Any chance of reaching the truck depended on moving now, while enough visibility remained to get down the gulch in relative quiet. They were outgunned above, and if their trek was pinpointed by clattering stumbles over rocks and snapped branches underfoot, they’d be shredded.
“She’ll die in that time,” Lynn said. “Once they know we’re gone, they’ll kill her.”
“I’ve got no interest in leaving my sister up there either,” Larry said. He turned back to them when he said it, so he was facing away from the woods when the shadowed slope gave birth to something bright and white. A man dressed in white camouflage like a 10th Mountain Division soldier spun around a tree not twenty feet from them and lifted his rifle.
Mark saw it all with strange clarity, a neat, clean line: Larry, the lip of the gulch, a downed tree, a shooter. The tableau was stamped into his memory instantly and forever.
The shot he fired, though, he would never remember.
He wasn’t aware of it until the man dropped, shooting as he fell, peppering a line of bullets into the sky, ripping apart pine boughs that fell with a peaceful whisper. Larry and Lynn both hit the ground, but Mark just stood there, the .38 still extended.
“Son of a bitch!” Larry scrambled up and stared at Mark. “You put him down?”
“Yes.”
“Lord, son, you must’ve fired faster than you saw him. Who taught you that?”
Mark looked at the gun as it if were unfamiliar. He had never been the best shot. Not the worst, but certainly not the best. Both of his uncles had been better. So had his wife.
“I guess it was Ronny,” he said.
Before his uncle could answer, they were interrupted by the crackle of a radio and a voice. It was coming from the dead man’s belt, but his body muffled the words.
Mark said, “Cover me, will you? I want to get a look at him.”
Larry snapped at him to stay down, but Mark climbed over the lip of the gulch. He glanced back once and saw Larry standing waist-deep in the gulch, braced against the earth, panning the gloaming forest with the scope.
“You see the other one?” Mark asked.
“No, but hurry up.”
Mark crawled to the dead man and saw a face he didn’t know. Not Garland Webb. That was a shame. Lord, was that a shame. If it had been Garland Webb, he could have gone on back down the gulch and out to the truck and driven out of here.
No, you couldn’t.
The voice made Mark jerk, because for an instant it seemed to come from the dead man himself. Just a trick of the mind. Adrenaline was cooking in Mark’s veins now, and if he wasn’t careful it would overrun him. You had to stay cool under fire, and he was doing anything but that. Not only his focus was slipping; his whole damn mind seemed to be.
He took the dead man’s rifle, then rolled him over. As he did so, he heard the voice again.
You’ll die here. All of you.
Again Mark jerked back.
“What the hell’s the matter?” Larry whispered behind him.
Mark didn’t know how to answer. Adrenaline, that was all. You felt crazy things in crazy moments, and this moment was about as crazy as they got.
He grabbed the dead man’s radio in a hurry, tugged it free, and then crawled back to the gulch with the radio and the rifle, heading right toward Larry, who was still scouring the trees through his scope, finger on the trigger. He wasn’t all the way back when the radio came to life in his hand, and this time he could hear it clearly:
“We have a runner! The second woman is out!”
Lynn jumped to her feet. “Sabrina!” she called. More of a shout than Mark would have liked, but even as she said it, she moved sideways and deeper into the gulch, wisely anticipating that she’d risked giving up their position. No shots came, but an answer did, a woman’s voice shouting without Lynn’s restraint. “Lynn! Lynn, where are you!”
Mark turned and started to tell Lynn not to answer, that shouts would get them killed, but Larry’s shot silenced them all. Lynn took a stumbling step back, Mark stopped crawling, and Sabrina Baldwin’s shouts ended. For a few seconds, the forest was absolutely still.
Then Larry lowered the rifle.
“Had to take it. She wasn’t even into the trees yet, and he’d stopped to fire. With that AR spitting bullets, he was going to kill her fast.”
Mark stared up at the pink-tinted peak where Larry had fired, and though he couldn’t see anything, he could hear something now. Someone was crashing clumsily through the woods. He scrambled to the base of a tree and lifted his revolver, but Larry didn’t move at all, just stood with the rifle lowered and waited on whoever was running out of the daylight and into the darkness.
A minute later, they saw her—a woman, slipping and stumbling down the slope, falling every few feet but bouncing up so fast it all seemed part of the plan.
“Sabrina!” Lynn climbed out of the gulch and ran toward the other woman and Mark made no move to stop her. Instead, he looked at his uncle.
“We’ve got two. Lynn said there were three men.”
“That’s all that have been shooting, at least. I’ve found four people with the scope since we got here. Two are here, and two are dead.”
Lynn Deschaine and Sabrina Baldwin met halfway up the slope. Sabrina fell into Lynn’s arms, and Lynn tugged her down immediately, pulling her to the ground and guiding her behind a fallen tree. Mark watched them and wondered what horrors they had shared and how they’d managed to get loose in a place like this.
“Nice shooting, Uncle,” he said.
“Shit, son, that was target practice. You were the one who went Wild Bill Hickok.”
It wasn’t much of an exaggeration. The bullet had punched through the other man’s heart before Mark knew what had happened.
For some reason, that bothered him.
He wiped sweat from his face and said, “Lynn? Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Lynn got to her feet and helped Sabrina Baldwin to hers and they came down the side of the mountain together, arm in arm, as if neither of them wanted to risk letting go again.
“You okay?” Mark asked the new woman. Sabrina Baldwin was shaking, but she nodded.
“We need to get out of here,” Mark said. “Is there anyone left to stop us?”
“I don’t think so,” Sabrina said. “Not if we hurry. He’ll be down for a while longer.”
“Who will be?”
“One of the men who works for Eli. Garland Webb.”
“Garland Webb,” Mark echoed. His voice had the same flat crack as Larry’s killing shot.
She looked at him with wide eyes. “You’re him,” she said. “You’re the one. Novak.”
“Yes.”
“Violet…I think she’s your mother? Violet shot him with a dart.”
Lynn said, “What? She did?” and she seemed stunned when Sabrina Baldwin nodded.
“She saved me,” Sabrina said.
“Where are all the ATV riders?” Larry asked. “We saw plenty of tracks coming in.”
“I don’t know. There was a large group this morning, but they left. If they come back, though…”
Lynn said, “She’s right—we need to get out of here fast. There are enough of them that we’ll be outnumbered, badly.”
Sabrina said, “My husband…do you know anything?”
“He was alive,” Mark said. “And I gave him his chance to play it the way he wanted. He didn’t want to risk doing anything that might threaten you.”
He thought about that and then looked at the radio in his hand and said, “You know, I just might be able to get a report on Jay.”
He put the dead man’s radio to his lips. Keyed the mike and heard static.
“Hello, gentlemen,” he said. His heart thundered but his voice was steady. “This is Markus Novak, reporting in from Wardenclyffe. I’ve come to see Garland Webb. We are long overdue.”