The John Milton Series Boxset 2

by Mark Dawson

  Leland jogged on, breathing heavily.

  The government? Maybe he did. Wouldn’t that be something? Did it change anything? Only if they let him get out of the woods alive, and Lundquist did not intend to allow that. Perhaps there were complications involved here, but, at the end of all of it, they would just say that John Milton had killed Lester Grogan, Lars Olsen, George Pelham, and the agent. He had killed them, fired on the rest of them, and then run.

  What else were they supposed to do? Let him go?

  God had placed John Milton in Lundquist’s path. A final obstacle to clear. A final test before the glory of what He had instructed him to do.

  The dogs pulled harder on the lead, and Walker’s arm was soon pulled straight, parallel with the ground. “Good dogs,” he called down to them. “Good dogs. You take us to him.”

  Chapter 31

  JOHN MILTON RAN.

  He stopped only to drink from the river and to eat. He saw an elderberry bush, and he stopped next to it, plucking off a handful of berries and stuffing them hungrily into his mouth. The juices were sweet and acidic, the tang making his mouth water. He hadn’t eaten properly since the venison two nights ago. That was going to have to be remedied sooner rather than later. He wouldn’t be able to run forever on an empty stomach.

  He took off his shirt and wrapped it around his waist. He wanted to let some air get to the wounds on his arm. The pain was still there, and he had been reminded of it by the jolt that greeted every upward swing of his arm. He turned back and tried to assess how far he had travelled. Two miles in the last hour? The arm had compromised his stride. He was covering much less ground than he would have liked.

  He set off again, pushing himself harder, gritting his teeth to ignore the pain. After another twenty minutes, though, the pain got worse. He couldn’t ignore it.

  He stopped by the water’s edge, dunked his face, and then took off his jacket and sweater and examined his arm again.

  The entry wound in his bicep, neat and circular, was healing. He had plucked out the worst of the debris. That wound would heal without the need for too much intervention, at least for the next few days.

  He turned over his arm. His tricep was worse. Much worse. The flesh around the edges of the hole had become blackened and necrotic. It was dead, and unless he did something about it quickly, he would develop a fever, and that would stop him dead in his tracks. Worse, if left untreated, the wound would eventually become gangrenous, and he might lose the arm. He had to deal with it.

  HE SMELLED the deer before he saw it. The body was just a short distance from the path, slumped down in the brush with a large bite taken out of its hindquarters. A wolf, Milton thought. It reeked of rot and decay, and he had to fight the urge to gag. He covered his mouth with the sleeve of his jacket and crouched down next to the body. He looked at the sticky, fibrous remains. A mess of white and brown maggots, each of them the size of half a fingernail, wriggled and seethed.

  Maggots. Milton knew his battlefield medicine, and he knew his military history. It had worked for injured soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars. Maybe it would work for him. And, he knew, maggot therapy had gained credence recently. Doctors were using them again to clean the gangrenous feet of diabetics, saving them from amputation. The cleanliness in those circumstances couldn’t have been much more different than this, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. He didn’t have much choice.

  Milton plucked out a couple of them and held them in the palm of his hand. They looked like blowfly maggots. That would do. He reached back down to the carcass and picked out twenty of them, held them loosely in his fist and then rinsed them in the river, shaking them gently to clean them as best he could. They were far from sterile, but that was out of the question today. He’d risk the possibility of infection against the certainty that things would get worse if he let the wound continue to fester.

  He winced at the thought of what he was about to do, chided himself for his squeamishness, and dropped the maggots into the wound. He fixed the dressing and wound the bandage around it again.

  Chapter 32

  LUNDQUIST LOOKED up into the sky and knew, with a local’s sure and certain knowledge, that the storm would be back again before the hour was out. The clouds were the deepest and angriest blacks, solid blocks of ink that gathered at the horizon and then rolled at them as though they were the outriders of a hurricane.

  “Where is he?” he said in frustration, louder than he had intended.

  “Can’t be far,” Michael said.

  Lundquist ground his teeth. He had been saying that since they had started.

  The dogs had stayed on his scent all morning. There had been no obvious attempt to lose them. His track led them along the banks of the little river, climbing ever upwards into the slopes that led to the larger hills and then, eventually, to the shallow peaks. There had been no more attempts to go through the water to lose the dogs. It was if he had stopped caring.

  Yes, Lundquist had been surprised that Milton was still ahead of them. He was wounded, and they had moved quickly, barely stopping. The men had been running with their weapons ready for the last two hours, kept alert by Lundquist’s barked exhortations should their focus waver.

  Milton had killed four men already.

  Damned if he was going to kill any more.

  They had been following the gentle upward slope, and Lundquist was feeling it in his legs and buttocks. Leland Mulligan had been blowing hard for the last hour, and Walker Price was damp with sweat. Michael was the fittest of them all, though. He had loped ahead of them, outpacing the dogs on occasion, diverting a few feet from the path in the event that Milton had left a more obvious sign that he had passed through.

  The path dropped into a hollow that was bordered by slopes of loose shale. They followed a stream up the other side, the incline becoming steeper and steeper, the water sheltered by the steep shoulders of a ravine. The dogs pulled harder, and Lundquist recognised in their agitated behaviour that they were close.

  “Weapons ready!”

  Lundquist looked around. He knew the woods, and he remembered this spot. They called it the Whitefish Trail. The climb that faced them was steep, but there was a narrow path that cut upwards that could be accessed without too much difficulty.

  He tightened his grip on his rifle.

  Tom Chandler was up front. “Hey!” he cried out. Walker hauled the dogs back onto their haunches.

  The dogs had led them to the face of the ravine on the right hand side. They had found an outcrop that reached out from the rock wall.

  Lundquist hurried across. There was a thatched screen propped against the rock face. Chandler was on his haunches behind it, poking at the remains of a fire with a stick. Walker settled down next to him and looked.

  “What do you think?” Lundquist said.

  “Yes.” Walker nodded. “Look at that. He’s been here.”

  Milton had dug a fire pit and lined it with rocks. The pit was full of ashes, and there were the unconsumed remains of a larger log that had been pushed away to die down. Walker disturbed the ashes all the way down to the bottom of the pit, but there was no sign of life at all. The fire had died out two or three hours ago, but that didn’t matter.

  Milton had been here.

  Lundquist stood, his knees complaining a little, and turned back to the others. They were gathered around the outcrop.

  Lundquist was about to speak when there came a tremendous thunderclap. He looked up: the black clouds had sealed off the last square of blue sky and now rolled black and unending as far as he could see. The temperature had plunged, and then, just as he crammed his wide-brimmed hat onto his head, the rain started again.

  “All right, men,” he called out, watching as they prepared their clothes for the change in the weather. “This is where he camped last night.”

  “How’s he stayed so far ahead of us?” Michael called out.

  “Pay attention!” Lundquist called out. “The dogs have a good scent. They�
�ve had a good one all morning. Maybe he stayed here for less time than we thought he did, maybe he’s just ahead of us. Maybe he isn’t as badly hurt as I think he is. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. What I do know is we are going to find him, and, when we do, we’re going to make him wish he didn’t drag us out in this weather.”

  “What are we doing now?”

  “We stick with it. We keep going until we find him.”

  Tom Chandler groaned.

  “What?” Lundquist said. “You want to stay? You forget what he did back in the field before we came after him? Think it’d be a good idea to wait here on your own? Don’t be so stupid.”

  Chandler looked away, chastised. Lundquist adjusted his hat, working the brim down, and nodded to Walker Price. The dogs leapt to follow the spoor again. Milton’s scent might as well have been painted on the path in fluorescent paint. He wasn’t far ahead, Lundquist knew it.

  Chapter 33

  HE KEPT RUNNING.

  A large ridge loomed up out of the trees, a sudden protrusion of sixty feet of bedrock granite that cut through the green with no obvious way around. Milton kept running towards it, pounding across the boggy trail. He heard the sound of the water from half a mile away, a shushing hiss that grew in strength the nearer he came to it. It became louder: a murmur, to a groan, to a roar. The trail cut through a stand of trees. Milton followed it, tracing a path around a gentle oxbow to the left and then to the right, and then he came to the waterfall.

  He stopped and looked up.

  He found himself in a little hollow, the river pooling in the bottom before draining away in the direction that he had come. It was verdant and fresh, with stands of ash and fir gathered on the shallow slopes. The ridge shot up ahead of him, more of a sheer cliff now that he was closer to it, blocking his way. The river rushed over the top. The falls consisted of two separate drops spaced about two hundred yards apart. The upper falls dropped about sixty feet; the lower about forty. The soft, layered, river rock was worn and sculpted, finished almost to resemble hand-rubbed pewter. It was formed into a number of channels, ledges, potholes, and other unique configurations. The river was funnelled between two sheer rocky lips and then was sent gushing out over the steep drops to crash against the rocks below.

  There was no obvious way to go on.

  Milton followed the river right up to the falls, treading carefully on the slippery, lichen-crusted stone. The ridge on either side of him was steep, too difficult to scale. He looked up. The falls offered a sheer drop into the plunge pool and the rocks that encircled it, mist and spray swirling around him.

  He turned and looked due south, out over the slopes of the hills, high above the terraces of trees below, and tried to place himself in relation to where he expected his pursuers to be. They would have started to follow him by now. He guessed that he had a lead on them, but he couldn’t guess how long that lead would last. Not long, surely. He was injured. He didn’t know the terrain, and he didn’t have a map. They would have none of those disabilities.

  Could he retrace his path and find another way around?

  And then, just audible in the quiet of the morning, he heard barking.

  They were tracking him with dogs.

  Milton allowed himself a wry smile. He had expected it, but it was hardly fair.

  Unless he was able to throw the dogs off, he knew that they would follow him relentlessly until they had him. He wondered what they were using to give them his spoor, and then he remembered his pack back in Lester Grogan’s office. He chided himself. He should have taken it with him when Lars Olsen had offered to drive him to the hospital. Apart from making it more difficult to track him, his pack had everything that he needed to stay out in the woods. Was he getting rusty? Should he have expected trouble? Leaving it behind had been negligent. In a situation like this, that could very easily be fatal.

  The dogs barked again. They made up his mind.

  He couldn’t turn back.

  The hounds would have taken Lundquist north, following his trail. They had probably reached last night’s camp by now. They would keep coming. He only had a short lead on them now. How long could he stay ahead?

  Not long.

  And if he was going to make a stand, this wasn’t the time or the place.

  He turned back to the waterfall again. He needed to put a barrier between him and them that would slow them down.

  The dogs would lead Lundquist right up here, but that would be as far as they could go.

  He would give Lundquist two choices: either leave the dogs and send his men up the cliff in pursuit or retrace his steps and find another way to ascend the ridge.

  Milton had to climb.

  HE WENT right up to the rock and laid his hands out flat, feeling the moisture, the slickness, the damp air below him reaching all the way up to his head and beyond. He shrugged the bag from his shoulder. He wouldn’t be able to climb with it safely.

  He considered his ascent. His left arm was sore and weak, and wouldn’t be much use. The rocks would be slippery and wet, too, and there were only a few decent handholds that he could identify from below. He would have to hope that he was strong enough to support himself, and that he would find enough suitable grips as he climbed up. It was a gamble. If he was too weak or if there was no suitable path, he wasn’t sure that he would be able to climb back down again.

  And he might fall.

  He took a deep breath, and bracing his hands on two suitable handholds just above him, he bore his weight. His left arm screamed with the effort, more than he was expecting, and the sudden pain dimmed his vision for a moment. He found a handhold above, and then another, and then another, slotting his feet into nooks and niches, jamming his toes onto narrow ledges.

  Thunder boomed.

  Ten feet.

  Twenty feet.

  His arm collapsed, and he lurched backwards, his feet cycling helplessly through the air. He shot out his right hand, and his fingers lashed around the roots of a sapling just up above, anchoring himself there until the pain cleared. He breathed in and out, sweat washing into his eyes, and gathered himself.

  Thirty feet.

  Halfway.

  He tried to find another foothold. The toe of his right boot jarred against the face. He angled his foot and jammed it into a crack. Then, trusting that his foot would hold, he let go of the trunk and reached his right hand up. His fingers fastened around a spur of rock, and he heaved up again. The spur was wet and slick, but his fingers found their grip, and he collected his balance again.

  Forty feet.

  He looked down and saw the pool below him. It looked even farther down now from his lofty perch, but the jagged rocks looked bigger, hungry teeth ready to devour him, distorted by the spray and the hurried glance that was all he dared risk. He remembered the climbs he had undertaken during Selection, up and down more challenging rock faces than this one.

  But, a contrary voice reminded him, you were younger then. You were in your twenties. It wasn’t raining like this. You weren’t injured. You had two good arms.

  He reached up as far as he could with his left hand and found another grip. He jerked his head around to the right and looked up again, identifying what he hoped might be another suitable grip. He closed his eyes, trusted his judgment, opened his eyes, released his handhold, and pushed up. His right foot slipped off the rock and dropped down, and he fell. His right hand missed the grip. He had a split second to anticipate the pain as his left arm had to bear all of his weight, but knowing that it was coming was only a minor assistance, for the pain, the incredible depth of it, drowned him in a tide so complete that he was only barely aware of the yell of effort that was impossible to suppress. His consciousness dimmed again, but his fingers knotted around the rock and held firm, his left foot sliding down the wet rock until his ankle clashed against something raised and sharp. He swung from his left hand, his fingers beginning to slip, and scrabbled up again with his left boot, ignoring the pain in his shin and ankle unti
l his toes were wedged in a cleft and his right hand had found a trailing vine.

  Fifty feet.

  Nearly.

  He stopped there for ten seconds, pressed against the damp rock face, breathing in deeply, the pain lighting up his left arm and all the way down the side of his body. The water boomed angrily from the plunge pool below him, spray billowing up at him. He craned his neck to the right again and saw another handhold five feet across the face and, above that, a narrow shelf that would fit his boot perfectly. He didn’t allow himself the time to question his decision. He yanked hard on the vine and pushed off with his left foot, scrambling across the face before gravity clutched at him and tore him down, his right hand brushing against the grip and missing it, his boot crashing onto the shelf. He reached up again and found the handhold, his fingers fastening around the sharp rock so tight that he cut himself, pressing gratefully against the rock again.

  He heard the dogs again, but they were louder now, much louder.

  It sounded as if they were right below him.

  The gunshot cracked out from the woods below, and the bullet winged off the rock a few inches below him.

  He had misjudged the sound of the dogs. They had been much closer than he had guessed.

  “Fire!” he heard Lundquist shout. “Bring him down!”

  Another round cracked off the rock face, breaking off sharp little fragments of flint and drawing sparks.

  He was helpless.

  He blinked sweat out of his eyes and looked straight up.

  It was easier from here. The face was pocked with small niches and nooks, and he found that he could ascend with just one arm, reaching up to secure himself before stretching out with his legs until his feet found the places to bear his weight. He quickened his ascent, salty sweat covering his face and dripping into his eyes and mouth. The water crashed and roared as if frustrated that he had managed to negotiate the climb.

  Every second that passed was another that he expected to be shot.