Sanctuary (Nomad Book 2)

by Mather, Matthew

  The young man’s face faded, replaced with cinder block walls. Jess shivered and clutched the thin blanket they had given her and Raffa to huddle under on the metal cot.

  “Jessica,” the voice hissed again, lower this time, but still urgent.

  She turned her stiff neck. Was it someone in the cell next to her? No. All the other cells were empty.

  “Look up,” urged the familiar voice.

  Massarra’s piercing blue eyes hovered behind the metal grates of the tiny window of their cell. “We must hurry.”

  Jess glanced left and right. No guards. “What are you—”

  “You need to get out of here, right now.”

  “I know that.”

  “No, I mean right now. You need to get outside of the Vivas encampment. You are in grave danger.”

  Jess nudged Raffa awake but held one hand over his mouth. She pointed up at the metal grate.

  “How can we get out?” Jess asked.

  Massarra shook her head in violent shivers. “You must find a way. Quickly. Yourself.” Her thin hand extended through the grate, her exposed wrist fragile and pale. From her fingers something fell into the dirt. “Outside the camp I can help.” Her arm and face disappeared.

  Jess rocked forward to her feet and knelt in the dirt. A switchblade. She clicked it open and tested the blade. Razor sharp. They’d strip searched both her and Raffa after returning them to the cell, put them into stained prisoners’ clothes, but they’d given them back their boots. Jess slipped the blade into hers.

  She needed to get out of here. But how? Get the guard over, stab him? Take the keys? Maybe. Maybe she could be fast enough by herself. She glanced at Raffa.

  “Guard!” she shouted as loud as she could.

  Raffa looked at the cellblock door, then back at Jess and down at her boot. He clutched the soiled blanket, but then straightened and stood. His hands shook but he balled his fists and nodded at Jess.

  “I need to speak to the English man!” Jess shouted again.

  A small metal opening over the main cellblock door slid open. “Cosa c'è?”

  “I need to speak to your boss! I know where my father is, but he’s very sick. We need to hurry.”

  The truck crested a ridge and Jess rolled sideways onto Raffa. She struggled to right herself, but her wrists were bound. She’d stood her ground in the jail, said that she’d only bring them to her father if Raffa was brought along. She insisted they had to go right away. The blond-haired man was suspicious, but he’d relented. He seemed in a hurry as well.

  A team was hastily assembled, and Jess and Raffa were tied together and pushed at gunpoint into the backseat of a truck.

  The vehicle’s engine growled. Jess marveled at how it had been modified for snow. Its four wheels sat atop triangular tank treads, but not a hack job like Raffa and Giovanni had performed on their Humvee—this transformation took expertise and resources and looked like a pre-fabricated kit.

  The Englishman drove the truck himself, sitting directly in front of Jess. A dark-eyed man with his face covered sat beside him. He held an automatic rifle, pointed up, and glanced into the back seat every few minutes. The truck’s headlights lit up conical swaths of fresh pink-white snow. Crystals of ice twinkled. Three snowmobiles—where the hell did they get snowmobiles?—whined in front of the truck, following hollows in the snow that hinted at the road. Outside of the lights of the truck and snowmobiles, she saw nothing but dead black.

  Hitting another bump, Jess tossed onto Raffa. “Andiamo,” she whispered. “Just follow me.” Raffa nodded. Fear in his eyes, but he steadied himself. Brave kid. She rocked back into her seat.

  The man holding the rifle looked over his shoulder at them.

  Jess waited until he turned back to lean down and take the switchblade from her boot. The whites of Raffa’s eyes gleamed in the light of the truck’s instrumentation. She began working the blade into the rough nylon cord binding her wrists.

  “We’re almost there,” Jess said in a loud voice, keeping her eyes on the man with the AK in the front.

  The roar of the truck’s engine lowered in pitch as the blond-haired man shifted down. An almost vertical wall of dirt, rock and ice appeared from the black gloom. The same ridge of earth across the highway that had stopped them the day before, the one they had to haul the Humvee and Jeep across by winch, the one she was counting on.

  Giovanni and Roger were about a mile to the north, she knew. They had to be watching. At the same time, the Englishman was wary of a trap, as was the guard beside him. Two more sat in the trunk, plus the three snowmobiles each with two men. They all appeared to be former military—very likely mercenaries. Ten heavily armed men versus her and Raffa, and maybe Giovanni and Roger and Leone. Even if they saw them coming, they wouldn’t be able to get here that fast. The wildcard was Massarra, but even given her apparent toughness and experience, what could a hundred-pound woman add to this unbalanced equation?

  There weren’t many options, but she had to do something, and fast. Jess cut through her ropes and handed the knife to Raffa, urging him with her eyes to do the same. Reaching forward, she unzipped the truck’s emergency kit, felt around inside. She found a flare and stuffed it into her boot. Everyone was distracted looking at the growing wall of rock, searching the darkness for any signs of movement.

  The blond-haired man downshifted again. The snowmobiles stopped where the spine of Earth became vertical. It hadn’t taken as long as Jess thought it would, but this truck with its modified treads, and the snowmobiles were much faster over the snow, and it was a straight drive down the highway from the Vivas encampment. She hadn’t had a lot of time to think. They pulled to a stop, one snowmobile up ahead and one to each side.

  The blond-haired man turned to Jess. “So you pulled your truck across here?” He turned back to examine the wall of dirt and ice. “I don’t see any marks.”

  “We brought our Humvee to the top and saw your city, Vivas. We thought it looked dangerous, so we winched up the Jeep and dropped it down here.”

  “And yet we don’t see any tracks from this side.”

  “The snow, the wind from the north, must have covered them. I came down here and did a reconnaissance. Look!” Jess pointed to their left. Just visible at the edges of the pools of light thrown by the Jeep’s headlights were a pair of ski tracks leading south where she and Massarra had come over when they were deciding where to head next. They’d explored a little to the south before deciding to head north.

  The blond-haired man leaned out his window. “Follow those tracks and see where they go. And keep in contact.” The man on the snowmobile in front nodded and gunned his engine, the other raising his weapon. They disappeared into the darkness. The blond-haired man turned back to Jess. “So where’s your father?”

  “On the other side. He is very sick. The only way he’s going to live is if you help us. I have no choice. If you climb to the top, you’ll see them. They’re camped at the bottom on the other side.”

  The man watched her carefully. “We will see.”

  He opened his door and yelled at the men on the snowmobiles on their right, then at the two men on the one beside him. Both left their engines on, headlights shining. The truck’s engine was still running, its lights still flooding the road ahead.

  He said something in Italian to the man holding the rifle in the front seat, then stepped out of the truck and walked in front, his backside illuminated by the truck’s lights. The man in the front seat glanced at Jess, then at Raffa, and opened his door and stepped out. The two men in the back disembarked and stood guard, one to each side of the truck.

  Doing her best to keep her upper body still and in place, Jess took the knife back from Raffa. He nodded. He was free. Keeping his hands low, Raffa shifted his arms toward her. Two of the men scrambled up the rocky embankment, toward the top. The blond-haired man and three of his mercenaries stood in front of the truck, their backs to it, but two men still stood guard to either side of the truck.r />
  Down to six. An improvement, but not enough.

  “Si, si!” one of the men yelled from the darkness at the top of the embankment.

  The blond-haired man turned to Jess. “Perhaps some truth?” He turned back. “You two, get up there and help them.”

  “Should I get out?” Jess asked. “It might be easier if my father hears my voice.”

  “Yes, come.” The man kept his back to her. Two more of his men scrambled up the rocky embankment.

  Down to four on two.

  Jess glanced at the snowmobile beside them, still running. She pulled on the door handle, and with a soft ka-chunk the door opened an inch. The interior light glowed on. Jess opened her door and slid out of her seat. She motioned for Raffa to follow her. The two men climbing disappeared into the darkness above.

  Any second, they’d realize that there was no camp on the other side.

  Biting cold assaulted her senses. She smiled at the man beside them, then feigned a slip in the snow. Reflexively, he reached out to help her, his rifle cradled in one arm. She took the arm, pretending her own hands were still bound together. Still giving him the same smile, she accepted his help. He had week-old stubble, his face as worn and weathered as Giovanni’s. As he hauled her up, she spun and brought her switchblade up in a quick motion, driving it into the carotid artery in his neck.

  He never saw it coming. His eyes went wide as the blade ripped through cartilage and soft tissue. Hot blood spurted across her arms and face. The man, eyes fixed on her, dropped to his knees, his body convulsing, a soft gurgling the only sound from his throat.

  She eased him into the snow in a spreading dark pool. Still gripping the man, she turned him, and slid his rifle into her own hands. The hum of the truck’s engine was loud enough that the Englishman and his men still stared up the rock face, their backs to her.

  Slinging the rifle over her shoulder, she took two quick steps onto the snowmobile and Raffa followed, stumbling at first getting out of the truck, then sprinting. Snowmobiles had no gears. She’d been on many, joyriding as a kid. Her heart pounding, feeling Raffa’s hand clutch her ribs, she wrenched back on the throttle.

  “Hey!”

  She glanced left. The guard on the other side had his rifle up, pointed straight at Jess. Twenty feet away. In slow motion, she felt the snowmobile’s engine roar, its track skidding and biting into the snow. In her mind’s eye she saw the guard’s finger on the trigger. She ducked, expecting a bullet.

  But it was his head that exploded in a spray of pink mist.

  The snowmobile rocketed forward and she hauled the steering to the left, into the darkness where the other snowmobile had gone. Looking over her right shoulder, she watched another of the mercenaries crumple to the ground.

  Jess accelerated down the hill, away from the road. Ice exploded from trunks of trees in front of her as bullets impacted them. Staccato bursts of gunfire. In the black distance, the smudge of the other snowmobile’s headlights appeared. The smear of light lengthened as the machine turned around, then formed back into a single bright blob as it headed back directly toward her.

  Over the immediate rumble of her own snowmobile’s engine, she heard the thin whine of the one at the truck. Reaching the copse of trees, she stole a quick glance back. A headlight bore toward them, following fast behind. The light of the other snowmobile danced in the air over their heads.

  She had maybe a two-hundred-yard lead.

  Jess pulled the throttle to its maximum and shot across an icy field. Her eyes teared up. The advancing light of the snowmobile in front of them grew brighter. They were sandwiched. She angled away from it at forty-five degrees.

  “When I stop,” Jess yelled over the engine’s noise, “get off and pick up the snowmobile, move it to the right.”

  Raffa gripped onto her back. “What you say?”

  Now wasn’t the time for an English lesson.

  “Get off when I stop and help me move the snowmobile,” Jess yelled again. She jabbed toward the right with her hand.

  She slowed to zigzag again through another copse of trees, then gunned the engine. The snowmobile skimmed over the top of the ice-encrusted snow. She kept her eyes searching through the blackness. And there it was. She jammed on the brakes. Raffa’s weight slammed forward into her, shoving the handlebars into her stomach. The snowmobile skidded sideways to a halt.

  “Grab it!” She disentangled herself and jumped off into the knee-deep snow, turning off the snowmobile’s headlight. Blackness. The snowmobile behind them was making its way through the trees, about a hundred yards behind, the headlight of the other one merging beside it.

  Around them it was pitch black.

  “Quick, quick,” Jess urged, pointing to her left. She strained to pick up the front of the snowmobile and pulled it three feet sideways across the ice.

  Raffa saw what she meant and he hauled the back of the snowmobile, but he moved it six feet. Jess pulled her end, sloughed it sideways again.

  “Again, again, come on.”

  They pulled it another dozen feet into the cover of some trees and behind a snowdrift.

  Jess grabbed the flare she’d stolen from the Jeep’s emergency kit, pulled it and it flamed to life. She ran forward ten feet and stuck the flare into the snow, right near the edge of the cliff. The headlight of the other snowmobile, less than thirty yards away, lit her briefly and she rolled sideways and held her breath. At full throttle, the snowmobile roared past her and shot off the edge of the cliff. The driver yelped. The sound of the engine went up an octave as the vehicle roared in midair.

  Seconds later a clattering crash as man and machine hit the rocks below. An orange fireball exploded below.

  Scrambling back to the trees, Jess helped Raffa drag their snowmobile further away. A wind whipped across the plateau, fresh snow coming with it. Jess and Massarra had explored this area, and discovered this cliff. It was impassible, hundreds of feet high, stretching for several miles north to south. It was why they had decided to go west. The other snowmobile appeared and slowed near the edge of the cliff. Two of the men disembarked and looked tentatively over the edge, at the guttering flames of the wreckage below.

  Doing their best to cover their snowmobile with snow and twigs, Jess and Raffa edged away in the darkness as the growl of the big truck’s engine became louder. The snow thickened. Jess caught a glimpse of Englishman’s face. She had a rifle across her back, but they still outnumbered her. Not the time for a firefight.

  “Let’s go,” she urged Raffa.

  9

  JESS DUG HER nails into the frozen earth. Something cracked. It might have been a finger. She couldn’t feel them. She couldn’t feel anything, not her feet, not her face. Somehow, she kept moving. Kept urging her body forward. Every ten feet she’d grope around to feel Raffa, but he wasn’t behind her anymore. She felt his arms around her, urging her forward.

  The blackness swallowed everything.

  She couldn’t see her hands in front of her face. The ground, the frozen rock wall on her left, the idea of a world outside this blackness receded from her mind. She just wanted to lie down, be engulfed by sleep and dreams.

  For a while she had been shivering, the cold biting into her, the pain throbbing in her fingers and toes. The agony receded, blossomed into warmth. The shivering stopped, the pain went away. Was she still moving? She sensed her arms and legs swinging back and forth, felt herself teetering, and falling over. Strong arms kept returning her back upon her feet, and she heard the constant whispers in her ear.

  And then.

  Something loomed in the darkness.

  Light. Movement.

  “Jessica, my God.”

  A face glowed in the light. Familiar. Her mind struggled.

  “Prendila.” Raffa’s voice croaked from his blistered lips. He lifted Jess one last time, which required all his fading strength, and pushed her forward.

  “Giovanni,” Jess whispered as he pulled her into his arms. That’s right, her f
rozen mind said to itself, we were trying to find Giovanni. And Hector. Now, stop. We can stop.

  She slumped. Her feet fell out from under her.

  “Start the Humvee,” Giovanni yelled at Roger. His headlamp pierced a thin ray of light through the swirl of falling snow. “Get the heat up to maximum. Keep the lights off.” He looked at Jess. “Jesus Christ, is this your blood?”

  “No, non è suo,” Raffa said. He slumped into the snow. “Not hers.”

  Roger disappeared into the darkness. Lucca emerged from the same darkness and yelped. He ran to his brother Raffa, fell beside him, and pulled his head and shoulders onto his lap.

  “What happened?” Giovanni cradled her in his arms. “We were about to leave, to go into—”

  A bright orange ball flashed in the distance, obscured by the deepening churning snow that fell from the sky. A half-dozen smaller orange balls flared beside the larger one. Jess stared at the flames, her eyes still unfocused. The orange ball grew into a fiery globule. No sound, but the ground juddered after a few seconds.

  Staggering together, they made it to the Humvee as the first shock wave hit them, a concussive, ear-splitting roar that rolled over and over, echoing off the rock wall behind them. The fireballs merged and climbed into the sky, a crazed maelstrom of snow and fire that illuminated the plain before them.

  Not fifty feet away, a solitary figure appeared, illuminated by the growing conflagration. Giovanni lifted Jess into the passenger seat of the Humvee and swung his rifle around. The figure jogged toward them. Giovanni raised his gun.

  “You must leave now.” A woman’s voice, stern and unyielding. Her face was invisible against the fireball.

  His rifle still up, Giovanni squinted. “Massarra?”

  She crossed the final twenty feet and held up one hand to push aside the muzzle of Giovanni’s AK. Another explosion lit up the dark clouds above. The Vivas encampment, less than two miles away, blazed. Screams echoed.

  “Now,” repeated Massarra, pointing at the spine of earth behind them. “Go to the other side and take the Range Rover. Back east, to the coast.”