Survival Instinct

by Doranna Durgin

  And after a pause, he said, “Keep talking.”

  “It’s only going to get worse. And it spreads along the nerve pathways—it can reach your brain in a matter of days.” Okay, so that was conflating shingles and poison ivy…but it sounded good. “Very few doctors know anything about it. I can tell you where to go for treatment.” She hardened her voice. “Of course, you’ll have to haul me out of here first.”

  And then what? He wasn’t likely to simply let her go.

  It doesn’t matter. It would be better than clinging to the side of a gorge cliff in the middle of nowhere, with no one the wiser and no one looking for her. She’d handle the and then what when she got there.

  Except he gave a snort of a laugh. “It’s not much of a rash,” he said. “I’ll go get myself some magic ointment at the drugstore. Meanwhile, you have a nice life. Or should I say, have a nice death.”

  “Bastard,” she muttered, but not so he could hear it. Not now. Now that he’d decided to leave her here, there were plenty of ways he could make this situation worse. She wanted none of it.

  And he wasn’t bluffing. His car engine started…and the vehicle drove away.

  Karin took a deep breath, ignoring the twinges in her ribs. “Cree-ap!” she bellowed into the open darkness.

  “Ap-ap-ap,” the darkness echoed back.

  All right. Think. So far, she was for the most part whole, especially considering how many things could have broken on the way down here. Her wrist would be a problem, but it wasn’t a jagged-bone kind of problem.

  Maybe things weren’t as bad as they seemed. Maybe she was already nearly at the bottom of this particular gorge. If she could slide her way to the bottom come daylight…

  Or maybe in daylight, she’d find a way to climb out, bum wrist and all.

  One thing she couldn’t afford to do was wait. Sure, people were going to notice her car, but this wasn’t a back-and-forth kind of road. This was an out-of-the-way, going-from-hereto-there road, the kind of road no one traveled twice in the same day or two. And she bet it would take a couple times of spotting her car before something bothered to think something wasn’t quite right.

  So…maybe things weren’t as bad as they seemed. Karin scrabbled around for a decent rock, something she could toss without effort but still big enough to hear on the way down. “Have a short journey,” she told it, and kissed it for luck. Then she tossed it out over the edge of her little cranny and listened to it bounce and hop.

  And listened.

  And listened.

  And slumped back against the cliff, not bothering to listen for the end of it. Softly, she said, “Oh, crap.”

  Chapter 7

  He wasn’t certain what woke him, not until the dog barked again. Even then, he almost let himself drift back into sleep. But the dog barked again, and Dave pried his eyes open.

  That he had to work so hard to manage it was enough to get him sitting up. The way he staggered when he got up…that triggered all his warning systems.

  What the hell had she put in his whiskey?

  And why?

  Dave acted without thinking, stumbling down the stairs in his boxers to check Ellen’s empty bedroom, and then straight to the bathroom where he cranked the shower on full and cold.

  The icy blast hit him hard; he managed to stay beneath it but only by snarling his best string of curses. Once he’d been through the litany twice, he figured enough was enough, and stepped out sputtering, reaching blindly for the nearest towel.

  It smelled of shampoo and of Ellen.

  Okay, that woke him up.

  Peeling off the wet boxers was no fun at all.

  From there he ran up the stairs—ran, because whatever she’d given him still hung in his system and he couldn’t afford to slow down—and pulled on clean underwear and a pair of jeans and an old Rochester Red Wings sweatshirt. He gulped down two of the caffeine pills he kept with his razor and ran back down the stairs and around to the back door, checking his watch on the way. Hours. He’d been asleep for hours.

  He didn’t have to know what she’d given him, or why. He only knew he had to find her. She was more than his best hope to help Rashawn. Now she was in trouble, and it was his fault.

  He shoved his way out into the cold night and discovered that leaving his coat in the car hadn’t been his best idea ever. The cold hit his wet hair and damp skin hard enough so his goose bumps might never fade. He fumbled for the car keys in the side pocket of the overnighter, hit the unlock key, and was never so grateful for the automatic interior lights. First things first: he threw his bag into the passenger seat and pulled on his dark Gore-Tex parka, listening to his teeth chatter.

  The next step was pretty clear, too. He slid in behind the wheel, firing the engine up—but he didn’t crank the heat up. It wouldn’t do to get too comfortable. Not until whatever Ellen had slipped into his whiskey was totally out of his system, and the caffeine had kicked in. But he was a man with a mission nonetheless; he reached into the passenger seat and pulled out his laptop, putting it aside to boot up while he grabbed his USB receiver. Then he found his glasses, knowing better than to try to work without them when he could barely focus in the first place.

  Oh, yeah, he’d felt guilty enough about that bug, even if at the time he was bugging her for her own protection and didn’t tell her only so she wouldn’t worry. As if she were still the old Ellen. Now his guilt dissipated somewhat, especially when the results of his two receivers—the GPS and the short-range RF—told her she was nowhere in the area. He took a closer look at the GPS map on his screen.

  What the hell was she doing at the border of West Virginia? She didn’t know anyone there…had no ties to the area.

  Running. Running like a rabbit.

  No, he told himself quite suddenly, listening to the gut instinct that had been poking at him since his arrival. Not like a rabbit, not anymore. Like a fox.

  But a fox who didn’t know she’d been tagged.

  The receiver beeped; he almost dismissed it in his attention to the laptop. But the beep meant the automatic scanning receiver had found success, and that made no sense. There was no way its range extended over a hundred miles. Dave alt-tabbed his way to the open receiver window and stared at it.

  Oh, shit.

  It was him. This car. Somewhere in the back half of it, probably under the wheel well.

  Barret’s man hadn’t given up at all. He’d just come back to bug Dave’s car, hang back and wait.

  Dave pushed the laptop aside and slid out of the car, running cold fingers along the inner wheel well, the bumpers, the second wheel well…and there it was. He pried the thing free and took it back to the car, flicking on the overhead light to get a better view of his prize.

  It was an impressive little device. Not as tiny as the beyond cutting-edge tech he’d planted on Ellen, but if the receiver was anywhere near this quality…

  Then Longsford’s man would have picked up the motion-activated bug on Ellen. If he was alert, if he was in the car…he could easily have followed her, staying in range. And that meant Dave somehow had to reach her before it was too late.

  God. I’m gonna need more coffee.

  “Dear Ellen,” Karin said out loud, speaking into the darkness. The moon had set; dawn couldn’t be far away. “Your sister is in a mess.”

  For one thing, she’d lost her hat, and then she’d lost most of her body heat through her uncovered head. She’d lost part of her scarf, too, but only because she’d used it to strap up her wrist. And then she’d ended up on a west-facing slope. This spot wouldn’t see warm sunlight until the day was half over.

  It wasn’t as if she could keep moving to generate body heat.

  The errand geek was right. She might last a day. If she was lucky.

  Daylight. She just needed to stay functional until daylight, until she could truly assess her situation.

  Helpless. Plain and simple helpless.

  When was the last time that had happened?

>   Never, she told herself…but even to her mind’s inner ear, the protest came too strongly.

  “It wouldn’t feel familiar if it was a first,” she said out loud, just in case it would make herself listen more carefully.

  But it did feel familiar. In a sly way, a trickle of feeling that was oh-so-hard to identify. A feeling she wanted to ignore. Under other circumstances she would have sprung to her feet and found some busywork, if only pacing. Now…really not a good time to take up pacing.

  So she kept her feet still, and she sat with her back against the earth and her face buried in her arms as she hugged her knees, trying to keep warm. Familiarity didn’t make sense. She’d never been helpless. She was the one who took to Rumsey’s games, at least until she realized the consequences of the games, from the charity scams to the good old ketchup-squirt scams. She’d been good at playing backup for Rumsey.

  At first, just by being there. Just being a little girl, engaging their interest for the investment scams or charity scams—the long view, when Rumsey needed a whole cast of characters. As she got older she’d carried his messages, muling not drugs or money but information. She interacted with the marks themselves, filling in while Rumsey was busy with some other scheme. And she’d even handled fenced goods and bartered information with their more felonious acquaintances.

  If Karin needed something, she got it. If she was in trouble, she got out of it.

  Until today, anyway.

  Now she had a wrist that was badly sprained if not broken, and she clung to the side of a mountain in the dark. And it felt…

  Familiar.

  And because she wasn’t afraid of anything, not even some damned elusive feeling, Karin shut her eyes and followed it. She let it well up inside her.

  Until suddenly she was eight years old, waiting for Rumsey to fetch her, because he was preparing to make one of his special visits. And she didn’t want to go. She didn’t want to go. How she wished her mother were still there! And she almost turned to Ellen to cry about it, but she already knew that Ellen wasn’t strong enough for Rumsey’s games, and if Karin didn’t go along then Ellen would have to do it.

  Didn’t anyone know? Couldn’t any adults see what was going on, the lies he made her tell? The fake smiles he made her smile, pinching the back of her neck when it looked like he was putting a proud hand on her shoulder?

  But no one had ever seen through the lies Rumsey told about her, about Ellen. No one had ever seen she wasn’t a perfectly happy, normal little girl with her perfectly normal family.

  Helpless.

  It didn’t take long to figure out that the best strategy for surviving—for thriving—was to put aside her reluctance. To become so good at scamming that Rumsey counted on her…that he did decently by her and Ellen in other ways. Food in the fridge, money for clothes…except later, when she really got good. She and Ellen had stolen their first bras together.

  Karin shivered, wrapping her arms more tightly around her knees. An emotional as well as a physical huddle, with helplessness smothering her in a wave of unwelcome feeling. “Okay, it happened,” she muttered, ready to be through with it even if it wasn’t through with her. “I made choices. I got past it. I’m not eight any longer.”

  No, she was twenty-six and she was stuck on a cliff.

  I wonder if Rashawn feels this way. Helpless.

  The thought came out of nowhere; it made her suck in her breath and then forget to breathe out again. No child should feel like this. It wasn’t something she could understand as an eight-year-old, but as a fully grown woman she understood plenty. None of that should have happened. Not to her; not to Rashawn.

  But I’m not Ellen. There’s nothing I can do to help.

  There’s nothing.

  Dave bought coffee at every opportunity, filling his thermos. He therefore also stopped to get rid of coffee at every opportunity, grateful that the amazing scarcity of gas stations was offset by cover at the side of the road. It was harder finding enough shoulder in which to pull over…these two-lane roads ran narrow, ofttimes barely notched into the side of a ridge. The mountain rose on one side, dropped away on the other.

  But Karin hadn’t moved, and he steadily gained on her, though he didn’t quite understand it. Unless Barret’s man had inexplicably lost her, he’d practically been on top of her all this time. But if he’d made a move, Karin’s tracking device would have reflected it.

  Unless Dave was too late, and Barret had instructed his walking wall of muscle to get rid of her.

  Dave hated being too late.

  Too many late-night drives hadn’t ended well. They now vied for his thoughts, from that very first dead boy—the one who’d set him on his life’s path—to last year’s young victim. Plenty of successes in between, but those weren’t what ever came to him in the darkness. They weren’t what came to him now as he raced not only to save another child, but to save his witness.

  To save the woman who’d kissed him senseless in the crude confines of an old henhouse.

  Dave’s leg gave a sudden cramp; he discovered his fingers crimping on the steering wheel. Too much caffeine, too much tension. Whatever Karin had used to dose him was wearing off. He’d probably be lucky if he wasn’t up for three days in the wake of all that coffee.

  Then again, if he didn’t get to Karin in time, he’d be just as glad to avoid the nightmares.

  Dave shook his hands out, and drove on toward dawn.

  The first hints of light came as a surprise; one moment Karin stared out into darkness and the next she could see the jumble of hills across the gorge. She worked on deep-breathing exercises, those she’d taught herself in the early days. She rarely needed them anymore; she could just drop right into whatever persona the moment demanded, playing her mark with experience. Playing anyone, if it suited her. If it got her what she wanted. Needed.

  Except…

  It had been over a year. A year of sinking into the most convincing role she’d ever needed. Deep immersion…but only a single role. And that left her out of practice, even when it came to fooling herself. In this case, fooling herself that she wasn’t, in fact, terrified.

  “I am a mountain goat,” told herself, staring out at the slowly brightening land. “Breathe deep. Ommm. Be the goat.” Not quite right, that last. She summoned up an imitation of her youngest goat. The easiest. “Beh-eh-eh,” she said into the mountain air. Yeah, that was so much better.

  But she couldn’t distract herself from her situation. Straight down, just as far as she would have expected from the endless fall of her tossed stone during the night. Karin’s mouth went dry at the thought of the pure dumb luck that had landed her on this small outcrop; she had to lean her head back and swallow hard a couple of times.

  All her survival skills were urban-based. Just because she’d lived on a tiny working farm for the past year didn’t mean she was ready to free-climb this cliff.

  Or you could just sit here and wait to freeze to death. Or fall asleep and roll off. Or dehydrate and faint and roll off….

  Didn’t seem like much of an option. She dug her fingers uselessly into the outcrop in a search for security as she slowly tipped her head back to see what lay above her.

  Not quite as bad as she was expecting. More of an angle to the ground, more vegetation handholds. Of course most of it was rhododendron with shallow rhododendron roots….

  Ugh. She didn’t want her life to depend on them.

  Then you’ll just have to be careful.

  But first things first. She wasn’t climbing this cliff with a full bladder. At least she was too frightened to feel the humiliation of peeing right out there on the exposed outcrop. But she was shivering before she got her jeans refastened—face it, she had been shivering for a long time now. It didn’t add to the security of the situation any.

  Finally she stood, turning to face the cliff in tiny little steps, never taking even an inch of ground for granted. She contemplated her best path…up to the rhododendron, over to the kudzu
, try to avoid the greenbrier, and then there was another, smaller ledge where she could dig her toes in and reevaluate the situation. She squinted up at the rhododendron, working up nerve. Her wrist throbbed fiercely and she’d be lucky to use it. She sure couldn’t count on it in a pinch.

  Deep breath. Reach up to the stunted bush, tug and test. Breathe. Now or never….

  The rhododendron held.

  She made it to the kudzu.

  The kudzu not only held, it offered her regular root knots. The narrow waterfall of vines—not quite suited to this elevation or it would have been a full-size blanket of growth across the hillside—had deep and sturdy roots, and the root knots sat above ground, spewing vines everywhere and most importantly giving Karin something to grab. One step at a time, always testing, her injured wrist held closely to her chest where she could feel her heart pounding even through the insulated canvas of the old army jacket. She kept her eyes on her goal, kept focused on the feel of the ground beneath tangled vines as it came through her cheap sneakers. The vines grabbed at the fingers of her work glove, and she disentangled her hand with care, pressing herself against the woody growth like a lover and taking hold with her teeth when she had to.

  It can’t be this easy.

  Not that it was easy in the least. Not with knowing how far and long she’d fall if she lost her grip, or the way the treetops had looked as they swooped away beneath her former perch. Idiot. Don’t think of—

  Her foot slipped. She cried out, snatching at the vines with her injured arm and then crying out again when she made contact. Her foot scrabbled, got purchase, lost it again. Her world narrowed to a bright point of pain at her wrist, the emptiness beneath her searching feet, the burn of stressed muscle in her arms, the sound of her own harsh, irregular breathing….

  There. There, she’d found purchase. She leaned against the vines and rock, panting, suddenly not cold at all.