Chapter 49
The strain on her leg from the constant climbing culminated in a fall when they reached Lookout Point, an alpine meadow being buffeted by a biting wind from the mountain peaks to the northwest. She didn’t see the root curving out of the ground and stubbed her right toe on it. Her injured left leg reflexively shot out to stop her, but a tearing pain buckled her knee. She fell, smacking her chin against the ground.
Craig was beside her in an instant. “Don’t move. You’ve popped some staples.”
She barely felt the stab of the needle into her leg, but it went numb quickly. She just lay on her belly while Craig tended to the wound. A bruise was swelling on her chin. A trickle of blood was running down her left cheek. She didn’t remember it hitting anything.
There were patches of glistening snow at this elevation. Low, sprawling shrubs clung to the shallow soil against the winds that blew across the bluff. Her eyes watered when she looked to the northwest.
Craig didn’t ask her to pull down her trousers. He just cut them open at the back and worked as fast as he could to reseal the wound. He then pressed two or three adhesive bandages onto it.
“Can you stand?”
“I think so.”
He helped her up. “Hold still.” He wrapped her left thigh tightly with an elastic bandage and secured it.
“I’m sorry if my butt’s getting in your way.”
“I’m not.” He finished by putting a small bandage on her cheek.
“Now what? This is as high as we can go and there are two men with four guns only minutes behind us.”
There might be another surveillance drone, too.
With his support, they headed for the northwest corner of the bluff. At the edge, she could look down on Dominion.
“It would be a beautiful view under other circumstances.”
“Randal often brought the students up here as part of their research. He’d land over there.” He pointed back to a large, mostly flat, platform of rock.
“What’s to research up here but a few runty bushes with a nasty sense of humor?” On second glance, the patches of snow turned out to be tiny white flowers trembling in the wind.
“This way.” He supported her, but he also tugged on her to get them going toward a trio of egg-shaped boulders ranging from eight to ten feet high that stood at the edge of a copse of spindly aspen. Once he got them behind the boulders, he ducked them down. “The Cotton brothers just arrived.”
“Is there another way down? Is there somewhere else we can go? You told me you were taking me to Colter’s farm.”
He pointed to the south. “Down that side is Quarrelle Creek valley. There’s a steep, narrow path that circles back to trails leading to the north side of Colter’s farm, but they’d spot us before we ever got to it.” He pointed north. “There’s a trail leading further into the mountains that way, but we’d have the same problem trying to get to it.”
“We’ve accomplished nothing. We might as well have taken our chances with the rocket launcher.”
“There were more men there; up here we only have two.”
“Two with two guns each.”
She peeked around the boulder. Bobby and Billy were crouched down and proceeding cautiously the way the other two had. No runty bush had tried to trip either of them. They didn’t know where their targets were, so there wasn’t likely a second drone. They also didn’t know she and Craig were out of ammunition.
“Wait here.”
She grabbed hold of him. “No. We stay together. Colter might have something unique in mind for us; crackpots like him usually do. Surrendering to them would get us down from here and buy us more time.”
Craig peeked out from behind the boulder. “They’ve separated. Billy’s closest. Bobby’s coming via the south edge of the cliff. I think that’s Bobby.”
She fell over onto her side to peek out and watched Bobby walking along the edge of the cliff straight for them. If she could hit him with a rock, it might knock him off. She looked around and found one slightly smaller than a softball. It was too heavy to throw with any accuracy while she was lying on the ground, though. She took hold of the boulder to get back up.
Craig helped her and embraced her when they heard the growl above them. Caesar was crouched on top of the largest of the three boulders looking down at them.
She peeked out to see where Bobby and Billy were. Bobby spotted her the moment she did, pointed their location out to the other evil twin and started running.
Caesar roared and sprung from his perch. Billy must have fired and missed because a moment after the bullets struck the boulders. He screamed briefly.
Bobby stopped jogging and turned. His arms fell to his sides. Unable to accept what was happening to his brother, he just watched for a few seconds before running to Billy’s defense.
Craig shot past her straight for Bobby, tackled him to the ground, rolled and landed on top of him. He smashed down on Bobby as hard and as fast as he could and managed to land a few blows to Bobby’s face and neck. He got the one rifle Bobby had managed to hold on to away from him and tossed it aside, but that gave Bobby the chance to get a good hold of him.
She came out from behind the boulder and limped as fast as she could for the rifle. To her left, Billy was writhing on the ground and clutching his throat. Caesar was gone.
Bobby managed to get to his feet while holding off Craig’s attack. He punched Craig twice in the face and tossed him aside. They were equal distance from the one rifle she could see when he spotted her. He started running for it after taking a quick look at his brother. Craig tackled him from behind.
They rolled over the south cliff together.
“Craig!” She fell when she tried to change direction. Clutching her leg, she got to her feet, retrieved the rifle and went to the edge of the cliff. “Craig! Craig!”
All she could see were rock outcroppings, plants that clung to the side of the cliff, one broken when Bobby and Craig must have hit it on the way down, the forest in the valleys below and a meandering white line that had to be Quarrelle Creek.
Billy emitted a gurgling moan.
She limped over to him.
His left arm had two gouges in it, defensive wounds. Caesar had slashed through his bulletproof vest and taken a large chunk of flesh out of his massive chest. He’d also gashed Billy’s throat. Blood squirted out sideways with every beat of Billy’s heart despite his efforts to stanch the flow. He glared up at her.
“I’ll bet when you were fifteen and bullying every other kid in your neighborhood, you never dreamed you’d grow up to have your throat torn out by a sissy mountain lion half your size.” She kept glaring back at him until he was dead.
“Caesar! Caesar! Come here, boy!”
Caesar didn’t return.
She started back for the cliff where Craig and Bobby went over, but stopped after only a few strides. Her left leg throbbed. When she touched the bandage it didn’t feel sticky and she could see no blood stain on it. Craig’s repair work was still holding up. The bandage did, however, feel tight enough to be cutting off the flow of blood to her lower leg.
Fleeing had taken her at least a thousand feet higher into the mountains and farther away from Shana. Even if her leg held up during the descent, and it wouldn’t, she would take too long to get back down. She was effectively stranded up here.
Using the rifle as a cane, she went back to Billy and went through his pockets but found no communication device on him. Unless Bobby had something, that meant the Cotton brothers had been given their orders, they’d been given free rein on how to carry them out and there had been no need to communicate with their command center, which meant she had been wrong. Surrendering to them would not have saved their lives.
The pain in her shoulder and at the back of her leg became a tingling numbness that overtook her whole body only to give way to trembling and dizziness that threatened to bring her to her knees until that, too, was replaced by heat snaking through every si
new and muscle, spreading out, rising up and radiating off her. She screamed as loud and as long as she could. The echo reverberated back to reinforce her cry, but both it and her energy soon faded.
Wind buffeted her from behind, her legs threatened to give out when she resisted. When she looked up at the cloudless sky, the faces of everyone she’d lost were there: her father’s insane rage in his eyes, his furrowed brow and snarling mouth as he closed his hands around her throat; her mother’s kind and tender smile at the travails of her daughter’s young life, the infatuations and heartbreaks, the triumphs and losses; Travis’ regret that he may have cause her guilt and doubt; Michael’s passive mask that she had interpreted so many different and disturbing ways; Craig’s eyes that her vanity had allowed her to believe were twinkling because of her the moment she’d looked into them; Shana’s scream of terror distorting her lovely features as those two men dragged her away.
Vivid and awful, she squeezed her eyes shut to all of them and the tears they brought.
Another gust of wind took out her legs. She collapsed, slapped her hands against the stone and wailed into the emptiness until her voice grew too hoarse and she could only whimper, “Shana, I. . . .”
The eagle came rising up on the thermals. It screeched as it flew over her and fled to the north ahead of the roar of rotors rising up behind it. Another RPA sent by Colter to monitor the progress of the mission, or to conclude it quickly with a rocket now that Billy and Bobby were down?
She got up, cocked the rifle and started for the cover of the egg-shaped boulders. Judging by how quickly the roar was getting louder, she was going to get caught out in the open. She turned to face the approaching noise and aimed the rifle. The roar increased to a much louder and more substantial level than at the lower plateau. A Forestry helicopter rose up over the bluff.
Randal landed it on the spot Craig had pointed out, turned it off and came to her.
“Where’s Craig?”
The tears started again when she pointed. “He and Bobby.”
“Come on. It’s really ugly down there. There have been explosions in town: the Mayor’s office, Fire Hall Number Three, the one with the big truck, and your office.” Randal lifted her into his arms and carried her back to the helicopter.
Her mouth moved but she couldn’t get any words out.
“Rob got some shrapnel in his leg, but he noticed something before the explosion and got Amelia and Janine to cover. They have only minor injuries.” He placed her into the back of the helicopter.
“Harry called me,” he said as he restarted the Bell and lifted off. “I went to the farm. There was nothing there but bodies and Portland SWAT. I took a chance Craig might have come up this way.”
“Take me back.”
“It’s secure. The action is at Colter’s farm.”
“There’s a tunnel.”
“Man, that guy’s an even bigger nut job than we thought.”
“The biggest there is. Shana would call him a real triple-O: a weirdo, wacko, psycho.”
“You have a very intelligent daughter.”
“I hope I still do.” She wiped away tears. “What’s happening?”
“It’s a standoff at Colter’s. There’s been shooting and explosions. Four agents have been injured. I think one lost his leg. Your colleague from the FBI, Colin Foster, and Harry are negotiating with Colter, who is holed up in his house with Kelly, Kate, Susan, your friend Mattie and Leo as hostages. That was the last I heard before I came looking for you.”
“He also has Saleha, Shana and two other children.”
The moment she closed her eyes, she started shaking. Her leg, chin and shoulder throbbed. She would kill Colter if she got the chance. He was responsible for all this death. He had Shana, Lily, Donny and Saleha.
Her hands opened and clenched repeatedly. Shana had to still be alive. She couldn’t have come back to Dominion only to lose her goddess, too. She had to keep wiping tears from her face.
Wear Something Red Page 49