by Cari Hunter
Sarah regarded her with what she hoped was an appropriate amount of skepticism, but Alex just stuck her tongue out at her and then turned the material up twice on each side for good measure.
“There. Perfect.” She took the hand Sarah offered her and stood. “Last thing you need is anything else to trip over,” she added with a sly grin, and ducked as Sarah swatted at her.
“I can’t help having two left feet when it’s dark and I’m knackered,” Sarah protested.
Alex gave her a quick kiss on the cheek and then stooped to collect their water bottles. “You can give those two left feet of yours a rest if you want. I’ll go find that stream you fell into, and you get everything packed up.”
Sarah chewed nervously on the inside of her cheek as Alex straightened with the bottles in her hands. It was 5:51 a.m. Five minutes of grace was all they had allowed themselves, and those five minutes of pretending that everything was fine were now up.
“I’ll be okay,” Alex said, obviously noticing her hesitancy. “It was, what? Fifteen minutes in the dark, so probably less now that I can see. We could leave it and chance finding something this morning, but we know that stream was running fast enough to be clear.”
Sarah murmured in assent; the last thing they needed was a stomach upset, and at the moment, they had no way of boiling the water prior to drinking it. They had run out of purification tablets two days ago.
“Take your knife,” she said, aware that Alex’s mind was already made up.
Alex patted the pocket of her jacket. “Already got it.” She pushed aside one of the branches at the shelter’s entrance and squeezed through the gap. “I’ll put this back for you.” She gave the shelter an appraising look. “You’re pretty well camouflaged from out here. The light’s not great yet.”
Sarah looked at the sky, where deep shades of indigo were swallowing the stars one by one. “Be careful,” she managed to say.
“I’ll be as quick as I can, okay?” Alex blew her a kiss and then rearranged the branch into place.
Sarah stood stock-still in the middle of the shelter, listening to her footsteps fade away. For a few irrational seconds, she considered running after her and insisting that it really would be more sensible if she accompanied her to the stream. Instead, she forced herself to sit cross-legged on the cold floor and start rolling up their blankets. Alex was right; clean water was essential if they were to spend another day hiking, and it would be quicker this way. They would be able to set off sooner. As much as Sarah tried to persuade herself, though, her arguments still rang hollow. She wanted Alex back with her so badly it was making her gut hurt. She shoved the blankets into her pack and distracted herself by folding the wet clothing they had discarded that morning. Then she glanced at her watch. Only three minutes had passed. It felt like much longer. She was just about to begin an inventory of what little food they had left when one of the branches at the entrance was lifted away. Unable to disguise her relief, she looked up with a smile.
“Hey, that was quick. Did you find somewhere close…” Her voice trailed off, the smile falling from her face.
The figure crouching in the entrance was not Alex but Nathan Merrick, and the gun he held was pointing directly at Sarah’s chest. He raised his other hand to his mouth and pressed one finger to his lips in a stark warning. She scrambled to her knees, snatched up a flashlight as a weapon and tried to push herself away, but there was nowhere for her to go. Merrick moved faster than she did, grabbing her wrist and twisting it until she dropped the flashlight, and then hauling her toward him.
“Just give me an excuse to fucking shoot you,” he hissed.
She didn’t answer him, her focus narrowed to the grinding sensation of his hand on her wrist. The pressure was so relentless she thought he meant to snap it, and when he suddenly released her, all she could do was bow her head and cradle her arm. The respite was short-lived, however. Just as abruptly, he shifted his hold to the collar of her jacket and forced her facedown at his feet.
“Shit, I might just go ahead and shoot you anyway.” He was breathing hard, and she could feel his entire body trembling as he tried to rein in his anger. “Chasing you through the middle of fucking nowhere.” With his hand bruising the back of her neck, he pushed until her cheek ground into the rough carpet of pine needles. “Where did he go?”
She barely heard him. Her breath coming in great, terrified gasps, she reached out to the flashlight he had kicked away, but the handle turned as her fingernails scratched on it, spinning it beyond her grasp. Merrick, apparently tired of being ignored, dragged her up to her knees and backhanded her across the face.
“Oh God.” She put her hands out to steady herself as the walls of the shelter seemed to sway and multiply. Her cheek throbbed in time with her racing heart, and black spots drifted across her vision; she wondered whether he would kill her if she vomited on him. It took her longer than it should have to recognize that he was pressing the barrel of his gun against her forehead.
“Where did he go?” he repeated, enunciating each word as if she were stupid. Spittle flew from his mouth when he spoke, and she was on the verge of asking him what the hell he was talking about when she realized he was referring to Alex.
“Stream,” she whispered, her throat feeling as if it were lined with broken glass. “He went to the stream. He won’t be gone long.” She saw no reason to correct Merrick’s mistake. He had obviously been watching the shelter when Alex left; distance, poor light, and Alex’s short hair conspiring to push him to the wrong conclusion. He seemed completely wrong-footed, and Sarah wasn’t sure which had him so unnerved: the fact that she wasn’t alone or the fact that her companion was supposedly male. Whichever it was, she just hoped it would be enough to make him cut his losses rather than risk trying to take them both on at once. She didn’t know where that left her, but she didn’t really care as long as Alex was safe.
“Keys and the GPS, now,” he demanded. His eyes kept flitting to the walls of the shelter as if he might be able to spot Alex’s approach through them. Sarah could feel the metal bruising her skin as he increased the pressure on the gun. She closed her eyes miserably when his finger twitched on the trigger. So much for keeping Alex out of this. As far as she knew, the keys were in Alex’s jacket pocket, and Alex had taken the GPS to the stream with her too. A flood of adrenaline made Sarah’s legs shake so hard that she had to sit back on her heels. She licked her dry lips.
“I don’t have them.” She looked up at Merrick as she spoke, determined not to let him see how frightened she was. “Alex took them with him.” Defiance made her punctuate her declaration with a shrug. She vaguely detected a blur of movement and heard the gun rip into the skin of her forehead a split second before the pain hit her. The force of the blow made her head snap back. Too disorientated to steady herself, she slumped to the side as a familiar thick tang of copper filled the small shelter and blood began to run into her eyes. She tried to raise a hand to the injury, but her arm refused to cooperate and she had to let it drop back down. Her body jolted once as Merrick kicked her in the abdomen. His voice was tense and agitated and he was asking her something, something about Alex having a gun. Curling herself up as tightly as possible, she left him to rant and allowed the grayness to fold in on her.
Chapter Eleven
“Get up.”
Although Sarah heard the snarled command, it seemed to come from within a thick fog. It brought more pain with it: an ache in her back that made her moan softly, betraying the fact that she was awake.
“Get the fuck up. I won’t tell you again.”
Her head hurt too. The pain dulled her senses and her understanding of what was happening to her, though she responded instinctively to the rage in his voice by attempting to stand. She tried to bring her hands in front of her to use as leverage, but it took another impatient kick to her back to shock her into realizing her hands were bound tightly behind her. Somehow, she managed to struggle onto her knees. The exertion all but knocked
her down again, and she panted against the cloth that was fastened across her mouth. Her nostrils flared as she forced herself not to panic at the almost overwhelming sense of suffocation. She must have been breathing while she was unconscious, she reminded herself in an attempt to be rational, and if she panicked now, then the next time Merrick kicked out at her, she wouldn’t be able to kick him back. It was this last point that gave her enough motivation to calm down, and when he dragged her to her feet she was able to stay upright.
She shivered as she stood there. A cold draft hit her torso and she looked down to find her jacket open and her shirt untucked. She had no recollection of Merrick searching her. The thought made her feel so sick that she staggered, only the wall of the shelter preventing her from falling. She rested her cheek against the chilled pine and willed herself to stop shaking. Through the gaps in the branches she could see that the light outside had barely altered; it appeared that only a few minutes had passed, but even in that brief time, Merrick had ransacked the shelter. He had Alex’s backpack strapped across his shoulders. The food Sarah had been about to take stock of was gone, and she assumed that he had taken it. Although she knew she had left at least one of his bags behind at the rocks where she had witnessed him murder the prison guard, he did not seem to have brought any of his own kit with him. The rope Alex had used as a safety line was now cutting deeply into Sarah’s wrists, and she had been gagged with a brightly colored bandana from Alex’s pack. Merrick had obviously intended his mission to be a quick recovery of his stolen items; she doubted he had ever planned to leave her alive. Feeling strangely sanguine, she wondered where he had found the paper he was writing on and how she could take advantage of her stay of execution. A pounding headache wasn’t conducive to intricate plotting, however, and she hadn’t thought of anything even remotely constructive before he took hold of her arm and pushed her ahead of him.
Once outside the shelter, he turned her to face him. With one hand, he held her jaw to keep her still, and with the other, he wiped the paper across her forehead.
“Think he’ll get the message?” he asked. He displayed the paper for her to see, obviously pleased with his own ingenuity. It bore one word: KEYS. Her blood was smeared across the last two letters. The cloth in her mouth precluded an actual answer, and she didn’t deign to respond in any other way. He walked away from her with a cocksure laugh. Sweat trickled down her spine as she watched him anchor the paper to the forest floor with rocks. Then he struck a match and held it to the shelter until a piece of wood caught fire.
“I think he’ll get the message,” he said as flames began to lick at the branches and smoke drifted through the walls.
Sarah certainly got the message: he wasn’t willing to risk encountering Alex without knowing whether she was armed or not. He had taken or destroyed everything that would help her, and he was now going to try to drag her on some sadistic kind of hunt. Sarah scanned the forest, terrified that Alex would be close enough to see or hear the fire, but there was no sign of movement in the trees. Seeming to pick up on her fear, Merrick gestured with his gun.
“After you,” he said with a thin smile.
She allowed herself to breathe a little more easily; they were heading in the opposite direction to the stream. All she could hope now was that Alex would decide to leave her to her fate and run.
*
The acrid smell of smoke was the first out of place thing Alex noticed. It wasn’t too obvious initially, just the slightest change in the scent of the air, but it instantly put her on her guard. She quickened her pace, jogging along the trail they had broken the previous night as the smell began to irritate the back of her throat and make her cough. By the time she could see the clouds of smoke, she was sprinting flat out. The water bottles fell to the ground as she ran into the clearing.
“Oh fucking…No. Sarah?” Caution forgotten, she screamed for Sarah over and over, her voice quickly growing hoarse. She took her jacket off, common sense deserting her as she approached the shelter fully intent on extinguishing whatever she could. She was less than a yard away when the roof of the shelter collapsed. The flames claimed it enthusiastically, and the rush of heat from the new fuel forced her back to a cooler patch of grass. She sank to her knees, sobbing and sick to her stomach. There was nothing left for her to salvage. The fallen tree was smoldering all along its trunk, and the walls she had constructed had been utterly destroyed. No one within could have survived.
She leaned forward and vomited until there was nothing left to come up. The bitter taste of bile made her retch again, and she wrapped both arms around her abdomen as if that might somehow ease the pain there. She couldn’t look at the shelter, couldn’t bear to risk a glimpse of anything that might confirm Sarah had been trapped in there as it burned. This wasn’t an accident. She knew Merrick was involved somehow. There was no reason for Sarah to have lit a fire; all Alex could think was that Merrick had found her and hurt her and left her to burn.
Birds sang cheerfully overhead, the rising sun lifting their spirits and making the frosty clearing look beautiful. Alex covered her ears with her hands and closed her eyes to block it all out.
She wasn’t sure how long she’d stayed like that. Her legs were cramped beneath her, and she was cold despite the fire and the sunshine. In front of her, the shelter had been reduced to ashes. Crumbling gray shapes stirred and floated upward as the breeze played over the top of the pile. She took hold of a solid-looking stick that lay nearby and climbed to her feet. She swayed, dizzy from a head rush and still feeling nauseous. Little needles of pain pricked her legs as their circulation was restored, and she had to use the stick to prop herself up until the discomfort had worn off. When she was confident she could move, she walked across the clearing.
Heat and smoke rose to greet her as she approached the ruins of the shelter. Her grip around the stick turned her knuckles white. She had searched for bodies before. Back on the force, she had witnessed many of the seemingly countless ways that there were to die, and the terrible indignities that could be suffered by people who had left their houses that morning without the faintest idea that their lives were to be cut short within hours. She had seen what heat or cold or trauma or the passage of time could do to a body, and she had gradually gotten to the point where she was inured to the emotions involved. None of that helped now. None of that prepared her in any way for what she was about to do.
With tears clogging her nose and the taste of bile still foul in her mouth, she pushed the stick into the ashes and began to pull the pile apart. Her arms felt leaden, as if her revulsion at her task had pervaded her muscles. The stick jarred and caught several times, but all it drew out were two metal buckles she recognized from the old backpack and a set of heat-warped cutlery. Although no expert in forensics, she knew the fire could not have been hot enough to destroy all evidence of a body, that she would have found bone fragments had Sarah been inside the shelter. She quickly turned to look across the clearing, as if staring at the ashes any longer might make that fact change. The stick suddenly felt too heavy to hold. She allowed it to slip from her fingers. A faint clack as the wood hit stone made her look down.
“What the hell?”
The sheet of paper had obviously been arranged for someone to find. A circle of stones secured it to the ground and stopped the wind from tearing it away. She snatched the paper up, confusion and hope combining to make her pulse pound in her ears. When she touched her fingertips to the blood on the paper, it was tacky, and she knew without a doubt that it was Sarah’s. The one-word message Merrick had left coated with her blood was not the most subtle of gambits.
“Holy shit,” Alex said, turning a slow three-sixty on the spot. She didn’t think she had ever been happier to learn that someone she loved had been injured and taken hostage. But then no one she loved had ever―She gave a short laugh as her thought process stalled, recognizing for the first time exactly how much Sarah had come to mean to her.
“Just hold on,” she wh
ispered. She had no idea what she was doing. She had no plan, nothing but the clothes on her back, a small knife, a sturdy stick, and plenty of water. Her odds were horrendous, but—she spotted the downtrodden grass that led out to the far side of the clearing—at least she knew which way she was going.
*
The noise from the helicopter was merely a distant drone, but it was enough to make Merrick force Sarah down into a crouch. She couldn’t help but look up, searching the sky more with hope than genuine expectation. Nothing but a solitary bird interrupted the blue, but she drew comfort from the fact that people hadn’t stopped looking for them. Even if she was a lost cause, Alex was still out there and in need of help.
A yard away from her, Merrick slurped noisily from a canteen he had unhooked from his belt. She tried not to watch him, but she couldn’t close her ears, and the sound of the liquid was something akin to torture. She was so thirsty. Her tongue felt thick and swollen against the gag. She didn’t know how far they had walked, but the latter section had been climbing steadily. Without the use of her hands to balance her, she had repeatedly slipped and fallen, and the constant barrage of abuse from Merrick had been even more wearing than the forced march. Despite her attempt to remain impassive, she cringed as he moved toward her.
“Here.”
He pulled the gag roughly from her mouth and held the canteen to her lips. She coughed as she tried to gulp too quickly, half the water ending up down her chin, and long before she had had enough, he took it away and finished the remainder himself. She pulled her knees up and wiped her chin on the pants she had stolen from him. After a few moments, there was a rustle of plastic, followed by the sound of contented chewing. She licked her dry lips, her mouth watering as the smell of sweetened oats reached her. When her stomach rumbled, she muffled the sound behind her legs, trying not to draw his attention, but he seemed quite happy eating and in no hurry to gag her again.