by Cindi Myers
She took a deep breath and squeezed back. I trust you.
A shadow darkened the opening to the tunnel—the silhouette of a tall, muscular man. “You can’t escape now,” Kiram said. “We’ve got you cornered.”
He raised his right arm, and Hannah recognized the silhouette of a gun before it melted into the shadow of his body. But he was aiming it at the opposite side of the tunnel from where they were standing. He hadn’t yet seen them. They were hidden in the deepest, darkest recesses of the tunnel, and his eyes, attuned to the brightness outside, hadn’t been able to make them out. The man at the other end of the tunnel wouldn’t be able to see them either, especially since the wooden support completely blocked them from his view.
Kiram took a step into the tunnel. Walt would have a clear shot at him now. Didn’t Kiram realize this? Or was he so sure of his own superior position that he wasn’t thinking? But would Walt fire? As soon as he did so, he would give away their position to the other man.
“It’s too late to save yourself,” Kiram said. “I promised to kill you and I will. But you can save the woman. The Prophet wants her and the baby safe and alive. Give yourself up now and I promise to take them to him. Try to take me and...well, I can’t help it if they get caught in the cross fire, can I?” He took another step toward them.
The shot was a loud, echoing explosion in the metal culvert. Hannah choked back a scream and sank to her knees, her body arched over the baby, who began to wail. A second shot followed the first, then two more in rapid succession. Head down, eyes squeezed tightly shut, Hannah couldn’t tell where they came from.
Her ears rang, and the smell of gunpowder stung her nose, but even half-deaf, the scuffle of retreating footsteps was clear. Opening her eyes, she turned to see Walt racing toward the far end of the tunnel. Before he had reached the end, an engine roared to life overhead, and tires skidded as the Jeep raced away.
Walt returned to her, the gun still in his hand. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“Yes.” She started to rise, and he bent to help her. “What happened?” she asked.
“I’m going to check on Kiram,” he said, and left before she could say more. Too shaken to move, she leaned back against the support and held her breath as he moved slowly toward the slumped figure at the tunnel opening.
She knew Kiram was dead by the heavy, sack-of-cement way his body rolled over when Walt nudged it. Walt knelt and put a hand to the bearded man’s neck, then eased the gun from his grip and tucked it into his belt. He took something else from the body, then returned to her side.
“Here.” He pressed something heavy into her hand. “He was wearing this on his belt.”
She realized she was holding a water bottle, and hurried to twist off the cap and drink. The cool, sweet water flowed over her tongue and tears stung her eyes at the sheer pleasure of it. She forced herself to hold back from drinking it all and passed it to him.
“The other man got away,” she said, when Walt had finished drinking and re-capped the bottle.
“Yes. He’ll tell the others we’re in this area. We need to move quickly.”
“Why did he come after us?” she asked. “I thought you shot him back at the camp.”
“I wounded him, but it obviously wasn’t enough to stop him. His shoulder was bandaged, but my guess is he hated me enough that he was determined to find me. That kind of emotion can lead people to do incredible things.”
“But he didn’t stop us,” she said. “He won’t stop us.”
“No, he won’t.” He started to lead the way out of the culvert, but she took hold of his arm, turning him toward her.
“What—?” She cut off the question, her lips on his, her body pressed against him. All the fear and anxiety and the giddy relief of simply being alive and with him at this moment coalesced in that kiss. All the passion she felt for him but was afraid to put into words found expression in the melding of her body to his.
He wrapped his arms around her, crushing her to him. There was no hiding her body’s response to him, or his to her. Heat and hunger and need washed over her like a wave, and she moaned softly as he caressed the side of her breast and lowered his mouth to nibble the soft underside of her jaw. Every kiss, every caress, reached past the barriers she had erected long ago and touched some vulnerable part of her deep inside, coaxing her to let go a little bit more, to surrender. To trust.
He rested his forehead against hers, his breathing ragged, his voice rough. “This isn’t the best time for this,” he said.
“I know.” She rested her palms against his chest. “We have to go. I just... I wanted you to know how I felt.”
“I got the message, loud and clear.” He wrapped both hands around her wrists and kissed the tips of her fingers, a gesture that set her heart to fluttering wildly.
Then he released her, and she wanted to cry out, but instead bit her lip and bent to pick up the baby, who smiled up at her with such an expression of happiness that tears stung her eyes. Talk about an emotional roller-coaster ride! The last thirty minutes had taken her through almost every feeling imaginable.
They moved out of the tunnel, the light momentarily blinding them after so much time in the shadows. Joy wailed, and Hannah rearranged the blanket to shade her face. “We’ll stick to the ravine,” Walt said. “It’ll be rough going, but we’ll be out of sight of the road.”
Navigating the ravine was akin to negotiating an obstacle course. Uprooted trees, boulders the size of furniture, loose gravel and tangles of thorny vines necessitated frequent detours and stumbles. After a short distance Walt took the baby so that Hannah had both hands free to steady herself as she climbed up boulders and teetered along downed tree trunks. She stumbled often, scraping her hands and muddying her skirt. But she plowed doggedly on. As difficult as this was, at least they weren’t out in the open, where anyone looking for them might easily spot them.
They had been walking less than an hour—and covered maybe half a mile—when the roar of approaching vehicles made them freeze in midstride. “It sounds like at least two of them,” Walt said.
“Are they on the road?” Hannah asked, straining her ears.
As if to answer her question, the engine sounds faded, followed by crunching gravel, then the engines revved with a different pitch than before. “They turned off the road,” Walt said. “They’re headed this way.”
He turned and continued moving up the ravine. “What are we going to do?” she asked, hurrying after him.
“As long as they stay in the vehicles, they can’t see us down here,” Walt said. He reached out a hand to pull her up over a large section of dead tree that was wedged across the ravine. “As long as they don’t stop and get out, they’re just wasting gas racing around up there.”
“How did they find us so quickly?” she asked.
“They might have radios.”
The engine noises faded again, and car doors slammed. Hannah looked up, and wished she knew what was going on up there.
“We’d better find a place to hide,” Walt said.
They moved farther down the ravine, losing their footing often on the rough ground, but pressing on. The ravine forked and Walt led her down the narrower branch, which was scarcely wide enough for them to walk side by side. This channel was more deeply eroded, but less clogged with debris, though tree roots reached out from the bank like bony fingers, snagging at their clothing and hair.
“In here.” Walt indicated a place where the bank was undercut behind a snarl of tree roots, forming a recess. Hannah balked, staring at what was really a mud-lined hole in the ground. It looked like the perfect home for spiders, snakes and who knew what else.
“Come on,” Walt urged. “We have to hide before they decide to search here.”
He was right, and there was no sense being squeamish. She followed him into the niche. He handed her th
e baby, then pulled the tree roots and a couple of loose branches to cover their entrance.
Sunlight filtered through the network of limbs and branches that formed one wall of their shelter, dappling their faces and making the niche a little less threatening. Hannah settled back into an almost-cozy spot and took out a fresh diaper and a packet of wipes. At least she could make Joy more comfortable. She stashed the dirty diaper in a plastic bag and stuffed it into the diaper bag, which she used as a kind of pillow at her back.
“Here.” Walt handed her a protein bar. “Dinner.”
“Thanks. You think of everything.”
“Yeah. I really know how to show a woman a good time.” He unwrapped a bar for himself. “Take this out-of-the-way bistro. You can’t imagine how exclusive this place is.”
“And it’s so romantic.” She laughed, and he grinned and rested his hand on her knee. “Anyplace with you seems romantic to me.”
She debated kissing him again, but the narrow confines of their hideaway—not to mention the baby on her lap—made that difficult. So she settled for lacing her fingers in his and soaking in the feeling of contentment that filled her. She was dirty, hungry, thirsty and exhausted, terrified of the killers who hunted them, and confused about what lay ahead for her and Joy. But all of those worries and fears faded into the background here beside Walt.
They shared the last of the water, munching in companionable silence while straining their ears for any sound from the searchers overhead. “It doesn’t sound as if they’ve come this way,” Walt said after a while. “They probably didn’t expect us to get this far. They might even suspect we went another direction.”
He shifted to turn toward her. “What happened last night?” he asked. “When Metwater took you to his RV?” Tension radiated from him, as if he was bracing for bad news.
“Nothing, really,” she said. “He seemed to think I ought to be flattered that I’d been singled out for attention from the great and mighty Prophet.” She made a face. “The guy has an ego bigger than his biceps.”
“So he didn’t try to force himself on you?”
“He intended to keep me prisoner until I came around to his way of thinking.” She sighed. “I think that’s what he did with Emily. At least, Phoenix told me he had moved her in with him a week or so before she died. Taking her with him to Denver was a special privilege—maybe an attempt to persuade her to give in to his demands. I think the stress of the whole ordeal, and being without her baby, brought on her asthma attack. Plus, Phoenix told me she had run out of her inhaler prescription.”
“It would be tough to prove murder, though if what you say is true, he could have definitely contributed to her death.”
“I know. But then, why lie and say she had run away instead of telling people she had died?”
“Because he didn’t want to upset the rest of his followers?” He put his arm around her. “We may never know. Though when I bring in Metwater, I intend to ask him.”
She settled against him, her head on his shoulder. “Knowing you care means a lot.”
He kissed the top of her head. “I do care.”
Yes. And she cared for him. But if caring were enough, her baby never would have died. She had made a mistake then, trying to do the right thing. She couldn’t afford to make another mistake.
* * *
DESPITE THE DISCOMFORT of her surroundings and the lingering fear for their safety, the sleepless night in Metwater’s RV, coupled with the physical hardship of fleeing across the wilderness, overcame Hannah’s attempts to stay awake, and she sank into a deep slumber.
She woke to Joy’s cries the next morning, sunlight streaking down from above. Next to her, Walt stirred. “I’m going to go up and check things out,” he said. “See if it’s safe for us to move on.”
He moved out of their shelter, and she took advantage of his absence to spread out the contents of the diaper bag and organize them. She had one more bottle of formula, which she would feed Joy this morning—and only two more diapers. No more water or food for her and Walt. But surely this morning they would reach safety. They couldn’t be that far from the highway after they had walked so much yesterday.
A shower of dirt signaled Walt’s return. “Everything’s quiet up here,” he said. “I think it’s safe to go.”
“Let me change Joy,” she said. “She can have her last bottle while we’re walking.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve stashed any coffee in there,” he said, eyeing the diaper bag.
“I wish. I guess all the coffee shops up there are closed?”
“Every one of them.” He waited while she finished diapering the baby, then reached down to help them out of their hiding place.
She groaned as she put weight on her cramped limbs. “I think every bone in my body hurts,” she said.
“We’ll have to complain to management about the mattresses in this place,” Walt said.
They climbed out of the ravine and she paused at the top to stretch and breathe in the fresh, clean air, which smelled of sage and wildflowers. After spending so much time out here, she would never look at the wilderness as barren again. “Which way do we go?” she asked.
Walt turned in a slow circle, taking in the surrounding landscape. The land was gently rolling, and devoid of any sign of human habitation. Only scrubby prairie and the occasional rock uplift defined the empty expanse. Hannah had hoped to see a road, but no such luck. “Does anything look familiar to you?” he asked.
“Everything out here looks the same to me,” she said.
“Me, too.”
His grim expression alarmed her. “Are you saying we’re lost?”
“I’m saying I’m not sure which way we should go to find the road.”
She turned to look behind them, at the ravine they had just climbed out of. “Can’t we just follow this back to the BLM road, then parallel that to the highway?” she asked. As much as she hated the thought of backtracking, it would be better than wandering aimlessly in the middle of nowhere.
“We could. If we knew which ravine to follow.” He indicated the network of half a dozen similar ditches that spread out in every direction.
“I don’t remember those,” she said. “When we were down in there, there was only one way to go, at least, after we took the fork off the main channel.”
“There were other forks,” he said. “Now I’m not sure which one we should take.”
She looked down into the chasm again. The thought of repeating the torturous crawl of the day before made her want to sink to her knees and weep. But she was stronger than that. “Do you know which direction the road was from Metwater’s camp?” she asked.
“East,” he said.
“The sun rises in the east, so we can walk that direction,” she said.
“Except we don’t know where we are in relationship to Metwater’s camp,” he said.
“So you’re saying we’re lost.”
He squinted up at the sky. “Yeah. I guess I’m saying we’re lost.”
The words seemed to bounce up against her brain, refusing to sink in. After all they had been through, this couldn’t really be happening. “You work out here,” she said. “Don’t you have some idea of where we are?”
“I’ve only been on the job two months,” he said. “And it’s a lot of territory. It would take years—decades—for any one person to know it all.”
“So what are we going to do?” She hated that they were in this situation—and she hated that she was looking to him for answers. She wasn’t the kind of person who depended on other people. She was used to solving her own problems. But this wasn’t a chemical formulation that needed tweaking or a budget item she needed to finesse. She had nothing to draw on to get them out of this jam.
“Right now, I think we’ve got an even bigger pro
blem to worry about,” Walt said.
“What are you talking about?” What could be bigger than being lost in the middle of nowhere?
“If I’m not mistaken, we’ve got a prairie fire headed this way.”
She turned to follow his gaze and gaped at the line of leaping orange flames that filled the horizon.
Chapter Seventeen
Walt stared at the line of flames inching toward them, the lessons from a wildland firefighting course he had taken as part of his training repeating in his head. The wind was pushing the fire in this direction, and there was nothing to stop it, and plenty of dry tinder to feed it. Firefighters carried flameproof shelters which—sometimes—could save their lives if they were overtaken by an out-of-control burn, but he and Hannah didn’t have anything like that.
He took hold of her arm. “We have to get back into the ravine,” he said. “If we’re lucky, it will divert the flames, or they’ll pass over it.”
She didn’t hesitate or argue, merely wrapped the baby more securely and started half climbing, half sliding into the ditch they had only recently climbed out of. “Try to find the cave where we spent the night!” he shouted after her. Already the roar of the fire was growing louder, like a jet engine revving for flight. The wind blowing toward them carried the scent of burning wood—like the world’s largest campfire.
He caught up with her at the bottom of the ravine and together they scrambled over boulders and branches, watching for the opening to the undercut that had sheltered them last night.
“There!” Hannah pointed to the place where they had pushed aside a knot of tree roots as they had exited their shelter.
“Hurry!” He took the baby from her and started up the slope. The fire was almost upon them, a hot, shrieking turbulence created by the flames sending debris flying, branches and even whole trees exploding into flames like hand grenades going off as the sap superheated inside the bark.
He shoved the baby, who was crying now, into the mud-lined shelter, then reached back to haul Hannah up by both arms. He pushed her into the opening, then crawled in after her, shielding both her and the child with his body, his back to the world above that was already being consumed by flames.