Another crash of branches and then it was right in front of me. Four hundred pounds and jet black. The bear was the biggest living thing I’d ever seen without a pane of glass in between us. The fur near its face was matted, it’s eyes yellow and dull. It’s large head weaved left to right.
I remembered all the sage wisdom about what to do. I remembered that the bear was probably more scared of me than I was of it. I remembered all that bullshit. But it doesn’t matter when this huge beast is steps away from you. I wanted to run, but I was too scared. I wanted to scream, but I was too scared. So I did nothing. I watched, paralyzed with fear.
The bear tilted it’s head and looked off to it’s right. It pivoted to face that direction and stomped the ground in front of it. It swayed it’s head back and forth aggressively, and even let out a strange little hoot.
Then I heard it. A low, rumbling growl coming from off in the trees where the bear was facing. It cut through the night air and I swear that even the insects stopped chirping when they heard that.
The bear’s ears went flat against it’s head and it began to shuffle backwards. Eventually it spun around noisily in the trees and ran off at full gallop.
“Teresa!” Dale said, running up to me from the camp. “Was that a bear?”
“Shh!” I said, “there’s a wolf nearby!”
A sharp laugh came from the trees and Jimmy walked out. “Sorry, no wolf here. Holy shit that was cool,” he said.
“You scared the shit out of me!” I said, punching him in the arm. “How did you do that?”
Jimmy rubbed his arm and flashed me a grin. “I’m afraid that’s on a need to know basis, ma’am.”
“The moral of this story is to hold it until morning,” I said as we walked back to camp.
The next afternoon, we edged our way down into a ravine, large scraggly bushes hemming us in. Shear white stone walls rose up on either side of us, and even though it was barely noon, it was dark in this lower area.
“Are you sure this is it?” Mr. Duggar said.
I double-checked my map. “Yes,” I said, confidently.
“Finally,” Jimmy said. His face lit up at the possibility of finding what they came out here for.
“I see something ahead,” Dale said, at the front of the group. He pulled some branches away from the stone wall and revealed a passage behind it. We’d have to stoop to get inside, but it opened up further in.
I followed behind Dale and Jimmy, and Mr. Duggar came in behind me. After walking in bent over, the cave opened up and we could stand up straight. We could hear water dripping far off in the distance, indicating that this cave linked up with others in a system. We didn’t know how far or how deep the caves went. Mr. Duggar had geological scans, but dates and the name of the company that conducted them had been redacted.
We turned on our headlamps, illuminating our surroundings. The walls were an orangish-red, and stalactites hung down from above. Several tunnels led off from the main chamber.
Right near our feet, a shallow pool of water extended through the test of the cave. I knelt down and shined my headlamp at the edge of the pool. there was a loose gravel, covered in moss. On top of the moss was a pink toadstool.
I recalled the document Mr. Duggar had given each of us, describing the fungi we were looking for. It was theoretical, it’s physical description a best guess, and Mr. Duggar had stressed that our chances of actually finding these mushrooms was very slim. His company had been searching for some time now. A pink toadstool was what they had come out to find.
“Holy shit,” I said.
“Back up!” Mr. Duggar said, almost screaming. He scrambled forward on hands and knees. He shone his light on the mushroom, “Yes, yes, yes!” He took a phone from his pocket and began taking photos of the mushroom.
I shared a smile with Jimmy and Dale. We’d done it! We found a new species!
Mr. Duggar stood up and faced us. His phone was in his hand, and I could hear it ringing on speakerphone. A voice picked up on the other end. “Data received,” the man on the other end said. “Hold for confirmation.”
“I thought phones didn’t work out here,” Dale said quietly to Jimmy.
“Who is that?” I said.
“Shut up,” Mr. Duggar said.
I recoiled from the rude response, already killing the buzz I felt from our victory.
“Specimen confirmed,” the man on the phone said. “You are cleared to proceed. Cleanup team will meet at the rendezvous point in two days.” The voice then hung up.
“Cleanup team? What’s going on here?” I said.
Mr. Duggar carefully put the phone away. “I suppose you deserve to know, after all. Mushrooms have unique biochemical properties, and this one mores than others. Once weaponized, it will make sarin gas look like breath freshener.”
“What?!” I said, jaw hung open. “I didn’t know that’s what we were here to get!”
“You younger generation have no imagination, no ambition!” he said, shrieking.
“Just relax,” Dale said, holding up his hand.
“For years I’ve been trying to find this god damned thing. Putting up with lousy kids, ingrates!” Mr. Duggar said. “But now I don’t need you two anymore.”
Without warning, Mr. Duggar pulled a pistol from his pocket and shot Dale in the chest. It was like the cave exploded in sound and light, and I fell to the ground with my hands to my ears.
I saw Mr. Duggar fire a second shot and hit Jimmy in the chest. He fell over onto his brother.
I screamed, not understanding what I was seeing. I saw Mr. Duggar level the barrel of the gun at me. I held my hands up. “Please, please, please!”
“Teresa, be quiet,” Mr. Duggar said, calmly. His voice was so calm, so serene. “Do you want to live?”
I looked over at Jimmy and Dale. I couldn’t tell if they were still breathing. My eyes teared up and I began to cry.
“Do you want to live?” Mr. Duggar said, as plainly as you’d ask someone if they wanted a cup of tea.
I felt myself nodding, not even sure where the ability came from. I was now alone with this madman, far off in the remote wilderness. No one would come looking for us anytime soon. I needed to play for time.
“Good,” he said, keeping the pistol pointed at me. “I have a new set of coordinates for you. A cabin, not too far from here. We’re going to go there.” He motioned with the pistol towards the cave entrance. “Now move it.”
I struggled to my feet, my knees almost buckling underneath me. I looked down at the brothers, and I saw so much blood that I nearly fainted. A sharp prod in the side from Mr. Duggar’s gun propelled me out of the cave back into the bright sunlit day.
“Just put them out of your mind, Teresa,” Mr. Duggar said, soothingly.
“You, you’re crazy! You’re a psychopath!” I said, trembling against the stone wall of the ravine. “Help!” I screamed.
“Scream all you want, Teresa. No one is out here. But if you won’t cooperate, I’ll have no use for you,” he said, punctuating the last few words by cocking the hammer back on the pistol.
“Ok, ok!” I said, panicking. “I’ll do whatever you want!”
“Excellent! there’s hope for you yet,” he said. From his pocket he produced a small slip of paper.
My trembling hand took it from him. It was a longitude and latitude coordinate pairing. I took out my map. “Please, can you call an ambulance? Maybe someone can get here in time to help them.”
“Your loyalty will get you in trouble, Teresa. Right now you’ve got more pressing concerns,” he said. He tapped the barrel of the pistol against the map.
I checked the coordinates against the map and nodded. “I can get you there.”
“You can get us there,” he said, correcting me.
I grit my teeth together and tried to stop my eyes from tearing up. I didn’t want to give this bastard the satisfaction.
“Obstinate as well? We’ll have to work on that,” he said. “Lead on, navi
gator!”
I trudged out of the ravine, Mr. Duggar close behind. Every step was a battle against letting out a sob. The thought of Jimmy and Dale in that dank dark cave, possibly still alive…It was maddening.
But Mr. Duggar was right about one thing: I had a more pressing concern right now. Murderers didn’t have much reason to leave witnesses if they didn’t have to. I was a liability for him, a loose end. I had to play my cards just right, and act when the time was right. Or I was going to end up in a cave somewhere as well.
I knew I couldn’t run. His gun would make short work of me, and he wouldn’t hesitate to use it. So that left fighting, and again I was outmatched. He had a good eight inches and hundred pounds in his advantage. I had my big knife, but I don’t think he’d let me get close enough to use it.
“Ok, let’s take a break,” Mr. Duggar said.
We’d been hiking for five hours since the cave, and my muscles were screaming. My legs were cramping, probably because I was dehydrated. I unbuckled my chest strap and felt thirty pounds fall off my shoulders. I rolled my shoulders and stretched, scanning the area. A massive stone ledge stuck out over the expanse of wilderness below.
We were ascending the side of Mt. Gennis, and were at least twenty miles from the nearest road or sign or civilization. It was getting late, and if we pushed all night we’d get to his location by morning. Pushing hard at night was dangerous, especially when we were pushing through un-trailed wilderness.
“Eat,” he said.
“I’m not hungry,” I said.
He chuckled. “Teresa, things are going to go a lot smoother between us if we have an understanding. When I tell you something, it isn’t a request. It isn’t a suggestion. It isn’t a friendly reminder.”
I bent over and unstrapped the top of my pack. I pulled out my food bag and held it up to him, then sat down.
“See, isn’t that better? If your generation was just more amenable to listening to your superiors, you’d be so much more successful,” he said. “Those two back there,” he said with a dismissive wave behind him, “they were a bad influence. You have to protect yourself from bad influences, Teresa. Bad friends are worse than enemies. An enemy will only attack you. A bad friend will change you.”
I sighed and pulled out a small pouch of jerky and began chewing. I knew it was probably ten times my daily dose of salt, but I didn’t taste it. I looked out over the ledge, at the tops of the trees thousands of feet below. So beautiful, and I hated every inch of it.
Mr. Duggar walked over near me and snatched my backpack. With the gun trained on me, he dug inside my pack blindly with his other hand. He pulled out my massive bowie knife.
“Haha! What was this for?” he said, turning the knife over in his hands.
“Protection,” I said, mumbling and looking away.
“It’s a good thing you’ve got me for protection now,” he said. He cocked his arm back and hurled my knife as hard as he could off the side of the mountain. I watched it sail out and downward. It seemed to fall for ages before it became an indiscernible speck and got lost.
“Ahh, this is better,” he said, pulling my Leatherman from my pack. “Now, this is a good tool. Multiple uses, compact, excellent choice.” His arm pulled back and shot forward, sending my multi-tool out over the side of the mountain. He dropped my pack back next to me. “I’m glad we got that out of the way. We can’t have any surprises.”
I stared at the ground, the despair of my situation coming over me. I concentrated on a single leaf, a brown five pronged thing. I saw the edges of my vision go blurry, I knew I was about to lose it. Some small part of me wanted to give up. Why fight it?
“How long until we reach our destination?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Teresa, Teresa,” he said, standing and walking over to me. He grabbed the back of my head, his fingers tightly curling into my hair. He forced my face up to look at him. “Are you trying to anger me?”
My mouth trembled, trying to apologize.
“When I get angry, I get irrational. I forget what we’re trying to accomplish. I forget about our team, Teresa. I just see you as a problem. Are you a problem?” he said, baring his teeth savagely.
“No! No!” I said, pleading. “I’m not a problem! Umm, ten, ten hours!” I said, regretting it. It was the truth, and something I wanted to keep from him. I could have stretched that out to buy myself more time.
Instead I’d handed him my last means of survival.
He released my hair and patted me on the head. “Good, good,” he said, returning to his pack. “I don’t see any point in trying to hike through tonight. We’ll camp here tonight.”
He reached into his pack and pulled out a length of steel chain. Almost twenty feet long, with a padlock on each end.
“I’m afraid tonight is going to be…uncomfortable for you,” he said. “But you won’t have to go through this again, I promise.”
He kept his pistol trained on me while and walked the chain backwards towards a large tree. He circled the tree and secured one end of the chain with the padlock. He walked away from the tree and motioned me over to it with the pistol.
I stood, walking over to the tree. My shoulders sagged, my head drooped down. I had to give it to this son of a bitch, he’d come prepared. I sat down at the base of the tree and locked the chain around my waist. The sound of the click reverberated through me. Before that moment, physical escape was an option. It had consequences, but it was an option.
“Excellent!” he said, putting the pistol away. He pulled my sleeping bag out of my pack and threw it over to me. “I don’t think it will rain tonight, but just in case, you can use this as a tarp.” He threw my tent shell over to me as well.
He began setting up his tent opposite me, with plenty of space between us. I looked past him out at the darkening sky. I realized this was the first night Dale and Jimmy weren’t alive to see. I looked up at the stars, brilliant specks in the dark blanket of the sky.
I didn’t go to sleep as much as drift in and out of consciousness. At one point I was convinced I was dreaming some horrible nightmare, but the cinched chain around my waist wouldn’t budge. If this was a nightmare, I was stuck for the duration. I heard the birds begin to chirp, and saw a brightness cast over the clouds at the horizon.
“Stop,” Mr. Duggar said.
We were trudging up another mountain, cutting across an old bootlegger trail. It was early in the afternoon, and we were getting close to his destination. I didn’t know what would happen when we got there, but I knew I was running out of time.
I leaned up against the side of a tree, putting as much of my weight against it as possible. I was exhausted. Too exhausted to cry, too exhausted to care. I heard a beeping sound behind me and turned to see Mr. Duggar with a small black box in his hand.
He waved it left and right, and the beeping became faster or slower, like it was homing in on something nearby. Then he pointed it up the side of the mountain we were on and the tempo increased even more.
“You did it. Good girl,” he said.
Another hundred feet up the trail, we veered left and kept walking in the direction of the beeps. We were near a large clearing in the trees, strange because they were all recently cleared. I saw ragged chainsawed stumps extend in every direction.
Mr. Duggar’s little device began beeping very fast, and he pushed a pile of branches away from the side of the mountain. Behind them, a pair of large doors stood. It was a shipping container, buried in the side of the mountain!
Saddled Bearback (BBW Shifter Cowboy Romance) (Bear Ranchers Book 2) Page 70