by Mark Dawson
Fair enough.
He stepped around the thatched screen.
He paused for a moment and listened: nothing, save the rustle of the wind through the leaves at the foot of the ravine below him.
He looked up, noticing, with discomfort, that the thin column of smoke rising from the chimney was already visible. Never mind. He wouldn’t be staying here for very long. He looked at his surroundings with the benefit of daylight. The rise through the ravine was gentle up until this point, but it became steeper the further it climbed, several spots angling towards the vertical with the water splashing down in small falls and goat trails picking a path upwards. The trees and underbrush on either side thinned out a little, too, but larger trees remained all the way to the top of the ridge.
Milton reached for the overhang and hauled himself onto it, then climbed up another fifteen feet until he was near to the top of the ravine wall.
He crouched down, his eyes fixed to the south, the direction that the police would come from.
He estimated that he had covered two miles last night even though it had felt like more. He tried to put himself into the shoes of his pursuers. They would have discovered the dead man’s body, and that would have frightened them. They knew that he was armed, and that, too, would have given them cause for circumspection. If he had been in charge of the pursuit, with the benefit of that limited information, he would have set up a cordon as far along the south side of the forest as he could and then called for reinforcements.
The state police, perhaps.
He would have painted himself as a dangerous fugitive, a cop killer, and flooded the forest with as many men as he could find.
He would have waited until daybreak to start into the trees.
And now he would be coming.
Right now.
The way he saw it, he had two options.
He could run.
Or he could fight.
There was something to be said for running. He had enough of a head start that if he went now and moved as quickly as he could, he would stand a decent chance of getting clear. He expected that Lundquist would have divided the forest into grid squares and then set up a quarantine to contain him within the squares that he could realistically have reached last night. There would be police there already, but the longer he waited, the more there would be. If he went now, he was confident he would be able to break through the cordon and get away.
But Milton knew himself too well for that, and he had already discounted it. There was no point pretending that running was ever going to be an option.
Lundquist had killed the sheriff. The boys he was sheltering had killed a guard during a raid. They had very nearly killed him. They had beaten Ellie. They had taken Mallory and Arthur. There was no telling what they would do to them, and that was assuming that they were still alive. Milton couldn’t leave until he had either rescued them or taken revenge in their names.
No. Milton couldn’t run.
He looked out to the south, to the wide swathe of green and to the town just visible in the distance. Ellie, Mallory, and Arthur were out there.
Lundquist was out there, too, in the trees, raising a posse and coming after him.
No. He couldn’t run.
But he could fight.
Milton clambered carefully down the slope, loose scree skittering ahead of him, and slipped back behind the screen again. He dressed, his clothes still damp. He collected the first-aid kit and pushed it back into the bag. He broke the fire apart, kicking dirt and stones over it until the flames died, and then stepped back outside and started to climb.
He would head north and find somewhere to make a stand. He would take out his pursuers, one by one, and he would get the information that he needed.
What was happening in Truth?
Where were Ellie and the Stantons?
And then he would go and get them.
Chapter 30
THEY BROKE camp and left soon after the dogs had arrived. There was no sense in waiting any longer. Lundquist thought there was a decent prospect that they might be able to run Milton down by the end of the day, and he wanted to get started as soon as possible to put this whole sorry mess behind them.
The terrain sloped gently up, heading to the hills and modest mountains that provided a natural margin between the land and the shores of the Lake of the Clouds. It was still reasonably level down here, and Walker Price guided the dogs onto a path that Lundquist knew would be easily passable for the next mile. It was clear enough to jog, and he found that he was quickly covered in a sheen of sweat.
“You remember the last time we chased someone out here?” said Walker between breaths.
“Sure do.”
“Not that different to this, was it?”
“Same thing.”
That set him to thinking. It had been half a dozen years ago. The man, Lundquist remembered he was called Gus, he had a trailer in the park next to where the Stantons had parked their RV, and the word was that he was into little girls. When the Lattimers’ daughter didn’t come home from school one afternoon, Lester had gone around to Gus’s trailer to talk to him, hopefully to cross him off his list. He had driven off, followed pretty much the same route as Milton had, and had gotten into the woods before they could stop him. Lester had raised a posse, all of the deputies plus Walker and his dogs and another ten local men, and they had gone after him. They had tracked him six miles north to the lake. They had found his body slumped against the trunk of a tree, his shotgun in his mouth.
The little girl had come home two days later. Turned out that Gus had nothing to do with it. Lundquist hadn’t wasted too much time thinking about it. He had been running from something.
Guilty conscience.
That was good enough for him.
“How far do you think he’s managed to get?”
“Not far,” he said.
It couldn’t be far. Milton was wounded. He would have had to find somewhere to stop if only to treat the wound to his arm. How far would he have been able to travel? Say he kept going until midnight. That would have been a two-hour head start. Lundquist added another hour onto that to be charitable. Give him three. A man who didn’t know these woods would struggle to head in a consistent direction. There were ravines and draws you could go into that couldn’t be exited at the other end. There would be dead ends and double backs that would neutralise some of that advantage. He had no food and no drink, so that would slow him down. And then there was the gunshot wound. Lundquist figured that a healthy man with a knowledge of the paths and trails around here would have been able to move at two miles an hour. But Milton, with all those disadvantages, he would have struggled to keep half of that pace. If he was right, the maximum Milton would have been able to travel before he stopped for the night was two miles.
Two miles was nothing to Walker’s dogs. They had a great spoor from the clothes in the bag, and their noses were so sensitive that Milton would never be able to lose them. He could be ten miles away, but, for all the good that would do him, he might as well be just behind the next tree. The hounds were anxiously tugging the leash, yapping to each other in excitement, and if they were to be released, Lundquist didn’t doubt that they would sprint right to him like arrows to a target.
The path wound left and right and up and down, skirting the trunks of bigger trees and sending them through the middle of the underbrush. Lundquist was older than the others, but he made a point of keeping himself in shape, and his habit of taking a run first thing in the morning was starting to look pretty smart now. He settled into an easy stride, his waist angled down and forwards a little so that gravity could give him a friendly boost in the right direction. Even Michael and the other younger men were beginning to blow, but Lundquist knew he would be able to keep going for another half an hour without having to think about stopping to catch his breath. That brought a smile to his lips.
They reached a stream that ran through a small meadow. The leash went slack as the
dogs stopped and started to circle, their noses to the ground.
“What are they doing?” Tom Chandler asked.
Walker reached down, unfastened Blue from the master leash, and handed her off to the younger man.
“They’ve lost the scent. You ask me, he went through the water to put them off.” He pointed to the other side. “Take Blue over there.”
“Aw, Lieutenant, do I have to?”
“Get over there,” he snapped.
Chandler did as he was told, splashing through the thigh-high water with the dog swimming determinedly beside him. They emerged on the other side, and Blue immediately put her nose to the ground, scuffled at the grass with her paws, and then started to bark.
“She’s picked it up again.”
The other dogs were agitated, keen to follow their sister over to the other bank, and Walker led them into the water. It was icy, the current was strong, and the footing on the bed was treacherous. Lundquist stepped carefully, submerged deep enough at one point that his balls were in the water, the cold taking his breath away, and then he was out. The dogs clambered after him, shaking their coats dry and then pulling urgently at the leash.
They set off again. The terrain started to climb, and they slowed their pace.
Lundquist jogged alongside Leland.
“This guy is serious, isn’t he?” the younger man asked.
“He’s military.”
“How do you know that?”
“He told Lester. British Special Forces.”
“Shit, Morten.”
“So what? There’s ten of us.”
Leland didn’t reply.
“You get anything else on him?”
“I ran the prints that Lester took when he had him in overnight.”
“And?”
“Got one hit. He was arrested in Texas three months ago.”
“For what?”
“Assault. Another bar brawl.”
Lundquist clucked his tongue against his teeth. “You’d think he’d learn his lesson.”
“Maybe not.”
“They get anything else on him?”
“File said that the feds came and claimed him the day after. This is where it gets real interesting, though. The sheriff down there, he wasn’t on duty when Milton was arrested. He came in the next day, heard the story about the FBI and why his deputy had let him out of his custody, thought he’d check it over, and called the local office down there. Turns out there was no record of Milton on any of their active cases. When he described the female agent who got him out, they said they didn’t have anyone there who even halfway fitted the description.”
Lundquist shook his head. “What are we dealing with here?”
“I’ll leave the thinking to you,” Leland replied. “It’s not what I’m good at.”
“Enough with the sass,” Lundquist said, but he was too intrigued to be irritated for more than a moment. “Maybe he works for the government?”
Leland jogged on, breathing heavily.
The government? Maybe he did. Wouldn’t that be something? Did it change anything? Only if they let him get out of the woods alive, and Lundquist did not intend to allow that. Perhaps there were complications involved here, but, at the end of all of it, they would just say that John Milton had killed Lester Grogan, Lars Olsen, George Pelham, and the agent. He had killed them, fired on the rest of them, and then run.
What else were they supposed to do? Let him go?
God had placed John Milton in Lundquist’s path. A final obstacle to clear. A final test before the glory of what He had instructed him to do.
The dogs pulled harder on the lead, and Walker’s arm was soon pulled straight, parallel with the ground. “Good dogs,” he called down to them. “Good dogs. You take us to him.”
Chapter 31
JOHN MILTON RAN.
He stopped only to drink from the river and to eat. He saw an elderberry bush, and he stopped next to it, plucking off a handful of berries and stuffing them hungrily into his mouth. The juices were sweet and acidic, the tang making his mouth water. He hadn’t eaten properly since the venison two nights ago. That was going to have to be remedied sooner rather than later. He wouldn’t be able to run forever on an empty stomach.
He took off his shirt and wrapped it around his waist. He wanted to let some air get to the wounds on his arm. The pain was still there, and he had been reminded of it by the jolt that greeted every upward swing of his arm. He turned back and tried to assess how far he had travelled. Two miles in the last hour? The arm had compromised his stride. He was covering much less ground than he would have liked.
He set off again, pushing himself harder, gritting his teeth to ignore the pain. After another twenty minutes, though, the pain got worse. He couldn’t ignore it.
He stopped by the water’s edge, dunked his face, and then took off his jacket and sweater and examined his arm again.
The entry wound in his bicep, neat and circular, was healing. He had plucked out the worst of the debris. That wound would heal without the need for too much intervention, at least for the next few days.
He turned over his arm. His tricep was worse. Much worse. The flesh around the edges of the hole had become blackened and necrotic. It was dead, and unless he did something about it quickly, he would develop a fever, and that would stop him dead in his tracks. Worse, if left untreated, the wound would eventually become gangrenous, and he might lose the arm. He had to deal with it.
HE SMELLED the deer before he saw it. The body was just a short distance from the path, slumped down in the brush with a large bite taken out of its hindquarters. A wolf, Milton thought. It reeked of rot and decay, and he had to fight the urge to gag. He covered his mouth with the sleeve of his jacket and crouched down next to the body. He looked at the sticky, fibrous remains. A mess of white and brown maggots, each of them the size of half a fingernail, wriggled and seethed.
Maggots. Milton knew his battlefield medicine, and he knew his military history. It had worked for injured soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars. Maybe it would work for him. And, he knew, maggot therapy had gained credence recently. Doctors were using them again to clean the gangrenous feet of diabetics, saving them from amputation. The cleanliness in those circumstances couldn’t have been much more different than this, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. He didn’t have much choice.
Milton plucked out a couple of them and held them in the palm of his hand. They looked like blowfly maggots. That would do. He reached back down to the carcass and picked out twenty of them, held them loosely in his fist and then rinsed them in the river, shaking them gently to clean them as best he could. They were far from sterile, but that was out of the question today. He’d risk the possibility of infection against the certainty that things would get worse if he let the wound continue to fester.
He winced at the thought of what he was about to do, chided himself for his squeamishness, and dropped the maggots into the wound. He fixed the dressing and wound the bandage around it again.
Chapter 32
LUNDQUIST LOOKED up into the sky and knew, with a local’s sure and certain knowledge, that the storm would be back again before the hour was out. The clouds were the deepest and angriest blacks, solid blocks of ink that gathered at the horizon and then rolled at them as though they were the outriders of a hurricane.
“Where is he?” he said in frustration, louder than he had intended.
“Can’t be far,” Michael said.
Lundquist ground his teeth. He had been saying that since they had started.
The dogs had stayed on his scent all morning. There had been no obvious attempt to lose them. His track led them along the banks of the little river, climbing ever upwards into the slopes that led to the larger hills and then, eventually, to the shallow peaks. There had been no more attempts to go through the water to lose the dogs. It was if he had stopped caring.
Yes, Lundquist had been surprised that Milton was still ahead of them. He was wounded,
and they had moved quickly, barely stopping. The men had been running with their weapons ready for the last two hours, kept alert by Lundquist’s barked exhortations should their focus waver.
Milton had killed four men already.
Damned if he was going to kill any more.
They had been following the gentle upward slope, and Lundquist was feeling it in his legs and buttocks. Leland Mulligan had been blowing hard for the last hour, and Walker Price was damp with sweat. Michael was the fittest of them all, though. He had loped ahead of them, outpacing the dogs on occasion, diverting a few feet from the path in the event that Milton had left a more obvious sign that he had passed through.
The path dropped into a hollow that was bordered by slopes of loose shale. They followed a stream up the other side, the incline becoming steeper and steeper, the water sheltered by the steep shoulders of a ravine. The dogs pulled harder, and Lundquist recognised in their agitated behaviour that they were close.
“Weapons ready!”
Lundquist looked around. He knew the woods, and he remembered this spot. They called it the Whitefish Trail. The climb that faced them was steep, but there was a narrow path that cut upwards that could be accessed without too much difficulty.
He tightened his grip on his rifle.
Tom Chandler was up front. “Hey!” he cried out. Walker hauled the dogs back onto their haunches.
The dogs had led them to the face of the ravine on the right hand side. They had found an outcrop that reached out from the rock wall.
Lundquist hurried across. There was a thatched screen propped against the rock face. Chandler was on his haunches behind it, poking at the remains of a fire with a stick. Walker settled down next to him and looked.
“What do you think?” Lundquist said.
“Yes.” Walker nodded. “Look at that. He’s been here.”
Milton had dug a fire pit and lined it with rocks. The pit was full of ashes, and there were the unconsumed remains of a larger log that had been pushed away to die down. Walker disturbed the ashes all the way down to the bottom of the pit, but there was no sign of life at all. The fire had died out two or three hours ago, but that didn’t matter.