Bracing for it doesn’t make it hurt any less than the first time. I push my mind past the screaming point and work at focusing on my escape. Before my feet left the bank, I had planned my trajectory to bring me around and past the waterfall. Without the pack dragging me down and with a better picture of where I’m going, I’m certain I can make the distance almost entirely underwater. My only worry is that the current might pull me off course. Even with my super vision, I am completely blind below the surface.
I kick and pull furiously until I suddenly become scared for Roma. Do sabre-toothed cats swim? Will he turn to try and attack them, charging into a hail of bullets? I should have given him instructions. I try now, but I can’t reach him with my mind.
I surface and look around. I am too close to the falls. It is throwing up a wall I cannot see around, a heavy spray in my face. I swim to my left for a better vantage point in time to see two men slide around the corner. One falls to keep from slipping into the raging river running out of the mountain. And then I spot Roma. He is in the rocks behind them, not able to go any farther in that direction without swimming. If the men turn around, they will see him.
“Hey!” My scream does not carry over the roar of the falls bouncing off the cavern walls. I kick my body out of the water, wave my arms and scream again. It is the man struggling back to his feet whose flashlight hits me in the face. He punches his buddy and points at me. They bring their weapons around to me, but before I can dive, before they can get their guns settled, Roma explodes from his hide, covers the ground in two blazing leaps and hits the men hard and fast. One catapults into the river. The other is lifted in Roma’s jaws as the huge cat attempts to leap the river to reach my side where he’ll be able to escape along the rocks which will carry him into the Hot Springs chamber. He drops short, and he and his victims are swept out of the cavern and onto the waiting rocks below.
I am nearly sick to my stomach when I finally crawl out and stagger to the hot pool. I strip naked and then ease myself in this time, letting the hot water ignite my nerve endings only a few centimeters at a time. It is very dark in this chamber with almost no light making its way in this far from the moon and star filled night. Tricia’s big eyes are about all I see of her huge, dark mass. They blink closed and then open again. I could probably find a way to tell her about Roma, but why? She has left that world and is here to die.
How many more cats and men will die before this is all over?
When I’m hot enough I lift my butt onto the edge and sit with my feet in the water. I’ve got to do two things. First is get into dry clothes. I may have a cat mind and a cat physic, but I’m still ninety eight point six and without fur or dry clothing I have no way of maintaining my body temperature. That may be more challenging than the second thing I need to do; save Mandi, Matt and Sharon.
I sort out the soggy stack of clothes. Doing one piece at a time I wring everything out, and then spread them around me. The GPS unit sits where I pulled it out of the jacket pocket. I turn it on. I wonder where the sat-phone went? It is probably not waterproof like the GPS, so no matter anyway. In a minute or so the lit-up screen tells me what I already knew, that it can’t find the satellites, but it does tell me other information. It is now 1:07. I navigate through the numerous menus until I find the celestial information. The sun rises at 6:12. The moon sets at 4:19. That means that there is an hour or more of extreme dark before twilight. I ease my naked butt back into the water and think about how to use that, and how to get my clothes dry.
“Well, duh!” I stand up with my utterance, and then sit on the edge and feel for my sports bra. Of course. What are we always told about camping and getting wet? Build a fire. That’s why both of us had a waterproof container of matches in our packs.
I struggle into the long underwear, blue jeans, T-shirt, and then sweatshirt and socks. I dump the water out of my boots and put them on, then push my wet limbs into the wet jacket and set my mind for my next challenge . . . finding my way out of here in the pitch black. Even with my superior eyes the tunnel out is a challenge. But to get dry I have to get to my pack. There is also food there, I hope.
“Bye, Tricia,” I say. Her eyes open. For the two or three seconds before they close again, I sense a deep wariness, and maybe a sadness as well, if sabre-toothed cats can feel sad.
No. It is not sadness. She is old and dying, accepting of her end of life. She simply sleeps and waits.
I turn my back to her and try to bring up a mental picture of how Yulya led me out of here before. The cavern lake is to my left; the edge of the hot spring pool is two feet to my right. Straight ahead is the tunnel that leads up and out onto the ledge where my feline vision, fed by the moon and starry night, will kick to full power. It is also where the cold night air could send me into hypothermia. I try not to think about that part.
A dozen steps and then I am into the pitch dark. Gingerly, I take a step forward, and then another. I’m sure there were no holes I could step into, but then what if there was and I never saw them? I get down on all fours and start feeling ahead. Damn! This is going to take forever. I stop long enough to fish my wet gloves out of the jacket pockets. Two hand steps later I feel warm air.
“Well, duh!” I had forgotten about this place from where hot air blows, its source probably a deep, middle-earth lava ocean. When Yulya and I came by here before I had thought about it being a great place to dry my clothes. In a matter of seconds I have my jacket and sweatshirt off and situated so that they and I are catching the hot air.
After an eternity I check the time. 1:29. Damn! This is going to take all night. I’m better off with the fire. I put everything back on and then sit for a minute to reorient myself, enjoy the warmth for another full minute to get my hair drier, and then head out.
A dozen hand steps later I stop and pull the GPS out of my pocket. I touch the button that ignites the light and turn it away from my face. Another “Well, duh” comes to mind. Even without my cat vision the light is enough to illuminate everything around me. I proceed faster now, and without having to use my hands.
The odor of the outside hits me long before I turn the corner and see the star-filled opening. I step out and take a deep breath. The night air, still and quiet, is not as cold as I thought it would be. The drop-off carries an eeriness to it that wasn’t there in the daylight. I put the GPS away and carefully work my way along the ledge, up through the bushes and onto the top where I stop and gaze up in awe. You don’t realize how big the sky is until you see it full of stars from a mountain top in Montana. Wow!
My pause for the view doesn’t last long. I shiver against a stiff breeze and start moving, following the same route as with Yulya only some six or seven hours before. I move fast, anxious to get into the trees and out of the wind. I’m more anxious to get into the cave where I can build a fire and get dry. There is also not much time to prepare to do whatever it is I’m going to do to rescue my friends.
I cross the creek in the same spot as before and then start an easy jog while reaching my mind out for the cats. I get nothing. They must be either in the cave or too far away, or they are asleep. I put it away until I hit the tree line. The breeze dies almost immediately. The ground starts dropping away and I reach for the cats again. Still nothing. That bothers me. There are men in their forest; I’m missing; Roma is missing. I should have sensed them as soon as I crossed the creek. They should have sensed me, but they are nowhere.
The forest floor gets steeper and I start side-stepping, and then jumping, covering six, seven feet and then sliding another six or seven through patches of snow and dead, rotten leaves. I turn one way and then the other, catching a tree branch to control my progress, and then another to come to a complete stop before I slide off a short drop. I’m almost to the bottom now. I consider my final trajectory, and then hear a cough.
All motion stops, including my breathing. Only my heart pounds in my ears. I turn my head this way and that, take another breath and hold. I hear nothing more beyond my pounding heart
. Maybe it was just a tree swaying, a pine cone dropping, a rock bouncing down the slope ahead of me, or Nadia growling at her kittens.
My breathing returns to normal. There are no rocks on this slope. The trees are still; whatever breeze I felt on top is not down here. My gut tells me it was not a pine cone. I still don’t sense the presence of Nadia, or any of the cats. I start moving slowly, angling to bring myself above the entrance to the cave where my pack and food awaits, where I am looking forward to building a fire and getting warm and dry. I squat against a tree, in a shadow of the moon, to listen and reach for Nadia with my mind. The forest is very still of psychic vibrations. But there is some other presence, a human energy I’m sure. A full minute passes before I realize I had stopped breathing. I let it out, inhale and exhale a couple of times, and then hold again. There is nothing. Whatever presence I felt, animal or human, is gone, or was never there.
I had to have imagined it. Still, something prevents me from moving. A doubt; a feeling; a lingering sense of something that was, or still is, out there; something that I have to identify before I move one more step.
After five more minutes I’m starting to get a chill. Obviously there is nothing and I’m going to freeze to death waiting for nothing to appear. I rise and move to my left, around the top of the cave entrance to where I can easily step off the last thirty feet of my decent. There is no sliding or jumping. I take each step carefully, making sure there are no breakable twigs, or anything unstable that would move or cause me to move unexpectedly. One step at a time and, suddenly, I’m at the bottom. I squat in the shadow of an evergreen bush. I wait two minutes and then rise and step around the bush.
The smell hits me like a club. There was nothing but the aroma of evergreen and crisp night air, and then all of a sudden I’m gagging on cigarette smoke. I hear him a split second before I see the glow of his cigarette coming straight at me. His head is down, intent on watching his footsteps in the dark. He has a rifle in his right hand, and a flashlight in his left, though he hasn’t turned the flashlight on.
He looks up and I almost bolt. He doesn’t see me, his eyes going to the sitting rock. He changes his directory, stops at the rock and leans his gun against it. After setting the flashlight on the rock he turns and steps away about ten feet. There is the sound of a zipper and then, several seconds later, the smell of human urine. He farts.
I wish I could turn off my super senses for just these few minutes.
I’m slowly backing up to take advantage of cover when the flashlight and gun draw my attention. Can I get to them and away while he is busy with his business. Even as I rise from hiding, there is a battle raging inside me, the new me against the doubting me. “I don’t care what you think, I’m doing it anyway,” the new me says. The doubting me huddles in the corner and shakes. I cover the open ground in cat silence, and the doubting me disappears.
I lift the gun with one hand and the flashlight with the other without barely slowing down, and then cross in front of the line of trees that hide the cave opening, heading for the shadows. I am stopped, though, by Edik, Nadia, and the two kittens. They lie on their sides like they are asleep. Were they put to sleep with the dart guns, or were they shot to death? There is no visible blood. Edik’s side rises and falls.
Emptiness and anger rise up inside me. The sound of the zipper turns my head. Our eyes meet for a heartbeat across the moon-lit space. He jumps to retrieve his gun, and then freezes when he sees that it is gone. Our eyes meet again. His right hand moves and I notice the pistol strapped to his thigh. Before I realize it, I’ve flung the flashlight away and have the rifle up to my shoulder.
“No!” The word just pops out of my mouth. He freezes again, like we are playing red light/green light. The thing is, I have no idea how to use this gun. I’ve shot a pistol once, a little .22. I’ve never touched a rifle before now. “Lay it down!”
Apparently my voice doesn’t give my amateur status away because he lays the pistol on the ground as though it is a crystal goblet.
I take a breath. “Walk away from it.”
He rises to his full height—not much taller than me but a good hundred pounds heavier—and without taking his eyes from mine steps to his left. I counter with a move to my left and forward, toward his pistol, lowering the gun from my shoulder, but keeping it pointed in his direction. He keeps moving, so I keep moving. He stops. I stop. I’m closer to his pistol than he is now.
“What do you want me to do?” he says.
Damn good question. I don’t have an answer. I need to take him out of the picture, but I don’t want to hurt him.
I shiver and notice the coat he is wearing; black ski-like jacket, insulated. “Take your coat off.” He stares at me; his hands dangle at his side. I bring the rifle back to my shoulder. “Now!”
He unzips it, slips it off and holds it out.
“Throw it to me.” His toss lands it halfway between us. I walk toward it. “Turn around.” He does. I lay the rifle down, put the coat on, which is a dozen sizes too big for me, pick up the rifle and back away. “Okay.”
He turns back around. “What now?”
Another damn good question. Tie him up in the cave? With what? I could just walk away and take his guns with me. I’d have disarmed him and gotten a warm coat to boot. That should be enough until I work out a plan to free my friends.
My stomach growls.
“Do you have food?” I ask him.
“In the cave.”
I should have food in there, too, if Sharon did what I asked her to do, unless they were caught before they got here. “Back up.” He does and I step until I’m standing over his gun. “Okay. Let’s go in the cave.”
He doesn’t move.
“I said let’s go into the cave!” I add a level of I mean business to my voice. He shrugs and takes a step forward. At the same time I hear, or sense, a movement behind me. I turn my head just in time to notice a bat-size stick at the edge of my peripheral, coming at me, but not in time to react. The pain is sudden, sharp, with a blinding flash of red, and then nothing.
Chapter 41
The ground is moving past my face. I’m hanging upside down over someone’s shoulder and the blood is draining into my pounding head. Through red haze and blazing pain I watch a leg and a boot move out of my vision below a butt, to be replaced by another leg and boot; back and forth; back and forth. The coat of whoever is carrying me rides above a gun in a holster in the middle of his back. He steps over a log and my face brushes a branch. What happened? Where am I being carried? Where’s Mandi? I can’t think straight around a jarring pain on every bounce and every footfall of my ride.
He stops and turns part way around. “Is this the right way?” The voice is baritone.
“A little left, I think,” says a normal voice. A flashlight bobs, illuminating another pair of legs and boots.
“You think?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
“Five more minutes and you carry her.”
My baritone ride starts walking again. Who the hell are they? Why am I being carried? Did I have an accident? Did I fall off a cliff?
“What do you think Dan is going to do with her?” my ride asks.
Dan! Who’s Dan?
“Hell if I know. I’m just following orders.”
“One of us should have stayed back with the cats.”
“They ain’t going to wake up.”
“You don’t know that. He’s going to be pissed if even one of them gets away.”
I’m cold, and I feel like throwing up. I want to tell Baritone to stop and let me down, but I can’t make a sound, and wiggling makes my head hurt more. I reach up to feel my head and find that my hands are bound with duct tape!
Dan. Duct tape. Sheriff Dan!
I close my eyes and try to think. Another branch drags past my arm, almost pulling me off his shoulder. He stops to adjust me, bouncing me a couple of times, his hand squeezing my butt for a hold. My stomach lurches once. Cats! Mandi and I saw t
he sabre-toothed cats near Bozeman. We drove to . . . to Sam’s old place. We hiked. There was a helicopter, and Matt.
My stomach lurches a second time, and then again, and suddenly it is all coming out; projectile vomit gushes down the back of my ride.
“What the hell is going on?” he says.
“What do you mean, what’s going on?” says the other guy.
I feel a lot better, but it doesn’t help my head. I need to be upright, sitting.
“What is she doing? Is she awake?”
“I don’t know. I can’t see shit. You’ve got the only flashlight.”
“Whose fault is that?”
“I had to take a piss. How did I know she’d sneak up on me?”
A big chunk of vomit hangs off the back of my ride’s coat, more on the gun holster. He has a pack hanging off his left shoulder. A corner of it has a smear of vomit. I remember the rest of it: swimming inside the mountain, being shot at, cold, hot, eating ham with my fingers, Nadia and Edik asleep, the kittens, Tricia waiting to die, making plans to save my friends, the stink of Sheriff Dan.
My ride grunts. “You could have at least seen where she threw your flashlight.”
“I had other things on my mind.”
“Yeah, like getting your dick back in your pants.”
“Stick it up your ass!”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“Only because you would.”
“Fuck you!”
Silence for a while; thank you. The little guy in my head is using a smaller hammer now, but it sure would help if I could be upright. I could probably walk on my own, but I’ve a feeling I shouldn’t reveal that I’m conscious.
We stop. “Your turn to carry her,” my ride says. “My shoulder is killing me.
“Not a problem,” says the other guy, a tinge of pleasure in his voice that I don’t like. And then I have a sudden flash of inspiration. I swipe away the vomit, unsnap the holster and draw the gun into my hands.
Sabre-Toothed Cat Trilogy Page 110