“Okay, Mom,” I say to the night air, and then touch Roma. “Let’s not just stand here big guy; let’s do something.” Yulya appears from somewhere and then together, we step out. I have no idea what we are going to do, but off we go to do it.
Chapter 43
How many of them are there? There is Sheriff Dan, Deputy Dog Eddy with a broken arm, Lester with punctured ribs, and Sarge. Four more men appeared before I made my last escape into the cold lake. Roma took out two of them when he went over the falls. Baritone is gone and I disabled Chubby. That leaves the original four in the cavern with Mandi, Matt and Sharon. Are there any others I don’t know about?
I approach slowly from the North with Roma, staying inside the trees. Yulya is doing the same from the South. My plan is for the three of us to converge on the Cavern entrance. As I get closer I more and more hate the fire they have burning. It means that someone is probably awake and it would be impossible to sneak in and cut duct tape. My nocturnal sight advantage would be nil. Four men armed with guns against me with a knife and my sabre-toothed sidekicks. If I wasn’t crazy before, this puts the rubber stamp on the certificate.
Apparently the nap did more for me than I thought. In the last five minutes I have virtually felt my strength returning, my senses rising to their peaks. And then I smell him. Actually Roma smells him first and then alerts me. The man stink. Do I stink like that? I hope not. It is not a human smell in general, but a stinky male human smell of the ugly variety. How in the world can they hunt? Maybe it’s just this particular one. Baritone didn’t stink, but Chubby did. Okay. Some men stink. Some don’t.
This one is putrid. Maybe that’s why he was selected as the sentry, get him out of the confines of the cavern. His own kind can’t stand him. He is on the north side of the entrance, under a tree, scanning out in the darkness with night vision goggles. Damn!
Squatted next to Roma, I listen. I also send warning to Yulya as there is probably a sentry on the south side of the entrance as well. A minute later he lets me know that there is. Don’t attack, I tell him.
I tell Roma and Yulya to stay where they are, out of sight, and then I move closer, remaining tight against the mountain wall, using trees and bushes as cover. If I can slip past stinky and into the cavern, I might have a chance. With the night vision goggles he won’t look toward the fire; he’s as good as blind for my purposes. The same with the other one. With two sentries, the rest would be asleep, I hope. I could quietly awake Matt, Sharon and Mandi, cut their binds, and then make our escape, going out the way I went in.
It feels like a plan.
Twenty feet from the entrance and about the same behind my sentry, I freeze. The other sentry is coming right at me. He is not looking my way; the nose of his goggles is pointed out, away from the firelight. I get low and try to tuck myself up under the boughs of a Douglas fir. The sentry stops five feet from me. All I can see is the tattered hems of his blue jeans, and his mud-caked boots. Needles from the tree are poking me in the face and I’m doing everything I can think of to hold a sneeze. I can’t hold it and make a feeble attempt to muffle it in the sleeve of my coat.
“Hey!”
Shit to hell! He heard me. What do I do? Surrender? Pull out the knife? Call for Roma?
“Yeah.” That’s the stinky sentry replying.
The muddy boots move away. I push the pine needles from my face and watch as he squats down next to Stinky. “I’m tired of this shit.”
“Same here.”
“This isn’t what I signed on for. I think Dan has flipped.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“I haven’t seen hide nor hair of one of these damned cats he talks about, and I sure as hell don’t see a reason to be worried about an unarmed sixteen year old girl.”
Seventeen!
“But what happened to Brad and Ken?”
“They probably kept right on going after they couldn’t get her.”
“I went up there and it’s like they just disappeared. There’s no place to go except into the lake or off the edge of the waterfall.”
“Well they went somewhere. I wouldn’t have wanted to come back to face Dan’s wrath.”
“Did you get a whiff of him?”
Sentry number two laughs. “Why do you think I’m out here?”
“No shit. Did you hear that radio call from Gary?”
“No.”
“He said that he and Chet got a couple of those cats, put them down with sleep darts.”
“No shit!”
“No shit.”
“Probably a couple of mountain lions.”
“Don’t know. We’re supposed to go get them at first light. Strange shit going on out here.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Whatever it is, he’s paying us good bucks to be here, and I got out of a Shakespeare play my wife wanted to drag me to. That’s worth it alone.”
“Queers in tights.”
“You got that right. No man should be subjected to that crap and have to pay for it too.”
Stinky snorts.
“Better get back to my post. These goggles hurt my head.”
“Yeah, but without them we might as well be blindfolded.”
“Nothing to see anyway. I’m going to take a ten minute break from them; get rid of this headache.”
“Whatever. Just don’t let Dan catch you.”
“Keep an extra eye. Whistle if you see anything.” Sentry number two stands and walks away, passing within an arm length of where I crouch. I watch him until he disappears and then send a stern reminder to Yulya not to touch him, and to not let himself be seen. I do the same with Roma. The last thing I need is to have one of these guys scream and wake up everybody else.
I let a minute pass, eye Stinky for another—he sits unmoving, asleep as far as anyone could tell—and then ease out from under the tree and edge up to the entrance. There is nothing to see at first, just the firelight flickering against the cavern walls. I inch forward one slow step at a time until I can see the camp fire and the sleeping forms, like cocoons dropped down at random angles. Mandi, Matt and Sharon are not together. Closest to the entrance is a bundle that I guess is Sheriff Dan. A few feet beyond him is Mandi. She is curled in a ball in her sleep sack, her back to me, cold looking. Beyond her are Lester and Sarge, warm in their cold weather bags, nearly right angles to each other.
Next is Matt. His hands and ankles are bound, and then tied and secured to crevices in two different directions. They are taking no chances that he would be able to free himself. He is awake. Our eyes meet. The heat in my pit flares, the one that I felt earlier when I hugged him. I close my eyes to break contact and then turn my head away. Shit to Hell! I don’t need this.
I open my eyes and look beyond him. There are two more forms. I assume the first is Deputy Dog and the last is Sharon. The deer carcass hangs twenty feet beyond her. Nice; a true mountain man’s ambience. The fire is on the opposite wall from all the sleepers, in line with the gear. It is not raging like I had thought; a few low flames seem to exaggerate themselves against the walls. Maybe it is my super sensitive vision that does the exaggeration. What is the point of keeping the fire going? It is not warming anything; not a single sleeper is huddled close to it.
The steady drone of the waterfall masks any noise I might make, but I step as though moving through a sound-triggered minefield, passing Mandi and looking down at each covered form to be sure that one of the bad guys is not awake. When I get to Matt I cut both ropes and then the duct tape between his hands, avoiding looking at his face. As I turn to go to Sharon he grabs my wrist. My eyes go straight to his, and then for a long five seconds I have everything I can do to keep from throwing my body on top of him. What has gotten in to me?
He reaches across with his other hand and wraps his fingers around the handle of the knife, and around my fingers. I can feel the electric touch all the way down to my toes. More seconds pass and then he lets go of my wrist and takes the knife from me. I relent my hold, but
am hard pressed to give up his hand. I start to clamp onto his fingers, feel the heat rise in my face, and then pull my hand away. He cuts the tape from his ankles and hands the knife back to me, nodding his head toward his mother. I drop my eyes, turn away, and then freeze in mid-step as I nearly step on Deputy Dog’s foot, almost screaming out my shock.
I relax, recover half of my composure, and then step around him and up to Sharon’s sleeping form. I glance back and see Matt approaching Mandi, pieces of duct tape hanging off of his wrists and ankles. Why didn’t he go to his mother and let me take care of Mandi? I push the growing jealousy down with the hot pit of desire in my stomach and kneel next the Sharon. She is lying on her back. I put my hand over her mouth and her eyes pop open, at first in fear, and then surprise. I touch my finger to my lips and then show her the knife. She extracts her hands from the bag and I cut them apart, and then she struggles out and I do the same with her ankles.
Mandi is sitting up, letting Matt unwrap the tape. She looks haggard. I lead the way back down to them, and then together we turn to go out. We get no farther. Sheriff Dan is sitting up in his sleeping bag, his pistol pointing at me. I guess I didn’t throw his guns far enough away, or he has a stash of extras.
“That’s about as far as you’re going to get. Put the knife down.”
Chapter 44
“Ain’t that Chet’s coat?”
I force myself not to look away from Sheriff Dan’s glare. The four of us are bound again, sitting in a semicircle around the fire. The warmth feels good. “Not anymore. He’s wearing Baritone’s . . . ah . . . Gary’s.” He gives me a long, questioning look, his jaw set tight. He is squatting next to the fire, facing me. He doesn’t smell anymore. The gray of dawn is beginning to filter in behind him. I start to make another wisecrack about Baritone losing his head, and then reconsider. “Gary is dead.”
He looks down and shakes his head. “Where is Chet?”
I shrug. “Maybe wandering around looking for a way out of the mountains, or waiting until daylight and trying to recover. He was dumb. He tried to get a bit too frisky with me and then threatened to kill and rape me . . . in that order. Before Gary could intervene, one of my cats took him out. I left Chet alive, with his balls slammed up into his chest.”
His tight jaw goes slack and his mouth hangs open.
“If you’re wondering about the other two guys who went after me up at the lake, Brad and Ken I believe, I’m pretty sure they’re dead, lying down below the waterfall. You’re losing your men faster than you can get them, Sheriff.”
“Your cats?”
There is no need to answer that question. The silence weighs on all of us until I finally break it. “I already know that you planned on killing us. If that’s still the case then there isn’t much we can do about it.”
He closes his mouth. From the corner of my eye I see Mandi and Sharon’s heads turn toward me. Matt’s eyes remain bored into the side of Sheriff Dan’s head.
“You, too, will die. You and the rest of your men. There is no escape. While you’ve been shooting at them with your sleep guns, they’ve been learning, and they’ve been getting angry. You will no longer see them unless it is part of their strategy to be seen. You will likely not hear them. You will not know they are near until hairs on the back of your neck rise and you feel the heat of their breath, the scrape of their tongue, and then the deep penetrating stab of their sabre teeth.”
“Are you trying to threaten me,” he says quietly, “or do I get the sense that you’re suggesting a deal? Let you go and they’ll let us go. Is that it?”
I shake my head. “The sabre-toothed cats don’t know deals, Sheriff. Kill us or not, my bet is that you won’t make it out of these mountains alive.”
He rises to his feet, looks at me a long time, and then walks away. He is scared of me. He is scared of the cats. He knows that he has painted himself into a corner.
“What the hell are you doing?” Mandi whispers at me.
Sheriff Dan has gone outside, to conference with the devil on how to get himself out of this mess, I’m sure, or to make a call to Lance . . . one in the same. “I don’t know,” I say.
“Can’t you give them some idea that if they don’t kill us the cats might not kill them? You didn’t have to tell him the truth!”
“She’s right,” Sharon says in a quiet, calming voice. “They have no reason not to kill us now.”
I know she’s right, but it’s like when I was being choked by Chet; the little girl Rebecca Price wanted to cry and beg for mercy, but the new and improved Sabre-tooth Reba pushed her aside and started kicking butt, or in his case, balls. At this moment the little girl part of me wants to curl up and cry herself to sleep. The big girl won’t let her. She is ready to gather her forces of sabre-toothed cats and rip all their hearts out, or more accurately to hiss and snarl, and then jump on their backs and bite their heads off.
I unclench my teeth and look back at Sharon, and then Mandi. “I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”
“Then keep your mouth shut!”
Mandi is so angry that I actually wonder if she’ll not want to share the house with me when we get back to Bozeman. I drop my eyes away and scold myself for worrying about something besides how to get all of us out of this mess alive, how to get back to Bozeman. She is so damned right. I’ll keep my mouth shut even if I have to bite my tongue until I cry.
The soft gray of dawn has morphed into very gray. There is no blue sky visible through the trees, only the darkness of heavy clouds; rain, maybe snow. With the opening of the day, the temperature has dropped. One of the men has added wood to the fire and it blazes up hot. I turn toward it and unzip the coat so as to let the heat in; dry my wet parts. I’d like to take it off, as well as my boots and socks. Can’t remove the coat because my hands are bound. Could probably take off my boots despite the tape around my ankles, but I dare not in case there is an opportunity for escape. I still maintain hope.
Mandi lies curled on her side, angry and stressed. Matt sits close to her, his hip against her back, his elbow resting on her shoulder. If his hands weren’t bound he’d probably be stroking her, massaging her neck, running his fingers through her hair. They are becoming a little too familiar, too comfortable with each other.
My jaw clenches again. Maybe I don’t want to share my house with Mandi.
All of a sudden he is looking at me. Desire blazes up in my pit and I begin to turn away. Not now, damn it, not now! Then something in my psychic center gives me pause. His look at me is not the same as my look at him. There is no fire in his pit. There is something else entirely, something that he is probably not even consciously aware of, something that in a flash turns my pit of desire into a pit of cold porridge. I jerk my head and my eyes away before I do or say or telepathically transmit anything.
A piece of Sheriff Dan shows through the trees surrounding the entrance to the cavern. He moves and disappears. A few seconds later he appears again and then disappears. He is pacing, probably while on the sat-phone. If not for the waterfall I’d probably hear him. The waterfall blocks out a lot of things but it doesn’t block out my psychic impressions. I can sometimes do that with my own force of will, and probably could right now, but my anger makes me extend my psychic antenna further, look deeper into Matt’s motivation. His feelings for Mandi aren’t nearly what hers are for him, yet he is taking her, my best friend, away from me. Is it retribution? All those responsible for his dad’s death are dead themselves, except me. He still blames me.
I pull back my antenna and fume. You bastard! You don’t give a twit about her. After you’ve broken us up you’ll probably dump her and then she’ll have nobody, once more rejected by someone she loved, someone she trusted. Maybe I deserve it, but she sure as hell doesn’t. I don’t want her to become another one of my victims.
But she already is one of my victims; tied up and on the executioner’s list because she followed me into my screwed up life. I saved her life at Christmas only to lead her
here to die. Sharon is another of my victims, losing her husband last summer, and then now about to join him, taking her son with her. And certainly, so is Matt my victim, a product of what I started a year ago. His actions are because of me. I have only myself to blame.
Haven’t you gotten enough people killed already?
Yes, Dad, I have gotten more than enough people killed. I lean forward, run my fingers through my hair, and squeeze my eyes shut against the tears. How the hell do I end it?
Chapter 45
I jerk from a nightmarish dream and just as quickly it is gone except for the impression of running very fast and getting nowhere. My standard frustrating nightmare; that and standing on the starting blocks at a swim meet naked because I can’t find my swimsuit. It is Sheriff Dan’s bellowing voice that has broken into my sleep. He is just inside the entrance talking to the two men who are standing watch over us. He is bellowing to be heard over the drone of water hitting water.
“Jesse, you stay here. Don’t take your eyes off of them for even a second. They’re slick and they’re dangerous. You understand me?”
Jesse nods. “No problem, Dan.” Jesse is tall and lanky with lots of kinky hair sticking out from under a Seahawks ball cap. He is the one I called Stinky earlier. His night vision goggles hang from his belt. “They’re not going anywhere.” Obviously he is not a deputy. He is probably thirty-five, but he looks like he’s had forty plus years of hard experience. His grin at me reveals a missing upper incisor, and a need for a good cleaning. Mom would be appalled.
Sheriff Dan walks the rest of the way in and tells the other guy, the other sentry, to go out with the others, that he’d be there in a minute. He stops close to Jesse’s ear, points at me and says so that I can’t hear—except he doesn’t know that I can—“She’s the dangerous one. Don’t listen to anything she says, no matter how she says it.”
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