Jesse twists his face and gives his boss a questioning look. “What do you mean, how she says it?”
The sheriff looks at me; the memory of my talking in his head while he sits in his own excrement still haunts him. Our eyes meet for just a split second. He turns back to Jesse. “Just don’t listen to her.”
“Not a problem. I won’t listen to her.”
“And don’t talk to her.”
“Right!” Jesse is getting a little irritated with the sheriff’s orders. “I won’t talk to her, either.”
“Why don’t I keep an eye on them, Dan?” Lester interrupts. He was busy struggling to his feet and putting on a shirt over his bandaged ribs.
He turns toward Lester and points his finger. “You, I don’t trust. I still haven’t decided what I’m going to do with you, so you keep your mouth shut and do what I say.” He points out to the helicopter. “Get your ass out there.”
“I . . .”
“I don’t give a shit about your ribs. Get out there!”
Sheriff Dan walks out. “Around the helicopter,” I hear him tell his men before he goes out of range. I wonder what he is up to? Lester stares at me while he buttons his shirt.
“Where’s my million?” I ask him.
He sucks up a wad of phlegm and then spits it at me. It falls short, thank you. He carefully bends down, picks up his jacket and follows after the sheriff.
Jesse shows me his missing incisor again. I give him my best Sabre-tooth Reba glare, then bare my teeth and hiss. He laughs and shows me more ugly teeth. I reach in to his wide open mind and repeat the words of the sheriff. “She’s the dangerous one.” His grin dies. Sheriff Dan is not so smart. He left us with his least important man, his most expendable, and to our benefit, the one easiest to manipulate.
But how? I could plant the idea in his head that he should walk out and join the others, or untie us first and then leave. Would he believe words playing in his own mind, or would I just be putting all of us in danger?
I turn away and look past my three companions, past the deer carcass still hanging in disgusting silence, up to the glow of incoming light where the mountain lake flows out and crashes onto the rocks below. I catch my breath. In the dark recesses of the shadow of the huge boulder where Black Beard lay with his hand trapped last summer, and where I can see with my super vision, crouches a big cat with sabre teeth. He must have come in through the back way and then leaped the river and crept over the rise. How did I miss sensing his entrance?
“Hi, Roma.”
He returns with something approaching a sabre-toothed cat’s purr, and what I can only interpret as, I’m here to serve, my mistress; I await your orders. I look back at Jesse with his mouth hanging open, his eyes questioning, confused, and then again at Roma. I will kill for you. A shiver runs down my spine that I would even consider giving such an order. It is one thing that they do it on their own, when I am not an accomplice. But to give the order to kill . . . I can’t do it.
I look at Jesse again. He cannot see Roma, I’m sure, but he keeps looking in that direction, and then back at me. I cast my eyes down as though bored and wanting to sleep. He walks up to me, stopping a bare few feet away.
“What are you looking at?” he demands.
I raise my head until my eyes are directly on his, trying to ignore his gun which is pointed two feet to my left. “At the ground between my feet.”
He points. “Up there. What were you looking at up there?”
“My mother died up there. I was praying to her that you guys don’t kill us.” Truly not that far from the truth. He turns and looks again and the barrel passes by my face, within my reach. He holds it relaxed, his finger not near the trigger. If I had my wits I could probably yank it away from him and then order Roma to take over before he could wrestle it back. I think too long and it passes out of my reach.
He looks for a long time and then turns back. “You should be praying to a higher power.” The barrel passes my nose again, but the opportunity is gone. The first time he was looking the other way. Now he is looking at me. “Still won’t do you any good. Don’t know why the boss doesn’t just do you all now. You’ve all been a pain in our asses.”
I sigh. “I’m sure, Jesse, and it’s only going to get worse. Maybe you’re right. You should have killed us.”
He creases his brow. “What do you mean?”
“On second thought, even if you did kill us it wouldn’t have made much difference.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I lied to you. I wasn’t praying to my mother. I was making contact with a higher power.”
His head bobs up and down with his laugh.
“Really. You should take a look. He’s standing right behind you. Turn around and meet Roma, my dearest and most powerful friend at this very moment.”
The laugh lines disappear, replaced with lines of doubt, and then, as he slowly turns around, with lines of fear. Any worry I had that he would raise the gun and shoot Roma are gone as the gun slips from his hand and clatters to a stop at Sharon’s feet. Roma greets him with a combination hiss and growl, and then bats out with a paw, knocking him to the ground. Jesse curls into a trembling ball. Roma props his paw on Jesse’s shoulder, like a cat would a mouse he only wants to play with, hisses in his ear and then turns his head toward me, saying, I’m sure, “What shall I do with him?”
As I sit with my hands and ankles bound, pondering the next step, Matt is already on his knees struggling with his few free fingers to release Mandi’s hands. Sharon is working on her own ankles. “You got any thoughts on what to do now?” Matt asks.
“We’ve got a gun,” Sharon says. “That’s got to be worth something.”
Five minutes later we’re all standing around Jesse, looking down at Matt’s handiwork. Even Jesse’s mouth is taped. He was very compliant when I told him I wouldn’t let Roma eat him. Matt holds out the almost empty roll of duct tape. “Unless they have another roll of this, we don’t have enough for the rest of them.”
“You’re assuming we can even capture them,” I say.
“Kill them.” Mandi’s soft voice, her quiet words, cut through the distant roar. She stands to the far side of Matt. Sharon and I both look at her. “Kill them all. They’re not going to stop until we’re dead.” She turns her eyes on me. “I don’t know why you keep stopping them, your cats. If you don’t let the cats have their way then we should take the gun and kill them all ourselves.”
“No, Mandi,” Sharon says. “I know how you feel, but that’s not the solution.”
“You have no idea how I feel!”
Mandi is right. Sharon has no idea. To have already been raped and beaten by someone who you trusted can leave a woman afraid of all men, deadly afraid of these men who would hold nothing back as they go after their male desires. I can see her fear; it leaps off her aura like flames through the smoke of a fire.
Her aura relaxes, though it continues a slow churning. “Sorry,” she says. The change is so sudden, I’m nearly thrown off balance. “Sorry,” she says again. Something doesn’t feel right, but I can’t put my finger on what it is; something to do with the sudden mood change. I know she’s stressed. We all are, but this goes beyond stress.
“Let’s just see if we can sneak out of here, and then decide what to do.” I don’t get an argument. “If we go out to the right and stay tight against the rock wall of the mountain, inside the trees, we should be able to make it away unseen.”
“Agree,” Matt says. He takes Mandi’s hand. “Let’s go.” They take a few steps and Sharon falls in behind. I turn around to lead the way out when the pressure hits me in the gut, and then in the chest; my signal of pending death. Immediately my head is full of explosions, bullets flying, and Jesse’s head exploding like a melon. I snap a look over my shoulder and find that Mandi has pivot turned and let loose of Matt’s hand, and is already one step away from Sharon, who carries the gun. I shove Matt aside, nearly into the glowing fire p
it, and lunge after Mandi. She drops her shoulder and plows into Sharon, hooking her hands around the gun and sending Sharon sprawling on her back. I start to scream, “No!” but catch myself for fear that it would carry to the men meeting around the helicopter. I’m five feet away when she gets herself set square on Jesse’s wide-eyed form, and begins bringing the butt of the gun up to her shoulder. She grew up with hunters, she had told me, and is quite comfortable with shotguns and rifles. I don’t think this AK, or Uzi, or whatever it is, scares her all that much.
Jesse shuts his eyes as the barrel levels on him. Mandi’s finger comes down on the trigger just as my hand comes up under the barrel. The gun explodes and I plow into her, jerking it from her hands and sending her ass over teakettle once again, toward the hanging deer carcass. The intense heat of the barrel sends the gun flying from my hand, nearly banging off of Jesse’s undamaged head. Dirt and rock fall from the ceiling, followed by cascading and shimmering dust. I look at Matt and Sharon. Neither were hit by bouncing bullets. How many bullets were there? Three? Thirty? I have no idea. It happened so fast there was no counting. I look at Roma who was near the entrance. He is also fine, though highly agitated.
I waste no more time. “Let’s go!” I yell and turn toward the cavern lake. “They heard and they’re coming.” My hand snags a bunch of Mandi’s clothing. “Matt, grab the gun!”
I didn’t have to tell him. He was already scooping it up.
“Let loose of me!” Mandi screams and tries to jerk away. My sabre-tooth adrenaline has kicked in and I could probably carry her if I had to. I ignore her screams and struggles. She is coming with me, willing or not. Suddenly Sharon is on her other side and together we are carrying her, over and past the sleeping bags and trash, past the huge boulder, over the rise and down to the lake’s edge.
“Now what?” Sharon screams over the roaring water.
That is the question of the day. I’ve done it twice and lived, and could, I’m sure, do it again, but I’m an experienced and talented competitive swimmer blessed with big cat feline strength. It would be pure and simple suicide for these three.
I sense Roma coming at a run and pull Sharon and Mandi aside. He leaps the rushing water and turns to look at me. Well, come on! I’m sure he’s thinking. It is nearly twenty feet. No way. If there was a way, though, we could escape around to the hot pool on dry ground and then up and out from there.
Could he leap that with one of us on his back?
Gun fire from Matt interrupts that thought, and then drives it home when there is returning gun fire. I’m sure there aren’t many bullets left in what Matt has. I call Roma back, instruct him and then tell Sharon to get on his back.
“Are you crazy?”
“We have no choice. We can escape if we can get across. Otherwise we are dead. Sheriff Dan is not going to just scold us and wrap tape around our wrists. He’ll tie rocks to our ankles after he shoots us, and throw us in the lake with my mother.”
She looks between me and Roma.
“You ride horses. You can ride a sabre-toothed cat.”
The gun goes off again. “Shit!” She adjusts her backpack, grabs a piece of Roma’s mane and leaps on.
Go! Roma quickly backs up and then springs forward and leaps the water. Sharon rides like a champ and is immediately off. Roma returns.
“Your turn, Mandi.”
“No way!”
“Get on or I’ll knock you out and he’ll carry you over in his mouth! Your choice!”
She looks across at Sharon, impatiently waiting, then back at Matt. When her face returns to me she says, “I’ve never ridden a horse.”
“Sabre-toothed cats are a lot easier. Get on, now!”
She does and barely has time to get her grip before Roma takes off. He leaps and she bounces but holds on until the last second, and then drops off with very little grace, landing on her butt. Roma returns and I yell for Matt.
He doesn’t hear me, firing another burst. More return fire and then he goes to fire again, but there is nothing. His gun is empty. He looks around at me. I frantically signal him over.
“Get on!”
He hadn’t been seeing what was going on, but puts two and two together very quickly. He drops the gun and climbs on Roma’s back. “Okay!”
Go! Roma bursts away and then leaps. For a split second I wonder if Matt’s additional weight will be too much for Roma. He falls short, but only his hind legs churn up the water; his momentum carries him onto dry land.
Roma prepares to return, but there is no more time. They are coming. They would shoot us as we leaped. I wave them on and tell Roma to go as I back up for my run. I hate this but like I told Mandi, there is no choice. They’ll shoot me as soon as they see me.
I take two hyperventilation breaths, take off at a sprint and then leap and point my body into the dive, and take one more quick, deep breath, somehow aware of bullets whizzing past me. This time there are no canned hams to shield me.
Chapter 46
If I am hit, I don’t know it because the pain of the ice-cold water would certainly be a lot worse. I porpoise kick like crazy, keeping my hands pointed straight in front of me, praying to contact something solid, like the far side of the lake, before I run out of breath. I do not want to surface right into one of the light beams, and if any of them put on their night vision goggles, I could really be toast, unless I can surface with the waterfall between me and them. I angle to the right, or what I am guessing in pure black, icy water is to the right, in hopes of getting to that area. If they spread out, though, and all have goggles, there would be no where for me to hide.
I keep going, counting on my sixth sense to drive me in the right direction. My breath is holding and I realize that the first two times I entered this lake there were circumstances that kept me from swimming a straight, underwater line. I mentally picture the layout and distance and know for certain that if I was in my Lycra competition suit I’d have no problem. Dragged down with a ton of clothing leaves me with a ton of doubt.
My lungs send the early signal of the need to breathe. I ignore it and keep kicking. It is not so cold now, all my nerve endings have gone numb. The need to replenish the oxygen to my muscles is near the point of overwhelming. I have to breathe. I angle up, deciding I will surface for one huge breath and a fast look and go back down, but where is the surface? Was I swimming down this whole time and have thirty feet of water over my head now and not enough air in my lungs to reach the surface. Will I stupidly drown in my escape?
Mom! Don’t let me die.
I can’t kick anymore. I have to take a breath. I can no longer fight it.
And then, suddenly, my hands feel the air and I hold for one more split second and then burst from the water with a huge, life saving gasp. And then I’m down again, but I need more. The one breath was not enough to sustain me for long. I need to surface again, get my bearings, hyperventilate my lungs and go back down for whatever is left. I stop swimming, relax, and then slowly surface for a look.
There is a light in my face. I start to panic and dive when I see the form behind the light. It is Matt and he is holding his little pen light, similar to the one that saved our lives a year ago. He is standing at the edge not six feet away. I swim toward him and he reaches down. And then the prelude to death pressure hits me again followed by a vision of Matt being slung back from a bullet in his chest. I turn and look over my shoulder at the far bank from where I started. There are two men standing there. One has on the goggles and is pointing our way. The other has no goggles, but has a rifle with a huge scope on it, a night vision scope I bet, and he is pointing it right at us, right at Matt.
I scream and grab Matt’s hand. The only thing I can think to do is bring him in with me. I yank him off balance and the gun explodes.
Chapter 47
Matt twists and tumbles into the water, screams in my ear, thrashes and coughs for a few seconds, and then goes silent . . . deadly silent. I force myself not to panic over him or the fact
that the next bullet could be my head, or his. I could go under and swim away but if he is unconscious I have to hold him up. I call his name and something bubbles from his mouth. I hope it is water, not blood. I grab his collar and pull him along with me until we have the waterfall as a block. I can still see the men, but they can’t see me. They move along the bank to gain a different angle, and I move with them. After several minutes Sheriff Dan shows up, says something, and they all go away.
Letting loose of Matt’s collar, I throw my arm across his right shoulder and around his chest and jam my hand up under his arm pit. He jerks and screams. In the cold water and through soggy clothes I cannot tell where he was hit, but it is obvious that he is in trouble. I may have saved him from a quick death from a shot to the heart, only to subject him to a long, painful death as he bleeds out someplace else. Maybe the cold water will slow it down and he’ll have a chance. I pull my hand away and he groans.
“Matt!” Sharon yells. She is kneeling on the bank looking for us, and she sounds frantic.
“Matt! Reba! Answer me!”
“Here!” I hook his collar again and kick my way to her.
“Where’s Matt?”
“With me. He’s been shot.” I pull him up close and then Mandi is next to Sharon. They reach down to grab him. “Be careful of his left side, I think. We need to get him into the hot water.”
“What hot water?” Sharon demands.
I point and the two of them carry him there as I drag myself behind. He reacts like I did upon hitting the hot water. “Ease him in,” I advise.
Sharon pulls him out. “It’s too hot.”
“No, it’s not.” I demonstrate by getting in myself, gritting my teeth to the burn. I take his feet and draw him in. In a minute I am cradling his head. Mandi is pushing his hair back and crying. “I’m sorry, Matt. I’m so sorry.”
I want to say, “You should be!” because if she hadn’t of suddenly gone crazy we’d have all made it out of there alive and dry. It’s completely her fault. I hold my tongue.
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