The horses clomped from the sandy bank and sloshed into the shallows, each step sending water through the air. Revel lifted his feet close to Blaze’s neck to keep his boots out of the water. Bailey eyed his posture and then did the same.
When it came to horses, she took his advice and copied his every move. No one had ever wanted to learn something from him before. He hadn’t realized he knew anything worth teaching. In less than a week, she’d made him feel like he could make a difference to someone in a good way. If for that reason only, he would make this trip a thousand times over.
When they reached midstream, the sandy riverbed became shallow, just as Tim had told them it would. The horses walked through the knee-deep water. There was no hushing the splash of the horses’ graceless gait. If whatever there was to fear wanted silence, they were asking for trouble.
Connor’s horse climbed up the bank first, and then Levi. The men were halfway to Tim’s campsite when Revel and Blaze left the river. He guided his wet horse to follow the others, but Bailey stopped Gee on the bank. She leaned forward and gave her horse’s neck a few slow strokes. Even with a thick winter coat on, Bailey’s chest rose and fell with heavy breaths.
Revel turned Blaze so he could go back and check on Bailey. “Are you all right?”
She sat up straight and squared her shoulders. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
He whispered, “That might be the first time I’ve seen you scared.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Yes, you were.” He almost grinned at her to let her know he was half kidding, but he couldn’t manage a smile.
She blew out a shaky breath through pursed lips. “Okay, so I was totally freaked out. For Gee’s sake, of course.”
“Of course.” He lifted his chin at the campsite. “Come on.”
She clicked at Gee and aimed her at the dirty aircraft debris Tim had used for shelter. Once close, they looped their horse’s reins over a tree branch and inspected the campsite. The canopy was longer than Revel had first thought. Connor lifted the narrowest end off the ground with one hand.
Revel couldn’t resist touching the strange synthetic material. It was lightweight but solid. “This is what protected you when you flew your aircraft?”
“Yep.” Connor used a broken branch to prop up the canopy. “Tim left in a hurry.” He pointed at a stubby orange gun. “And used up all his flares.”
Revel stooped to look inside the coffin-sized shelter. A thin sheet of crackly blue material stuck to the ground. Atop it, a scattering of miniature camping supplies and personal items. He picked up a white tube with the words tooth paste printed beneath a picture of a sparkling ocean wave.
Nothing from the outside world made sense to him.
He returned the tube to its place on the blue material, and as he stood, marks in the soil caught his attention. Several shoe prints dotted the earth in all directions and a strange animal print indented the ground over many of them.
He knelt by the deepest print and hovered his hand in the center of it to gauge its size. His whole hand fit into the center of the print. With three indelible toe marks, each ending in a deep claw depression, the print wasn’t one he recognized. “Look at this!”
The others pressed in close. Bailey squatted beside him and traced a similar print. She looked at Connor. “Are there emus in the Land?”
“No.” Connor’s brow furrowed and he looked at Levi. “Any ideas?”
While Levi puckered his lips in thought, Revel nudged Bailey. “How heavy are emus?”
“About one hundred thirty pounds.”
“How much do you think Tim weighs?”
She pulled her hand off the print and brushed her fingers together. “I don’t know. He hasn’t eaten anything but fish for weeks.”
The other men were now listening to them. Revel asked, “More than one-thirty?” When she nodded, he pointed at the print. “This track is deeper than Tim’s shoe print. Much deeper.”
Everyone was looking at Bailey now, who had more biology knowledge than Revel could pronounce.
Connor asked, “Ostrich maybe?”
Bailey traced the print again. “Couldn’t be. They only leave a two-toed print. This animal has three wide toes and a small back toe, so it isn’t a cassowary either.” She pointed at a little triangle behind the heel of the print. “Looks like a moa-type bird. They can be over ten feet tall, so if it felt threatened it could gut a man with one kick.”
Connor shook his head. “Moa? Never heard of it.”
“They’ve been extinct for hundreds of years.” She stood slowly and followed the dizzying blend of animal and boot prints toward the steep incline of the mountainside. “Look!”
Revel hurried to her with Connor and Levi close behind him. “What is it?” he asked in a quiet voice, hoping she would lower her volume too.
She pointed at the ground between a scraggly evergreen tree and a rock wall. “Whatever that massive bird was, it’s made a path up the mountain.” She hiked a few paces up the misty path. “More boot prints. It chased Tim up there. That’s what he was scared of. And he used up his flares last night trying to scare it off. It’s probably what made that creepy sound we heard earlier.”
Revel exchanged glances with the other men. Bailey didn’t stick around to get their opinions. She took off hiking up the narrow path, following the boot prints with determined energy.
Revel stayed as close to her as he could, but her agile steps and athletic verve increased her lead. His breath deepened and a strange odor filled his nostrils. Something wasn’t right on this side of the river.
The path veered sharply around the few evergreens that grew from the mountain’s rocky crags, and the boot prints became less visible the higher they climbed. Bailey’s quick footsteps barely crackled the twigs ahead of him, but Connor and Levi’s boots made thick stomps not far behind.
The fog closed the path in like a walled corridor. Bailey disappeared higher up the mountain and into the cloud. Revel’s breath shortened when he lost sight of the woman he was supposed to protect.
Chapter Nine
Bailey’s leg muscles warmed as she ascended the mountain. The massive bird that appeared to have chased Tim from the campsite had carved a grooved path in the ground with its heavy stomp and sharp claws, leaving no moss in an eighteen-inch-wide dirt trail that twisted between fir trees and around bulbous stones up the mountainside. A sharp odor filled the air, stinging Bailey’s sinuses. No matter how thick the fog or how many times the fern-lined path seemed to cross itself or how badly the mountains smelled, Bailey would not stop until she discovered where the trail led, for that was where she would find Tim.
About halfway up the mountain, the path’s dirt became drier and rockier, showing fewer tracks. Tim’s boot outlines were no longer complete. Every few yards, Bailey saw the vague curve made by his shoe sole, which was enough to keep her charging upward.
Her breath grew heavier the harder she pushed her tired body up the steep incline. She hadn’t slept enough—the good, deep kind of sleep that repaired cells and cleared thoughts—during this trip. Now, as she tried to hike and search and listen, she struggled to visualize her biology textbooks and determine exactly what animal had left the giant prints.
The world’s largest bird species like ostriches and emus were as distinct in anatomical features as they were in geographical habitats. Since the Land was isolated, there was no logical reason to believe the bird she was tracking was any known species. Still, most of the giant bird species she remembered learning about had a few behavioral traits in common. They were usually curious, cautious, and timid; aggressive when defending territory; deadly when feeling threatened.
The path intersected with another identically formed path, and Bailey paused. The tip of a fern tickled a sliver of skin it found between the bottom of her jeans and the top of her hiking shoes. She kicked it away and looked back down the path.
The men weren’t far behind her. She couldn’t see them through the fo
g. They probably wanted her to slow down, but they dared not yell for her since Tim had warned them to be quiet.
The giant bird must have been checking him out for the past couple of nights. He’d acted scared of something on their last few calls but hadn’t known what it was—or so he’d said. If he had been hiding under the filthy jet canopy when the creature approached, he wouldn’t have been able to see it clearly through the dirt, or maybe it hadn’t come close enough for him to get a good look at it without his glasses. Or maybe after weeks alone, he’d thought what he saw was a hallucination.
It wasn’t. This animal was real. And huge.
The guys’ boot steps grew closer. She wanted to be the first to find Tim. Her face should be the first he saw in the Land. She didn’t have a good reason why but only the desire, and that was enough to drive her onward. She gave the cross path a quick check for shoe prints and saw none. Tim hadn’t turned there, so she kept hiking straight up the mountain.
The higher she climbed, the less fern surrounded the path. The dirt trail led her between boulders and scraggly evergreen trees that grew out of the crevices. The foul odor grew stronger the closer she got to the summit, and the fog began to thin. Without it the morning sunlight brightened the path and helped her scan for tracks as she hiked.
After a few minutes of climbing but not seeing any boot prints, she slowed her pace to look as far in every direction as she could see. This area of the Land wasn’t like the rest, but the difference wasn’t in the flora and scent as much as it was in spirit. And it wasn’t simply the threat of being in an unknown creature’s territory. Just when she’d thought the Land was the only good place left on earth, the sinister presence in the mountain region proved that in a fallen creation, evil was everywhere.
“I need you, God,” she whispered to the only power strong enough to hear her no matter where she was.
The path dwindled as rock overtook the ground, but she kept going in the same direction. Her hike steepened to its sharpest degree yet. She used her hands to balance as she climbed over a smooth rocky edge. At last, she broke through the fog and stood in the sunshine. The bright morning rays made her squint while she rested her hands on her knees and caught her breath.
Even in the wind the air smelled like a burning tire mixed with rancid meat. She turned to look down from the mountain’s windy summit toward the way she’d climbed. The top of the fog blocked all view of the path, the men, and the river. The fog was thin enough on the other side of the river to see the rolling hills beyond the valley and the silvery blur of the gray leaf forest to the west. The Inn at Falls Creek was too far to the north and east to see from here. Could she have seen this summit—the most southerly mountain peak in the Land—from her cozy second floor room at the inn?
She wished she were in that room now as she glanced at the ground around her feet. It was all rock and no soil with no fern or paths or prints. The giant bird must not come up here, nor had Tim. She drew her radio out of her pocket. “Tim? It’s Bailey. We found your campsite and followed your footprints up the mountain. Tim?”
Sweat soaked her collar. She released the talk button on the radio and unbuttoned her coat to let the cool air hit her neck while awaiting his response. His radio wasn’t at the campsite, so he must have it with him. Why wasn’t he answering? Had the creature gutted him and fed his flesh to its young? Had he found a place to hide and was trying to stay quiet so the giant bird would go away?
As she closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sky to pray for help, Revel climbed over the edge of the summit rock. He gave her an odd look, then bent down and offered a wrist lock to Connor, who didn’t need it.
Finally, Levi surfaced from the fog too. “What’s that smell?”
The three men met her in the middle of the summit. She expected one of them to harangue her for taking off without them, but no one did. As she raised the radio to her lips to call Tim once more, Revel pulled on her sleeve.
She turned to see him, Connor, and Levi all standing motionless, mouths parted as they stared out to the west. Since reaching the mountaintop, she’d only wanted to look back at the Land, but the men’s expressions made her look west too.
The vast ocean stretched to both the southern and western horizons. More mountain peaks rose to the north, higher and darker than the one they were standing upon, but the mountains’ western bases were also flanked by the dark, flat waters of the cold sea.
Revel spoke with a disappointed edge to his voice. “Nothing. There’s nothing on the other side of the mountains. Ever since I was a boy, I imagined there were more villages over the mountains or more wilderness or an ancient kingdom still functioning as if time had frozen a thousand years before Christ. But there is nothing. The Land’s western edge rises into peaks then drops into the ocean.”
She rubbed his shoulder the way she used to console defeated teammates. Neither of them had found what they came up here for, but she wasn’t done searching for Tim. She would find her father.
A crisp, salty breeze blew up from the ocean below, drawing her gaze down the western mountainside, which was far steeper than the side she had hiked up. As the wind blew up the western side of the mountain, the noxious burning-rubber smell came with it. Thick vines unlike any she’d seen covered its rocky surface from the edge of the summit all the way down the almost vertical drop to the boulders where waves crashed far below. “How high up are we?”
Revel and Levi remained silent, letting the former pilot answer.
“This peak is approximately twelve hundred feet in elevation,” Connor said.
She glanced behind her at the fog. “It didn’t seem that high of a climb. Only took about half an hour to get up here.”
Connor checked his pocket watch. “Forty-two minutes. This peak is lower than the others to the north. And the foothills grew in elevation the farther west we rode, so our ascent was probably about eight hundred feet. But you’re right. It seemed too easy to get up here considering the folklore.” He stared down at where the mountain met the ocean and opened his palm in front of her. “Give me your binoculars.”
She pulled them out of her backpack and followed his line-of-sight to a narrow strip of beach far below. Strange shapes jutted from the black sand, forming fence-like shadows, some in semicircles, some in straight lines. A separate arrangement of debris marred the beach every few hundred feet. “What are those?”
Connor blew out a long breath and lowered the binoculars. “It’s a ship graveyard.” He passed the binoculars to Levi. “The hull remnants at twelve o’clock look like part of a Portuguese caravel. Probably fifteenth or sixteenth century. The steel hull farther north is from a World War II–era PT boat. You can still see the Mark Eight torpedo on the deck.”
After Levi studied the wreckage, he handed the binoculars to Revel. While he was surveying the ancient ships, a thought occurred to Bailey. She turned to Connor. “Justin Mercer told me the Land is hidden because of atmospheric reasons. Sophia showed me how the gray leaf vapor somehow obscures everything on the other side of it. Which do you think hides the Land?”
“Until we have more information, I believe it’s a combination of the atmospheric factors and the gray leaf molecules in the air.”
She motioned toward the multiple piles of half-buried ship debris below. “So if the Land is invisible from outside of its mysterious bubble, why did all of these ships come here?”
Connor shook his head. “They didn’t come here. They wrecked here. Just like the Providence ran into the sandbar off the coast of Good Springs in the eighteen sixties. Which means Good Springs isn’t the only possible point of entry for the Land.” He looked at Levi. “This changes things.”
Levi nodded once. “We need security teams outside the villages as well.”
Revel handed Bailey the binoculars. As she raised them to scan the ship graveyard, the horrific animal scream pierced the fog on the eastern side of the mountain. She didn’t flinch this time but only slid the binoculars into her
backpack and tried the radio again. “Tim? Can you hear me?”
She let the static buzz before she stashed the two-way in her coat pocket with it still on. “He must have turned off his radio because he thinks noise attracts the bird.”
“Or birds,” Levi mumbled.
Connor raised a dark eyebrow. “Maybe it does.”
She reached into her pocket to decrease the speaker’s volume, but kept it loud enough to hear if Tim called her. As she turned away from the ocean view to go back down and search for Tim, she gave the western slope one last look. The vine-covered rock face of the mountain between the beach and the summit would be a nearly impossible climb if someone survived being shipwrecked there.
While she gazed down, something moved in the vines below. She inched closer to the edge and rested her hands on her knees to balance as she tried to see what had moved. The vines were thicker in diameter farther down the mountain, some as big as tree trunks. Their leaves were wide and flat with twining petioles, but unlike any plant she’d studied.
Even though the sunlight was bright, the western side of the mountain was still shadowed too much for her to inspect the unusual plants how she would have liked. She raised the binoculars to get a better look and inched closer to the cliff.
Revel cautioned, “Bailey, you’re dangerously close to the edge.”
Her footing was solid. “No, I’m not.” She scanned the portion of the mountainside where she had seen movement.
Nothing but vine and rock. “Could Tim be down there?”
No one answered for a long moment. Finally, Revel said, “Surely not. We lost his boot prints before the summit. He turned somewhere farther down and didn’t come up here.”
Detecting doubt in Revel’s voice, Bailey lowered the binoculars to give him a quick glance. As she did, an arm-thick section of the unusual vine darted over the summit’s edge. It encircled her ankle above her hiking shoe like a constrictor and yanked hard enough to drop her onto her backside.
Air whooshed from her trained lungs the instant before she hit the ground, and her hands smacked the rock to blunt the shock of the fall. Her muscles responded from memory before her mind could think, but the vine dragged her to the edge.
Uncharted Destiny (The Uncharted Series Book 7) Page 11