Page 52 of At Midnight Comes the Cry
She turned away and headed back. The snow wasn’t falling fast enough to hope her footprints would be covered by the time the militia search party reached this area, but she figured she could make it evenharder if she carefully chose where her boots came down. She kept her eyes moving, up, to follow Van Alstyne’s blazes marking the path, down, to step close to low-hanging boughs and overgrown brush where snow hadn’t accumulated yet. Up, down. Up, down. The snow was coming faster now, still windless and light, but worrying. She just needed to stay calm and get to where the three of them had camped last night. The chief and Paul had picked it because it was well away from the alarmed perimeter. She didn’t have to make a plan right now. She didn’t need to panic about being stuck alone in the woods in the snow with a bunch of fanatics looking for her.Jesus Christ, girl, get a hold of yourself.
She kept her head up, wiping her face, searching for the double blaze marking the location of the trip wire. There. There? Yes, thank God, no mistaking those two peeled strips of bark. She twisted back to see that her passage was, as she’d hoped, already blurring, then faced forward again, eyes focused on the wire. She never saw the tree root that caught her toecap, twisting her ankle and sending her thudding onto the forest floor, scattering snow and snapping the trip wire.
The shrill alarm she heard was only in her imagination. She didn’t waste time cursing or crying or screaming at her always-bad luck. No hope now they’d waste their time on the inner circle; the militia men would be headed straight for the perimeter. And beyond, which meant last night’s campground was useless—they knew somebody was out here, and they’d keep looking until they found her. She had one sidearm with eight rounds, she was crap in the woods—her only advantage was a few minutes’ head start.
She scrambled up from the snow and took off, no thoughts of hiding her trail now. Snow whipped in her eyes, blinking and watering, as she kept her face tilted up to spot Van Alstyne’s blazes marking the trail to the bluff.
She tried running, but only went a few strides before her boot landed on something slick that turned beneath her. She flailed wildly, grabbing a pine branch and hanging on until she got her balance and righted herself. Walking, then. Fast walking.
The scrub snagged and caught in a way it hadn’t when they’d slowly and cautiously marked this trail yesterday. She pressed on,constantly searching for the next peeled mark, then the next, then the next. She pushed her hat above her ears to better hear what might be coming behind her, but the only sounds were the crunch of her boots and the dried-paper crackle of dead leaves and the barely there breath of snow falling. She almost wished she could hear shouts and footfalls and… and klaxons and dogs baying. The sense they were creeping up on her was like ice water dripping straight down her spine.
She told her imagination to shut the hell up. She wouldnotwaste time looking back—she had seen enough of Hudson’s cross-country races to know where that got you.
The next blaze was different; a straight peeled strip with a bit of bark dug out on either side, roughly cross-shaped. What didthatmean? She bent over, shielding her face for a moment from the relentless snow, trying to slow her racing brain enough to picture the chief making the marks. She could envision him peeling a little bark off a tree, a strip on each side, but they’d been walking a ways before she really noticed. Paul had been trying to download his wilderness skills for her, and she’d been focused on that. So now she remembered everything about finding the North Star and f-all about why this mark didn’t match the rest.
It was reliving that moment that dropped the clue into her head.It’s the first one he made. They had come up the long, steep slope of giant pines and climbed over a stone lip. Van Alstyne had said something about marking the trail while Paul was writing directions on her arm. Which meant the edge was right in front of her, a stone’s throw away.
She strode forward. If she could just get over that bluff and start heading down the mountain, the militia would have at least two directions they’d have to search. When she got to the bottom and turned onto the old creek bed, they’d have to split their search again. Every turning would force more choices for them, and less chance of being caught for her. Of course, there was the matter of her being able to tell east from west when she couldn’t see more than a couple feet—
She stepped onto air.
She screamed, cartwheeling wildly, tipped forward and went down, back leg dragging behind her, thudding, rolling, pounding.She hit a massive tree with the force of a woodsman’s axe, all the breath exploding out of her lungs. She lay there for a time, sucking in air and crying and hurting all over.
Eventually, she rolled to her stomach, got her knees and hands beneath her, and clambered to her feet. Her hat had flown off somewhere along the way, and when she gingerly shrugged free of her backpack, she saw the two side pockets were empty. Her water bottle and the gun, gone.
Shit.
A head start. That’s your only advantage. A head start.
Okay, the gun didn’t matter. The water bottle… one way or another she was headed back to the truck, she could do without for a while. She opened her pack and dug around until her hand closed over a long-sleeve thermal tee. She yanked it out, draped it over her head, and tied it beneath her chin like a Russian doll. A bruised, wet, shaking Russian doll.
The downward slope made her thighs tremble and ache. The feathery pine branches far above screened out the sky; she could see much farther, and in patches the ground beneath her feet was more pine straw than snow. Useless now to count the number of steps Paul had written on her forearm; she staggered slowly down, trusting she would find the stony creek bed sooner or later. At least she wasn’t so blinded by snowfall she’d dive into it headfirst.
The stretch of tall pines and the steep slope ended at the same point, the ground leveling out and turning rockier. Hadley took a few steps back and forth, brushing snow off the stones in places, until she satisfied herself this was their trail. She shoved her parka and sweater up to her elbow.
The snow hitting her bare skin felt like small stings, but Paul’s assurance held true: the directions stood out, bold and black, unsmudged by her misadventures. She took a moment, envisioned the three of them deciding to head up the hill she’d just descended, and turned right, hoping hard she wasn’t blowing it again. If she got lost on the mountain… well, at the very worst, she could start yelling and wait for the bad guys to find her. She trudged along the dry creekbed—not so dry now—her arms stretched out for balance against the uneven footing. She counted steps under her breath.
Despite the twinges and aches from her fall, she was feeling better. Even if some of the militia boys had managed to track her from where she’d set off the alarm, she had definitely widened the gap when she fell halfway down that slope. Ha! Take that, savvy woodsmen!
Crap. She had lost count. She picked up the last number she could recall, added ten, and moved on. As a hat, her thermal shirt left a lot to be desired, and her hair’s growing dampness was one more pain in the ass, along with the literal pain in her tailbone. She wondered if Paul had blazed a trail, or if she could follow the marks left by his uncle’s truck after it had been moved. Should she try to go after him at all, or trust she’d be able to make it all the way back to the chief’s truck? And if she got there, would she be able to get off the damn mountain with all this damn snow piling up?
What was the count again? She stopped for a moment. Christ. She pulled her sleeve up again and stared at the marks, which were beginning to look more and more like Japanese kanji or hieroglyphics. She remembered reading one of the early signs of hypothermia was mental confusion. Though except for her head, she wasn’t feeling too cold. Maybe hypothermia made you warm up somehow? She stripped off her gloves and wiped her face. Put them back on. Added ten to her last remembered count. Stepped forward.
When she entered the glade where they had found Pierre Laduc’s truck, she nearly wept with relief, which was stupid, because as long as she stuck to the creek bed, how could she not have wound up here? Still. She checked her arm, and sure enough, Paul had included the number of steps to the truck. It took her another six strides to get close enough to see through the veil of snow that it was gone. She continued to the spot where the pickup had stood. Any tracks Paul might have left had already been buried, but she could see a raw scrape on one side of a tree heading downslope from the clearing.
Okay. She made it this far. Now she actually had to come up with a plan. Should she play it safe—sort of—and stick with the directions to where she and Paul and the chief had stashed the trucks what felt likea week ago? Keeping in mind they might be snowed in? Or should she try to follow Paul, in the hopes he hadn’t gotten so far ahead since leaving this morning that she’d be unable to catch up? Either way offered lots of uncertainty, topped with a healthy dollop of possibly freezing to death.
If she hadn’t been staring so hard, she would have missed the faint shape, like a collection of smoke and darkness, taking form between the trees. She glanced over her shoulder, in the direction she had come from. It couldn’t be one of them, could it?
“Freeze!”
It was the ranger. The sense of relief made her light-headed for a second. “I’m already freezing, Paul.”
“Hadley?” He sluffed through the snow until they were close enough to see one another clearly. “What the hell are you doing here?” he asked, at the same moment she said, “Why aren’t you off this mountain?”
He shook his head. “I tried to drive out the way Pierre had come in. I don’t know what I was thinking. I might have been able to figure out his route if it had still been clear. Maybe.”
“Where’s the truck?”
