“It might be all we need,” I finished for him. “I’m with you, Marlon.”
I pulled out the map Angie and I had been using before we left his house and scanned it, trying to pinpoint where I thought we were and where I knew we were heading. Then I held it up for him to see, my finger on a spot about two miles in front of us.
“And it looks like we’ve got a river due east of us by about two miles. Right between us and Ellis Woods.”
He crawled over and gazed at the map, then shook his head slightly. “I know the river you’re talking about, but you’ve given us better position than we actually have. It’s more like four miles east of here.” Looking up, he met my eyes. “I don’t think we’ll get there before nightfall, and we’ll be asking for trouble if we try to do it at night. We’re going to have to shelter in the woods for the night. Try the river in the morning.”
I stared at him without answering, digesting that bit of news. Four miles away wasn’t the end of the world, but he was right; we weren’t going to make it there by nightfall. Not at the rate we were taking to move through the snow.
Which meant we’d be spending the night out here in the woods. With a wounded woman and a vengeful outlaw after us.
Two hours later, my watch—which was tracking our steps—told me that we’d traveled another 1.2 miles. We were heading due east, courtesy of the compass Marlon carried with him, and we’d found the journey more difficult than it had been in the flat prairie, but not impossible. The trail we’d followed had wound through the woods with enough variety to keep us hidden from most anyone unless they were directly behind us. Thank God.
Unfortunately, the snow had also been deep enough in the woods that it had made pulling the sled even more difficult. The occasional branch across the trail, and the underbrush we had to break through, had made it even more difficult.
And I could see through the spaces in the canopy above us that the sun had reached well beyond the peak of its journey and was moving quickly toward its sleeping place below the horizon. A glance at my watch told me that it was two in the afternoon, and a quick check of my own personal knowledge told me that sunset would be at five. Three hours. Three hours to travel three more miles and try to cross a river with a wounded wife.
It wasn’t going to happen. We would have been absolutely insane to have tried it. Suicidal. Not even the idea of Randall showing up in the middle of the night was more dangerous than trying to cross a river—which may or may not be frozen, this early in the season—with a wounded woman, in failing daylight.
Marlon, who had been taking a turn at pulling the sled, stopped then and turned toward me, unwrapping the ropes from around his chest.
“Your turn,” he said, huffing. “I’m getting too close to exhaustion to keep pulling.”
I didn’t argue with him. He’d already done more than his fair share. When I moved to take the ropes, though, he put a hand on my arm.
“Nightfall is going to be on us within three hours,” he said, his voice quiet enough that I didn’t think Angie would be able to hear it.
She’d spent most of the journey quiet, and though I hoped that it meant she was resting, I thought it far more likely that she was coming up with Plans A, B, and C—which she would no doubt present to us the moment Marlon and I ran out of ideas for how to get us safely into Ellis Woods.
“I don’t think we can go on much longer,” Marlon continued. “Night is going to fall more quickly down here under the trees than it does out in the open.”
“And we only have two flashlights,” I continued. “Those aren’t going to do us much good against the darkness. Or anything that comes after us.”
He jerked his head in a nod. “Best we start looking for shelter now, rather than later,” he replied.
That was fine by me. “Spend the next three hours with our eyes open so we don’t have to do something in a hurry in Hour Four.”
He squeezed my arm, his eyes flashing his appreciation. “In another world, another life, John, I would think you were my son.”
His words hit me right in the stomach. My own father had been gone so long that I barely even remembered him—except for the night he left, leaving my mother sobbing on the floor as I hid in my room, watching him stride through the door, suitcase in hand, never to return.
I’d never known a real father, but if I’d had one…
“I would have been lucky to call you Dad,” I told him, giving him a rough grin. “But let’s leave the imaginary life for later, eh? We have miles to go and shelter to find.”
He barked out a laugh at that, then tossed me the ropes to the sled and turned back to the trail, his eyes scanning it for ideas. I could almost see the wheels turning in his head already as he searched his memory banks for anything that could be of use to us here.
I hoped he came up with something good. I’d lost several steps since my time in the military, and I was starting to reach exhaustion more quickly than I liked. And the last thing I wanted was to be completely tapped out when Randall and his cousins found us.
We found shelter about an hour later. Dusk was just starting to fall under the trees, their shadows stretching longer and longer into the snow, and we were reaching that time of day when everything started to look distinctly flat. Things that you’d thought were many feet away were actually underfoot, and things that you thought were close—like the next tree—ended up being some distance from you.
It was both my most favorite time of day and my least favorite time. When we were out in the open, this part of the day, when the sun was starting to slip quietly toward the horizon and the light started to grow dim, was when I felt I could finally start to breathe again. The day was finishing, along with all its pressures, and it felt like the entire world was taking a breath before it went to sleep. It was the point I’d always looked forward to when I was in Afghanistan—that moment when everything was still and quiet, after all the action of the day and before night missions began—and that had never truly left me.
Out here in the wilds, though, with an unknown man after us and an array of dangerous situations ahead of us, I didn’t feel any of that relief. Instead, I felt only the pressure of needing to find shelter as quickly as possible.
When Marlon suddenly put his finger up in the air and muttered an “Aha!” I was therefore immediately relieved.
He made a sharp turn to the left and took us forward about one hundred feet. It was off our path and was taking us away from our goal of the river, but it didn’t take long before I saw what he’d realized. We crept quickly through the woods, thinner here than they had been, and within minutes we were looking up at a steep rock face, rising suddenly from the ground of the forest.
And in that rock face, I could already see, were a number of caves and crevices.
“Marlon, you genius,” I breathed.
He gave me a glance from the corner of his eye, and I could see how pleased he was with the praise.
“Hardly. But observant. And I tend to plan ahead. I marked this area in my mind some time ago, purely because it offered so much shelter. I’m ashamed that I didn’t think of it sooner. But you know what they say…”
“Better late than never,” I finished. “At least most of the time. And in this case, it’s very well done. These will be perfect for the night. And in the morning—”