Will and the others had just stepped off the giant flagstones when the baying of stalkers rolled toward them again. The sounded alarmingly close. Elliott had been going at full speed but came to a dead stop, spinning around to face the boys.
"How can I have been so incredibly stupid?" she burst out in a fierce whisper.
"What do you mean?" Chester asked.
"Can't you see it?" she said, her voice cracking with exasperation.
Crowding around her, Will, Chester, and Cal exchanged blank looks.
"They've been harrying us for miles… and I didn't spot it." Elliott gripped her rifle with such aggression that one of her knuckles cracked. "What a fool!"
"Spot what?" Chester said. "What are you talking about?"{
"The pattern… We've run into Limiters at every turn, and we've gone exactly where they wanted us, like hens in a roundup! They've corralled us, time after time."
Will thought she was about to break into tears, she was so livid with herself.
"I've played straight into their hands…" She let the stock of her rifle slide to the ground until it rested in the dirt, then she leaned against the barrel, her head bowed. She was visibly crestfallen, as if all her sense of purpose had suddenly left her. "After everything Drake taught me. He wouldn't—"
"Oh, don't even, we're doing just fine," Cal cut her off, trying to remain calm but sounding far from it. Spent to the point of collapse, he just wanted to get wherever and finally rest. "Can't we just go along there?" he appealed to her, pointing at the perimeter of the Pore.
"No way," Elliott replied wanly.
"Why not?" he pressed her.
She didn't answer for a moment, her eyes on Bartleby. The cat's head was up and his ears cocked alertly; as they watched he raised his head even higher and sniffed. Elliott gave a resigned nod as she finally answered Cal.
"Along there, somewhere, is a bunch of Limiters, all with rifles trained and ready." At the boys's continued refusal to accept what she was saying, she seemed to pull herself together, her eyes flashing angrily at each of them in turn. "And out there" — she jerked her thumb to the left — "will be enough White Necks to fill a stinking church. Why don't you ask your Hunter? He knows."
Cal glanced at his cat and then regarded Elliott dubiously, as Will and Chester took a few paces in the directions she had indicated to scrutinize the barren landscapes.
Pulling down his lens, Will could see a considerable distance up the slope where the menhirs lay in haphazard arrangement. "But… but there's absolutely no one there," he insisted, his voice whining with the implausibility of it all.
"Nothing this way, either," Chester added. "You're getting jumpy, Elliott, that's all. We're fine, really," he pleaded as he and Will wandered back to rejoin her.
"If fine is being shot to shreds, boy, then I'd have to agree with you," Elliott said tersely as she swung up her rifle in a single deft movement, readying it against her shoulder.
52
Drake bombarded Sarah with question after question as they went, grilling her about what she knew. She was finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate and often answered disjointedly, sometimes getting the sequence of event in the wrong order as she told him about Rebecca and the Dominion plot.
Eventually they lapsed into silence, Drake because he was trying to conserve his energy to carry Sarah, and Sarah, because the spells of light-headedness were coming with greater frequency. Like a leaking bucket, she felt the lifeblood seeping form her. The odds were stacked heavily against her ever seeing her two sons again.
"These boots are gonna…" she wheezed as Drake carried her along. The pain from her shattered hip was so vast and all-consuming that at times she saw herself as a cork bobbing on the surface of a shiny red-hot ocean, which, at any moment, might fold over her and suck her into its depths. She fought and fought to stay afloat, to stay focused, but her whole head throbbed with a searing pain from the gunshot wound to her temple, as if her brain had been cleft in two.
"You keep lying when…"
And finally, Drakes chest heaving with the exertion, they came to the gradient down to the Pore.
Despite his fragile cargo, he broke into a run.
A singsong shout rolled over the expanse toward them.
"Oh, Will!"
He went rigid.
"I know you're there, Sunshine!" it called gleefully.
Will recognized the voice without a moment's hesitation. He locked eyes with Elliott.
"Rebecca," he gasped.
For an instant none of them moved.
"I think we're in trouble," Will said helplessly.
Elliott nodded. "You're so right," she agreed, her voice devoid of any intonation.
Will felt exactly like a rabbit caught in the blazing headlights of a huge juggernaut that was thundering down on it.
It was as if, deep in his bones, he'd always known this moment would come, that it had been inevitable right from the start. And yet he'd led all of them straight into it. His befuddled gaze fell on Chester, but his old friend gave him such a glare of bitter recrimination and contempt that Will had to turn away.
"Well, don't just stand there! Take cover!" Elliott barked.
They scattered, Elliott and Chester flinging themselves behind one menhir as Will and Cal took another.
"Oh, Willlllll!" the voice came again, spiked with little-girl sweetness. "Come out, come out, wherever you are!"
"Do nothing," Elliott mouthed at him with a rapid shake of her head.
"Hey, big brother, don't jerk me around!" Rebecca shouted. "Let's have a little chat, for old times' sake."
As Elliott had commanded, Will didn't respond. He stuck an eye around the side of the boulder, but saw only darkness.
Rebecca went on, unamused. "OK, if you're going to play silly games with me, let's get the rules straight."
There was a lull. In the ongoing absence of any reply from Will, Rebecca continued.
"Righty-o… the rules. One… as you seem a little bashful, I'll come down to you. Two… if anyone gets it into their head to take a pop at me, the gloves are off, and this is how it'll go. First I'll let slip the stalkers; my little darlings haven't been fed for days, so, trust me, you really don't want that. Or in the unlikely event the dogs don’t do you in, my squad of crack riflemen will. Last, I've got the Division with some heavy ordnance up here… their guns will smash anything in their path, you included. So, pull any stunts and you'll suffer the consequences. Got that?"
There was another pause, then her voice came, more strident and imperious this time. "Will, I want your word I've got safe passage."
Will quite trying to see up the slope and slumped back behind the huge menhir. He felt that Rebecca would be able to look right through even that, solid rock, as if nothing more than a pane of glass separated them.
A chill sweat trickled down the small of his back, and he found that his hands were shaking. He closed his eyes and, banging his head against the rock behind him, moaned, "No, no, no, no, no."
How could it have gone so wrong? They'd been making good progress toward the Wetlands, with wide open spaces before them and an abundance of routes to choose from. Now they were in this appalling predicament, hemmed in with a colossal black hole behind them. How could it have come to this.
And in Rebecca, they were up against somebody so utterly merciless and brutal; somebody who knew him like the back of his hand.
He shot a glance over to Elliott, but she was remonstrating with Chester. Will couldn't catch anything of what they were saying. As he watched, they appeared to reach agreement and their frantic exchange finished. Elliott quickly shucked off her rucksack and began to delve around in it.