She smiled back, a quick, timid twitch of her lips. Monks seized the moment.
“Here, this will jump-start us,” he said. He reached for his jacket and pulled out the little jar of meth. Mixing speed and hypothermia might be a bad idea, but at this point, he was willing to risk anything. Marguerite was slow to accept it, maybe sensing that it would goad her out of her passivity. But then she unscrewed the lid and bent over it to inhale.
Monks did the same. It occurred to him that this was, in all probability, the only time in his life that he would crouch naked beside a fire in the wilderness with a lovely young woman, doing illegal drugs.
He pressed his palm against her cheek.
“Now come on,” he said. “The kid needs you.”
She wavered for another several seconds, but then nodded. She set Mandrake down and started pulling on her clothes.
Monks closed his eyes in relief.
21
His feet hurt like hell. The wet, loose pull-on boots had chewed them into blistered lumps of flesh that he picked up and put down, one in front of the other, in a dull, trudging cadence without end. Marguerite slogged along silently ahead of him, so he could keep her in sight in case she weakened again. The snow had stopped, and what was on the ground had lightened to a film of slush, but the terrain was still rough. At least he could be sure now that they were traveling in a straight line.
It was just after noon. He estimated that they had made it twenty-some miles from camp, now descending a series of ridgebacks in a direction he was pretty sure was west, where Marguerite thought the nearest highway lay. The clouds had lifted enough for him to navigate by a general sense of the terrain sloping down toward the ocean, moss growing on the north side of the trees, and an occasional glimpse of faint lighter streaks behind the dark shifting tapestry of gray, indicating the path of the sun. But they still obscured any long-range vistas, and they presented the kind of threat that kept experienced outdoors people uneasy. He looked up constantly, trying to gauge what was coming. It seemed to him that the clouds were thickening again, suggesting another storm moving in. Often, several of them lined up out on the Pacific like batters in a dugout, waiting for their turn to step up to the plate and lash the countryside.
Monks knew that both he and Marguerite were getting close to collapsing again. Even if they could find shelter, he wasn’t at all sure that they would recover this time. But there had to be a road before too much longer.
There was nothing to do but keep lifting up those feet and putting them down, one after the other.
Marguerite stopped abruptly, raising her head.
Monks had heard it, too-a human voice.
He stood motionless, listening hard, trying to convince himself that the sound had been a tree branch snapping under its snow load, or a raven’s caw.
But he knew the truth, and a few seconds later, it came again-a man’s voice, shouting, as if calling to someone else.
Marguerite swung to face him. Her eyes burned with fear and accusation.
“I told you he’d find us!” she half-sobbed.
Monks shushed her angrily with a wave of his hand, and stepped close.
“Come on, keep moving,” he whispered hoarsely. “Stay in the trees. And stay quiet.”
She turned and hurried on. Monks followed, with disbelief washing through him-along with rage, the feeling of being cheated. He had started to believe that whatever their other troubles might be, they had finally eluded pursuit, that last night’s heavy snow and today’s melting had wiped out their trail. He didn’t believe for a second that Freeboot had zeroed in on Marguerite’s thoughts, like a radar beam. The maquis had probably spotted some tracks from a vantage point, as he had feared, and found enough vestiges to follow.
In this vast rugged landscape, it still seemed astounding.
There were at least two voices, maybe more. They continued to sound at intervals, no doubt following the clear line of tracks in the snow. The distance was hard to gauge-at least a mile, he guessed, and hoped to Christ farther. In a silent alpine forest, voices could carry a very long way.
But one thing became clear within the next hour. They were gaining, fast.
Monks turned his head, listening over his own panting breath. He was sure that the pursuers were within a half-mile by now.
When he turned back, he saw that Marguerite had stopped on top of a rise and was pointing a shaking finger ahead, like an ancient explorer, long lost at sea, finally sighting land.
He hurried to her side. Below, cutting across the mountain bases, lay the dark curving scar of a paved road.
He put his hands on his hips and bent over, breathing deeply, trying to relax and think. The distance to the road looked like about two miles. Staying on the ridgeline, they could make it in an hour. But that terrain was wide open, and a half-mile was easy shooting range for high-powered rifles.
The only other way that he could see was to drop down into the ravine that lay to the north-just the kind of situation that he had been trying to avoid. It would be choked with undergrowth and deadfall, and he could see the dark glimmer of a stream at its bottom, water that might be too deep and fast to cross. But the thick brush would provide cover, and without that, they were dead.
“We’re going to make it,” he told Marguerite, gripping her shoulders. “I’ll go first now. Stay close.”
Then a gunshot cracked through the silent air, the sharp echoing boom of a large-caliber rifle. A man yelled something. Monks could not make out the words, but the tone was menacing, and Marguerite flinched.
Without doubt, the voice was Freeboot’s.
The ravine’s bottom narrowed into a gorge with sheer granite walls twenty feet deep. What was probably a lazy stream or even dry in most weather had become a small river, tossing dead branches along its frothing course at the speed of a man trotting.
Monks stared down at it. He had led them into the trap he had been fearing. Unless they found a ford close by, there was no way they were going to get across this one.
The gunshots behind them were frequent now, some of them full automatic bursts, crashing through the thick tree branches. None of them were coming close-Monks didn’t think that the maquis had seen them yet. The rifle fire was intended to scare them into giving up, and Marguerite looked ready to. She was lagging behind, forcing him to wait for her and hiss encouragement. Physically, they were both on their last legs. But he knew that she was giving in to Freeboot’s imagined psychic power, too.
Monks bulled his way through the brush along the gorge’s narrow granite shelf, looking back every few seconds to make sure that she was still behind him, snapping branches with his hands to clear them out of her way. They passed one place where a section of bank had caved into the stream to form a stepping-stone bridge. It invited tormentingly, but extended only halfway across.
After fifteen minutes, he realized that some of the gunshots were coming from ahead of them, not behind. The maquis had fanned out on the ridge above. When they started dropping down into the ravine, it would be like a closing fist, with their prey in the middle of it.
He turned back, gripping Marguerite by the wrist and yanking her along to the rockslide they had passed. The half-dozen boulders that stuck up above the water’s writhing surface would get them halfway. That was the best they were going to find. He pulled her close and clamped his arm around her waist. This time he couldn’t trust her to hang on to his belt.