“Are you wearing a gun?”
“Of course.”
“Can you shoot it? I mean, can you shoot it well? Anybody can pull a trigger.”
“I can shoot it well, Mrs. Serbin.”
“You may need to. If we see them…they aren’t the kind you run from. They’re the kind you have to kill.”
“It would be my pleasure,” Jamie Bennett said. “You find them for me, and I’ll kill them. You’re right-running and hiding doesn’t work. I’m done trying that approach.”
The words sounded right, bold and brave, and maybe Jamie believed them. Allison wanted to as well, but she couldn’t. If she saw them again, she knew she wouldn’t be walking away. Not twice.
Survivor-mentality requirement: gratitude.
You had to find small things to be grateful for even in the worst of circumstances, because that large thing-the simple, obvious statement of I am alive-didn’t always win the day; there were times when you did not want to be alive. As the three of them worked their way up the base of Republic Peak, Ethan made a point to be grateful to whoever had passed this way for the tracks they had left. The trail led up the slope like a divine path. It was not hard to follow, even in the night-when people hiked over a scree, they caused rock displacement with virtually every step, exposing the dark, damp undersides of stones; there were long gashes where feet had slipped, and the places of dirt between rocks trapped clear prints. One of the hikers was outfitted with poles, and those punched holes in the dirt here and there above the footprints.
Because it was convincing enough for the Blackwells, because they did not know Connor’s boots, they were content to follow it. Ethan was able to move faster, killing time no longer a problem, because he was eating up plenty of it by chasing a false path.
The moon was entirely hidden now, and most of the stars. The famous Big Sky vanishing to blackness as the storm front swept ahead. They were two-thirds of the way up the slope when Ethan saw a strike near Amphitheater, the next peak west. White light like a flicking snake’s tongue. Ahead of them there was a sound like hard rain, and he believed it was hailing just a bit higher up.
“I know pace is an issue to you,” he said. “But we’re going to be at high risk up there right now. High risk. Twenty minutes of pause should be enough. Let that lightning go over, and then we carry on. But if we keep climbing, then-”
“We’ll keep moving,” Jack Blackwell said. His breathing was heavy now, ragged even, and Ethan savored the sound, enjoying every rasp of pain.
“Here’s the thing,” he said. “They won’t be moving. They’ll do the sane thing and take shelter. I suspect they have already. We won’t be losing time.”
In truth, he was growing damned curious about who these two hikers were and where in the hell they had camped. He knew what the prints told him-two women, most likely, or one woman and one boy or a very small man, but not Connor Reynolds. He couldn’t make sense of the route, couldn’t see what the average backpacker might hope to achieve by taking it. If the goal was Republic Peak or Amphitheater, there were better ways in. It was a curious trail.
“What do you think the odds of Ethan’s being struck by lightning are?” Jack Blackwell said.
“Slim. It’s a possibility in our current environment, certainly, but still slim.”
“And his odds of dying if he decides to delay us needlessly?”
“Oh, I’d say they are substantial. I’d also point out that the high pressure is moving away from those peaks. I suspect Ethan knows this, so the storm might be a bit of an excuse.”
Ethan paused. It was a fascinating observation, for two reasons. First because Patrick had made it, and there weren’t many men who could make such a proclamation about a high-pressure system while on the move through the wilderness, and second because he was wrong.
It was called Buys Ballot’s law. In the Northern Hemisphere, if you stand with your back to the prevailing wind, the area of low pressure will be on your left and the area of high pressure on your right, because wind travels counterclockwise inward toward a center of low pressure. The directions are reversed in the Southern Hemisphere. Patrick had made the observation but drawn the wrong conclusion.
A mistake, Ethan wondered, or are you not from this place?
He thought then of their voices, that oh-so-careful speech. Flawless English, but too clean of accent. They seemed to come from nowhere.
Southern Hemisphere, he thought. You are far from home, boys.
Patrick’s world was backward here. His observation about the storm might not cost him-or it might cost them all-but this was good to know. If Ethan was right, this was very good to know.
“My thoughts exactly,” Jack was saying. “Do we take a vote, then, or do we leave it up to Ethan? I’m a firm believer in democratic process.”
“This I know.”
“But at some points, clear leadership must be taken. For the greater good. So perhaps-”
Ethan began to move before they reached a decision. Up ahead, the clattering on the rocks was louder, and he felt the first stinging lashes on his own skin. Definitely hail. He watched ice gather and melt in the beam of his flashlight.
The men followed him, and up on the rock scree, everyone was silent; gasping breaths filled the night amid the sounds of the hail on the rocks and the wind whistling and moaning around them and the oncoming thunder. The world was lit time and time again by brilliant flashes. At the top of the rock scree, on the plateau at the base of Republic Peak, the hail was gone and all that remained was the lightning and whatever chased after it.
Ethan’s mind was no longer on the storm, though. It was on those hikers ahead of them. The false path, the decoys. Their behavior was making less and less sense to him the higher they climbed. The prints up here were fresh. Not just recent, not just left within the day, but left within maybe an hour.
The grass held depressions from where two people had removed packs and sat on the ground. Those depressions were dryer than the rest of the plateau. That meant that their bodies had acted as shelters from the hail. That meant they were not far ahead at all.
Who was willing to hike toward a mountain peak in the dark and during a hailstorm? Who was willing to climb the ladder to meet lightning?
It’s not him, Ethan insisted to himself. I know that boy’s boots, and these tracks do not belong to him.
Survivor-mentality requirement: an open mind. Rigidity was the door to death.
Ethan looked at the depressions again as the plateau was illuminated in a series of four rapid-fire strobes of lightning, and he saw his mistake. He’d underestimated them.
He’s wearing new shoes. He’s wearing a pair of her shoes.
It was a wise precaution and a handsome trick, and if they’d been chased by anyone else, it would have worked, or at least bought them some time. A good tracker would have seen those prints and disregarded them, knowing they were not the same as the boy’s.
The only problem was that Ethan and the boy were both trying to be clever. The boy was trying to protect himself by changing his trail, and Ethan was trying to protect him by chasing a trail he knew wasn’t the boy’s. Now he’d not only found the boy’s trail for his killers but closed the gap between them.
35
It was the humming that finally shook Hannah free from the fog, a loud electric buzz, like an alarm clock, that called her grudgingly into reality.