He’d made good time at first, even though the narrow path started out nearly vertical and mostly mud. His boots were broken in and his legs didn’t mind the workout. He’d been running a rugged up-and-down trail along the Milwaukee River for years, a ten-mile loop over broken terrain with a forty-pound steel plate in his ruck. His load today wasn’t hardly heavy at all, mostly rifle and ammunition.
His concern was the dude behind him.
The path wasn’t much of a path, and once you passed the little string of primitive campsites, there was no good reason for anyone to be out here. The dude definitely had some skills. Lewis had sped up and slowed down and doubled back and all the rest, lost some time along the way, but had only seen the dude twice, both times on long doglegs wrapping broad inside curves where the mountain folded back on itself, and even those were just glimpses of something moving. Lewis heard him maybe four times, each time through some oddball trick of alpine acoustics, on those wide stretches of scree where the loose rocks rattled underfoot and echoed off those high granite walls.
Otherwise the dude might have been a ghost.
By midafternoon, Lewis figured he was just gonna have to outhump the motherfucker. So he hit the gas and hauled ass.
Lewis was city born and bred, didn’t come up with this wilderness bullshit. He got a fair amount of practice during two long deployments as a PFC in the Afghan boonies, which was actually a lot like this country, steep and bony and mostly dry. Long views over rocks and scrub to improvised enemy firing positions that changed every five minutes. He’d liked it when nobody was shooting at him, but that wasn’t often, not where he’d been. His army time taught him mountains and tactics and weapons, which came in handy there and afterward. He’d also learned, if he hadn’t known it already, that nobody was gonna look out for him but his own self. He’d taken that knowledge back to the world and created some opportunities that might not occur to just any old soul. The work wasn’t strictly legal but did give a particular kind of satisfaction and didn’t hurt no civilians, neither. Might even help some, you took a certain point of view.
Then he’d met Peter and they’d run into that mess in Milwaukee and everything changed. Dinah and her kids, something Lewis had never imagined possible. He was grateful as hell, but it was a shock, this new life. Making lunches and meeting teachers and getting kids to school and sports practice. Had its rewards for sure but excitement wasn’t exactly one of them. Not like he was used to.
He’d thought of this trip like a booster shot, giving him a dose to see him through the next year. When things were wrapped up here, he told himself, he’d be ready to go back to Dinah and the boys and domestic tranquillity. That was what he told himself, anyway.
By late afternoon, Lewis hadn’t seen or heard from the ghost in two hours. He munched handfuls of trail mix as he walked a long upward traverse, then over a broad saddle and up again, eyes and ears open ahead and behind. He was supposed to meet Peter’s friends in the upper snowfields by nightfall so they could get an early start at that pass where the river dropped a couple thousand feet. He could see the waterfall on the map, but nothing that looked like a way down. June had said she’d done it, but that was almost fifteen years gone. Rockfall, avalanche, the workings of ice and snow, no way to know what it looked like now.
Things could change fast in the mountains.
His path had thinned down to nearly nothing when it leaped upward again in a long series of switchbacks. At the top he stopped for a drink of water and could finally see the figure clearly below him, head down, walking steadily without pause or hesitation.
Then he knew. Shit, the dude was no ghost. And he was keeping up.
He could have been some local, out for a hike. Mailman on his day off. It was possible.
Not likely. But possible.
Lewis took out his new Nikons and glassed the man. It was hard to be certain through the screen of trees, but he thought he saw a black barrel sticking out of the top of the man’s pack.
Lewis didn’t like that.
He was locked and loaded, the rifle assembled and strapped to his ruck but easy enough to get at. He could fire from here and likely kill the man, remove that particular problem.
Or maybe kill some dumbass civilian out hunting squirrels for his stewpot.
Maybe also miss his shot, which was possible even for Lewis, firing downhill with an unfamiliar weapon, and start some run-and-gun bullshit. Have to duck and dive and generally fuck up his timetable.
Either way, not worth it. Not yet.