“Right,” she said. “I’ll go first.”
She ran a bight through her figure 8, passed it under the harness point, then clipped the 8 onto her harness. She double-checked the carabiner lock and wrapped the rope past the small of her back, under the bow where it was strapped to her pack. She turned to face him, her freckled face intent and focused. “See you on the ground,” she said, and flashed that grin. “If you fall, try not to land on me.”
Then she walked backward off the branch and into the air.
Peter lay down across the branch and poked his head around its curve to keep her in sight. The rope went down and down, but he’d already lost her in the mist and shadow. He couldn’t even see the ground from here.
He waited until the rope went slack, just a minute or two. Then a wave ran up the line, and he knew she’d flipped it to let him know she was off. He ran the rope through his own figure 8, clipped on, checked the lock.
He turned away from the drop and bent his knees slightly, enjoying the green glow of the tree and the solidity of the branch beneath his boots for one last moment. Then took a deep breath, wrapped the rope into the small of his back with his left hand, and jumped into the darkness.
A giant grin on his face.
This was turning out to be a pretty interesting day.
7
They moved as quickly as they could through the trackless tangle of rocks and underbrush. But some of the deadfall jumbles were twenty feet tall, and a single misstep could mean a twisted ankle or worse.
Peter didn’t know what the hunters would do. But it was a reasonable possibility that they might split their forces. Keep two men at the tree and send two men back down to the trailhead to look for her car. If they hadn’t found it already.
If they could track June’s phone in real time, they probably also knew where she’d been.
He was hoping they’d lost the signal in the mountains and only picked it up again when she climbed the tree.
Maybe there were eight of them. Maybe they had reinforcements already at the trailhead. Maybe they really were government. Maybe June was an escaped mental patient. Speculation was useless without more information. Peter had a distinct lack of information. So he’d work with his instinct, which had proved useful in the past.
As they slogged down the steep slope through the endless brush, each step taking twice as long as it should, Peter’s instinct told him it was very possible that at least some of the hunters would get to the trailhead ahead of them. A map and compass would come in handy about now.
He felt better when they reached the creek. They could move much faster and in a more direct line, although they were sometimes up to their knees in frigid water. June was pretty sure this creek eventually ran through a culvert under the logging road below the trailhead, so they could come up behind any watchers. She said she’d hidden her car up an overgrown spur and around a curve that would shield it from view.
The road announced itself as a patch of light ahead of them. Now Peter thought they might be ahead of the hunters, although probably not by much. The creek made a pool at the culvert, which was partly blocked by sticks and brush. He could hear the sound of a river on the other side. He took the lead and belly-crawled his way up the muddy verge, feet soaked and cold. He stopped when his head came level with the gravel. Nobody there. The road just an unsightly scrape in an otherwise beautiful wilderness.
She crawled up beside him. She tilted her head uphill. “The trailhead is another few miles that way. Room for maybe ten cars.” She tilted her head downhill. “My Subaru is that way. Past the next curve there’s an old logging spur on the right, you’ll see the gate. It’s unlocked.”
Peter wanted to see if the hunters had left anyone up at the trailhead. If so, maybe ask a few questions. But they were likely to be heavily armed. And if something happened to him, June was alone and screwed.
He looked up the road, and down. There were no signs of human life but the damp gravel road and the woman beside him. Her face was flushed. He could see her pulse fluttering in her throat.
“You ready?”
She took a deep breath, let it out. “You bet,” she said.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
They came up to the road with nobody else in sight, down through the graveled tunnel of trees and around the turn with no sound but their own boots on the gravel. The gate was welded tube steel, rusty but strong. It opened with the soft scream of distressed metal.
Then up the old track, which looked like it hadn’t seen a road grader for a decade or more. Bushes grew out of the middle of the road, and runoff had washed out small sections. But her little white Subaru wagon was right where she’d left it, an old four-wheel-drive at least thirty years old. There were a lot of them on the road in the West, where underbody rust was only a distant ugly rumor. A good car. Durable, well made. A classic.