Glancing at her over his shoulder, Cal said, “I’m going to take a look outside. When I give you the all clear, run as fast as you can toward that mountain you came down off of earlier. I’ll be right behind you. Don’t stop for anything.”
Gina nodded, suddenly breathless. Her stomach clenched, and it felt as if her heart, which was already racing, had just received a jolt of speed. She hauled the backpack up and slid an arm through the strap.
“Give me that,” he said. Hooking a hand in the other strap, he took the backpack from her and slung it over his shoulder along with the first one. “Did I mention you need to run really fast?”
She didn’t argue. Even if she’d wanted to—she didn’t—there wasn’t time.
He unlocked the door—she tensed at the soft click—and eased it open.
The sudden blast of cold, damp-smelling air reminded Gina horribly of Ivanov bursting through the door. The roar of the tractor, the rumble of the generator, the knowledge that armed murderers were out there, the thought of her dead friends, all came together in a nearly paralyzing rush.
“Move your ass,” Cal growled.
Gina realized that she must have missed his signal. Taking a tentative step forward so that she could peek out the door, casting a single hunted glance around outside—because of the fog she could see maybe ten feet in all directions—she bolted across the stoop. Plunging into the fog, welcoming the billows of gray mist that swallowed her up and hopefully hid her from anyone who might happen to look her way, she flew back the way she had come, toward the mountain she had walked off earlier. Down in the depths of the fog she couldn’t see it or the path, but she knew where they were, knew the way.
Head down, heart pumping like a piston, she ran across the crackly ice as fast as she could. With every step she took she was conscious of the treacherous surface beneath her feet and thankful for the slip-resistant, rubber-soled boots that several times arrested an incipient slide and saved her from falling. She ran so fast she got a stitch in her side, but, pressing a hand to the place that hurt, she kept going without slowing down. The crunch of her feet in the ice-crusted snow terrified her. The sound of her own breathing terrified her.
She was mortally afraid of being spotted, and shot. What was it they said about the bullet that killed you? You never even saw it coming?
Jacked on terror, she ran like she’d never run before in her life.
Cal stayed right behind her. She could hear his footsteps crunching through the snow, too, could see the dark bulk of him looming between her and the buildings whenever she glanced back. If shooting started from that direction, he would almost certainly take the first bullet. She wondered whether he was staying behind her for just that reason.
Reaching the path that was really no more than a rut carved into the bare, rocky face of the mountain, she leaped up it like a mountain goat and kept going along the twisty trail with no thought of slowing down. Gina was so intent on putting distance between herself and the killers that she jumped with surprise and cast a startled look over her shoulder at Cal when his hand clamped around her arm and he pulled her to a stop.
Chapter Eighteen
Hold up,” Cal said. “Let’s take a break.”
He was breathing hard, and Gina realized that she was, too. Gasping for air, actually, and still troubled by the stitch in her side. She grimaced and bent over, rubbing the place where it hurt.
“You all right?” he asked.
She nodded, too winded and in too much pain from the cramp to speak. They were in an area that she’d passed through on the way down, when her biggest concern had been making his phone call and she’d had no idea of the horrors awaiting her. This part of the mountain had apparently experienced a landslide at some point, because large boulders lay all around, partially blocking the path and also, she saw now, blocking them from the view of anyone who might be looking their way from above or below. Of the same near-black, volcanic composition as the mountains themselves, they were dusted with snow.
Good choice of location if they had to stop, Gina thought, then sat down abruptly on a boulder that was the approximate size and shape of a low bench. She had no choice: now that she’d stopped, her legs had turned to jelly and were refusing to support her.
You are not going to lose it.
It was an easy thing to tell herself. She was light-headed, though, and wobbly, and the boulder and the path and the steep, snowy slope behind her suddenly seemed as insubstantial as the drifting feathers of mist. Some eiders were nesting in the rocks nearby. She couldn’t see them, but she could hear and identify them from the soft rrr, rrr sounds they made.