Bad Moon On The Rise (26 page)

“
Listen,” I said, holding
out a hand. Bobby grabbed onto the trunk of a sapling and leaned
against it, groaning, his huge chest heaving in and out. “Do you
hear that?”

“
Hear what?” he asked.
Sweat trickled down his brow despite the snow raining down on
us.

“
They’ve already got the
search dogs after us.” I could hear the hounds baying below. That
was bad news. They’d had the dogs ready, housed at the prison, and
were going to start searching from the road. They knew we had few
avenues of escape and would have to make for the road sooner or
later. “They’re coming in from the road side.”

“
That means they’ve found
my car,” Bobby gasped.

I brushed the snowflakes from my eyes
and searched the forest floor, seeking another path. I saw
brambles, bushes, decades of decaying leaves and pine needles. But
no path.

“
Over there.” Bobby
pointed left. ”The trees thin out. See?”

I headed to the left, Bobby tumbling
and cursing behind me. A few dozen yards down the slope, the thick
growth gave way to the banks of a mountain stream that snaked
through the forest less than two feet wide, cascading over rocks,
winding through the shrubs, steaming in the cold air.

“
This way,” I shouted. “It
has to lead somewhere.”

“
Yeah—to people,” Bobby
pointed out.

“
We can’t get through the
other way,” I said. “We don’t have a choice. There’s too much
undergrowth.” My face was already scratched from brambles and my
calves ached from leaping over mounds of fallen logs and vines. I
could not imagine how Bobby felt. His only option was to crash
through obstacles and he had to be a few synapses away from a heart
attack.

“
Go without me,” he gasped
behind me. “I could have made it back to the car, but we both know
there’s no way I can make it if we head into the interior.” He was
leaning on a pine tree now, heaving and choking from the effort of
scrambling up slopes after decades of inactivity.

I crawled back to him over the forest
floor, grabbing onto thick kudzu and ivy to hoist myself up the
incline.

“
What are you taking
about?” I asked. “Let’s just keep going.”

“
No way.” He tightened his
grip on the pine tree. “I’m done. We both know it.”

The piercing bay of hounds in pursuit
of quarry split the air. The sound was terrifying and the dogs
seemed only yards away. “Oh, god,” I said, unable to see a thing
through the waning light and the thickly falling snow.

“
Get out of here,” Bobby
commanded me. “They’re getting closer. Go on. You know what to do.
Here—take this.”

He pulled his cell phone from one of
the many pockets hanging off his camouflage vest and tossed it to
me. I caught it and stuffed it in my jeans.

“
Take this, too,” He threw
me a pocketknife, followed by a hailstorm of snack cakes wrapped in
plastic. “You might not have anything else to eat.”

“
Thank you, Bobby,” I
called out as I grabbed the pocket-knife. The Little Debbie cakes
would have to stay. I was leaving Little Debbie—and Debbie
Little—behind forever. Nothing was going to stop me now, be it
starvation or snow or a dozen of the smartest hunting dogs on this
planet.

As if sensing my determination, the
pack let out an unearthly group howl that cut through the forest in
a primal challenge. They had found our scent.

“
The stream,” Bobby
shouted. “Lose your scent there.”

Of course. I’d watched enough
late-night prison movies to know that trick. But it was damn cold
and the stream was wet.

The howling convinced me. I gathered
my courage and leapt, clearing the banks of the stream and landing
on its slippery, moss-covered far bank. I fell, grabbed the roots
of a tree, couldn’t keep hold and slipped into the
stream.

The sensation was the oddest I have
ever felt.

As snow swirled about me and I
shivered from the cold, I could feel the wet slowly seeping through
my tennis shoes—but it was like blood leaking inward instead of
out. The water was warm. The stream should have been
life-threatening cold, but the water was as warm as
blood.

Of course. Silver Mountain was dotted
with natural hot springs, one of the very few reasons tourists
visited each year.

The stream might save my
life.

I headed up it, away from Bobby and
the eerie cacophony of triumphant howls beneath me. I headed
upstream as fast as my sturdy legs could trundle my
thirty-something ass, panting and splashing and heaving myself
forward with the help of every root and vine I could grab. I have
never moved so fast, I have never been so motivated, I have never
wanted to flee as much as I did in those moments. 

As I climbed, I heard Bobby’s shouts
of terror waft up through the snow-choked air. The dogs were
closing in. He sounded as if he were in agony. I couldn’t help it—I
had to stop and look back. I found a thick hardwood and hoisted
myself up on a branch so I could peer down the mountain.

And there I saw my dearest friend,
sacrificing himself for me.

Bobby clung precariously to a bending
pine as the pack of hounds surrounded him, baying furiously, their
tails wagging in triumph as they crowded closer and closer to their
prey. Bobby was emptying his pockets, throwing them the remaining
Little Debbie cakes he had stashed in every crevice. The snacks
sailed over the heads of the uninterested hounds, yet Bobby kept
offering what bribes he had, even tearing a pack open with his
teeth and poking it toward the dogs in abject terror. They were too
disciplined to take the bait. I heard a whistle and knew the dog
handlers would be on them in minutes.

Abandoning my friend, my true and
forever friend, I dropped into the center of the stream and fled
once again, turning as far from the prison as I could go, all the
while praying the stream would take me somewhere.

More than eighteen million acres of
forest land stretch across North Carolina, much of it in the
mountains and most of that inhabited by wild boars, an occasional
black bear, a few mountain cougars making some sort of miraculous
comeback that I was in no position to appreciate, plus hundreds of
songbird species, every one of them currently huddled beneath
snow-covered branches, where they would stay toasty and warm.
Unlike me. Right now, I was the only creature stupid enough to be
tramping around those millions of acres and I had no fucking idea
where I was.

When I could climb no more—and barely
breathe—I pulled myself out of the stream onto a rock and tried to
get my bearings. The snow was falling thick and fast and my feet
were wet almost to the knees. I wouldn’t last an hour if I tried to
hike through the woods in wet shoes and socks in this weather. I
needed a miracle.

And I got one.

At first the sound seemed almost like
a hallucination: banjo music. Cascading, running, bouncing,
unstoppable banjo music.

Just a few bars at a time at first,
but then more as the wind shifted and brought the full tune to me.
I didn’t know the name, but I recognized it: my father used to hum
it when I was a child. It was an old song, something from the
Thirties maybe, or even earlier. But I knew that tune, and I knew
that I had heard my father hum it, and I took that as a
sign.

I sat there, unmoving, blocking
anything else out but the music. I ignored the cold and the snow
and the bite of the wind against my face. I followed the music. It
couldn’t be all that far away. The mountain and the trees would
block most sound being carried over a distance.

I envisioned where I must be in
relation to the prison. The stream had taken me west, I was sure,
and at this point, that meant it would take me a day or more to cut
inland and get to the other side of the mountain, where the narrow
highway wound back around in its twisting journey. I figured the
music had to be on my side of the mountain, off the same stretch of
highway that led to the prison. I couldn’t be more than a half mile
or so higher than Silver Top, but I thought maybe, just maybe, most
of the search crews would be looking for me below the prison,
figuring I’d be heading down off the mountain.

It felt safer following the music. I’d
keep following the banjo and start praying that I was more than a
big rat following the sounds of a Pied Piper to my death. I had no
other choice.

I kept going.

The mountain gave me a gift—the snow
had banished the usual forest sounds, bringing a contemplative
peace to the wooded acres. I was surrounded by a churchlike
atmosphere of solemn hush. The stream added to the illusion that I
was safe by turning warmer with each few yards of progress I made.
I must be nearing the area of hot springs that Silver Mountain was
most noted for—and I was pretty sure hot springs meant people, or
at least tourist cabins, preferably deserted and stocked with lots
of coffee and something a little more substantial to eat than all
those Little Debbie cakes I’d left behind.

Poor Bobby. Trying to feed those dogs
his Little Debbie cakes. I could not shake the image from my
mind.

Bobby. I had Bobby’s cell phone in my
pocket. Maybe I could call someone for help, at least someone who
could tell me where to head from here. But who? It wasn’t like I
had a lot of friends. Most of them were associated with law
enforcement in some way and I couldn’t put them in the position of
protecting me. They’d lose their jobs. You can stretch a lot of
rules, but helping someone escape from prison was not something
likely to be overlooked by anyone’s Internal Affairs Department.
That meant my friend Marcus was out, and Bill Butler, too, plus
approximately 90% of the men I’d dated over the past ten years. The
remaining 10% were probably in prison themselves. Bobby D. was no
doubt in custody by now, being browbeaten instead of me. Who knew
where Shep was—or if I could trust him?—and Burly certainly
couldn’t be of help to me in this.

Then I realized that there was one
person in this world I could absolutely call on, someone who had
done time himself, for a cause he believed in, someone who knew the
mountains like the back of his long, work-worn hands, someone who
would understand what I was up against and tell me what to do
without needing to rub it in that he was coming to my rescue in the
first place.

What the fuck was his phone
number?

Oh, god. My brain was starting to go
numb from too much fear, too much cold, too much everything. I
found a rock and perched on it, my ankles warmed by the hot
springs, and sat very still, envisioning my landline phone in my
mind, pretending I was about to dial him. I didn’t call him often,
but for some reason, I had always remembered his phone number
easily. There was something about it that always stuck in my
memory. What the hell was it?

Birth dates: that was it. His number
was my birth date, preceded by… a two, which I had once thought
stood for the two of us together, before life and circumstance had
divided us.

I took a deep breath and dialed,
praying he would be home.

He answered on the third
ring.

“
Ramsey?” I said. “I’m in
trouble.”

“
Casey? Are you okay?” He
always got right to it.  “Where the hell are you?”

“
I don’t know. Somewhere
in the mountains and it’s snowing hard and my feet are wet and I
don’t have a coat and, oh yeah, I just escaped from prison and
there are maybe a dozen prison guards and cops after me and at
least as many tracking dogs.”

The silence on the other end seemed to
last forever, but at last he said, “You’re not kidding, are
you?”

“
No,” I said miserably.
“I’m not. I went undercover and it went bad and Bobby busted me out
today and he almost had a heart attack in the process and they got
him and now I don’t know where the fuck I am, and I can’t go back
there, but I think I’m pretty close to freezing to death. The only
thing I do have is gloves.”

He started to laugh. I could not
believe my ears. That bastard was laughing at me.

“
Ramsey Lee, you tell me
right now what is so damn funny about my predicament. I thought, of
all people, you’d understand.”

“
I do,” he assured me.
“It’s just that I always wondered what it would take for you to
lean on me a little. Now I know: it takes frostbite, starvation, a
prison break and eminent arrest. Less than I thought,
actually.”

“
Did I mention I'm using
Bobby’s cell phone and I figure I have ten minutes of airtime left
on it, at most, if I can even keep finding a signal.”

“
Okay,” he said, all
business again. “What can you tell me about where you are right
now?”

I described where the prison was, and
finding the stream, and the warm water, and my theory it was
connected to an area of hot springs. ”Oh yeah, I hear banjo music,”
I added, half joking.

“
Banjo music?” Ramsey
said. “That helps. Look, don’t waste your air time. I’ll call you
back in ten minutes. I’m going to poke around the Internet. Let me
see what I can pull up.”