Desolation Point (19 page)

“That feel better than your trousers?” she asked, teasing the soft skin at the corners of Alex’s mouth with her thumbs. In lieu of an answer, Alex turned her head slightly and captured one of the thumbs between her lips. Sarah took a ragged breath; there was a promise in Alex’s eyes that was doing very strange things to her knees. “Forgot about the spare pairs we pinched, didn’t you?” she said.

“Shit.” Alex looked toward their bags. “Yes, I did.”

Back at the hut, not knowing how long it would be before they found help or help found them, Alex had decided to take all of Merrick’s clothing. Now she pulled the pants out of the backpack and held them against herself.

“Bit long on me, so we might have to hack a couple of inches off for you,” she said, and then her eyes closed with pleasure as she pulled on a clean, dry pair in place of the muddied ones she had been wearing. “Oh God, I think I’m in heaven.”

Sarah fastened the zipper on her own pair and Alex opened her eyes to see what she was laughing at.

“Oh.”

“Yeah, oh,” Sarah said mournfully. “I think these might constitute a trip hazard.” Her feet were nowhere to be seen, the material of each leg bunching on the floor of the shelter. Fastening her belt as tightly as it would go just about kept the pants on her hips.

Alex turned Sarah’s wrist and lit up the dial on her watch to calculate how much time they had before they could leave. Her shoulders dropped as she relaxed slightly. “Right then. Let’s see what we can do here.” She held her pocketknife between her teeth as she adjusted the material and then used the blade to slice cleanly through the cloth. “Reckon you’ll be a trendsetter soon as we get back. The distressed look is very now,” she said, once she had cut both pants legs to a satisfactory length.

Sarah regarded her with what she hoped was an appropriate amount of skepticism, but Alex just stuck her tongue out at her and then turned the material up twice on each side for good measure.

“There. Perfect.” She took the hand Sarah offered her and stood. “Last thing you need is anything else to trip over,” she added with a sly grin, and ducked as Sarah swatted at her.

“I can’t help having two left feet when it’s dark and I’m knackered,” Sarah protested.

Alex gave her a quick kiss on the cheek and then stooped to collect their water bottles. “You can give those two left feet of yours a rest if you want. I’ll go find that stream you fell into, and you get everything packed up.”

Sarah chewed nervously on the inside of her cheek as Alex straightened with the bottles in her hands. It was 5:51 a.m. Five minutes of grace was all they had allowed themselves, and those five minutes of pretending that everything was fine were now up.

“I’ll be okay,” Alex said, obviously noticing her hesitancy. “It was, what? Fifteen minutes in the dark, so probably less now that I can see. We could leave it and chance finding something this morning, but we know that stream was running fast enough to be clear.”

Sarah murmured in assent; the last thing they needed was a stomach upset, and at the moment, they had no way of boiling the water prior to drinking it. They had run out of purification tablets two days ago.

“Take your knife,” she said, aware that Alex’s mind was already made up.

Alex patted the pocket of her jacket. “Already got it.” She pushed aside one of the branches at the shelter’s entrance and squeezed through the gap. “I’ll put this back for you.” She gave the shelter an appraising look. “You’re pretty well camouflaged from out here. The light’s not great yet.”

Sarah looked at the sky, where deep shades of indigo were swallowing the stars one by one. “Be careful,” she managed to say.

“I’ll be as quick as I can, okay?” Alex blew her a kiss and then rearranged the branch into place.

Sarah stood stock-still in the middle of the shelter, listening to her footsteps fade away. For a few irrational seconds, she considered running after her and insisting that it really would be more sensible if she accompanied her to the stream. Instead, she forced herself to sit cross-legged on the cold floor and start rolling up their blankets. Alex was right; clean water was essential if they were to spend another day hiking, and it would be quicker this way. They would be able to set off sooner. As much as Sarah tried to persuade herself, though, her arguments still rang hollow. She wanted Alex back with her so badly it was making her gut hurt. She shoved the blankets into her pack and distracted herself by folding the wet clothing they had discarded that morning. Then she glanced at her watch. Only three minutes had passed. It felt like much longer. She was just about to begin an inventory of what little food they had left when one of the branches at the entrance was lifted away. Unable to disguise her relief, she looked up with a smile.

“Hey, that was quick. Did you find somewhere close…” Her voice trailed off, the smile falling from her face.

The figure crouching in the entrance was not Alex but Nathan Merrick, and the gun he held was pointing directly at Sarah’s chest. He raised his other hand to his mouth and pressed one finger to his lips in a stark warning. She scrambled to her knees, snatched up a flashlight as a weapon and tried to push herself away, but there was nowhere for her to go. Merrick moved faster than she did, grabbing her wrist and twisting it until she dropped the flashlight, and then hauling her toward him.

“Just give me an excuse to fucking shoot you,” he hissed.

She didn’t answer him, her focus narrowed to the grinding sensation of his hand on her wrist. The pressure was so relentless she thought he meant to snap it, and when he suddenly released her, all she could do was bow her head and cradle her arm. The respite was short-lived, however. Just as abruptly, he shifted his hold to the collar of her jacket and forced her facedown at his feet.

“Shit, I might just go ahead and shoot you anyway.” He was breathing hard, and she could feel his entire body trembling as he tried to rein in his anger. “Chasing you through the middle of fucking nowhere.” With his hand bruising the back of her neck, he pushed until her cheek ground into the rough carpet of pine needles. “Where did he go?”

She barely heard him. Her breath coming in great, terrified gasps, she reached out to the flashlight he had kicked away, but the handle turned as her fingernails scratched on it, spinning it beyond her grasp. Merrick, apparently tired of being ignored, dragged her up to her knees and backhanded her across the face.

“Oh God.” She put her hands out to steady herself as the walls of the shelter seemed to sway and multiply. Her cheek throbbed in time with her racing heart, and black spots drifted across her vision; she wondered whether he would kill her if she vomited on him. It took her longer than it should have to recognize that he was pressing the barrel of his gun against her forehead.

“Where did he go?” he repeated, enunciating each word as if she were stupid. Spittle flew from his mouth when he spoke, and she was on the verge of asking him what the hell he was talking about when she realized he was referring to Alex.

“Stream,” she whispered, her throat feeling as if it were lined with broken glass. “He went to the stream. He won’t be gone long.” She saw no reason to correct Merrick’s mistake. He had obviously been watching the shelter when Alex left; distance, poor light, and Alex’s short hair conspiring to push him to the wrong conclusion. He seemed completely wrong-footed, and Sarah wasn’t sure which had him so unnerved: the fact that she wasn’t alone or the fact that her companion was supposedly male. Whichever it was, she just hoped it would be enough to make him cut his losses rather than risk trying to take them both on at once. She didn’t know where that left her, but she didn’t really care as long as Alex was safe.

“Keys and the GPS, now,” he demanded. His eyes kept flitting to the walls of the shelter as if he might be able to spot Alex’s approach through them. Sarah could feel the metal bruising her skin as he increased the pressure on the gun. She closed her eyes miserably when his finger twitched on the trigger. So much for keeping Alex out of this. As far as she knew, the keys were in Alex’s jacket pocket, and Alex had taken the GPS to the stream with her too. A flood of adrenaline made Sarah’s legs shake so hard that she had to sit back on her heels. She licked her dry lips.

“I don’t have them.” She looked up at Merrick as she spoke, determined not to let him see how frightened she was. “Alex took them with him.” Defiance made her punctuate her declaration with a shrug. She vaguely detected a blur of movement and heard the gun rip into the skin of her forehead a split second before the pain hit her. The force of the blow made her head snap back. Too disorientated to steady herself, she slumped to the side as a familiar thick tang of copper filled the small shelter and blood began to run into her eyes. She tried to raise a hand to the injury, but her arm refused to cooperate and she had to let it drop back down. Her body jolted once as Merrick kicked her in the abdomen. His voice was tense and agitated and he was asking her something, something about Alex having a gun. Curling herself up as tightly as possible, she left him to rant and allowed the grayness to fold in on her.

“Get up.”

Although Sarah heard the snarled command, it seemed to come from within a thick fog. It brought more pain with it: an ache in her back that made her moan softly, betraying the fact that she was awake.

“Get the fuck up. I won’t tell you again.”

Her head hurt too. The pain dulled her senses and her understanding of what was happening to her, though she responded instinctively to the rage in his voice by attempting to stand. She tried to bring her hands in front of her to use as leverage, but it took another impatient kick to her back to shock her into realizing her hands were bound tightly behind her. Somehow, she managed to struggle onto her knees. The exertion all but knocked her down again, and she panted against the cloth that was fastened across her mouth. Her nostrils flared as she forced herself not to panic at the almost overwhelming sense of suffocation. She must have been breathing while she was unconscious, she reminded herself in an attempt to be rational, and if she panicked now, then the next time Merrick kicked out at her, she wouldn’t be able to kick him back. It was this last point that gave her enough motivation to calm down, and when he dragged her to her feet she was able to stay upright.

She shivered as she stood there. A cold draft hit her torso and she looked down to find her jacket open and her shirt untucked. She had no recollection of Merrick searching her. The thought made her feel so sick that she staggered, only the wall of the shelter preventing her from falling. She rested her cheek against the chilled pine and willed herself to stop shaking. Through the gaps in the branches she could see that the light outside had barely altered; it appeared that only a few minutes had passed, but even in that brief time, Merrick had ransacked the shelter. He had Alex’s backpack strapped across his shoulders. The food Sarah had been about to take stock of was gone, and she assumed that he had taken it. Although she knew she had left at least one of his bags behind at the rocks where she had witnessed him murder the prison guard, he did not seem to have brought any of his own kit with him. The rope Alex had used as a safety line was now cutting deeply into Sarah’s wrists, and she had been gagged with a brightly colored bandana from Alex’s pack. Merrick had obviously intended his mission to be a quick recovery of his stolen items; she doubted he had ever planned to leave her alive. Feeling strangely sanguine, she wondered where he had found the paper he was writing on and how she could take advantage of her stay of execution. A pounding headache wasn’t conducive to intricate plotting, however, and she hadn’t thought of anything even remotely constructive before he took hold of her arm and pushed her ahead of him.

Once outside the shelter, he turned her to face him. With one hand, he held her jaw to keep her still, and with the other, he wiped the paper across her forehead.

“Think he’ll get the message?” he asked. He displayed the paper for her to see, obviously pleased with his own ingenuity. It bore one word: KEYS. Her blood was smeared across the last two letters. The cloth in her mouth precluded an actual answer, and she didn’t deign to respond in any other way. He walked away from her with a cocksure laugh. Sweat trickled down her spine as she watched him anchor the paper to the forest floor with rocks. Then he struck a match and held it to the shelter until a piece of wood caught fire.

“I think he’ll get the message,” he said as flames began to lick at the branches and smoke drifted through the walls.

Sarah certainly got the message: he wasn’t willing to risk encountering Alex without knowing whether she was armed or not. He had taken or destroyed everything that would help her, and he was now going to try to drag her on some sadistic kind of hunt. Sarah scanned the forest, terrified that Alex would be close enough to see or hear the fire, but there was no sign of movement in the trees. Seeming to pick up on her fear, Merrick gestured with his gun.

“After you,” he said with a thin smile.

She allowed herself to breathe a little more easily; they were heading in the opposite direction to the stream. All she could hope now was that Alex would decide to leave her to her fate and run.

*

The acrid smell of smoke was the first out of place thing Alex noticed. It wasn’t too obvious initially, just the slightest change in the scent of the air, but it instantly put her on her guard. She quickened her pace, jogging along the trail they had broken the previous night as the smell began to irritate the back of her throat and make her cough. By the time she could see the clouds of smoke, she was sprinting flat out. The water bottles fell to the ground as she ran into the clearing.

“Oh fucking…No.
Sarah?
” Caution forgotten, she screamed for Sarah over and over, her voice quickly growing hoarse. She took her jacket off, common sense deserting her as she approached the shelter fully intent on extinguishing whatever she could. She was less than a yard away when the roof of the shelter collapsed. The flames claimed it enthusiastically, and the rush of heat from the new fuel forced her back to a cooler patch of grass. She sank to her knees, sobbing and sick to her stomach. There was nothing left for her to salvage. The fallen tree was smoldering all along its trunk, and the walls she had constructed had been utterly destroyed. No one within could have survived.