Desolation Point (29 page)

“Go ahead.”

“Where did you sign my permit for?”

Marilyn answered without hesitation. “Desolation Peak with a camp at Ross Lake.”

“Thank you,” Sarah whispered fervently, any lingering doubts about Marilyn’s identity completely eradicated. “Oh God, thank you.”

The weight of the pack had slowed Sarah considerably. Unable to tolerate it on her back for long, she had swapped to carrying it in her arms before ultimately lowering it to the ground and dragging it by a strap for the remainder of the distance. She was beginning to worry she had taken the wrong route when she heard Alex’s hacking cough just ahead of her.

Alex was pretty much where Sarah had left her, except that she had managed to sit herself up slightly by leaning against a fallen tree. She didn’t look comfortable, and her wheezing was audible from several yards away, but she raised her bound hands in greeting as Sarah ran across to her.

“Hey.” Sarah cradled Alex’s face and kissed her cold lips.

“Hey.” Alex’s voice was hoarse and even that short reply came out fractured by coughing and squeaking. “You okay?”

“Fine. I’m fine.” Sarah had thrown open the backpack and was rifling through it. “I spoke to Marilyn. There’s a team on the way,” she said, pulling out a sweater and pants, and chasing down a pair of socks that had flitted into the grass when she unraveled the sleeping bag. She held up the clothes. “You going to help me out here?”

“You got a key?” Alex rattled the handcuffs to emphasize her point.

“No.” It was the one thing Sarah hadn’t been able to find; Deakin had probably taken it to the bottom of the river with him. She opened the side pocket of the pack. “No, but I’ve got a knife…”

Deakin may have been a white supremacist with a deplorable worldview, but he knew how to maintain his weapons and his Bowie knife sliced through Alex’s outer layers of clothing as if they were butter. The fresh sweater trapped her arms beneath it when Sarah tugged it over her head, but the elated expression on her face suggested it was preferable to being soaked. With her hands bound, though, she didn’t seem to have the strength or coordination to help Sarah with her pants, and in desperation Sarah took the knife to those as well, apologizing profusely when she accidentally nicked her knee. The spare pants had probably belonged to Tanner. They were large and loose, and Alex managed to stay awake long enough to wriggle into them. By the time Sarah tucked her into the sleeping bag, her eyes were heavy-lidded and her head was drooping.

“You sleep, okay?” Sarah told her, propping her up against the pack that was now stuffed with her shredded clothes. “They’ll be here soon.”

Alex nodded and closed her eyes. Sarah, too drained to do anything else, was content just to sit beside her for a while and watch her breathe.

*

The shriek of an eagle circling above the cliff on the opposite side of the river startled Sarah from an uneasy doze. Silently berating herself for having fallen asleep, she turned to check on Alex, a movement that caused a sharp stab of pain in her abdomen and reminded her that she wasn’t exactly in the best shape either.

Alex didn’t stir when Sarah put a hand on her cheek. The skies had cleared through the morning, but the sunshine only emphasized how pale she was and made the dusky tinge to her lips more apparent. She was shivering intermittently. Sarah looked around the unkempt patch of grass and bracken surrounding them. There was plenty of wood from deadfalls scattered on the ground, more than enough for a fire. All she had to do was stand up and collect it, but her stomach roiled at the thought of moving, and even as she sat there, her legs felt like jelly. She opened Deakin’s first aid kit and looked at the packets of painkillers. The trade names were mostly unfamiliar to her, but she knew that Tylenol was for pain and fever, and the advice leaflet in the box of Advil said similar. She dry-swallowed two of each, gagging on the taste and hoping they would stay down long enough to give her some respite.

Supporting her side with her hand, she slowly gathered as much wood as she could and—keen to get all her activities completed in one go—filled a pot with water. The fire lit on her third attempt, smoldering at first before sparking properly into life as one of the larger logs caught. Sarah was watching the water slowly beginning to simmer when the harsh tone of the radio cut through the relative calm. She stared at the small black handset, eager to speak to Marilyn but assailed by the familiar dread that it would be one of Deakin’s men on the other end. The tone seemed to grow more insistent, echoing through the clearing and bouncing back off the river. She blocked it out, working to convince herself that even if it was Aaron, he would be miles away at the hut by now and couldn’t hurt her from there. The thought gave her the confidence to pick the radio up, the tone ceasing immediately as she pressed the talk button.

“Hello?”

“Sarah?” Marilyn sounded barely on the right side of frantic. “Are you both okay?”

Sarah glanced at Alex, who had inclined her head slightly at the disturbance but had yet to open her eyes.

“Not really,” she said, trying not to allow Marilyn’s panic to bleed into her. “Alex isn’t breathing properly. She took some water into her lungs and I don’t know what else I can do to help her.”

“Is she conscious?”

“Now and again.”

“Okay. There are medics on their way to you. The team has given an ETA of three hours. Let me try and get ahold of them…” Her voice trailed off and Sarah heard her hold a rapid discussion with two different men, another radio buzzing faintly in the background. Sarah found Deakin’s GPS and worked out their exact location while Marilyn conferred with the rescue team. She turned her attention back to the radio as Marilyn addressed her again.

“The medics say you should try and keep Alex awake,” Marilyn told her. “When she’s able to drink, push fluids, the sweeter the better, and keep her warm.”

Sarah nodded, relieved that she had inadvertently followed most of this advice already. “I got her changed and into a sleeping bag but I can’t get the handcuffs off her,” she said, and heard what sounded like a muffled gasp from the other end of the connection. When Marilyn replied, it was with obvious difficulty.

“You’ve done real good, Sarah. Three hours, that’s all, and they’ll be with you.”

“Okay. Oh…” Slowly but surely, Sarah pulled together the mention of the handcuffs with the need to tell Marilyn about Tanner. She rubbed a hand on her forehead and her fingers came away wet with sweat. “There’s a man in the woods, close to the camp I told you about. He worked with Deakin. I shot him in the leg. I didn’t have time to tie him up, but his leg was broken and he was bleeding a lot.”

Marilyn let out a surprised laugh as Sarah paused for a breath. “Shouldn’t give my guys too much of a problem then?” she said.

“He was unconscious when I left him,” Sarah conceded. She didn’t want to acknowledge that she might have killed him, but the thought wormed its way into her head regardless.

“I’m sure you did what you had to do, Sarah. The medics will take care of him too.”

Sarah thumbed the talk button but released it again without responding. For a couple of seconds, there was silence from both sides, then: “Marilyn?”

“Go ahead.”

“Tanner might have a key,” Sarah said quietly. “For Alex. He was the one who cuffed her.” The logic of that had escaped her when she had returned to the camp; all she had wanted to do was collect the supplies and take them back to Alex. “I have our coordinates for the rescue team, if that’ll help.” She read out the numbers as they appeared on the screen, hoping they made more sense to Marilyn than they did to her.

“That will definitely help,” Marilyn said, once she had read them back for her to confirm. “I’ll pass all the information on.”

Sarah nodded, feeling calmer now that she had remembered everything she needed to say. “I’m going to make Alex a drink.”

“Good girl. You do that and call me if you need me.”

“I will.” She cut the connection and set the radio down. She wrapped a scrap of T-shirt around her hand to protect it, and reached for the pot of hot water.

*

“Drink this. No, don’t spit it out.” Sarah held the cup of sweetened tea to Alex’s lips. “Drink it. That’s right.”

It was the third time she had tried to follow Marilyn’s advice to “push fluids,” and as usual, Alex was not being the most compliant of patients.

“Look, it’s not my fault Deakin packed this stuff instead of cocoa. It’s only fruit tea. I don’t see why you’re pulling your face.” Sarah took a sip to prove her point and only just refrained from spitting it back into the cup. “Shit, that tastes like cat piss. What flavor is it supposed to be?” She checked the packet. “Pampering pomegranate and goji berry.” The grass steamed as she emptied the cup onto it. “Well, I suppose it must be very stressful being the leader of a bunch of skinheads,” she muttered.

The smug expression on Alex’s face was ruined when she began to cough. Sarah helped her lean forward and supported her until the worst of it seemed to have passed.

“Better?” she asked, guiding Alex back against the pack.

“Yeah, thanks.”

“How’s about vanilla, chamomile, and honey, instead?”

Alex nodded, her body still jerking with coughs she was trying to suppress. Sarah poured more water and stirred the tea slowly as it steeped.

“I’m sorry,” Alex said, so quietly that Sarah barely heard her above the tapping of the spoon on the metal cup.

“About the tea?”

“No, about the river.” She coughed again and Sarah tried to brace her, but she moaned in pain regardless. “So stupid. Shoulda left me in there.”

“Like that was ever an option.” Sarah ruffled Alex’s hair. “Just don’t do it again, okay?”

“No fucking chance of that,” Alex said fervently. “Drowning hurts like a bitch.”

Sarah smiled, holding the cup for her to sip from. “So did hauling your arse out of the water.”

Alex’s eyes had closed, and when Sarah nudged her, it seemed to take an awful lot of determination for her to open them again. “Thank you for hauling my ‘arse’ out of the water,” she mumbled.

“My pleasure.” Intent on keeping her awake, Sarah persevered with the cup. “It’s a nice arse,” she added as an afterthought.

Alex’s shoulders began to shake as she laughed, which set her off coughing and made Sarah instantly apologetic.

“Shit. Sorry. Here, try the tea.”

Alex choked a mouthful down and then took a second more comfortably.

“What happened to Deakin?” She was looking around now, as if fractured pieces of the past few hours were only just returning to her.

“He hit his head and the current took him under.” The cloying smell of the tea combined with the memory of his skull splitting into the water made Sarah’s stomach churn, and she moved the cup farther away from her. “He’s dead, Alex,” she said, wondering whether she would ever think of the man with anything other than loathing. “And Tanner’s in the woods with a bullet in his leg. I don’t know if he’s…” She shook her head. “I don’t know if he’s still alive. I could’ve checked when I went to the camp, but I was so tired.” The words came out like a confession, and Alex must have picked up on her distress because she leaned her head on Sarah’s shoulder. “I just wanted to get back to you,” Sarah whispered, as guilt and sorrow and stress drained her anger away.

She felt Alex kiss her cheek and moved her head a fraction so that the next kiss touched her lips.

“So much of this I would want to change,” she said. “But if it meant not meeting you, I wouldn’t change a thing.” Abashed, she wiped her face dry before she dripped tears into the tea, and then reached over to wipe Alex’s face for her. “And that’s about as mushy as I’ll ever get.”

“You could blame it on your fever,” Alex suggested.

Sarah winced. “Yeah, I was hoping you’d forgotten about that.”

“Kinda hard to forget when I just burned my lips on you.”

“Oh.”

“How long till they get here?”

Sarah studied her watch, struggling with the simple calculations. “About an hour and a half.”

“Got time for more tea.”

“Yup, got plenty of time for that.”

“What do we have left?”

There were three bags remaining in the packet. Sarah tried to keep her face straight as she read them out. “Tangerine Temptress, Blueberry and Banana Burst, or Buttercup Sage.” Alex stared at her in disbelief and Sarah shrugged. “Or we could just drink water.”

“I vote for that,” Alex said quickly. “I feel crappy enough as it is without choking on a cup of Buttercup Sage.”

Sarah tossed the packets into the fire, crinkling her nose at the pungent smell that rose up. “Bloody hell, as if we needed further proof that Deakin was a psychopath.”

Alex was attempting to bury her nose beneath the neck of her sweater. “God, I need my hands.” She smiled when Sarah leaned across and held her nose for her. “Oh honey, if that’s not a sign of true love,” she said, her voice sounding as if she was impersonating a duck, “then I really don’t know what is.”

*

The soft clink of the handcuffs was muffled by Alex’s sweater, so that she could continue to twist her hands against the metal without disturbing Sarah. She didn’t like to think what damage she was doing to her wrists, but the pain in them was the only thing keeping her alert. She couldn’t ever remember feeling so tired. Not even after working a week of night shifts in the middle of a Los Angeles summer, the heat baking her as she tried in vain to sleep through the day. This was a different kind of tired altogether, an almost irresistible yearning to give in, to stop having to fight so damn hard for every breath she took, and simply to close her eyes instead.

The metal bit into her skin when she deliberately pulled her wrists apart, the renewed agony jolting her awake. She knew there was a very strong possibility that if she closed her eyes, she wouldn’t be opening them again. Her chest whined like a decrepit set of bagpipes as she breathed. It felt as if she were trying to draw air in through a wet sock, and it made something grate at the base of her lungs. There was still fluid in her chest; she could hear it when she coughed, and she occasionally ended up with a mouthful of dirty water. Not often enough to clear it, though, and the relentless coughing combined with the matted laceration at her temple had given her a throbbing headache.