Though the cloud-cloaked peaks loomed higher than ever, by nightfall the mountains’ forested lower slopes remained a good ten miles away. As the sun dropped below the distant horizon, Callie and Pierce had only scrub pine and juniper to shield them, and not much of that.
Pierce stopped at the foot of a steep slope and turned to search the land below them. Callie followed the direction of his gaze, the wind enfolding her from behind as it swooped off the mountainside. “When the wind changes they’ll smell us,” he’d said. Now he loosed a breath of decision, stripped off his pack, and pulled out a small hatchet. They continued up the ragged slope, zigzagging over uneven shelves of rock to a hollow bounded by a juniper-studded ridge. Midway across it, a gnarled old juniper bowed beside a massive sandstone block, and it was there he decided they’d shelter.
“Do you know how to build a lean-to?” he asked her.
“Sort of.”
Turning, he hacked and tore a good-sized clump of sage from the ground, then handed Callie the hatchet. “Cut as many branches as you need from the other junipers. Pile ’em around this big one—between it and the rock. Make it look natural.”
She stared at him. “We’re going to hide?”
“Yes.”
“But what if they come?”
“If I do my job right, they won’t. Keep your SLuB ready. And watch out for the redclaw over there. I won’t be long.”
Callie swallowed her protest as Pierce turned and descended the bank, dragging the sage after him. At the bottom he tossed the bush aside, reshouldered the pack, and jogged into the gloom, leaving Callie on her own. From this vantage she could see the pale outcropping where the Trogs had attacked Pierce’s friends, steeped now in twilight. On a promontory several miles beyond it, a gleam of light flickered amid a cluster of dark spots. She could not tell if they were moving.
The hatchet’s thunking chops echoed across the hollow like gunshots, advertising her presence to anything nearby. Even without it, pulling and twisting the branches free made a horrible racket, and it took nine good-sized limbs to complete a lair under the juniper. By the time she was finished, her hands were cut and scraped, her bitten thumb throbbed, and her legs shook with fatigue.
She climbed onto the rock beside the juniper to await Pierce’s return. It might be wiser to hide in the lair, but she couldn’t bear the thought of huddling there alone, unable to see what might lurk outside.
Overhead, stars twinkled into view against the rapidly darkening vault of indigo, while out on the distant promontory two fires flickered now, bright pinpoints on a sandstone sea. She turned to the mountains behind her, pulling a strand of windblown hair from her face. Junipers jabbed the skyline to her right—dark, twisted witch forms climbing the ridge. In the hollow below, the gloom had acquired a foglike substance, thick and dark among the darker blots of the trees.
Restlessness simmered within her. Why was Pierce taking so long? Had he surprised something unpleasant? Lost his way? Stumbled off a cliff in the darkness? Doggedly she put her worries aside, assuring herself he knew what he was doing and would be back.
The breeze died to a faint stirring of air perfumed with sage and juniper. She folded her legs yoga style on the rock, which was still warm with its store of the day’s heat, and sighed. If I hadn’t left the road, would I be in one of those Safehavens now? She wished suddenly for Meg. Though this was so much bigger than a simple, airheaded misjudgment, it was hard for Callie to continue being put out with her. And right now, she longed for a friend. Had Meg stayed on the road? Had she been dropped off at the same point, or was she hundreds of miles away? It was a depressing thought.
Out in the shadow-clad trees a twig cracked, followed by a rattling of rock. Callie sat forward, adrenaline prickling across her back and arms. Trying to remember Pierce’s instructions, she drew the SLuB and turned it on. The immediate fine vibration against her palm comforted her, but her sore thumb made it hard to hold the weapon.
Another rattle and scrape. Closer this time.
Her scalp crawled. Her palms grew damp.
Peering into the twilight, she willed a form to appear in the thickening fabric of night.
It’s probably Pierce, she told herself. I should let him know where I am. But visions of huge, hirsute humanoids stilled her tongue and made her heart pound in her throat.
How long she sat there rigid and trembling she did not know. The last light waned, wrapping her in folds of velvet blackness. Starlight limned the junipers and rocks with silver, washed the ground with a pale glow. The last flippet of breeze died, and stillness settled over the land.
“Miss Hayes?” Pierce’s low voice came so unexpectedly—and so close—that she flinched and sucked in an involuntary gasp.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Don’t shoot.” A round shadow moved by her knee, and she dangled her legs down the rock face. His hand touched her thigh, moved to her waist, and then to her arm to steady her as she slid down beside him. He didn’t let go when she was down, and she didn’t pull away.
“Where’s the shelter?” he asked. The familiar musky tang of his body odor was unexpectedly comforting.
“Here.” She groped for the opening, his hand on her shoulder, and then crawled under the branches. The pungent scent of juniper filled her nostrils, and spiny leaves pricked her palms and knees. Pierce eased in beside her, pulling the last branch across the opening.
His pack and leather vest were gone, but it was a close fit, nonetheless, pressing them shoulder, arm, and thigh against each other. He was hot and sweaty, and she could hear the rush of his breathing, his face only inches from her own. Normally she would have found such closeness intolerable. Now she had to fight to keep from pressing against him like a lost child.
“What if they come?” she whispered. “We’ll be trapped.”
He shuddered, but his voice was firm. “Trogs’ night vision is way better than ours. After dark, we’re better off going to ground. I’ve laid a false track in case they come by.”
“And if it doesn’t work?”
“That’s what the weapons are for. Now we’d best keep quiet. Voices carry a long way out here.”
He fell silent, and from the rigidity of his body, Callie guessed he was searching again with that inner sense of his. She sat equally rigid at first, adrenaline surging with each new rustle or crackling twig. But as time passed and nothing happened, exhaustion overpowered her fear, and soon she was dozing off, dream images mingling with reality—Meg pointing a TV camera through the branches, her father standing in her kitchen doorway, backlit by the bright afternoon outside, Pierce shuddering beside her, warning her not to let them smell—
Her body jerked, startling her awake, and the SLuB shifted. Something was pulling it from her grasp. She grabbed for it—
“It’s all right, Miss Hayes,” Pierce whispered. His fingers had closed around her hand and the SLuB at her first movement. “I’ll keep watch.”
“But you did it last night.” Her voice was slurred. “And don’t call me Miss Hayes.”
“Okay, Callie.” He tugged at the SLuB. “But I’d rather not be shot in the knee, if you don’t mind.”
As he slipped the weapon free she relaxed against him, her head falling onto his shoulder.
Her sleep was plagued by horrible howlings as unseen monsters chased her down an endless red-walled canyon. She woke once, disturbed when Pierce moved his arm from under her head. Cold air rushed against her, and she shifted closer, seeking his warmth and the comforting contact of his body. He did not pull away and, after a few moments, dropped his arm around her shoulder. The next time she woke, dawn light filtered into their juniper-bough shelter. Pierce was sound asleep with Callie curled securely in his embrace, one arm draped across his chest.
Realization stiffened her, and she pushed away—
Which startled him awake. Mortified, she leaned forward and pretended to listen for sounds from outside the shelter. It was a few moments before she heard anything but the rush of her own blood.
An innocent quiet, punctuated by birdsong and insect whirs, pressed around them. Pierce said nothing and, to her intense relief, presently eased away the bough at the opening and crawled out.
Dismayed by how stiff and sore she was, Callie reached back to brush the prickling leaves from her side and struck the hard carapace of a sand mite clinging to the back of her shirt. With a cry of revulsion, she lurched out of the lair, jittering around as she tried to slap it loose. Pierce jumped down from the rock, seized her shoulders, and spun her around to pluck it off. She heard it crunch beneath his boot.
Feeling foolish now, she turned back to thank him, but he was already walking away. “Watch out when you get your pack,” he said over his shoulder. “There’ll be more.”
Four of them clung to the pack. Shivering as she imagined them crawling over her while she slept, Callie gritted her teeth and pulled them free one by one, crushing each with a rock. After she finished, she went looking for Pierce and found him on the other side of the sandstone block. He had redonned his weapons and the leather vest, but there was no sign of his pack.
“Nothing came by except the usual,” he said. “Rabbits, coyotes, a rock dragon—probably a juvenile from the size of its tracks.”
“What about those horrible howls? Did I just dream them?”
The thought of dreaming reminded her of how she’d awakened this morning, which brought the blood back to her cheeks. She averted her eyes, studying the distant folds of landscape.
“There were mutants up here, all right, but not close. Like I said, sound carries a long way out here.”
He pulled two packages of nuts from his vest pocket and handed one to her. “You filled your water bottles at the seep, didn’t you?”
She nodded. “What happened to your stuff?”
“I left the lizard carcass as bait and hid the pack. If I’m lucky, they won’t have found it.”
Soon they were headed toward the mountains again, angling sharply left from their previous course. Callie was not nearly as energetic as she’d been yesterday. Her legs creaked with stiffness, and her collarbone protested the renewed burden of the pack, light though it was.
Presently they came to a place where something had gouged a great wound in the land. Rocks were upended, sagebrush uprooted and half consumed. A nearby juniper had been ravaged, limbs stripped of leaves or torn off altogether, trunk gored, bark shredded to expose the white cambium beneath. As before, the place reeked of urine.
“Well, they found the carcass,” Pierce said, squatting over a dark, scuffed place scattered with chips of bone.
Callie gaped at the spot. “They ate all of it?”
He rose and continued up the drainage. “After they pass through the fire, they eat everything they can get their hands on.”
“What do you mean, ‘pass through the fire’?” She glanced around uneasily.
“They have a device that generates a curtain of energy. I have no idea what it is—some kind of radioactivity, I’d guess. It gives them a rush of power, a shot of super-strength. If they’re injured, it’ll heal them—for days afterward their flesh regenerates at a hyperaccelerated rate. If you don’t kill them right off with a clean head shot, you usually don’t kill them. It also makes them crazy hungry. For food and . . . other things.”
A rustle drew the barrel of his weapon, but it was only a sand mite. Surprisingly, he refrained from shooting it. Ascending a gentle rise, they found another mutilated juniper, shoved onto its side, its roots clawing the sky. Branches littered the ground and mingled among them was the frame on which Pierce had strung the lizard hide, now splintered and gnawed. The skin was gone.
Callie stared at the naked frame. “They ate the hide, too?” She was beginning to understand why Pierce was afraid of them.
“Ah!” His cry of satisfaction drew her gaze. Standing in the crown foliage of the downed tree, he bent out of sight and re-emerged with the pack. “I tied it in the middle where they’d have to think to get it,” he explained. “The fire curtain makes them irrational, too. Maybe it’s the hunger. Anyway, I hoped the hide would distract them and—oh. Look here.” He crouched beside a scraped patch of sand and picked up a bloody curl of dragon skin. “This is probably the same youngster that came past our lair. Looks like two or three mutants. You can see where they ate the bloody dirt.”
She came up beside him, gripping the shoulder pads of her pack. “I guess they don’t take prisoners, then?”
He stood. “Better to be eaten.”
His gaze fixed on the light-washed hollow ahead and went briefly blank. Then he said, “They probably rejoined the main group before daybreak. Come on.”
As they gained elevation the juniper and sage gave way to oak and pine. Patches of knee-high grass waved in every clearing, hiding a multitude of sand mites. Repeatedly they had to stop and pick the creatures off their legs, yet Pierce continued to refrain from shooting them—to save E-cubes, he said—stomping them to death instead.
Midmorning Pierce found a scuff in the dirt he called a footprint. He pointed out another scuff soon after, then a crumpled weed and a black mark on the shoulder of a rock. But it was the clear, ridged sole print at the base of a young oak that finally convinced Callie. Their pace slowed now, and she welcomed the opportunities to rest. Her feet were killing her, and the harry bite in her side ached. Her thumb, swollen and purple, still throbbed, to say nothing of her stiff shoulders, her tender collarbone, her overworked back, and her head, which was pounding dully.
Gradually, tall straight-trunked evergreens replaced the oaks. The ground grew softer, dustier, matted with pine needles, the air redolent with warm sap. Pierce talked of meeting his friends before nightfall.
They stopped for lunch on a rock overlooking a dry stream bed. Rough-barked pines marched up the opposing slope, and a particularly massive specimen curved out of the rocky bank below them and to the right. A stand of oak blocked Callie’s downstream view, but she wasn’t about to get closer to the drop-off than the ten feet she already was. Pierce, nearer the edge, could keep watch.
“At least one of them’s hurt,” he said, portioning out the last of his jerky and hardtack. “That’s why we’re gaining on them.”
Callie glanced at him sidelong. “Your friends?”
He nodded, studying the ravine.
“You’re pretty good at this stuff, aren’t you?”
“I grew up tracking deer and cattle in country not much different from this.”
“You lived on a ranch?”
“Just outside Durango.”
Somehow she hadn’t taken him for a cowboy. She supposed it fit, though—the tracking, the familiarity with weapons, the ease with outdoor life. “So how’d you end up here?”
His sky-colored eyes glanced at her and quickly shifted away. He bit off a piece of hardtack. “I was riding fence line. Came upon this white panel truck parked in the middle of nowhere. The guys with it said they were doing a survey, and I figured they were Division of Wildlife. They asked for my help.” He crunched down the last of his hardtack. “Next thing I knew I was here.”
He didn’t ask how she’d gotten hooked, so they sat in silence, listening to the birds calling from the trees. A bee droned toward them, inspected a crumb on the rock, and floated off. With a sigh, Pierce stretched out on his back, cradled his head in his hands, and closed his eyes.
Callie watched him surreptitiously, taking in the lean form, the broad shoulders and narrow hips, the corded, muscular forearms. He was a far cry from Lisa’s lawyers and MBAs. More like one of the heroes in the cherished Zane Grey novels of her adolescence.
A cowboy.
His breathing deepened. He shifted against the rock’s gritty surface and turned his face toward her. Asleep, he looked almost boyish. Perversely her mind snapped back to this morning when she’d awakened in his embrace.
Hers was not a touching family. Expressions of affection were not explicitly discouraged, they just never occurred. She couldn’t recall more than a handful of times when her mother had hugged her, and she had no recollection of any such demonstrations from her father. Lisa, the consummate psychologist, had initiated more physical contact in recent years, but it was an uphill battle. And as hard as it was to touch each other, they certainly didn’t throw themselves on strangers. The way she was snuggling with a man she hardly knew this morning made her feel almost . . . dirty.
Of course, she’d been desperately afraid last night, and he was her only hope of survival. The thought of going it alone in this wretched world was not one she liked to contemplate.
And yet, I must. Callie frowned across the sun-dappled ravine. Because the longer I stay with him, the farther from the Gate I get.
Downstream a flock of birds took flight in an explosion of wing beats. They wheeled overhead and vanished beyond the spiring trees.
Maybe one of his friends will help me. . . .
No. They were his friends, out here for the same reason he was. If anything, they’d be less cooperative in a group. But if they meant to trade their lizard parts with the townspeople maybe they’d— Pierce leapt to his feet, snatching up his rifle as he did, astounding her with his ability to come instantly and thoroughly awake. Now he stared downstream with that eerie not-quite-here expression on his face. “They’re after us,” he whispered.
A shrill scream split the air, punctuating his words. Whatever made the sound was coming up the draw behind the oaks.
Pierce pulled her off the rock, scrambled around the trees, and flung himself flat on the needled ground. “Get down!” he hissed, inching forward on belly and elbows.
Callie dropped beside him, leaf tips pricking her forearms. Dust tickled her nose, and she fought off the sneeze as she searched the drainage bottom for their pursuers. There! Three tall figures with grotesquely overdeveloped brows and jaws stalked into view. Bearded, shaggy-haired, and furry, with their arms dangling to their knees, they looked like protohumans. Trousers covered their lower bodies, each garment a different color—red, orange, brown. All three carried crossbows and quivers of short arrows—quarrels she thought they were called—hung across their backs.
Pierce had them in his sights. “You take the one on the right,” he said. “On my word.”
She looked at the SLuB in her hand—when had she pulled it from her belt?—then at the approaching men. “You mean . . . shoot him?”
“Dead center. Forehead shot if you can.”
Though the air was cool, sweat beaded his brow. Below, the ugly trio moved toward them, following the stream bed, gazes on the ground.
“Pierce, they’re people, I can’t—”
“They’re not people,” he growled. “If they catch you, they’ll kill you. But in their own good time. Now would you aim that thing?”
The leader dropped to all fours, sniffing the ground like a dog. Then he threw back his head, loosed another hair-raising howl, and took off on three legs, carrying the crossbow in one hand. He was leading his companions along the very route she and Pierce had taken less than half an hour before.
Callie thumbed on the SLuB and braced her elbows against the ground, holding the weapon in both hands as Pierce had taught her. Notch and peg bobbled on a hairy shoulder. She edged the barrel left, aiming for midchest. Her heart beat rabbit-fast, and she sought to slow her breathing. “Squeeze the trigger,” he’d said. “Don’t jerk it.”
“On three,” he murmured. “One . . .”
Callie’s SLuB wandered off target.
“Two . . .”
She brought it back, hands trembling.
“Three!”
I can’t do this! She let the SLuB’s barrel fall as Pierce’s rifle spat its blue-green fire. His victim crumpled. He fired again, and the second Neanderthal fell, howling and writhing on the ground. It was the first time she’d seen Pierce fail to hit a target dead on.
Before he could fire again, the third Trog dodged behind a rock.
“Come on!” Pierce pulled her up the hill.
“I couldn’t do it,” she lamented.
His face was grim. “The hurt one’ll need help. If we’re lucky, he’ll distract the other.”
Behind them an earsplitting double wail rose from the ravine.
They were well up the mountainside when it dawned on Callie that Pierce’s second shot hadn’t been off at all. With both companions killed, the third mutant—the one she’d failed to take down—would have had no reason not to continue the chase.
She glanced at Pierce, respect for him rising another notch.
They rested in an open area surrounded by the tall pines. Callie stood gasping as her companion unzipped her pack—still on her back— and drew out a single bottle to share. His eyes never left the trees around them.
“Surely you don’t think they’re following,” Callie said.
“They heal fast after the firewalk. And they cover ground like you wouldn’t believe. We’re way too close.”
He took the bottle from her, gulped a mouthful of water, then screwed on the lid and slipped it back into her pack. The zipper whined shut.
“They’re not howling anymore,” she said.
“That’s what worries me.”
They continued upslope at a stiff pace. A thicket of underbrush gave them the option of following a game trail or circling into the open, and Pierce opted for the game trail. As they pressed through the sharp-tipped leaves, Callie became aware of the deep quiet around them. No birdsong, no insect noises, not even a breeze. Ahead Pierce eased into a clearing. She followed closely, hands trembling, every sense alert. A sudden animal odor provided an instant of warning before a hairy form reared out of the bush beside them.
Pierce fired as the beast howled and smacked the rifle from his grasp. He staggered back, and the thing leaped upon him. Off-balance, Callie stumbled sideways into the sudden hot awareness of another attacker on the off side. She glimpsed deep-set eyes, a flat nose, and a jaw full of dagger-sharp teeth. As she pivoted to avoid his grasp her heel caught on a root, and she pitched backward to the ground. Instantly the creature dropped upon her, straddling her hips. Seconds stretched into what seemed like long, nightmarish minutes as the clawed hand swung lazily up and back—
And she realized that by some miracle she still gripped her SLuB.
The hand floated down. With limbs turned to rubber, she brought up the SluB, closed her eyes, and squeezed the trigger. The gun bucked. Heat seared her belly and the backs of her hands as she sensed the beast recoil above her.
She opened her eyes. A bloody wound creased the Trog’s side, but it seemed not to matter. The mutant reached angrily for her hands and the weapon in them. She fired again, into its chest this time. The creature’s black eyes flashed, narrowed, fixed upon her own—
She shot it a third time, the SLuB’s green fire drilling a hole between its eyes. As its head rolled backward, the beast collapsed forward, the full weight of its massive body pinning her to the ground. Gagging on the stench, hardly able to breathe for the weight on her chest, Callie struggled weakly to free herself. From somewhere close came the snarling of the second beast, and odd rasping whimpers that couldn’t be Pierce—but must be.
In rising desperation, she gave a mighty heave and wriggled partly free of the dead Trog’s body. Another heave and jerk and she was out, staggering upright—and still gripping the SLuB. Across the clearing, Pierce’s rifle gleamed against gray humus. Between it and Callie, a black-haired monster had him pinned to the ground. She could see only his boots, part of one leg, and way too much blood.
“No!” Her own shriek brought the mutant upright and halfway around before she shot it, the shock of the beam knocking it off-balance and away from Pierce, who lay curled in a ball, head tucked, hands over his ears. The beast roared and flung wide its arms, pig eyes burning into her own, and she fired again. It reeled backward, stumbled over a root, and fell into the covering embrace of a thick growth of vine and brush. But still it wouldn’t stay down. As the dark hulking shadow rose yet again, panic pushed Callie over the edge. She fired repeatedly, hardly even aiming, the foliage at the end of her beams leaping and quivering, little bits of leaves whirling up in a veil of smoke as, in the shadows, tiny flames burst into life and flickered out.
She didn’t come to her senses until the weapon quit from overheating and agonizing pain seared her hands. The mutant lay still beneath a leafy shroud. At least for the moment.
Sobbing, she dropped the SLuB and stumbled forward to where Pierce still huddled in a fetal position, whimpering pitifully. She collapsed to her knees in front of him. “It’s okay,” she gasped. “I shot it.
It’s dead.”
He gave no sign he’d heard her, but he didn’t appear to be badly injured. Most of the blood must have been the mutant’s. She touched his quivering shoulder. “Pierce?”
The quivers grew into great wracking shudders.
“It’s all right,” she said. “They’re dead. They’re both dead.”
She was shaking almost as badly as he was and drew away, averting her eyes, dismayed by his loss of control. She picked up her still-warm SLuB, then sat down again, numb with shock.
Eventually the shudders waned. His breathing slowed. His face relaxed. Finally he opened his eyes. She watched focus sharpen in his expression, and then he started up.
“You’re hurt!”
“No—” She held out her hands, warding off his panic. “The blood’s not mine. It’s the Trog’s. I shot him.” She held up the SLuB.
His gaze went from the blood on her jumpsuit to the weapon in her hand, then swept the clearing, lingering on the dark, still hump, half hidden in the bushes. Finally he lurched upright. His stride had stabilized by the time he reached for his rifle. She watched him switch it on and off, pop out the cube, and snap it back. Then he drew a long breath and glanced over his shoulder. “We’d better get going.”