Desolation Point Read online

  At first it was just sounds: a thud and a short cry of distress, but then a voice carried toward her with perfect clarity. It was a man’s voice, different from the first one, wavering with fear but fighting to stay calm.

  “Just let me go, please. Look, I don’t know where we are. I don’t know where you’re going. Who could I tell?”

  No one answered him, but there was another thud, followed by a weak groan. He coughed, and Sarah winced at the thick, wet gurgle of his breathing. She turned off her flashlight and huddled low as she attempted to make sense of what she was hearing. Torn between a desire to stay hidden and an urge to try to intervene, she held her breath, slipped her pack from her shoulders, and tucked it out of sight behind a boulder. Then she crept forward, navigating a path through a maze of oddly shaped rocks to reach one that was far larger. She climbed atop it and lay flat on her front. For what seemed an interminable length of time, she stared across the small clearing, struggling at first to comprehend exactly what she was seeing and then simply not wanting to believe it.

  A man and woman clad in wet weather gear stood a short distance away with their backs toward her. In front of them, starkly lit by the flashlights they were training on him, knelt a second man. The thin white shirt he was wearing was torn and bloodstained, with epaulettes on his shoulders suggesting he had been at work before he had somehow ended up here, struggling to hold his position on the rain-slickened scree with his hands bound behind him. He was shaking his head, blood running from his nose and splattering onto the ground as he repeated the same words over and over again like a delirious mantra.

  “Please don’t kill me. I have a family. Please don’t kill me.”

  Locked in a heated debate, his captors were ignoring him. The woman walked around him to peer tentatively over the edge of the cliff face, and then turned back to her companion. With mounting horror, Sarah watched the woman laugh and shrug, before the man standing beside her kissed her savagely. When they broke apart, he took one step, placed a gun against the forehead of the kneeling man, and pulled the trigger.

  Too stunned to look away, Sarah gasped involuntarily as a gout of blood exploded from the back of the man’s skull, the wind hurling it forward to cast a fine spray across the face of his murderer. As if in slow motion, the body slumped to one side, its eyes staring blankly in the twin beams of light as blood continued to leak out onto the scree. With a look of disgust, the woman pushed her toe beneath the torso and tried to roll it, cursing in exasperation when she was unable to shift its weight. His expression impassive, the man took a firm hold of the body and flipped it into the void. He tracked its progress down the mountainside and then, seemingly satisfied, wiped his hands on his pants to clean them.

  Sobbing silently, Sarah edged backward, her fingers still clamped around a loose piece of rock that she had taken hold of but never had the chance to throw. She felt sick, her legs weak and clumsy as she tried frantically to move; she needed to get back to where she had left her bag. Ignoring the sting of her abraded palms, she half-fell, half-jumped down from the rock she had been lying on. The impact forced a moan from her, and the crunch of the footsteps heading in her direction halted immediately.

  “What the fuck?” The woman’s voice, low and wary, followed quickly by the snap and click of a round being chambered.

  The man gave a derisive laugh. “You really think someone’s gonna be wandering out here in this? Don’t be fuckin’ stupid, Beth. Gunshot got some critter spooked, is all.”

  Sarah didn’t wait to hear whether the woman had been persuaded by the man’s argument. Throwing caution to the wind, she turned the flashlight on, instinct and adrenaline taking over to plot the simplest route back. The light bounced as she ran, a sudden glimpse of color catching in its beam as she reached the outskirts of the rocks. She stooped to grab the bag, swinging it onto her shoulder without pause and only realizing as she did so that something was wrong, that it was a duffel bag, not her rucksack. The additional weight unbalanced her, and she staggered slightly, her shoulder colliding with a rock. Momentarily stunned, she tried to catch her breath, casting the light around to look for her own bag. She couldn’t see it; all she could do was hope that this one would contain enough supplies to replace hers.

  As she readjusted her burden, a choppy burst of wind lifted the veil of gray for an instant. A glare of light caught her full in the face and a startled shriek was drowned out by the man’s guttural yell of “You little bitch!” before the mist dropped again, and the two figures, so close they had almost blundered into her, disappeared.

  Sarah was already running. There was no path for her to follow, just the certain knowledge that she needed to get as far away as she possibly could. As she was about to hurdle a boulder, a sudden bang made her ears ring. To her right, shards of stone flew into the air. She ducked left, losing her footing and skidding a short way down an incline before she grabbed hold of something stunted and prickly and came to a jolting stop. Below her, rocks and debris continued to slide, clattering loudly as they gained speed before finally coming to rest at the start of the sparse tree line. Gravel and scree shifted beneath her feet, edging her irresistibly downward as she tried to stand. Terrified, she took a huge gulp of air, but another gunshot effectively made her decision for her. She forced herself upright and began to run down toward the trees, the fragile formation of the slope collapsing and disintegrating as she sank her boots into it. Her momentum was too swift for her to control her descent effectively and she tumbled, crashing onto her side but continuing downward regardless.

  The tree line loomed ahead. With a desperate effort, she dug her boots into the slope and pushed herself to her feet once more. She dared a glance over her shoulder, able only to distinguish two faint beams of light. They were moving slowly toward her, the progress of her pursuers more cautious than hers as they attempted to follow her without falling. In front of her, a vague path threaded through the gnarled firs and then led into a massive tract of thicker forest. As she set off again, the duffel bag shifted suddenly and she had to pause to move it back. Almost immediately, she heard the crack of gunfire. Three shots rang out in a rapid salvo, followed by a shock of pain that ripped through her right side.

  “Oh God.” Wavering unsteadily, she clamped a hand to her side, able to process little other than the fact that she was still standing and just about able to walk. Not daring to use her flashlight any more, she staggered down into the trees, the trail forgotten, her priorities narrowed to staying on her feet and finding out how badly she was injured.

  Minutes passed with no additional shots fired. Blood oozed unbearably hot against her freezing fingers. She balled her hand into a fist, pushed down hard where it hurt the most, and ran deeper into the forest.

  *

  Even in the middle of the wilderness and in the middle of a storm, there had been no mistaking what the noise was. Alex had automatically dropped into a crouch at the sound of the gunshot, and she had still been crouching there minutes later when the second shot was fired. Several others had followed at uneven intervals, and—having already realized she was in no immediate danger—she had attempted to work out where they had come from. The scream of the wind and the distortion from the valley made that next to impossible, though they had been somewhere off to her left and possibly at a level slightly lower than her own. She found herself fervently hoping that the gunshots had been necessary to ward off an animal, but knew that was unlikely to be the case.

  She switched her flashlight back on and cautiously retraced her steps, her beam concentrated on the right-hand edge of the trail. It took her thirty minutes to find what she was looking for: an overgrown trailhead that had obviously been long abandoned in favor of the route she was on. Her map still had it marked, a dotted line creeping around to cut into a huge expanse of forest, down toward where she now thought she needed to be. With a whispered but heartfelt apology to Walt, she stepped over the rocks that had been placed to keep hikers on the official trail to the
summit, and did her best to pick up her pace.

  *

  At first, Sarah mistook the noise for thunder, a tumultuous barrage of sound that seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. She swayed on the spot as she listened, her breath coming in painful gasps, her fist cramping and sticky at her side. She felt sick, dizzy, and so exhausted that it took her several minutes to realize there was no thunder, and the flickers of rushing movement filtering through the trees in the first weak light of dawn were actually a river. Her feet sloshed in gathering pools of overflow as she neared its banks. It had been swollen to bursting by the storm, and the force of the water was sweeping massive pieces of debris along as if they weighed nothing at all.

  There was no way that she could cross it. There would be no bridge so far from any of the trails and there was no possibility of her wading or even swimming safely to the other side. Her legs began to buckle as she stood staring at the water, and before she even recognized what was happening, she was down on her hands and knees with her vision slowly fading out on her.

  “No, no.” In desperation, she deliberately ground her knuckles into the wound on her side, the pain bringing everything sharply into focus again. Blood streamed through her fingers and she swallowed convulsively against a sudden surge of nausea. Her head hanging low, she forced herself to stand. For hours now, there had been no sign of anyone behind her, but the riverbank at this point was too open, too exposed, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to carry on for much farther. For what seemed like the hundredth time, she pulled her phone from her pocket and squinted through the mud and blood smeared across its display. The signal jumped to one bar and vanished again in a heartbeat. She kept it clutched in her hand as she made her way back to the cover of the tree line. With one eye on her phone, she slowly followed the course of the river downstream and began to search for somewhere to hide.

  The rain had settled into a relentless drizzle, cloud blanketing the forest and ghosting eerily through the trees. The dawn chorus had been muted by the storm, and the occasional quiet crunch of Sarah’s boots sinking into the carpet of pine needles was the only regular disturbance of the stillness. Her attention was divided between breaking a trail and scouting the territory, and she didn’t see the raised mess of roots from a lightning-blackened fir until she fell over them. This time, she didn’t have the strength to get up again.

  “Shit.”

  Snared like an animal in a trap, she twisted and kicked weakly until her boot came free. She immediately drew her legs up and rested her head on her knees. She was wondering vaguely whether she would pass out before she threw up, when the phone that she was still gripping buzzed once. Barely daring even to hope, she turned it over to find a new text message from Ash.

  Hey, you. Guessing you’re out of range (yes, Tess is worrying). Hope you’re getting up to all sorts of mischief. Details as soon as you can. Love A x

  “Jesus.” The unintentional irony of the message was lost on her as she watched the signal strength hold steady at two bars. With shaking hands, she searched her contacts until she found the park’s emergency number that Marilyn had insisted she take with her. The call was answered in three rings.

  “You have reached the emergency helpline for the North Cascades National Park. Due to the extreme weather, we are experiencing a high demand for emergency assistance. Please leave your name, number, and a brief message after the tone.”

  As the high-pitched beep faded, Sarah wondered despairingly what she should say. She didn’t want to risk hanging up without speaking, since she didn’t know whether she would still have a signal the next time she tried.

  “My name is Sarah Kent. I got lost near the Desolation summit.” She shook her head, tears streaming down her cheeks as her voice broke. How could she possibly fit everything that had happened into one phone message? “I saw a man kill someone and he shot me. I’m bleeding and I don’t think I can run anymore. Please, if anyone is there, please―”

  “Hello?” The person on the other end of the phone sounded breathless. “Sarah?”

  “I’m here.” She closed her eyes and wiped her face with the sleeve of her jacket. “I’m here.”

  “It’s okay, sweetie, it’s Marilyn. You’re on the loudspeaker and we’re all gonna try and help you, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Sarah, we have someone out there looking for you. Are you able to describe where you are or what direction you went in?”

  With her eyes still closed, Sarah tried to talk through her route, starting with her failed attempt to find the path down from the summit. She gave them the direction she thought she had traveled in, before describing the ledge she had followed. When she told them what had happened there, some logical part of herself registered the fact that they seemed to know more about the perpetrators than she did.

  “Did you see any landmarks? Anything unusual up there?” Marilyn had been coaxing the information out of her bit by bit, seeming to sense that Sarah was teetering on the verge of collapse.

  “Rocks,” Sarah murmured. “Right near where it happened, one big one was flat like a tabletop. I ran down from there into the woods and I came out into a clearing.” She laughed suddenly, shaking her head at her own ineptitude. “Oh fucking hell, I’m right near a fucking river.”

  She heard Marilyn begin to confer urgently with a man whose voice had been in the background throughout the call.

  “There’s a tree about twenty minutes down,” Sarah said, fighting to remember anything else that might help. “A fir, struck by lightning. I fell over it.”

  “That’s really good, Sarah. Try not to go too far from there.” The line crackled and faded, and Sarah shook her head as if her will alone could strengthen the signal.

  “They’re going to find me,” she whispered. “They’re going to find me before you do.”

  When she looked down at her phone, it was already dead.

  *

  Still chewing the granola bar she had dispatched in two bites, Alex refolded her map and set off again with a renewed sense of urgency. From the information Sarah had managed to provide, Marilyn and Walt had been able to plot her likely route and give Alex a good idea of her current whereabouts. It was by no means an exact science, but it was certainly better than nothing, and the old trail Alex was following headed in the right direction. In a guarded tone, Marilyn had warned her that Sarah was injured, but Alex was loath to start worrying about the implications of that just yet. Don’t go borrowing trouble was one of Walt’s favorite sayings, and she had decided that was sage advice, given her situation.

  Her trail was descending at a steep gradient, and she had to step carefully to stop herself from slipping. Loose stones rolled beneath her boots, making the path treacherous, so she moved to its edge to try to walk on the grass and moss that had taken root there. She followed the zigzagging route for an hour, her knees and lower back aching with the stress of tempering her speed. Small streams sluiced across her path at regular intervals, impromptu waterfalls cascading down the mountainside to further increase the volume of the river she could hear pounding its way through the valley.

  Her caution now had little to do with losing her footing. Instead of remaining on the trail all the way down, she began to break a route of her own, keeping the path in sight but weaving through the trees above it until she was low enough to catch glimpses of the gray foaming rapids that split the forest in two. Descending farther still, she could see that the river was completely inaccessible, huge rocks tumbled by avalanches creating an unbreachable barrier, and yet she knew that at some point Sarah had found a clearing. This made her plan an incredibly simple one: find the same clearing, walk for another twenty minutes, and then look for a tree felled by lightning. It sounded so easy in theory, but in practice it would probably be akin to finding the proverbial needle in the haystack.

  Despite her misgivings, however, the clearing proved surprisingly easy to spot. An obvious natural opening had been formed by the path of an old ava
lanche, and grasses and ferns had taken full advantage over the years to create a small lea. She had seen nothing like it so far, and peering downstream into the mist rising from the water, she could see no other similar clearings, masses of rocks quickly dominating the landscape again. Confident of being in the right place, she was setting off to start her search for the stricken tree when a flash of movement ahead of her made her drop quickly into a crouch. Any hopes she had had that it was Sarah were immediately dashed when a second figure joined the first. Keeping low, Alex crept toward a thicket of new-growth firs and watched as the man and the woman conferred and then slowly turned full circle to scan the area.

  Alex froze as the man looked across to her hiding place. His face was pinched and pale, but anger and frustration blazed in his eyes, and his attention did not linger for long.

  “She’s not here, Nate.” The high whine of the woman’s voice carried her words easily to Alex.

  “I fucking know that.”

  The man—who Alex now knew was Nathan Merrick—was already walking onward, not bothering to wait for the woman to catch up with him. He was going in the exact direction Alex had been heading. At a loss as to what else she could do, she timed a minute on her watch and then set off behind them.

  *

  Beads of water dripped from the moss with the regularity of a ticking clock. With her hands cupped beneath it, Sarah waited patiently for her palms to fill and then gulped the water down. No matter how many times she did this, her thirst still raged, but she didn’t dare move to the stream she could hear trickling close by like a particularly cruel form of torment. She leaned her head back down on the duffel bag and pulled her knees close to her chest. Something low on her abdomen gave her a sharp stab of pain, and warm wetness began to soak into the sweater she had wrapped around her wound. With a moan, she twisted to sit up again, pressing the sweater against herself and trying not to cry out. Her feet scuffed in the gravel as she struggled to find a comfortable position, and she was about to try lying on her other side when she heard the crunch and snap of a twig and then the unmistakable sound of footsteps approaching. She shrank back into the shadows as far as she possibly could, clenched her fist, and waited.