Desolation Point (28 page)

“Oh God.” Sarah felt her legs buckle and she slammed onto her knees. Wisps of gray drifted into her vision. “No, no.” She couldn’t faint. Deakin would have heard the gunshot. She had to get back to Alex. “No, fucking,
no
.”

When she stood up, her stolen pants slipped down her hips in such a ludicrous way that she almost laughed, before starting to cry instead. With one hand hitching them up so they wouldn’t trip her and the other hand clasped around the gun, she ran back toward the clearing.

*

Alex was leaning forward on her hands, panting from the effort of bringing them from behind her back and trying not to panic, when she heard the gunshot.

“Shit.” She scrambled up as footsteps rapidly closed in on the shelter. With no time to second-guess herself and no way of knowing what had happened to Sarah, she ran straight at Deakin, barreling into him so that they both fell to the ground. They tumbled over each other and she heard him grunt as her elbow collided with his ribs. Taking advantage of his disorientation, she clubbed her fists into his face, blood and saliva slick on her knuckles as his lip burst open. Her advantage lasted only seconds. From the corner of her eye she saw him raise his hand to her collar, and with one flick of his wrist, he threw her off him as casually as he might swat a fly. She skidded through the mud, the roar of the river suddenly overwhelming as she slid closer to its banks. The side of her head struck a rock, snapping her neck backward and making her vision blur and then darken.

When she opened her eyes, everything had shifted.

She was upright, Deakin’s arm crushing her throat, and her feet scrabbling for purchase as he pressed a gun against the side of her head. Sarah stood in front of them, holding a gun so tightly that her arms were quivering with fatigue. She gave a choked sob when she saw that Alex was awake, and Alex felt a grief so complete that it nearly knocked her out again.

“What are you thinking, girl?” Deakin asked Sarah. “Thinking you might be able to shoot me in the head?” He spat a thick clot of blood into the mud. “You haven’t got a hope in hell.”

She looked at Alex, her eyes begging for advice. Alex shook her aching head, fully aware that Deakin was more right than he would ever know, that this was the first time Sarah had even held a gun.

“Please, just let her go.” The raw agony in Sarah’s voice cut through Alex like a blade. They weren’t both going to get out of this, that much seemed perfectly clear, and accepting it as a fact made her decision easier.

“Sarah.” She raised her voice above the volume of the river, ignoring the crack Deakin gave her with the butt of his gun. “Find a radio. You’ll be fine, sweetheart.”

Sarah shook her head, clearly not understanding what Alex meant, yet seeming to sense that something awful was about to happen.

Alex closed her eyes; she couldn’t bear to look at Sarah and still do this. Bracing herself with her feet apart, she quickly began to push backward. She felt Deakin’s arm slip slightly just before he fired a shot that deafened her. The shot flew wild and wide, the bullet pinging harmlessly off a rock as Deakin lost his footing. She kept pushing, steadily gaining momentum and forcing him along with her, until the crumbling bank of the river gave way beneath her feet. There was a strange, free-falling sensation that cut off abruptly as they crashed into the water.

*

“
Alex?
”

Sarah’s legs felt like they were moving through molasses. Nothing seemed to be working properly, and she could hear someone screaming, but by the time she reached the river only seconds had passed. Her jacket was already in her hands, her boots loose enough to be kicked off. The remnants of the bank were steep and unstable, the water deep when she lowered herself into it. Still clinging onto the bank, she tried to breathe through the shock of the cold. She saw Deakin’s arms flailing just beyond her reach, but then they fell motionless as his head collided with a massive boulder. His skull cracked like a cantaloupe, and thick gouts of crimson swirled through the rapids. The current twisted him around, snapping at his limp body before dragging him deeper and out of sight.

“
Alex?
”

She ducked her head beneath the water, trying to see through the foam and the silt churned up by the collapse of the riverbank. A brief flash of color appeared in the murk, and when she surfaced again, she spotted Alex ten yards away, her chained hands clasped weakly around a small piece of wood. Unable to do anything but keep her head up, she was drifting dangerously close to the current that had overcome Deakin.

Sarah took a huge breath and then dove and struck out toward her, forcing herself to keep swimming even when her lungs burned and her muscles threatened to cramp and seize up. She turned her back as a wave rose up, feeling her skin scrape across the submerged rock that had caused the turbulence. Alex was almost close enough to touch now, but she disappeared beneath the water again. Sarah reached out frantically, kicking against the rock for extra leverage, and felt thick, heavy material brush against her fingers. She snatched at it, clamping it in her fist and flipping over onto her back so she could haul Alex properly into her grip. With her hand cupping Alex’s chin, she began to turn, aiming for the shore and trying not to think about how limp Alex felt or how far from the camp they might have drifted. She was tiring, her thoughts muddled by a deadly combination of exhaustion and hypothermia. Something slammed into her shoulder, tipping them both sideways, and she gulped a mouthful of water before she could stop herself. She coughed, simultaneously hacking water up through her nose and mouth and nearly losing her hold on Alex in the process.

“Fuck this!” She screamed her defiance to anything that might have been listening. The yell cleared her lungs. She gave one final push toward a small channel she could see leading into a calmer pool of water. Away from the main tumult of the rapids, it immediately became easier for her to kick, and she was able to steer a course with more accuracy. Smaller rocks began to knock against her legs, and when she experimentally lowered her feet, the tips of her toes brushed against the bottom. She gave a cry of relief, falling forward and grappling for the riverbank, one arm now wrapped bodily around Alex. When her fingers got a proper hold on the grassy ledge, all she could do was gasp for breath and try to keep Alex’s head above the water. The ledge at that point was too steep for her to pull herself up, let alone drag Alex out as well. Treading water, she scanned the riverbank for a shallower incline. With one hand intermittently gripping the bank to guide her along, she dragged Alex another ten yards downriver to a sloping beach. Silt and pebbles dislodged beneath her knees as she approached the beach, and she realized belatedly that the water was shallow enough to stand up in, although her legs collapsed beneath her when she tried. Functioning largely on autopilot, she managed to crawl onto the beach and drag Alex from the water.

“Alex?” She turned her onto her back and unzipped her jacket with numb fingers. “Don’t you fucking dare…” she whispered. She pressed her hand and then her ear to Alex’s chest to feel for breathing. The pulse at Alex’s throat was beating strongly, but her breaths were labored and rattling against the water in her lungs.

Trying to remember the lifeguard training from her job at the swimming pool, Sarah positioned Alex on her side, tilted her jaw to open her airway, and improvised by slapping her on the back.

“Cough,” she said fiercely. “Come on, cough, Alex. Come on, love. You’ll feel better, I promise.” She yelped when she felt Alex’s hand twitch. Encouraged, she hit her harder, prompting a fit of coughing so violent that it ended in Alex vomiting a large amount of dirty water onto the gravel.

Alex groaned, still coughing convulsively. Keeping her in the recovery position, Sarah wiped her mouth clear of secretions. It made a mess of Sarah’s sweater sleeve, but she didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything other than the fact that Alex had just opened her eyes.

“That was a fucking stupid thing to do.” Sarah tried to yell it, but the words came out broken by sobs.

Alex mouthed the word “sorry,” but any sound she might have made was silenced beneath another fit of coughing that left her limp and blue around the lips.

“Shit.” Sarah looked up, trying to gauge where they were in relation to the camp. They were still on the same side of the river, and although it felt like they’d been in the water for hours, realistically, they couldn’t have traveled very far from the clearing. Still, there was no way Alex was in any condition to walk back.

The sand Alex lay on was sodden, the weight of her body sinking slowly into it as water lapped at her toes. Beyond the scattering of stones and driftwood that delineated the beach, Sarah could see a patch of grassy undergrowth ringed by trees. She hooked her arms beneath Alex’s and interlaced her fingers to strengthen her hold.

“Give me a push, Alex,” she said, more in hope than expectation.

Alex tried, her legs scuffling ineffectually in the sand as Sarah lugged her onto the grass inch by laborious inch. The grass was long enough to conceal Alex if she remained lying down, and even though Sarah was certain there was no one left to harm them, it made her feel less anxious about what she had to do next.

Bending low, she rested her hand on the clammy skin of Alex’s forehead.

“I love you,” she whispered, as tears tracked twin lines of heat down her cheeks. “Stay right here, okay? I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

*

“Radio, blankets, clothes, food, matches, handcuff keys.” Sarah chanted the list of essentials as she ran, her addled brain skipping items and rearranging their order on each repetition. “Gun,” she added, trying to make a mental note to pick hers up from where she had dropped it alongside her boots and jacket. “Oh, boots and jacket.” As if to emphasize her oversight, something crunched into the sole of her left foot, hard enough that it would almost certainly be painful just as soon as her extremities regained sensation. At least the numbness was one thing in her favor, the second being the apparent fever-reducing effect of the cold water she had been immersed in. Neither of those was likely to last for much longer, however, and she was relieved beyond measure when she finally picked up the faint smell of smoke. She had been running flat-out for five minutes by then, and as soon as she slowed to a walk, her legs began to fold.

“Just keep going,” she muttered, her memory jumping back unbidden to a set of parallel bars with Ash waving chocolate at one end and Isaac’s gentle encouragement behind her. “Gun, boots, jacket, cuff keys. Radio,
radio
.”

The possibility that Tanner would have somehow made it to the clearing had plagued her until she had distracted herself with the lists. As the fire came into view, she surveyed the area furtively, but there was no sign of him. Even so, she picked up the Glock first, the weight of it strangely reassuring in her hand as she pushed her feet back into her boots.

The tent was well stocked with food, equipment, and dry clothes. She swiftly changed out of her soaked layers and set aside a spare set of clothing for Alex. Sitting in full sight on top of a cozy-looking sleeping bag was a radio that she grabbed and turned on, willing the battery to be full so that she would not have to go and search Tanner for his. The light flashed green, and static hummed when she thumbed the talk button.

“Hello? Can anyone hear me?” She waited for an answer, to no avail. After a careful switch to the next possible channel, she repeated her message. Her stomach twisted with fear: fear that no one would answer her and fear that, if someone did, it would be Aaron, or another of Deakin’s cronies waiting to play the same trick all over again.

“Hello? Can anyone hear me? Please come in.”

A click cut into the static. Then a voice, female and familiar, and tremulous with hope.

“Sarah? Is that you, honey?”

A rush of adrenaline made Sarah drop the radio. She snatched it up again as Marilyn, obviously afraid that she had misheard the hail, repeated her question.

“I’m here,” Sarah managed to say, and then stronger, “I’m here. Please,
please
don’t go.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Marilyn said slowly and carefully, as if she were negotiating a hostage crisis. “We have teams out looking for you all over the area. Can you tell me where you are?”

Deakin’s GPS lay abandoned beside his radio. When Sarah flicked it on, she found it required no passcode, and she squinted at the coordinates it provided, her vision doubling intermittently. She read the numbers out, stumbling over the second set and repeating them all in response to Marilyn’s patient prompting. She remembered Deakin calling the river the East Fork Creek, so she told Marilyn that as well.

“Good, that’s real good,” Marilyn said. “I got you.”

“I’ve got to get back to Alex,” Sarah muttered, already halfway through shoving supplies into a backpack.

“Alex?” Marilyn’s voice rose an octave and there was a sudden babble of voices in the background. “Alex is with you?”

“Yes. Well, no.” Sarah stuffed a sleeping bag into the pack. She had upended everything but still hadn’t found the keys to Alex’s handcuffs. “I’m going back to her now. She’s a little way down the river. Shit.” She shook her head in an attempt to clear it. “Those coordinates, that’s the camp, but we were in the river.” Tears of frustration made her vision even more blurred. None of this was coming out right. “I ran for five minutes,” she said, taking care to sound all the words out. “We’re five minutes’ run downriver from the camp.”

“I got it, Sarah,” Marilyn said. “I’m gonna pass that on to our closest team. Don’t worry.”

“Thank you,” Sarah mumbled, busy sealing the pack up and hoisting it onto her back. “I have to go now.”

“Sarah?”

“Yes.”

“Take the radio with you, okay? Leave it on this channel.”

“I will.” Sarah stared at the radio, paralyzed by an irrational but overwhelming fear. “Marilyn?” she said.