October skies

CHAPTER 81

Sunday

Sierra Nevada Mountains, California

Julian spun round at the sound of his voice. ‘Oh,’ he gasped, and then managed a faltering smile. ‘I believe we were all going to celebrate finding Preston’s things, weren’t we? Shall I brew us a nice pot of coffee?’

Shepherd cocked his head in an odd, unsettling way, a distracted, far-off expression on his face. Barns looked at him, one hand sliding discreetly into his jacket pocket for something.

‘Mr Shepherd, sir?’

Shepherd shook his head silently, his lips fluttering in silent debate.

‘Rose and I will get some firewood,’ Julian added, reaching for Rose’s hand. ‘Get a nice fire going for the coffee? Have some breakfast too… okay?’ Julian wondered if Shepherd had heard any of that, but then the man’s troubled eyes returned from far away and locked onto his.

His thin lips spread slightly with a hard-fought and weary smile.

‘Yes,’ he said, his face flinching and flickering. ‘Do that. Go get some firewood.’

Barns’s hand hesitated in his jacket pocket. He looked confused. ‘Sir?’

Julian turned to Rose and mouthed, ‘Let’s go.’

They backed away from the two men, turned and walked, struggling with an instinctive urge to break into a desperate run.

Julian heard Barns’s voice again. ‘Sir? Are you sure about letting them go?’

Rose whispered from the side of her mouth. ‘Shit, Jules, I’m sure they know. They know we know.’

‘Keep walking,’ he hissed back.

Behind them, Barns’s voice came again, insistent. ‘Mr Shepherd, are you all right?’

They stepped a little more quickly over the undulating mounds of moss, both desperately trying not to give in to the growing rush of panic. For some reason Shepherd seemed to have slipped into a listless state. Right now he was letting them walk. Julian figured if they started to sprint, that might snap him out of it.

Twenty yards ahead of them were the first saplings that marked the edge of the clearing and the start of woodland rising from it. To their left, in amongst them, making her way down the slope, weaving through the trunks, he caught the briefest glimpse of Grace’s red anorak.

‘Look, there’s Grace up ahead-’

His words were interrupted by a high-pitched shriek of rage from behind them. It was Shepherd’s voice… but somehow not Shepherd.

‘KILL THEM!’

Julian turned to see Barns react instantly, whipping out a gun and adopting the well-practised firing stance of a trained killer.

‘Oh shit. RUN!’

He heard several cracks of gunfire and felt the throb of a bullet passing his ear an instant later. Rose yelped beside him as they raced for the trees. The sound of two more cracks came in quick succession.

He felt the sleeve of his jacket tugged viciously and saw the white puff of inner lining exploding from a ragged hole.

‘Shit!’

They reached the first narrow tree trunks as a third double-tapped volley was fired, sending splinters of young wood into the air. Julian and Rose ducked down and scrambled under the low branches into the undergrowth.

He lost his footing on a root and tumbled over.

‘Jules! Get up! Get up!’

Rose held out a hand; he grabbed it and pulled himself up just in time to see Grace emerge from the trees, clearly confused by the ruckus. She started jogging towards the two men, unslinging her rifle. Julian realised that, in all innocence, she must have been thinking the shots were being fired at a bear.

‘GRACE! RUN!’ Rose screamed.

Grace turned their way, confused by Rose’s call. She turned to Shepherd, her gravelly voice raised urgently as she asked them what the hell was going on.

Julian watched in horror as Shepherd’s hired killer swiftly raised his pistol and shot the old woman point-blank.

‘NO!’ screamed Rose.

They watched in shocked stillness as Grace flopped lifelessly to the ground. Shepherd casually reached down and scooped up her gun.

‘Oh shit-shit-shit…’ Julian muttered. He grabbed Rose’s hand and pulled her after him. ‘Come on!’

They scrambled up the hillside, alternately weaving their way through dense clusters of undergrowth and brambles that scratched and grabbed at them, then bursting into small isolated clearings encircled by a thick, tall wall of dark green fir trees.

Julian stopped in one of them and turned to look downhill, through a gap in the trees towards the clearing. He could see the Day-Glo colours of their tents clustered together in the middle, and amongst them the darker, navy-blue anoraks of Shepherd and Barns. They seemed in no immediate hurry to pursue; instead Barns was picking through his backpack, and Shepherd was slowly scanning the hillside, a hand cupped over his eyes to keep out the low-angle glare of the morning sun. Suddenly his other hand shot up and pointed directly towards them. He heard the distant bark of the man’s voice a second later.

‘Shit!’ snapped Julian. ‘He’s spotted us.’

‘Jules,’ Rose whispered, ‘look at us.’ She pointed at her anorak and his. One was lemon yellow, the other orange. ‘We’ve got to lose these.’

‘You’re right.’

They pushed their way out of the clearing back into dense foliage, and there, hidden from view for the moment, they shed their anoraks. He tucked his into a small bundle and pushed it under his jumper, creating a pregnant bulge.

‘We need to hang onto them,’ he said. ‘It gets cold at night.’ She nodded and did likewise.

‘Okay, then,’ he said, gasping for air after the last few minutes of exertion. ‘You’re better with directions — which way?’

Rose nodded up hill. ‘That way is west, I think… and perhaps we’ll get a signal on your BlackBerry at the top.’

‘Right.’

They pushed on again, stopping to rest momentarily in a small rock-strewn glade a few minutes later. Julian looked back down at the camp clearing and saw the dark outlines of both men walking calmly across it, towards them and the tree line.

‘They’ve stopped fucking around down there, now. They’re coming for us.’

She turned to look. ‘Can they find us?’

Julian shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s possible we’ve left tracks behind us that could be followed… shit, what do I know? I doubt it, though.’

‘Yeah,’ she whispered. ‘It’s not like he’s some Indian master-tracker, right?’

He watched them as they disappeared from view beneath the forest canopy below to begin their ascent up the hillside, towards them. He didn’t like the calm, unhurried way they had made their way out of the clearing. If Shepherd’s body language said anything, it was: I know exactly where you two are, and I’m coming for you.

‘Let’s just hope not.’ He grabbed her heaving shoulder. ‘Come on! Let’s move.’

Rose nodded wordlessly. They turned and continued scrambling uphill.

An hour later, the trees thinned out before them and they found themselves standing in the open, three-quarters of the way up one of the bare peaks that looked down on the valley in which they’d camped. Above them, dry brown tufts of grass gradually gave way to a sharp and steepening slope of bare rock that rose to culminate in a jagged horizon.

Rose sighed with relief to see a break in the peaks to their right, a quarter of a mile along the side of the slope — a narrow pass.

‘There,’ she said, pointing to it. ‘I guess that’ll take us into the next valley.’

Julian nodded as he pulled out his BlackBerry and tried for a signal.

‘Anything?’ Rose asked hopefully.

He shook his head.

‘Let’s go,’ she rasped between breaths. ‘Maybe we’ll pick up a signal on the other side.’

The pass was little more than a modest gulch, hacked like the very first cut of an axe into a tree trunk. It was just about wide enough that a 4x4 might have made it through, if it weren’t for the many fractured boulders and slides of rubble that clattered noisily and shifted unnervingly beneath their feet.

The sun was high in the sky as they emerged and looked down on a much broader valley.

‘Anything now?’ asked Rose.

Julian snapped his phone shut and shook his head. ‘No.’

She scanned the world below looking for some sign of civilisation — even an empty road would have been worth heading for. Then she spotted it.

‘Look!’

Julian followed her finger. ‘What is that?’

A wide, shallow, slow-moving river wound its way westward down the valley, and on a major horseshoe bend in the river, they could see a row of squat wooden buildings.

‘Looks like some kind of logging camp,’ said Rose. ‘Abandoned, though, do you think?’

‘Yeah.’

‘We should still make for that. There might be something there. There might be someone there.’

Julian nodded.