The Chase, page 12
“Just think one step at a time,” Julie said.
“I’m not up to this exertion like you two, but I’ll make it.”
“We’re going slow. If you want revenge, think about that. It’s possible at the pass or the saddle, but not here,” Tanya said. She signaled Julie to start climbing, turned Rebecca uphill, and gave her a hand to help her over the first several rocks.
The thick undergrowth that slowed their progress thinned. Open patches of herbs, small shrubs, and a few banner trees broke up the krummholz, They were close to the start of the tundra, a landscape of miniature plants now devoid of flowers but a colorful mixture of reds, oranges, cinnamon, and browns, grassland, meadows, and rockfields called fellfields.
Tanya had mixed feelings about the tundra. It was windswept and treeless and could be sunny and inviting one hour and incredibly hostile in another.
Some areas were desert like, others lush with vegetation depending upon wind and snowfall. Large rocks broke up the landscape brought up thousands of years ago as the soil was churned by freezing and thawing.
Tanya took a deep breath. Walking would be easier, but in places heaps of boulders blocked grasses and loose gravel made footing difficult.
Julie was soon several feet ahead of them and lost in the mist. She paused. The fog cleared, and she looked down at them.
“Keep moving. We’re coming,” Tanya called, ill at ease with Rebecca’s obvious reluctance to move forward.
“Maybe the men have given up on us,” Rebecca said when she caught up with Julie. “We can retreat and look for Cindy instead of wasting time going over god knows what kind of terrain.”
“Too big a chance,” Julie said, and she began climbing over the rocks in the stream.
Tanya pushed Rebecca forward. An oppressive dread took hold of her mind. Her palms were wet. The ghostly outlines of the high peaks added to the gloom consuming her and her heart beat faster than it should. She felt the presence of the creatures climbing below her. Her body tensed and she tripped on a boulder that threw her off balance.
“You okay?” Julie called.
“Yes.” Turning around, Tanya sent a reassurance expression. Would the nightmare ever end? Rebecca stood in a daze. Julie adjusted the pack, tightened her waist belt and moved forward. The landscape corralled by fog held them in an icy grip of terror. She could not rid herself of a feeling of doom. Tanya increased her speed, but Julie asked her to slow down.
“Rebecca needs to stop for a minute,” Julie said
“We can’t. We’ve got to keep going,” Tanya responded. “The mist is getting heavier.”
The mountains she loved now seemed hostile and held her in gloom as deep as death. She wanted to survive, but the dread she felt filled her with emptiness. Perhaps her life had been too perfect.
It was suddenly torn apart. Greg would be gone from her life even if she did survive. Why was this happening to her? If they didn’t stay ahead of the menace pursuing them they would die. Her breath came in short gasps and her heart pounded in her chest. She stopped climbing.
“I’ll take the pack,” Tanya said when Julie came up to her. “You’ve carried it long enough.”
Without protest, Julie slipped out of the pack and dropped it in front of her. “I guess I do need a break. Have you any idea how we’re doing?”
“We haven’t reached the small tarn at the bottom of the snowfield,” Tanya said.
They heard a crash behind them and turned to see Rebecca stumbling down the way they had come. Julie hurried after her taking long steps over the wet rocks.
“Just what we don’t need is for one of us to fall and break an ankle or leg,” Julie called and she chased after Rebecca.
When Julie was close to Rebecca, she grabbed her arm. Rebecca reacted with a hard jerk freeing herself and throwing Julie off balance. Tanya cut around Rebecca to stop her plunge downhill. Rebecca pushed past her, but Julie came up behind them and threw herself against Rebecca, and the two fell headlong into a clump of tundra grasses free of rock.
“You’re losing us time again, damn it,” Julie said between her teeth.
Tanya was startled at the anger she heard in her voice. Her mouth went dry. Frustration spawned anger and anger could lead to loss of control of thoughts. It was uncharacteristic of Julie. She read surprise on Rebecca’s face. At least she reacted, her first sign of lucidity since they had left camp.
Then Julie held out her hand to help Rebecca to her feet. “Take my wrist,” she said.
Rebecca stood and brushed debris from her clothes.
The strain of their situation was unbearable. Thunder crashed in Tanya’s ears as she fought to stifle a feeling of defeat. She wanted to collapse where she stood and wait for the men to kill her, but her inner desire to live prevented her from doing so.
“Sorry,” Rebecca said. “I know I can’t take your lives with mine. I won’t do that again. You said we might be able to push them off the cliff. I want them dead. When they’re gone, I don’t care what happens. They deserve to die.”
The tone of Rebecca’s voice and the malice in her words turned Tanya’s anger toward the men. Could she really push anyone to their likely death? At the moment, she didn’t know.
“We’ve got to move,” Tanya urged them to move forward.
“Could you kill another being?” Julie asked for no reason.
“I don’t know,” Tanya said. “I’ve been thinking about it.”
“I’ll manage alone,” Rebecca said. “I’m the one who has reason.” Her words were hoarse.
Without another word, Rebecca moved ahead of Julie and Tanya, hiked uphill to the red backpack, removed her fanny pack, and shouldered the backpack.
“We need to hurry. Once were on top, we’ve got to make plans, catch those bastards off guard. I want them destroyed.”
“You’re the slow one. Let me take the pack and you carry the fanny pack,” Julie said, her voice coarse. She put on the pack and resumed climbing.
Tanya led. The hill became steeper and she slowed her pace. Uncomfortable thoughts filled her mind. Pushing the men to their deaths was beyond her comprehension. What was she thinking? Yet, she knew it might be their only hope of survival. In her mind, she remembered the comments of a police officer at a self-defense class she had taken. “People who buy guns for protection almost never can bring themselves to pull the trigger. In their instant of hesitation, the criminal has time to take the gun and kill the victim.”
Rebecca pushed ahead of Tanya without a comment. She let her go, paused to catch her breath and settle her pack.
“She doesn’t know the route. You have to lead,” Julie said.
“Right.” With long strides, Tanya overtook Rebecca who was gasping for air. She slowed down even though it wasted valuable time.
“The men may not be in condition for the climbing either,” Tanya said. “They could be moving slowly too. They might even give up the chase.”
She saw them in her mind as though she had turned on a television screen. Two of them were muscular almost like boxers. The youngest was scrawny and small. The oldest man was thinner, but looked as though he could hold his own. Of the four, she thought he might have the least trouble climbing.
A gust of cold wind swept through her. The blast heightened her anxiety. She listened for sounds that might tell her where the stalkers were, but all she heard were small rocks clacking against each other as they fell against the granite cliff to the right of them.
Her olfactory senses revealed the smell of dry grasses and dank rotting duff. The sun they had seen briefly was gone. Even climbing uphill without landmarks, they could end up on the wrong side of the cirque and that added to her concerns. She asked herself, Why us? Why me? No answer came to her. Rebecca and Julie had fallen far enough behind her that she could no longer see them. Reluctantly she retraced her steps and found them. Rebecca sat on a rock rubbing her right thigh while Julie rubbed the left calf.
“I’ve got incredible cramps in my legs. I’m not sure I can go on,” Rebecca said.
“What’ll we do now?” Julie asked with desperation in her voice.
“I may have some aspirin in the bottom of my pack.” Tanya opened the inner compartment and felt in the bottom. “Damn, I’m going to have to take everything out and that will take time.
With quick motions, she pulled items from her pack and arranged them into heaps on top of a piece of plastic until she found a small purple pouch. “I think I have ibuprofen and acetaminophen as well. What do you want to try?” She spoke with a calmness she did not feel.
“Nothing’s going to help.” Rebecca groaned and stretched one leg straight in front of her. “This is killing me. I can’t move.”
“Take some ibuprofen. At least try and see if it helps,” Tanya handed Rebecca three pills and a water bottle.
Rebecca swallowed the pills.
“Try standing, straightened one leg and then the other and point your toes toward your head. That sometimes works,” Tanya said.
“I can’t possibly stand.”
“Then sit and try it. We’ve got to keep going. It’s nearly noon,” Tanya begged. She stuffed items into her pack.
“Have we enough food for a snack and a short rest?” Julie asked.
“We’ve taken too many as it is, but I think we can each have an energy bar. They’re in the fanny pack.”
Julie removed it from her waist and found them on top.
The anxiety Tanya felt gagged her when she ate the food and she choked. They lacked any defense until they reached the top of the couloir, and they would need courage and imagination to stop the men. Anyone of them could grab an ankle and pull them off the narrow shelf they would need to stand on to accomplish their goal.
Their survival depended on quick, fast reactions, and a ruthlessness she was not certain the three of them possessed. Worried about their ability to act sent her to her feet. She needed time, time to think and to plan.
“Your cramps, how are they?” she asked impatiently.
“The pills seem to be helping.”
“Can you walk?”
“I’ll try.”
Black despair threatened to flood over Tanya and her heart began to pound. She felt the hairs prick the back of her neck. The thick whorls of mist added to a sense of immediate danger.
“They’re coming,” she whispered. “I feel them.”
Julie jumped to her feet, strapped on the fanny pack, and began climbing uphill. Tanya helped Rebecca into a standing position.
“If you want to vindicate Cindy’s possible death, move,” Tanya whispered.
With a groan, Rebecca leaned forward and clutched her thighs. Then she straightened and climbed uphill, one slow step after another. They would never make it to the pass by nightfall.
Rebecca knew she was putting her friends in danger. It startled her to realize she didn’t care what happened to them. She wanted the men dead. Her cramps hurt, and it took all her willpower to walk.
If she remained where she was, the men might pass her in the mist. She wanted to face them, see them fall one by one down the couloir, hear them scream out in terror as they tried to arrest themselves, look into their fear-filled faces. Her breath caught in her throat with the awareness of the pleasure it would give her to see them die.
What had gone wrong? Why was this happening? Why Cindy? She was just a kid, a good one at that. All of the darkness in Rebecca’s past deluged her thoughts. She had tried so hard to escape a childhood filled with abuse from a father who was drunk more than sober.
He had dominated their lives and allowed them no freedom. His cruelty to her mother, her brother, and her had remained buried for so long and now it was with her in her every step.
Yes, she wanted those men dead for what they had done to Cindy, but also as revenge against a father she had come to hate. They reminded her of him.
Her mother became so fearful of her father she slept with a pistol under her pillow. In one violent night, everything exploded. Her father, in one of his drunken states, beat her mother into unconsciousness.
Her brother found the pistol and shot and killed her father. Justified though it was in her mind, her brother still spent five years in prison, and her mother lingered for months never regaining consciousness.
And her mother? How could she tolerate the beatings, the destruction, the degrading verbiage he threw at them? Rebecca had never forgiven her mother for staying with her father. She could have left and protected them, but she had not. Now Rebecca could not protect Cindy. What had she done?
Tears filled her eyes and ran down her cheeks. She had planned her life so carefully to avoid any repeat of her childhood. Bill and she married at eighteen. He was a small placid husband who never questioned anything she said nor did.
Her son followed her dictates until recently. Upon entering college, he changed his major to music instead of her demands that he major in pre-med. Didn’t he realize he only had mediocre talent? He could not make a living playing a guitar. In spite of her threats, David persisted in music and now they hardly communicated.
Thank God for Cindy. She had been like Bill willing to do what was best for her. She planned to major in science, enter medicine, follow Rebecca’s outline. A shudder ran through Rebecca’s body. Was she like her father? Cindy was dead because she, Rebecca, had insisted Cindy accompany them on this trip. Tightness grabbed her heart and she let out a pitiful groan.
Rebecca could not see Tanya or Julie, but she plodded forward without further protests. They came to a narrowing in the canyon and Rebecca paused. Sitting on the edge of a rock Tanya waited thirty feet in front of them, below a waterfall.
“You know away around this?” she asked.
“Not really. I think we just have to cling to the side of the bank and make our way above the falls,” Tanya said.
“How you doing, Rebecca?” Julie asked.
Rebecca flopped on the bank next to Julie. “I want them dead,” she said with a cold, primitive, savagery in her voice.
Tanya crossed above the two. “Then, no rest. We still haven’t reached the glacier tarn.”
Each step on the rocky scree threatened to send Rebecca falling toward the stream. With her toe, she attempted to make a small platform. Slowly she made her way to the head of the V-shaped opening and away from the deafening roar of the water. Once past the crack, she turned to watch Tanya and Julie.
A cold blast of wind hit them, died momentarily, then picked up, lifting the mist around them, pushing it apart into long wisps and small circles. She shivered and began climbing across a polygon of rocks and into jagged rocks standing on end. The grasses and plants were orange, red, and brown mimicking her emotions and the threat she felt.
There was no doubt the tracks they left in the loose rock would alert the men to the distance separating them. She increased her speed at a cost to her energy. Ahead, she saw the huge snow-filled cirque, the steep couloir they had to climb, and the jagged outline of the ridge covered by black sky.
Beneath her foot she crushed a small brown alpine paintbrush. Could she commit murder? Then she became no better than the men. Rebecca didn’t care. She could live with herself and her beliefs if she carried out the plan forming in her mind.
She paused to study the hanging snowfield filling the cirque and the steep, narrow chute to the right before making her way around the small lake at its base. Grapple began to fall and she pulled her hood tight around her face. She groaned. The soft pellets of ice would only add to the difficulties ahead of them.
Rebecca sank to the ground, exhausted from her push to the cirque.
Chapter 12
Greg had misgivings about leaving the dog in the kennel, but he decided he had no choice. His injury would cause problems and slow him down. Now he wished the dog was with him. The rain of the last few days had erased any tracks that might have given them clues as to the whereabouts of Tanya and the others.
At the moment, he wondered what he was doing out on such a miserable day. If nothing was wrong, then he and Steve could never hope to catch up with the four women who were almost two days ahead of them.
He splashed through a puddle and slogged uphill disgruntled with the entire situation. Of course, nothing could have happened to them. His worry was irrational, not like him. The dog had simply wandered off and gotten lost, and in the process injured himself.
Tanya was one of the most capable outdoor people he knew. She could survive anything, he reasoned. In spite of his inner arguments, the gut fear he’d had since the dog had been picked up remained with him. He could not obliterate the nagging worry.
Tanya never let the dog out of her sight. She would have followed him to the trailhead if necessary, but she had not. He wanted to know why. Something was amiss, but what?
The heavy fog outlined the trees in ghostly forms and added to his black mood. He perceived a danger, an external threat to the woman he loved as irrational as it seemed. He did not believe in premonitions, yet he sensed something was terribly wrong.
Within three hours Greg and Steve reached what appeared to be a recently used campsite. Steve, a game hunter since childhood, searched the perimeter of the site looking for tracks, human and dog, not elk or deer. What he found disturbed him. Boot prints, tennis shoes, small and large tracks mixed one on top of the other and filled with water, formed a picture of confusion.
