Neil McMahon - Revolution No.9

When she was finished, he took his turn. With the drug’s harsh fire piercing his brain, he gave her the flashlight, unslung his rifle, and followed her at a jog. The path was overgrown with weeds, barely visible, but he could see the vestiges of tire tracks.

His sense of direction was utterly blotted out. He could have been heading toward the moon.

He slogged along at his half-run, working to keep up with the younger, quicker woman. The meth told his brain that he could lope like a wolf all night, but his body, with the days of cumulative fatigue and his clumsy boots and wet clothes and the extra weight he was carrying, was already laboring hard. His ears strained to pick up the sound of an approaching engine over the driving rain.

If the heavily armed, night-goggled maquis caught up with them, it would mean a firefight.

A short one.

When the half-hour was up, Monks guessed that they had gone about two miles. He was starting to get a feel for the terrain. The trail was cut into a mountainside, running at a slight downhill grade. He watched the faint luminescent tunnel that Marguerite’s flashlight opened up in the blurry night, hoping for a flat stretch to one side or the other, but the going was steep, both uphill and down. His body heat from the first strenuous exertions had evened out, and he was noticing that tonight was quite a bit colder than it had been. The raindrops pelting through the flashlight’s beam were taking on the thick, splayed look of turning toward snow. So far, whatever tracks they had left would be hard to follow. But in fresh snow, footprints would be unavoidable-another reason to get off the road.

He decided to head uphill. It might help throw off their pursuers, who would expect them to take the easier course. And downhill was likely to lead them to another flooded ravine like the one they had crossed getting out of camp, but potentially larger and impossible to ford. He watched the light beam intently for the next couple of minutes, and finally settled on a rockslide as a takeoff point.

He slowed to a walk, pulling in deep rasping lungfuls of wet air, and called hoarsely to Marguerite to stop.

“Turn off the light, and don’t turn it on again unless I tell you,” he said when he caught up to her.

But before she clicked off the beam, he caught a glimpse of her eyes. The earlier euphoria was gone. She looked scared and tense, and while it was impossible to tell in the rain, he thought she might be weeping. He realized that with all of his own concerns, he hadn’t thought about the hurricane of violence and emotions that she had been going through.

He put his arm around her shoulders.

“Look, we’re doing great,” he said, speaking forcefully, close to her, as he would to a green ER resident or nurse losing her nerve. “You’re saving this little boy’s life, remember that. Now come on, we’re going to make it.”

He wondered if, in the instant before the light beam vanished, she saw the madness in his own eyes.

By midnight, there were two inches of new snow on the ground and the air was thick with big wet flakes, swirling around in a near-blizzard. The going was increasingly harder and colder. They were long past trying to run-now they were just trudging soddenly and blindly in the hope of gaining distance. His feet were aching and at the point of numbness.

He tried not to think about how easy it was to get turned around in these kinds of conditions.

They had made it up the rockslide and onto a ridge, then gradually downward into what seemed to be the floor of a broad valley. The pressing claustrophobic canopy of trees had thinned, yielding to a sense of open space. It was getting to be time for Mandrake’s hourly check, and Monks was looking for a sheltering tree, when he saw Marguerite’s form, barely visible a few yards off to his left, stumble and fall.

He hurried to her side, expecting her to scramble back to her feet. But she lay where she was. He knelt and put his hand on her, feeling her racking shivers. Her clothes, like his, were soaked through. He pulled the flashlight from her pack and shined it on her face. Her eyes were dull and unfocused and her teeth were chattering.

Hypothermia. She needed to warm up, fast. Stopping might cost them their lead, but there was no choice.

Monks turned in a circle, staring futilely into the night for some sign of shelter. The flashlight’s beam, like headlights, showed nothing but the whirling snow. He didn’t dare leave her and scout on his own-he might not be able to find her again.

“Okay, honey, come on,” he said, clicking the flashlight off and stuffing it in his coat pocket. “We’re going to get someplace and warm up. Just a little farther.”

“I can’t feel my feet,” she whispered.

He stood, gripping her wrists, and pulled her upright. She was not a small woman, and it took everything he had. He realized that he also was on the edge of collapse.

With his arm tight around her waist, he walked facing into the driving snow, hoping to run into cliffs at the valley’s edge that would provide a lee. The shapes of trees appeared like specters, and Monks got the dizzying sense that the branches were clutching at them. They stumbled on, slipping and panting, in a nightmare fantasy where all that mattered was the next step toward a goal that they would never reach.

Then he started seeing rocks among the trees-at first stumpy granite boulders thrusting up from the valley floor, then outcroppings and piles of sharp talus. They had come to the base of a mountainside. Up close, in its shelter, the driving snow lost its force and fell as gently as on a Christmas card. Now he could see dimly for ten or fifteen yards. With the dark line of rocks to follow, he decided to take the chance of going on alone to scout for an outcropping that would get them out of the wet. He eased Marguerite back, sitting her down against the slope, then unslung Mandrake and settled him beside her.

“I’ll be back in a couple of minutes,” he said, then added sternly, “Don’t move, you understand?”

She nodded faintly, eyes closed. It was unlikely that she would try, but she might be hallucinating by this point and stumble off toward some imagined safety.

Monks stood for a moment, breathing deeply, trying to gather whatever strength he had left. Then he walked, fifty yards, a hundred. There were dry patches under cliffs that would be better than nothing, but no real shelter. He pushed on for another hundred yards, aching to collapse, and fearing that if he went much farther he wouldn’t be able to make it back.

Then he saw a break in the cliff face, a darker splotch the size of a car. He got out the flashlight. Its beam showed a cavity ten feet deep, where the cliff base sloped back in. Boulders lay tumbled to the sides like buttresses.

He set the flashlight on a rock, leaving it on so he wouldn’t miss it on his return, and started back to get the others. A fierce giddy elation pierced the numb shield of his fatigue. Now they had a chance to make it through this night.

Monks trudged back to the cave with an armload of firewood, dry branches that he’d snapped off a dead tree. Crouching under the low stone roof, he dumped them on the ground and broke them into shorter lengths under his boot, then built a small circle of brick-sized rocks and filled it with pine duff.

Marguerite lay huddled up, shivering and chattering, watching him through glazed eyes. Mandrake was sprawled in his rucksack like a lifeless doll.

With stiff, shaking hands, Monks lit a match. The pine needles glowed briefly, but didn’t catch. The match went out. So did the next one.

He clamped his teeth tight, concentrating, and pawed through the duff for the driest clumps.

This time, the bristles flared up and stayed lit. He fed the flame with other clumps, then with small twigs, and finally layered bigger sticks onto the rocks in a grid, making sure there was plenty of air flow.