Authors: Patrick Lee
Even after the sound of the helicopter faded, Travis watched the ridgeline through the cedar boughs for ten minutes. The way ahead, visible from this rise, stood bare and shadowless for more than two miles. Getting caught in the open would be suicide.
The going had been as rough as he’d expected. Five times now, in just over twelve hours, the chopper had come hunting the valleys for them, making slow and methodical passes or simply stopping to hover for minutes on end. Concealment had been sparse but always reachable within the short warning time provided by the incoming rotors, echoing among the peaks.
They’d reached these cedars by the breadth of a wish, Travis setting Paige deep beneath the branches and pulling his own limbs under just as the aircraft rounded the nearest bend in the valley.
Now the silence felt sturdy again. As sturdy as it was going to get, at least.
Paige had drifted off—had barely been awake to begin with, in fact, even when the drumbeat of the blades had passed within a hundred feet. She was in bad shape and getting worse by the hour. The skin around the fissure in her upper arm had grown angry red, and the infected tissue inside appeared to have tripled its presence since Travis had first seen it. Most frightening of all, the veins visible in her forearm had distended and darkened, at least some aspect of the infection spreading that far. And that was only where he could see it. Where else was it branching to?
His first-aid kit might as well have been a make-believe set for a toddler playing nurse. It had nothing that could deal with this injury, though he’d tried the spray can of bactine anyway, with her assent. The only clear result had been searing pain, which she’d tried her best to hide from him. She’d failed—you could only blink away so many tears.
By the time they’d ditched the ATV in the river—after skirting the bank for miles to find a stretch of rapids foamy enough to conceal it—Paige was running a high temperature and unable to stay conscious for any real amount of time. So Travis had dumped his eighty-pound backpack into the rapids as well—keeping only the smallest water pouch—and carried her.
It was harder than he’d supposed it would be. She weighed maybe forty pounds more than the pack, and she hadn’t been designed by North Face to distribute the load to his frame. Uphill distances became leg-press workouts. Downhill was worse, every step compressing his ankle and threatening to roll it over into a sprain. Which, in a roundabout way, he realized, would amount to a fatal injury. For both of them.
It helped to consider what Paige had gone through these past three days. All his discomfort was a shin-bump against a coffee table by comparison.
He lifted her carefully now from beneath the cedar. Her eyes opened for a second but didn’t focus on him. He wanted to believe that her catatonia was mostly a result of the drug and the sleep deprivation, but had to accept that the infection’s role was considerable, and growing. Her forehead beaded like a windshield in rain.
He left the cedar stand and got moving, pushing the pace faster now than at any time before. The open space ahead was the physical distillation of anxiety itself. He imagined that this was how agoraphobics felt in shopping malls. Like prey.
There was no reason to think the chopper might be friendly. Had Paige’s people somehow located the wreck, they’d have shown up in greater numbers: fighters overhead, and multiple helicopters offloading personnel along every ridge for miles. It would have been the confident presence of a force on its home soil.
This lone chopper was more like a prowler in someone’s house.
Ahead, the valley curved gradually, revealing that the open space continued farther than he’d seen at first. He’d hiked this route on his way in, but couldn’t recall the specific layout of tree cover.
He recognized the high, rocky crest on which he’d seen the Dall sheep, his first night in the park. At that time he’d been a few miles east of it, on the Coldfoot side; he was far west of it now, still deep in the range. Adding up the rough distances, and considering his speed—slower than he’d traveled with just the pack, despite the urgency pushing him now—he put Coldfoot at least another twenty hours away.
He wouldn’t sleep, of course. Paige would live or die based on how soon she received treatment for the infection. Hours would count.
As he walked, he thought of what she’d told him in the clearing.
Tangent. The Breach. The Whisper.
He had in his pocket the piece of clear plastic he’d retrieved from the dead ATV riders. The Whisper’s key. What exactly would the Whisper do, when its key was applied? Paige’s words came back to him:
We didn’t build this thing.
We as in people.
The implications were hard to get his mind around, and not because he didn’t believe her. Just the opposite.
Paige interrupted his thoughts, murmuring something in her sleep. No words—just a scared sound, miserable and pleading. It lasted only a few seconds, and then she was quiet again, though Travis felt the tension in her muscles linger, and saw her eyes flitting back and forth behind their closed lids. He wondered how long it would be before she could dream anything other than nightmares.
“You’re safe,” he said quietly. “They’re gone.”
He didn’t expect it to work, but it did. She relaxed almost at once, into what passed for dreamless sleep.
Mostly, he tried not to look at her.
Tried not to notice her eyelashes, or the way her bangs fell on her forehead, or the nearly invisible traces of long-lost freckles across the bridge of her nose. Tried not to think of how, in spite of his muscles burning as if battery acid were flowing through them instead of blood, this was the best he’d felt in a decade and a half.
She was something. No escaping it.
In a way, she was everything. Everything that his future would never contain. A year out of prison, he hadn’t even humored the idea of dating again. He’d spent fifteen years learning not to think about what he was missing. He’d gotten pretty good at it, too, and his freedom had brought little reason to change that perspective. His body might not be constrained behind razor-wire borders any longer, but his chances with a woman like Paige sure as hell were.
It wasn’t that he’d be alone forever. There were ways to take the edge off his past, and he was working on them. He’d been doing construction in Fairbanks for most of the year he’d been there, on a contractor’s crew. Working hard at it, and working smart, paying attention to the business side of the job. And saving his money. He’d be in a position to head up his own crew before too long, starting with medium-sized projects, mostly additions. If he played it right, he’d be putting up new homes on spec within five years, and eventually—maybe another five years after that—the homes would be high-end. Somewhere along that arc, with a solid career to speak for him and with prison far enough behind, he’d find someone who’d give him a chance.
But not someone like Paige. Not even close. And that was fine, as long as he didn’t think about it.
So he tried not to look at her.
But mostly he failed.
The open span, which turned out to be over three miles long, terminated at a grove of alders where three smaller valleys converged from high above. He’d gone a quarter mile beyond the grove, into more open space, when he heard the chopper again. No chance of getting back to the alders in time. He tried for them anyway.
He was a hundred yards shy, moving faster than good judgment counseled on the rough ground, with the rotors like drumsticks on sheet metal and the chopper seconds from breaking into view, when he took the misstep he’d been dreading.
He saw it a tenth of a second before his foot touched down, time enough to recognize the mistake but not redeem it. The bare patch of dirt, no larger than a dinner plate, was dark and moistened, either by snow runoff or a spring somewhere beneath it. All the dirt on this slope was moist, but grass roots held it firm—where there was grass. Travis had simply taken his eyes from the ground a half second too long, watching the ridgeline for the chopper.
His foot hit the soft earth and slid sideways as if on ice.
For a second—his balance gone, his body pivoting without any pretense of control—he simply knew it was over. They would sprawl. The chopper would be on them before he could even pick himself up, much less Paige. And just for a challenge, here was a jagged boulder in his path, perfectly placed for him to crack his head against when he fell.
Somewhere in the churn of his thoughts rose the impression of driving on ice. Spinning out. Turning into it instead of against. Stupid—but all he had. He pitched his shoulders forcefully counterclockwise, the direction of the spin, and found himself standing still so suddenly that it was almost disorienting.
The rotors were drumming against his skull now. Any second.
A single hope had tempered his anxiety during all the time spent in the open: the men in the chopper had no idea who had killed their friends at the camp. They’d be forced to assume a hidden survivor from the jet had arrived, or that the captives themselves had somehow taken the upper hand. Either way, they would expect the fugitives to be dressed for room temperature inside a 747—not an Alaskan hike.
The boulder, just above knee-height, was only a step away. He turned and backed against it, sitting roughly and keeping Paige in his arms, her legs now draping across his lap. She was already wearing his heavy coat, minus a sleeve to let the wound breathe. He let that arm—her right—press against him, out of sight to anyone high above.
Then he pulled her face to his, close enough to create the illusion that was their only chance for survival: that they were an ordinary couple hiking in the back country, caught in the middle of a kiss.
At that instant the chopper broke into the clear above the nearest ridge, angling north at a good clip. Then it stopped. The pilot had seen them. Travis had only a peripheral sense of the thing; Paige’s face took up most of his vision.
The clatter of the blades intensified as the aircraft fixed on them and moved in.
Travis shut his eyes—they’d be visible from the chopper’s height—and tried to make the kiss look real. One hand holding the back of her head, the other around her waist. His mouth pressed against hers. The turbines settled in directly overhead, screaming and pounding and lashing their hair against their faces hard enough to sting.
All of which provided enough sensation to wake Paige.
Travis felt her body flinch. He opened his eyes and found hers staring right back at him, wide and startled, from less than an inch away. This was it. This would blow it. She’d pull away, and a few seconds later, machine-gun fire would herald the last seconds of their lives.
Then her eyes changed, and she understood. She pulled him closer, her free arm coming up, her fingers in his hair. And now she was really kissing him, her mouth parting, so warm and intense that for the most fleeting moment it was all Travis could focus on. No thunder of turbines, no rotorwash, just her kiss, as desperate as her need to keep breathing. For that moment, it almost didn’t matter that it was fake.
It occurred to him only in passing that they should probably wave at the helicopter, as almost anyone would, but by then he heard the engine change pitch, and a moment later the aircraft was moving away up the valley and taking its downblast with it.
She continued kissing him for another ten seconds, until the chopper was far away, and then they separated, eyes still locked on each other’s, six inches apart.
“Good thinking,” she said, whispering because it was all she had the strength for.
He managed a nod, suddenly hard up for dialogue.
She turned to stare after the helicopter, but had hardly moved when her breath caught and she nearly passed out from a wave of pain. She’d accidentally pressed her damaged arm into his side, so lightly Travis had barely felt it.
She regained her composure and slowly brought the arm out in front of her. She saw the purpled veins spiderwebbing her forearm, more than a foot from the infection’s source, and for the first time since he’d met her, Travis saw fear in her eyes.
“How far from town now?” she said.
“Just a few hours,” he lied. “Close your eyes again and we’ll be there.”
For a long moment he thought she would do just that. She leaned into him, her forehead against his cheek. He was about to stand when she spoke again.
“Remember this. From the place where they tortured me, go in the opposite direction from the crash site, and at fifty steps find the biggest tree around. You can’t miss it. The Whisper is on the far side, buried two feet down. I scattered needles to hide the ground I disturbed.”