Dark Sky (Joe Pickett #21)(75)

He knew he’d made a mistake to make that climb, but he’d never admit it. Earl didn’t acknowledge his errors. He just pressed on.



* * *



—

The party was halfway down the slope and strung out on the trail when Earl looked down the drainage and saw movement in the trees below. Something was passing through a thick grove of aspen downstream of the drainage path. He narrowed his eyes but kept moving.

Had they pushed a small herd of elk out in front of them? he wondered. Had Joe and Price somehow gained superhuman strength and gotten much farther ahead of them than he thought possible?

Then he heard Kirby say, “Riders. Two of them.”

And Earl now saw them. Two people on horseback coming up the drainage from below. One large, one small. The small one in front.

Earl turned. Kirby was right behind him and Brad was twenty yards in back, leading the string. The section of the slope they were on was wide open. If the two riders looked up, they’d see them for sure. There was no time to move his party out of the clearing and into the timber out of view.

“Who is that?” Kirby asked. “Looks like a big guy and his daughter.”

At that second, the lead rider raised her head and stopped her horse. She’d seen them.

Earl thought for a second. Then he waved at the two riders with as much friendly enthusiasm as he could fake.

“Brad, you stay back with that string of horses. Pull over in that thick timber below and get set up to cover us. Kirby, you come with me.

“Let me do the talking, boys,” he said over his shoulder.





TWENTY-FIVE


Joe had been scrambling clumsily down the creek for fifteen minutes, stepping from rock to rock, his lungs aching and his breath ragged, with Price struggling to keep with him ever since he’d heard:

“Wud are you guys togging about?”

“Keep your voice down.”

It had been the Thomases, above them. On top of the ridge just ahead of where they were in the drainage. Something was wrong with Brad’s voice and Joe guessed it was a result of his injury. But the exchange had been between Earl and Brad, for sure. As he moved, he stole glances up the slope to his right, fearing that he’d see the riders silhouetted against the dawn sky. He never saw them, but he knew they were there.

Either Earl would come down the slope and literally run into them, Joe thought, or the Thomases would arrive downstream and just ahead of them and cut off his and Price’s route. Neither scenario was any good.

Joe stopped and leaned forward, his gloved hands on his knees. He was exhausted and he knew he didn’t have the physical strength to climb another ridge in order to proceed down the mountain in another drainage.

When he raised his head and studied Price, Joe determined that the man couldn’t make another climb, either. Price was hurting. His face was drawn and pale. The wound in his shoulder had helped to take everything out of him.

Joe gestured to the top of the ridge and mouthed, “They’re right there.”

Price’s eyes widened, and he looked for a second like he was about to break down.

“Maybe if we let them get ahead of us,” Joe said softly, unsure of himself. “Maybe if we follow them down the mountain instead of being chased by them.”

Price shrugged as if he had nothing to add.

Joe said, “I’m running out of ideas.”

“At least we can see a little bit now,” Price said, indicating the breaking dawn sky.

“Which means they can see us.”



* * *



—

In the half-light of the morning, Joe studied the hillside to the north. There was a big gap in the trees cleared by a rockslide an indeterminate number of years back. The slide was filled with piles of talus and scree and lengths of trees that had been snapped off in the incident. A pile of huge rock slabs were stacked like a collapsed accordion at the bottom.

There were dark horizontal openings between several of the big slabs. One opening, he saw, looked wide enough that a man could enter it. He couldn’t tell from where they were standing how deep it went back and if there was enough space for both of them to fit inside.

Joe nodded toward the slide pile, and Price followed his gaze.

“It’s worth a try,” Joe said. “We can lay low and let them wonder about us for a while.”

Price nodded, and sighed. “So now we’re cave dwellers,” he whispered. “I started out this trip posting my experiences from my phone to a satellite. We’re going backward through human history one hour at a time.”



* * *



—

Joe approached the horizontal opening. At its widest, it was about eighteen inches.

“Let me borrow your headlamp,” he said to Price.

Joe turned it on and shone it into the mouth of the crevice. He couldn’t see how far it stretched back, but it appeared to get narrower the farther it went into the mountain. It looked big enough in there for the both of them.

He shone the beam on the crevice floor. There was loose but dry dirt broken up by small white bones and black teardrop-shaped animal scat of some kind. He noted the surface of the dirt was lined like corduroy. Scratch marks.

“We’re a little early for bears to hibernate,” Joe whispered. “But I can’t promise that.”