Southwest of Faenella, Eganene
“Are you sure?” Peter asked.
Elisabeth could see part of his boot from where she was hidden behind a large pine. The sweet smelling needles brushed her lips, tickling her, but she ignored them.
“I counted three,” she whispered back. Sighting both her weapons at the nearest target, she watched the man creep closer. A few hundred yards away, he’d been gaining for the past hour. Peter hadn’t noticed.
“Can you see them?” she called again, just loud enough for her voice to carry the twenty feet.
It was cold, the temperature below freezing. Elisabeth shivered. The icy wind toyed with her hair, a paramour whose chill fingers brushed her scalp and worked themselves beneath her layers. Her blue eyes teared, the tracks seeming to slow and freeze against her face. Peter gave her a thumbs-up and disappeared, his foot sliding into shadow.
If I can’t see him, she thought, how am I supposed to avoid shooting him? Repositioning her feet more comfortably between two larger roots, she narrowed her eyes.
Cloaked in Peter’s clothes and jacket, she was utterly unrecognizable. Two sweaters covered her upper body, lending her some bulk beneath the large jacket. Peter had hemmed her slacks so that her legs could move freely. She’d gone a step further and tucked her cuffs into her new boots. It helped keep the snow out and her legs warm.
Peter had found her boots at a woodcutter’s lodge not a day past. There were no lights in the windows, and his guess was that they were away delivering their goods. Given the large number of piles and neat stacks, the man had been busy. The property was cleared for acres around. Elisabeth thought the butchered trunks looking sad, like so many broken teeth.
She waited inside the tree line while Peter went to scout. He’d circled the area, disappearing into the forest to return some fifteen minutes later. She saw him wave to signal that they were alone.
As dirty as she was, he was worse. He’d grown a beard, and it took a moment for her to recognize him. He didn’t look the same without a clean face. His clothes were covered in bits of leaves, and his dark hair was oily and matted.
The deadbolt was no match for Peter’s boot. The frame cracked loudly when he struck it. He had shoved himself inside, gun ready. Elisabeth followed, feeling conflicted. Breaking and entering had never been something she thought she’d do.
Inside the squat building, the first thing she noticed was the cold fireplace. Looking at it longingly, they'd taken the people’s blankets and all the food they could carry. The woodcutter had a good supply of dried meat. Peter told her it was rabbit and venison, salted and cured.
Elisabeth felt sorry for them. Over the last week, she had learned what it was to be hungry. It wasn’t something she’d experienced on Earth, not something she understood. Not in this way.
Real hunger was a gnawing monster. A ravenous hole that twisted her guts like it wanted to pull her inside out. It chewed her from within, grinding her intestines together so that she was could hardly stand upright. Some times it just made her nauseous and weak.
The food Peter had brought from his house in the city was long gone. Elisabeth still wasn’t sure where they’d been, although Peter had called it Delphi. Since they’d fled from his safe house, they’d been pushing hard. It was little sleep and continuous movement, and endless drive to put distance between themselves and whoever was following them.
She was burning calories faster than she had ever had before. Far beyond what sports had ever done to her on Earth. And the cold too had burned her fat away. It left her lean and quick, but with less warmth than she needed.
At the cottage, she’d followed Peter to the house. Despite her moral objection to the theft, she couldn’t help feel a thrill at their find. One of the prizes had been the woodcutter’s oiled hide. At least six feet in length and width, it was sewn together from many smaller skins. The material was silky smooth between the stitching. Waterproof, it kept them dry at night.
The best of the plunder was her boots. Made of thick leather and lined with fur, they were warm, comfortable and a welcome relief from Peter’s hand-me-downs. They fit snuggly, neither too tight nor loose. It was possible, she thought, that without them she might have already lost some toes.
But, even with the new footwear, Elisabeth was cold. Always so cold. Once, she thought that she knew cold. She used to walk everywhere in the city, blocks and blocks in the cold, northeastern air, in Philly and in Des Moines. Those moments were just memories in her mind. Seconds of her life that she could focus on when she tried.
That hadn’t been real cold, she knew.
She’d been wrong. Her past moments in the city were nothing to living outside, traveling outside. Now, her time was a series of days and nights of uninterrupted misery. No shelter, no break, just wind so cold it seared her cheeks. Her skin was chapped and raw, her lips cracked They bled when she spoke.
But all that was just the surface.
It was inside that the cold lived. It had entered her, crept into her blood to slow her. It made her weak and sluggish. When she wasn’t moving, struggling, her body cooled precipitously. She would shake, her limbs quivering against her wishes.
At night, she dreamed of her warm bed and a roaring fire. Even in those moments, she couldn’t remember what it was like to be warm. The idea always melted from her, like snowflakes on her chin. Comfort was but a remembered illusion.
The sun disappeared behind the mountaintop. Watching that fading light, Elisabeth shook her head. The day’s last golden rays had burnt themselves out completely.
She could accept being in a different world, as surprising as that was. The little that she knew confirmed it. No cars, little electricity, it was all so different. She was somewhere strange, someplace she had never even known existed.
What she couldn’t figure out was why men were hunting them.
No other reason than Peter, she thought.
Of course, he’d been trying to convince her otherwise. At his house, she’d been so sure. She’d been unwilling to imagine that those men had been there for her. Why would they be? She didn’t know where she was or how she had gotten there.
Despite days on the road and many conversations, she still wasn’t sure what was truth. What did they want and why were they willing to track her for so long?
She’d done nothing to them. She didn’t even know anyone in this world, with the exception of Peter. How could they even know she existed, let alone hate her enough to try and kill her?
She’d lost track of the days, lost track of how many nights she’d slept terrified of someone killing her. If Peter was right, then these men were after her. She didn’t know anything more than that. Men were following her and they meant her harm.
It was only a few hours ago that she and Peter had made their way up the steep cliff, using fingers and toes to scale the pitted cliff face. She’d discovered she was a good climber, finding small recesses in the stone to use as anchors to haul herself ever upward. She never looked down, not once.
When they reached the top, they found a long plateau that stretched for miles. It wasn’t until she was there, peering over the edge, that she realized how much danger she’d been in. The forest below looked like a shaggy carpet, the evergreens rolling along the slopes that appeared gentle and soft from above. It was a straight drop. Had her stomach had anything in it, she might have been sick.
They had hoped the plateau would be easy traveling. For her part, Elisabeth wanted an early camp and a fire. She knew it was unlikely. Peter had refused every other night, his expression remorseless. She knew he was worried about the men noticing the glow or smelling the smoke. Each night, she’d sit there in the cold, flicking the lighter open and closed, until he got annoyed with the sound.
That was before she saw the men.
It had been providence, really. Having cut deep inside the forest, she decided to detour back out to the cliff face. It was a whim, a half-mile trek from their path, all in the hopes of seeing a semblance of the impostor Philadelphia skyline one last time. Instead, she’d found small figures climbing the face of the mountain.
The winter sun was bright and it reflected off the metal tools they used. There were three of them, their tiny bodies looking like figurines. Her first instinct had been to shout a hello, but she knew who these men were. They weren’t hikers. They were hunters. They were the men who had been following her since Philadelphia.
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The forest was almost dark now. Elisabeth wasn’t sure if that was better or worse. The ripe moon hung in the cloudless sky, its brightness filtering through the trees and laying shadows across the forest’s base. Gnarled roots and decaying branches littered the floor, abandoned everywhere in beds of dead leaves and week-old snow. The colors shifted as she walked, disturbing balance and depth perception.
It was good the snow was old and broken. It helped to hide her tracks. She could see her breath steaming in the air, the hot, little jets of warmth clouding before her face. Wrapping a spare piece of cloth about her mouth and nose, she breathed softly.
She could see one of the men. Three hundred feet away, he was a small, deadly target. As he crept silently through the trees far on her left, she wondered where the other two had gone. It was obvious the stalkers knew their prey was close. The man she was watching was taking precautions, hiding behind tree trunks, moving slowly, changing directions intermittently, but always heading south.
She and Peter were almost at the end of the plateau. Forty feet behind her, the level ground ended in a steep but navigable hill that sloped to the mountain’s floor. Covered with tangled brush and crooked trees, it was their only way out. It was also the way they were traveling.
Peter had been absolutely frustrating on that account, refusing to tell her where they were going, saying only that they were traveling south and west. At one point, she told him that she wouldn’t go another step unless he told her where they were heading. He kept going.
She followed. There hadn’t really been a choice.
Elisabeth squinted into the fading dark, feeling the heaviness of her eyes. The last week had been filled with endless hours of traveling and long, fitful nights. The freezing temperatures made sleeping difficult. They both split time taking watch.
Those long evenings staring into the blackness, had been excellent practice, she thought. She’d gotten good at discerning normal forest shadows. It was easy to pick out something, or someone, that didn’t belong.
The man was dressed in a long surcoat, the moonlight glinting from silver stitching and buttons. He was still a few hundred feet away. She was surprised she could make him out. He was the second man, taller than the one who had turned west towards Peter.
Elisabeth searched for the third, edging to the lip of the ridge to check southward. The vast forest stretched out, the trees interposed with the clumps of white snow that were visible against the rocks. She searched for buildings, smoke and light, carefully scanning her eyes along the horizon.
Nothing. There was nowhere to run.
Eventually, she found the last one behind their position, five hundred feet below. The man’s head was lowered as he climbed the hill she thought had guarded her back.
“Thought the high ground would be good,” she whispered to herself and then smiled, laughter bubbling at the back of her throat.
She closed her lips firmly. What did she know about it?
It was silly to think that she knew what she was doing. She’d spent the majority of her life in the city.
Abruptly, her vision shifted. She saw it, like someone had shown her a birds-eye view of the whole situation. She and Peter were hiding on a small plateau, two of the men coming at them from the north, spread out by at least two hundred feet. The last man was creeping up the hill south of them. When he crested that rise, she would have nowhere to go.
A trap, slowly closing.
It was only a matter of time. If they did nothing, he would flank them in earnest. If they chose to flee, he would have an open target.
No! she thought. No, no, no!
Checking her guns, she thought rapidly. She was tired. She was cold. And she was angry. These men were stalking her; they meant her harm. At this point, it didn’t even matter why.
Elisabeth felt a plan taking form. But how was she going to tell Peter?
She didn’t even know where he was. The two men coming from the north had stopped, still a few hundred feet away. She would have to hurry.
Slipping out from behind the brush, Elisabeth crouched low to the ground. Keeping her elbow tight against her body to prevent the extra bullets from jingling in her pocket, she headed northeast, away from where she’d seen Peter.
Her guns felt like blocks of ice in her hands, the soft grips almost as cold as the metal of the long barrels. They were the bigger man’s guns. Peter had said they were something special from World War II. Elisabeth didn’t see how that made any sense. This was a different world.
She tried to move quickly and quietly, aware that any second she wasted was too much. Snow crinkled at her touch. She winced with each step. If her stalkers realized where she was, a gun shot would be the last sound she heard.
Above her head, night birds called to one another, oblivious to the peril below. The noise startled her, but worse yet was the eerie silence that followed. Twice she heard an animal skitter away as it caught her scent, the crackling leaves marking its progress.
She looked for Peter, desperate to see him, to warn him away from the impending gunfire. He was all she had. Elisabeth had no idea where they were going or how to get to a place where people wouldn’t hunt her.
And she liked him, too, if she was being honest with herself.
These men stalking them proved he’d been telling her the truth. He’d told her what was happening and expected her to act. Elisabeth took that responsibility easily. If it was more than she had expected, well, she’d live up to it.
She had faith in herself. And it meant something that Peter did, too.
Stopping dead, she looked about, one more time, carefully. The man nearest to her was thirty feet away, moving slowly towards her. This close, she could see the pale skin of his face reflecting the moonlight. He didn’t look worried, but excited, like a hunter on a TV show.
Elisabeth felt anger wash over her. Rage. It turned her vision red and tightened her fingers on the triggers.
It was a new and alien sensation. She let it flood through her veins, her chill receding as the emotion gained strength.
Who the fuck are you? she thought angrily. Who are you to hunt me?
She’d never shot anyone, never killed an animal, but her instinct to live was strong. This man wanted her dead. She couldn’t talk to him, didn’t want to. She just wanted him gone.
As he passed her position, Elisabeth mimicked his steps, her foot falling as his did. He heard nothing, raking his gaze southward in his search.
Easing herself behind him, she kept herself low. The guy’s partner, the taller man, was nowhere in sight. The third man had not crested the hill. One chance at this, that’s all she’d get. It meant Peter’s life and her own.
Elisabeth was close enough to throw a rock at his head. The wind blew from the southeast now, burning her eyes with the man’s foul smell. It was sickly sweet, a cloying fragrance. He smelled like a dead animal left too long in the sun.
Anger coursed through her again and a hot sweat beaded on her forehead.
He’s been hunting me for weeks, she thought.
Elisabeth followed him, miming every step, every shift in weight, until she spotted the taller man about sixty feet to the west. At nearly the same time, the third man crested the hill, a hundred and fifty feet in front of her. There was still no sign of Peter.
Elisabeth gripped both guns, feeling the cold metal against her trigger fingers. They were heavy, but she was strong and held the weight. With her left hand, she found the man front of her, glad that her weak hand would make the easy shot. No more than fifteen feet, dead ahead, he still hadn’t sensed her.
The tall man was focused southward. He was further away than she’d hoped. Elisabeth unconsciously let her gun trail upward and to the west, adjusting for wind and trajectory.
Time slowed and she saw clearly, like bright white lights were illuminating her targets.
Calm, so calm, she pushed to her toes. Nothing moved and no sound interrupted her. The forest was still and the birds were silent. Her feet were balanced, the left in front of the right. She felt her arms rise. Blond hair hung limply from her brow and her eyes glazed. Her breath rose and fell easily.
Her body arched, muscles tensing. Her weight shifted, all without thought. A second passed, then two, as she stretched into position. Elisabeth could hear her heart and the steady thrum, thrum was soothing.
Each tree, branch and leaf was as clear and perfect as if she were inches away. Beneath the smaller man’s feet she could see dried leaves, the brown, crinkled flesh and the tiny bloodless veins.
His long hair waved gently in the breeze, each strand perfect, thin and fragile. Blood raced through his veins to move the flesh of his neck. Heat came off him in waves, rising slowly and dissipating in the cold air. Her own blood ran fast, its heat filling her, urging her to pull the triggers.
The man had come hunting, but Elisabeth was the hunter now.
She stood, arms stretched. The barrels of her guns connected to the men, as surely as their own arms were connected to their bodies. Within the chambers, she felt the bullets aching. They wanted to taste blood and warmth for just a part of a second.
Crack! She sent them home, the twin cylinders racing up and out.
Silvery in the moonlight, they shone with an otherworldly beauty. They spun so quickly, they seemed to not turn at all. White fire was born behind.
The perfect oval fell ever so slightly as it raced home. The impact was instantaneous. A sinking depression, the skin and skull bowed to the bullet’s pressure. Then elasticity failed, the bone unable to hold as the bullets pushed through.
The man’s scalp swung out. It was a lily pad floating on a sea of red droplets. The spray was a fine silk scarf adrift in the winter air. Elisabeth wanted to close her eyes. The image was perfect, a single, momentary beauty. Color splashed against the dirty, winter whiteness.
She saw the bullet’s sister racing forward, the invisible barrier of air pulling, slowing it, dragging it from its course. But not enough. The man had not yet turned, did not know his partner was dead. Foot still raised to take another step, the bullet slammed into his back.
Elisabeth watched him go rigid. She watched him press against her silver. He arched his back, as though the bullet might still pass beneath him, as though he might absorb the blow. The bullet entered his body, sliced through his spine and pushed out of his chest. The skin burst open like a ripe grape exploding.
Below the thick branches, the man’s face was slack. His mouth was open as though to utter something important. Beneath these shadows, his blood fell. Its color was more purple than wine. He dropped to his knees, graceful, his arms falling languidly. His body had no feeling. Only his heart did not know he was already dead.
The tree behind her head shattered.
The barking exploded, flying outward in a hundred pieces. The impact was jarring. Grasping her head, Elisabeth dove to the ground.
Shit! she thought. Someone is shooting at me!
Cold inundated her body in a great rush, like there had been some protective bubble around her a moment before. It swept in, filling the vacuum.
It hit her hard, like a punch in the stomach. She doubled over, hardly able to breath.
Oh no, oh no, her mind stuttered.
Arms wrapped protectively about her head, she could hear bullets hitting the ground around her. Oh no, oh no, oh no...
I just shot two people!
Her weapons were still in her hands, the muzzles smoking in the chill air. Images of silvery bullets, splashes of red and explosions of white burned behind her closed eyes. Each second filled with a thousand images.
Oh no! she thought, stupidly. I shot someone. No, not someone, two people.
Phiz! Dirt sprayed up before her, a sharp rock slicing into her face. Snow sprayed over her head. Elisabeth looked and could see the hole the bullet had made. It was only inches in front of her face.
Dear God, she thought, I’m dead.