Chapter 4
He’d have to circle the perimeter. That gave me ten minutes. Maybe twelve.
I clawed my way up the ravine wall, hauling on rhododendron stems that snapped like frozen glass in my grip. Twice, my left boot blew out of the loose shale, sending me face-first into snow-choked laurel hells, my lungs wheezing like a punctured bellows. Each breath was a mouthful of dry needles and needle-fine frost.
When the rusted tin roof of Station Four finally appeared through the black lattice of spruce boughs, it looked less like a shelter and more like a crypt.
Snow had drifted four feet high against the eastern wall, anchoring the structure into the slope. The stovepipe was bent at a dog-leg angle where a fallen birch limb had crushed it years ago. The heavy plank door hung crooked on hand-forged strap hinges, held shut against the gale by an exterior hasp secured with a rusted surveyor’s pin.
I reached the stoop, knocked the pin loose with the heel of my boot, and threw my shoulder into the wood.
The door screeched inward across frozen dirt, spitting ancient hemlock needles and dry moss into the air. I dragged myself inside, hauled the door shut behind me, and dropped the inside drop-bar into its iron saddle.
Darkness slammed down like a wet blanket.
The wind outside was a muffled shriek through the tin seam, but in here the air was still, heavy with the smell of rotted creosote, rat droppings, and decades of damp paper.
I didn't dare strike a match. Even through a shuttered window, the flare of sulfur would glow through the plank chinks like an electric eye against the black woods.
I collapsed against the workbench, sliding down to the dirt floor, my teeth chattering so hard the vibration ached behind my cheekbones.
*First the boots.*
If I left the wet leather on, the toes would turn black before midnight.
My fingers refused to grip the laces. The joints were stiff, fat and yellowed like tallow candles. Gritting my teeth until my jaw popped, I clamped the frozen nylon lace between my molars, hauled my head back with a savage jerk, and felt the knot slip. I peeled the right boot off with a wet sucking sound.
The wool sock was frozen stiff to the heel. When I tore it free, it took a thin layer of dead skin with it.
I tucked both bare feet directly against the skin of my lower belly, shoving my hands under my armpits, curling forward into a tight ball on the dirt. The initial warmth didn't feel like relief; it hit with a sickening, razor-sharp burn that drew bile into the back of my mouth. Capillaries reopening. Flesh screaming as the ice crystals gave way. I pressed my forehead against my knees, biting down on the wet collar of my coat to keep from yelling into the dark.
*Two minutes.*
I gave myself two minutes of agony, counting every heartbeat against my ribs, until the sensation in my toes shifted from white agony to a dull, throbbing burn.
Then I reached for the canvas field sack I had snatched off Faith's porch bench during the scramble.
In the chaos—when her shotgun blast took out the storm window and Caleb’s men racked their weapons—I had grabbed blind. I had caught the canvas web-strap of the old cruiser pouch hanging from the coat peg beside her back door. It was an old army-surplus haversack she had used for twenty years to collect ginseng roots and wild morels along the bluff lines.
Inside the flap, my trembling fingers found a half-empty box of waterproof field matches, a roll of surveyor’s orange flagging tape, and a heavy, rubber-armored Motorola handheld radio—an obsolete forestry transponder Faith kept on the kitchen shelf to monitor the weather bands when winter storms threatened the livestock.
I pulled the radio out. The plastic was scuffed, the rubber antenna bent, but the red power toggle still clicked with solid mechanical weight.
I clicked it on.
The small LCD screen flared with a dim green backlight, illuminating my cracked knuckles. The battery indicator showed two bars out of three.
I dialed the rotary selector down from the forestry repeater to the emergency municipal band: 155.055 MHz. The Bluefield County Sheriff’s dispatch.
I thumbed the push-to-talk bar.
“Dispatch, this is Jesse Vance,” I whispered, keeping my throat low, my mouth glued to the microphone grill. “Emergency traffic. I’m at forestry station four, north ridge of Black Creek. I am on foot, pursued by armed subjects. Repeat, Silas Redfern’s men are—”
I released the bar.
No squelch tail. No click of a repeater dropping into carrier lock.
Just a low, rhythmic, hydraulic hum that thrummed through the tiny speaker like a diesel turbine idling inside an empty water tank.
*Whir-clack. Whir-clack. Whir-clack.*
A tone-burst pulse. It wasn't the dead atmospheric hiss of an out-of-range receiver; it was an active, high-wattage carrier tone overriding the entire regional band.
My stomach dropped into a cold, leaden ball.
Silas didn't just have shotguns and snowmobiles. The Redfern Timber Corporation held the communications leases for the microwave relay tower on top of High Knob. They had installed a commercial repeater array up there three summers ago to coordinate their log hauls down through the state gap.
They hadn't just hunted me into the woods; they had put a blanket over the entire valley. They were drowning out every county channel between here and the Virginia state line. Nobody was coming over the gap. No state trooper was going to see an SOS flaring on a terminal sixty miles away.
I switched through the banks.
Channel two: county fire. *Whir-clack.*
Channel three: state forestry. *Whir-clack.*
Channel seven: Redfern logging tactical.
I reached channel seven and froze.
The speaker didn't emit the tone burst. It was open. Clean, unencrypted frequency, crackling with the wet splatter of high-altitude static and the raw, throbbing whine of two-stroke engines.
*“—past the old spillway,”* a voice rasped. Caleb. He was yelling over the howl of his sled’s exhaust. *“The bitch clipped Bell’s flank. Dog’s bleeding out in the drifts, won’t track. I left her at the culvert.”*
A second voice came through, cold and slow, cutting through the radio noise with the dry authority of an executioner: Silas. He was back at the homestead, sitting at the base station on the parlor desk.
*“Leave the hound,”* Silas said. *“The boy won’t make the ridge on foot in this drift. He’s carrying bad water, Caleb. He knows about the trench.”*
*“I’m telling you, the timber trail’s drifted ten feet deep at the cut,”* Caleb barked back. *“If he went up the rocks, he’s headed for the line shanty.”*
*“Then burn it,”* Silas replied without a second of hesitation. *“Don’t waste shells looking in the dark. Put a flare through the eaves and wait for him to jump out.”*
A heavy silence fell over the channel, broken only by the rhythmic crunch of a snowmobile track dropping into low gear.
*“Copy that,”* Caleb muttered. *“Lyle’s behind me on the Bravo sled. We’re at the bottom of the switchback now. Three minutes.”*
The radio clicked dead.
My breath stopped in my throat.
