No Going Back (15 page)
My lunge took me against him, and we both continued among the boulders. Samuel was off balance, and by virtue of the fact that I’d grabbed hold of his shirt with my free hand, so was I. He went down on his back, his head caroming off a rock, and I landed on top of him. He uttered a wordless grunt, but that was the only sign of discomfort. I hit him again, pulping his nose and mashing his lips against his teeth. Luckily I had landed with both my feet flat on the ground either side of his body, so I didn’t continue to tumble over him. I drew back my fist to strike him again.
Most others would have been stunned, maybe out of the fight altogether, but Samuel Logan was made of sterner stuff, or maybe his brutal mind refused to feel pain the way gentler souls did. He spat a mouthful of blood-laced saliva in my face, even as he reached for my throat with one hand and my cocked elbow with the other. His action forced me to draw my throat out of his clutch, but it also served to make me miss my next punch. Samuel came up, trying to get his hips beneath him. His arms swiped at mine, and this time he did get a grip on my elbow. His fingers dug for the ulnar nerve and a tingling pain shot the length of my forearm into my ring and pinky fingers. He also nipped at the radial nerve, intending to immobilise my arm, but we were beyond pain compliance techniques. Caught cold, or already beaten down, I’d have groaned in agony at the assault on my nervous system, but I was too fired up to be slowed by it now. I wrenched my arm free, then aimed an elbow into his face that knocked him sprawling under me.
He was a child of this desert. His heart was as barren of pity as the wasteland, and his flesh was forged of the same rock as its landscape. Or that was how it felt fighting him. Counting being whacked with the water container, he’d now taken four heavy shots directly to his face, but it wasn’t slowing him down. I contemplated going for the knife in my back pocket, but the thought was too fleeting to act upon, because he was already coming back at me, more furious now than before. He bellowed like a wild thing, bucked beneath me and I was sent flying off him. My left shoulder slammed the rocks, and I rebounded on to the trail. Smaller stones dug painfully into my knees as I scrambled up and turned to meet him.
‘Gonna make you sorry for that!’ he snapped as he came to his feet. I was only sorry I didn’t kill him when I first had the opportunity. ‘Go for it!’ I launched myself at him, throwing a knee into his chest. He rocked on his heels, but then came back swinging.
His punches were well aimed, and flashes of black edged my vision.
Samuel kicked at my gut, and I folded round his foot. The blow hadn’t landed cleanly, and I used the ruse to get in close. My headbutt cracked directly into his already smashed nose. Samuel grunted, but only at being caught out. I rammed my forehead into his face again, until he snapped out of it and almost took my throat out with a knife-hand slash. I danced back, then immediately launched in at him with a kick to his balls.
Shockingly, Samuel took the blow and wrapped me in his arms. A taller man’s ears would have been an open target for both my palms, but he was shorter than I and his head was jammed against my chest. I punched him in the skull, but couldn’t get the leverage for a full-on knockout blow. Samuel hauled me off my feet, spun me like a pro-wrestler and slammed me down on a boulder and almost separated my spine for me. He knew how to fight.
Once I had fought a giant of a man, and he’d manhandled me in a similar fashion, but on that occasion his sheer size had also been his weakness and I’d been able to kill the fucker using speed and mobility. But Samuel wasn’t hindered by size, and he was canny enough to keep his vulnerable targets well hidden while he pounded me with one hand. With my back bent tortuously over the boulder I wasn’t in the best position to fight back. His right hand drummed my ribs in a staccato beat, each exhalation of pain I emitted giving him encouragement to hit me again. At the edges of my vision danced blackness that had nothing at all to do with dehydration, and in reaction I struck back.
When caught in a life or death struggle it isn’t easy to control your bodily reactions: instinct takes over and both physical and psychological switches are thrown in order to help you survive. When your vision tunnels to a pinpoint, your hearing becomes a dulled hush, and your scrotum shrivels tight, you can forget about applying intricate combat manoeuvres. The only thing you’re capable of is the most gross of motor functions, those that include holding on and clubbing arm movements. It’s why so many fights that start on the feet end on the floor with both combatants doing little more than grip each other. So, Samuel wasn’t aiming to dig into nerve clusters now, he was only intent on smashing me to a pulp. I admit it: I was in the same place, and it was now a matter of who was going to land the most telling blow. For a second or two, my money was on Samuel Logan.
I was enshrouded in the red haze of battle, where only my enemy existed. I’d forgotten about saving the women, I’d forgotten about Jay and Carson or whoever might be bearing witness to our fight, I’d forgotten about the knife in my pocket, I’d forgotten about the heat and the rocks, and the entire world. Now all that mattered was someone was trying to kill me, and all I wanted to do was kill him first.
Even the crack of a revolver wasn’t enough to sway my mind; it was one more bang that rattled inside my ear canals along with all the others. Only when the gun barked a second time and Jay screamed real close in our ears did we struggle apart. I grabbed at Samuel, but he slipped beyond my fingers, and I ended up colliding with yet another boulder and almost finishing what Samuel had started. I didn’t exactly see stars, because the void I looked on for the briefest of moments was pitch-black. I yanked back from the brink of unconsciousness, blinking rapidly to clear my vision and gulping in air to my straining body. By the time my head was clear enough to make sense of what was going on, Jay was already past me and pursuing Samuel through the maze of boulders.
‘No, Jay!’ I stumbled after her. ‘Get back here!’
She came to a halt, panting, the gun held in both hands shaking in time with her body. Samuel disappeared among the rocks. His escape was both a blessing and a curse: thank God both Jay and I had survived, and bollocks that Samuel had got away. For a second I considered snatching the gun from Jay and chasing him down, but good sense wriggled its way into my pounding skull. ‘Give me the gun, Jay.’
She did so, her face a picture of confusion. ‘I couldn’t do it,’ she moaned. ‘Even after everything he did to me, to Nicole and Ellie, I couldn’t shoot him in the back.’
I was glad that she hadn’t. ‘That makes you a better person than you’ll ever understand,’ I said. The truth was, even though he was trying his hardest to pierce my insides with my ribs, I wouldn’t have condoned shooting him in the spine. Not because it was a cowardly thing to do, but I wanted that bastard to die looking me in the eyes. Except, if I said that to her, Jay would wonder what kind of man she was relying on to save her and her friends’ lives, and perhaps decide she’d merely traded one kind of monster for another.
Also, the fact that she’d used the gun went unsaid. I wasn’t ungrateful that she’d possibly saved my arse, but if I’d wanted Carson or Brent to hear gunfire I’d have just shot Samuel at the start.
I opened the chamber, fed a couple of fresh shells from my pocket into the cylinder and snapped it closed. ‘Fetch the water, then let’s get going. Time’s against us now.’
While Jay went to gather up the water container, I pulled myself together. At least that’s what it felt like: after the hammering I’d taken my joints felt like those of a marionette, only held to my torso by loose strings. Pretty soon though the tightening would begin, and if I didn’t get moving, I’d seize up, and Jay would have to find a new nickname for Carson Logan because I’d be moving like the Tin Man in need of lubrication.
‘Think we can use this?’
Jay approached me holding out the radio that Samuel must have dropped during the fight.
I didn’t see that it was much use to us, for it was even less effective than my cellphone currently was for calling the police. However, one thing was instantly apparent: Samuel had no way of contacting Carson and bringing him back to this spot. He’d have to return to the pass to flag him down as he responded to the gunshots – supposing he’d heard them – and by then we could have moved a considerable distance.
Taking it from her, all I could hear was static. I thumbed down the volume and jammed it into my shirt pocket so I’d hear any transmission, but wouldn’t give our position away. We’d won a slight reprieve, but the chances now of getting Jay to the Yukon and safely away, and then returning to release the others before the Logans got back to the ranch, were growing very slim.
‘Excellent,’ I said, feeling anything but. ‘Now let’s get moving.’
17
Jay considered this man who’d come from out of nowhere to act as her protector. He said that he’d come at her father’s behest, but had not related how he’d ended up at the Logan ranch so, in keeping with her earlier analogy, she fancied that a tornado had plucked him from wherever it was he hailed from and dropped him at the ranch just in time, like the house that flattened the Wicked Witch. Pity she didn’t have a pair of ruby slippers whose heels she could click and take them all safely home.
He was English, but didn’t talk with any definite regional inflection she could make out. It was more a cosmopolitan accent, or one that had been shaped through some kind of institutionalisation: the military she assumed, from the skills he’d exhibited. Occasionally he slipped into a US vernacular that sounded a little odd to her ear, and she wondered how long he’d been living here in the States. He stood under six feet, but only by a shade, and had the tight build of an athlete, broad-shouldered and slim-hipped; however there was nothing that would make him stand out in a crowd. Not until you looked into his features and noted a stoic calm that could be mistaken for an uncaring attitude. His outer shell was a lie, she knew. If he only cared for his own well-being, he’d have shot Samuel when he had the opportunity, and the rest be damned. He hadn’t, he’d forfeited his own safety for hers and for her friends’, and chosen to risk everything in hand-to-hand combat with the brutish man. That was where he also stood out; she’d never seen anything like the way he’d gone at Samuel outside the frame of an action movie, or believed that after the beating he’d endured anyone could still operate without complaint. Jeez, if Samuel had been punching her as hard as that, she’d have been hospitalised, or dead. Yet Joe Hunter was up and jogging, moving with a grace she’d never seen in any man. When she was at Penn State she’d been surrounded by football players and boys from the wrestling team, tough, fit and aggressive guys, but she doubted any of them could have stood for more than a few seconds against Hunter. There was something about him, like a smouldering fuse you couldn’t detect until you looked deeply into his eyes. They had the same intensity she’d once seen in a caged wolf, a beast tamed only so far that could return to its intrinsic savage state at the flip of a coin. She thought she should fear such a man, yet she didn’t. She was only thankful that he was on her side.
She wished to know more about him, though this was neither the time nor the place. All that was important was that he was there and prepared to do everything to see her to safety, coupled with his promise that he’d return for Nicole. She knew he could be trusted to do everything possible to save her best friend. His was a selfless attitude: she didn’t doubt that her father had paid handsomely for his services, but she suspected that Joe Hunter wasn’t motivated by money. His reward was his opportunity to help others. She wondered what would feed such altruism in a man, or if indeed she was even on the right track. Perhaps his need to help others was his way of atonement, making up for some perceived sin from his past. Or maybe she was totally off base and he was simply someone who, as she often joked about herself, liked to live on the wild side. Perhaps he required the adrenalin rush guaranteed during a conflict with the Logans and it was his way of unleashing his ferocious side without having to turn it on to those closest to him.
That was a sobering thought. She couldn’t picture him turning on his loved ones, quite the opposite in fact; he was the type who’d die for them first. She imagined that he was loyal to a fault. His friends would be very important to him, the reason he’d asked that she telephone his friend, Jared Rington, at her first opportunity. Something about that name sounded familiar, his nickname more so, and she was certain she’d heard her father mention it in passing. Perhaps her dad knew these men from the days when he was in the army. She didn’t know much about her dad’s military past, only that he’d served his term as a chef to the guys who did all the fighting. She wondered now if that tale was true, because you didn’t get to know the likes of Joe Hunter dishing up chicken and fries.
Joe was running a few yards ahead of her, his attention on the rocks around them, but regularly straying back to ensure that she was keeping up. On occasion he’d held out a hand to help her over the most rugged obstacle, but had quickly released her again, not because the gesture was too familiar but because he was trained not to compromise his weapons. What must it be like being in a constant state of readiness like that? Jay believed that she would burn out within days and couldn’t fathom how Joe had attained the age he had. Not that he was old, but he had to be in his late thirties, though his stamina belied that somewhat.
Hunter had come to a halt, and was staring out from between two large rocks. Their run had brought them towards a massive structure that reminded her of a petrified mushroom, with a wide umbrella-shaped overhang. Hunter seemed to be listening, his head scanning back and forth like a radar dish. He nodded silently to himself, then beckoned her forward.
