There, Lauren trembled, her body convulsing furiously in reaction to the cold, but she hadn’t felt any shame. The weight of icy water surging downward from sixty feet above looked powerful enough to crush her, but she hadn’t turned back. It was nature being nature in the rawest of states. Water embraced by earth, squeezed to the surface by pressure, becoming one with a wandering stream that plummeted to whatever lie below, because gravity could not be defied.
Its seductive influence calling to her, Lauren had gone to stand beneath the cascading water, feeling instantly the tremendous weight of earth’s pull on it. Her body’s reaction to the cold was all-pervading; it was both pleasurable and painful, delightful and heartbreaking. And it had gripped her with a vigor so fierce that she nearly hadn’t been able to countermand its invitation.
Lauren knew the signs and stages of hypothermia. She knew how it began and how it ended, but had never experienced it firsthand until then. Still, she’d stood there and showered beneath the arctic-laced deluge until she couldn’t feel her toes and could barely catch her breath. Collapsing into a writhing ball atop herself, she’d scrambled away on numb hands and wobbling knees, her motor skills radically diminished. Just as her body had begun teeming with an abnormal internal warmth, she’d found her pack and fought in desperation to unstow a fire kit and a mylar blanket with which she’d enveloped herself. She couldn’t recall the precise sequence of events that followed but remembered well the sensation of her fire’s lifesaving heat breathing on her skin.
Had doing this been absurd? Looking back, it undoubtedly had been. Lauren had taken herself to the brink of bitter death in the remotest of locations miles away from help, having turned a blind eye to every conceivable risk. But she felt different now, on the mend, far improved from what she had been. She was formidable once again, as if by some means she’d become one with the cataract and had emerged from it, revived anew. Doing this had cleaned the slate, allowed her to break herself down to the crux, to the raw essence of who she was at the core. Lauren had needed to chip away all the frivolous nonsense from her being to become one with herself again, to relocate her inner strength, to be unafraid and unconquerable, something that could not be stopped, akin to a force of nature.
Her father had taught her about the outdoors, how to survive in less than ideal environments, and the basics of firearms and self-defense. Dave Graham, Woo Tang, Sanchez and the unit had instructed her to be deadly, resilient, to improvise, adapt and act deliberately, and commit to violence of action. Their voices had spoken subliminally to her when needed or called upon, but this time, it wasn’t her father or her armed forces tutors who were doing so.
“Positive attitude coupled with a superior state of mind makes all the difference…once you’ve made up your mind that nothing can stop you, nothing will.”
It was Jade’s counsel, sounding off perceptually in paraphrase, almost as if on cue. The woman had become a friend of sorts, even though she remained nothing short of an enigma, but that hadn’t hindered her stirring verse from circulating all through Lauren’s psyche, functioning as the lifeblood fuel she so demanded right now.
Contemplating her journey, Lauren admitted to herself she didn’t know where to begin. As she scoured the environment below for visual indications and anything that might help her find direction, she recapped the latest events and their aftermaths together with the most recent, an act so heinous it had sent her over the edge.
This had begun with children being abducted while playing innocuously in their own backyards. But by what means? The roadways in and out of the valley were blocked and guarded, eliminating the threat of vehicular travel, but it was undeniably impossible to secure all the pathways and trails. Lauren knew practically all of them. Many led from trailheads off Trout Run Road into the higher elevations of national forest and surrounding wilderness. Most were more than footpaths, though; they were multiuse trails, designed for equestrian and even all-terrain vehicle use. Wrongdoers could have feasibly entered the valley on any one of these, executed their mission, and departed on foot without a trace.
Agents who performed these categories of tasks were without a doubt disciplined, in shape, and well trained. Far from amateurs, they were experts in their trade, and that meant direct confrontation wasn’t going to work. If Lauren were to beat them, she would need to take them out without being seen or heard, much in the same fashion as they had swooped into the valley to perform their exploits.
They had been a stone’s throw away then, but where were they now? The FEMA camp itself was a mere fifteen miles away from her back-door stoop, but the operations in which they’d been engaging had brought their people much closer in. Had they returned to the safety of their headquarters? Or were they still here, possibly encamped somewhere nearby…making ready to perpetrate yet another iniquity while gloating over their accomplishments?
Lauren placed both palms to the sandstone and deliberated. For reasons she couldn’t discern, she knew they weren’t far away. It was an intuition, a feeling of a tactless, intruding presence that didn’t belong. She’d felt a similar presence when she and Grace had come here on an innocent hike on Thanksgiving Day only to have so much go awry. Just as she had known then who had been to blame, Lauren knew who was culpable now; the federal elements that had been seeking so hard to wipe her commune out were
