He stank of stale sweat and had breath like rotten bananas. She had to concentrate in order not to retch. Forcing a smile, she ran her fingers over the front of his jeans, deliberately hurrying before he became erect.
She reached for the top button with her right hand. With her left she touched the stubble on his face. Apparently wanting to feel her breasts and use both hands, he turned the knife flat against her. It was a mistake. She put everything she had into her knee to the testicles and two thumbs into the eyes.
He fell to the ground, thrashing. Sharp thumbnails had gone deep; he was clawing at his eyes. She jumped away and ran. Only after getting twenty feet down the hill did she think about the gun. She cursed herself. Spinning around, she plowed back up through the brush only to see a second armed man coming toward the first.
Leaping back downhill, she barely maintained her balance as she ran full out.
'I'll shoot!' somebody said to her side as shots rang out. She disappeared over a six-foot drop-off. Even with all the noise of cascading rock, she could hear them coming after her.
'She's right down here,' one of them shouted. As she bounded down the hill, she saw a tiny clearing and a ramshackle cabin about the size of a two-car garage, made of unpainted plywood. It had a big black stovepipe running up the side. Darting around the structure, she looked wildly for a place to hide. Knowing that she was running to a creek bottom in unfamiliar territory, she realized they would no doubt get close enough to shoot when she tried going up the opposite hill.
Slamming through the door, her hands shaking, she looked for a gun. Junk was piled everywhere. There were boxes and sacks of supplies stacked two or three deep all along the wall with three bunk beds and a table in the middle. Against one wall by the door, there was an old wood cook-stove. No gun. A knife on the table. She grabbed it and crawled behind some sacks of fertilizer. These people lived like animals. Desperately she clamped her sides, trying to calm her breathing, trying to make a plan.
'Hell, it's hard to find her in this brush,' came a voice from outside.
'We'll find her. You run downstream on the trail and then come back up the draw.'
'Wait. What if she went in the cabin?'
'Shit. You take off, I'll look.'
She tried to make her hands stop shaking, to get control.
It seemed her whole convulsing body would give her away. The door creaked on its hinges.
'Come out, come out, wherever you are.'
He started at the far end, looking behind some boxes. Scrunching down as tight as she could, she tried to make herself invisible.
She had no illusions. Getting caught would be a death sentence-after they were finished raping her. It made her desperate. Believing she had nothing to lose, she decided to lunge with the knife. He was five feet away and almost to the stacks of fertilizer. Trying to look around the six-foot stacks without exposing himself, he moved with slow deliberation. Any second he would see her.
His hand draped over a sack about three feet in front of her and above her. Frightened out of her mind, she lunged, skewering the hand with the knife, running it through and pinning it to the sack.
The man let out an earsplitting scream and dropped his gun to clutch at his hand. She dashed out of the cabin and with a backward glance saw him remove the knife.
'I'll fuckin' kill you!' He started shooting wildly.
'What the hell?' a second voice said.
There were at least four men, but now two were wounded. She crashed through the brush, hitting small saplings with bruising frequency. Charging down through brush so dense she couldn't see three feet, she had no idea where she would end up. She broke into a small clearing. There was a wiry short man with a grim, determined expression ten feet away pointing a gun at her middle.
'Party time,' he said. 'Wanna wrestle?'
Instead of shooting, he bolted after her, grabbing her around the middle. He stank like the first.
She turned, slapping the palms of her hands over his ears.
'Shit,' he said, dropping his gun and trying to hold her arms.
Grabbing his ear with her teeth, she ripped the flesh and came away with a hunk the size of a quarter.
While he was feeling for his ear, she managed to kick his unprotected groin and connected. When he doubled, she kicked him in the face, hitting his eye with the toe of her boot. She picked up his gun. Deep, ragged breaths poured out as she tried to will herself to shoot him, then cursed at herself because she couldn't. He was hurt, but he could still hunt her. It was a weakness.
'What the hell?' a voice said as she ran. Two men hurt but not incapacitated. Maybe a third was out for good, blinded with two swollen eyes. With only one uninjured man, the odds were getting better. She wondered how many shots the pistol had left in it. In Alaska she had learned about guns. Although she never had to use one, she had carried them in case a grizzly turned her way.
She knew her life depended on flight. Given her inexperience, she would not win a shoot-out against three men. She had to flee down the creek. Turning at an angle to the stream, she went down and away from the men, running the whole way. Then something grabbed her foot, she was flung through the air, and a horn blast went off. Another trip wire. On the steep bank the gun went flying. Straight down the hill, she turned, running a hundred yards through heavy brush.
Sliding and jumping downhill, she traveled maybe twenty yards, then crashed through more brush and over the edge of a rock outcropping, continuing down an almost-vertical rock face. Aware that she was starting to free- fall, she reached out and clasped a tree root. A searing pain went through her shoulder, but she managed to hold on. With her other hand she pawed desperately at the rock, finally finding another handhold. She looked down. Hanging over a large expanse of watery brown muck bordered by an almost impenetrable wall of marsh grasses, she was trapped.
She heard the crunching sounds of a man in the woods.
'I saw her running down the mountain over here.' A deep voice.
'All right, all right, but I don't know what a lone woman, without a pack, without even a coat, is doing out here. How Spike let her crunch his balls and gouge his eyes, I'll never know. She's the type who'd turn us in tomorrow.'
''Maybe with a little encouragement she'd warm our beds tonight.'
'We have three million dollars in plants to worry about. She's already half-killed Spike. Dutch is half blind. Let's just shoot the bitch and be done with it.'
The voices were getting closer. Silence was crucial.
'I say we chain her in the shack first.'
'We'll figure that out when you find her. Dutch, use the eye you got left to search down in the bottom. English, you circle around up the hill. I'm gonna hang around in this area.'
'My hand hurts.'
'I don't give a shit.'
From where she hung, Maria watched the shadow of the man moving to the creek bottom until he appeared below her, downstream about fifty feet. Dutch. He was tall and skeletal, skin like tanned leather, an uneven pirate- looking beard. She held her breath. She was plastered as close as possible to the rock, but she would be visible if he looked up. She studied him as he debated stepping in the mud, tentatively placed his boot on the watery surface, and began sinking rapidly. Quickly he yanked his boot clear of the muck. Shaking his head, he eyed the putrid swamp.
'No one could have walked through this mud without leaving huge tracks,' he shouted up to the leader. Turning, he began walking back uphill, climbing the rock slope using all fours, obviously in pain. Then having turned well above her, he could be heard crashing through the brush. She heaved a quiet sigh of relief. Obviously, they didn't realize how far down the hill she had gotten.
From above, Maria heard more crunching sounds of footfalls on the brushy slope. There were at least three men. Knowing that she could not hang on indefinitely, and that she would be discovered if she crawled up the outcropping, she began to consider a drop to the mud. By dropping under the lip of the rock, she could remain well-hidden.
She was in a small steep-sided mountain valley, where for a few hundred yards the creek ran nearly flat, and where the land acted as a natural settling pond before it spilled the water on down the mountain in riffles and cascades. On one side of the creek, the side from which she hung, there were some large gray rock formations near
