Bleak Mountain

An hour up into the forest, Elliot fell again, not a stumble this time, but flat out, pulling Garcia down with her. She’d made it look real, only the location giving her away, stopping him at a break in the trees, a balding place where his jumpsuit shone beacon bright on the spruce-clad slope.

Garcia turned his head to the breeze and heard it, the merest pulse of motors at first, then growing coarse on the next tide of air, before the singing of blades arrived in accompaniment. He tugged Elliot’s arm. She resisted, eyes bluffing weary, knees anchored. He took a fistful of collar, and dragged her back into the trees, deposited her on a branch with her feet swinging clear of the ground. The helicopter came around the forest. It tilted into the gorge, yellow against the pines, swung past them with its door yawning, then drifted away, fold over mountain fold, across a pallet of baize and penitentiary grey, before jumping the horizon, sharp against the snow of the high peaks.

‘They’ll be back,’ Elliot said, shuffling on the branch. ‘They won’t stop.’

She was a type, he thought. Small for the job and something to prove, hating pretty, disguising it hard-faced, wearing an attitude for protection. Jean Elliot, another Yankee girl driven west and inked somewhere to tell it. ‘Forty others on that bus,’ he said. ‘Six drowned, I figure, the rest taking the valley. It’ll keep them busy a while.’

She straightened her uniform jacket. ‘They’ll get further on level ground. And they have the river.’

‘Thirsty, are you?’ he said. ‘Your choice to be a fucking hero.’ He shook the handcuff that forged their coalition. ‘You could have kept this holstered – could’ve just looked away.’

‘Let you go?’ she said, eyebrow completing the reply. She had said little since the river, working him out perhaps, or just saving her strength. She was breathing through her mouth, sweat beading at her hairline and on her neck. On the hollow of her throat.

‘You’re regretting it already,’ he said. ‘You’re out of shape.’

She regarded him impassively. If she was scared, the eyes weren’t showing it. ‘I’m OK,’ she said.

‘Maybe you are. Maybe you’re just trying to slow me. Maybe I should kill you.’

Elliot’s fingers found something to do with the bark of the tree, curled tight into its broken surface. She said, ‘You won’t kill me, Garcia.’

He spat, wiped his mouth on his sleeve. ‘You don’t know me.’

‘I know you killed three people – but you sure as hell didn’t have to drag them behind you afterwards.’ She rubbed at a red line on her wrist, pushed the cuff further up her arm.

Garcia raised his head and looked for the sun between the branches. ‘Three more hours of daylight, I figure.’

‘Kids are coming home from school about now,’ said Elliot.

‘Don’t tell me about your fucking kids! You think I give a shit? Don’t you go starting that with me!’

She shrugged. ‘Just sayin’.’

‘Preferred you sayin’ nothing.’

’Preferred me? Preferring me now are you?’

Garcia grabbed her shirt, tugged her towards him until their noses almost touched. She flinched instinctively, then stared back fiercely. He lifted her off the branch and hoisted her over his shoulder. ‘Prefer carrying, to dragging you. Faster that way.’

She was quiet again for a while, and they went on up the mountain, hard to the slope, and struggling for grip. She’d be a fool to needle him, he thought, but she did anyway. She said, ‘Prefer riding to walking.’

Another two hours, and the forest had left them, the trees thinning into high meadows, cliffs rising to guard the airy spaces, snow-crowned and scree-cuffed, faces creased with disdain. The sun went winking below the horizon and when the wind dropped, the water of the gorge called in whispers. Elliot couldn’t think of the river without seeing the prison bus on its side, its wheels spinning down, engine panting through the vents as the river quenched its insides. A pair of grebe waded in the shallows unperturbed, by the screams echoing inside, colleagues and inmates trapped, flailing, dragged under the foam. And then those turbid waters seemed so much like home, cleaving the mountains, dredging and churning the memories.

Her father thought he was a good man, and perhaps he was. Jim Elliot talked of serving his country in the abstract, but not the Mekong Delta, spoke about his wife in a list of virtues, but never the illness that took her before she knew much of motherhood. He didn’t want a daughter though, didn’t know how to be with her, so instead he raised a disappointing son. God knows she tried, took the knocks, the schoolyard taunts, used her fists when she couldn’t. It was what she couldn’t do that counted most though, perhaps more in her mind than his, but it never seemed that way. West Point was always a distant dream, but unreachable after what happened. It was what she couldn’t do that took him from her.

There was something of her Dad in Garcia’s walk. She’d watched him in the yard, a man feared among the fearsome, his reputation the benchmark for surviving incarceration. He loped in heavy strides, shoulders wide and rocking, a balance bowl imagined in each hand. He talked his game, worked out, shading every comment with menace. But he’d never been on a mountain, that much was plain. It was the way he picked his route, the lack of forethought, the placement of his feet, ponderous and inefficient. Not foolish mistakes, just ignorance, born of the flatness of some borderland shithole. He was unused to the ways of forest and mountain and never acquainted with what Appalachian folk took for common sense. He didn’t know it, but this place would kill him. And anyone chained to his wrist.

She came up alongside him for a while, matched him stride for stride as twilight became dusk, making subtle adjustments to their route to reduce the risk of injury, watching a roof of purple drawing in from the east to begin a starless night.

‘You’re keeping up, now.’ he said, flat-toned.

‘A few more minutes, then we’ll stop.’

‘We’re not stopping.’

Elliot curled her fingers through her short-cropped hair, lilted her chin to the sky. ‘I guess we’ll die, then.’

He came to an abrupt halt, pulling her up short. Whatever he was going to say changed by the time it left his lips, moderated, his expression barely catching up with his thoughts. ‘We’re on the side of a fucking hill,’ he said. ‘That’s all. And over that way, a dozen miles maybe, there’s a town.’

‘Temperature’s already down twenty,’ said Elliot. ‘Wind’s picking up. It’ll go below zero tonight, and we’ll be frozen to the mountain by dawn. Push on in the dark, and we won’t get half a mile. A place like this can end you a dozen ways.’

Garcia exhaled sharply. He flexed the muscles of his neck and shoulders, almost as if he thought he could impose his physicality on the landscape. ‘Only a dozen?’ he said, eventually.

‘You can feel the cold in your lips already, can’t you?’ she said. ‘We can take shelter, go on at first light.’ He didn’t move, just turned his head back the way they’d come, then up along the high pass.

‘What shelter?’ he said.

She started walking again ‘Somewhere along here there’ll be a gap in the rocks, a cave. We’ll be out of the wind. Won’t be warm though, unless we make a fire.’

‘We’re not lighting a fucking fire.’

Elliot took them higher, closer to the rocks, scanning ahead in the half light. ‘You might think again when we find somewhere – you’ll be going in first to kill the bear.’ The handcuff jerked slightly. She could feel him looking at her as they walked. After a while she said, ‘But not this time of year.’

Garcia knew he was in trouble long before they found the cabin. The shivering came first, then as darkness fell he found his mind wandering, refusing to focus, unable to consider options. Worse still he was wearing Elliot’s jacket, not because he had demanded it, but because she had insisted, slipping it from her shoulders, pulling it inside out over the handcuffs. Neither could survive if the other perished, she said, and for the moment at least, the cold was affecting her less. Now he stumbled beside her, behind even, jacket half-way up his arms.

It began to snow as they turned the end of a limestone bluff, tight granules thrashing them like wedding rice. They went forward with narrowed eyes until they were groping along the cliff, near blind. The cabin was almost at touching distance when they saw it, a few yards clear of the rocks and made of rough planks, its generous roof already coated with powder. There were no vehicles, no lights, the curtains open behind deep-silled windows. They went up onto the porch, Elliot energetic, scouting for something to jimmy a window. Garcia’s mind had frozen, and he watched helpless, until his hand reached out and tried the door. It protested for a moment, then swung open, sucked them stumbling inside. It was a cabin like many others, functional, bare-floored, and welcoming only compared to the alternative. There was a rug by the door, some basic furniture, sink, wood-burning stove. It was a place that would keep you alive in all weather. Unless you opened the door to the wrong person.

The body wasn’t visible from the door. It sat in the corner next to a tall dresser, knees up and head forward, grey beard almost touching the knife in its chest. It was almost as if the man had gone there to die tidily, not to trouble the next arrival. They looked at him for what seemed a while. Garcia couldn’t make himself say anything. Elliot said ‘Shit.’

They didn’t speak of it again until they were warm. Garcia watched Elliot lay a fire in the stove with one hand, her motions a blur of competence, a lighter appearing in her hand, then flames springing yellow and white between the logs, throwing warmth against his cheeks. Bit by bit the torpor receded, and Garcia found himself thinking again. ‘Dead for long, d’ya think?’ he said.

‘Hours, not days,’ she said. ‘And no struggle – quick and brutal.’ She looked at him, then quickly away, her train of thought clear. And she was right; it was exactly how he would have done it. How he did it three times in one day.

Elliot reached out and checked the temperature of his skin, roughly he thought in case he mistook it for caring. Not satisfied, she got to her feet and pulled him over to a chest by the wall. She lifted the lid to expose the clothes dripping around its rim, stooped to sort amongst them. Her head came up suddenly, taking a glancing blow as she stepped back, hand to mouth. She stared at the chest, before reaching back into the mound of clothes. When she brought her hand out again it held an orange jumpsuit.

‘I’d say two hours.’ Elliot scooped some beans into her mouth, eyes on the body in the corner, her mind working the implications. ‘On his own, and by a more direct route, he’s two hours ahead.’

‘If it’s who I think, it’ll be longer – three hours at least.’ Garcia propped his feet on the table, gulped his coffee noisily.

‘Athletic, then.’

‘John Bailey,’ said Garcia. He watched her, waited for her reaction, so she gave him nothing. ‘Kills whenever it suits him,’ he said. ‘Enjoys it.’

‘You don’t say. You were going to kill me earlier – remember?’ Elliot turned and looked at him squarely, keeping her expression deadpan, something about the way the day had unfolded, making her bold. Still flexing her fingers though, couldn’t stop that.

‘Was just makin’ a point. Anyway, I’m not a murderer.’

‘Fuck’s sake, Garcia! Don’t go whining about your innocence.’

‘Never said I was innocent – killing someone doesn’t make you a murderer.’

‘You’re so full of crap. Listen to yourself. Three priests in three churches – what do you call that?’

‘No - you listen! So badass, but still saved my life, didn’t ya? If I’m lying to myself, then so are you.’

‘This is what I do. I’m working, not lying about myself.’

‘Children? What was that? You ain’t got no children!’

Elliot looked away, focussed on the flames licking at the stove door. ‘Oh, you think?’

‘I know. Because I had a kid once, and I know what it’s like to lose…’ Garcia made to stand up, as if he thought he could walk away from the conversation, then felt the tug of the cuffs and sat down again.

Elliot decided on silence. She watched the fire for a while and it turned to rushing water, as it was bound to. And she played it over, the rockfall, the bus plunging into the river, the chaos that followed. Someone released the shackles, the prisoners got the keys somehow, overpowered the guards. Others just fought the river like she did. Then she was on the gravel bank, radio gone, and Garcia came out of the water beside her. She cuffed him before he saw it coming. Then threw the key into the forest, just so he knew it was no use. That’s what he thought she did.

She asked him because she was curious, but perhaps as much to stop her thoughts turning from the river deaths to the other one, long ago, the one that really mattered. She asked him without expecting an answer, and perhaps he answered without thinking he would.

‘Suicide,’ he said simply. ‘The boy couldn’t live with it anymore.’ He took a deep breath, emptied his lungs slowly, took another. ‘What happened at the mission school – those priests.’

The meaning came slowly to Elliot. She said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and found that she actually was.

Garcia drained his mug, set it down hard. ‘It was a kind of war, see? I owed it to him, and now it’s done. I won’t kill again.’

‘You may have to.’ said Elliot, gentling her voice. He frowned, not understanding. ‘This snow – it could bring Bailey back.’

Outside the wind had moved off the mountain and the snow fell, thick and silent. Flakes parachuted past the windows, and the dark landscape filled to billowing softness.

They made a tour of the room, removing anything that might be used as a weapon. Knives in the kitchen, tools from the cupboards, and in a drawer three shotgun cartridges. But there was no gun. Garcia held the cartridges in the palm of his hand, rolled them around like dice. Their message was ominous and needed no stating.

‘We can’t keep him out,’ he said, after a while.

‘Better hope he doesn’t come back, then – or I’m as good as dead.’

‘If he was three hours ahead, he could have got below the snow by nightfall. He could be down there, sitting in a bar.’

‘But if it was only one hour…’ said Elliot. She drew him over to the corner, to the corpse. ‘Still warm, she said, and no rigor mortis. Starts only two hours after death.’

Garcia studied her. She was afraid now, a sinew flicking in her jaw as she chewed her lip. And there was that flexing thing she did with her fingers. He said, ‘Might not get back; snow’s already real thick.’

‘We’d be better apart,’ she mused. ‘I’d go out the back way, move fast.’ She looked at him. ‘Unless you weren’t really done with killing.’

Something tilted in Garcia’s gut. For ten years he had survived on intimidation. Now, Elliot was afraid, and whatever the advantage, it didn’t sit easy. ‘Well, we’re not apart,’ he said, skirting the point. ‘You threw that option away.’

She looked him in the eye now, unnervingly close, as if searching for him in plain sight. She said, ‘No regrets.’

The knock came sooner than they expected and more softly, finding them without a plan. A second knock, louder, and Elliot’s insides slid like plates at sea. Bailey was almost unrecognisable in the snow, and for a moment it seemed he didn’t know them either, launching into his story, squinting, edging into the doorway. There was no shotgun.

‘Lose the knife,’ said Elliot from behind Garcia’s shoulder. She nodded at the scabbard at his belt. ‘Throw it out there in the snow, and you can come in.’

He gave nothing away. Standing in the middle of the room, eyes picking them clean, a click of the tongue at their forced union, then stamping away the snow. He shrugged out of his jacket. ‘Found it in a cabin down in the forest,’ he said. ‘Else I wouldn’t have made it this far.’ He looked at Garcia’s jumpsuit. ‘Guess you rode your luck,’ he said. Elliot was next for scrutiny, tongue flicking at his lips, then he moved on, scanning the room. ‘Whoa!’ he said at the body in the corner, as if seeing it for the first time. ‘Enough already, man!’ He scratched at his chin, and just for an instant, his eyes found the clothes chest.

That was the last said of the body. Elliot wasn’t going to discuss it, when any comment might be an unwitting provocation, and it seemed Garcia had decided the same. They sat, talked of the accident, the escape, and all the while she knew the figuring that was going on behind their eyes, heard it in the tautness of their voices. Garcia spread his body across the couch, feigning confidence, and gradually the pauses found their way into their talk, became longer, tiredness tugging, though less it seemed at Bailey. He was not a man made for rest, eyes roving, edgy, heels a fraction off the ground. Elliot had seen it before, the simmering exercise yard, tinder waiting for the spark. Of the two of them, you’d put your money on Garcia, his bulk and strength, but more often than not it was cunning and agility that made the difference.

Still, it was Bailey who closed his eyes first. His knees splayed, hands fell loose. His breathing didn’t change though, chest rising and falling to the same quick rhythm. Elliot turned her face to Garcia, shook her head when he made to speak. She looked for a subject to keep her alert, and found it still slumped in the corner, though why there she still couldn’t figure. The knife was still there too, buried to its hilt, potent, overlooked. Somehow the posture of the body was more disturbing though, pitifully foetal, Elliot thought, so much like her father when they had found him at the base of the cliff that day, broken and folded beside the rushing water. There could be no sleeping once she brought that all to mind, and so just this once, she went to it, recalled it fully. There was the fear first, the giddying terror tearing through her two hundred feet up, clinging to the rock face, impervious to all encouragement. Frozen, body and soul. The granite gnawed at her fingertips, pressed cold to her cheek, swayed and tipped her towards oblivion. Then the rescue, her father in the lead, edging closer, unclipping his line to reach for her. Then falling. Gone in a moment. No scream, not for a marine.

She had called it fate to mask her guilt. And fate, she thought, had drawn the bearded man to die int that tidy corner of the cabin. Well, something had. Something. Retreating perhaps, avoiding. Or perhaps, seeking. Elliot looked at the body more intently now, something bringing her mind to higher alert, eyes more sharply focussed, ranging across the floor, the face of the dresser, then higher to its decorative cornice, where barely visible glinted the barrel of a shotgun.

Bailey was talking again, and this time with purpose. He turned from the window, the sky behind him hinting at dawn. He was setting up the endgame. ‘You’re fucked,’ he said, nodding in Elliot’s direction. ‘You’ll have to lose her, somehow.’ Garcia said he would figure it out. ‘It’s my ass too.,’ said Bailey. ‘Choppers will be out lookin’, soon as its light.’ He stared at the body in the corner, then turned his head, locked his gaze on Garcia.

‘Don’t make it worse for yourselves,’ Elliot said, knowing it a feeble argument. Bailey didn’t even look at her. She no longer existed as a person, if she ever had.

Garcia rattled the handcuff. ‘High-tensile,’ he said. ‘Any rate, she’s useful.’

‘Hostage? Only ever ends one way, bud. Just carve her hand off and get rid.’ Bailey grinned, then cleared the table with a sweep of his arm. ‘Hold her down, an’ I’ll do it.’

If there was a moment that triggered him, it wasn’t obvious. One moment they were talking, the next, Bailey had vaulted over a chair and was going for the corner, for the knife. It didn’t come out cleanly from the corpse, and that bought them a second. Garcia got to him, dragged Elliot with him. He barrelled Bailey into the corner, and they grappled over the body, knees, elbows, a butt of a forehead, nose erupting, the blade scything under an arm, catching the woodwork.

Elliot got hold of the dresser and went at it like a rat, scrambling for the shotgun, only for the handcuff to haul her back. The knife came under Garcia’s arm again and caught her in the shoulder. She didn’t even feel it, until it came sucking free, the pain blunted even then by adrenaline. She went for the gun again, clawing at the dresser’s fretwork, until the cornice was in her grasp. The bodies lurched beneath her in their death struggle and now the cornice moved, the whole dresser shifted, toppled as her fingers closed around the weapon. Garcia’s hand was wrenched from Bailey’s throat, and he was dragged away, disappearing beneath the falling dresser.

Now Bailey stood alone, red-faced, but victorious, Garcia buried, and Elliot pinned waist down. He caught his breath, then came forward, cold-eyed, with the knife held easily in his palm. Elliot wrenched the shotgun from beneath her and steadied it against the dresser with her one free hand. Fired point blank.

Garcia went when the sun came up, left her blood-spattered. She had been out for a while, and when the world returned he was standing in front of her, free of the cuffs. Her hand went to her pocket.

‘Thought I would check,’ he said, and nodded at the table, where the keys lay in a pool of sunlight.

He was wearing mountain clothes now and had the shotgun in his hand. ‘Gets better and better,’ she said and strained forward to bring the two bodies into view, the bearded man lying stiff now, and Bailey’s with little to show north of his shoulders. ‘What are you going to do?’

He exhaled. ‘I’ve glued the wound.’ The mention of it sent pain surging down her arm. ‘It’ll do for now, but you need to hope they come soon.’

‘Don’t take the gun,’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘Chances are they’ll catch up with me and…’

‘They will.’

‘Easy trail in this snow. But if I can get to the town, I’ll make a call about you…’

‘You best get going,’ she said.

He took a cable tie from the table. ‘Some of these in the dresser’, he said. ‘It will look better.’ He knelt in front of her, pushed up her sleeves and saw the tattoo on her arm, the crest, the Latin motto; and the name.

‘The Marine Corps,’ he said. ‘Who is..?’

‘He was my father.’

’You called him ‘Jim’?’

’I called him, ‘Sir’.’

He looked at her directly and she held his gaze, hoped he wouldn’t say anything more. Hoped that he would.

‘You did your job,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t have done more.’

‘Semper fidelis,’ she said.

There were no good-byes. The light came flooding when he opened the door, white, clean, bringing the forest on a breath of air. He left the gun at the door and stepped out into the snow, looked back at her through the doorway. Behind him she could see the orange of his jumpsuit, laid out on the porch.

‘Duty,’ he said. ‘The things it makes you do.’

About the Author

Steve Gay is a writer of historical fiction, science fiction, thrillers and short stories.

His first novel, The Birds that do not Sing was published in November 2020 and is available from online retailers and bookshops. More about the novel, and the author can be found at www.ookabbeypress.com