"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 the water's edge; the other side had fewer sheer drops and was more soil-covered, the trees growing in places to the water's edge but not so densely that on a climb out, her invisibility would be guaranteed. The Douglas fir and the scattered oak were rich green in the sunlight of the day, but now in the lengthening shadows some were turning black, making the place seem deadly solemn.
The leader called out from a distance well above the rock. "I see another one coming. This one's got a gun."
Realizing her pursuers were distracted, she decided to drop. Letting the root slide through her hand, and using her fingers and toes to cling to the rock, she accomplished a controlled but painful slide. She moved down three feet, paused for a split second, and then pushed herself off-plummeting ten feet to the mud, her chin barely missing a stone projection as she fell.
Instantly she sank to her thighs in soft, velvety ooze. She had never heard of quicksand anywhere in California, but that hardly put her at ease. If it was quicksand, she knew thrashing would be stupid. But she had read about swimming in quicksand. The horror was that you got only one swimming lesson-and if you failed, you died.
She looked down again. Her belt was closer to the muck. Maybe she had just leaned over and wasn't really sinking. No-she had been still. Straining to pick up her right foot, she tried to move forward, but she received only shooting pains through her ankle for the effort and a loud sucking sound. The noise was frightening. And now the mud was touching her belt.
Above her she heard the growers on the hillside, waiting for whoever had been following her. With luck they would kill or run off her pursuers, but would that really help her? For the first time she felt cold, and wondered how long she could stand in the mud before her lowered body temperature would become life-threatening.
She looked down, barely saw her belt. How long until the mud reached her neck? Maybe she should just try crawling forward and gamble that they wouldn't hear her movements. What irony if she should die in this mud hole after escaping both the growers and her kidnappers. Tears came to her eyes. Don't be a wimp, she scolded herself.
She listened intently and soon realized that the leader was sitting just above her. Occasionally he would call out to the others who were searching the hillside. Any movement on her part created water and mud noise sufficient that she would be heard. Only a real struggle would free her.
Maria shivered uncontrollably as the sun began to slip below the ridge in the western distance. She was having a harder and harder time remaining conscious. She had ceased being in pain from the cold and the bruising; how she was numb, and she knew that was bad. Struggling and pulling herself out might soon be her only option. Dan's face kept flashing through her mind. He was coming, she kept telling herself, fighting the cold with the only weapon left to her: hope.