The men who’d gone to the barn jogged back up.
“Well?” Matt asked.
“No one’s there, but someone was,” one of the men said. “All the stalls are empty, and the horses are gone.”
Matt looked past the two men at the barn, searching for any sign of the animals, but none were around.
“Could they have ridden away on one of them?” Barlow asked.
That thought had crossed Matt’s mind, too, but it would have been a huge risk. The attack team from Project Eden could easily have spotted them on a horse, and chased them down with one of their helicopters.
“I think they went into the woods on foot,” Miller said. He crouched down next to the footprints. “These leading toward the trees? They’re on top of the other ones, so they’re the last ones made.”
“They could have doubled back to the barn on the grass,” Barlow argued.
Miller shrugged, conceding the point, but not seeming to buy into it.
Matt looked at the barn, then at the woods. “I think the horses were only a diversion. Jon wouldn’t have risked taking one. We go into the woods.” He touched the transmit button on the radio. “Christina, what’s the closest emergency supply location from the barn?”
There was a pause, then she said, “There are three within a two-mile radius. One is a mile and a half northwest of you, one almost due west three-quarters of a mile, and one is northeast just over half a mile. I can send you all of their coordinates, if you’d like.”
Matt looked down at the prints Miller had found. The set on top was heading east. It was also the only logical direction to find civilization.
“Just the last one for now,” he said. “We’ll check there first.”
There was no question that the emergency stash in the east was the one Jon and Brandon had visited. It was half uncovered, and many of the supplies were gone.
Matt shone his flashlight into the tube. Per procedure, all the empty bags from the supplies they had taken had been put back inside, but, oddly, they had all been scrunched toward the bottom, like someone had crawled into the tube and stamped them down with their feet. An unnecessary step. Also, why had Hayes left the top half off? He should have replaced the metal plate and pushed the loose ground cover back over it.
The men from the team were scattered around the area, searching every square inch for any clues.
“Anything?” Matt called out.
“They walked in together from over there,” Miller said, pointing in the same direction they had come from. “I also found two sets of prints heading away. They’re both going in the same general direction, but they’re not on the same path.”
“You mean they split up?”
“Or left at different times. Which is pretty much the same thing, I guess.”
The team broke into two groups — Matt, Barlow, and two of the other men following Brandon’s prints; and Miller and the other two following Hayes’s. It wasn’t long before the two sets of tracks diverged enough that the groups were no longer in sight of each other.
There was only one reason Matt could think of for Hayes and Brandon to split up. Someone from the Project Eden team must have been in the area. That also could explain the compacted bags in the storage tube. Perhaps Brandon was hiding inside.
Matt could see the hint of a clearing ahead. Just before they reached it, the radio came to life.
“Matt,” Miller said. “You need to come here.”
“Where are you?”
“There’s a clearing. It’s pretty much straight northeast of where—”
“We’re just coming to it now,” Matt said.
“You’ll see us once you get here.”
As soon as Matt stepped out from the woods, he spotted the others. Miller and the two men with him were hunched over something on the ground. It wasn’t until Matt was a few feet away that he saw the legs of a man.
“Oh, Jesus,” he said.
Miller turned. “It’s Hayes.”
“Dead?”
Miller nodded. “Shot in the back.”
Matt knelt down next to Miller and looked at the body. Hayes was lying on his back, part of his chest blown out.
“You turned him over?” Matt asked. If Hayes had been shot in the back, he should have been lying on his stomach.
“No. He was already like this.”
So it was either the person who killed him who turned him over, or…
God, let me be wrong.
Matt struggled back to his feet. “We need to look for Brandon,” he said loudly enough for all of them to hear. “Spread out. Check everywhere.”
After twenty minutes of searching, the only thing they discovered were depressions in the meadow where a helicopter had landed.
That troubled Matt even more. Had they taken Brandon?
They carefully checked the area around where the helicopter had been, but the ground was a mixture of dead grass and leaves, so no footprints had been left behind. No way to know who might have boarded the aircraft.
“Miller,” Matt called out. When the man came over, he said, “I want you to do a circuit just outside the clearing. See if you can pick up Brandon’s trail again and figure out which way he went.”
“No problem.”
As Miller started to turn away, Matt said, “Look very hard.”
24
Brandon had told the woman what he could. The Ranch and the people there, he said nothing about. When she wondered how he knew what he did, he’d kept his mouth shut. He was confident she believed him, though; he could see it in her eyes.
Once she had finished asking him questions, she’d let him get some food from the kitchen, where he noted the back exit out of the corner of his eye. She then ushered him back down to the room in the cellar.
“Take an inventory,” she told him, pointing her gun at a clipboard hanging on the wall.
His face scrunched in confusion. “What?”
“Check to make sure everything on that list is still correct.”
“Wouldn’t you already know that?”
Her mouth tightened into a tense, straight line. “Just do it,” she said. She slammed the door closed and locked it again.
Having no intention of counting cans and jars, he had spent most of the morning thinking of ways he could get away. They all came down to the same thing — if the opportunity presented itself, he would just run.
A good enough plan, except for one big problem: the gun. Would she actually take a shot at him? He didn’t think so, but it was hard not to remember the hole in Hayes’s chest.
While he’d been thinking, he could hear the woman walking around upstairs. She seemed to be in constant motion, moving from room to room, pulling open doors, scraping across the floor. She was still alone, though, so maybe the person she lived with wasn’t home. He hoped so.
After a while, the woman turned up the volume on her computer so loud that he could hear the wah-wah-wah of the voices on the news resonating through the floor. Occasionally, he could even make out a word here and there, but mostly had no idea what was being said.
As the time passed, he started thinking about that coming evening. He didn’t want to spend it in the cellar. He wanted to be away from there, as far as possible. He paced back and forth, his anxiety increasing.
Finally, he stopped himself, knowing he needed to distract his mind so he wouldn’t wind himself up so much.
He caught a glimpse of the clipboard.
It’s better than nothing.
So, despite his earlier decision, he began checking the woman’s supplies. In addition to the cans of cream of mushroom soup, there were hundreds of others containing pears, apricots, baked beans, lima beans, peas, pineapple chunks, Spam, and beets, just to name a few. The jars, with the exception of seventy-two containing Ragu spaghetti sauce, were all labeled on the lid and filled with things he guessed the woman had jarred herself — cherry preserves, apple sauce, pickles, stewed tomatoes, and the like.