"Eric, come here! Cougar tracks. I swear."
"Tracy."
"Don't give me that boy-who-cried-wolf shit. I'm telling you they're cougar tracks or puma tracks or whatever the hell you want to call them. Look."
Eric brushed aside a tree branch and stepped over some bristles and soggy yellow leaflets warning residents to evacuate. They'd been hiking through the woods for five days. Santa Barbara was just on the other side of the hills and today was the day that the experiments on the Long Beach Halo were supposed to take place.
"Look at that," Tracy pointed with her crutch. "I told you, damn it."
Eric knelt next to the tracks and studied them.
"See? Okay, maybe I was kidding before about seeing one, but look. Jesus, the size of 'em."
Eric stood up, peered through the trees to a clearing. A small house stood alone at the top of a knoll. "Come on, let's check out that house. Might be empty."
"I was right, wasn't I? Cougar, right?"
"Nope."
"What do you mean? Look, damn it. The pads, the four toes, the long claw marks. Four of them here. Another four there. Like it was running."
"Very good," Eric said, meaning it. "Only it's not a cougar, not any kind of a cat. Probably a wolf or a wild dog."
"But the claws-"
"Cats don't leave claw marks, they keep them retracted. Also, there are four footprints together here. Cats leave only two."
Tracy frowned. "What're you saying? They tiptoe?"
"No, it's called directly registering. That means that when they pick up their front foot, the rear foot on the same side falls directly into the front print so it looks like a single print. Cats are the only animal family that does that. However, a fox will also directly register."
Tracy gave him a cold stare and turned away. "I hate you sometimes."
Eric smiled, stepped up behind her, slipped his arms under her crutches and wrapped them around her. "You love it when I tell you crap like that. Makes you feel outdoorsy. Admit it."
"Ha. If I felt any more outdoorsy you'd have to mow my legs."
Eric laughed, kissed her neck. "Hmmm. I see what you mean. You could use a bath. Your neck looks like it's got cougar tracks on it."
"Me? Me?" She broke away from him. "You're the one who went for a midnight dip in a cesspool the other night. Christ, you smell like Pittsburgh."
He stepped closer to her, their faces only inches apart. A smile twitched at his lips. "I thought you liked Pittsburgh."
She laughed, pressed her lips against his, mashing them hard. She let her crutches fall to the ground. Immediately, she felt his powerful arms lift her onto her toes, pull her body next to his, crush it there with just the right amount of pressure. The dull ache in her broken leg seemed to stop for a moment. When she pulled her lips away from his, she was panting a little. "Do we have time for this?"
"I'll check my schedule."
"You know what I mean. Today's the big day. White man's silver birds come from sky. Drop chemicals on primitive natives down here."
Eric shrugged. "I told you, that's a crock. If the government was going to do something like that, they wouldn't pick Santa Barbara. Population density is too great. It makes more sense to try this kind of thing over the desert."
"Eric, we're talking about the government."
He laughed. "Yeah, right. Still, something is going on. There's a reason they wanted this place evacuated. Something they don't want us to see."
"And so we've got to see it."
"No. Not necessarily. But I know Colonel Dirk Fallows will. He won't believe those flyers any more than we did."
"Uh, than you did. I believed them."
"You're here."
She nodded at the crutches on the ground. "I wasn't given a lot of choices."
Eric stared at her for a moment. She was right. He hadn't considered her at all. He'd thought only of the opportunity to outwit Fallows. For once to know where he was going and get there first, instead of having to track him. This was his chance to rescue Tim. Nothing else had mattered.
"You're sure he's coming?" Tracy asked.
"I'm sure. He's a master at exploiting opportunity. And when the government doesn't want you someplace, that's a guaranteed opportunity begging for someone like him."
"What do you think it really is?"
"I don't know."
Tracy stooped down with awkward grace, her bandaged leg balanced straight out, and snatched up her crutches. She wedged one under each arm. "I guess the romantic mood has been broken."
They started for the house in the clearing. Eric lead the way with Tracy keeping pace remarkably well despite her crutches.
"I saw this guy with one leg run the New York Marathon on these things one year," she huffed as she swung next to Eric. "Young kid, maybe seventeen. I kept wondering what the people behind him with two legs were thinking as they tried to catch up."
"Probably that winning the race wasn't as important as being able to at least run in it."
"Uh-oh. There goes that deep thinking again. You know what Einstein said, 'I shall never believe that God plays craps with the world.' "
"He said dice. 'I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world.' "
"You're no fun. Just because you used to be a history professor doesn't mean you know everything. You can't believe everything you read in books. My uncle Gerald was a gardener for Einstein when he was at Princeton. Uncle Gerald had just told Albert that the azaleas he'd planted last season were all dead of rot. Professor Einstein was devastated. Uncle Gerald tried to cheer him up by telling him that in that particular climate, planting azaleas was a crap shoot. To which Einstein replied, 'I shall never believe that God plays craps with the world.' He later polished it up using the word dice."
Eric stopped in the middle of the field and stared at Tracy. "Is that true?"
Tracy kept swinging ahead choppily on her crutches, laughing with each hop. She glanced over her shoulder at Eric and smiled. "Gotcha."
They approached the cabin downwind. Immediately Eric knew something was wrong. "Down," he whispered. "Down."
Both of them dropped to the ground, letting the long grass surround them. Tracy had her.357 clutched in both hands. Eric checked the bolt in his crossbow.
"What?" Tracy asked, eyes raking the house for movement. "You see something?"
Eric shook his head. "Smell something."
Tracy took a deep sniff. The usual smells: burned wood from the many campfires and brush fires that swept unmolested through huge portions of the state. There was always the smell of fire in the air. But there was something else. Something rotten. "What is it?"
"Something dead. Probably human." He pushed up to one knee. "Wait here."
"Count on it."
He gave her a smile and was off, dodging in zigzags toward the modest weather-beaten house. She saw him slam up against the house, kick open the door, then crouch into the dark room, his crossbow sweeping for a target. Then he was gone.
Tracy waited, ears straining for the sound of an arrow, a gun, a knife, a muffled cry for help. Maybe she was too far away to hear. Her stomach sloshed and growled, but otherwise there was silence.
Finally, Eric appeared at the door and waved at her to come up to the house. She waved back and he disappeared back into the house.
As she climbed slowly to her feet, pulling herself up with one crutch, something odd occurred to Tracy. Eric's crossbow had been fired. As he'd waved to her with one hand, his crossbow had been gripped in his other hand, but there was no bolt in it and the string was uncocked.
Had he fired at something? Or was someone in the house? Someone holding Eric prisoner and waiting for her to come too?
Tracy hopped slowly toward the house, her gun balanced awkwardly as she held it and maneuvered the home-made crutches at the same time. What would she do? Refuse to go any further? They might kill Eric. But if she kept going, they'd probably kill both of them. With both dead there was no chance of saving Tim. At least with her alive, she could try.
But would she? With Eric gone would she try to save Tim? Probably not, she admitted.
She kept moving toward the house.