CHAPTER 79

THE TREES OVERHEAD FORMED a thick canopy, and the trail had been fairly well used, so we were able to move fast and hard north, hearing the snowmobiles behind us whine and then stop below the rim of the butte.

“I bet they’re bogged down in all that drifted snow,” I said.

“This is our chance, then,” Sampson said. He surged in front of me to break trail through the snow that had made it through the tree limbs overhead.

John was one of the strongest men I knew, and his long, powerful legs blew through the snow as if it weren’t there. I stayed right in his tracks, both of us cutting the way forward for Bree, who was puffing along, holding her own.

“I run all the time,” she said at one point, gasping. “Why can’t I breathe?”

“High altitude.” I grunted. “I feel like I’m going on half a lung myself.”

“Or worse,” Sampson said as the trees began to thin. The powder under our feet deepened, and the snow falling intensified. “Is that your big meadow up ahead, other side of that last stand of woods?”

“Has to be,” I said, forgetting how tired I was and surging after John in the now knee-deep snow.

We’d made it to the south edge of that last stand of fir trees when we heard the snowmobiles rev up a solid mile or more behind us.

“How long is that meadow?” Bree asked as we moved fast into the shadows and the cover of the woods.

“Less than a mile,” I said. “Do we stick to the edges or stay on the trail?”

“The trail,” Sampson said. “We’ll move faster.”

We could see the long meadow and had almost broken free of the trees when my foot snagged on something buried in the snow. I felt something pop, and I fell hard.

“Alex!”

“My ankle!” I moaned, looked back, and saw my boot was caught in a loop of rusted cable sticking up out of the snow. “Where the hell did that come from?”

“Probably left over from the old mining days,” John said, quickly pulling on the cable and loosening the loop enough to release my boot.

We could hear snowmobiles moving again. A lot of them. One sled sounded like it was already on the flat, less than a mile back.

“You two go get the guns,” I said, wincing as Bree helped me to my feet. “I’ll hide in the woods here.”

“We’ll never make it across that meadow,” Bree said. “They’ll shoot us down.”

“She’s right,” Sampson said. “We don’t have a choice now. This is the last cover. The last place we can ambush them.”

“Ambush them?” I said. “With what?”