She responded with a delicate snort. “Anyone who knows how to open handcuffs with a hairpin would surely know how to hot-wire a car. You do, don’t you?”
“Yes,” he answered with a shrug. “But it doesn’t matter. Even if he’s got a vehicle, I’m sure he has it hidden so well that he would find us again before we came across it. It’s not worth it, Chloe. We’d be better off walking until we find someone more willing to help us.”
“If we find anyone willing to help us.”
“We will,” he assured her. “Just remember what you promised me last night. Don’t give up.”
He watched her draw her shoulders straighter, her chin rising to a stubborn tilt. “I’m not giving up. I can keep going if you can.”
“Good. See that big, forked branch over there? It looks to be about the size I need for a walking stick. Want to fetch it for me?”
Stepping carefully over rocks and pinecones, Chloe made her way to the stick and then returned it to him. As he’d hoped, it made a pretty decent crutch.
“It doesn’t look exactly comfortable,” Chloe commented, eyeing him doubtfully as he supported his weight on the sturdy branch.
He shrugged. “It’s okay.”
“You’ve had worse, right?”
He had to smile a little at her ironic tone. “Right.”
Muttering beneath her breath, she fell into pace with his slow but steady steps. He wasn’t sure what she said, but it sounded like, “Ten steps at a time.”
Hell of a way to start the new day, he thought again. But at least it had stopped raining. For now.
The befuddled man with the shotgun didn’t have to worry about finding them on “his” road, Chloe thought later. She and Donovan had been slowly making their way for hours, and had yet to come across anything that actually resembled a road.
Donovan’s theory was that the hermit hid his vehicle some distance from the cabin and hiked the rest of the way, either to avoid leading anyone to the place or because the terrain directly around the cabin was too rough to traverse in whatever vehicle he possessed. Apparently, he and Chloe had blundered off in the wrong direction when they’d made their hasty exit from the cabin.
For all he knew, they could be walking deeper into the forest rather than out of it.
“What about supplies? How does he get them to his cabin? There certainly wasn’t enough there for him to survive on for more than a day or two.” Chloe tried to keep one eye on their path and the other on Donovan as she spoke. She worried about him falling again, or somehow re-injuring his leg. It was insane that he was attempting this walk with a broken bone, but it wasn’t as if they really had any other choice, either.
“He probably stashes supplies nearby. Cases of canned food and bottled water, that sort of thing.”
Chloe thought of the way Donovan had spoken of the armed man with something close to compassion. “He really is a strange, sad man, isn’t he?”
“Yeah. One of those unfortunate cases that slipped through the cracks of the veterans’ system.”
“You think he’s a veteran?”
“You didn’t notice the fatigue jacket or the boots?”
“All I saw was the gun,” she admitted a bit sheepishly.
He nodded. “I focused fairly intently on that shotgun, myself.”
He paused, leaning heavily on his improvised crutch, and studied the area ahead. Stopping beside him, Chloe, too, looked forward. The sight was enough to make her gulp. They’d hit rough patches before during the hours they’d spent in this forest, but this time they’d reached a particularly difficult area.
Erosion from an ancient, fast-flowing river had carved a deep furrow into the rocky ground. Still wet from the heavy rains yesterday, the ground around the ravine looked slippery and treacherous. Heavy underbrush lined the narrow clearing they’d been following, and a steep limestone bluff rose on their right, preventing them from going that direction without climbing. Behind them, of course, was a crazy man with a shotgun—and possibly three armed kidnappers.
She felt her shoulders sag. She wasn’t giving up, she assured herself. But she was so tired of having one obstacle after another thrown their way. It felt sometimes as if the whole universe was conspiring against them—and yet they’d survived it so far, she reminded herself. Battered, but unbroken. At least for now.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for a break,” Donovan said, making her wonder if he found the scene ahead as daunting as she did.
“Definitely,” she agreed.
They found a mossy patch of ground in the shade of a twisted old hickory tree. Chloe helped Donovan lower himself to sit, then sat beside him.