over the thick roots of pine trees, and kept her T-shirt close to her mouth so she could breathe. Her eyes were red and raw, singed by the fire and the smoke.
I’m not going to make it. I’m not. It all ends here. And for what?
She thought of her father and grandfather, whom she would miss. She thought of her mother, long since dead, whom she would see again. She thought of Patty, how she had left her alone last night and all that had happened as a result of it. And then she thought of what this particular death would be like. In spite of the searing heat, she felt a chill at the thought of it.
In this case, with this fire, this smoke, she felt it would hurt terribly―more than having her throat cut, which she didn’t remember because Mark Rand had knocked her unconscious. The pain came afterward, when she woke up, the six-inch wound in her neck sealed shut with stitches.
The fire was different. The fire wouldn’t offer a swift death. It would lick around her body, blister her skin, taste her bones and muscles, and then it would consume her. She knew that and she was scared to death of it. In spite of herself, she began to cry as she continued to run forward, the branches now snapping against her face because she couldn’t see well enough to push them aside. Her fear of the unknown sank in deep and took hold.
She wiped her eyes and in the next moment, everything changed.
When she saw him, he also saw her.
She stopped running, swiped her eyes again, and was stunned to find that someone else was out here. Someone else was trying to make their way out. It was difficult to see clearly through the smoke, but he looked vaguely familiar. Someone she knew from Bangor? A fellow hunter?
Couldn’t be. He wasn’t wearing hunting gear.
She could see well enough now to know that this wasn’t the man who brought her here, only to be run off by a moose. She thanked God for that. This was somebody else.
She was about to call out to him for help when he raised his hand at her. In it, she saw a gun.
Before Cheryl Dunning could process any of it, he fired it at her. And then he fired again and again while all around them, wild animals, startled by the sounds of the shots, leaped higher off the forest floor. Terrified and confused, they ran toward him and away from him and finally into him, knocking him to the ground all while a portion of Monson burned.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The shots startled her, a bullet chewed through her, but when she looked down to see where she was hit, it was only a knick. Left arm, close to the shoulder, blood flowing, but not severely.
Lucky.
But still terrified. She looked ahead and watched one of the running bucks slam its rump against the man in its effort to escape. It knocked him so hard to the ground, she saw his feet kick up as he rolled over, where above him, sheets of fire roiled across the sky.
But she didn’t see him get up.
Confused and frightened
(who is he who is he who is he who is he),
she ducked low out of sight, pressed her hands against a pine tree to steady herself and felt how moist and sticky it was.
Sap, she thought. Sap!
It was so hot in the woods, the fire was heating the trees that hadn’t yet been affected by the flames. The sap was thinning in the heat. It was sweating through the bark. It was starting to run.
With her father and her grandfather cheering her on in her heart and in her head, she took a filtered breath of air, held it, pulled down her shirt over her nose, mouth and shoulder, and smeared a handful of the sap over the wound in an effort to seal it shut.
It stung like hell, but it worked. Once, when her grandfather was gutting a deer, he cut himself so badly, he did this until they could get him to the hospital. She’d likely get an infection from it, but she wasn’t concerned―at least not yet. If she could get out of here, antibiotics would knock it out in no time.
She exhaled, made the mistake of inhaling, and started to cough from the smoke. She pulled her shirt back over her nose and mouth, felt like gagging, but willed herself not to.
She