"The last thing I remember" - читать интересную книгу автора (Klavan Andrew)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Woods I don’t know how long I ran like that. A long, long time, it seemed like. The woods got thicker and thicker around me, darker and darker as they shut out the sun. I strained my eyes, looking for a sign of civilization. A house, a cabin, a ranger station, anything. But as far as I could see, the woods went on forever, an endless, mysterious pattern of vines and branches, massive tree trunks and low shrub.

For a while, I stuck to the trail. It was broad and flat- more like a fire road than a hiking trail-so I could move along it quickly. I figured that was the best way to put some distance between me and the guards. In here, see, in the forest, their weapons were useless at long range. There was no way they could even see me for any distance, let alone get a shot at me through the trees. So they’d have to catch up to me first. They might be able to do that if they could push a vehicle through here. But if I was right about that truck-if it was the only vehicle in the compound-or even if they had to go back to the compound to get another truck-then I had time to cover some territory before they could begin to close the gap.

So I ran along the trail as fast as I could go, deeper and deeper into the woods. But it was tough going. I was already unsteady, battered, hurt. Soon enough, I began to feel my legs start to weaken and my lungs start to give out. Not to mention, I needed a drink of water-a lot. I didn’t know how long it’d been since I’d had a drink, but I was starting to feel the need in a big way-not just in my dusty mouth and my parched throat, but in the wooziness that was seeping into my brain like fog and the weakness that was spreading from the core of me out to my limbs.

Finally, I was staggering. The trail was no good to me now. I couldn’t travel quickly anymore anyway. So I left it and plunged into the depths of the brush and trees. There was no running here, not for long. After just a few steps, the undergrowth got so thick that I had to tear it away with my hands to make any progress at all. On the plus side, the trail was soon invisible behind me, which made me suspect I was probably more or less invisible from the trail as well. Even if the guards caught up to me, they wouldn’t be able to see me. They might well miss me and run right past.

But if the way had been hard before, it was even harder now. Pushing through the brush, tearing through the hanging vines. Now that I wasn’t running anymore, the pain-that spiky torture suit of pain-seemed to close over my body again. I ached and burned. Branches scratched my face and arms. Vines and tangled bushes wrapped themselves around my legs like hands trying to hold onto me. I yanked myself free of them. I shoved myself on. With every step, my thirst got worse. I got dizzier. The weakness at my center spread steadily into my legs and arms.

Then, suddenly, I was down. I didn’t even remember falling. All at once, I was just lying on the forest floor with my face in the dirt and half my body caught in a tangle of thorny underbrush. I lay there, gasping, barely conscious at all. I tried to listen for voices, for footsteps, for gunfire-to hear if the guards were closing in on me. All I could hear, though, was the harsh, rasping sound of my own breathing and the hammering rhythm of the pulse in the side of my head.

It was a long while before I stopped gasping and another long while before my breathing and heartbeat slowed. Then, as I lay there listening for any sound of the approaching guards, other noises came to me, the noises of the forest. They sort of rose up around me so that I knew they had been there all along and I was just becoming conscious of them. There was a steady flow of birdsong, birds calling to birds in the high trees. There was a steady trill of crickets and the rising, falling rattle of the cicadas. Bees hummed and twigs and dead leaves crackled as the lizards scrambled over them.

I lay there and listened. They were good noises somehow. They were cheerful, peaceful. Exhausted as I was, thirsty beyond belief and scared beyond telling, the noises soothed me. They gave me a sort of lazy, dreamy sensation, and I started to think there might still be some hope-I might still get away from this insanity and back to the life I knew. Maybe someone would find me here, I thought sleepily. Or maybe I would somehow summon enough strength to get up and stumble on a few more steps and find a village or a highway or hikers-or better yet, hunters with guns who would protect me. Or maybe I would just fall asleep and wake up in my own bed, as I had fallen asleep in my bed and woken up in this insanity.

I lay there lazily and listened to the forest noises- birdsong, crickets, bees. And without thinking much, I kind of gazed at my hand, the hand lying on the ground right in front of my eyes. That’s strange, I thought in a distant, dreamy sort of way. Where’s Beth’s number? Because this was the hand that Beth had written on with her marker yesterday. And though it was bruised and bloody and there was an ugly burn mark on it, I could still see: the number was gone. There wasn’t a trace of it. Which really was strange, wasn’t it? I remembered how, just before I went to sleep last night, the last thing I did before I turned off the light was to look at my hand and see the number was still there. It was strange-strange that there should be no sign of it now at all.

I lay there gazing at my hand and thinking about that and listening to the forest. My mind drifted from thought to thought, and not all my thoughts made sense as my consciousness came and faded. I don’t know how much time passed like that, but the next thing I knew, amid all the birdsong and so on, I became aware of something else: a deep, loud, almost comical burp of a noise. A frog. A big one, by the sound of it. A big old bullfrog honking it up not very far away.

The frog burped again, and it made me smile-it’s true-a hunted guy lying there with my face in the dirt and my arm tangled up in scratching branches, and I smiled at the noise the frog made… and then I stopped smiling, because an idea had come to me.

I listened harder. Or that is, I shifted the way I was listening. I started listening for noises of a different tone, a different kind. Now, instead of the birdsong and all the rest, I was listening to the sound of the air moving through the treetops. I was hearing the creak and pop of wood bending as the trees stirred this way and that. I heard the low rustle of silence, and finally-there!-there it was-almost buried in that range of sounds but just audible: I heard the trickling whisper of running water.

The frog gave another great big burpy croak, and I not only smiled again, I almost laughed out loud. It was as if he were talking to me, calling to me through the forest, saying, “Here I am-burp-a frog-burp-and what do frogs like?-burrap!-pardon me; must’ve been something I ate-they like water!

”

I’m not sure anything else could’ve gotten me moving again, not even Winston Churchill. But water-oh yeah, I’d move for that. I ran my tongue around my mouth, trying to dampen the terrible dryness there. I braced my hand against the dirt. I started to push myself up. The bushes-those thorns I was lying in-they seemed to grab hold of me, as if they were trying to keep me there, as if they were saying, Not so fast, Harley-Charlie. What’s your hurry, dude? Take it easy. You don’t need water! You just need to lie here and sleep, sleep, sleep!

I gave a growl of resistance. I felt the branches dig into my flesh as I wrestled my arm free of them. Then I was up. On my knees; on my feet. I stood where I was, weak, hunched over, swaying slightly. Listening to the sound of water. Trying to figure out where it was coming from.

The frog croaked again. That was no help. You can’t find a frog by the sound of it. Try it sometime. It always sounds like it’s coming from where it’s not. Every time you move toward it, it comes again from somewhere else.

But the water-I could still hear that. I began to move toward it. Stumbling over the thick jumble of roots and bushes at my feet. Staggering from tree to tree. Leaning against the sturdy trunks to rest and catch my breath again.

The water sound grew louder quickly. In another few moments, I had found it: a small stream. It wound quickly through dead leaves. Its water winked and sparkled beneath the single pale yellow beam of sunlight that fell to the forest floor through the clustered branches above.

I stumbled to it, openmouthed. Dropped to my knees at the edge of it. I fell forward, my mouth seeking out the cool flow.

I didn’t know much about forest survival or anything like that, but I knew I was supposed to be careful about drinking water. I remembered something about trying to find the place where the water moved quickest and how you were supposed to be careful not to drink too much or too fast.

Yeah, I remembered all that-but I didn’t care. I was just too thirsty. I stuck my mouth on that stream and tried to suck the entire thing right out of the ground in a single gulp. When that wasn’t enough, I grabbed handfuls of it and shoveled it into my face as fast as I could.

Oh, it was an amazing sensation. With every gulp, I could feel the strength flowing back into my body. That cloud of dizziness that had closed around my mind-I could feel it breaking up into wisps and drifting away, leaving my thoughts clear. Everything around me-the leaves, the sunlight, the water, the whole world-was suddenly in sharper focus. It was practically magical, like stories from the Bible where people are healed, going from sick to well in a single second.

I drank and drank, and when I couldn’t drink anymore, I rolled over on my back and just lay there, gasping and feeling good and strong. I could think clearly again too. With the water in me, with strength in me, I could begin to think and plan, trying to figure out what had happened to me, what I was dealing with, how I could get away and get back home. There had to be a solution to this craziness, after all. There had to be some sort of reasonable explanation. This wasn’t a show on the Sci Fi Channel. Those weren’t space aliens coming after me. They didn’t tractor-beam me out of my bed into another dimension. Somehow I’d just been… stolen… stolen out of my life and shoved into this one. There had to be a method, a reason. And there had to be a way out. There had to be.

But before I could find the answers, I had to start moving again. I had to find my way to a road, to a town, to the police.

I had an idea. I turned over on my side and lifted off the ground-which wasn’t easy, believe me. Every time I stopped moving, the stiffness and pain settled over my body again. But with a lot of grunting and groaning, I managed it. I turned over and lifted myself up, and then grabbed hold of the slim trunk of a birch tree and pulled myself to my feet.

I looked down at the water. It had to run somewhere, didn’t it? It was just a narrow stream, but still, it had to make its way somewhere. Maybe it just petered out, but maybe it flowed into a bigger river that would lead me, in turn, to a town. Or maybe it ended at a lake, where there’d be vacation homes and boats and phones…

I tried to follow the flow with my eyes, to see where the stream led, but it was no good. The stream wound into the trees and disappeared from view. So-weary as I was-I started moving again. I began to follow the bubbling flow of the water.

I stuck close to the stream where the brush was thinnest. I pushed through the trees. I went around the bend.

And my heart sank as I saw where the stream ended. I saw the water curve around once, and then curve back. Then it came into a clearing, and there… it vanished into the earth.

I stood where I was. I stared unhappily at the place where the water disappeared. It was a clearing, an opening in the trees. At the center of it, there was a sort of depression in the earth. It looked almost as if the ground had collapsed there and fallen in on itself. At the bottom of the depression, there was a dark hole, an opening about as big around as a man. It seemed to lead into nothingness, complete blackness. The stream poured out of the deep forest shadows, skipped merrily over the brighter clearing, and then, with the suddenness of a snapped finger, it was gone, through that hole, into that impenetrable dark.

I knew what it was. As I said, I wasn’t a big forest survival guy, but I’d hiked in the woods around my home enough and I’d seen this sort of thing before. It was a sinkhole. The stone beneath the dirt here must be soft-limestone maybe. The water had worn a hole in it and there was probably a cave-even a network of caves-underneath.

Well, so much for that idea. There was no way I was going underground into absolute blackness. If I was going to die, I was going to die up here in the light. I’d have to find another way.

I turned from the sinkhole and scanned the forest. It was the same in every direction, the same tangle of branches and vines, the same streaking sunlight, and the same shadows slowly getting deeper, darker. Soon it would be night and there’d be no chance of finding my way. For now, at least I knew I’d been heading in the direction of the sinking sun when I left the compound. If I kept traveling that way, at least I’d put some more distance between me and the bad guys before dusk.

I was just about to set off when I heard it. An unmistakable sound. An engine-Maybe a car, I thought with faint hope-but no-no-it was a truck. It was getting louder, coming closer somewhere beyond the trees. It was out on the trail, out of my sightline, but not that far away, not far enough. For another second or two, I tried to hold on to the desperate hope that it was someone besides the guards, someone who might help me.

Then the truck stopped and I heard their voices, and my hope was gone.

“There,” one of them said in a thick, syrupy accent. “Look. The branches.”

“I see it,” said another.

It was the guards all right. They must’ve had a second truck back in the compound. Or maybe they’d gotten another set of keys to the truck I’d stolen. Or maybe… well, it didn’t matter, did it? They were here. They were close.

“Looks like he went off that way,” said the first man now.

“Yes,” said the second. “I see it.”

“Dylan and I’ll keep watch on the path in case he tries to double back and make a break. You three, take Hunter. Stay in radio contact.”

“Will do.”

For another second, I stood in the little clearing, unable to think, unable to move. My eyes darted frantically back and forth, looking for a way out-any way. If I was quick, I thought, I still might stay ahead of them, find a place to hide.

But the next moment, I heard something else, something new. It was a sound that seemed to go through me like a dentist’s drill hitting a raw nerve.

Take Hunter, the man had said.

And when I heard that next sound, I knew who Hunter was. He was a dog. A bloodhound.

And judging by the long, hungry howl that now came winding to me through the tangled branches, he had found my scent.

He was after me.