Bone Rattle by Marc Cameron (best ereader for pdf .TXT) 📕

into view, strung like powerlines across a deep ravine. A series of waterfalls boiled just uphill, throwing a cloud of misty spray. Across the gorge was a simple basket of bent steel and wooden benches hung from the cable on two pulleys. Cutter estimated it was seventy or eighty feet away. Someone had used it to cross and then left it on the other side.

Maycomb stopped at the trees, well away from the rocky edge. “How deep is it, do you think?”

Cutter moved to the square platform. Grabbing one of the steel posts where the cable attached on his side, he peered over.

“A hundred, maybe a hundred fifty,” he said.

“Okay,” she said, moving to join him. “As long as it’s deep enough to kill me outright. I don’t want to lay down there in agony for hours until someone can come down and get me.”

“Guess that’s one way of looking at it.”

A nylon rope ran in a continuous loop through a series of metal guides the length of the cable, then through pulleys on both sides of the ravine. The metal car or hand trolley was attached to this rope.

Cutter had no idea when the hand trolley had been built. The steel piping was screwed instead of welded. Two small wooden benches were bolted to the floor on either side of the open frame, facing each other. There were no seat belts, and the frame itself provided the only handholds beyond the rope used to pull yourself back and forth. The pulleys and cables were rusted, but appeared to be in good condition – at least good enough to carry the previous load across that day. The newest piece of the setup was the rope, a spliced length of twisted mountaineering rope called Gold-line. It was frayed, but serviceable, probably attached by Tom Horning or one of his group of adventurers sometime in the past year or so.

Cutter believed they might have pegged the trolley, making it impossible to bring over, but he gave it a stout tug and it began to move toward him.

“You can still wait—”

A loud pop came from the far side of the ravine. Cutter initially thought it was a gunshot, or some kind of sabotage to the line, but the hand trolley continued to squeak and wobble toward them. It took just under a minute to bring it all the way across.

“Get in!” he said.

To her credit, Maycomb complied without question.

Cutter stood on the opposite side of the trolley cage, balancing the swing as best he could. Both hands on the rope, he began to pull hand over hand. He needed to get them across as quickly as possible.

“Want to tell me what that was?” Maycomb asked, staring straight across the gorge, as they swung, and inched, and swung some more. She and Cutter both avoided looking down at the silver line of churning water in the rocks beneath their flimsy basket.

Cutter kept pulling, but nodded to a silver canister tied to the pulley arm on which the trolley rode the cable.

“A flashbang,” he said. “They set it and left it.”

Maycomb closed her eyes and groaned. “So now they know we’re behind them.”

“They know somebody is,” Cutter said. “If they’re close, they could send someone back to check – and we’re sitting ducks out here.”

Maycomb reached up to grab the rope. Timing her efforts to match his, she began to help him pull. “Yeah, and you look like a cop from a hundred yards away.”

Cutter stepped off the trolley as soon as they reached the other side, holding it steady for Maycomb.

“This way,” he whispered, stepping toward a line of devil’s club, fiddlehead fern, and alder on the uphill side of what looked to be Donita’s direction of travel. “Try your best not to touch any of the vegetation.”

“Yep,” Maycomb said, breathless with tension. She mimicked Cutter’s twisting dance to avoid disturbing the alder and berry leaves.

They needed to get off the trail as quickly as possible, but Cutter wanted to gain the high ground before he took a minute to see if someone returned to check their back trail.

He didn’t have long to wait.

Chapter 44

The first shot snapped through the branches to their right, skittering leaves and narrowly missing Maycomb. Cutter spun at the staccato crack, pulling her down behind a thick-hipped hemlock that was wide enough to cover them both as long as their aggressors attacked head on. If there were three of them, as Cutter suspected, there was a slim chance of that. They’d simply fan out, using their own trees for cover while they flanked the couple and picked them off.

Whatever he was going to do, he needed to do it fast, before the others got organized. To do that, he needed intel. Rather than removing his pack, Cutter asked Maycomb to get the compact Leupold binoculars from the outside pocket. He rolled to the side, staying low to come up behind a neighboring stump of old growth, peeking out a good ten feet away from where he’d last been seen.

There were three all right. An older man with a huge black and silver beard and a man with slick black hair, each carrying a pistol. Slick carried a pack with a coil of climbing rope. The third man was younger, more muscular, with a killer look in his eyes that distance couldn’t hide. A tough guy, and he knew it. He also carried a pack, out of which he took the components of a scoped precision rifle.

Cutter didn’t take the time to get any more information. He had all that he needed to make a decision.

He belly-crawled back to Maycomb behind the hemlock tree.

Two more pistol shots skittered through the foliage. WAG shots— wild-ass guesses for now, but they’d settle down and zero in soon enough.

“We have to move,” Cutter said. “Three bad guys. One of them is putting together a rifle – and he moves like he knows how to use it. Good chance he’s the shooter from