“Glad you like. I usually prepare three deer a year as jerky, and rosemary is my favorite. I can use it on the trail to make a really good stew. Hoss likes it too.”
They ate in companiable silence as the sky continued to change color. Chewy drank coffee that was thick as tar and about the same color, from a thermos that, while it looked to be permanently stained, might have started life as some tan shade.
By the time they were finished and all the wrappers were cleaned up, a rope dropped down the boulder. Liz leaned back and shaded her eyes, looking up and behind her. Eli was standing on top of the seven-foot-plus tall boulder, outlined in the brightening light, his face in shadow.
“You missed breakfast, Captain America,” she said.
“Captain America?” Chewy started laughing, a sound like the boulder beside them might make if it pulled loose and rolled from the stone wall. “Captain America,” he wheezed.
“It’s what my niece and nephew call him.”
“Yuck it up, Chewy,” Eli said, sounding bored. “Liz, I have a Z-drag assembled and I can pull your pack and then you right on up. Chewy’s a different matter. He weighs in somewhere between a small horse and a young bull.”
“I’ll manage Hoss. Me and my new knees got this.” Chewy started rummaging in his pack again.
Liz tied her packs and the walking stick to the rope and her… boyfriend?… pulled her packs up hand-over-hand. When the rope came back down, the end was tied in a loop. She put one foot in it, protecting her knuckles from the stone in front of her, and her shoulder from the stone beside her, studiously not looking out over the cliff to her right as Eli pulled her up and away from the edge. She rose in jerks and pauses, which was embarrassing because she was so… not skinny… but she didn’t hear Eli grunting, so that was good. And when she rose over the edge, he secured the line and lifted her as if she weighed nothing.
“Hey Lizzie.”
He looked up and around, taking in everything, before he kissed her soundly and noisily. “What say we leave Chewbacca behind and do this alone?” He looked around again, and the fire of embarrassment and anger shot through her before she realized he wasn’t ignoring her, he was watching for enemies. Soldier boy at work.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He has really good venison jerky.”
“He’s dead weight.”
“I can hear you,” Chewy said.
Eli kissed her again. Looked around. Kissed her again. When he pulled back and stepped away, Liz was slightly breathless, and not from climbing the mountain. She said, “Are you kissing me to punish Chewy for something?”
“Happy happenstance. Mostly I’m kissing you because I like kissing you. A lot.”
His dark eyes returned to her, gleaming with something she didn’t see often, the light that was both reckless and totally aware, heated and cold all at once, the light of battle. She put a hand to her face. His beard, which he hadn’t shaved this morning, had scraped her delicate skin. Not that she was complaining.
“But I guess we should help the poor old man up the boulder,” Eli said. “We’ll need something slow to run after us if a bear decides to chase us.”
“I can still hear you, Hoss. Don’t make me come up there and whip your ass.”
“You cussing in front of my girl?”
“I apologized for the language. She thanked me for my service. We’re good.”
With a horrible rattling sound, a rope shot up over the boulder and Eli caught it one-handed, pulling it up. The rattling got worse as the top rung of a flex, leather, and chain ladder appeared. Eli grinned at her and secured the ladder to the drag line he had created around various trees. A minute or so later, Chewy pulled himself up over the boulder, taking in everything with eyes nearly as intense as Eli’s. The man was limber and nimble for such a seriously big guy.
Liz blinked when the ladder was pulled up. “You’ve been carrying that? All this way?”
“’Course. What do I look like? A monkey? Like Captain America, here?” Chewy made that rumbling laughter as he tossed the bulky, and clearly heavy, ladder into his pack. In a high falsetto, like a child, he said, “Hey. Captain America. Would you please carry my pack? It’s soooo heavy.” Chortling, he shouldered said pack and walked up the path and around the curve of the hill, leaving them behind.
Liz looked at Eli, who still had a bored expression on his face. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know he would make fun of you.”
Surprise flashed across his face and was gone. Eli said, “Lizzie. I’ve been called worse. When we were in the field he used to call me Shit for Brains. A superhero is easy. Now gimme one of your energy bars. Saving the world uses up a lot of calories.”
Liz handed him an energy bar and followed Chewy.Shit for Brains. Yeah. Captain America was much better.
Brute
Chewyand the others were back along the trail and several hundred feet lower in elevation when the scent he was following got stronger. A lot stronger. The grindy chittered softly in his ear. Brute crouched low, belly to the dirt and pebbles, doing the predator crawl around the hill and through the twisted limbs of laurel. Not the trail the others would follow. Only the four-footed could make this trail. Or a monkey.
Before him, a clearing opened out, with a small shack built up against the hillside. It wasn’t much, maybe ten feet by ten, with a rusted metal roof. It had a leaning stone chimney that looked as if it would fall down with a slight wind, probably crushing the small shack. Place hadn’t been painted in decades, only a trace of green paint here and there, lots of moss and mold and rot. Twenty feet away, an old fifty-five gallon drum marked the spot where a springhead had been tapped and water trickled down, collecting into what looked like a sun-damaged kiddie pool. The pool was full and water trickled out of it, along the ground, out of sight. There was no driveway. No car. No motorcycle. No trail in. Not even a fire burning, no faint scent of smoke on the air. Nothing.
