Chapter 27 Foiled Plan
She slipped from the trees onto the gravel road, her heart still thrumming, but now with a fragile thread of triumph. The road stretched empty before her. On the left side, parked a little way down, she saw it. One of the rigs, the Subaru Forester, she recognized from the meeting at Henry’s place. Eleanor. Her stomach clenched with a mix of relief and renewed anxiety. They were here.
As she stepped fully into the open, a figure lunged from the driver’s side of the truck. “Clara! Run!” Eleanor screamed, her voice tearing through the quiet afternoon, laced with pure terror.
In the same instant, Clara heard it: the heavy, rapid thud of boots hammering toward her from behind, directly from the tree line she had just exited. Her blood ran cold. She whipped her head around, her vision blurring at the edges, just in time to see a monstrous shadow detach itself from the deep green. The form of one of Thorne’s thugs, a hulking brute, was bearing down on her with terrifying speed. She registered the cold malevolence in his eyes, the brutal set of his jaw.
She turned to run, but it was too late. He was on her in a flash, his hand clamping over her mouth before she could scream. He snatched her up with ease, like a rag doll, one massive arm circling her waist, lifting her effortlessly off her feet. The breath was knocked from her lungs, and she flailed wildly, kicking, scratching, trying to bite the hand over her mouth, but he was too strong, too unyielding. He carried her, struggling and desperate, backward, off the road, and into the dark maw of the woods.
“Let me go!” she tried to scream, the sound muffled and useless. Her fists pounded uselessly against his muscular form, her nails tearing at his shirt, but he didn’t even flinch. Deeper they went, away from the road, away from the distant sounds of the campground, swallowed by the oppressive silence of the forest. Another figure emerged from the shadows, a second thug, his face grim, a folded white cloth held ready in his gloved hand.
The brute holding her released his grip on her mouth just enough for the second man to press the cloth firmly over her nose and mouth. A sickeningly sweet, cloying aroma filled her nostrils, burning, invasive. Chloroform. Her vision swam. She tried to hold her breath, to fight it, but she was already light-headed from the exertion, from the fear, from the lack of oxygen. The sweetness intensified, tasting like decay and oblivion. Her limbs felt heavy, detached. The world spun, the trees blurring into an indistinct green. Her mind faded into a dull drone. The thug’s face, a distorted mask of satisfaction, was the last thing she saw before everything dissolved into an empty, echoing blackness.
Every muscle screamed in protest, but a far more visceral pain tightened his gut, the gnawing fear for Clara. She had to have made it. She had to. The thought was a prayer, a desperate plea echoing against the granite peaks of the Colorado Rockies.
The film canister, small but heavy with the weight of her Aunt Bea’s work and their shared perilous nights, was Clara’s cargo. A thumb drive nestled within, a digital key unlocking Victor Thorne’s web of deceit – the illegal logging, the toxic dumping, the quiet, insidious destruction of this wilderness. If Clara had reached Lake Finney, if she had made the drop, and then rendezvoused with Eleanor or Henry, then the evidence was safe. And more importantly, Clara would be safe, already on her way home, away from the ruthless pursuit of Thorne’s thugs.
He turned toward home, no longer providing the now unnecessary diversion, pushing his body with a desperate urgency that had been held in check for too long. The measured pace he’d set for Clara, a careful balance of speed and stealth, designed to avoid detection and accommodate her city-bred inexperience, was a luxury he could no longer afford. He was alone now, Thorne’s thugs far behind him, their fading shouts a testament to his successful evasion. The only thought scorching his mind was getting back to her.
The moon, a sliver of bone in the velvet sky, offered little aid as he plunged deeper into the wilderness. He knew these trails like the lines on his own calloused hands, every familiar landmark and the stones and dirt beneath his worn boots. Sleep was an alien concept. He pushed through the night, his breath pluming in the frigid air, the silence a deceptive blanket, broken only by the howl of a distant coyote or the rustle of unseen creatures. But in Ethan’s mind, there was only Clara.
Her laugh, bright and echoing. The way her eyes, initially wide with trepidation at the wildness surrounding them, had begun to sparkle with a nascent understanding, a burgeoning love for the very things he cherished. The soft press of her body against his, the warmth of her skin, the tangled intimacy they had found together, savage and dangerous. Their bodies had found a language beyond words weeks ago, a deep comfort that transcended the chaos around them, but their hearts were just now catching up, intertwining with an exquisite slowness that made their separation unbearable. He’d resisted it, built walls around his reclusive heart for years, but Clara had dismantled them with a quiet resilience, a shared purpose that mirrored his own connection to this land. She would be worried sick over him; he knew it. He would not let her worry long.
It was midday the following day when he finally reached Henry’s place. His weary muscles screamed for rest, but the moment he stepped from the tree line, he instantly saw that no one was there.
Henry’s weathered pickup was gone. A pair of dusty work boots left neatly by the door, but no sounds of life, no faint scent of coffee or woodsmoke coming from the cabin itself. Just an unsettling quiet that vibrated with absence.