Free Hell's Fortress by Daniel Wallace, Michael Wallace

allowances.”
    “Fine.”
    Eliza let out a sigh of relief. “Good. Now tell me, why are you driving us so hard? It’s almost dark. We’ll never make it over the mountains in one day. Why not pace ourselves?”
    “It’s those drones. Day or night, they’ll be able to see us out here.”
    “They haven’t attacked us. I’ve got to think we’re safe by now.”
    “Say they fired their two missiles,” Miriam said. “The first was a warning. The second destroyed the bunker. If they’d had a third, it would have wiped us out. Maybe that’s what they wanted all along.”
    “Speculation.”
    “Maybe so, but tell me that’s not what you were thinking.” Miriam nodded. “So the drone flies back to refuel and rearm. That takes a couple of hours. Three, tops. They’ll be back over this territory before dusk. How long until they find us?”
    “Why do they want to kill us anyway?” Eliza asked. “Now that we’ve escaped the quarantine, what possible good does it do to track us down?”
    “An example to Blister Creek. If we somehow make it back, the others will know the quarantine can be evaded.”
    “You don’t know they’ll attack us. You’re just speculating.”
    “Those drone pilots are nineteen- and twenty-year-old kids,” Miriam said. “Operating a joystick, playing a video game in front of a computer monitor. We got away. They want to hunt us down and win the game.” She shrugged. “You’re right, I don’t know it, but I’m not willing to take a chance either.”
    Eliza looked toward the hills. The closest stood in a row at the feet of a higher range rising ominously at their backs.
    “It’s another two miles to the hills,” Eliza said, “then we’ll face some hard hiking to get into the forest where there’s cover. I don’t know that I’m up for it, and I know those other two aren’t.”
    “We can’t spend the night out here, that’s for sure.”
    Eliza studied the terrain closer at hand. There were rocky outcrops and twenty-foot hillocks jutting here and there from the ground, but nothing that would give cover from infrared when night fell.
    “What about the arroyo?” Miriam said. “The water is low. We could go down and burrow into the soft sand on the side. The ground will shield us.”
    “No way. It rains and we all drown. Even a little bit and those hillsides start slumping down. We’ll be buried alive.”
    “Then we double-time it for the hills.”
    Eliza was afraid Miriam was right. After her effort to wrest control of the decision making, now that she had it, she saw no alternative but to go along with Miriam’s original plan.
    “And when we reach the hills, what then?”
    “I have no idea,” Miriam said. “Look for a mountain pass?”
    “Some of those mountains are ten, eleven thousand feet high,” she said. “Thick woods, twenty feet of snow up top. We have to find Route 14 over the top if we’re going to have a chance.”
    Miriam looked dismayed as she scanned the foothills and range. “I have no idea where that is.”
    “Pretty sure we didn’t reach the turnoff to Alton, which means 14 is south of us. We’ll get up to the woods, then cut south until we find the highway.”
    “What’s that road like?”
    “Steep. The summit is up by the tree line. For all we know, the highway is still covered with snow after the spring we had. Wish that creep Kemp had left us a knife so I could make snowshoes.”
    “You can do that?” Miriam sounded impressed.
    “Sure. I used to go hunting with my brothers. Jacob and Enoch taught me how. Keep an eye out for jagged rocks—something that would cut an aspen branch. Bet I could still figure out something.”
    Miriam looked back toward the others. “Our five minutes are long gone. Are you ready?”
    “Let’s go. But I want to explain our thinking to the guys first.”
    “Make it quick.”
    Grover’s face sagged when Eliza gave him the bad news about reaching the hills by dark. “I don’t know if I