Free Desolation Point by Cari Hunter Page B

that I’ve found someone,” she muttered, pulling it out to find a text that Ash had sent over twelve hours ago. The signal on her phone was wavering between one bar and two, and her mood lightened immeasurably as she grinned at the photograph of Jamie, a picture of innocence with chocolate cake smeared all over his face.
    Deciding to delay replying until she was somewhere warm and dry, she returned the phone to her pocket. Then she tilted her head to one side, listening and trying to reestablish the direction she needed to take. The ledge she was negotiating gave her no protection from the wind that whipped rain into her face, wind that tormented her by intermittently lifting the mist to give her a few precious seconds of clear visibility before casting it down to conceal everything once again. Her gloves were soaked through, her fingers numb from trying to find purchase on the slippery rocks, but as she strained to concentrate, the chill that suddenly made her shudder had nothing to do with how cold she was.
    At first it was just sounds: a thud and a short cry of distress, but then a voice carried toward her with perfect clarity. It was a man’s voice, different from the first one, wavering with fear but fighting to stay calm.
    “Just let me go, please. Look, I don’t know where we are. I don’t know where you’re going. Who could I tell?”
    No one answered him, but there was another thud, followed by a weak groan. He coughed, and Sarah winced at the thick, wet gurgle of his breathing. She turned off her flashlight and huddled low as she attempted to make sense of what she was hearing. Torn between a desire to stay hidden and an urge to try to intervene, she held her breath, slipped her pack from her shoulders, and tucked it out of sight behind a boulder. Then she crept forward, navigating a path through a maze of oddly shaped rocks to reach one that was far larger. She climbed atop it and lay flat on her front. For what seemed an interminable length of time, she stared across the small clearing, struggling at first to comprehend exactly what she was seeing and then simply not wanting to believe it.
    A man and woman clad in wet weather gear stood a short distance away with their backs toward her. In front of them, starkly lit by the flashlights they were training on him, knelt a second man. The thin white shirt he was wearing was torn and bloodstained, with epaulettes on his shoulders suggesting he had been at work before he had somehow ended up here, struggling to hold his position on the rain-slickened scree with his hands bound behind him. He was shaking his head, blood running from his nose and splattering onto the ground as he repeated the same words over and over again like a delirious mantra.
    “Please don’t kill me. I have a family. Please don’t kill me.”
    Locked in a heated debate, his captors were ignoring him. The woman walked around him to peer tentatively over the edge of the cliff face, and then turned back to her companion. With mounting horror, Sarah watched the woman laugh and shrug, before the man standing beside her kissed her savagely. When they broke apart, he took one step, placed a gun against the forehead of the kneeling man, and pulled the trigger.
    Too stunned to look away, Sarah gasped involuntarily as a gout of blood exploded from the back of the man’s skull, the wind hurling it forward to cast a fine spray across the face of his murderer. As if in slow motion, the body slumped to one side, its eyes staring blankly in the twin beams of light as blood continued to leak out onto the scree. With a look of disgust, the woman pushed her toe beneath the torso and tried to roll it, cursing in exasperation when she was unable to shift its weight. His expression impassive, the man took a firm hold of the body and flipped it into the void. He tracked its progress down the mountainside and then, seemingly satisfied, wiped his hands on his pants to clean them.
    Sobbing silently, Sarah edged