Page 31 of Warrior Security
“How long were you married?”
“Three years too long.” She picked up the next staple and drove it into the post with one clean swing. The conversation was over. Her hands said so, her posture said so, the precise controlled force of the hammer said so.
I didn’t push. I wanted to. I wanted to know about the man who’d given her that scar. Wanted to beat the shit out of him without even knowing his name. Wanted to know more about her life in Upstate New York and how exactly she’d ended up here.
But she wasn’t talking so I drove my own staple in and we kept working.
Eleanor. The scar. The ex-husband. The family who wouldn’t use the name she’d chosen. Pieces of a picture I could see the edges of but not the center, and every piece she gave me made itclearer that the center was something she’d spent years building walls around.
We worked in silence for a while after that. She handed me staples when I needed them and I held the wire taut when she needed me to, and neither of us tried to fill the quiet.
The sky changed while we were working the last section. What had been blue and clear went dark in the time it took me to drive four staples. The clouds didn’t just build up along the ridgeline. They blackened, piling over one another in thick, heavy layers that swallowed the afternoon light. The wind came in hard from the west, shifted south, then came back from the west again. The temperature dropped fast enough that I stopped working and looked up.
The brief storm four days ago had been all noise. Thunder and rain for forty-seven minutes, then nothing. This was different.
“We should go,” Lark said. She was already gathering tools, her eyes on the sky. “That’s not messing around, and we’re at the wrong side of the property to get caught in it. Montana storms can get ugly quick.”
We moved fast toward the truck, a quarter mile back along the fence line on the low ground near the access road. We made it about halfway before the rain hit.
It didn’t build. The sky opened and dumped, a wall of water so dense I could barely see Lark ten feet ahead of me. Within a minute, we were soaked through, the ground under our boots turning to mud.
Then it got fucking worse at a speed I wouldn’t have believed if I hadn’t been in the middle of it.
The low ground between us and the truck started collecting runoff. At first, it was just standing water in the ruts. It was shin-high and cold, but we could still walk through it.
Then it started moving. Brown water channeling through the natural low point, picking up speed as more flowed off the ridgeline above us, the rain still pouring down in stinging sheets everywhere.
I could see the truck, barely, maybe eighty yards ahead, parked where we’d left it. The water around it was already up to the wheel wells and still rising.
Lark stopped. She was staring at the truck, face grim.
“What’s wrong?”
“If that water gets into the engine intake, it’s done.” She had to shout over the rain. “And if we get in and it won’t start, we’re trapped in a cab while the water rises around us. It’s a death trap. I know better than to park in that ravine. Stupid. Damn it.”
I looked at the eighty yards between us and the truck. The water was brown and fast and climbing. She was right. “We’re not getting to the truck. But we can’t stay here either.”
She grabbed my arm and pointed uphill, toward the rocky slope to the north. “There’s an overhang up on the ridgeline. Rock shelf. I’ve been up there before. We have to go up. Now.”
I didn’t argue. She was definitely right. The water was already up to our knees in the fifteen minutes since the storm started. This was a flash flood zone. Going back the way we came wouldn’t help either—we’d be completely open to the storm.
She turned and started climbing. I followed. The terrain was steep and slick. Wet rock, loose shale, mud that gave way under every step. The rain drove sideways into us, and the wind tried to push us back down. Lark knew the ground and moved fast, her boots finding holds I couldn’t see, but the wet rock made everything uncertain.
She slipped. Her boot hit a patch of shale and her leg went out from under her, and she started sliding back down the slope. I caught her arm and pulled her up before she’d gone two feet. Her hand gripped my forearm hard, fingers digging in, and fora second, her face was close to mine, rain running down both of us, her breath coming fast.
“Thanks.” I saw her lips form the word more than heard it. She let go and kept climbing.
We reached the overhang five minutes later. A shelf of rock jutting out from the ridgeline, maybe fifteen feet deep and eight feet high at the opening, narrowing toward the back. Protected from the wind on two sides, open on the third facing the valley below.
At least it was out of this goddamned torrential rain.
I looked down. The low ground had become a channel. The truck was still visible, water halfway up its doors. The rain wasn’t letting up. If anything, it was getting worse, the sky so dark it looked like evening even though it was early afternoon.
We weren’t going anywhere.
Lark stood at the opening, arms wrapped around herself.
“Are you okay?”
