The Law of Nines

The second man put a boot on the downed man and leaped over him, diving toward Alex. Alex pressed the trigger twice in rapid succession. He didn’t know if his bullets found their mark or not, because the man was still crashing in on him. As the man’s arm came out to tackle him, Alex dodged aside, seized the man’s hair, and used his forward momentum to help heave him out over the edge. The man stumbled, trying to stop, but he was moving too fast. He screamed all the way down.

Gun held in both hands, Alex pressed his back against the rock wall, catching his breath. He looked out over the edge and went weak in the knees at how close he had been to going over the side with the assailant.

The man on the ground wasn’t moving. Alex didn’t like the idea of not having the gun fully loaded as he went into an unknown but definitely hostile situation, so he quickly pulled a box of ammo out of his backpack. With his thumb he forced four more shells into the magazine, filling it to capacity. Seventeen rounds in the magazine plus one in the chamber gave him eighteen rounds in the gun plus the rest of the loaded magazines if he needed to reload in a hurry.

While eighteen rounds sounded like a lot, he knew that if there were enough men coming at him even that many shells wouldn’t last long. He didn’t know what choice he had.

Gathering his wits, he hurried the rest of the way up the trail to the top, where it flattened off considerably. Even so, it wasn’t exactly flat. Beyond an expanse of forest, jumbles of rock rose up to make the top of the massive plateau a series of rocky layers.

While from a distance it might have looked flat on top, up close the stacks of ledge, the sheer granite faces, and the squared-off breaks in the stone had a hauntingly man-made look to them, even though the plateau was obviously entirely natural. A person with a good imagination could make more out of it than layers of rock. With some imagination it looked almost like an extensive, complex structure.

Now that he had made the top, Alex wasn’t sure what to do. He searched around the area where the sloping rock ledge had emerged on top, but there was no man-made trail. While the trail below was used by the security force to get to the mountain, they apparently rarely or never climbed to the top. It didn’t look to him like anyone had ever walked across the delicate pale lichen and deep green mosses.

He finally decided to follow the exposed ledge that created a natural trail through the woods. In one low, damp place, he spotted Jax’s boot print. Deeper in, he came to a curious depression leading into the rock jumble.

Before going into the narrow chasm, he pulled a box of ammo and four magazines from his pack. He put the box of ammo in the front pocket of his jeans and the spare magazines in his back pockets. As he moved into the tight opening in the rock, he found that it wound into gorges that eventually rose perhaps a hundred feet in places.

The natural trail through the rock led him into a narrow cleft. High above, he could see that the smooth sides revealed only a long slash of leaden sky. Alex went in deeper. The rock overhead that must have once stood taller yet had toppled over in the distant past, possibly during earthquakes, so that it now lay across the cleft and acted as a roof. The deeper Alex went, the gloomier it became.

The farther in he went, the more the jumbled, weathered rock turned into a dark labyrinth. Alex stuck a hand into his pack, searching blindly for a flashlight. He found it and pulled it out.

When he switched on the light and pointed it ahead, a man was standing in the narrow passageway through the rock. Alex went for his gun.

“If you want to see her alive, you need to follow me.”

Looking at the man through the iron gunsights, one eye over each of the two outer dots and the center blade of the front sight rock-steady over the bridge of the man’s nose, Alex hesitated.

But for only an instant.

He pressed the trigger. The gunshot inside the confines of the rock passageway was deafening.

“I don’t negotiate with murderers,” Alex said under his breath as he stepped over the corpse and made his way deeper into the maze of rocky crags.

“Seventeen left,” he counted to himself as he hurriedly followed what was becoming like a cave running deeper into the mountain. With his flashlight he had to check that each side branch he came to was clear. He stuck to what seemed the main crevice running through the mountain. In places the huge slabs of granite had shifted over millennia or even tipped and fallen, leaving many spots a tight squeeze to get through. In other places he had to climb over rubble from when the rock overhead had collapsed.

Alex didn’t know how long he had been running when he realized that up ahead he saw natural light. As he continued on, the light grew steadily brighter.

When he rounded a slight bend in the fissure through the mountain, he spotted something out ahead in that area of light. He rushed ahead, trying to make it out.