Sanity Frontier

All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh.

Doris Lessing

TWELVE

Derek Morgan awoke with the morning sun. He had handed over sentry duty to Reid at 3am, and curled in for what amounted to a long nap. He checked his watch and groaned at what he saw. Some holiday this was turning out to be.

They had stopped for the night, confident that those they were pursuing would have decided to wait until morning to hunt Rossi and Emily. Hopefully, their suspicions were correct. In any case, tracking their progress would be relatively simple; fresh snow had fallen the day before, untouched but for the trudging of feet. On the other hand, that also meant that Rossi and Emily were similarly trackable, providing that the strangers had gone the right way in the first place. It was all a great big game of chance, and no-one knew where the wheel had landed.

They packed up their gear, ready to move out. They didn't know how far behind they were, and felt no real urge to let the lead increase.


Emily woke up irritable, and it was no surprise. Having been unable to find it in her pack the previous night, she had the sinking feeling that her antidepressants had burnt to a crisp in a certain cabin fire.

'Are you alright?'

'I'm fine,' she snapped in reply, and immediately regretted it. 'Sorry.'

'Pills missing?' He really didn't miss a trick.

'Yeah.' She searched through the pack again, painstakingly removing every item, and then replacing it. The pills were indeed nowhere to be found. 'There's nothing we can do about it now,' she finally said. 'But we are going to have to think of a plan. We can't just run away from this.'

'Sounds like every problem.'

The plan they settled on was a baited ambush. Practically unarmed and injured, Emily realised almost immediately that, naturally, she was going to be the bait. It always seemed to happen that way.

'They won't shoot you on sight,' Rossi reassured her. 'You saw the bodies, they likes a slow death. Painful. Tormenting.'

Images of the past flashed through her mind, brought on by low levels of serotonin. Phantom pains passed gracelessly through her body in a crippling wave. Screams that were not her own echoed in her ears. Screaming for help. She closed her eyes. Torment was nothing new.


It seemed ironic that she had half a packet of cigarettes at the bottom of the pack, and yet no Escitalopram. She took a couple of painkillers to calm the raging pain in her leg, and lit one up, taking great care to be as liberal with the smoke as possible; she wanted to be seen. To be fair, they hadn't made the trap blindingly obvious. To the naked eye, the inexperienced hiker, she was hidden quite well, but to someone who knew these mountains even half as well as she did...

Rossi had felt confident in choosing his own ambush spot. A lifelong hunter, he knew what was visible to the eye and what wasn't. He shuffled in place, wanting to make sure that he wouldn't be seen. If he had known the mountain better, perhaps his chances at finding a suitably safe hiding spot would have increased. As it stood, though, Dave Rossi took several steps backward in order to get a better view and promptly fell off a cliff.

Emily heard Rossi's strangled cries, and immediately swore. The one cliff edge and he had to go and fall off it. To be fair, she had neglected to mention it to him; it was barely a ten foot drop. He could have survived it with nary a broken bone.

She heard something else – voices, muttering away to each other in French. Perfect timing. Rossi had fallen off a cliff, and she was stuck there as bait with no follow up. She had the axe still. Compared to two rifles, it was nothing.

There were muted footsteps as they rounded the corner. She struck out with the axe, hoping to God that it wasn't Morgan or Reid. The blade caught one of them in the arm. It stuck, blood spurting from the wound. They hadn't been expecting any resistance. It gave some merit to the basic idea of the trap, but further emphasised its poor execution. The man roared in pain, uninjured hand grasping at the axe's handle. He had dropped his rifle, and Emily went to retrieve it before the second man could react.

The wood stock caught her across the back of the skull.

A/N: I'm going to finish this one off as quickly as possible so I can get started on the third and final installment of Angels Fall First. For those of you that care, there may be a twisted form of M/E to look forward to.