The Bodies Left Behind

the rocks littering the area: some were too big to budge, but others could, with some difficulty, be rolled or lifted. Also, there were plenty of logs and thick branches.
    Brynn growled, “Let’s send ’em into the thorns.”
    Michelle nodded.
    Then Brynn had an idea. She took the compass bottle from her pocket. With the knife she cut off a long strip of cloth from her ski parka and tied it around the bottle. She gripped the candle lighter.
    Michelle pointed out, “It’s just water.”
    “They don’t know that. As far as they know it’s full of alcohol. It’ll stop ’em long enough for us to get some rocks down on them.”
    Brynn peered down. The men were almost directly below them. She whispered, “You ready?”
    “You bet I am,” Michelle said. She lit the strip—the nylon burned bright and sizzling.
    Brynn leaned over the edge, judged the distance and let the bottle fall from her hand. It landed on the ledge about five feet in front of Hart and bounced but stayed put.
    “What—?” Hart gasped.
    “Shit, it’s alcohol! It’s going to blow, get back.”
    “Where are they?”
    “Up there. Someplace.”
    The shotgun fired and a few pellets struck the rock face near the women. Amy, huddled nearby, began to scream. But Brynn didn’t care. Somehow screaming and howling seemed just right at the moment. They weren’t a deputy and a dilettante actress. They were warriors. Queens of the Jungle. She wanted to give one of her wolf cries at the moment herself.
    Together they rolled the biggest rock they could—it must’ve weighed forty or fifty pounds—toward the edge of the cliff. They muscled it up and Brynn rolled it into space. Then looked down.
    The aim was perfect but fate intervened. The rock wall wasn’t completely vertical; the missile hit a small outcropping and bounced outward, missing Hart’s head by inches. The rock did, however, crack apart the formation it struck and showered the men with fragments. They backed up ten feet along the ledge. The partner fired again but the pellets hissed past the women and upward.
    “We can’t stop,” Brynn called, gasping in a whisper. “Hit them with everything we can pick up.”
    They pitched a log, two boulders and a dozen smaller rocks.
    They heard a cry. “Hart, my hand. Broke my fucking hand.”
    Brynn risked a peek. The partner had dropped his shotgun into the brambles.
    Yes!
    Hart was gazing upward. He saw Brynn and fired two shots from his Glock. One spattered the cliff nearby but she dodged before the shrapnel hit her.
    She heard Hart call, “Comp, the fuse’s out. Look. Get that rubble off the path. Kick it off.”
    “Hell, Hart, they’re going to break our skulls.”
    “Go ahead. I’ll cover you.”
    Brynn was nodding at a log, about five feet long and a foot in diameter, with several sharp spiky limbs a few inches long. “That.”
    “Yes!” Michelle smiled. Together the women got onto their knees and pushed the trunk parallel to the cliff’s edge. Gasping from the effort, they collapsed against it.
    Brynn held up a finger. “When I tell you to, throw a rock behind them.”
    Michelle nodded.
    Brynn grabbed the spear.
    She thought of Joey. She thought of Graham.
    For some reason her first husband’s image made an appearance.
    Then she nodded. Michelle pitched a rock down the ledge.
    Brynn stood. She saw Hart looking behind him, toward the clatter of the rock and, giving an otherworldly howl, she flung the spear at the partner’s back as he bent down to muscle some debris off the ledge.
    “Comp!” Hart cried, looking up at just that moment.
    The man spun around and danced back from the spear, which missed him by inches, digging into the stone at his feet with a burst of sparks. He slipped and rolled off the ledge. All that kept him from falling was his left-handed grip on a crack in the rock. His feet dangled above the vicious thorns.
    Hurrying to him, Hart glanced up and fired. But Brynn was out of his line of sight and helping Michelle push the deadly log closer to the edge.
    Brynn took another fast look—Hart was bent over, his back to her, gripping his partner by the jacket and struggling to pull him up. They were thirty feet below, in a direct line, and the rock face here was smooth. The impact of the log would shatter bones if not kill outright. One of them at least would be knocked into the sea of thorns.
    No hesitation now.
    Brynn got a good grip on her side of the log and Michelle on hers. “Go!” Brynn