Page 39 of Eco-Activist’s Mountain Men (Mountain Men Reverse Harem #4)

Luna

W ill tomorrow be my last day on Earth?

Will Tim Collier find a way to get to me and kill me sometime tomorrow, just as he has promised?

I'm only twenty-four. There's so much stuff I still want to do. I'm too young to die.

I tell myself not to be so melodramatic.

I've got four brave mountain men around me—including a brooding hulk in Luke, and a former Army Ranger in Jack.

Maybe Collier won't even come. Maybe—like Jack said earlier—he was just shooting his mouth off.

Letting off steam. He didn't really mean it, and he was just trying to scare me.

Well, if he's trying to scare me, he's definitely succeeding.

I'm so glad Luke has been assigned to stay close to me. It's not just the safety of having him here to deal with anything bad that might happen; it's the comfort of having someone there to keep me company. Right now, I don't want to be alone.

Toby and Eric spend an hour and a half digging out the two spare cameras and setting them up for live data transfer.

Finally, they call the rest of us over, and we all gather around Eric's laptop.

Sure enough, the screen is divided into four equal-sized boxes.

Two of the boxes are grayed out and just have the words "Camera Not Registered" written across them.

The other two show reasonably clear, real-time video images.

"That's great, well done." Jack stands between them, his arms clasped across their backs, giving them a squeeze across the shoulders to indicate his satisfaction.

"We'll head off now. Sooner we go, sooner we'll be safely monitoring any potential approaches via those two tracks."

"Okay, brother. Remember, this guy's military trained. Make sure you hide the cameras well. Before you rig them, check around to make sure you're not under observation."

"You bet, bro." Eric nods his agreement, and the two of them gather up the two cameras and take the rifle and ammunition pouch that Jack offers them.

"There are twenty rounds in there. The rifle's a single-shot, bolt-action, forty-five.

No scope, just the standard sight. Not exactly a military weapon.

It's designed for hunting, not self-defense.

I've cleaned and tested it, and it's working fine.

Make sure you're comfortable with operating the bolt before you go anywhere. "

"Aye, aye, Captain."

"Okay, Jack."

The two of them file outside and head towards the barn where the quad bike is stored. A few minutes later, we hear the roar of an engine starting, and then the sound of the engine slowly dying away as the boys head out into the wild.

"Okay, guys," Jack lets out a deep sigh, as if he's been holding his breath for the last few hours. "That's about all we can do. Now comes the hard part."

"The hard part?" I turn to him, not sure what he means.

"Yeah. Waiting."

"Oh," I say. "Yeah, I guess you're right."

For five minutes, we sit there, the three of us at the kitchen table. None of us is saying anything. None of us knowing what to say or how to say it.

"I wish Southpaw was here," I say. "For all his attitude, he looked after me. I see that now. I didn't appreciate him enough when I had the opportunity. No disrespect to you guys—I really appreciate your support. But I'd feel even safer if Southpaw was here too."

"He comes and goes on his own schedule," Luke replies. He could turn up in the next five minutes, or we might not see him for a couple more months. Ain't no way of telling."

Another silence. Eventually, Jack gets up and refills his coffee from the jug.

The waiting is… painful. The ominous feeling of dread that has been with me since I first saw that text from Tim Collier seems to grow and loom greater in the quietness.

I need to do something—anything—to distract myself.

"How long will it take the boys to fix those cameras and get back here, do you think?" I ask Jack.

"An hour and a half, maybe two hours."

I consider this. Then make up my mind.

"Right then," I say as brightly as I can manage, given the circumstances. "I'm not sitting here like this for two hours. I'm going to clean the kitchen from top to bottom."

"Good idea."

"Yeah, and you two can help."

We turn the kitchen upside down, scrubbing surfaces, paying attention to the stuff that usually doesn't get properly cleaned—even the coffee jug gets a going over.

At last, everything is shiny and clean, and the kitchen almost sparkles in its newfound cleanliness.

Just as Luke is wringing out the sponge he's been using to clean the sink with, we hear the quad bike motor in the distance, getting louder, informing us that Toby and Eric are back.

I make for the door, but Jack reaches out an arm and holds me back. "Sorry, Luna. Not today. Not tomorrow either. Best stay inside. Just for a day or two. For your own good. Don't forget you're car?—"

"Carrying a baby," I finish for him. "Yeah, I know. I guess you're right."

"Just for a day or so. Until this all blows over." He reassures me.

"Better safe than sorry," Luke adds his own thought. "We'll all wait here. Let them come to us."

So we wait in the kitchen until Eric and Toby come stomping in, Eric holding the rifle, which he immediately puts down in order to turn his laptop on.

"They're in place," he tells us. "We're pretty sure no one saw us. We certainly didn't see anything, anyway. Now… let's see if we can…" He busies himself, tapping the keyboard and moving the mouse around for a moment or two.

"There we go. All working."

Just as before, we all crowd around to take a look.

Sure enough, just like earlier, we see the screen divided into four equal boxes, two of which are grayed out and not in use.

The top two boxes, though, are both occupied with real-time video images.

We can see they're real-time because there's some leaf movement in the gentle breeze.

"The one on the left is the main track. It's up by that big boulder. You know… past the sharp right bend as you go down the hill."

"Got it," confirms Jack, and Luke nods to show he recognizes the spot.

"The other one is about halfway down the steep slope where it bends slowly to the left. A bit higher up towards us than the other camera."

"Right."

"Yeah, they look fine. Now I guess we need to make sure at least one of us is monitoring them."

"Oh yeah," I say. "I hadn't thought of that part of it. Isn't there an alarm system, or anything?"

"No, nothing like that. You can set it to only record when it detects movement, but it doesn't actually send an alert or anything."

"So that means if we're not really careful, someone could easily slip past and we wouldn't ever know," I say.

Toby bends down to ruffle my hair. "You know you said you wanted a job, Luna?"

"Oh, for fuck's sake." I throw my hands up in disgust. But secretly, I am glad for the touch.

I catch myself wondering if I'll still be around this time tomorrow to enjoy it.

I gulp. I hope so. Truly, I do. But I have to be brave in front of my boys.

I can't let them see how much this asshole Tim Collier is getting to me.

It wouldn't be fair to them. They're worried enough about me already.

"Alright, alright, I'll do it. But I'm not doing it on my own. I'll need company. Besides, I might miss something. Better to have two people. You guys can take shifts with me. Then, when I need a rest, someone can take over for me. Alright?"

"Alright, we agree."

"What about nighttime?"

"What do you mean?" Eric responds.

"Well, will the camera work after dark?"

"Oh, I see," he says, now getting where I am coming from.

"Yeah, they're equipped with infrared. They just automatically switch over when it gets dark, just like home security cameras do.

Then in the morning, they switch back again.

Some of the best wildlife photography gets captured at night, when the animals are out hunting and grazing. "

"Good. So, we're safe twenty-four by seven?"

"I guess, so long as we keep watching the screen, of course."

In the end, we all stick around in the kitchen, with none of us having anything much better to do, and all of us feeling the need to be around the others.

The afternoon winds slowly onwards. My eyes grow tired watching the laptop screen.

I see a few birds, and at one stage, a fox trots smartly past one of the camera positions.

Otherwise, the images are monotonously dull and unchanging.

The James brothers prepare a macaroni cheese for us all for our dinner, and in fact, it's not too bad—quite tasty in fact, if I'm honest. We keep an eye on Eric's laptop over dinner, but nothing happens.

Honestly, I'm not expecting to see Tim Collier show up until tomorrow sometime, but even I realize that forewarned is forearmed, and it's better to be safe than sorry.

Especially when it comes to armed madmen out in the forest.

"Of course," says Toby conversationally over dinner. "There's absolutely nothing stopping the guy from ignoring the tracks and just walking up to get to us through the forest."

We all stop eating and stare at him. He looks around at us, then shrugs and helps himself to another spoonful of the macaroni as if he'd not said anything important. "Well… you did say he was special forces. Just saying, is all."

I can see from the look on Jack and Luke's faces that Toby's right. An ex-special forces-trained soldier isn't going to announce himself with a calling card and just walk up the track. We all look at each other glumly.

"So was all that effort with the cameras a waste of time?" I ask.

Jack takes a moment to reflect. "No…" he remarks, eventually. "We just don't know what he's thinking. If he even comes at all, I'd say it's fifty/fifty as to whether he tries to come undetected, or whether he'll simply come straight up one of the tracks."

"But that means we'll still have to monitor Eric's laptop."

"Yes."