What matters is the radio. Dawn finds the handset strapped to the dead guy’s belt. It’s a little bit bigger than a cell phone, and it looks intact. She pulls it out of the dead guy’s holster and fumbles for the on switch.

(She’s never used a radio before, but she’s hoping if she just starts calling for help someone will figure out the rest.)

Dawn locates the on switch. And the button you push to transmit a message.

She’s about to transmit her very desperate message, when—

(you guessed it)

—Warden.

Chapter 126

WARDEN GRABS DAWN’S LEG AND PULLS.

He drags her away from the dead guy and down the slope again. He’s barely able to stand, hunched over and glaring at her with blood coming down his face, and his neck still skewed in that weird way.

He’s favoring his left arm, too, so maybe that’s broken. Either way, he looks like he had the shit kicked out of him, and bad, but Dawn knows he’s still stronger than her by a mile. She knows that he means to kill her.

He drags her down the slope toward the trail, but this time Dawn isn’t too worried. She isn’t worried that Warden’s stronger than her. She isn’t worried that he’ll have no problem killing her. She isn’t even kicking herself for not crushing his windpipe when he was unconscious.

No, as Warden drags her back down toward the trail, Dawn’s actually feeling pretty chill about the whole situation.

Why?

Because Dawn found something more than just the radio when she went up the mountain to the dead guy.

She found Warden’s knife, too.

The knife he stole from Christian. That he used on Lucas and Brielle. The knife that’s still slick with his sweat, and their blood.

And as Warden drags her down on her stomach and flips her over onto her back on the trail, Dawn grips that knife, tight.

And at just the right moment,

she leans up

and jams that motherfucking blade

right into his chest.

Chapter 127

THERE’S NO COMING BACK from that, not even if you’re the kind of semi-indestructible final-boss bogeyman who tends to populate stories like these.

But Dawn stabs Warden again, just to be sure.

She stabs him until he staggers away and collapses and lies there on the trail on his back, and she holds on to the knife and watches him and you’d better believe it’s a long freaking time that she does, until she’s sure he’s not moving, not breathing, not playing dead and just waiting for her to turn her back.

Dawn lies there, for maybe an hour or even longer, and Warden doesn’t move, and neither does the other dead guy, and the mountain around them is silent.