CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
AUGUST 2001
Ted sat up front next to the pilot, Silva and Nick in the back jump-seats, headsets and harnesses on, the inside of the helicopter a sauna despite its open doors. The pilot adjusted knobs and levers, increasing the motor’s RPM until it was screaming, blades blurring with speed as they lifted off. He radioed in their location, call numbers, and destination—everything translating to Len’s radios as the Lenites prepared for battle. A war that had been coming all along.
“They’re monitoring the radio traffic—they can hear everything,” Silva said, speaking into her headset. Nick looked over at her. “There was a group of men gathering on the compound this morning.…”
“So that’s where the occupiers went,” Ted replied. “That idiot deputy, Slocum, told me they had it all under control, but the sheriff’s office sent word that a group of the Lenites had left the visitor center early this morning.”
The Lenites, the bees, the elk—everyone following the instinct to swarm and abscond.
They rose and banked sharply, a dizzying rush of sudden height. As the ground receded under the doors, Silva kept her eyes ahead, staring at the horizon and holding onto her seat.
“How many got out?” Nick asked Ted through the headset, his voice coming from a crackly distance through the earphones even though he was sitting only a foot away.
“Not certain—as many as two dozen,” Ted replied. “Enough to cause a disaster. That son of a bitch better have tagged them, is all I can say. They still have their wild instincts—ran north above the river to the thickest understory, but hopefully we’ll still be able to spot them. If we do, you’re on.” He gestured to the two rifles secured in between the front seats.
The helicopter fishtailed side to side through air currents in a pause-set motion that made Silva’s stomach feel as if it had flipped over and was suspended upside down. It felt like her heart was in the same position. Len Dietz versus Nick—versus them both. More than even Nick understood.
They reached altitude, flying high enough that the spread of the Two Rivers plateau flattened below, the land losing its contours from the air. When they reached the back stretch of the elk-ranch acreage a few miles from the compound, they saw the remaining captive elk bunched together, their tawny rumps bright against their darker coats. Ted instructed the pilot to fly to the summer grazing pastures, to follow the fence line. In the back corner, they found the breach—a mess of boards stacked up against the wire fence, somebody’s attempt at temporarily mending the gap.
The helicopter circled low, flying along the river, then made paths farther in, but there were no elk—nothing but a few mule deer, who bounded away in long-distance hops like gazelles when the chopper came near. The pilot angled toward the foothills.
They flew a few miles, the mountains rising from the rolling plateaus studded with pine, when the pilot pointed to what looked like brown boulders in a bunch of shrubby growth—several elk bedded down in the day’s heat. The pilot circled in close, and with the chopper’s disturbance the elk took off running, dark necks stretched long, yellow rumps tucking under as they picked up speed. A dozen cows, eight bulls, and ten calves. More than they’d expected to find. Nick looked through a spotting scope and said, “Ears tagged,” and that was enough.
The pilot maneuvered the helicopter lower, following the herd as they ran a loose-fanned line. He passed and banked back, and they scattered, shifting direction as if pushed by the wind.
Ted indicated a large cow in the rear of the herd, running a few yards behind. “Think you can take that one?” he asked.
Nick swung his leg out into the empty space outside his door, the harness snug against his chest as he held the rifle low, following the cow over the top of the scope, lining up the sights. When he pulled the trigger, the cow’s front knees buckled and she fell, skidding and tumbling to a stop, her body in a twitching heap.
Back around, the remaining elk close below, Nick lined up his next shot, but it went high, a spine shot, and the cow bellowed in pain. She stopped running, circling drunkenly. One of the calves stopped and looked back at her, bleating.
Nick cursed, waiting for the pilot to swing back around so he could take another shot, and as the helicopter tipped, he took the cow down. She toppled sideways, her front leg broken, the light blond of her underbelly exposed, but she kept bellowing, her head raised, her back legs working to push her up again. The bleating calf ran back toward her, and Nick aimed carefully. Two quick shots—one for the cow and the other for her calf.
Silva tried not to look, her heart thudding sick and heavy in her chest, bile rising in her throat. This wasn’t anything anyone should ever have to do, anything anyone should ever see.
They chased the others, Ted and Nick trading shot after shot, the open land preventing the elk from taking cover or resting. Exhausted from the pursuit, the elk ran bunched together, the bulls’ antlered heads extended at awkward angles, the calves falling behind. Nick and Ted didn’t stop shooting until the last one collapsed—brown, twisted mounds of carcasses strung for a mile.
As the pilot called in the dead elks’ location, Silva’s stomach twisted, nausea coming on so suddenly she barely had time to lean out the open door, vomit spattering over the helicopter’s side. The pilot slowed and leveled out as she heaved over and over, Ted passing a bag back to her, even though it was too late, nothing but bitter bile burning the back of her throat.
Ted leaned back, patted her on the knee. “At least you waited until it was over,” he said as she wiped her face with the back of her hand.
“Who’s going to take care of the carcasses?” Nick asked, his voice tight and his face drawn, everything about him tormented, trembling on the edge of anger and sorrow.
“The CWD crew was just waiting for the coordinates. They’ll be on their way,” Ted said. He turned to look at Silva. “Sorry you had to see that. Never should have come to this.”
The pilot circled around, heading downcanyon as Nick and Ted looked for more elk. Hot wind blew dead grass, lifting dirt loose from the hillsides next to them, the Snake winding below. In the distance, acres of yellow star thistle shifted color as it blew, the sky such a deep indigo it seemed as if they were suspended in a fathomless sea instead of the air. But as they wrapped around the canyon toward the Larkins Ranch, they saw a dark smudge of smoke rising near Almost Paradise, its edges rimmed with orange spilling out like ribbons of dust.
Delores’s warning: There’s a storm brewing.…
The pilot altered direction, aiming toward the rising cloud, all of them trying to ascertain what it was and where it was coming from. With sinking dread, Silva knew—this was Len’s storm. It had been coming for years. It had been coming all along.
Within moments, the acrid smell of char made its way into the helicopter, the smoke boiling up—a black billow rising like a mushroom cloud, the sky the color of a contusion. Flames licked the grass and brush, smoke engulfing the hills below the cemetery’s palaver tree. Right where Silva had been hours earlier, her hand buried in bees.
The swarm. The certainty of it settled in the core of her stomach like cold lead. They had burned the bees, their retaliation for Fish and Game invading their land and killing their elk. Their retaliation for Nick’s trespass. They had set their promised apocalypse in motion.
The helicopter pilot climbed, circling around the fire, his voice in their earpieces calling it in to the wildland-fire repeater, reporting on conditions and location. Heat radiated up through the helicopter’s open doors and flames leaped from grass to tree, rushing over the trail and down the hillsides with a kind of insatiability that left Silva paralyzed. Nick had talked about how fast dry grass burned, desiccated thistle—how fire came like a rush of wind. There was no stopping Len Dietz, just as there was no stopping flames from rushing through dead grass.
Smoke billowed thick all around them as an advance of hungry flames rushed down the draw like a curse, eating everything in their w
ake. No matter how quickly they responded to the fire, there would be no getting it under control in these conditions without retardant planes and helicopters dumping as fast as they could refill, and it would be too late by the time the pilots gathered their gear, got in the air. It was too close, burning too fast, Nick leaning so far out his door Silva was afraid his harness would break, his expression a mask of anguish and fear as he gauged the fire’s trajectory just as he had the raft wreck.
Suddenly through the smoke, they had a view of the Almost Paradise complex below them. Near the cemetery, there was a flurry of movement, men with rifles slung over their shoulders lining up as the helicopter flew over, one holding what looked like a rocket launcher in his hands, Len Dietz standing behind them. Beside him was a boy Silva recognized—Isaac, armed the same as the men, seemingly as ready for war as they were, looking skyward, a lit blowtorch in his hand.
“They started that fire,” Ted said, shock in his voice.
“The bees,” Silva said, looking out with a sinking heart at Isaac standing below the burning palaver tree, her chest tight with pain. “They’ve burned the bees.…”
Standing among the graves of all the fallen women and girls, Len Dietz stepped forward in a fighting stance and lifted a loudspeaker to his mouth. “Your slaughter will not go unanswered. Your time of judgment is here,” he said, his voice cutting through the canyon, coming disembodied through the air. “ ‘Behold, the day is coming, burning like a furnace; and all the arrogant and every evildoer will be chaff; and the coming day will set them ablaze so that it will leave them neither root nor branch… burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.’ ”
His men lifted their guns and yelled, “Burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.”
Len ushered Isaac to stand next to him as he spoke again. “ ‘As a tongue of fire consumes stubble and dry grass collapses into the flame, so their root will become like rot and their blossom blow away as dust; for they have rejected the law of the Lord of Hosts and despised the word of the Holy One of Israel.… For the lips of an adulteress drip honey, but in the end she is bitter as wormwood. Her feet go down to death.’ ”
Len stopped then and lifted the boy’s hand in the air. “Nick Larkins, behold your brother, Isaac.”
Len’s booming voice rang through the air as his men dropped to their knees and took aim, firing as one unit, muzzles flashing with light.
Veering off quickly, the pilot called in emergency codes, using the words arson and under fire, Isaac looking up at them with Nick’s same blue-eyed, sinking gaze, standing next to Len Dietz as a son.
The rest of it came so closely together it seemed instantaneous: the quick tata-tat-tat of automatic rifle fire—like someone impatiently knocking on a hollow door, demanding entry—then a gray streak of screaming smoke and a rocking percussion so close it blotted Silva’s ears and knocked the helicopter sideways. Darkness engulfed them, a whirlpool that sucked them down, spinning and banking, swallowed in smoke.
At first Silva thought the explosion was something that had happened inside her own brain, a distant ringing pain in her skull, everything as silent and dark as if she were being held deep underwater, insistent hands pulling at her, trying to lift her to the surface. A voice in her ears said, “Shots fired, repeat, shots fired. We’re going down—” Someone pressed a wet cloth in her hands, telling her to breathe through its dampness, the haze of choking smoke everywhere, Nick slumped over next to her, unconscious. The pilot angled the helicopter downriver, sweeping so low over the water it looked as if it were about to take them captive.
The pilot radioed in that he was making an emergency landing and then called out a sharp warning through the headset as they went down, the helicopter tilting sideways before crash-landing with jarring impact on flat land a mile below the ranch, rotor blades whirring unevenly.
Silva sat dazed, her brain thick, the harness tight against her chest, her limbs immobilized, feeling as though she’d suddenly sunk into quicksand. Ted unbuckled his harness and came around the side to pull Nick out of his own harness, hoisting him away from the helicopter and laying him on the ground carefully, stabilizing his neck and head, calling for emergency responders, relaying Nick’s vital signs—his heart and breathing rate elevated.
When Silva finally managed to get herself unbuckled, she found the ground with unstable legs and stumbled to Nick’s side. She touched his face, his neck, crying for him to be okay.
He opened his eyes and looked at her with dilated pupils and tried to push himself up. Ted held him back, told him he couldn’t go anywhere. Told him it was all okay, that he just needed to stay still and wait for the paramedics to arrive. But Silva knew where he was trying to go. Juniper. The horses. The bees. The bonsai.
Her feet found the trail’s packed dirt, Ted calling her name over and over from somewhere behind as she started running, her legs moving under her faster and faster until finally it was quiet—just the uneven rhythm of her footsteps and the smoke pulling her forward, moving through a land she no longer knew except by the feel of it under her feet. A jagged line of fire rushed down the hills toward the ranch, black smoke mushrooming above, blotting the sky.
Somewhere along the way, she stumbled and fell hard, pebbles embedded in her palms and knees. A grasshopper landed on the back of her hand and perched there a moment before springing out of sight. Nick’s story of the neighbor’s barn burning returned to her, the plague of locusts feeding themselves into the flames.
She kept running until she made it to the ranch lawn, fire already overtaking the back of the property where the hives were—the air so thick with smoke that the bees wouldn’t be able to see to escape, a rush of hot wind crackling the air, driving the fire forward toward the apiary.
She ran through the smoke to them, picturing flames licking up the hives, igniting the wax inside, consuming the bees she’d brought back along with the brood they’d left behind, heat scorching their wings as the flames overtook them. She couldn’t see anything, couldn’t breathe. She bent over coughing until it felt like her lungs would collapse, her eyes and airways burning as though they’d had embers pressed into them.
She ran for the hose, dragging it from the garden, where it tangled in the wire fence, looping around itself like a snake coiling under threat. She yanked until it came loose, but it was too short, would only reach the corner of the yard, the smoke a wall, thick and choking, the air a gray haze, flames eating up acre after acre, insatiable and unstoppable. She coughed until she gagged, light-headed and dizzy, her lungs rejecting the air.
The flames had reached the old sheep shed in the back corner, and the grayed boards cracked and popped as they ignited into a rushing flare, sending burning embers to the trees at the yard’s edge and onto the roof of the house. Flames creeped up the tree trunks into the tree crowns that blew up like torches, raining down burning needles, setting the house roof on fire, the yellow tips of flames licking up from the shingles.
Juniper barked frantically from the house, and Silva dropped the hose and ran. When she rushed up the steps and opened the door, the dog streaked past her and disappeared into the smoky haze. Her voice was croaking and weak as she called for him over and over again.
She ran with the larch and juniper bonsai to the river and settled them in shallow water before going back for the spruce, cedar, bristlecone, and hackberry. Afterward, holding a wet rag over her nose and mouth, she heaped all she could carry from the house in her arms, grabbing the picture of Nick and his mother from the wall along with one of his bee books, the house sides crackling into flames that cloaked the house in smoke—as though the fire were ashamed of its own dirty work, its final consummation, everything turned to ash, a scab of char, a blackened bit of nothing. First it would take the walls, then the ceiling and the floor, then the bedroom she and Nick had shared, watching as the mornings came in, imagining a life made whole.
Dizzy and coughing so hard she could hardly walk, she ran to the barn. I
nside, Tiko’s eyes were rolled back, the whites of his eyes like reflectors, his coat shiny with sweat. Thrashing, he kicked and reared against the wood stall, high-pitched screams rising from his throat. When Silva opened the stall and tried to reach him, he screamed and whirled, catching her with his back end, slamming her into the wall so hard she crumpled over. She pushed herself to her hands and knees and tried to get the stall door open as he reared up, pawing the air, crazed, his hooves coming down a foot from her head. He ran forward, ramming into the stall door so hard Silva thought he had broken his chest, but he bolted out, escaping from the barn corridor to the yard.
She crawled through the smoke to Sage’s stall, where the mare lay stretched out on her side, heaving as if she’d been galloping, a green slag plastered on the smooth hair of her rump, sweat streaking her coat, her legs spayed out as if she were slipping on ice. Her neck pulsed with tremors as she tried over and over to get up, exposing the purple-gray of her gums as she squealed and lurched, her hooves grazing Silva’s thigh, her neck arched in pain as Silva tried to pull her head off the floor, trying to help her get up.
“Oh god, no,” Silva cried, holding Sage’s head as she convulsed. “No, no, no,” she sobbed, leaning over, retching on smoke that had grown thick and rancid, closing her diaphragm. Sobs came from somewhere so deep inside her they were soundless, racking her body. She was a curse, the black rot of loss pulsing raw and evident on her, infecting everything she touched, turning everything and everyone around her to ash. She should have let herself slide into the water a long time ago.
Sins of the Bees Page 29
