Those Who Wish Me Dead

by Michael Koryta

  “What is it? What does it mean?” Connor was almost screaming.

  “It’s electricity,” she said. “There’s a lot of it in the air.”

  But it meant more than that. It meant there was already a ground charge. It meant one of those lightning bolts had met the mountain. They were connected now, earth to sky, and Hannah and Connor between. They were almost to the rim of the glacier that lay between the peaks. Far below them the crimson and scarlet ribbons of the fire still glowed, but that wasn’t the light that concerned her anymore. There was suddenly a blue luminescence to the rocks all around them. The white of the glacier looked like glass over a Tahitian sea.

  Saint Elmo’s fire. The eerie light that had haunted sailors for centuries, scaling the masts of tall ships in empty oceans. Now, far inland, it crackled on the high rocks to their left, sparked upward in a cobalt cloud that climbed and then was snuffed out in blackness, overeager in its attempt to claim the sky.

  And all around them, that possessed hum. Not a static sound but dynamic, the pitch rising and falling, though the air was flat and still. Lightning flashed and vanished and flashed again and the mountain quaked from thunder. She felt a tingle then, not the kind born of panic but the kind that should create it. When she looked at Connor, she could see that the hair on the back of his neck was standing straight up, the arched fur of a defensive cat.

  “Run,” she said.

  But he couldn’t run. They were too high and it was too steep and all he could do was take three unsteady steps before his feet caught and sent him stumbling to his knees. The blue world boomed with thunder and then bloomed with an aggressive flash of white before fading back to blue. Hannah hadn’t moved, hadn’t taken a single step, and below her, Connor was still trying, crawling on his hands and knees now, to get back down the mountain.

  She thought of the boy who’d boiled in the river trying to reach her.

  Connor tried to push himself up. Braced his weight on his hiking sticks, and she fixed on them: an aluminum pole in each hand. A lightning rod in each hand.

  “Connor!” she shouted, and now she was moving, finally untethered from the fog, stumbling and slipping after him. “Drop the poles! Drop the poles!”

  He turned back and looked at her and then registered the instruction and shook his hands free of the wrist straps. The poles bounced down the mountain. She took a step from one rock to the next, heading toward him.

  Then she was on her back.

  She stared at the night sky and realized her boots were in the way of the sky. Why was she looking at her boots? Why was she upside down? She was upside down on the mountain and somehow Connor was above her when before he’d been below. He was also down. The high hum was back—had it ever been gone?—and her body ached.

  You got hit, she thought in wonder. You got struck.

  She tried to move, expecting that she wouldn’t be able to, but her body responded, and she saw that Connor was moving as well. They hadn’t been hit. The mountain had been hit, again, and it had absorbed the strike for them, again. It might not continue to.

  She crawled toward Connor and stretched out her hand. “Come on.” When his hand met hers, the touch carried a static jolt. She tugged him toward her and they began descending the slope together, and then the crawling turned to falling and they slid down, jarring pains and jolts as they gave in to the gravity they’d fought the whole way up here. She knew that they didn’t have long to fall—one of the drainages awaited, and she was braced for the impact when they hit it.

  The landing was less painful than the trip down. They smashed into a crevice of rock, and Connor took most of the impact for her. They were wedged in the rocks now some forty feet below the peaks. Connor tried to struggle upright but she held him down.

  “Stay low,” she said. “Stop moving and stay low.”

  They huddled there in the rocks together and above them the world boomed and bloomed, boomed and bloomed.

  No rain fell.

  It wasn’t a salvation storm. It was a flint-and-steel storm. Down below, the fire crews were watching it and waiting for rain, although they probably realized by now that it would not come. All that wind carried was dry lightning, the worst kind for a red-flag day. There would likely be new flare-ups now, with all these strikes around them. It was what could happen when you put your faith in a cloud.

  She held on to Connor and pressed them both into the rocks and watched the electric storm pass and felt true hatred. She’d trusted in it and it had turned on her and become an enemy. She’d met enough enemies along the way. They chased behind and loomed ahead, and she did not need them to fall out of the sky above as well.

  “We got hit,” Connor said. He’d been silent for some time, watching. The worst of the storm was moving on, it seemed, though Hannah knew you couldn’t count on that, not when the skies could throw something deadly at you that was an inch wide and five miles long.

  “No, we didn’t. The mountain got hit.”

  “But I felt it.”

  “I know. I did too. You okay?”

  “I can move. You?”

  “I can move.”

  She looked at him in the darkness and then looked at the scarlet snakes of fires below. There was a hotshot crew down there. They might have reached them before daylight if she’d just committed to it. Instead, she’d stayed high to avoid the fire and nearly killed them both.

  “If we can both move,” she said, “we should. It’s time to get you out of here, Connor.”

  “We’re going down here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The drainages are tough walking,” he said, but he didn’t continue arguing for once, even though it was true.

  “I know they are. But we’ve done some tough walking to get here. I know you can make it. You do too, right?” When he didn’t answer she said, “Connor?”

  “I can keep going. We’ll be walking straight down into the fire, though.”

  “Yes.”

  “To find the firefighters?”

  “To find the firefighters. They’ll get us out fast.”

  She pushed herself up on the heels of her hands and considered the long, winding drainage ahead of them. It was the worst kind of climbing, steep and filled with windfall. But it led straight down too. It was the sort of path you could follow even in the darkness.

  “We’ll have to get close to it.”

  “Yes.”

  “I can smell it so strong from here. Is it even safe? Is it safe to get that close?”

  A crimson tree flowered in the darkness and then faded. Spot fires flaring in the burned-out area, trailing the main blaze, as if they’d been separated from the herd and were starving fast because they could not share in the meals.

  “There’s a risk to everything,” Hannah said. “I know something about what’s in that direction. The men behind you, I don’t know anything about.”

  “I do.”

  “There you go. And you think they’ll kill us.”

  “They will kill me. I don’t know about you.”

  “There’s no you or me anymore, Connor. Not at this point. Just us. It would seem like the best chance for us is to walk toward that fire.”

  He might have nodded. In the darkness she wasn’t sure. He didn’t speak, though.

  “We’ll make it, Connor,” she said. “Listen to me: I promise you, we’re going to make it down there, and you’re going to get out of this place and never see it again. Not unless you want to. You ready to get out of these mountains?”

  “Yes.”

  “Me too.”

  They’d left the fire tower a few short hours earlier, walking with a plan. This time when they started out, they were crawling. As the storm faded and dawn came to replace it, they moved out of their old world and into a new one, as if the lightning had bridged the divide and taken them over to another land. It was all gray, this world, from both the light offered by a sun still trapped behind the mountains and the smoke rising to meet it. Once they mad
e it out of the drainage, they found a flattened stretch of land, and it was Connor who realized its significance first.

  “This is the trail,” he said. “This is the Republic Pass trail.”

  So it was. Four miles to go. Roughly the same distance they’d covered since leaving the tower, and yet it would—or should—feel like a tenth of that. They’d be walking downhill on a trail now, not fighting over the peaks and into a storm.

  “Almost home,” Hannah said, “and nobody’s behind us yet.”

  36

  When the lightning began to strike the peaks, even the Blackwell brothers knew it was time to pull back.

  “Just for a bit now,” Jack said in a soothing singsong, as if urging a sick child to rest. “Just a few minutes is all.”

  They knelt below a shelf of rock carved out by an ocean some thousands of years before, and for the first time, they were all within arm’s reach of one another.

  Survivor mentality: appreciate the opportunities the environment gives you.

  But what were those grand opportunities? Ethan could grapple with one brother in the dark and wait for the other to kill him.

  The mountain trembled with thunder, and the wilderness was illuminated again and again in a rolling strobe of light. A few hundred yards away, one of the lightning bolts connected with a jack pine; it went up in a glitter and then part of it fell to the ground and continued a slow burn, half of it standing, half of it down on the mountain. Wildfire season. This was how most of them would begin. Dry, angry fronts like these. Isolated strikes in desolate lands.

  “Seems to be passing,” Patrick said.

  “The worst of it is over, at least,” his brother said. “A bit more lies behind.”

  “Enough that we should waste the time?”

  “At some point there’s a measure of risk to be assumed. You think we’ve reached that point?”

  “We’re close to him. It’s still dark. I’d hate to waste those things. Too much has been going on behind us since morning. When they come for him tomorrow, they’ll come big.”

  “Let’s finish it, then.”

  Ethan watched them slide out from under the rock shelf and then separate, as was their way, and whatever chance he might have had was gone. He didn’t move right away. He stayed crouched beneath the rocks and watched the lightning and smelled the smoke and thought of how close they were to the boy now.

  “Ethan?” Jack Blackwell called, congenial. “I hate to press you, but we’re on a bit of a deadline here.”

  He slid out from under the rocks. Thunder cracked again but it lacked its earlier bass menace as the storm drifted eastward. The lightning flashes were still there, sporadic but still there, and not a single drop of rain had fallen.

  “That’s the peak you wanted,” Patrick Blackwell said, indicating Republic as it lit up in another flash. “Correct?”

  “Yeah. But there’s no point going up there now.”

  “I thought you were certain that was their destination. The trail seems to agree.”

  “They’d have gotten off the peaks when the lightning started.”

  “If I might interrupt,” Jack said, “I seem to recall Ethan’s notion about the visibility afforded up there. The idea that we might be able to see anyone in the vicinity.”

  “He did have that notion, you’re correct, Jack.”

  “Worth the climb, then, I’d imagine.”

  Ethan didn’t know where Connor and the woman from the lookout were, but he was certain they would be within visible range of an observer at the top of Republic Peak. Would fall within the crosshairs of the scope on Patrick’s rifle.

  Ethan thought again of his father, and for the first time he had an answer to the man’s question. How will I know that it works? Connor Reynolds can tell them. When he walks out of these mountains alive, he can tell them that it works.

  “You climb first,” he said to Patrick, nodding at the steep wall of rock that now lay in shadows, knowing what the response would be.

  “No, no. We’ve entrusted you with leadership. You go on and climb. Don’t worry, Ethan. We’ll be right behind you.”

  Where Republic Peak turned from a steep walk into a true climb, Patrick Blackwell slung his rifle over his shoulder and stayed close to Ethan, and Jack fell back. They did it without discussion but Ethan understood it, and of course it was the right move, they never seemed to make anything but the right move. On the rocks a rifle shot would be awkward and difficult, while the pistol, requiring just one free hand, was much more functional.

  Ethan watched it take place and saw it for what it was: his last chance extinguished. Any hope of killing them both, always minuscule, was now nonexistent. He could take one, though. When Ethan died, he wouldn’t die lonely.

  The brothers were silent for once, focused on the climb, reaching for hand- and footholds in the shadows. Hand and foot, rock to rock, on toward the sky.

  To the east there was a thin band of pink, and the black sky of the storm had lightened to a pale gray that allowed them to see just well enough; the rocks were still dark, but their shapes were clear. The forested hills fell away behind them and they climbed to meet that lead-colored sky, more than two vertical miles in the air now. It was a climb Ethan had made many times and always enjoyed and he wished that it would go slower, because it was his last climb and it seemed he should be allowed time to think. There were prayers and wishes and whispers required, but they were moving too fast and he couldn’t sort them out, couldn’t even land on an image of his wife; everything was simply another rock with his hand closing over it and the summit getting nearer and with it the end.

  That was fine, then. It would end with a hand on a rock anyhow, so focus on that, he decided, think of nothing else: hand on rock, rock on skull—all he had left to achieve. He was hoping that his own rock was still on top of the summit pile, the last one he’d held, the one he’d been imagining for so long on this hike, when Patrick Blackwell swung away to the left and scrambled past him.

  The sudden speed came without a word or a warning. All along Patrick had been content to remain just below, hovering near Ethan’s feet, following his path, and then as the summit neared, he’d moved away and onto a more difficult path but he moved faster, and now he was in the lead and Ethan was between them both and Patrick was not looking back, but moving faster still, as if he were in a race over the face of the rocks, like so many of the boys Ethan had watched, each determined to be the first one to the summit.

  No, Ethan thought, no, damn you, I had to get there first, you were doing just what you should have been doing, you were staying just in the right place…

  He tried to match him then, tried to catch him and pass him, and below him, Jack Blackwell saw it and called, “Patrick.” That was it, just his name.

  Patrick Blackwell glanced back at Ethan and said, “What’s your hurry?” as he pulled himself up onto a ledge below the summit and slung the rifle free.

  Ethan stopped with the barrel a foot from his face, Patrick’s hand casual on the trigger, his back braced against the rock, where he would have no trouble shooting. Below them, Jack had stopped moving.

  “Everything all right, Ethan?” he called. “Seemed to become a race there for a moment. Why don’t we let my brother take the summit first. He’s always been the competitive sort. It would mean something to him.”

  Patrick Blackwell was smiling at Ethan. Understanding some of it, if not the specifics.

  “Maybe you can relax a minute?” Patrick said. “You just relax.” He slid sideways on the ledge a few feet, far enough to clear the rifle out of Ethan’s reach, and then he turned and grabbed the rock above him and pulled himself up, one fast springing motion, dragging his rifle over the stone, and then he was at the summit and standing upright again, and at his back was the pile of loose stones on which Ethan had pinned his hopes.

  “Come on the rest of the way now,” he said.

  Ethan looked at the rock in hand. A slab of stone, useful for
holding on to the face of the mountain, useless as a weapon. His weapons were waiting above, and he was below, and he felt as if it had always been that way.

  He climbed up and straightened and stood and there they were at the top of the dark world. Patrick Blackwell held the rifle on him until his brother had also reached the summit and then he moved several steps away and lowered his eye to the rifle scope and began to search the slopes. Jack had his handgun drawn and was looking at Ethan with curious amusement.

  “You seem flustered,” he said. “Have we troubled you?”

  Ethan moved to the pile of stones, the pyramid that marked 10,487 feet in the air. He was facing Yellowstone now, his back to the Beartooths and his home. He looked at the rocks and told himself the job would have been impossible to accomplish even if he’d beaten them to the top, even if something, anything, had gone according to plan.

  There will be another chance, he told himself. Getting down, maybe, there will be another chance, another way, a better one.

  “Jace, Jace, my old friend,” Patrick Blackwell said, staring through his scope. “So good to see you. So very good.”

  Jack turned from Ethan and looked at his brother, and the amusement left his face.

  “You can see him?”

  “Indeed. He’s with a woman. His friend from the lookout tower, I imagine.”

  “You’re sure it’s him?” Jack asked.

  “If there’s another pair like them hiking toward a forest fire, I’d be rather surprised, but come have a look. It’s the first time we’ve seen him live, after all. You’re entitled, brother.”

  Jack moved away from Ethan and toward his brother. Patrick was kneeling with the rifle braced on the rocks, facing the northern slope.

  Why did they go high, Ethan thought, why in the hell did she take him high? I was supposed to be buying them time. I was supposed to be winning this.

  Jack walked over, knelt beside his brother, and accepted the rifle while passing Patrick the handgun, keeping them both armed. The right move. They never made the wrong move.