by Jack L Knapp
I left them the newspapers and headed for home. Ana Maria might be back from visiting her family by now; I looked forward to seeing her again.
Chapter Three
T wasn’t in the cabin when Shezzie woke up.
He had gone to bed as usual but his sleep had been interrupted several times. The thrashing around woke her and she’d tried to help, but without success. In the past, she had simply held him for a time until he fell back to sleep, but this had stopped working.
A week had passed since Ray and T worked on clearing the brush and trees from the canyon. The fire had moved deeper into the forest since then, following other canyons up the mountainside.
T appeared to be back to normal for the first few days, but then the dreams and nightmares came back. He became more introspective as well, another sign that something was troubling him. He went for long walks, and when Shezzie tried to accompany him she had been rebuffed.
Exhausted by the interruptions, Shezzie had fallen into a deep sleep at some point in the predawn hours; she hadn’t heard him leave the cabin. She found a note when she eventually woke up, telling her where T had gone, but it didn’t keep her from worrying.
T had driven into the forest, up one of the many access roads near where the fire still burned. No dwellings were threatened, now that the fire had moved deeper into the mountains; still, firefighters struggling with contrary winds and the steep terrain had only partially contained the fire, despite having aircraft dropping water and chemicals ahead of the blaze.
She had tried to comm T as soon as she realized he was gone. She’d waited, but there was no response. Worried, she’d finally called Ray and filled him in on what had happened.
I listened to the voice in my head, faint but clear, as she brought me up to date. Concern apparent, she finally asked if I could help.
Now I was worried too.
That incident with the falling tree had nagged at me. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the tree should have crushed T or at least forced him to ‘bubble up’. Could he really be strong enough to deflect the falling, spinning mass of a tree weighing several tons?
I had also gotten stronger, but I doubted I was as strong as T had become. My ability to control objects had improved with practice; I spent hours lifting objects, moving them around, turning things upside down and then back again, rotating them in the air. I’d even practiced shaking small amounts of salt or pepper into the sink. That was difficult! I had to lift the shaker from a table, position it upside-down above the sink, move it rapidly up and down a few times, then rotate it back upright and return it to the table. It didn’t take a lot of strength to do this, but it took enormous amounts of concentration. Such a simple task, taken for granted by everyone, but fiendishly difficult when you’re doing it by psychokinetic effort alone! I worked at the exercises as much as possible when Ana Maria wasn’t around.
Having Ana Maria in my life was a positive thing; I had been happier since establishing our relationship than I could remember ever being. I marveled that this beautiful young woman had found something in me she could respond to.
She spent time with her family when her schedule permitted, but we had decided she was wasting money traveling back and forth to Juarez every day. I’d cleared out some of my clothes and we now shared the closet in the bedroom. It was really strange for a man who had lived alone all his adult life to find a woman’s clothes sharing his closet space! Not to mention sometimes finding skimpy underthings in the bathroom that had once been mine alone.
I was happy, but my level of happiness wasn’t being shared by T. I didn’t know what he’d experienced as a combat soldier, but whatever it was, the memories wouldn’t leave him alone now.
She responded immediately,
I offered the usual meaningless reassurances and we broke the connection. I checked the gas level, filled the tank, and then broke a few speed laws heading north.
I knew approximately where I was going, based on information Shezzie had provided. I passed a ranger station on the way, stopped, backed up and then went in. They had topographic maps for sale and I bought two that covered the region when laid side by side. The area was simply too large to show any appreciable amount of detail on a single map.
Back on the road, paralleling the small Jemez River for a time, I soon passed through the village of Jemez Springs. A little farther along I passed the entry to the dormant Valles Caldera and kept driving. The road twisted as it climbed deeper into the mountains.
The bowl of the ancient supervolcano, visible off to the left, is now a huge expanse of grassland, bounded by ponderosa pines and a few firs where the rim rises above the flats. A movie crew was assembled just past the gate today, Jeeps and a Toyota 4-Runner for the photography crew and actors, pickups and a cargo truck with a crane for the grips. Perhaps they were waiting for guides from the national preserve. They paid no attention to me as I passed and I had no time for them.
Climbing higher into the mountains above the caldera, I watched for an exit on the right. There was a small paved parking area just off the highway, and I stopped there to look at the map. I would pass through an extension of Bandelier National Monument first, then would be back on national forest land.
The designations appeared haphazard, even confusing. The forest service has a set of rules for their holdings, the national preserves have another set, and the Bureau of Land Management has yet another. Different politicians to administer them; perhaps that’s the reason for all the different designations. Maybe they understood the reasoning.
Just past the cattle guard marking the boundary of Bandelier National Monument was a road branching off to the left. According to the map, that led to a gate in a barbed-wire fence. This established the boundary to a part of the forest set aside to prevent elk from being disturbed during breeding season. The gate was usually closed against vehicle traffic, although there was an entrance for hikers. I expected to find T’s truck parked beside the gate, if indeed he’d decided to go on to Obsidian Ridge as the note he’d left Shezzie said.
The ridge was a remnant of the last volcanic eruption, weathered now and covered by blown-in soil. Black, glassy chunks littered the ridge, and thousands of years ago the ancient Clovis and Folsom peoples had carried the obsidian away to make into arrowheads and spear points. A few finely-made obsidian knives had also been found. A lot of the artifacts now resided in museums around the Southwest.
A few hikers come here in the summer, more rarely a few hunters in the fall, but the area otherwise attracts few visitors. Maybe that’s why T had sought it out. It appeared that he had pulled off the dirt road, into a small parking area where hikers left their trucks before heading into the forest. From there, he might have walked in or simply sat down and thought. But the truck should be there, if I could find it.
As it happened, I had no trouble finding T’s truck. No indeed. How often do you see a pickup truck hanging vertically in the air, front bumper down?
I spotted T then. He stood in the cleared space, looking up at the truck floating above him. He had no particular expression on his face. He just stood there, eyeing the truck where it hung directly overhead.
I watched in horror as the truck slowly eased downward until it was barely touching T’s forehead, the bumper making gentle contact with his skin. I didn’t know what I c
ould do--I doubted my ability to control that much weight, certainly not with the precision he was displaying! Was he in the process of ending his life?
But he lifted the truck as gently as he’d lowered it, and then it floated away. The truck slowly rotated in the air until it was floating level with the wheels down T then eased it into contact with the parking lot. I watched, fascinated, as the tires touched. First their angle with the road changed as the springs and shocks took up the load, then the tires changed shape as they felt the full weight of the truck. It caused them to swell between the ground and the wheel rim, a slight but noticeable bulge.
He finally noticed me as I closed the car door. “Found me, did you?”
I nodded. “You were holding that tree, too, weren’t you?”
“Sure. I’ve handled heavier things. This time, I left myself no out. I would hold the truck or I would die. I had no time and no room to deploy the bubble if my control failed, but I held the truck up long enough to be confident I could control it before I went on with the exercise. The hard part was lowering it carefully to just above my head, then lifting it back up from there.
“I knew I could do it. I had reached a plateau as far as strength and control were concerned, but after I melded with Shezzie, then with you later on, I got through the plateau and began to get stronger. Surfer dying was the catalyst, I think. I got so mad that I just let everything out and…well, I discovered that I had changed.
“I may still be changing. I don’t know. I don’t even know what I am or who I am anymore. You’re the only one I can talk to, because Shezzie just wouldn’t understand. She’s got a lot of telepathic Talent, not much psychokinesis. She also saves lives, but I take them. You too, Ray. That’s what you do. I can talk to you.”
His tone was bitter. “All this ability, but I couldn’t save the men I was supposed to save. All I could do was instantly decide that someone was better dead than alive and make it happen.
“But you’ve been there too. You know what it’s like to kill, with no appeal possible and no chance for them to do anything except die. We can do it, we did it, but did we get the right to make that decision when we got this curse? It’s not a gift. I don’t know whether it’s really a curse, but I can’t believe it’s a gift. I regret the day those people brought me to the School.
“Yeah, I was pushing my Talent today. But I knew I could do it, and if I was wrong I just didn’t care. I killed all those people and if I now killed myself, well, it was just karma or fate or something, laughing at the joke even while it happened.”
He sat down and covered his face with his hands. He might have been crying, but I wasn’t sure. I had no idea what to say. It was what I had been afraid of, the depression and the suicidal tendencies, but at least he hadn’t managed to kill himself yet. I would have to do something, but I had no idea what that might be.
I hesitated for a moment.
With that, she was gone and I turned to T. He had stopped the sobbing, if that’s really the word for it. Now he sat there on a log that the forest service people used to keep parking under control. His face looked empty.
“Time to go for a walk, T. I need the exercise, and you do too. I may have a job for us to do.”
His face showed slight interest. “A job? What kind of a job?”
“I was just thinking. How strong are you?”
“I don’t know. Strong. I haven’t tried to move a mountain, but I don’t know that I couldn’t do it, not now. OK, probably not. But I can do a lot more than grab falling trees and lift pickup trucks. I stack a mean rock too.”
He smiled. I had no idea what that meant, but the smile was promising.
“We pulled weeds together. How would you feel about pulling a few trees?”
“Do you think we can? I haven’t tried that,” T said, “but it might be possible. How about you? Are you strong enough to rip a tree out of the ground, or handle one if I can manage it?”
“Only one way to find out, T. I could try stacking what you pull. What I’ve got in mind is for us to get somewhere ahead of the fire. Those firefighters are having a hard time in that canyon country and there are few roads, so it’s leave the trucks behind and walk in for them. They’ve got to carry all their equipment too, and it’s dangerous if the fire changes direction. There’s no fast way to escape. Men on foot can’t run away from a wildfire that’s closing in at twenty miles an hour.
“We could drive as close as possible, park, and hike in a little closer. Not too close, though. We don’t want anyone noticing what we’re doing. We find a spot before we get to the fire zone and try to pull a tree out of the ground.
“I think they do that with big logging machines. If they yank the tree out of the ground, it doesn’t leave a stump, and it makes it easier for the people who grow the trees to replant. Maybe we could do it if we tried, or maybe we could work together to do it. If we can, we pull trees ahead of the fire line and just lay them on the ground. We might be able to create a zone with no trees standing upright, then the firefighters can deal with the fire when it reaches the cleared part. As long as we can keep the flames from jumping across the next ridge, we’ll have reduced the danger to the fire guys a lot and if there’s no tree crown for the fire to reach, it will be low enough for them to deal with. I’m willing to try it.”
T looked a little dubious, but willing. More important than that, he was interested, so we took his pickup and left my Volvo at the parking area across from Valles Caldera.
#
We drove as far as we could toward the fire line, then turned back when we spotted a roadblock up ahead. Cops and fire officials want people to stay well back from the danger. We turned around and looked for someplace to park. We soon found one and started through the forest, heading toward where the smoke haze hung above the trees.
T tried a medium sized tree first. The test tree was probably twenty feet in height, killed by the bark beetles, yet he easily ripped it free of the ground. He laid it down and I tried moving it. It took a few tries, but finally I managed it. A second attempt went easier. I could help him by doing the stacking, even though I would probably pay for it later with a headache.
Lightning, a careless camper, even wind blowing a tree into a power line, any of these was enough to spark a fire. The tree that T had pulled was already dead so it might be lighter in weight than others we’d find ahead. We would have to see. But now we knew it was worth trying.
We hiked through the woods, soon passing the roadblock. We’d walked several hundred yards further into the treeline to avoid being seen; now we walked directly toward where the smoke rose into the sky ahead.
“Ray, I don’t think we can use the bubble up here. Feel that wind? It’s blowing hard enough that if we bubble-up, we’ll be drifting wherever the wind blows us. I’m sure that the bubbles aren’t proof against heat either. Light gets through, and I think that means he
at radiation, infrared, can get through too. We’ll just have to be careful, and if we can’t do this safely, we leave. It won’t help the firefighters if you and I get burned.”
I nodded agreement. He’d been doing PK a lot longer than I had, so I would let him make the call.
We ended up about two or three miles in front of the fire line. We could smell the smoke when the wind eddied, hear the popping sound in the distance as trees exploded from the heat. Flammable sap, rich in turpentine, boiled out of the ponderosa trunks and flared in the heat. The flames soon engulfed the whole tree.
Fast-moving fires might only scorch the bark; this kind of fire would destroy the forest down to bare dead soil where even the humus had burned away.
T began wordlessly picking medium-sized trees and dropping them. I moved the first few trees, the noise we made competing with the distant roar of the fire. I watched T, then decided that I’d give it a try. It worked; knowing that something was possible made a difference. I began by pulling small trees, moved to larger ones, then began tackling the same size trees T was working with. He glanced at me in surprise and then began to simply rip the biggest trees from the ground and lay them aside, parallel to the trail we were making. The downed trees formed a barrier across the direction we expected the fire would come. The trees would still burn, but the flames would be near ground level rather than in the treetops. Our impromptu firebreak would almost certainly help the firefighters. Ground-level fires are less hazardous to firefighters than crown fires.
We lifted, tossed the trees toward the distant fire line, and moved on. We worked carefully but still made progress. There was a distinct line behind us now where no trees remained standing, the line marked by the trees we’d ripped from the ground. It left this part of the forest looking as if a tornado had touched down. The line of down trees stretched more than a mile behind us.
We kept working, adding two more miles of cleared timber before I heard a helicopter in the distance. I thought it was probably one of the fire-fighting choppers, flying over and dumping water or chemicals on the fire, but it might not be. News reporters also circled around, getting footage for their evening report on television.
