Primal Threat

by Earl Emerson

  “Over there.” Following Muldaur’s gaze off to the north, Zak saw a puff of dust working its way in their direction.

  “The Jeeps?”

  “I don’t know who else would be out here. And they weren’t all Jeeps. That first one was a Porsche Cayenne. It costs over ninety thousand dollars if you get the loaded model.”

  “At least we won’t have to contend with them. Stephens said they won’t be able to get past the Spur Ten gate. The people who have fishing cabins up at Lake Hancock have a key, but nobody else.”

  “I just wonder how they got past the guard.”

  “What would you have done if they’d stopped?”

  “I don’t know, Zak. Every time somebody risks my life with a four-thousand-pound vehicle when I’m on a twenty-pound bike, I get pissed. I know people who carry guns when they ride, but if I carried one I’d end up using it. So I don’t.”

  “Shooting at a car wouldn’t be a good idea.”

  “It wasn’t such a good idea trying to run us off the road, either.” When Zak turned to leave, Muldaur said, “Wait a minute. I want to see if they head back to North Bend.”

  “They really bugged you, didn’t they?”

  They watched the distant plume of dust wend its way south. From their vantage point Zak couldn’t make out the individual vehicles, but he knew there were four of them. For more than a minute the dust trailed off behind the trees, then reappeared, then vanished again. Finally it stopped at a point almost exactly in line with Seattle’s skyline. “They’re at Spur Ten gate,” Muldaur said. “Probably trying to figure out how to get through it.”

  The plume of dust flattened and gradually dissipated. “We’re out in the middle of nowhere and I can still hear somebody’s dog yapping,” Zak said.

  “This is America. Everybody’s entitled to at least one gun, one truck, and two dogs. Geez. Feel how hot that wind is?”

  The breeze came at them from two directions, from above on the mountain and from the south, skimming the face of the hills they’d ridden up. “It’s so dry it sucks the moisture out of your mouth.”

  “In California they call them Santa Anas,” said Muldaur. “Up here they call them Chinooks. The wind picks up heat as it rolls down off the mountains. And some of that heat is coming directly from eastern Washington. The pass acts as a bellows.” Suddenly he noticed that the vehicles were headed straight for the base of the mountain on a ribbon of dirt road. “Jesus. They got through the gate!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. And they’re headed straight for our camp.”

  They got back on their bikes and climbed for another fifteen minutes until they hit the crest of the foothills, where they turned around and headed back down. Muldaur estimated they’d reached the forty-five-hundred-foot level. They wouldn’t go a whole lot higher this weekend, though they would descend and climb these hills many times more. As they pedaled they drank from their CamelBak water packs. Even though Zak’s pack had held almost a hundred ounces when they started, it was nearly dry now.

  Though they were both expert riders and had expensive high-tech mountain bikes with disc brakes and front and rear shock absorbers, on the downhill Zak easily sped away from Muldaur. The difference between them, Muldaur was fond of telling him, was that Zak hadn’t yet had his accident. “You get in a wreck where it takes six months to heal, you’ll slow down,” Muldaur said. “You’re just one crash away from going my speed.”

  Zak laughed, let go of his brakes, and disappeared around a sharp bend. Later, Muldaur told him he must have been doing forty—an insane speed, really, when you thought about the unpredictable road surfaces and the drop-offs.

  The trail was bisected by short sections of washboard produced by heavy truck traffic over the years. It had the added hazard of short, diagonal dikes laid across the path to channel off heavy rainwater. All of this on a bumpy road with unexpected twists and turns and the occasional rock smack in the center.

  Zak bounced onto the dirt platform near their camp and purposely skidded his rear wheel, kicking up a cloud of dust. Giancarlo came out from behind the ancient debris pile, where they were setting up camp, just as Muldaur came down the hill and kicked up his own cloud of dust. “That’s all very little boy,” Giancarlo said.

  “Isn’t it?” Muldaur said.

  “They’re right down there.”

  “Who’s down where?”

  “The Jeeps. Just below us. Looks like they’re getting ready to spend the night.”

  “Are you shitting me?” Muldaur rolled his bike toward the near side of the debris pile so he could peer down the hill. Zak followed until they were both able to peek directly over the lip of the landing. To their surprise, four vehicles were parked less than a hundred yards away in a tiny clearing at the end of an overgrown spur road: a Porsche SUV, a Ford pickup with gigantic tires, a Jeep, and a Land Rover that looked as if it had never been off a paved road until today. The vehicles were parked helter-skelter and coated in dust except for muddy eyeholes polished on the windshields by the wipers. One tent was already set up, and two people were working on another. Somebody had started a small fire.

  “Jesus,” said Muldaur. “Of all the fucking luck. There must be fifty square miles out there, and these assholes park so close they’ll hear us snoring.”

  “It’ll be okay,” said Giancarlo. “They’ll be down there and we’ll be up here.” He smiled ironically at Muldaur. “Besides. The waterfall makes enough noise that we probably won’t hear each other.”

  “There’s a statewide fire alert,” said Muldaur. “They’re not even supposed to be here.”

  “Neither are we,” said Zak.

  “We’ll be all right,” said Giancarlo. “If we’re lucky, they’ll never even know we’re here.”

  “Fat chance.” While Zak pulled out the tent he and Muldaur were going to share, Muldaur took a small, folding handsaw from the items Stephens had sent up for camp maintenance and rode back up the mountain with it. Nobody questioned him, probably because everyone but Zak thought he was having a hissy fit over the other campers.

  Zak set up the tent, washed the dust off his legs under the waterfall, and changed into a clean pair of cotton shorts, sandals, and a loose-fitting T-shirt he’d received as part of the entrance package at a bike race earlier in the summer. Then he began exploring. The forty-foot waterfall zippered a sheer wall very close to where they’d camped, then meandered straight to the cliffs and lapped over the edge in a sorry dribble. To the west, jutting out from the edge of the mountain with a sheer drop on three sides, stood a bluff, a narrow bridge to nowhere. The first part was the narrowest with a drop of sixty or eighty feet; then the land fell away, and the distance to the jagged rocks below grew to more than a hundred feet.

  Anyone going out onto the bluff had to jump a five-foot gap with a small gully directly under it. Still in his sandals, Zak leaped to the first outcropping, strolling out onto the bluff, which, at its widest, was as wide as a man was tall and twenty-five feet long. “Geez,” said Giancarlo. “What if that rock’s bad? What if it crumbles?”

  “Then I’ll be dead,” Zak said nonchalantly.

  “I guess I will be, too,” Giancarlo said, making the leap.

  The view from the outcropping was magnificent.

  Giancarlo said, “Look over there.” It took Zak awhile to spot it, but off to the south, where they’d seen the last houses when they were riding up, white smoke was pouring off a hillside. “Is that a forest fire?”

  “A small one. Look how it stretches along there. I don’t think they’re going to tap it with a pump can.”

  Zak heard a dog bark again, closer this time, and as he glanced at the side of the mountain where the Jeep group was camped, he noticed a man on a rocky outcropping, a pair of binoculars aimed at them. Zak waved, but the binoculars didn’t budge. Thirty minutes later when Muldaur showed up, the man was gone. “Where you been?” Zak asked.

  “Nowhere.”

  “Just thou
ght you needed some more miles?”

  “I don’t want to take advantage of you youngsters by being too fresh tomorrow. Jesus. Look at that fire.”

  “We’ve been watching it.”

  “You know these campers below us have a fire going, too?”

  “Plus a couple of boom boxes that are making a hell of a racket,” said Zak, who’d been trying not to let the noise bother him. “Why is it that music is the most beautiful thing in the world if it’s yours, but it’s simply hideous if it isn’t?”

  Beyond the Olympic Mountains the sky was beginning to glow a rosy pink, yellowish at the edges, with deep purple and maroon patches in the middle. It was easy to see from the haze over Seattle that the colors were going to get only more vibrant as the sun continued to die. A small bank of cumulus clouds hunkered over the Olympics, and the waning sun was painting them a brilliant white.

  “There are communities near Wenatchee that have been evacuated because everyone is choking from the forest fires,” said Muldaur.

  “Yes, but this is going to be a splendid sunset,” said Zak, nodding at the horizon. “Thank God for pollution.”

  Muldaur laughed his loud, braying laugh. Few people laughed as hard as Muldaur, and even fewer found as much to laugh about. It wasn’t until they hiked back to camp and saw the visitors that he stopped.

  6

  February

  It had been almost four weeks since the wreck, and Nadine Newcastle was still in a neck brace, her left ankle in a cast from toes to knee. Walking with the aid of crutches and accompanied by a horde of family, friends, and department officials, she smiled sweetly at the firefighters who greeted her at the front door of Station 6.

  The first thing Zak noticed was the unmarked cast on her leg. Not a single signature, greeting, or smiley face had been scrawled on it, even though each of the three giggling girlfriends accompanying her looked fully capable of wielding a grease pen.

  With Nadine were her parents, her brother, and one of her brother’s buddies, a soft-looking young man introduced as William Potter III but called Scooter by the Newcastles. Zak immediately tagged him as a soul who wouldn’t last ten minutes in the fire service. A lot of people came through the station because they wanted to be firefighters, and it was impossible for Zak not to regard each one the way a horse trainer eyed a colt he was thinking about taking on. Not that Potter wanted to be a firefighter. The watch he wore was easily worth a month of Zak’s salary.

  Twenty minutes earlier, they’d received a call on the main phone from the assistant chief telling them that the chief of the department and several other city officials would be visiting, along with a civilian who wanted to donate a good chunk of money to the Medic One Foundation. The civilian turned out to be Donovan Newcastle—Nadine’s father.

  Before Zak could finish polishing his boots, the visitors showed up in staggered formation: chiefs, a couple of newspaper reporters, the boisterous family and friends pouring through the front door like partygoers and, except for the girl on crutches, all chattier than magpies.

  Nadine Newcastle was prettier than he remembered, with an open face, guileless gray-blue eyes, and lustrous brown hair that hung below her shoulders. And she was sweet—in fact, that seemed to be her main trait. He found himself immediately attracted to her. Her brother was a year or two older, about her height, the same stocky build as their father but with the pug nose and freckles of his sister. His name was Kasey.

  The Newcastles told everybody how grateful they were for the rescue of their daughter, who, according to the doctors, might have ended up a quadriplegic had the firefighters been even the tiniest bit sloppy in their spine management.

  Mr. Newcastle was dressed in a formal suit and at various intervals stood off to one side as if he wasn’t interested in talking to any firefighters. Mom flirted with the chiefs, who tried not to ogle her plush figure. The Newcastles had money coming out their ears, and Zak couldn’t help noting that the son, who wasn’t more than twenty or twenty-one, wore an expensive-looking European-styled suit. Muldaur tried to politely engage him in conversation, but he and his friend Scooter turned their backs on Muldaur to zero in on the lone female firefighter in the station.

  All in all, there were probably eighteen or twenty people crammed into the beanery and adjoining watch office. At one point the crew of Engine 6 was asked to line up in front of the apparatus with Nadine Newcastle while a newspaper photographer stood outside the open bay doors in the rain and shot photos. Mrs. Newcastle had brought a small cake, and it was served on mismatched plates from the station’s beanery cupboards. It was then, while everybody was standing around holding crumpled paper napkins, that Zak stole out of the room, squeezing behind the two bulky pieces of fire equipment in the tight apparatus bay, and was startled to find Nadine Newcastle more or less hiding behind Ladder 3.

  Even though their initial meeting at the accident nearly a month earlier was the genesis for all the pomp, they’d exchanged only a few words until now. “Looking for the restroom?”

  “I was just standing here thinking.”

  “And what were you thinking?”

  “That I don’t like parties.”

  “I don’t either. What’s your excuse?”

  “Do I need an excuse? I just don’t like them.”

  “I was sneaking away myself.” When Nadine smiled, it made her look even younger and prettier than when she’d first walked in out of the drizzle.

  Zak made his way around her and headed for the bunkroom fifteen feet away. When he reached the door, he turned and looked back at her and thought for a moment he’d never seen anyone looking quite so blue. They were celebrating the fact that she was alive and not in a wheelchair, that her father was bestowing a hundred grand on the Medic One Foundation, but she looked like she’d just flunked a midterm. “Does that C-collar hurt your neck?”

  “None of it hurts. I just want to be myself again.”

  “I know what you mean. I’ve had some injuries over the years, and they’re never very pleasant.” And then, with a twinkle in his deep brown eyes, he added, “Want to look around the station?”

  “What’s in there?” she asked, pointing to the bunkroom door.

  “It’s where we sleep.”

  “You’re sure it’s okay?”

  “It’s not okay at all, but I’ll make an exception for you.” While he held the door, she hobbled into the bunkroom, handling her crutches with the skill of an athlete. “As I said, this is where we sleep. Where we change clothes. This is also where we hide out when the station’s full of people.” The bunkroom was a long, narrow affair built onto the old station during the remodel twenty years earlier. It had a men’s washroom at one end, a women’s at the other, and a long corridor off which were small cubicles formed from tall banks of lockers enclosing each bunk. Firefighters assigned to the station kept their uniforms, sleeping gear, and assorted personal effects in the lockers. “This is mine.”

  She worked her way into his cubicle, glanced at the narrow bunk, saw the book he’d been reading atop a pillow, then turned to his open locker door and scrutinized the photos taped inside the door. “Do you mind if I ask who these people are?”

  “That’s me alongside my two sisters, my mother, and my father. I think I was about ten.”

  “You were a cute little guy. What are they all doing now? I mean, you’re a fireman, of course, but how about the others?”

  It wasn’t something Zak had often been asked, or else he would have taken the photo down. A year ago one of the men on the other shift wondered why he didn’t have pictures of girlfriends on his locker instead of ancient family photos, but Muldaur, who had been nearby, replied for him. “Modern-day shutter speeds aren’t that fast. Zak doesn’t keep a girlfriend long enough for anybody to get a picture.” Recognizing the essential truth behind the joke, everybody had laughed, Zak included.

  He hadn’t shared any stories about his family with anyone at the station and was mildly intrigued that he felt l
ike telling a stranger. “The one on the end is Charlene. She was the oldest. Six years older than me.”

  “She’s pretty.”

  “Yes.” Even after all these years, Zak was amazed at how much it hurt to tell somebody about it.

  “You put that in the past tense.”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Really? How did it happen?”

  “She was driving me and my other sister somewhere, and we got hit head-on by some zoned-out woman in a pickup truck. It’s a long story and one I’d rather not go into.”

  “I’m sorry.” Nadine pointed to his other sister in the photo. “And this is…?”

  “Stacy. She’s three years older. She’s staying with me for a while.”

  “With you and your wife?”

  “I’m not married.”

  “And your mother and father, how are they doing?”

  “I can tell family’s important to you, isn’t it?”

  “Family is everything. Family and Jesus.”

  Zak remembered how her mother had watched over her in the beanery, how her brother and the family friend had fetched cake for her and made sure she had a place to sit, how they’d tried to include her in their conversations even though she’d been a reluctant participant, and now she’d given them all the slip.

  “My father’s living with me, too, but only until he gets his own place.”

  “And your mother?”

  “My mother died the year before I got into the department.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I would do without my mother.”

  “Mine had breast cancer. She beat it back the first time, but we didn’t have any insurance, so she was facing these huge bills—and then it came a second time, and she didn’t take any treatment. We weren’t as close as I wish we had been. I think about that sometimes and wish I could change it. But…”

  “Why would she do that? Why would she forgo treatment?”

  “She never admitted it was money, but I’m pretty sure it was.”

  “You must miss her.”