by Earl Emerson
When Scooter came back, he spoke over the cacophony of the chain saw. “They were all in on it. The big guy. The retard. All of them.”
“They must have planned this last night,” Kasey said. “That’s when this tree was cut down.”
Jennifer’s shock was quietly metamorphosing into rage. “They were planning to kill Chuck all along?”
“And me, too,” said Scooter. “Don’t forget they wanted to shove me off the cliff.”
“Are you sure they didn’t do the tree just a few minutes ago?” asked Bloomquist.
“That’s impossible,” said Fred. “It had to take a good long while to get this thing down with a handsaw. Bicycles. Handsaws. Seems like they do everything the hard way.”
“But why did they kill Chuck?” said Jennifer. “What on earth were they thinking? And sending that guy down to get us with the gun? It seems…insane.”
“All I know,” said Scooter, “is Polanski’s a psycho. You wouldn’t even believe the lies he told Nadine to get her away from me.”
“I wonder what other surprises they have waiting for us,” said Perry, beginning to shiver with the excitement and terror of it. Kasey wondered if he was going to make it through the morning without fainting. Kasey wasn’t worried about more surprises. The cyclists wouldn’t be expecting a chain saw, so they were probably lollygagging now in the belief that they were home free. And just as they hadn’t been expecting the felled tree, the cyclists wouldn’t be expecting Dozer, either. He had no doubt the dog would cause his fair share of grief farther up the mountain.
After they cut the log away, Kasey drove slower while he and Scooter scrutinized the road above them. He knew there was a chance the cyclists had heard the chain saw, which meant they might be lying in ambush. Kasey sensed the renewed fear inside the Porsche, both from himself and from Scooter, who now fondled the rifle like a compulsive masturbator. It was mind boggling that those maniacs had downed a tree in order to block the chase and that they had done it the night before.
If they had tried to conceal the dog, they hadn’t done a very good job. Scooter saw it first. “Shit! Look what they did to Dozer!”
Stopping close together, the four vehicles idled in the road. Kasey wanted to tell the others to back off, that they shouldn’t congregate, but he was too upset by the dead dog to bother with tactics.
Scooter took a good long look at Chuck’s dog, then peered up the road through the scope on the rifle, shoulders tight, squinting, cursing under his breath.
The others lined up along the road and stared at the skewered cadaver in the ditch.
“Jesus,” said Bloomquist. “He was such a nice dog.”
“He bit me once,” said Perry quietly.
“Shut your fucking mouth.” Fred was near tears. First his brother and now Dozer. “He never hurt anyone.”
“These people are capable of anything,” said Scooter, who hadn’t taken his eyes off the road.
The whole morning had turned into a nightmare. All Kasey wanted to do now was drive back home.
“Damn it,” said Jennifer, bursting into tears again. “Why is this happening?”
“Nothing else is going to happen,” said Scooter, pointing his rifle up the hill. “We’re in control here. They’re running from us. We should take that dead guy and hang him in a tree. Show them we can be brutal, too.” They’d wrapped Morse in a sleeping bag and thrown him into the back of the Porsche. Kasey hadn’t approved but he couldn’t stop them. Nobody thought it was appropriate to leave Morse in the road even though they had been forced to leave Chuck’s body on the mountain.
“We’re not hanging any bodies in any trees,” said Kasey. “It’s bad enough I’m driving him around like he’s a sack of groceries, okay?”
“They left the dog as a message. We should leave them a message. The Indians used to do it. It was a way to terrorize your enemy. You’d be surprised how bad you can scare somebody by pretending to be crazy.”
Kasey walked around to the driver’s door on the Porsche. The rest of them piled into their vehicles and proceeded up the mountain, scanning the slopes that swept up from the left-hand side of the road. When they got to a plateau where the road flattened out, they sped up, hoping to catch the cyclists in short order.
“How fast do you think they can ride?” Kasey asked Scooter. “On a flat road like this? How fast?”
“Thirty-five miles an hour?”
“I was thinking more like ten.”
“Hell, people can run ten miles an hour.”
Their conversation drew to an abrupt halt when they reached an intersection, one branch leading straight ahead, the other veering to the left. Scooter got on the walkie-talkie. “Which way, people? Let’s have some ideas here.”
“Your guess is as good as ours,” said Bloomquist.
“I’m thinking we go straight,” said Jennifer. “It seems like they would stay on the main road.”
“Seems like they would take a side road,” Bloomquist countered. “Remember, they’re trying to be deceptive.”
They ended up taking the road that branched to the left. A minute later Scooter spotted tracks where the bicycles had splashed through a wet spot on the roadway. They stopped and everybody got out except Perry, who was anxiously looking around the woods from inside his Jeep. The woods were deep, one staggered tree trunk after another in the shaded canopy, and Kasey half expected to see somebody in a bright cycling jersey step out from behind the bole of a tree and unleash a flurry of gunshots.
“Okay,” Kasey said, kneeling in the road next to the bicycle tracks. “I think there’s a lake up here somewhere. I saw a sign back there—”
“Lake Hancock,” said Jennifer.
“There are tracks from five bikes here,” said Bloomquist.
Fred scratched his scalp. “There were five to start off with. We burned one bike back down the hill in the fire. There should only be three tracks if one of them is at the gate. What’s going on?”
“We, uh…” Bloomquist didn’t have an answer.
“No, somebody rode through this mud twice. Two somebodies. Hell, for all we know, only one of them went this way and the other three are behind us.”
The two men with guns turned them toward the trees while the rest surveyed the landscape nervously. They watched the shaded woods for a long time. The only open space was the road behind and in front of them. Everything else was forest.
“Okay, okay,” said Bloomquist, finally. “Let’s get going. I don’t like this.”
Fred levered a cartridge into his rifle. “Jennie and I are going to check out that road to the lake. We’ll catch up.”
“Keep in touch on the walkie-talkie,” said Kasey.
“If they start shooting,” Fred said, “leave a couple for me.”
33
By the time they got to the east end of the basin Lake Hancock lay in and found the old logging road that ran up the mountainside above the south shore, Zak decided the guys in the Jeeps had taken the other road. Perhaps the tracks they left had fooled them. Or maybe they’d found the dead dog, gotten scared, and turned around when they found room at the top of the ridge. Whatever it was, Zak suspected they now had a period of respite and should make use of it.
Even though he’d caught only a glimpse of blue water through the tops of the trees to their left, Zak knew the lake was there by the fact that the relentless stands of Douglas fir they’d been passing were now integrated with deciduous trees, saplings, brush, and other plant life that usually grew near water. Paralleling their path, a bald eagle soared over the lake. There were slopes to their right so steep a man could not walk up them. Some were solid rock, others loose rock anchored by scrubby trees. When they got to the end of the lake, the road took a sharp bend, nearly but not quite doubling back on itself, gaining altitude so quickly that Muldaur warned the riders behind him to drop their chains onto the small rings in front before they lost momentum and fell over.
As the clanking of chains on four bi
cycles sounded, Stephens looked up the hill and said, “Jesus, boys. We’re going to have to walk.”
“If a logging truck can make it,” said Muldaur, “we can, too. Once you start walking, you’re giving up the mechanical advantage.”
Zak pushed the thumb selector on his handle grips and began going through his gears until he settled on the smallest of the three chain rings in front. It was a twenty-seven-speed bike, but when he looked down through his legs to see what gear he’d ended up in, he was in his second lowest.
“I think I’m going to have to get off,” said Stephens, grunting with the effort.
“You get off, you won’t get back on,” said Zak.
“How far is it?” Giancarlo asked.
“I’ve no idea.”
“There’s some small lakes at the top,” said Stephens. “And then the road actually goes back down to the river. It’s kind of a big loop. We could actually make it back to town this way.”
“Then that’s what we should do,” Muldaur said. “We circle up and around and back into town.”
They were traveling a little slower than a fit man could walk. This side of the mountain was shielded from the wind that had been drying them on the first climb, and Zak found himself sweating heavily. He knew that if he turned around to see how the others were doing, he’d tip over, so he gauged the other riders’ distance by the sound of their breathing and the noises their tires made on the hard rock. At least they were in the shadows and didn’t yet have the sun beating down on them.
After a few minutes the road swerved to the right, giving Zak a view out over Lake Hancock, a beautiful blue puddle already several hundred feet below. It was a small lake encased by mountains on all sides, a row of cabins on the northwest lip; a strong man in a rowboat could cross it lengthwise in a few minutes. From here the cabins looked like Monopoly board pieces, and the water looked deep. The blue was enriched with swatches of green at either end and traces of violet and jade in the middle. The bald eagle he’d seen earlier was still above the water, though they had now climbed above him. Sounding mechanical, a hummingbird buzzed them, swinging high above their heads and diving at them a second time like a miniature warplane.
“God, they’re aggressive,” said Giancarlo.
“Up here they’re very protective of their territory,” Muldaur said.
The road grew steeper, and Zak pushed his thumb shifter until he was in his lowest gear, traveling less than two miles an hour now. Any slower and they’d tip over. A stand of trees came up on their right, and the lake disappeared behind them. They were riding single-file, each following the bike in front while searching out the best part of the road. Zak couldn’t see evidence of any vehicles having traveled this logging road in years, though there were some rusting cables by the wayside in several spots.
The hillside here was so steep, Zak reminded himself to be careful in case they had to come back this way. At speed, a momentary lapse of concentration could cause a bike to rocket hundreds of feet off a bluff.
When they came out of the trees, they were in direct sunshine for the first time in a long while. The shadows hadn’t exactly been cool, but now the road was baking. They were high on the mountain on the south side of the lake. Zak had a hard time judging just how much time it would take to reach the summit, or where the summit might even be. Hazarding a glance behind, he saw Stephens almost fifty yards back, Giancarlo behind him. Muldaur was still twenty feet in front, which was close enough to keep in voice contact but not so close they were in each other’s way.
“How are they doing back there?” asked Muldaur.
“Okay so far. You see the top?”
“No, but from what we saw yesterday on the other side of the lake, I’m willing to bet we’re about a third of the way up.”
They heard a popping sound from somewhere far below, the lake and the basin it sat in acting as a natural megaphone in the quiet morning air. When they heard a second pop, Zak said, “You think that’s them?”
“It has to be. Probably trying to bring down that bald eagle. Everybody else was ordered to evacuate the area because of the fire danger. And we haven’t seen anyone else.”
Another hummingbird flew over their heads, and then another, whirring straight off the rocks to their right. It was a moment or two before Zak realized they were actually bullets. “They’re shooting at us.”
“Fuckers.”
Muldaur moved to the far left side of the road, Zak following, each trying to minimize exposure to the riflemen. Zak could still see the lake and the cabins, which meant the shooters could see him.
“What’s going on?” It was Giancarlo yelling from down the road. He’d dropped even farther back.
“They’re shooting at us. Move over.”
Zak lowered his upper body as much as possible, then heard a bullet thunk the earth embankment behind him. “They must be a quarter mile away,” he said. “Maybe farther.”
“More like a thousand yards. I wonder how long we’re going to be exposed here.”
It took another minute and several more bullets before they reached a mound of dirt and rock on the right side of the road that screened them. Zak stole a look behind and glimpsed Stephens and Giancarlo riding even farther to the left than he and Muldaur. The surface of the road was more uneven where they were, and as he watched, Stephens lost his equilibrium and was forced to snap out of his quick-release pedal and put a foot down. Without batting an eye, he began running his bike up the hill, pacing Giancarlo.
Then they hit another long open stretch where they would be exposed to gunfire. It gave Zak the creeps thinking that at any moment a bullet might puncture one of his lungs. It wasn’t as if they could get medical help up here. Anybody wounded would probably die on this road, the others forced to leave him to his fate. He kept mentally replaying the gunshots that had killed Morse, especially the second bullet—the one that tore his brain apart. Any injured rider left on this road would most likely be finished off the same way.
They were like ducks in a shooting gallery, traipsing up the steep road one by one, two bright orange jerseys in the lead, followed by Stephens’s red one and the royal blue on Giancarlo. They were wearing the brightest colors in the mountains.
They heard another shot, then another. Zak felt his heart thumping and looked down at the wristwatch heart monitor strapped to his handlebar: 180 beats per minute. If he kept this up much longer he wouldn’t be able to ride at all. A bullet hit a wall of rocks to their left and whirred off into the distance like a Fourth of July firework. “You think from that distance a bullet still has any punch left? You think it would kill someone?”
“Not real dead,” said Muldaur. “Just sort of dead.”
“You see the top?”
“No. Do you?”
“I don’t think there is a top.”
Making a tremendous effort on foot, Stephens had almost caught Zak, while behind them Giancarlo was steadily losing ground. Breathless and choking on his words, Stephens pushed his bicycle alongside Zak. “There’s a couple of old roads that veer off to the left. They go to old mining claims. There won’t be anyplace to hide.”
“Hide?” said Muldaur. “I was thinking more along the lines of climbing up this wall and dumping boulders down on them.”
Stephens didn’t have enough breath to reply. Zak said, “You find a spot, I’m with you.”
“Shit!” gasped Muldaur. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”
“What is it?” Zak asked, pedaling harder, putting the pressure on until he caught Muldaur, who was twenty-five feet ahead now. The road was especially rutted here. Finally, he pulled up alongside Muldaur. They were beginning to sound like racehorses running themselves to death.
When Zak saw the Styrofoam shards sticking out of Muldaur’s helmet, he realized his friend had been hit. He didn’t see any blood, but something had obviously nicked Muldaur’s helmet above his right temple. “You okay?”
“Those fuckers almost got me.”
A
nother bullet slammed into the rocks above their heads. After that it was all pumping legs, heavy breathing, and their own heartbeats thumping in their ears. After several more minutes the pitch of the road decreased, and Zak and Muldaur were able to drop down a couple of cogs, quickly outpacing Stephens, who was still pushing his bicycle.
34
Just when Jennifer thought things couldn’t get any worse, Fred ran down to the water, where he knelt next to a thick tree, lined his rifle up alongside the trunk, and fired across the narrow lake and high up at the mountain. She couldn’t get her mind off the dead dog in the back of the truck or the way his eyes seemed to be looking at her. At least the dead man in the back of Kasey’s Porsche was wrapped in a blanket so she couldn’t see his eyes. Fred fired again and again, saying “bastards” after each shot. “Bastards.”
While the others headed up the mountain on the north side of the lake, she’d driven the Ford down a side trail that led seventy-five yards through a thick stand of trees to a small, muddy beach near the west end. The lake was so blue and gorgeous and pristine, she could hardly believe it was up here amid all this awfulness. Judging by the marks in the dirt, plenty of other trucks had at one time or another parked where she put the Ford. Along the shoreline she saw bits of fishing gear, a sinker with some line attached, a forgotten cherry bobber.
“What are you doing, Fred?”
Squeezing off another shot, then another, he said, “Bastards.”
“What?”
When she stood behind him and traced his line of vision onto the mountainside, she realized he was pointing the gun at a scar on the mountain that traversed the slope on the other side of the lake at a steep angle from left to right, a scar she at first thought was maybe made by glaciers. Then she saw four dots moving up the mountain, two orange, a red, and a blue: the cyclists.
