by Earl Emerson
There was no telling how long his stupor lasted. When he finally came out of it, he forced himself to creep forward and touch the Land Rover. If he could touch it, perhaps the feel of warm metal in the August heat would bring him back to his senses. When he put his palm on the Land Rover and pushed gently, the vehicle tipped slightly. He knelt and peered inside at a man who, if he was alive, probably didn’t have more than a few minutes left. Zak had met him a month earlier at a picnic at the Newcastle estate: Ryan Perry, one of the tagalongs who followed Kasey and Scooter everywhere. Nadine once told him Kasey divided his friends into two groups, those he genuinely liked and those he tolerated but made fun of when they weren’t around. Perry was firmly in the latter camp and always had been.
He appeared to be dead, but Zak would have to check for a pulse to be certain, which meant crawling inside.
Okay, he said to himself. Get inside, check his carotid artery, and then get out. No problem. You’ve done it a hundred times. Just do it. Perry’s eyes weren’t exactly open, but they weren’t closed, either. Zak knew if he were in uniform, he’d be inside by now, but he wasn’t in uniform and he’d fallen into a well of fear he couldn’t climb out of. It was impossible for him to put into words why he couldn’t go into the wreck, what the fear was all about.
And then he was astonished to see a drop of liquid splash in the dust at his feet. Then another. Liquid was running off his face, which he mopped with the back of his cycling glove.
As soon as he realized he was crying, he entered into a transcendental moment in which he wasn’t quite sure if he was kneeling beside a car with his dying sister inside, or kneeling beside a car in the woods seventeen years later. A good portion of his brain wasn’t sure if he was twenty-eight or eleven. What made it worse was that his situation gave him a flash forward into the rest of his life. From now on there would be a hundred things he wouldn’t be able to do. The car was only the first of myriad successive cascading dominoes. In the future he might not be able to go into fires. He might not be able to climb tall ladders. Zak Polanski—the sniveling coward who let his sister die because he couldn’t crawl into the car to unfasten her seat belt.
“What are you doing, Zak?” Muldaur yelled from the road. “Hurry up. They’re on the walkie-talkie. They’re headed this way. We have to get moving.”
Zak heard himself say, “He’s dead.”
“You already went in?”
“Yeah,” Zak lied. “He’s dead.” Zak headed back up the hill, stepping carefully over the rocks so he wouldn’t twist an ankle. In the space of two minutes he’d turned into a coward and a liar. He’d been waiting for it his whole life, it seemed, and now it was here, the fait accompli. As he walked up the hill, he wondered if it showed on his face.
Scooter was standing now but didn’t look like any kind of threat, blood gushing from his nose, his shoulders hunched as if he’d been beaten. “You’re going to pay for this, Polanski, you fuck. You broke my goddamn collarbone. You almost killed me. You’re going to pay big time.”
With the rifle laid horizontally across his handlebars, Muldaur headed down the hill. “Come on, Zak. They’re right behind me.”
Giving Scooter one last look, Zak caught Muldaur a hundred yards down the mountain. “Are they really coming?”
“Yeah. I got one of their walkie-talkies in my pocket.”
“Com One to Com Three. Where are you? Come in?” When nobody replied, the speaker said, “Com One to Com Three. We’re halfway down the mountain. Where are you?”
“If they’re halfway down the mountain, they’re right behind us,” said Zak. “You think they’ll stop at the wreck or keep coming?”
“They’ll pick up Scooter and check on the dead guy.”
“I hope so.” Zak wondered if Ryan Perry was really dead.
“Back there. That was the most awesome piece of riding I’ve ever seen. Scooter came damn close to blowing your nuts through the roof of your mouth when you came down the hill.”
When they got to the bottom of the mountain and the road leveled out, they heard the white noise of the river. Stephens had told them it was a mile from the bottom of the mountain to the crossroads, but Zak wasn’t thinking about the crossroads. Freezing up outside the Land Rover scared him in a way nothing else had in almost two decades. It scared him more than any of the close calls he’d ever encountered in the fire department, and he’d had his share.
Even if it hadn’t cost Ryan Perry his life—which it might well have—in his own mind his failure would always stand between him and Nadine. Zak had been waiting for the day when the cowardice he’d discovered in his childhood would infect his adult life, and this was that day.
41
Having taken first-aid training with the ski patrol, Kasey was the only one who knew how to cut a blanket into strips to make a sling and swathe for Scooter’s fractured clavicle. He worked on the sling while Fred hiked down through the rocks and broken trees toward the Land Rover. Kasey handed his rifle to Bloomquist. “Here. Keep an eye on the road. There’s no telling where those guys are.”
“Plus, they took my gun,” Scooter said.
“What?”
“What do you mean what? Take a look at that car. I was lucky to get out alive. Next thing I know that retard grabs my Winchester.”
“I don’t understand why they didn’t shoot you,” said Bloomquist. “I thought they wanted to kill us all.”
“They might shoot me, still. They might shoot us all, still. Right now the retard has the rifle.”
All of them peered down the road with varying degrees of trepidation. Kasey could feel the paranoia in the group as if it were being passed from one to the other like a bottle of tequila. It was an eerie feeling to think somebody was watching him, eerier still to think they might be doing it through the telescopic sight of a high-powered rifle. They all crouched down, and Roger, who’d been holding the weapon as if it were a broomstick, began taking an interest in its working parts. Kasey noticed that the only one who didn’t try to make himself into a smaller target was Scooter. It must have been the pain that kept him from being more diligent.
Moments later, Fred called up from thirty feet below the road. “Perry’s in there.”
“How is he doing?” Kasey asked.
“I think he’s dead.”
“What do you mean you think he is dead?”
“Read my lips. I think he is dead.”
“Did they kill him?” Kasey turned to Scooter.
“I think the crash did,” yelled Fred.
“Oh, my Lord,” said Jennifer.
Bloomquist, who had a rich chocolate tan from lounging around the Newcastle pool all summer, turned pasty and began to look faint. He and Ryan had been friends since grade school, and Kasey knew it would take awhile for him to digest this turn of events. Hell, it was going to take them all awhile. They’d lost Chuck and Ryan. Jesus, how were they going to explain this to their parents? They could blame Chuck’s death on Polanski, but this was partly their own doing, wasn’t it?
After Kasey finished the sling and swathe on Scooter’s left arm, he walked over and lifted the rifle out of Bloomquist’s hands. Down the hill he could see the Land Rover pancaked on its roof, the upper half of the vehicle caved in. Looking at the wreck, it seemed a miracle that Scooter had been able to get out.
It was bad enough that Chuck was dead and the cyclists had sent their gunslinger down the hill with that pistol. It was bad enough they’d mutilated and killed Dozer. But now, to make things worse, poor little Ryan Perry was dead, Scooter was walking wounded, and the cyclists were armed with a loaded Winchester and a scope. All they’d meant to do was drink beer in the woods and have a good time. Who could have guessed they would spend the rest of the weekend running from a bunch of maniacs?
“They’re going to kill us all,” said Jennifer, staring at the road.
“No, they aren’t,” Kasey said, dropping an arm across her shoulders and hugging her close. Kasey was rather proud of
the way he’d come to be the leader here, and now it was his responsibility to keep things together, to forgo a panic. “Listen to me, honey. They aren’t going to get anybody else. What happened here was a fluke. We’ve still got two trucks and two guns, and we’re mad as hell. They think they have the advantage, and that’s going to be their undoing.”
“I can’t believe we got Perry killed,” Bloomquist said.
“Bullshit we got him killed,” said Scooter. “They killed him just like they killed Chuck and the dog. If Fred hadn’t been alert enough to pop that dude who came down with the revolver earlier, we’d all be roasting in the sun. And I can tell you this. If you’d taken another minute to get here, you would have found two bodies instead of just Perry.”
“Ryan wanted to try skydiving,” said Bloomquist. “But he was too scared to sign up. He must have been terrified at the end.”
“He was terrified his whole life,” said Fred, not unkindly. “How did you guys end up crashing?”
“They must have put something in the road. Whatever it was, it blew a tire. There were two of them riding their bikes, and then all of a sudden after a bend there was only one, and he was going slower. It was like he was trying to slow us down. One of them must have gone ahead to set a trap. Next thing I know I’m climbing out of the wreck.”
“They’re murderers,” said Jennifer. “If we weren’t sure before, we’re sure now. Chuck. Dozer. And now Ryan. They’re out-and-out murderers.”
With only the wind and the sound of Chuck’s idling truck as background noise, everyone grew quiet. It was weird the way tension catapulted them into these quiet moments, Kasey thought; this was the third or fourth period of total stillness since they’d reached the crash site.
Kasey said, “When I wrecked my first Carrera in high school, there was a two-by-four in the road. Remember?”
“You were drinking,” said Bloomquist.
“Which doesn’t mean there wasn’t a two-by-four in the road.”
“I don’t want to lose any more of my friends because we were too timid,” said Jennifer. “We’ve got to stop them before they stop us. Is everybody in agreement?” Standing nose-to-nose, as she was wont to do, she addressed the question to Bloomquist, who didn’t flinch but gave the appearance that he was about to.
“I’m with you guys,” Bloomquist said. “Perry never hurt anyone.”
“Oh, shit,” said Fred, running for his truck, which he’d left idling. A small clump of dry grass had caught fire on the side of the road, apparently ignited by something on the vehicle’s underside.
Fred jumped in and moved the truck down the road, then ran back and stomped the burning grass with his sandaled feet. He worked at putting out the small fire until Scooter pulled on his arm and said, “Fred, let it go. They’re up there somewhere. At least two of them are. Let it burn their asses.”
Fred and Scooter looked at each other for a few moments and then gazed down as the flames emitted a soft crackling noise and began to spread.
“We can’t do this,” said Kasey.
“Why not? It was an accident. Nobody can control accidents.” Kasey noticed that Scooter’s gray eyes were almost as bright as the time they tried coke.
“Besides, the whole valley’s on fire. Nobody’s going to notice.”
“It’s worth it to flush them out,” said Fred. “At least they won’t be behind us. There’s only a couple of ways off this mountain, and we’re sealing one of them off.”
While Roger Bloomquist stood staring at the wreckage of his Land Rover, the others watched the fire creep through the long brown grass above the road. Within moments, a hot wind began pushing it up into the dry brush and twigs on the other side of the ditch and assisting it as it fingered its way up the side of the mountain. Soon it looked like a series of huge orange zippers flying up the mountain.
“Jesus, that wind is dry,” said Fred.
“That’s the same Chinook we had yesterday,” said Bloomquist.
“The fire sure is hot,” said Jennifer. “Even from here I can feel the heat.”
When the flames reached the first of the trees, they began racing up the side of the mountain with a ferocity Kasey found hard to fathom. It was as if a plane had napalmed the slope. “We shouldn’t have done this.”
Scooter snorted.
“Too late to stop it now,” said Jennifer, who was plainly having her own doubts.
Like a series of match heads igniting, a stand of scraggly trees on the hill caught fire and one by one began crackling and popping with little explosions caused by pockets of pitch. Burning debris began to rain down onto the road.
Kasey knew they had to leave or they would be caught up in it, and he knew the others were looking to him for a sign, but he couldn’t tear himself away from the spectacle. He watched for another minute, then turned and surveyed the valley below the mountain. Even though he should have been able to see the contours of the valley, he saw nothing but white smoke blowing through the trees they’d driven past the day before. There were multiple fires below them, and now there was at least one above them.
“Remember,” said Scooter. “This was an accident. Fred’s truck ignited some grass. We couldn’t do anything about it. Right, Roger?”
“Right.”
“Right, Jenn?”
“Right.”
He turned to Fred, who said, “Fuckin’ A.”
“I just thought of something,” said Bloomquist.
“What?”
“That fire’s going to go up to the lakes. It’ll destroy Perry’s Jeep.”
“Those three little lakes are miles away.”
“What’s going to stop it from getting there?” Kasey asked.
“Yeah, well. Perry’s beyond caring about that.”
“Still, it’s sad,” said Jennifer.
“A lot of stuff is sad,” said Fred, striding toward his dead brother’s truck. “But there comes a time when you have to do something about it, and that time is now.”
42
During mountain bike races both Zak and Muldaur had crashed and remounted to finish the race often enough that they were used to riding with injuries, so they both knew they could gut it out now. At least for a while.
“What took you so long?” Muldaur asked.
“He was having such a good time beating you to a pulp, I didn’t want to spoil it for him.”
“That’s what I figured.”
“Plus, it took awhile to figure out what to do.”
“You didn’t have a lot of choices. Man, that took some guts. You could have been hurt bad coming down the hill. Or he could have shot you.”
“I was hurt bad.”
“Thanks for bailing me out, though. I really mean that. I think you saved my life.”
“You’re welcome.”
Eventually the ground leveled out and they found themselves side by side on a single-lane logging road, clear-cuts and gentle uphill slopes to their right, sporadic glimpses of the North Fork of the Snoqualmie River through the dense firs to their left. According to the directions Stephens had given them, they would soon be approaching the intersection at the bottom of the hill below which they’d camped, and would soon see the little concrete bridge where the races had ended. That morning they’d gone up the mountain and then had circled back almost to their starting point. They should be within five or six miles of the beginning point of their trip and the guard at the gate.
After half a mile Zak broke a protracted silence. “You think we should go back to town? We could send help back for Giancarlo and Stephens.”
“I think we should try.”
“What are you going to do if we see the others?”
“I don’t think they’re going to trade shots now that I have a gun.”
“That gun is not going to deter Scooter. In fact, it might make him more likely to fire at us.”
“Even with a broken collarbone?”
“If he can fire a gun, he will.”
After
riding a mile on the flat road, they arrived at the junction near the bridge. On the far side the landscape was cloaked in wind-driven white smoke, which they knew signaled burning vegetation; it was shifting like a series of rapidly moving fog banks. From time to time wind currents picked it up off the ground and allowed them to see the terrain, but from their vantage point along the river it was generally impenetrable. Every once in a while a gust would send enough toward them to cover a football field, and they would be riding in a fog for a few minutes.
“Are we going to be able to ride through that crap over there?” Muldaur asked.
“Doubtful.”
“Which means we won’t be going back into town anytime soon.”
“It might get better farther on.”
“It might get worse, too. It’s a good seven or eight miles into town from here.”
“More like eight or ten.”
“That’s a lot of smoke to be pedaling through. If we keep heading north in the hope of finding a clearing and we don’t, we’ll be in that much deeper. And I don’t think we’re going to find a clearing.”
“Neither do I.” Looking dazed and confused, several deer wandered down the center of the road, noses high. “Why’s it so low?” Zak asked.
“The wind’s holding it down.”
“Let’s climb the hill. We get some altitude, maybe we’ll be able to see a route out of here.”
“Fine by me.”
They had climbed at least 6,000 and probably 8,000 feet already in their journeys, which made this 250 feet of altitude gain seem paltry, yet Zak could feel his quads burning and his back getting stiff with the work. His injuries didn’t help. The higher they climbed, the better the view to the south, until they stopped at the washboard corner that had given them so much trouble in the race.
Most of the roads below were masked in billowing white smoke. Obviously, the road back into North Bend would be impassable for hours, perhaps days. Muldaur stared at the burning valley. “It’s everywhere.”
