by Earl Emerson
“The wind must be twenty, thirty miles an hour in places.”
“I don’t see any firefighting crews.”
“Seems like all of eastern Washington is on fire. Two days ago the governor said crews were stretched to their limit and they were thinking of using inmates to work the fire lines. You don’t think they ran out of manpower and are planning to let this one burn, do you?”
“All I know is the best air’s going to be higher on the mountain.”
“Eventually Kasey and Scooter and the others are going to figure that out, too, and come up behind us.”
“That’s why we better go up now. Hopefully, Giancarlo and Stephens aren’t coming down, because I’m not sure they’ll have the strength to make the climb back up.”
“I’m not sure I have the strength to make it back up,” said Zak.
“Now, that I’m not worried about.”
They rode the next short, steep section and stopped at the Jeep camp, catching their breath while riding in circles around the abandoned barbecue. “I don’t get it,” Zak said. “Where’s Morse’s body? You don’t think they threw him off the cliff, do you?”
“Maybe they took it with them.”
When they went to refill their hydration packs at Panther Creek near their own camp, they found that their belongings had been stacked in a pile and set afire. Luckily they had their water purification kit with them. Zak kicked through the charred remains. He was sore from his crash and could feel air cooling the pus on his left hip and his left arm. As he walked, he felt pain in his right ankle he hadn’t noticed while pedaling. Three people and a dog were dead, yet seeing his own charred sleeping bag and Giancarlo’s scorched Bible made him feel as bad as any of it. Camp jays, crows, and chipmunks had been carrying away the scattered food.
Because Muldaur still had the relatively heavy Winchester braced across his handlebars, Zak offered to carry the walkie-talkie, which began crackling in his jersey pocket. “Commando One to Commando Two.”
“Two, over.”
“Did we ever find out what happened to Scooter’s walkie-talkie? ’Cause Scooter doesn’t have any recollection of where it went.”
“That’s a negative, Commando One. All I saw was Perry.”
“So for all we know they’re listening in.”
“For all we know.”
After a few moments of silence Scooter’s bombastic high-pitched voice came on the air. “Hear this, you redneck peckerwoods. We’re coming, and this time we’re not handing out any tickets for second chances. So you better start pedaling your asses off.”
“Do you think we should answer?” Muldaur asked.
“Like he said, I think we should pedal.”
They climbed six more minutes on the same road they’d already climbed once that morning, hoping all the while the Jeeps weren’t coming up right behind them, because this time they wouldn’t have a felled tree to stall them. There was no telling what Stephens and Giancarlo were doing. Zak hoped they were somewhere on top of the mountain, perhaps near the lake, and that they would run into them at the top.
Zak looked at Muldaur. “You know how to use that rifle?”
“When I was in the army, I was rated top marksman in my unit.”
“Let’s hope those rich boys behind us didn’t have private shooting tutors like they had for everything else.”
43
By the time the walkie-talkie crackled again, they’d climbed another mile on the single-lane dirt road, most of it in the sun, which now bored through the high haze. “Commando One from Two. We’re turning around. I just hope to God they aren’t hiding in the smoke, because we’ll be sitting ducks.”
“Don’t be coming back here. Keep looking!”
“Bullshit. You come over on this side of the river and look. It’s too smoky.”
“Okay. We’ll go up the hill and search. You come back and go along the river and look for a way out. That way, if one of us gets caught in an ambush, the others can flank them.”
“Sounds good. I haven’t scored yet, and I need to bag one.”
“It’d be nice if we could each bag one.”
The walkie-talkie in Zak’s rear jersey pocket grew quiet. “You think they meant that last bit?” Zak said.
“Naw. They were just trying to throw a scare into us.”
“It worked.”
“Have you noticed there are only two units talking? There should be three.”
“Maybe the other one’s up top laying for Giancarlo and Stephens.”
When they finally reached the plateau that couched Lake Hancock, Zak wasn’t as exhausted and maimed as he thought he would be. It gave him hope he might get his race legs back. It had taken more than thirty minutes, but they’d come up at an even pace, and now the woods on the plateau afforded more shade than the hillside had.
Zak said, “The air’s better up here.”
“It’s starting to get hazy toward the lake, though. In another couple of hours, we won’t have any clean air at this elevation, either. We better find Giancarlo and Stephens.”
Dreading the climb out of the lake basin, where they would have to traverse the same road that had exposed them to gunfire earlier—it seemed like days earlier—they trekked around the south end of Lake Hancock, riding with no hands while they munched Clif Bars and sipped water from the bite valves on their backpacks, gathering strength for the next climb. It was the nastiest mountain they’d done all day, but it surprised Zak to see how anxious Muldaur was. This was the area where a bullet had chipped his helmet, and until now Zak thought it hadn’t affected his friend.
It occurred to Zak that all that chatter on the walkie-talkies might have been a ploy and that the Jeep gang might be circling to surprise them at the top. Or that the third remaining vehicle might have been up there waiting all along.
They kept a watch out over the lake, which had now acquired a nappy surface from the wind. The breeze was hot and laden with the perfume of distant fires. It was just past noon, and even up here the air was beginning to get smokier. By six o’clock nothing on the mountain would be breathable.
Zak said, “You think the fire’s going to jump the river and creep up this mountain?”
“If it comes up the mountain, it won’t be doing any creeping. In steep country like this it’ll travel faster than a man can run.”
“I wonder if it travels faster than a man can bike?”
“None of these roads go straight up. Chances are, even if we outrun it, we’d get cut off.”
“Scary.”
“Most definitely scary.”
Several times Zak almost tipped over while gazing out at Lake Hancock and the surrounding mountains. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he wouldn’t be surprised to see a Porsche Cayenne or a white Ford pickup, or muzzle flashes from a rifle barrel. “We better keep our minds on our work,” said Muldaur. “If they start shooting, we’ll know soon enough.”
They rode uphill for another twelve minutes before they spotted Giancarlo and Stephens coasting toward them, their fingers tight on their brake levers. As they closed in, Stephens said, “Where are you guys headed?”
“We were coming to save your butts,” said Zak.
“We were going down to save yours,” said Giancarlo. “Why didn’t you guys go back into town?”
“Way too much smoke,” said Zak. “We figured the best place to wait this out was up top.”
“We thought so until it got too smoky. There’s a fire right below the ridge a couple of miles back. The whole ridge is layered in smoke. It’s bad.”
“It’s true,” said Stephens. “My asthma was kicking in. Are they behind you?”
“Not that we know of.”
“So are we going down or up?”
Zak looked at Muldaur, who shrugged. “Down, I guess.”
Zak didn’t like the thought that they’d climbed almost a mile up a mountain without cause. That was the initial idea for the weekend—to ride their butts off—but
now that the situation had changed, they were trying to husband as much energy as possible, to hold something in reserve in case the others got close. Zak and Muldaur turned around and lowered their saddles for the descent, then gazed down at Lake Hancock, surveying the woods and the ancient logging scars on the mountain opposite, reviewing the roads for trucks or small movements that might turn out to be angry young men with scoped rifles.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” said Muldaur.
“I could think of worse places to die.”
“Me, too.”
By the time he and Muldaur began their descent, Giancarlo and Stephens were halfway down the mountain. At the bottom the four of them regrouped and rode back around the lake. When they reached the three-way crossroads at the head of the lake, they stopped while Giancarlo searched for signs that the trucks had passed by. “Hard to tell,” he said after scanning the road surface. “There’re so many tracks. I know they came by a couple of times earlier, but I can’t tell for sure if they’ve been around recently.”
“Okay. So here’s my take on it,” said Stephens, looking around at the other three. “This probably isn’t going to surprise anyone. I think we should ride down the hill and head back into town. If we run into them, we’ll just stop and put our hands up. What are they going to do, murder us?”
“That’s exactly what they’re going to do,” said Muldaur.
“Murder us?”
“Have you not been paying attention? Look at my helmet.”
“Gimme a break, you guys. They’re not going to murder us. We’re civilized. They’re civilized.”
“The problem with riding back into town,” said Zak, “is that we were down by the river and we got a good look at the roads. They’re not passable, and they won’t be for a long, long time.”
“So we’re going to have to hide out up here until it is passable?” said Giancarlo.
“That’s how it looks.”
“I was wondering where you got that rifle,” said Giancarlo.
“I’ll tell you all about it after we find someplace to hide.”
They took the road on the north side of Lake Hancock, this time skirting the spring entirely. When they reached the turnoff to the lake, their choices were to either continue up the mountain on the same route Zak and Muldaur had taken the previous evening, venture through the trees in the direction of the lakefront itself, or pursue the narrow, gated road that ran along the north side of the lake, where there were a dozen or so small cabins.
“We could hide out in one of those shacks,” said Stephens. “Of course we would leave money and a note for whatever we took.”
“I’d rather be out in the open,” said Muldaur. “What about you, Zak?”
“I want to be able to run in more than one direction.”
“Giancarlo?”
“The only reason I’d go to those cabins would be to look for firearms.”
“You guys are turning this into a war,” said Stephens. They ended up climbing the switchback road that rose up out of the plateau to the north, the same road Zak and Muldaur had ridden the afternoon before, a mountain on their right-hand side. As they began the ascent, Stephens pulled alongside Giancarlo. “It could be worse, I guess. At least if those fires get close, I’m with three firemen.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know. I’ll be with professionals.”
“These are wildland fires.”
“Yeah. So?”
“So we work in Seattle. We’re structural firefighters. We don’t know anything about wildland fires.”
“Same principles, right?”
“Are you kidding? You know as much about what’s going on out here as we do.”
44
The road climbed for almost an hour before feeding onto a rolling plateau at about four thousand feet, which was essentially the top of the foothills butting into the Cascade Mountains. The plateau was laced with an intricate maze of logging roads, many of them overgrown dead ends. Once on the plateau the worst of the climbing would be over, especially now that they weren’t following the original plan to forge a path all the way to Salmon La Sac on the other side of the Cascades. Riding north out of the basin put the sun at their backs, the wind sucking the moisture out of their mouths, blowing sweat off their chins and noses. They were sweating so heavily they looked as if they were biking through a fine mist. When they stopped at the last crossroads, Giancarlo strapped his helmet to his handlebars, and the others followed suit. The hot breeze on their bare heads felt good, though Zak worried about sunburn on his scalp.
The road started off steep and grew steeper, running in a straight line for a quarter mile through a gauntlet of dark green Douglas fir. There were at least two other major roads that connected to this, one coming up from below from the left—probably from the river—and another joining from above. They wouldn’t reach either for a while, though. As they climbed, the group once again separated into a hierarchy based on leg strength and conditioning, with Zak and Muldaur in the lead, Stephens farther down the grade, and Giancarlo out of sight behind. Not being a complainer by nature, Giancarlo hadn’t said anything, but it was clear the dog bite was hampering him, and all of them knew that if the truckers came from below, they would reach him first. They might have given him the rifle, which he was fully capable of using, but the extra weight would have hampered him further, so he said he didn’t want it. At this point, they had no idea where the trucks would be coming from, or even if they were on the mountain.
They had briefly considered riding as a foursome, but Zak and Muldaur thought it better to go ahead and use the extra time to scout, which they did, finding several overgrown side roads, most of which petered out quickly when they followed them. About a third of the way up the mountain, Zak found a road and explored it while Muldaur waited for the others. “Looks like a good place to hide out,” Zak said when he came back. “It leads to an old mine.”
“Do you think we need to stop?”
“I think these two are doing the dying swan.”
“I don’t know how they thought they were going to make the whole weekend.”
“They would have made an ordinary weekend, but not in this smoke, not with all this stress. Plus, Giancarlo’s got that leg wound from the dog.”
“I suppose so.” Stephens was laboriously making his way up the hill, head bobbing with each pedal stroke, while Giancarlo wasn’t in sight yet. “Let’s go in here, then. I doubt they’re going to check every little dogleg, and if they do, I have the rifle.”
“For all we know they went back to town.”
As if on a signal, they heard the first walkie-talkie transmission in twenty-five minutes. “Kasey? You guys check that one, too?”
“Already got it. Stay off the air.”
“Right.”
“They’re at the cabins,” Muldaur said. “Right behind us.”
The four of them ended up walking their bikes through a stand of reedy saplings that had grown through the rocks. Then 150 yards of overgrown road fed them into an open mine pit just large enough to use for a shooting range, which people had obviously done in the past, for there were hundreds of broken bottles and other consumer items filled with bullet holes against the far wall, and thousands of spent .22 brass cartridge cases under their feet. It was a horseshoe-shaped pit that might have been scooped out by a meteorite instead of miners with shovels. Trees rimmed the crater, and there was at least one spot to the east above the pit where they could see a piece of an old logging road on another face of the mountain. Here and there on the floor of the pit lay rusted chunks of abandoned machinery.
The road had a hump in it just before it reached the mine, and it was from this hump that they turned around and discovered the best view into the valley from this side of the mountain Zak had seen yet. If it hadn’t been so hazy, they would have been able to glimpse Seattle and the Olympic Mountains beyond the sound, but as it was all they saw was a cotton-candy haze that stretched for thirty mil
es.
“Jesus,” said Giancarlo.
“Your leg?” Muldaur asked.
“No. The whole valley’s burning. That fire line must be five miles long. It jumped the river. It’s coming up the side of the mountain. There’s nothing but smoke.”
The others stepped over to where Giancarlo was standing on a mound at the side of the road. From here they were able to see the distant lower parts of the mountain to the south; fire was indeed running up the sides of the lower slopes in massive sheets.
“That’s about where the wreck was,” said Zak.
“Shit. There’s another fire.”
“Where?” Stephens had climbed higher than the others, was standing on an old cedar stump eight feet across. When the others joined him, they could see directly down the mountain to some of the cliffs near where they’d slept the night before. Flames were coming up the side of the mountain close to where their camp had been.
“Three different points of origin,” said Muldaur. “Out in the valley. By the wreck and one at our camp.”
“They had a fire in our camp earlier,” said Muldaur. “They must have come up behind us and lit something in that area again. Now they’re searching the cabins at the lake. They’re right behind us.”
“If we’d stayed on the main road, they’d catch us for sure. This detour was good.”
After some time had gone by, Stephens lowered his voice and said, “Did you see Morse when you were at the camp?” Zak could tell it had taken a good deal of effort to get the question out. He and Morse had been friends for years.
“The body was gone,” said Zak.
“Gone where?”
“No idea. There was no trace of him.”
“They probably took him back to town.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” said Muldaur. “They probably have him all spread out in a funeral parlor with gardenias in his hair and wearing a nice new tuxedo.”
“There’s no need to get snide.”
