Primal Threat

by Earl Emerson

  The Ford came speeding past again, stopped in the center of the intersection, and then careened back along the south side of the lake, where they’d recently shot at the cyclists. “Now!” said Muldaur as he pushed his bike across the tinder-dry forest floor.

  49

  Zak had forgotten how far the beginning of the downhill run was from the intersection. At least a minute of riding on the flat, maybe two. He could hear the white Ford speeding up. Once again, they found themselves in an all-out race for their lives. This time Muldaur took the first hard pull, towing the four-man pace line for twenty seconds, pulling so hard he strung the other three out behind him, each seeking as much shelter behind the man in front as possible. When Muldaur signaled and moved to the right to avoid a pothole, so did the rest of them in a syncopated rhythm like a caterpillar. They were traveling in excess of twenty-eight miles an hour, no mean feat on mountain bikes.

  As Muldaur swung wide and dropped toward the rear of the queue, Zak took the second pull, putting his head down and dropping his chain to a smaller cog in the rear. Behind, he could hear the Ford gaining. Feeling he couldn’t trust Stephens, whose turn would be next, Zak took a longer pull than Muldaur’s: he was determined to get them to the top of the hill before the Ford caught them. After that, they would be in free fall. Zak was breathing so hard he thought he was going to break a rib.

  “This is a pretty good workout,” Muldaur shouted from behind. He barely had enough air to speak.

  “Great workout,” gasped Zak.

  “Maybe we should do this every year.”

  “What? Hire guys with rifles to chase us?”

  “Yeah.”

  Before Zak could think of anything else to say, he heard a shot from behind them. There was too much wind in his ears to hear anything else, but he knew the Ford was closing in. Then suddenly the four bicycles careened down the beginning of the long descent. True to form, Giancarlo surged into the lead and was soon sixty yards in front.

  Zak and Muldaur rode side by side. They could hear Stephens’s bicycle behind them as he lost ground. Zak heard a clattering and cocked his head to one side, thinking somebody had fallen. “Lost the rifle,” said Muldaur, pulling ahead.

  They sailed down one long stretch of road and turned a corner to the left, all four of them picking up speed.

  Zak didn’t see Scooter until Scooter fired at them.

  In fact, he caught only a quick glimpse of the Porsche and Kasey in the background, and then they were behind him. Muldaur, who had been in front of Zak, had aimed his bike at Scooter, who, probably because of his earlier experience with Zak, fired just the one shot and then dived away from the road frantically lest he get run over again. It was enough of a distraction for them all to get past unscathed.

  The road was straight for almost two hundred yards, and Zak heard more gunshots behind them. Then the road arched to the right, and Zak, taking advantage of the arc, pulled to the far right-hand side of the road to get out of sight as soon as possible. It was getting smokier and smokier.

  They sped down the mountainside in a loose phalanx, aware that there were at least two SUVs chasing them now. All in all, Scooter had gotten off three shots, but nobody seemed to be hit. Muldaur was a couple of bike lengths in front. Zak could hear Stephens’s bike clanking behind him as the chain slapped the chain stay, and when he cocked his head he could hear the trucks; otherwise the wind in his ears blocked all sound. He was well aware that there was no chance of a powwow and even more aware that they were now weaponless.

  Zak knew from the night before that this descent would take at least ten minutes, probably longer because of the smoke. As they wended their way along the treacherous roads, the smoke grew thicker until at one corner they almost piled into one another, Giancarlo only five or six feet in front of Zak now. At one point on one of the tightest switchbacks on the mountain, he caught a glimpse of the Ford and the Porsche, both with their headlights on, the Porsche running its windshield wipers. Shortly after that, smoke blotted out everything behind them.

  “This is getting crazy,” said Stephens.

  “I know,” Zak said.

  “Maybe we should slow down!” Stephens yelled.

  “You want to get shot,” Muldaur shouted over his shoulder, “you slow down.”

  “We’re all going to crash.”

  At the next bend it became a moot point, because the air cleared up and they were able to increase their speed. By the time the trucks came into view, the cyclists had picked up considerable distance on them, approaching one of the steepest sections of the mountain, a part of the road that seemed to drop almost straight down, arching to the right as it fell. As Zak recalled, it would get less steep around the corner. The two men in front of him actually accelerated. And then Zak did, too. It was foolhardy, and he could hear Stephens losing ground behind them as he griped about their recklessness. Then Giancarlo was skidding off to the right. Muldaur skipped to the left, and Zak found himself on a collision course with a three-point buck standing in the center of the road.

  Zak missed the deer by inches, close enough to catch fleas. In front, Giancarlo continued to slow and so did Muldaur, because the road was filled with animals. A rabbit. A squirrel. Three more deer staring at the cyclists as if in a hypnotic trance.

  All four riders ended up within feet of one another, standing in a bank of rolling smoke. Giancarlo was coughing the loudest, though Stephens wasn’t taking it well, either. “It was a miracle nobody hit that deer,” said Muldaur.

  “What deer?” said Stephens, in between coughing bouts. Zak could barely see Stephens and couldn’t see Muldaur at all. He could see the rear wheel on Giancarlo’s bicycle, but Giancarlo’s torso was a smoke-shrouded blur. The ambient temperature at the lake had been in the low triple digits, but it had increased significantly down here.

  “You think there’re more clear spots?” Muldaur asked nobody in particular. “Like if we went forward it might clear up?”

  “I think there’s more smoke,” said Zak.

  Zak heard the sound of Stephens’s inhaler. And then, farther down the mountain, the fire crackling like a dinosaur snapping two-by-fours in its jaws.

  “How close do you think the fire is?” Giancarlo asked.

  “I think it’s close,” said Muldaur.

  “Okay,” Giancarlo said, turning his bike around and walking it up the hill. None of them would be able to remount because of the pitch. “I don’t care what happens up there, I’m not riding into a forest fire.”

  Without further discussion they turned around and hiked back up the hill, pushing their bikes, coughing, and trying not to inhale too much smoke. Zak and Muldaur pulled their jersey necks up over their faces to filter out the worst of it.

  “This is fucked,” said Muldaur.

  “Anybody read Young Men and Fire?” Giancarlo asked. “It’s about the Mann Gulch Fire in Montana back in the ’fifties. A group of smoke jumpers got caught out in the open with a fire coming up a slope the same way this is coming at us.”

  “The ones who survived were the ones who could run uphill the fastest,” said Zak. “The slower guys got caught and died.”

  50

  Because they’d been proceeding blindly into the miasma, the unspoken assumption among the four cyclists was that the trucks behind them had turned around, too. In addition to the smoke and the almost unbearable heat, the winds had picked up with gusts Zak estimated at close to sixty miles an hour, perhaps as high as eighty. At one point a large stick blew across the road from somewhere and jammed into Stephens’s rear wheel and derailleur; it took two of them to dislodge it. They’d been in the smoke longer than they should have, and Zak had doubts that they would be physically able make it back up the hill. He guessed they’d descended to within half a mile of the camp, which meant they would be climbing for at least half an hour longer to reach Lake Hancock again. Descending had been a bad move, but given the choices they’d been facing, there hadn’t been anything else to do. />
  For all they knew, this was the end of their lives. Zak could see it in the faces of the others, and he was afraid they could see it in his. It wasn’t something he wanted to show. Firefighters took a great deal of pride in maintaining an appearance of nonchalance under all circumstances, and Zak knew he and Muldaur had been full of bluster all day. Now the smoke was incapacitating them.

  They heard a loud crash above them, and then through the smoke Zak saw the outlines of the two vehicles, driver’s doors winged open. The vehicles were only thirty feet away. The Porsche had rear-ended the pickup truck, and both were more or less blocking the roadway. An air bag had deployed from the center of the steering wheel in the Ford, and there were droplets of blood on it. Jennifer was sitting on the ground outside the truck, while Kasey remained in the driver’s seat of the Porsche holding his bloody nose in one hand, a pair of broken sunglasses in the other. Scooter was on the ground on the far side of the Porsche, rocking back and forth in agony. His airbag had deployed also, and judging by the way he was acting, it must have whacked his broken collarbone pretty good. Bloomquist was sitting dismally in the back of the Porsche like a child in the time-out corner.

  Zak reached inside the pickup and turned the motor off, then knelt beside Jennifer, who was sitting on the rocky ground as if she’d been thrown there, while Giancarlo walked to the far side of the Porsche and stepped back with a rifle in his hands.

  “You okay, Jenn?” Zak asked.

  “I’m okay.”

  “You get thrown out?”

  “No. I stepped out and just sat down. I don’t know why, but I’m having a hard time getting up.”

  “It’s the smoke. It makes you sick.”

  “What happened to my face?” Jennifer touched her upper lip, which was beginning to swell.

  “Air bags deploy at a hundred eighty miles an hour. Don’t worry. It’s minor.”

  Jennifer stared at Zak as if he were a creature she’d discovered at the zoo. “You guys shouldn’t be here.”

  “Too late now.”

  As they spoke, a gust of hot wind whistled through the area and lifted the smoke enough that they could see one another clearly for the first time. Fred was in the bed of the pickup with his rifle held at his waist, while Giancarlo, in the road below him, was pointing the rifle he found at Fred’s chest. Fred’s teeth were limned with blood. The ropes and belt he’d used to lash himself into the back of the truck had tangled so that he had a loop over one arm and another around his neck. Even if he wanted to, he wouldn’t have been able to react in time to keep Giancarlo from shooting him. “You just throw that out of there,” Giancarlo said, “or I’ll shoot it out of your hands.”

  “You don’t shoot that well.”

  “I think he does,” said Muldaur. “He’s been hunting since he was eight.”

  Oblivious to his surroundings, Scooter was still writhing in pain on the ground. Jennifer was sitting below Kasey who’d bounded out of his Porsche, probably so everybody could see he wasn’t armed. Bloomquist was cowering in the backseat of the Porsche. None of them had expected to see the cyclists up close, and now the only weapons in sight were the rifles Fred and Giancarlo wielded.

  While the nine of them waited for something to happen between the two men with guns, a mature elk clambered up the hill, hooves clanking on the rocky road, snorting and lumbering past Muldaur as if he were nothing more than a fence post. The elk’s big brown eyes took them in momentarily, and then the animal continued up the road without missing a step. The smoke began to thicken, and Jennifer coughed. So did Scooter. Zak could hear Stephens wheezing. A fierce wind filled with debris and cinders swirled around them and almost blew Zak’s sunglasses off. Several hot cinders hit his bare skin. As if stung by a hornet, Jennifer slapped at her leg.

  “The fire’s too close,” Zak said. “We gotta stop screwing around and get out of here.”

  “Tell him to put down his gun,” Fred said.

  “You put yours down!”

  As they waited for the drama to play out, they heard a loud, whooshing noise like a freight train barreling through a desert town in the middle of the night. Everyone knew instinctively that the fire was getting close. Too close. Zak didn’t know a lot about wildland fires, but he knew they created their own geothermal systems, and frequently the winds surrounding them were fiercer than any native winds, capable of causing the fire to behave in unpredictable ways. Spinning around as if in a cyclone, a large, dark object flew over their heads. Moments later the wind died, and the object fell to the earth with a clank. It was part of an old, rusted car body. It would have killed anyone it hit.

  “Jesus,” said Jennifer.

  Zak helped her to her feet; her arms felt warm and moist. He thought she held him for a second too long, as if she needed something from him or was trying to impart a message.

  “We need to get the hell out of here,” said Giancarlo, who hadn’t moved the rifle from his shoulder. “Call a truce and get out before we’re dead.”

  “Fine with me,” said Fred. “A truce.”

  “Then put the gun down.”

  “No fuckin’ way, man. You killed my brother.”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with your brother. I was in camp when that happened.”

  “Okay, they killed my brother. You’re part of it.”

  “We didn’t do anything,” Zak said. “Scooter knocked him off that bluff by accident. If they both hadn’t been half drunk, it wouldn’t have happened.”

  “He wasn’t drunk,” Jennifer said, stepping away from Zak. Any coalition they might have formed was gone now. Fred began to swing his rifle in Zak’s direction.

  “You put that gun on my friend and I’m going to pull this trigger,” said Giancarlo.

  Fred stopped moving. “You guys killed my dog.”

  “Yeah, well, your dog took a piece of meat out of Giancarlo’s leg the size of a sandwich.”

  “Truce! Truce?” Kasey stepped forward. “Okay? Okay, you guys? Before we all look like broiled knockwurst? I don’t know shit about forest fires, but I think we’re in trouble here.”

  “He’s right,” said Giancarlo. “Put the gun down.”

  “I put it down, you’ll shoot me.”

  “Give me a break, knucklehead. If I was going to shoot you, I would have done it by now. I need you to put your gun down before I put mine down so we can be sure you don’t shoot us.”

  “Fred,” said Jennifer. “Put it down.”

  Scooter was on his feet now, eyes full of tears. “Don’t let them buffalo you, Fred. Put a bullet in him. He doesn’t have the nerve to shoot back.”

  Before Fred could make a decision, the wind picked up again, and they all heard a horrendous crashing to the south. On the other side of a knoll that blocked their view of the valley and the fast-encroaching fire, they heard sounds that resembled a beast with feet as large as trucks, snapping branches and cracking rocks.

  Jennifer tried to climb into the cab of the truck, trembling so badly she couldn’t coordinate her movements. “I’m getting out of here.”

  When the crashing noises in the forest began to sound out to the north, too, and they saw flames fingering into the trees a mere fifty yards away, Fred flung his rifle into the road. “Don’t shoot, you bastard. Just don’t shoot me.”

  Giancarlo picked up the rifle, ejected the cartridges, flung the gun into the woods with one hand, then did the same thing with the rifle he’d been holding. He collected his own pistol and tucked it into his jersey pocket.

  “Just for the record,” Muldaur said, “we didn’t push Chuck. And that revolver Morse had wasn’t loaded.”

  Scooter climbed into the Porsche. “That fucker was going to kill us all. Why else would he pull a gun?”

  “He was giving it to you,” Zak said. “As a peace offering.”

  As he stepped into the Porsche, Kasey Newcastle gave Zak a look of incomprehension. Zak could see the horror in his eyes as he momentarily considered the possibility that t
he morning’s hostilities had been spawned by lies, that Scooter had been lying to him all day. Jennifer was trying to maneuver the Ford, which had less damage than the Porsche, but it was clear to Zak they wouldn’t be able to turn around on the narrow road. Both vehicles would be forced to make the return trip up the hill in reverse.

  Stephens was already two hundred yards up the mountain, pedaling steadily.

  The Porsche and the Ford began driving up the hill backward. Higher on the mountain, Muldaur and Giancarlo pulled over as they were passed by the trucks. When Stephens was overtaken, Zak could see him talking to the occupants of each vehicle as they slowed to pass.

  51

  Stephens turned around and realized he was the only one who’d left the accident scene. Had they not seen the bull elk rampaging up the road? When a wild animal disregards the presence of human beings, something is seriously askew. And those winds? Stephens had never experienced anything quite like them, the logs and debris flying through the air. The winds were easily 120, maybe 130 degrees Fahrenheit. Everybody was sweating heavily, even Jennifer, whose tight T-shirt Stephens noticed was wet down the spine and below each breast.

  This was what it was all about. This was what he’d been saving his energy for. He knew the others had been making vigorous efforts unnecessarily, while he’d been conserving every last watt of power for the time when it would count. The race went not to the swiftest but to the smartest. The swiftest man in the race rode hard, but the smartest man was on his wheel ready to lunge past after the front man wore himself out. Of course he’d been drafting, and in doing so had banked up a fair amount of reserves. He realized the others were in better shape than him by virtue of having put in more hours on the bike, so it stood to reason he had to do what he could to even the odds. Stephens was reasonably sure if they had to ride to the top of the mountain at speed right now, he would beat the others handily.