by Earl Emerson
The first section of the road was steep, but it leveled out a tad and passed through an uphill vale with trees on either side. Soon it began climbing in earnest in a long, steady grind, trees and steep slopes to the left, the treetops and occasional drop-offs to the right. Stephens found himself on a long, sweeping right-hand turn, where he was able to peer down the mountain.
The sight that greeted him made his mouth go dry.
Almost everything Stephens could see below was either on fire or had already burned. When he could pick them out, individual trees looked like burning match heads. All of the green they had looked out on this morning during their first trip up this road had been replaced by smoke, char, and blackened upright snags that had once been trees.
He caught a glimpse of the fire maybe a third of a mile to the south as it raced up the face of the mountain at an alarming rate. He was almost certain the near-vertical slope didn’t connect to this road, but if it did the road would no longer be viable. The fierce winds would waft flames across it like a blowtorch. There was no way he or any of the others would make it if the flames encroached on the road. He didn’t like going this hard, but if there was ever a time this was it.
He pushed on, feeling the pain in his legs, wondering if he was going to cramp. Last year after the RAMROD, Stephens had suffered a cramp that left his quadriceps sore for a month. When the Porsche and then the white Ford approached him, Stephens moved to the side of the road. He’d planned this carefully, knowing if the four of them requested rides at the same time they were unlikely to be effective, but if he could get up the road and negotiate by himself, he had a chance of success. As usual, the spoils went to the victor, and the victor was the smartest. He was well aware that there was a certain amount of ego involved in outsmarting others, and Stephens wasn’t immune to it, although he certainly did his best to project humility, unlike some others he was too generous to name. In fact, part of his mind was rehearsing how he would tell this story to his wife when he got home without sounding like he was bragging.
“How about giving a fellow traveler a ride?” Stephens said amiably as the Porsche came abreast. He would show them he wasn’t cut from the same cloth as the others. “I know you’ve got room for one.”
“Fuck you,” said Scooter.
“I’m not like these others.”
“Who are you kidding?”
“They’re firefighters. I’m a chief financial officer. I know Fred’s father.”
“Jesuuuuuuus…”
When the tall Ford reversed alongside him a few moments later, he looked up at Fred, who was sitting next to Jennifer. “I know you’re both reasonable enough to give me a ride.”
“Screw you.”
“I’m not with those others.”
“The hell you aren’t.”
“It was my plan to make peace between the two camps.”
“You’re soooo full of crap.”
“Just give me a ride. I can help you with those guys. I know what could put them in trouble.”
“They’re already in trouble. And so are you, asshole.”
It was only after the trucks began to fade in the haze that Stephens was shocked to find Muldaur and Zak twenty yards behind and closing. He hoped they hadn’t heard his pleas for a ride. Stephens put his head down and focused on the section of dirt and rock three to four feet in front of his front tire. He was going to stay in front of them as long as possible. His lungs hurt. His legs were aching. Even his butt muscles hurt. Despite all his efforts, these two were passing him. Looking at the bright side, he knew once they got in front, their pacing would help, and each time they reached one of the flatter spots on the road, Stephens could draft.
“What’d they say?” Zak asked.
“They wanted to give me a ride, but I didn’t think it would be right if they wouldn’t take you guys, too.”
“Sure you weren’t begging for a ride for yourself?”
“Not without you guys.”
“Right.”
Stephens began pedaling harder in an effort to stay with the two more polished cyclists. He dropped his chain to a smaller cog on the back and pushed for a few strokes, then thought better of it and went back to a lower gear. Even with all his efforts, he was barely hanging on.
“Hey, Zak?” Muldaur was speaking now.
“Yeah?”
“I just found a better way to work out. Better than having guys with rifles behind us.”
“You mean getting chased by a forest fire?”
“Right.”
“Excellent. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that.”
The fire had jumped the road and was crawling up the mountain behind them. It would take only a small change in direction for the wind to blow it at them. Stephens had no way of estimating how fast it might be closing in, but he knew the climb was going to take another twenty or twenty-five minutes. This was no time for any of them to be making ridiculous jokes. Didn’t they know? A gust of wind. A slight variation in terrain. A flat tire. A broken chain. Any piece of defective equipment, and one of them would be a goner. So far nobody’d flatted and nothing had broken on any of the bikes, but if it did the affected rider would be kindling. A few minutes later they hit a relatively flat spot, where Polanski and Muldaur took turns in front and Stephens remained behind. Astonishingly, just before they started the next climb, Giancarlo caught them. When Stephens turned around to take a look, Giancarlo’s face was blank and pale, and he was breathing even harder than Stephens.
“Can you stay on, Giancarlo?” It was Polanski. Nobody’d asked Stephens if he could stay on.
“Not at this pace. Just go on.”
“We can slow a bit.”
“Don’t you dare.”
The winds, which had been boiling over their heads the last few minutes, picked up. For a time they were blowing from directly behind them, coming out of the north. Then they were gusting from the west, hot and full of smoke and projectiles, twigs and pinecones and burning debris. A gust almost knocked Stephens over. They climbed together for thirty seconds before Giancarlo dropped back.
Incredibly, Stephens found himself next to Polanski, who forced him to fight for the smoothest sections of the road; Muldaur was somewhere behind. Whoever lost each of their small battles fell behind slightly when he had to ride the rougher section. And then another blast of filthy air crept up their backs, and Stephens felt something sting his arm. The air was swirling with hundreds of tiny burning cinders.
The heat began increasing at a phenomenal rate. Tiny cinders singed his neck, and one even burned through the sleeve of his jersey. By now Stephens had lost twenty bike lengths on Polanski. He cocked his head to one side and saw Giancarlo another hundred yards down the hill, pedaling in a labored motion, zigzagging from side to side.
A wall of flame rose up behind Giancarlo, and he was limned by yellow. It was hard to judge how close the fire was, but Stephens guessed the cyclist below him would be dead in a minute or less. Forty yards in front of the trio the top of a Douglas fir burst into flame, and one by one they gravitated to the other side of the road as they passed it, each feeling the radiated heat from the flames.
52
Surely the cyclists had to be lying when they said Morse came to them with an unloaded revolver. Kasey had been having misgivings about the incident all day, but no matter how many times he replayed those few seconds before Finnigan shot Morse, he could not honestly view it as a peace talk. What he remembered most was Morse trying to gull them into complacency seconds before he pulled out the gun.
Actually, now that he thought about it, Morse had been somewhat limp-wristed with the pistol. But then, after he got shot the first time, he raised the gun again, and that was when Kasey knew he’d meant to hurt them all along. In addition, had not Scooter checked afterward and found the revolver loaded? Why would Scooter lie about that? As he drove up the mountain in reverse, Kasey decided the cyclists were the true liars. They had to be.
“They do
n’t have the balls to shoot us,” Scooter said. “That guy this morning tried and choked. That’s what gave Fred the edge.”
“I don’t know about balls, Scooter. You saw the way they killed Chuck’s dog.”
“That wasn’t pretty,” said Roger Bloomquist from the backseat.
“It was loaded, wasn’t it?” Kasey asked.
“What?”
“That revolver you took off the guy Fred shot. It was loaded?”
“I said it was, didn’t I? Besides, even if it wasn’t, a guy pulls a gun, you have every right to shoot. The cops would.”
“I’m not sure he wasn’t trying to hand us the gun the way he said he was.”
“Don’t believe that for a minute. It was the perfect con. He was going to shoot you. You go back down that road and you’ll find the bullets. I can show you exactly where they are.”
It was an odd assertion, Kasey thought, because this morning only moments after he supposedly tossed them, Scooter hadn’t been able to locate them, or didn’t want to.
“Hey. I have an idea. We’re going to be passing those guys in a minute. Let’s bump them off the mountain. We could make it look like an accident.”
“I don’t think so,” Kasey said.
“It’s a long ride up this hill on a bicycle,” said Bloomquist. “They’re not going to make it to safety before the fire gets them.”
Kasey didn’t pay a whole lot of attention when they passed the first three cyclists, and despite Scooter’s urging to do otherwise, he drove with care. So did Jennifer. People had been injured and killed, but so far Kasey had accomplished none of the damage, and he was beginning to see the percentage in keeping it that way.
On top of the mountain, trees were blowing in all different directions, some of the younger firs bent almost to the ground. The Cayenne rocked from side to side in the winds, hot smoke blowing around the interior. Several times Kasey had been forced to slow because of the smoke in the road. They should have picked up the cyclists, he thought. Kasey didn’t want to think about it too much, but he had an idea that under conditions such as these, it was tantamount to murder that they hadn’t.
53
Zak knew Stephens had been dogging it all day, but the tenacity and courage he showed now that they were all spurred by flames was unbelievable. It was amazing how strong he’d become, falling off the pace for a few hundred feet, then making a gargantuan effort to get back on and succeeding repeatedly. Now, as they headed up the final stretch of mountainside, Stephens was right on their tail.
Twice now they’d seen a wall of fire behind them, and each time it looked like Giancarlo was pedaling out of it, bobbing and standing up at times, even though it was awkward and dangerous to stand while pedaling on these steep gravel and dirt roads. Zak had a dreadful feeling in his gut that Giancarlo was going to be overtaken by the rolling inferno.
Incredibly, by the time they arrived at the last leg of the ascent, Zak was thinking about giving up. It was the first time all day he’d seriously considered getting off and quitting, and the notion startled him. Of course his legs had been aching all along, and his lungs weren’t processing the smoky air well—he and the others had been bringing up globs of dirty phlegm for the past half hour—but the rest of his body hurt as well: his shoulders, wrists, and palms, the soles of his feet. Even the muscles in his face felt tight and cramped. He was having a hard time holding his head up. He wasn’t the only one in trouble. For the past two hours he’d noticed a tic playing under one of Muldaur’s eyes and what appeared to be a weakening of his left leg, his knee flicking out to the side in an odd way at the bottom of every pedal stroke. He’d thought Stephens or Giancarlo would be the first to crack, but now he wasn’t so sure he or Muldaur wouldn’t be the one.
This last stretch of road ran up the mountain in a straight line, and several times in the last mile the howling, gale-force winds had come close to knocking one of them over. Zak moved ahead of Muldaur to take another pull at the front just as the wind began riffling the tops of the trees in a way he hadn’t seen until now, whipping the tallest trees and bending them almost to the ground. Zak found himself expending an enormous amount of energy just to keep the bike upright and stable.
For a while the wind grew so loud he couldn’t hear anything else. When it finally died down, Muldaur was cursing. Zak wanted to turn around to see if Stephens was still with them or if Giancarlo was in visual contact, but he didn’t dare loosen his grip on his handlebars or even cock his head for a look.
The heat came over the treetops first. Then behind the treetops a large, quick tongue of flame shot into the sky. It frightened Zak, but it must have terrified Stephens, because he pulled alongside and, a moment later, began inching away. He was breathing like a steam engine. Another tongue of flame revealed itself, and instead of disappearing as the first one had, it scoured the treetops alongside the road, setting them alight one by one like a giant blowtorch. Oddly, the winds were so gusty that about a third of the treetops were snuffed out as soon as they ignited. Zak had never seen anything like it.
The winds continued to grow more violent. At times they would blow from directly behind to help push them up the hill. Twice, Zak dropped his chain down a cog or two into a higher gear ratio to take advantage of the wind assist.
It was only with a superhuman effort that Zak was able to get on Stephens’s wheel. Once again Stephens had remained behind for long periods and then took advantage of the energy he’d been saving to leap forward and save himself. When Zak or Muldaur took the lead, they always came around with a slow acceleration so the others could get used to the new pace without being dropped, but Stephens continued to launch himself up the road as if purposely trying to lose them.
Muldaur had been flagging for the last half mile and was now cursing as Zak towed him back in line behind Stephens. Even though they were only making seven or eight miles an hour and sometimes as little as four or five, because of the thirty-or forty-mile-per-hour wind in their faces the second and third man in a pace line received enormous benefit. There were lulls in the fire-induced hurricane, too, which made Zak nervous, because it was impossible to guess from which direction the next gusts might issue.
As the fire to their right began working its way up the mountainside in front of them, they could hear what sounded like the crinkling of giant plastic wrappers. Aside from the occasional tongue of yellow leaping into the air over their heads and then vanishing into the atmosphere, they saw little flame. The fire was like a monster behind a door and seemed to be marching up the gully alongside the road faster than they were traveling. For almost a minute the noise was fifteen yards in front of them. Zak’s greatest fear was that the fire would suck all the oxygen from the road and they would suffocate. He didn’t mind dying, he told himself, but he wanted a fair shot at outrunning the fire, not that anything about this day had been or was going to be fair. Still, if they could get back to the level of the lake, they might have a chance.
It angered him when he thought about the two vehicles making it to safety without them. Kasey and the others were probably up to their necks in icy lake water right now. Zak had been so hot for so long that a dip in a snow-fed, ice-cold lake seemed like a slice of heaven.
At any moment the fire speeding alongside in the trees might cross the road and block their exit. Should that happen, investigators would find four charred bicycles, eight melted tires, four corpses. The only reason they weren’t getting scorched now was that the winds were carrying the heat in a hundred directions, and most of the heat was on the far side of the trees. Even when the flames bore down on them once or twice, all they felt was the same hot wind they’d been suffering all day.
They were riding faster now, the three of them in a line, Stephens pedaling with a ferocity Zak had never seen from him, wobbling from side to side and running off the smooth sections on the road in his haste. If there had been any doubt before, there was none now—they were riding for their lives, and Stephens seemed to know
this better than any of them. Zak remembered having once read about studies done concerning airplane crashes. Scientists had wanted to discover who survived and why, and it turned out that in order to survive a cabin fire in a passenger jet you needed to be one of the strongest men on board—the survivors were almost always men. It didn’t take researchers long to figure it out. If someone is on fire, every ounce of gallantry and any other civilized trait go out the window. The brain reverts to the Neolithic when survival is on the line. Zak knew they were getting to that place, if they weren’t there already.
They had an eighth of a mile to go to reach the crest.
Suddenly Zak’s legs found renewed strength. Muldaur’s must have, too, because together the two of them chugged up the road like a matched team of plow horses. The wind was howling in their faces, so Zak let Muldaur take the first pull, then when he swerved to the side, went through and rode in front for as long as he could hold it. They continued to switch off, working together until—in less than a hundred yards—they left behind the last of the burning treetops. Without meaning to, they also left Stephens, but they couldn’t worry about Stephens any more than they could worry about Giancarlo.
For the last eighth of a mile Zak and Muldaur rode side by side, moving faster and faster, each waiting for the other to crack. In the end Muldaur pulled ahead, and, when he did, Zak cast a look over his shoulder. Stephens was two hundred yards back, but oddly there was no evidence of fire behind him; just the smoke that had been molesting them all along. There was no trace of Giancarlo. Absolutely none.
54
Still breathing almost as heavily as they had been while they were climbing, Muldaur and Zak stood astride their now motionless bicycles and rested their forearms on their handlebars. They were safe, at least for a few minutes. Zak propped his forehead on his arms and stared at the ground. They’d both shot up over the top of the mountain, ridden fifty yards farther, then turned around and pedaled until they were close enough to see the grade.
