by Earl Emerson
“We’d die from smoke inhalation,” Muldaur replied.
“What if we don’t give a damn?”
“I don’t believe you don’t give a damn.”
“What if I don’t care what you believe?”
“We’ve got to get away from here and you know it. We’ve been through worse than this in the fire department.”
“Have we?”
“Well, maybe not. But we’ll make it out of here. Zak, if I really believed we were going to find good air out there somewhere on the lake, I’d be the first one in.”
“I’m just so tired I think I’m going to drop dead.”
“Me, too,” said Giancarlo. “But the deal when you get in a situation like this is, you keep going until you drop. And then you get up and go some more. You never quit.”
“Let’s get going before we talk ourselves to death.”
Once they were moving again, Muldaur was sorry he hadn’t taken a dip with the others. Their shoes were squishing and their Lycra shorts were shiny with the wet, and he envied the coolness they must be feeling, however temporary. The road that headed north out of the Lake Hancock basin climbed sooner than he remembered, and the heat from their work began to build quickly. Giancarlo had already disappeared in the smoke above them, while Muldaur and Zak rode one in front of the other as they had been doing most of the day. Muldaur had a queer feeling in the pit of his stomach that Zak’s unwillingness to do another climb put him a leg up on Zak if things got desperate again, which made him also feel that if only one of them was going to die, it would be Zak. He immediately felt guilty for having the thought.
Once they began climbing, his legs felt wooden. Earlier, he’d strained every muscle in his calves, quads, and buttocks, and had been pushing through the pain with each pedal stroke, but now he felt as if he were made out of wood.
By the time they’d ascended five hundred vertical feet, the smoke on the road behind them began to get sketchy. They were catching glimpses of Giancarlo up ahead, and astonishingly he was holding his own; he may even have gained ground since they began. Was it possible Muldaur and Zak had shot their wad on the earlier climbs and Giancarlo was now beating them the way Stephens had been?
Without speaking about it, Zak and Muldaur both stopped at one of the drainage canals cut diagonally across the road. He knew these mountains probably received 150 inches of rain a year; the shallow ditches were important for preserving roads that otherwise might be washed away by rainwater. Breathing heavily, they stopped and angled their bikes so they could see down the hillside. The sky showed some blue, but it was mostly a gauzy pale gray. Below, over the lake, a thick residue of smoke lay in the basin like a deformed cake. On the opposite side they could see fires burning on the far mountain. They had only one option, and the fact that they were on their way cheered Muldaur just a tad. The plateau behind them had acted as a buffer, but sooner or later the fires would be coming up this road. The most troubling aspect of this route was that if the fire sneaked up behind them, they would have no recourse but to race it to the top of the mountain.
“How far to the top of this?” Zak asked.
“You don’t remember?”
“Do you?”
“I was thinking thirty minutes from the lake?”
“I was going to say forty.”
“Ballpark.”
For a while the road was clear of loose rocks, and they were able to ride side by side. When a helicopter passed overhead, Muldaur said, “Too bad we don’t have a flare gun. We could signal.” Having a possible source of rescue so close at hand while finding themselves helpless to attain it was dispiriting.
Fire began approaching from below and to their left. They couldn’t see it, but they could see the smoke pushing up over the ridge in front of it, moving at twenty-five or thirty miles an hour, the smoke dark and heavy and carrying embers, some of which were large enough that Muldaur was worried about running over one and flatting a tire. Higher up, he could see the hurricane winds roiling the landscape. The more he saw, the more depressed he became. By the time he finally heard the Ford truck racing up the slope behind them, Muldaur was just about ready to quit.
58
Stephens knew he would eventually win out, and he had, because his three former riding companions were pedaling in the smoke while he was comfortably ensconced in the backseat of a vehicle costing, with the turbo option, full leather, and GPS, well over a hundred grand.
“So why did your friends kill my brother?” Sitting next to Stephens, Fred slapped the tire iron into his palm.
“Well, now, I don’t know that I would call them friends, Fred. They’re people I went on a weekend ride with. You know them as well as I do.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Which question was that?”
“Don’t play dumb. Why did they push my brother off the cliff?”
Jennifer turned around in her seat and looked at Stephens with an intensity that seemed close to psychotic. He had always been able to charm women, particularly the ones who were dependent on him for raises and annual evaluations, and he wondered why he hadn’t been able to win over this young woman. She’d been as adamant as Fred that he not ride with them.
“I don’t know any more about it than you do. Just what they said. I was just waking up when they were chasing Scooter through the camp.”
“They were chasing him?” Kasey asked.
“That’s what it seemed like.”
“They wanted to get rid of him so there would be no witnesses, right? With no witnesses, they would have told us Chuck and Scooter both fell off, one of them trying to save the other.”
“All I know is they said it was an accident, and Scooter caused it.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it!” said Finnigan.
“Well, uh, yes…it probably…I’m just relating…because they’re saying it, doesn’t make it true. Hey, look. I barely know those guys.”
Suddenly Stephens was aware that the Porsche was pointed down the mountain. “We’re not going down, are we?”
“Take a look.”
“You’re making a mistake.”
“Who’s driving? Me or you?” Kasey stopped the Porsche in the middle of the road. Although the smoke wasn’t as thick or settled as it had been half a mile back on the plateau, they could see only 150 feet now.
“I don’t see any fire,” said Fred.
“Oh, it’s down there,” said Stephens. “Look at those scorched treetops.”
“Whatever was here is gone now.”
“I’m telling you, it was…the flames were thirty feet high. Fifty feet high. I don’t mind admitting I’ve never been so scared in my life. It’s completely unpredictable. Why take a chance?”
“Where’d it go?” Kasey asked.
“I’m not sure. At one point it was in front of us. The wind was blowing every which way.”
“If it was in front of you, you’d be dead,” said Fred, matter-offactly. “Jesus. You guys are all liars.”
“Why don’t you call them?” Kasey said, handing a walkie-talkie to Jennifer. “See what Scooter found down here?”
While she tried to raise Scooter, Kasey let the Porsche roll down the hill.
“I can’t raise them,” said Jennifer.
“Jesus!” Fred Finnigan exclaimed. The Porsche slid to a halt.
Bursting through a cloud of smoke, the Ford pickup was speeding up the hill backward, slewing from side to side on the narrow road. Beyond the pickup a large, dark cloud was chasing it up the mountain like something out of a cartoon. In another fifteen seconds the Ford would collide with the Porsche, and the cloud would overtake them all. Kasey pushed the gear lever into reverse, wrenched around to look out the back window, and floored the accelerator.
When they got to the top, Scooter rolled down the window in the Ford and yelled at them, “Did you see that?”
“See it?” Kasey yelled back. “It almost caught all of us.”
Af
ter they turned around and were racing along the level roads in the woods, Stephens twisted around to evaluate the luggage space behind the rear seats. If they weren’t hauling too much gear, he would importune Kasey to stop and pick up his bicycle. There was no point in leaving a three-thousand-dollar machine out here where the fire would destroy it. He pulled one corner of the storage cover up. “Jesus Christ! What’s he doing here?” Morse’s eyes were open, and his head was twisted to one side, grit and pebbles imprinted into both cheeks. His dull, dried-out eyes appeared to be staring directly at Stephens.
Fred looked over his shoulder casually and said, “Kasey likes carrying him around. We were thinking of mounting him on the hood when we drive back into town.”
Nobody else spoke. Still turned toward the back, Stephens peered out the rear window. Flames had come up the hill and were licking the opening to the woods behind them, highlighting the dark tunnel of trees alongside the road with a brilliant burst of flame. They were actually being chased now, and by a fire that had traversed a quarter mile in only a few minutes.
“Jesus!” Stephens said, surprised by his own profanity. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Stephens was no longer in control of his own destiny, and it was making him feel increasingly uneasy. He was riding in the back of a car with a man who detested him and who may or may not have been drinking all day—the floor was littered with empties—and panic seemed to have overtaken the driver in a way he hadn’t witnessed in any of the cyclists. That was the attribute he admired most about the firefighters, the fact that they were able to take every adverse circumstance in stride, although their gallows humor was certainly annoying and even puzzling. At least they were never on the verge of losing their minds the way these people seemed to be.
Several times the Porsche strayed to the side of the road in the smoke, and either Jennifer or Fred had to scream at Kasey to get him back on track. On top of everything else, the engine was beginning to misfire. “Maybe we should stop and take out the air filter,” said Stephens. “It’s probably clogged from all this smoke in the air.” Kasey’s reply was to slam his foot on the accelerator. The flames in his rearview mirror had scared the wits out of him. Stephens himself was shaking, more frightened now than he’d been all day. Fred’s nostrils were tinged with soot. The interior of the car was full of smoke. If he didn’t know better, Stephens would have thought Fred was whimpering.
They were past the lake now, heading northeast. It was the same road he’d ridden up with the others before resting at the mine, and Stephens knew that once they reached the loose network of logging roads that crisscrossed the top of the mountain, they would most likely be safe. The only problem would be getting there. What worried him was that if the Ford stalled in front of them, there wouldn’t be enough room on this narrow road for them to maneuver around it. In other words, they would all be on foot, all six of them. After half a mile when they broke out of the smoke, Fred and Stephens both turned around so they could peer back down the mountain. Flames had burst through the lumpy mound of smoke that had been sitting over the lake. It was hard to tell how high they were, but Stephens estimated some at a hundred feet or higher, dancing up through the smoke at intervals before dying back down. The road they’d been on only minutes earlier had turned into a death trap.
Some of the trees behind them were tall—a hundred feet or so—and he knew how dry they were and how fast they would burn once ignited. Every year after the holidays, he burned his Christmas tree out behind his house, and it never failed to go up like a Roman candle. They were driving up an entire mountainside of them. As if to emphasize the point, a gust of wind dropped a chunk of burning material in front of the Porsche.
Kasey ran over one of the rain-diversion culverts at speed, and their heads all bumped the roof. Stephens bit his tongue. Fred cursed. Jennifer cried out. Kasey slowed enough to regain control of the vehicle, then sped up again. “Watch out for my friends,” Stephens said. “They’re probably on this road.”
“I thought we were your friends,” Fred said, elbowing Stephens hard. Stephens tried not to stare at his enormous arm muscles or at Fred’s hair and eyebrows, which were bleached from too much sun.
This was, he thought, a weekend of curious allegiances: first to the cyclists, because his commonality with them was their commitment to physical fitness, exercise addicts who congratulated themselves on their addiction, telling themselves how fortunate they were not to be addicted to something worse, like booze or drugs or gambling. His connection to Newcastle and these others had more to do with class than behavior. They were all of the same class, some by virtue of birth, but all by virtue of income. While it was true that each of these people, except perhaps Jennifer Moore, had been born to privilege, Stephens had accumulated enough money and investments during the past fifteen years that he felt at ease, if not at one with them.
Stephens knew by the amount of dust flying around on the road in front of them that they were gaining on the white Ford. If that was true, they were gaining on the cyclists, too.
The smoke had thickened and was blacker. The wind was picking up. From the way the road arched around the face of the mountain, Stephens realized the fire they were running from might soon be alongside them. On this stretch, they could not see far enough through the trees to know where the blaze was for sure, but judging from the smudges in the sky, it was on their left and moving forward quickly.
“There’s one now,” said Fred, leaning forward until his nose was nearly touching Jennifer’s earlobe. “Run him down. Run that murdering bastard down.”
Kasey increased his speed as he passed the cyclists, and for one terrible moment Stephens thought he was going to hit them, but Kasey made no move to sideswipe the bikes. As they overtook the first cyclist, a sweep of heat, smoke, and jagged orange flashes reached up through the trees on their left and licked the roadway. Stephens began to feel the heat from the flames through the broken-out rear windows.
They drove through the gauntlet of burning trees and kept going, and as they did so it grew deathly quiet inside the Porsche. It was clear to everyone that they were leaving the cyclists to die.
No matter how hard he tried, Stephens couldn’t stifle the thought that they were all going to die. He’d been scared earlier in the day, and a couple of times he’d been close to panic, but until this moment he’d never felt he might not make it. He wasn’t sure what Kasey and the others were thinking, but they were all as stiff as he was.
While they were traveling faster than the cyclists, this narrow and treacherous road didn’t allow them to travel over twenty-five miles per hour, so as they passed them, each biker was able to get a gander at Stephens inside the Porsche. He hadn’t been counting on that. The first was Muldaur, who seemed to be suffering as much as any man could. The look of shock on Muldaur’s face when he recognized Stephens in the Porsche was exceeded only by the bitter look Zak gave him a moment later. Giancarlo, unexpectedly the lead rider of this trio, had the temerity to flip him the bone. Stephens knew they were disappointed that he’d circumvented their group negotiations to make a deal for himself, but hey…there was survival and then there was everything else. If they weren’t smart enough to figure that out, it wasn’t his fault.
And then it happened. The eventuality Stephens had been warning the others about for some minutes now. The white Ford in front of them had stopped in the middle of the road, was actually rolling down the hill backward. The brake lights came on and the engine, which had stalled, roared back to life. Momentarily. Then a cloud of black smoke poured out the tailpipe, and the truck stalled again.
There was barely enough room for the Porsche to squeeze past, and even then its driver’s-side wheels were bouncing over the rocks that rimmed the road. Kasey swung out even farther. The driver’s door on the Ford popped open, then closed when the driver realized the Porsche was about to take the door off.
After they were safely in front of the disabled Ford, Stephens turned around a
nd saw Bloomquist and Scooter climbing out of the tall cab. Behind Scooter, maybe two hundred yards down the mountain now, a stand of trees burst into flame. The three cyclists were in front of the flames, but only barely. Stephens couldn’t take his eyes off them. They were about to be roasted. He couldn’t believe it.
Bloomquist and Scooter yelled for the Porsche to stop, but the Porsche engine was running rough, too, so maybe Kasey was afraid if he stopped and let it idle it would quit, that they would all die. Or maybe he was afraid that if he stopped, the fire would overtake them in those few seconds. Or the cyclists would. It was hard to know why he floored the accelerator, speeding into a bank of black smoke that had drifted onto the road, but he did. Stephens felt sick about it, but still he was glad they hadn’t stopped.
“Slow down,” Jennifer yelled. “We need to pick them up.”
“You’re going to crash,” said Fred. “Can you even see?”
Stephens could feel the rocks under the car as they edged off the road. They rolled sideways and then hit a tree and came to rest, rear wheels spinning, the Porsche canted at a forty-five-degree angle. Now they’d done it. Now they were on foot, too. Without knowing how, Stephens found himself on the road blundering through a web of smoke, running. He couldn’t see the fire racing up the mountain behind them, but he could hear its dull roar.
All six of them had been relegated to climbing the mountain on foot. And, of course, the cyclists were so far back they were all probably dead by now.
59
Zak was surprised to see Stephens in the backseat wearing a smug look of satisfaction. It took a couple of seconds for it to sink in, but when it did Zak found himself enraged to the point that he actually felt a wave of energy run through his limbs. Good. Anything to help propel him to the top of the mountain in front of the fire. It was the first shot of adrenaline he’d felt in a long while, and it perked him up. It was one thing to get chased up a mountain by fire, another to die while one of your erstwhile friends gloated over it. Zak would have ridden through hell to wipe the self-satisfied look off Stephens’s face.
