High Desert Barbecue

by J. D. Tuccille

  Twice she passed by small cairns left by earlier hikers. Each marked a faint trail that wound up and into the distance. Tempted though she was, she knew that any diversion from the canyon floor itself would leave her truly on her own; Scott and Rollo would have no idea where she was. Worse, Rollo had warned his companions that, while trails official, unofficial and recognized solely by the animal kingdom did wander through the area, the best she could hope for was to emerge on a jeep road miles from help—or even water. Other trails just led further into wilderness.

  So onward she walked.

  It was several hours later, as the shadows grew longer, when she heard gunshots behind her, in the distance.

  Chapter 42

  With Ray leading the way, Jason’s team trudged slowly, tentatively and with varying degrees of enthusiasm (or lack thereof) down the canyon. As if to make up for the recent rains, the sun blazed down and glared off the rocks and in their eyes. The blue sky overhead featured a few puffy, postcard-ready clouds that carried too little moisture to so much as settle the rising dust.

  Monsoon season was like that—drowning you one moment and baking you the next.

  The group had made remarkably little progress in the past few hours—nobody but the silver-diapered park ranger seemed enthusiastic about rushing ahead. Terry and Bob, in particular, favored frequent rest stops and a slow pace.

  But they all realized that only a severe case of sunburn camouflaged the red flush of Ray’s rage. Nobody revived the earlier conversation about turning back.

  “Take it easy, Ray,” Jason cautioned. He did his best to inject confidence into his voice so he’d sound like he was in charge.

  “Why?”

  “So you don’t get yourself ambushed.”

  The man responded with a growl.

  “If I go any slower, we’ll be going backwards.”

  “Well … be careful.”

  Ray snorted.

  “If you’re worried about me, let somebody else take point.”

  “Uh … sure. How about—”

  Ray whirled around.

  “I know. How about Bob?” He cupped his free hand to his mouth. “Hey, Bob, you courageous cow killer. Get your ass up here!”

  A faint voice drifted from the end of the column.

  “Ummm … What do you need me for?”

  “To take the lead. Jason wants you to test for traps and such.”

  Jason’s eyes widened.

  “Hey, that’s not what I—”

  “Get up here, Bob!”

  The dejected-looking activist stepped slowly to the front, his rifle dragging from his hand. The skin of his chest and shoulders was filmed with sweat and dirt. His wispy beard was caked with a rime of salt from dried perspiration.

  “Jason, I don’t know that I want to do this.”

  Jason placed his hand on the environmentalist’s shoulder in what he hoped was a reassuring gesture.

  “It’s all right. We’ll all take turns.”

  Ray chuckled.

  “No worries. Bob’s a seasoned combat veteran. He’ll do just fine.” He stepped closer to Bob. “If anybody shoots at you, just think of him as a mammalian menace.”

  Bob seemed to slump in his skin.

  “OK.”

  The column got underway once again.

  “Don’t worry, Bob. I’m sure—”

  The unhappy activist’s rifle flew forward, out of his hand, as he fell backward. Red spurted from his shoulder.

  Newly developed reflexes sent the rest of the team diving for cover before they were consciously aware of the gunshots echoing from the canyon walls.

  Chapter 43

  Scott heard the bickering long before he spotted any targets.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “Not again.”

  He glanced up the face of the cliff, looking for a sign that his friend was returning. He got a double eyeful of nothing for his trouble. The rocks and shrubs hung as still as photographs, revealing no motion.

  The rains of the previous day were a forgotten memory, and each breath was molten.

  “Shit.”

  His face was wet with perspiration, which oozed past the sweatband of his cap. Individual drops of sweat crawled across his scalp with a sensation like tiny bugs marching in column. Pulled low over his eyes, what remained of the bullet-damaged brim of the cap cut the glare and gave him a clear view of the canyon floor.

  Reflected by the high walls of dirt and stone, disembodied voices tramped through the canyon like an expedition of dyspeptic phantoms—perhaps the ghosts of ill-tempered cowboys past.

  Though Scott would have liked to believe that real-life cowboys wouldn’t sound so much like a married couple counting the days to a nasty divorce.

  Lagging behind the flapping of lips, a lone figure came into view around a bend in the canyon. A moment later, his—or her—companions followed.

  Remembering how his earlier mercy had been repaid, Scott didn’t hesitate to bring his borrowed .22 rifle to bear on the leader. Sprawled prone on his rock ledge, he rested the barrel on his balled-up left fist. He peered through the peephole rear sight, focusing on the front sight resting against the blurry image of his target, and slowly squeezed the trigger.

  Accustomed to the kick of his .45 pistol, he barely noticed the slight recoil of the little rifle.

  He’d fired four rounds before the first answering shots etched the stone around him.

  Chapter 44

  The seatbelt held Tim in place as the Park Service truck lost its traction through the curve on the dirt road and slipped sideways. Brake, gas, steering wheel. He operated the controls simultaneously, in a combination that would have been catastrophic if catastrophe weren’t already under way.

  He had time to contemplate the oncoming ditch and brace himself before the world turned upside down. The engine screamed, Tim screamed and the truck shuddered through a roll. Over, over, thump! His head slammed into the thin padding of the roof. Something crunched and the windshield shattered before his eyes.

  Instinctively, he clamped his eyelids shut.

  The truck came to rest. Tim hung suspended sideways by his seatbelt. He fumbled with the clasp and unfastened his restraints, immediately tumbling into the passenger seat. Now he was wedged in place. The cab of the vehicle confined him, the air clouded with dust drifting through the new gap in the windshield.

  Tim struggled to right himself, caught between the seat and the dashboard. Losing skin in the process, he forced himself into a more traditional orientation with gravity: feet down, head up. At least, he thought that’s how it was—he couldn’t really see through the choking cloud kicked up by the accident.

  He found the driver’s-side door handle and pushed. The door, miraculously, opened, then fell back down into place. He pulled himself up, pushed again, and climbed out of the cab of the truck.

  Moments later, he stood above the vehicle, by the side of Sycamore Canyon Road, assessing the situation.

  Tim felt bruised and battered, but not injured in any important way. A sizable knot was forming on his head, but that seemed to be the worst of the damage.

  The truck looked worse, but not mortally injured. The front windshield was shattered and dents marred nearly the entire surface of the vehicle. The engine had stopped sometime during the roll, which caused Tim some concern, though he was vaguely thankful that the crash hadn’t turned into a fiery wreck. He remembered plenty of movies in which crashes automatically turned into balls of flame. He didn’t know how close Hollywood crashes came to the real deal, but he figured a temporarily dead engine was better than premature cremation.

  The most serious issue seemed to be the truck’s orientation, resting on its side at the edge of the ditch like a sick beast. However intact its vital parts might be, the truck wasn’t going anywhere until its tires once again touched earth.

  As Tim examined the mess, his relief at coming through the wreck unscathed began to morph into rage at betrayal by his means of trans
portation. His face grew red and he charged back to the truck. He braced himself by the roof and leaned his full strength and weight against the wounded vehicle. It rolled forward, and then rocked back. He pushed again. It rolled again, a little farther, and then rocked back against him, threatening to topple over and crush him beneath its weight.

  Unheeding, Tim threw himself against the vehicle once more. It moved, teetered on the edge of either a final return to its wheels or a crashing flop onto its back. He called on reserves of strength and pushed just a bit more.

  The truck slammed into the ditch, rocking on its suspension with its wheels once again in contact with the ground. All was right—at least righter—with the world.

  The moisture in his body seemed to have migrated from his mouth to his armpits, where it rapidly evaporated through the fabric of his shirt into the Arizona air. Wheezing a little, Tim fetched his backpack from the truck’s enclosed cargo area and sucked a long draught through the water hose. He checked his hip—his gun was still in its holster.

  An inspection tour of the truck revealed a new problem: the right rear tire was blown. He didn’t have a chance of getting back on the road, let alone to the trailhead, until it was fixed.

  Soon, sitting on the spare tire with a lug wrench in his hands, he wrestled to remove stubborn lugnuts. One nut didn’t want to budge; whoever had last put it into place had paid no attention to the threads. Instead, they’d just cranked at it until it refused to turn any more. He put his full body into turning the wrench, leaning with his weight until it creaked and, suddenly, gave way.

  A sharp pain shot through one finger. Howling, Tim peered at the mangled tip. The nail was torn almost completely away. Blood oozed and then dripped from the finger and down his hand. He whimpered slightly, then stood and hammered his uninjured hand on the roof of the truck.

  He caught his breath and forced himself to sit back down. He removed the remnants of the nail, and then went back to work.

  The spare tire went into place in short order.

  Tim left the jack and the ruined tire lying in the dirt as he made his way to the driver’s door and eased himself into the seat. A trail of red drops marked his passage. He rested the lug wrench on the dash and slipped the key into the ignition. It turned.

  Nothing happened.

  He turned the key again.

  Not a whisper or a groan came from the engine.

  With an animal growl, Tim erupted from the truck. He slammed the lug wrench into the hood, leaving a deep dent. He backed up and cocked his right leg, unleashing a powerful kick into the left front quarter panel.

  Something stretched and snapped in his ankle. He dropped to the ground with his mouth open in a silent howl. With his eyes screwed closed, bright flashes of light synchronized with the throbs of pain. He couldn’t quite catch his breath.

  He had no idea how long he’d been there when he heard the engine noise. It was a low buzz, off in the distance, but growing louder.

  Dragging the injured foot, Tim climbed up the edge of the ditch and back onto the road. Every step was an agony.

  There, down the road, he could see a vehicle approaching. It came closer, closer. The distinctive outlines of a Subaru Outback emerged through shimmers sent up by the desert heat.

  Favoring his right ankle, the battered ranger limped to the middle of the road. He waved for the car to stop. The lug wrench wagged from its firm grip in his left hand, dried blood crusted his right arm, and a large knot distorted the outline of his head.

  “Slow the fuck down, goddamnit,” Tim screamed. He waved his arms frantically.

  The car seemed to slow momentarily, then put on a burst of speed. With a roar it rushed past him.

  Tim coughed and spat dust in the wake of the speeding Subaru. It skidded into a turn and disappeared around the bend, chased by his curses.

  Sweating and filthy, the enraged ranger threw his lug wrench to the ground. It landed ineffectively in the dirt. He limped over to the wrench, picked it up, and hurled it again. This time, it bounced off the hard-packed dirt of the road, flew across the ditch, and smashed into the driver’s-side window. The safety glass shattered into hundreds of round-edged fragments.

  Red-faced, Tim clenched his fists and screamed. Then, he sagged and sighed. Laboriously, he eased himself down into the ditch and retrieved his backpack.

  Moments later, he began hobbling, ever so slowly, along the long road leading to the Sycamore Canyon trailhead.

  Chapter 45

  Truth to tell, one patch of scrubby forest could look pretty much like another patch, even to a seasoned desert rat like Rollo. Fortunately, Rollo was experienced enough to know that, and he had a hatful of tricks for marking trails and recording the location of caches. He knew to take sightings on prominent and permanent—well, permanent in human terms—landmarks. He left cairns and other signs that he could read, but that didn’t reveal too much to outsiders.

  Then again, time and imperfect memory have a way of defeating even careful planners, let alone cheerful misfits with a taste for beer and fine dope.

  “Goddamnit!” Rollo yelled for the third time in ten minutes.

  Dirt caked his arms up to his elbows, as well as his knees and chest. A base layer of grime etched by streams of perspiration marked his face like aboriginal war paint. Before him a two-foot deep pit gaped dark and empty. Within easy view, two other holes of equally recent vintage bared their emptiness to the sky, promising nothing but sprained limbs to unwary travelers.

  “It’s around here. I know it.”

  The sun burned blazed in the sky, heating his hat until it felt like a campfire smoldered over his pate. He spat dust, and wished he’d been smart enough to bring a water bottle when he’d dumped his pack. This was supposed to be a quick trip up and back—that’s what he’d promised Scott, anyway. Instead, it had turned into a scavenger hunt. And he was the scavenger, burrowing into the earth with his hands and a broken branch for want of anything better.

  He was sure—almost sure—that he had the right place. The scenery looked familiar. He’d found what he knew was an old blaze he’d carved in a tree, and then, a few minutes later, another.

  But that scattering of rocks … Was that what the years had done to one of his old cairns? Of the others, he’d seen no sign. Animals walking by and seasons of rain could easily have tumbled the stones in all directions.

  That left him digging at random in the general area of his old cache. He hoped. And so he burrowed into the ground with his hands, tossing a plume of dirt in the air behind him like an inept badger and challenging the durability of his increasingly creaky knees.

  Crap.

  Something chattered mockingly from within a thorny pile of scrub a few yards ahead of him.

  “Chee-chee-chee-chee.”

  He wrapped the fingers of his right hand around a clod of earth, damp from the recent rain, and compacted it into a ball. He flung the missile as hard as he could.

  “Laugh at that you fuc—”

  Overbalanced by the pitch, he lost his grip on the edge of the pit and slipped forward into the hole. His hands shot out to grasp the edges but slid through the crumbly earth without gaining any traction. A moment later, he spat soil from between his lips and sent up another round of curses to singe the sensitivities of the wildlife.

  As he pulled himself out of the pit, his fingers brushed against something hard and curved. He quickly dug into the wall of he hole he’d made, revealing a piece of what was clearly a large, plastic cylinder.

  “Hallelujah!”

  Some time later, a five-foot length of PVC pipe capped at both ends lay on a pile of loose dirt (and one of Rollo’s fingernails). Sweaty, dirty, bleeding from a half-dozen minor abrasions, and looking more feral than ever, Rollo laughed maniacally.

  The feral man gripped one of the caps and began to twist. He grunted. He sweated some more. Finally, he stopped to catch his breath. He examined the cap closely.

  “Son of a bitch.”

&
nbsp; Now Rollo lay down, clamping the cylinder between his knees. He gripped the cap with both hands and exerted himself again. A wild grin played across his face.

  Slowly, the cap began to turn.

  Chapter 46

  “Why am I the only one shooting back?” Jason screamed. He crouched behind cover that consisted of a manzanita bush and a few rocks—not much protection, but all he had at hand. His rifle poked through the bush, resting loosely on a branch. He crouched as low as possible, grasping the rifle with just his right hand and squeezing off rounds with little attention paid to aim.

  “I’m shooting,” Ray answered calmly. He knelt behind even sparser cover, firing aimed shots at a spot well up the canyon wall. A twig near his head exploded into fragments, and the man barely flinched before firing again.

  Jason glanced around, looking for somebody or something else to focus on other than the person trying to kill him and his colleagues.

  “What about the rest of you?”

  Terry sat well to the rear, leaning against a bank of earth carved by the high water brought by Monsoon rains and spring snowmelt. He covered his head with his hands and rocked back and forth.

  “Shit,” Jason muttered. He looked to Samantha and his eyes softened. She smiled back.

  “Is there anything—?”

  She held up a magazine from her rifle and pointed it toward him so he could see that it was empty.

  “Oh shit.”

  She pointed to where Rena carefully tended Bob’s wound out of sight of the shooter ahead.

  “Them, too, I think.” She shrugged sheepishly. “Sorry.”

  Jason began sucking wind in convulsive sips and the world seemed to spin. He let go of his rifle and cupped his head in his hands. This expedition was supposed to be an idealistic lark. He and his comrades had set out to drive human habitation from the high desert pine forest in the name of all that was good and green.