Primal Threat (22 page)

37

T
hey’d been dodging the trucks for hours now, trying to make their way to safety. Zak knew that Stephens had a fair idea of which direction they should be heading, but it seemed as if every time they began making progress, the trucks would trundle past, a rifle bristling out the passenger’s window of the big white Ford. Each time they dived into the woods with their bikes and hid as best they could; after the trucks passed they returned to the road and pedaled for a while, ears cocked. It was dodgy because several times the trucks had doubled back within a few moments of passing them.

Having stumbled upon one of the primary routes back down the mountain, they’d stopped at a ledge and gazed out over the panorama of Seattle’s skyscrapers far in the distance, unsure whether the trucks were below them or in the woods behind them and not knowing which direction to take.

They’d spent most of the morning climbing, getting shot at, and then meandering around this huge, forested plateau on various logging roads in an effort to keep one step ahead of the Jeeps. After escaping from the Lake Hancock basin a mere thirty seconds ahead of the trucks, they’d climbed one of several offshoot roads Stephens later said ended at three of the best fishing lakes in the state. They had been forced to hide, and not very well, when the trucks came roaring up behind them. Although the trucks didn’t stop, Zak could have sworn they’d been spotted by the guy in the Jeep who’d been last in line, Ryan Perry. He looked right at Zak, eyeball-to-eyeball, but kept going. It was the closest they’d come to getting caught, and Zak wondered if he’d really been spotted and Perry, for some unknowable reason, was covering for them.

Once the trucks had passed, they descended the twisty mountain road at breakneck speeds, expecting the vehicles to be on their heels, yet they didn’t come back down for quite some time. Had the cyclists continued to the top, they would have been trapped where the trees thinned out at just over five thousand feet. Two hours had passed since the close call, and now they were on the lip of the Cascades looking out at most of western Washington, including Seattle, Bellevue, and parts of Puget Sound. “We could go down the hill here,” said Zak, “but we might be riding into their laps.”

“I think we should stand in the road and talk to them,” said Stephens. “They’re not going to shoot us. At least not with us looking them in the eye.”

“You want to bet your life on it?” said Muldaur.

“They’re not psychos.”

“No, they’re not psychos,” said Zak. “But for some reason they’re acting that way.”

“What they are,” said Giancarlo, “is a bunch of out-of-control, spoiled rich kids who got pissed off and decided to take the law into their own hands.”

“Easy there on the rich-kid stuff, Giancarlo. You’re starting to sound like Zak.” Muldaur laughed.

Muldaur had, over the course of the past hours, become the de facto leader of the quartet. It was natural for Zak and Giancarlo to take orders from him—they both knew him as a lieutenant in the fire department—but where Stephens worked
he
was the boss, and he clearly resented taking a backseat. Still, in the last hour they’d worked as a cohesive unit under Muldaur’s leadership.

Stephens looked around the group. “I think they’re behind us.”

“There are no recent car tracks anywhere here,” said Giancarlo, stooping over the road. He’d become their unofficial tracker by virtue of his hunting experience and had already twice shown them where they needed to cover their tracks in the dust to keep from giving away their route.

“No tracks doesn’t mean they’re not below us,” said Zak. “They could have taken another road.” Zak figured they could see at least fifty miles to the west, south, and north. To the east behind them lay an area clogged with old stumps that stretched for fifty yards before the dark woods began.

“Hear that?” said Zak. “A truck!”

“Which way’s it coming?” Giancarlo asked, mounting his bike.

Muldaur glanced down the hill and said, “Not from down there.”

“Which way do we go?” Stephens was on his bicycle. “Down or back? I have to warn you, this is a nasty downhill.”

“Let’s head for those trees over there,” said Muldaur, running with his bike and mounting it on the fly. The four of them barely made the trees before the Land Rover hove into view from the shadowy road. They found a hollow where they were all able to duck down and hide.

Peering through a stack of dead trees and stumps the logging companies had dumped twenty years earlier, Zak found a perfect spy hole from which to observe the Land Rover 150 feet away. He watched as Scooter and Ryan Perry got out and took up the identical positions Muldaur and Zak had abandoned moments earlier. Scooter had a rifle in his hands.

Zak looked down at his crocheted cycling gloves and realized his hands were shaking. He couldn’t believe how angry he was.

From time to time Scooter would jerk the rifle to his shoulder and peer through the scope as if practicing to shoot at a moment’s notice. Zak turned to Muldaur and whispered, “You fart this close, they’re going to hear it.”

“I’ll make it sound like a 12-gauge,” said Muldaur. “We can get away while they’re ducking for cover.”

“You guys are gross,” said Stephens.

“I have an idea,” said Muldaur. “If they go down the hill, we’ll follow them. It’s a narrow track, but if we can get in front, we might get them to chase us.”

“Chase?” whispered Stephens. “Are you nuts? Why would we put ourselves in the line of fire?”

“Look how steep that road is. Scooter’ll crash trying to keep up.”

“What if he doesn’t? What if we crash?”

“It’s too chancy,” said Giancarlo, who was their best descender and whose opinion in this matter Zak valued above the others’. “Maybe one guy could pull it off, but even that would be dicey.”

“That’s why they won’t be expecting it,” said Muldaur. “It’ll drive Scooter insane to see two of us come past. And that Land Rover is high and tippy. You saw him last night. He’s a crappy driver.”

“He got super-pissed when we beat him,” said Zak. “If we did it again, he would really be mad.”

“I think it’s a bad idea,” whispered Stephens. “You can beat them down, maybe, but at the bottom the road runs flat along the river for a good bit before it gets to the bridge. If they don’t crash, they’ll catch you on that section.”

“If we do it right they’ll crash,” said Muldaur. “Somebody come with me.”

“It’s suicide,” said Stephens.

Muldaur looked at Giancarlo, who said, “My leg. I can’t do it.”

“Zak?”

“Chase them down the hill?”

“One of us on either side. Scare the piss out of them.”

“They’ll shoot at us when we come by.”

“They’ll be lucky if they keep all their teeth in their mouths going down that mountain.”

“So will we.”

“Are you coming with me?”

“I wish we knew the road better.”

When Scooter and his companion got into the Land Rover and disappeared slowly over the lip of the mountain, Muldaur pedaled through the weeds and rocks to the road. By the time Zak caught him, he’d already reached the juncture where the road headed downhill. Zak took the wheel rut on the right side of the road, while Muldaur took the one on the left.

38

“
T
his thing just doesn’t seem right,” said Perry, holding the armrest on the door with one hand, bracing himself against the dashboard with his other. In an attempt to further wedge himself in, he had one foot on the seat and his knee in his chest. The Land Rover was rocking so violently Perry felt like a shoe banging around inside a washing machine. He’d already bit his tongue and smacked his elbow on the window, and now that Scooter was beginning to pick up speed, he’d fumbled for his seat belt so many times he gave up. It was all he could do to keep from bouncing through a window and landing on the road.

This was by far the worst road they’d seen so far—and they’d been on some doozies—rocky as heck, the pitches changing every fifteen or twenty feet, off camber at the worst times, with more frequent and rockier rain diversions across it than anything they’d seen until now. Much of the road surface seemed to be granite, slick and hard, and there were loose rocks everywhere. There was no telling how many months or years since anybody drove it.

The only good part was that Perry was able to see the panoramic view out to the west, at least when his teeth weren’t clacking together. Scooter had his eyes glued to the road, wrestling the steering wheel as if it were alive, cursing every time they hit a bump, pumping the brakes and letting them go and then jamming them again, engaging the ABS system four times in just the first hundred yards. It was almost as if he were deliberately trying to pitch Perry through the windshield.

And then in a flash their situation changed. Whooping like wild Indians on a raiding party, two orange-clad cyclists passed them, one on either side, flashing down the hill at almost twice the speed of the Land Rover.

They’d come so close to their windows and had startled Scooter so badly he momentarily lost control of the vehicle. Perry smashed his head against the roof and yelled, “Shit!” It came out
thit.

“Jesus! What was that? Bastards!”

“Don’t chase them,” said Perry. “They’re going too fast.”

Scooter sped up anyway. It was reckless, and Perry was about to tell him to slow down when Scooter thrust the rifle at him with one hand. “Pump some lead into those assholes.” Incredibly, without losing control of the vehicle, Scooter had snatched the rifle from the floor in the back. They hit another bump and Perry’s head made contact with the roof again, causing him to see stars. The rifle smacked him in the face and then flew into the backseat, where it bounced into the cargo area in the far rear.

“Shoot those fuckers.”

“Are you kidding? It’s all I can do to keep from going through the roof.”

“Ass wipe.”

They passed a small waterfall, the water rushing under the roadway through a culvert. Then the road flattened and turned left, gigantic rocks on either side. It swung right and began descending along the edge of the mountain again. Somewhere between the time Ryan lost his grip on the rifle and the waterfall, they lost sight of the cyclists. When they came back into view there was only one rider, and he’d lost most of his speed. “Where’s the other fucker?” Scooter asked.

“I don’t know. Slow down and quit swearing. Maybe the other guy went off a cliff.”

“We can only hope.”

“
We’re
going to go off a cliff if you don’t slow down.”

“Quit being such a pansy. We almost have him.”

Perry’s tongue was swelling where he’d bitten it, and he could taste iron as his mouth filled with blood. Twice in the last hundred yards the suspension had bottomed out with a horrible metallic clunking, and twice they’d hit so hard Perry thought he’d sprained his neck. He was being jostled so that his voice came out in a warble. Whatever else was going on, they must have been making the cyclist nervous, because the remaining rider kept turning his head half a notch so he could chart their progress in his peripheral vision. Perry could see no obvious reason for the cyclist’s sudden decrease in speed. Whatever prompted it, the cyclist looked to be in complete control, while Scooter was barely able to keep the Land Rover on the narrow, snaking track.

Gradually they drew close enough that Perry could see it was the retarded guy. As soon as he realized who it was, Scooter began driving even more recklessly, edging closer to the rear wheel of the bike. “Stay still, motherfucker! I’m going to run you down.”

“Quit cursing,” said Ryan.

“Go fuck yourself.”

“You’re going to get us killed!” Just as he spoke, they slid partially off the road and sideswiped a sheer wall. Perry was surprised he’d yelled, and even more surprised at how high-pitched his voice sounded. He hadn’t flung such anger at anyone in years. The noise the Land Rover made when it contacted the rocks merged into the excruciating staccato cacophony coming from Perry’s mouth when he realized they were both about to die.

“Look. We can tag this bastard. Watch me tag him.”

“Can’t you see he’s toying with you?”

“No way. All I have to do is put on a little pressure and he’ll go off into the trees. If we catch him, I bet I can make him tell me where the others went.”

The cyclist slowed on a piece of road about twenty feet long, a section less steep than the rest. He raised his left hand above his head and gave them the one-finger salute, then shot down the hill like a guided missile. Scooter gunned the accelerator.

Ryan stopped talking as they went around a curve that had a drop-off on the left. He could feel a knot growing on his forehead like a unicorn horn. All he could see was air, haze, and blue sky. Scooter turned the wheel too hard, and they went back across the road to the right, where the Land Rover nudged a barrier of rocks, bounced, hit it again, and then without Ryan knowing how, spun around 180 degrees. They were suddenly sailing down the hill backward, the cliff on their right.

Scooter was screaming a torrent of curse words, and then Perry was yelling, too. He heard metal on metal. Metal on rock. Metal on dirt. Metal on trees and brush. Bushes rushing past the sheet metal and windows. He was tumbling inside the car. They seemed to tumble forever. When they finally stopped, all he could hear was steam hissing out a broken engine hose and the stereo, which was still blaring. Scooter was moaning. At first Perry figured Scooter was surely dead, or about to be, while he himself was going to be okay.

Considering what he’d just gone through, Perry felt surprisingly sound. It seemed as if they’d been sliding and rolling and careening forever. It was only when he tried to get out that he realized he couldn’t move. Not an inch. Not his arms or legs or head. Not even his pinkie. In fact, now that they’d stopped tumbling and he’d stopped holding his breath, he came to the sudden realization that he couldn’t breathe, either. He was in a vise of crushed metal, and the vise was so tight he couldn’t expand his lungs or close them. He was so constricted, he could barely squeeze thoughts through his cranium. One thing was certain. If he didn’t get out of this in just a few seconds, he was going to suffocate.

“Somebody help me,” he wanted to say, yet, when he tried to speak, the only thing that happened was a little bit of warm blood trickled down his chin.