Primal Threat (33 page)

“You’ll never find him in all this smoke,” said Muldaur.

“If you go down, you’ll never make it back up,” added Giancarlo.

“I have to go. He’s stuck in the car.”

“Maybe he
was
stuck,” said Muldaur. “But he must have gotten out by now.”

“I can’t take that chance.”

The way Zak saw it, things boiled down to Nadine and how badly he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. If her brother died up here, Zak would lose her. Until he met Nadine, he’d never understood the expression
wanting to grow old with
, but this was the woman he wanted digging in the garden outside his window when he was creaky and aching and his digestion had gone bad…although to be truthful he had no idea whether Nadine liked to garden or not.

“Where’d the fire go?” Zak asked. “Why didn’t it keep coming up?”

The second wildland firefighter, a reedy young man who had been looking nervous since the moment Zak first saw him, said, “We’ve been watching it all day. These mountains have magnified the effects of the wind. There’s no telling. There’s no telling where it’s headed next. I mean, it’s just as likely to hit a section as it is to skip over it. You get anywhere close to it, and it’s going to be like a blowtorch. Down below, they had winds of almost sixty miles an hour. One direction. Then another. It’s the weirdest fire we’ve fought all summer. It’s a bellows effect of the pass that keeps changing things so quickly. You got wind coming through there like a hurricane. They had to close I-Ninety this morning because of the winds.”

“What about the helicopter? We saw a helicopter earlier.”

“They’ve got engine trouble. They’re back in Fall City working on it.”

“So there’s no truck or anything up here?”

“Not unless
you
brought one.”

“Don’t do it!” Muldaur said.

He got up to speed in fifty yards, and then, as soon as he hit the smoke, he held his breath for as long as possible, finding his first intake of smoky air even more foul tasting than he remembered. As he descended, the smoke continued to grow thicker.

There were alternating patches of burnout on the mountainside, so that half a mile down he found a huge charred area, both sides of the road scoured clean, timbers smoldering, and then a quarter mile later the trees were green and unspoiled again. He went through two clean sections and two burned ones. Then the smoke thinned and the wind picked up, and he found himself with a death grip on his handlebars. He knew the fire came right behind the wind and that he was coasting into the most dangerous area.

The mountain had an indentation with a small gully on the right that the road builders had filled in and which became a crease as it climbed the mountain on Zak’s left. It was on this section where Zak found the first body. The fire had roared up the gully, burning everything he could see below and most of the trees in the crease above. The body was facedown in the center of the road, and he couldn’t tell who it was until he turned it over. The clothing that had been pressed against the dirt had kept almost all of its original color, and unless he’d given his Hawaiian shirt to someone else, this was Roger Bloomquist.

Zak let the body sag back to its original position and remounted. On the trip down the mountain he’d been gulping air when there
was
air to gulp, but now he was holding his breath for the simple reason that he was in shock. He’d been a firefighter for seven years, but aside from photos in some early training sessions, he’d never seen a burn victim, at least not a dead one. As he coasted into the bowels of uncertainty, he tried to think about what Bloomquist must have gone through in his last few minutes. He wondered what his last thoughts were, and he wondered, too, what his might be when he got caught by the flames.

The second body was within shouting distance of the first, and had it not been obscured by smoke he would have seen it while he was still bending over the original corpse. He began crying, more at the futility and senselessness of these deaths than anything else. He never cried on the job, but this was different. He’d known these people. And their deaths had been so needless. They might have driven to the top of the mountain a long time ago if they hadn’t tried to go back down through the fire. The second corpse was curled into a ball, arms extended as if picking berries. Closing in on the body, he braked to a stop. How odd that this person had a history and a memory and maybe a thousand or so people who knew his name, and now with only a slight change in wind direction he’d become a lump of charcoal.

He stared for much longer than he probably should have, trying to identify the body without touching it. Eventually, he recognized the leather sandals. He looked for and could barely see the tattoo of a dollar sign on his ankle. Scooter. All of his crap had finally led to his own death. Had Scooter been willing to take Zak’s advice about slowing down, he might have made it out on foot, but in the end even the hideously out-of-shape Bloomquist had overtaken him.

It was hard to believe how far down the mountain he had to coast in the violent winds to find the Porsche. The area around the SUV was untouched, the trees covered with soot and tinted by smoke, but still ripe and awaiting ignition. Ironically, had Scooter and Bloomquist hunkered down here, they might still be alive, because this area was relatively unscathed.

The vehicle was in the ditch where he’d last seen it, both passenger’s-side doors ajar. Because of the extreme tilt, he couldn’t see in the passenger’s-side windows, nor through the windshield, which was starred and partially buried in the dirt and rocks.

Faint music flowed from inside.

Dropping his bike in the center of the road, Zak called out, “Anybody in there?”

He lifted the front door, propping it open with one arm while he peered into the cockpit, which appeared to be empty. An air bag had deployed out of the steering wheel. “Jesus,” Zak said aloud as the implications of this fiasco struck home. He never should have come down the mountain. There were loud crackling sounds nearby as the woods began exploding. The fire, which had skipped over this area on its first pass, was beginning to nudge it again, and the odds of outrunning the flames a second time were infinitesimal.

Just as he was pulling away, he saw what appeared to be a pile of clothing in the driver’s foot well.

The pile began moving.

Kasey was bent almost double, prying at something near his feet with a large, bone-handled knife. His face was stained with tears, and he looked as despondent as anybody Zak had ever seen. “I thought you guys were gone.”

“We thought
you
were gone.”

“My foot’s jammed.”

“Think two of us can get it out?”

“I don’t know.” Suddenly Kasey looked like a kid on Christmas morning. He was twenty and had been facing this alone, and now he had help.

“Just a minute. I need to get something to prop this door open.” Zak clambered off the side of the Porsche and looked around for a limb or a rock. Below their position he could see flames leaping over the tops of trees, dying down, then leaping up again. It was the same fire that had chased them up the mountain, returning now to complete the chore.

All he could do now was pray he had the guts to dive in and get Kasey out, pray that the panic that had paralyzed him at the earlier wreck didn’t return. He knew he was stalling, and every minute he stalled was putting him and Kasey a minute closer to death. He was all too aware that this wasn’t a fire department operation, that he didn’t have people backing him up, that he wasn’t wearing any protective gear. He felt so unbelievably vulnerable with his arms and legs bare. He knew that, should the fire overtake them, nothing burned faster or hotter than the interior of a modern vehicle with its plastic dash and console and synthetic carpets and seats. Even without the gas tank, which almost never exploded except in movies, car fires were hot and dangerous. Everything around them would light up like a small sun.

He hadn’t been away more than a few moments—at least he thought it was only a few moments—when Kasey began yelling. “You still there? Christ, you didn’t leave, did you? You stupid bastard.”

Zak peered into the doorway. “Try to keep the excitement level down to a dull roar, would you?”

“I thought you left.”

“Nobody’s splitting. We go out of here together.”

“It’s too weird. You pulled my sister out of a car. Now you’re pulling me out.”

It was weirder than Kasey knew. He’d rescued Kasey’s sister, but seventeen years earlier had failed to rescue his own.

He’d cheated death when he was eleven; he’d always known that. His destiny had been to crawl inside with Charlene and not come out. He wondered if he was going to cheat death and destiny one more time.

Zak walked around the rear of the Porsche and stooped to pick through the rocks at the edge of the road. When he thought he saw a pair of cycling shorts inside, he stood on tiptoe and peered through the broken rear window. It was Morse. These guys were murderers and liars, and, when this was over, their thousand-dollar-an-hour attorneys were going to blame the deaths on Zak and Muldaur, but all morning they’d been hauling around the body of the man they’d murdered as if it were some sort of trophy.

“Where are you? Are you still there? You’re not making any noise.”

Zak picked up a piece of broken rock and jammed it into the door hinge. “Let me look at what’s going on.”

Thinking it was a miracle he hadn’t been overcome by panic already, Zak slithered into the Porsche, lowering himself past the gearshift console and Kasey Newcastle, who reeked of sweat and fear and the sour smell of old beer. His guess was that a formation of rocks in the ditch had bit into the sheet metal like a fork and jammed his leg.

Zak pulled gently on Kasey’s bare leg. “That hurt?”

“Hell, yes, it hurts. You don’t think I’ve been trying to yank it out?”

Zak was lying half across Kasey’s hips, feeling his body heat against his own already hot flank, their voices close and soft like lovers. “Give me the knife.”

It was dark in the bottom corner of the Porsche where Zak was working, but he quickly calculated what needed to be done. The sheet metal had popped inward and grabbed Kasey’s ankle like some sort of metallic flower so that the bloody flesh and bones of his lower leg were gripped tightly. Using the blade of the knife, Zak began prying the metal out of the way, using a second rock he’d brought with him for leverage.

“Shit! What are you doing to me? Ouch. Shit.”

As he worked inside the Porsche, Zak had to admit he felt safe swathed in all the leather and luxury. Even knowing there was a cadaver in the back didn’t bankrupt the false feeling of refuge.

“I hear the fire,” Kasey said. “How close is it?”

“Close enough that you’re going to have to run on that ankle after I get you out of here.”

“Run on it? I can barely feel it. Maybe if we close the door? Maybe it would go over us.”

“The fire gets anywhere close to this rig, it’ll go up like a road flare.”

“I know you’re a fireman and everything, but are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“It sounds like it’s right outside. Hurry. Damn it, Zak. Hurry.” It was the first time Kasey had ever used Zak’s name.

“Okay. You’re free. Pull your leg out.”

When Kasey scrambled out of the Porsche, he actually used parts of Zak’s body like rungs on a ladder. Zak backed out. By the time he reached the road, flames were close enough that he could feel them on his jersey.

Kasey was already flying up the road on foot.

Because the fire was fingering through the trees on either side of the road, Zak knew this had turned into another footrace. For a moment the fire seemed delayed, yet the instant it gathered some momentum and began marching up the mountain with any sort of certainty, they would both be dead.

Zak picked up his bike and began running alongside it, wondering if he should abandon it. He and Kasey were running at almost the same speed, Kasey 150 yards in front, though he had yet to turn back to see if Zak was okay. And then, as he pushed the bike up the hill, Zak began to lose ground. On Kasey and on the fire.

Running put new stresses on his already overtaxed leg muscles and, as he ran, Zak’s legs began to cramp. If he could get on his bike, it would be better, he thought, as shadows from a cloud of black smoke scudded up the mountain over their heads. He heard an explosion behind him: probably the Porsche’s interior as it reached ignition temperature and burst into flame.

It didn’t irritate Zak that Kasey was ahead of him. What irritated him was that Kasey hadn’t turned around, hadn’t given Zak a second thought. It made him sick to watch panic manipulate people, knowing it could just as easily manipulate him. Ironically, they were running toward the bodies, seeking refuge in what had already proved to be a deadly trap for Kasey’s two friends. The bike began to feel heavier and heavier. He had the feeling that without the additional burden of the bicycle, he might be able to run himself into a groove, and perhaps the stiffness in his legs would ease up, but he didn’t let go of the bike and consequently was forced to slow down. He could hear trees crackling like distant gunfire. His shoulders and the backs of his legs were beginning to grow hot. So this was what it was like to get chased down by a forest fire. This was what it was like to die alone in the woods. At least he would be able to stop moving. He’d been moving all day, and he was so tired…At least he’d be able to rest.

As he pushed his bike up the mountainside, he began thinking about his own impending death. He knew Nadine would eventually go on to marry somebody else. In years to come, he would be the firefighter boyfriend she had that one summer. By the time she had grandchildren, she might not be able to recall his name. There would be a hole in the world where Zak had been, but it would be a very small one, just as in the grand scheme of things, with billions of people on the planet, most humans left rather small holes when they died.

As Zak ran, Kasey cast a glance back over his shoulder for the first time. It was clear from his movements that he wasn’t checking to see how Zak was doing but was instead gauging the distance to the fire.