Those Who Wish Me Dead (9 page)

T
he sun was still visible
above the mountains when Ethan Serbin handed Jace a knife called a Nighthawk. It was all black except for a thread of silver along the razor-sharp edge of its eight-inch-long blade. Ethan wore it on his belt at all times, but now it was in Jace’s hand. It looked like a twin of the one he’d seen pulled through a man’s throat not that long ago. He was afraid his hand was shaking, tried hard to steady it.

“You hold the knife by the blade when you’re passing it to someone,” Ethan said.

“
By
the blade?”

“That’s right. Using the underside, just like this, keeping the dull portion in your palm. You don’t ever want to point the blade at the person you’re giving the knife to. That’s how an accident happens. You keep control of it until you’re sure he has control, right? So take it by the bottom, like this, so your palm and fingers aren’t near the sharp edge. Then you pass it over, and say, ‘Get it?’ Wait for the other person to say, ‘Got it.’ Then you let your hand fall away and say, ‘Good.’ You wait on all three—
get it, got it, good.
Because if anyone pulls too fast or gets sloppy, people get cut. We don’t want people getting cut.”

Jace glanced at the rest of the group and saw all the boys watching with interest.

“All right,” Ethan said. “Let’s do this.” He passed the knife over. “Get it?”

“Got it.”

“Good.”

Ethan let his hand fall away from the knife and then the Buck Nighthawk was in Jace’s control. The feel of the knife gave him a strange sense of power.
Let’s see Marco try something now.
He wanted one of his own, on his belt just like Ethan’s.

Ethan said, “Do you remember what you’re doing with the fire?”

“Yeah.”

“Then get to it.”

Jace sat on his knees in the dirt and cut strips of tinder from a piece of something that Ethan called pitch wood, carefully selected because the waxy substance inside the timber acted almost as a burning fuel, helped your flame catch and hold. He cut a series of long, thin curls of tinder and then, at Ethan’s instruction, he turned the knife sideways and scraped, creating a shower of small shavings. The rest of his fire materials were gathered and ready; all he needed to do was spark the flint and get his tinder to start burning.

He knew it wasn’t going to start, though. He’d watched Ethan do it, the whole thing looking effortless and easy, but he knew it really wasn’t. He would spark the stupid fire-steel tool for an hour and nothing would happen and then Marco would make some wiseass comment and everyone would laugh and Ethan would take his tools back.

“Get that bundle a little tighter,” Ethan said. “Think of it like a bird’s nest.”

Jace formed the tinder into a cluster with his hands, and then Ethan said, “Give it a shot.”

“Want somebody else to do it?”

“What?”

That had sounded too much like Jace Wilson, too nervous, and so he tried to find Connor again and said, “Why do I have to do all the work? I made the kindling, let somebody else do the rest.”

“No,” Ethan said, “I’d like you to do it, thanks. If you’re ever alone in the woods, Connor, you’re not going to be able to share the workload.”

Jace wet his lips and picked up the Swedish fire steel, a tool with a thin tube of magnesium and a metal striker. He braced the striker with his thumb and pushed down and sparks showered as soon as he began, but nothing caught. The sparks died in the air, just as he’d known they would.

“You’ve got to hold it lower,” Ethan said. “All the way down against the tinder. Brace it on that platform piece, that’s why we have one. And don’t flick at it. However fast you want to go, make yourself do it at half that speed. Think of yourself in slow motion. The tool will do the work for you; it’s not a muscle move, it’s a control move. Yes, just like that. Again. Again.”

Jace was aware of all the eyes fixed on his failure and he was starting to hate Ethan for it, was looking for something Connor Reynolds could come up with to stop it, a bit of bad attitude, maybe even some real anger…

He jerked his hand back in surprise as the tinder caught and a wisp of smoke began to curl.

“Okay,” Ethan said. “Now, when you give it air, be real gentle. Real light.”

Jace lowered his face to the tinder and blew gently and the flame grew and spread, and now the larger pieces were burning, and Ethan told him to add his sticks. He had a brace piece at one end and a series of pencil-lead-size pieces to be added first, leaning against the brace at a forty-five-degree angle. Once those caught, on to the pencil-size, and then the finger-size. He jumped to the second stage too fast, and the smoke began to come thicker and darker, the sign of a fire fighting death, and Ethan said, “This is where you use your brace.”

Jace took a free end of the brace piece and lifted it gently. Ethan’s design wasn’t the tepee style Jace had seen before but more of a ramp, everything angled over the flame and toward the brace. When Jace lifted the brace, the fire that he’d been threatening to smother from above received immediate oxygen from below and the flame caught and grew and crackled.

The sound of it got attention. Everyone in the group murmured a little, impressed.

“We all get to try it?” Drew said.

“Yes. Nice work, Connor. It’s a fine fire. May I have that knife back?”

Jace took it by the bottom of the blade, offered Ethan the handle, and said, “Get it?”

“Got it.”

“Good.”

The Nighthawk was gone from him then, and Ethan was moving on, but Jace didn’t care. He was staring at the flames. He lifted the brace piece again, gave it another gust of air, and couldn’t keep from smiling.

I can make fire,
he thought.

When Claude woke, the sun was hot on his face and his arm ached worse than his head, though that pain was powerful too. He blinked and saw nothing but a harsh golden sun and a cobalt sky and for a moment the pain was forgotten, because he believed they were gone, that they’d moved on and left him there.

He tried to sit up and discovered that his arms were bound back over his head, and then he was concerned but still not scared because at least the two strangers were gone. This situation he could deal with somehow; with the two of them, he’d have had no chance.

“Seems to be among the living again,” a gentle voice said from behind him, and that was when the fear returned, icy prickles bubbling along his flesh.

“The waking dead,” a second voice said, and then they rose and again Claude saw only shadows as they returned to him. He was aware for the first time of the smell of wood smoke and the soft poppings of a small campfire.

They circled around in front of him. The one called Jack had the gun back in its holster, but the one called Patrick was still holding on to the chain-saw blade. Steam rose from the oil and grease trapped in the links, wisps of black smoke. It had been in the fire.

“We’ll take that location now,” Jack said. “Where Serbin has the boys. We’ll take it from you.”

Claude tried to move, scrabbling his boots in the dirt. They’d bound his hands back against one of the trees he had felled, and there was no chance of moving its weight.

“I’ll give it to you,” he said. His voice was a high fast rasp. “I’ll tell you.”

The man looked down at him and shook his head.

“No, Claude,” he said. “You misunderstood me. I said that we were going to
take
the name from you now. Your chance to just give it away is gone.”

The one with the smoking chain-saw blade approached from the right and Claude tried to kick him but missed, and then the long-haired one grabbed his boots and held his feet down as the other wrapped the hot string of saw teeth around Claude’s arm. His skin sizzled on the metal and the smell of burned hair and flesh rose to him as he screamed. The one holding his feet had steady, unblinking blue eyes. They never changed expression. Not even when his brother began to tug the blade ends back and forth, back and forth.

They’d gone through all of the muscle and arteries and half the bone in his left forearm before Claude screamed Allison Serbin’s name loud enough to satisfy them.

The blackness came again and this time it would not leave, he could not clear himself from it, he just faded in and out, and the fade-out was better, because the pain was numbed some then. Not enough, but some. He knew that he was going to die here on the hill above his own home, on a sunlit, blue-sky day, and he was less troubled by that than by what he’d just done, how he had given them what they wanted. He could feel his own blood warm and wet on his back, pooling beneath his arm and then running down the slope, and he hoped that it would pump faster, empty his body swifter.

Bring it to an end.

Their voices came and went in the blackness.

“I’m in favor of it. Would take a fine crime-scene team to determine he died anything but a fool’s death, and I suspect they do not have such a team in this area.”

“Does it matter how he died?”

“Time might matter. What this man Serbin hears and when he hears it might matter.”

“True enough. Of course, if you do that, the whole hillside goes up. Awfully dry. Good breeze blowing and taking it up the mountain, into all that timber.”

“Might provide quite a distraction, then.”

“Another fine point. You’ve won me over, brother. But you’re assuming we’ll have no need for him again.”

“I’ve seen lying men and I’ve seen honest men. In that last moment, when he said the wife was the only one who knew? He had the characteristics of an honest man. In my assessment.”

“I concluded similarly.”

What they were discussing, Claude had no idea. He was distracted by wondering what had happened to his arm. The pain suggested it was still part of him, but he had trouble believing that it was. If he was strong enough, he could move it, and that might tell him whether the arm remained, but moving seemed a terrible idea; he wanted to hold on to the blackness longer, where the pain was less. He tried to find it again and could not, because the sun was too hot. The sun was keeping him conscious, and he hated it, oh, how he hated it. What he’d give for a single cloud, something to block out that heat.

But the sun came on stronger, relentless, and with it came the smell of smoke, and he realized then that the sun had somehow set the mountain on fire, and he thought that was one hell of a thing, because in all of his years in this country, he’d never encountered a day so hot as to set the earth to smoking. Someone should do something about that. Someone should make a cloud.

The mountain crackled around him as the sun strengthened, and Claude Kitna squeezed his eyes shut tight and moaned low and long and prayed for a cloud as the world turned to fire.

H
annah didn’t trust her eyes.
She’d sighted the smoke late in the afternoon and promptly went to the binoculars, certain it was a trick of the light or maybe some backpacker’s campfire, nothing more. She’d already sighted one campfire and found the same boys who had been in various spots around the mountains for nearly a week. Scouts or something. When she saw the second fire, all she was expecting to find with the binoculars was the same group, but when she glassed the hillside above the tree line, she saw a steady column of smoke, growing and thickening, too much for a campfire.

Still, she didn’t call it in immediately. She lowered the binoculars and blinked and shook her head. For days she had watched the empty mountains for fresh smoke and had seen none, and there had been no storms and no lightning, nothing to give her cause for suspicion.

But there it was.

She lifted the glasses again as if the second viewing might prove her wrong; she felt like someone on a ship in ancient times who, sighting land after many months at sea, was afraid that it was an illusion.

It was not. The smoke was there, and it was spreading, and Hannah Faber had her first chance to help.

She was nervous going to the radio; the simple protocol suddenly felt infinitely complex.

Get it together, Hannah. Get it together. This is your damn job, they’ll do the rest, all you have to do is tell them where the hell it is.

That was when she realized she didn’t
know
where it was, that she was rushing to the radio without first identifying the location. She went to the Osborne, rotated the bezel, put her eye to the gun sight, and centered it up with the smoke. Looked at the map and got her bearing. This one wasn’t far off at all. Five miles from her tower.

Too close, too close, get the hell out of here.

She shook her head again, chastising herself. It was the first flare-up, and they’d get it under control fast. Nothing was coming this way.

Easy to say, hard to believe. She was supposed to be removed from it up here. She was supposed to be far from the flames, supposed to—

“Supposed to do your damn job,” she said aloud, and then she went to the radio and keyed the mike.

“This is Lynx Lookout. Do you copy?”

“We copy, Lynx.”

“I’ve got smoke.”

She felt as if it were a stunning proclamation, a real showstopper, but the response was flat and uninterested.

“Copy that. Location?”

She recited the location and bearing, told them the volume was small, the character was thin but building, the color gray.

“Copy that. Thanks, Lynx. We’re on it.”

“Good luck. I’ll keep watching.”

Keep watching. What an impotent thing to say, and do. Once she’d have been putting on the Nomex gear and the White’s fire boots; once she’d have been strong and tanned and ready to take it on—the whole world afire couldn’t scare her. Now…

I’ll keep watching.

“Hurry up, guys,” she whispered, watching the gray plumes grow, seeing the first tongues of orange in the mix now, and she wondered how it had started. There on a ridge so close to the road; how had it started?

Nick would say a campfire. There’d been no lightning, she’d watched for it every night and had not seen any, and so the source was likely humans. It was an odd place for a campfire, and a dangerous one. She looked at the map and traced the contour lines and saw what it might do. It could burn up off that ridge and find open grasses and scorch through them and then hit the high forest, pushed by the wind. If it did, it would run into the rock, and in its quest for fuel, it would climb sidehill and find the gulch that waited, lined with dry timber. And then they’d be fighting it low. Down in a basin rimmed by steep slopes.

Some of the best friends she’d ever had died trying to outrun a burning wind in a basin like that.

She didn’t like the way those contour lines looked. There was plenty of fuel in the gulch below the place where the fire had begun to burn, and, dry as it was with this early drought, the flames would be moving fast.

The first crew got there within thirty minutes, and they encountered more than they’d bargained for. The wind was pushing the fire upslope, toward a stretch of dry jack pine, and the reports over the radio were grim and surprised.

“We can get a pump truck to the bottom, but no higher. It’s climbing pretty well.”

“So trench it and bladder-bag it,” Hannah said. She wasn’t on the air, they couldn’t hear her, but she hoped they’d somehow sense her advice and take it. If they got up high enough, they should be able to contain it. With the truck soaking the bottom of the hill and a proper trench cutting it off from climbing toward any more fuel, they’d be fine. It would be hot, hard work, though, and the sun would be setting soon, and then it would be just the crew and the firelight and the wind. The wind was the great enemy, the most menacing and most mysterious. This she knew as well as she knew her own name.

They didn’t hear her advice but they followed it anyway, and she listened as they sent a trenching team a half a mile farther up the mountain, where they could cut the blaze off from the next stretch of forest and hopefully leave it to burn out in the rocks.

“It will go sidehill, guys. It will have no choice, and the wind will help it, and then you’ll have to fight it at the bottom.”

That was what they probably wanted. The fire would be bordered by creeks and road and rock there, and they would believe they had it sequestered. Unless the wind had different plans.

Her first fire with Nick hadn’t been all that different from this one. A wooded windblown hillside. She was on her second summer then and had a sophomore’s cockiness—been there, done that, seen it all, though of course she hadn’t. Rookie bravado, sophomore cockiness, and veteran’s wisdom. The three stages she’d come to know. She suspected that some sort of law required wisdom and loss to be partners. At least, they always seemed to ride together.

She’d loved Nick from the start. In the way it wasn’t supposed to happen, the way you weren’t supposed to trust. Love at first sight was a fairy tale. Tough girls rolled their eyes at it. And she’d meant to, she had absolutely meant to, but the really special thing about love was that it scorned your attempts to control it. That was a great thing. Sometimes.

Rule number one for a woman on the fire line: you had to outwork everyone.

Rule number two: when you did, you’d be considered less of a woman because of it.

That had been infuriating in the first summer. Fighting fires was a male-dominated world—weren’t they all, though?—but she hadn’t been the lone woman. There were three on the crew, but she was the only rookie. The jokes came early and often, but she was cool with that, because, frankly, that seemed to be the way it went. Boys being boys. Giving each other shit over any perceived weakness, circling wolves settling pack order, and her weakness, as they saw it, was readily apparent: the extra X chromosome. So you took the jokes and you gave them back and then you went to work, and here’s where it mattered—would you live up to the identity that the jokes created, or would you forge a new one? You couldn’t be the joke, there was no respect to be found there, no room for softness among crew members for whom fatigue was often the starting point and not the finish line. When you erased the jokes, though, when you matched the guys’ work or exceeded it, a fascinating thing happened—apparently, you lost your femininity. Now the jokes came out of respect, and the tone was altogether different. Once your nickname was Princess; now it was Rambo.

All of this wasn’t to say she had had bad relationships with the boys of summer. On the contrary, they were some of the best friends she’d ever had, or would ever have—if there were no atheists in foxholes, then there were no enemies on the fire lines. But dating someone on the crew was different. It was like giving something back that you’d worked hard to earn. She’d made a rule before the second summer, a sophomore’s rule, the unyielding kind that broke the minute you applied it: The fire line was work. End of story.

And so of course there had been Nick. And of course he hadn’t been just on the crew; he’d been the boss.

That was the summer she wore makeup to a trench line, the summer of the cosmetology-school jokes, the summer of the happiest days and nights of her life. She’d become certain of the invalidity of her own rule—it didn’t have to be all work. You could work with someone you loved, even on the most dangerous of tasks.

She no longer believed that. On the witness stand, pointing at the topographic map and the photos and explaining how it had all happened, she knew that her rule had not been invalid. You fought fires as a crew. Lived and died as a crew. And if you were in love with one person on that crew, just one? All your best intentions didn’t mean a damn thing. Love always scorned your attempts to control it.

She sat in her tower now with her feet up and her eyes on the wispy smoke over the mountains and she spoke to the radio without keying the mike, spoke as if she were out there with them. A constant stream of chatter. She was warning them to watch out for widow makers—burning limbs that dropped from above without warning—when the pump truck reported a victim.

Hannah lifted her hands to her face and covered her eyes. Not already. Not on the first fire of the season, the first
she
had called in. She felt as if the death had come with her, somehow, as if the death had followed her back. A certain wind chased Hannah, and it was a killing wind.

Fifteen minutes after they announced the victim, they came back with more:

“I think we’ve got a campfire source. Appears to be a fire ring here, stones, and the fire must have jumped it and gotten into the trees that were brought down. Look like fresh cuts too. Only seeing one DOA. Can’t tell if it’s male or female. Burned up pretty good. We’ve secured the body and what’s left of an ATV and, I believe, probably a chain saw.”

There was your source. Someone had been felling timber and decided to keep a fire going while he did it, then left it untended, in the wind. Oblivious to the risk.

“Stupid bastard,” Hannah whispered, thinking of those who were walking into the flames right now for some foolish mistake, thinking of all that might be lost just because someone wanted to roast a hot dog.

It felt strange, though. Somehow, it felt off. She’d spotted the smoke around four and the sun had been high and hot, hotter than it had been all summer. Nobody would have needed or wanted a campfire for warmth. And it was late for lunch and early for dinner, and it didn’t sound as if the victim had been camping, anyhow, not with an ATV and a chain saw. He’d been working, probably. And what person doing sweaty work on a hot afternoon wanted a campfire?

There was something off with the fire source, no question. But the first task was putting the blaze out fast enough so they could figure out what the real story was. Until those flames were gone, nobody was concerned about determining their source.

The tower swayed more as the sun descended, the wind freshening at dusk.