Wildefire (6 page)

Jackie patted her on the shoulder. “You know what you need?”

Ash peaked out from between her fingers. “Eight hours of rest before tomorrow’s exam? Bug spray that repels assholes?”

“I was thinking more along the lines of a cocktail or two. Maybe five.”

Ash cast a long look at the chemistry textbook sitting on top of her dresser, and then at the clock plug stuck in the wall. The wires sparked. “How soon can Darren be outside with the car?”

Jackie grinned mischievously. “I took the liberty of texting Darren when I saw Bobby Jones run past my door like a bat outta hell. He should be by any minute now.”

“You’re a good friend,” Ash said.

“I know.” Jackie stood up. “And I wouldn’t be a good friend if I didn’t tell you to change. . . . Please put on something besides your academy-issue polo.”

Ash held the collar of her shirt up to her nose and sniffed. She sighed. “You win.”

47

Five minutes later they were standing out on the stone term

race behind the girls’ residence hall. Like all of the other buildings at Blackwood Academy, the dormitory had a faux log cabin exterior that was actually made from some plastic compound, which supposedly contained traces of recycled milk cartons. A single filthy lightbulb buzzed in its metal cage over the back door, a back door that the architects had intended for use as a loading dock. It got far more use, however, as an escape route for mischievous students.

Ash shivered in the chill air and wrapped her black pashmina tightly around her dress. On clear nights in Northern California, the temperature plummeted as soon as the sun went down. Now, at the end of April, the summer fogs had already begun to sweep through the surrounding redwood forest, keeping the days around a steady fifty degrees.

“Aren’t you cold?” Ash asked Jackie.

Jackie glanced from her tank top to her skimpy jean shorts before looking back at Ash as if she’d asked an offensively ridiculous question. She was from Winnipeg and was accustomed to chilly northern nights.

Their conversation was interrupted by the low rumble of a motor echoing from the dark port of the underground garage. The entrance was built into the face of a nearby bluff. In an attempt to keep the campus green and eco-friendly in relation to the local national park, 48

the school had built only a small parking lot beneath the grounds to accommodate faculty cars. Here in Berry Glenn, California, they were 350 miles from San Francisco. Given the campus’s remote location, very few students bothered to bring transportation with them.

The world could have ended outside the forest in some massive global catastrophe, and the students would never know it until they departed for summer break.

Darren Puget’s shiny silver pickup crested the hill coming out of the garage, and the instant he hit the access road, he nixed the lights, threw the truck into neutral, and cut the engine, seemingly all in one single motion.

The car coasted ever so slowly to a stop in front of the two girls. He leaned out the window with a huge grin spread across his face, wearing the reflective aviator sunglasses he never seemed to go without, with zero regard for time of day or weather.

He pushed the aviators down to the tip of his nose and winked at Ash. “You ladies ready to push?”

“You’ve
got
to be kidding me.” Ash unwrapped her pashmina, revealing the little dress underneath. “Unless you’re wearing a miniskirt in there, which wouldn’t shock me in the least, you better let me take the wheel.”

Darren tossed his chin-length hair back with an insulted
humph
. “You know, I get a call from Jackie saying that one of our good friends is in need of escape, so I drag myself out of bed the night before an exam and put my ass on the line to sneak her off campus for some 49

debauchery . . . and you have the
gall
to tell me to push my own truck?”

Ash crossed her arms and tapped her foot.

“Don’t give me that look, princess.” Darren wagged a finger at her. “And let’s be honest here. Between the three of us, you are the only varsity athlete, and by a
landslide
the most muscular. So ditch the heels, stretch those born-to-play-tennis legs of yours, and get behind the damn truck.” When Ash made no initial move to do as he said, he added, “Truck’s not going to push itself.”

“You’re a real catch. You know that, Darren?” Ash stripped off her high heels and fired them through Darren’s open window; he barely put up his hands in time to block his face. She padded over to the bumper in her bare feet. “First round’s on you.”

“First round’s on Daddy Puget of Puget World Holdings,” Jackie corrected her, and took up her spot on the left taillight.

Fortunately, the dirt access road declined steadily from the garage all the way to the edge of the forest, but getting the truck moving was still going to require some serious man power. Ash nodded to Jackie, and with a deep breath she set her feet into the dirt, and they began to push.

At first the truck rolled forward only at a trickle’s pace along the back side of the girls’ dormitory. Given the distance they had to push the steel beast before they reached the front gate, it seemed like it was going to be 50

an impossible feat to get the truck off campus. After what felt like an interminable stretch, they approached the edge of the residence hall, and the road curved around to meet the main quad. Inside the cab Darren gradually turned the wheel, steering them around the corner and past the rolling front green of Blackwood Academy.

The quadrangle was made up of five buildings.

The girls’ and boys’ dormitories marked the southeast and southwest corners, respectively, with the Mercer Academic Building placed between them like a disapproving chaperone. Mercer was built facing north so that on a sunny day its magnificent bell tower would cast a long shadow across the quad, the cross at its tip serving as the needle to the sundial markers placed around the green. On the far side of the lawn, to the east, was the campus dining hall and fitness facility, while the access road led past the last fixture of the quad—the twenty-bedroom faculty lodge.

This faculty lodge was the reason that Ash and Jackie were pushing the truck along the dirt road—a truck that, mind you, had a perfectly tuned motor and was so fresh off the assembly line that Ash could practically smell Detroit on it.

Ash pictured Bobby Jones hog-tied and lying in the middle of the road, his mouth gagged and his face pressed down into the dirt.

She imagined him squirming as he watched the truck roll forward.

51

She thought about how fast the truck would need to be going in order to flatten that utterly handsome yet vile mouth of his.

And she pushed.

As she put her foot to the gas pedal in her mind, the truck accelerated from a crawl to a slow walk, and soon to a trot. The faculty lodge was coming up fast on the right-hand side, and she noticed that several of the quad-side bedroom windows were open to let in the cool night air.

Sure, the truck’s motor wasn’t on, but in the silence of night, the crunching of the wheels against the gravel was more than enough to wake at least one professor . . . and that’s all it would take.

Again Ash pictured Bobby lying in the middle of the gravel path, his eyes wide, wriggling helplessly like a beached whale.

The truck picked up even more speed.

Ash glanced over at Jackie and saw that she was having trouble keeping up at this point. “Get in,” Ash instructed her, nodding to the truck bed. Jackie nodded back, grabbed hold of the truck’s loading door, and vaulted up onto the bumper. She lost her balance and toppled into the rubber-lined bed, but her fist shot up over the back gate to indicate that she was okay.

In need of just a little more fuel to keep the truck rolling, Ash imagined Bobby one last time.

She visualized the wetness spreading across his crotch as he pissed himself in sheer terror, listened to 52

the muffled screams leak out through the cloth gag in his mouth.

But in her imagination the truck swerved right at the last possible moment, and Bobby’s high-pitched shrieking died to relieved, childish sobs.

After all, Bobby Jones wasn’t even worth a new set of tires.

In one vengeance-powered leap Ash sprung from the gravel road up over the loading door and landed in a squat in the middle of the truck bed. With their momentum and the slope of the hill leading down to the main entrance, the truck rattled past the faculty lodge and barreled on toward the main gate.

Darren leaned out the truck window and pumped a victory fist in the air. “Jesus, Ash, have you been mix-ing steroids in your oatmeal? That was some Wonder Woman shit.”

Ash bit her lip sheepishly. “I don’t know what got into me.”

Jackie winked at her. “I know who
didn’t
get into you.”

Ash extended her foot and playfully kicked Jackie in the knee.

Back in the direction of the faculty lodge, Ash saw the front light come on, illuminating the previously uninterrupted darkness of the quad. “We’ve got company,” she shouted to Darren.

He flashed a thumbs-up out the window and shouted,

“Not for long!”

53

The truck’s engine sputtered to life, and Darren screamed “Yeehaw!” before slamming his foot down on the gas pedal. They rocketed through the two stone pillars that marked the entrance to Blackwood Academy.

The silver pickup streaked off into the night, a fierce phantom of steel vanishing off into a dream of redwood trees and silent roads.

The gravel crackled beneath the truck’s tires as they rolled to a halt in front of the Bent Horseshoe Saloon. True to the grimy bar’s name, a gnarled wooden horseshoe had been nailed over the entrance. Ash would never know whether they’d hung it askew on purpose, but it always looked one strong breeze away from dropping onto someone’s head.

The saloon was just one of a few storefronts that made up the old mining town of Orick, a town that existed in the twenty-first century for its motels and bed-and-breakfasts, a waypoint for the summer’s stream of visitors to the national park. Thus, the clientele of the town’s only bar consisted of a curious mix of weary travelers and wiz-ened locals.

Ash tried her best to act casual as she pushed through the flapping double doors to the saloon with practiced grace, Jackie and Darren in tow. The occupants of the saloon looked up from their beer and fishing conversa-tions to gawk at the newcomers. Ash ignored the twenty pairs of hungry male eyes and carelessly flipped her fake 54

ID onto the bar in front of the bartender. “Amaretto sour,” she said.

The bartender pressed his hands down on the countertop. Raggedy Ray’s sea-worn face was spiderwebbed with age, like mud left to crack under the hot sun, but his golden hair was seeing only the first invasion of gray. He didn’t even bother to look down at the driver’s license on the countertop. “Sure thing, princess,” he croaked. “You want one of those frilly umbrellas in it too?”

“Depends”—she slid a ten-dollar bill across the bar top—“on whether you want to keep the change and lose the sense of humor.”

A spry grin stretched across the barkeep’s face. “Your quick wit always brightens my day, lovely,” he said.

“What’ll your friends be having?”

“We’re standing right here,” Darren said from the back.

The bartender raised an eyebrow and leaned around Ash. “Oh, it speaks.”

Darren rolled his eyes and flashed his platinum money clip, the crisp stack of twenty-dollar bills looking fresh from the mint. “Yeah, well, ‘it’ would like a Diet Coke. . . . That is, if you’re out of moonshine.”

“And a gin and tonic for the thirsty girl in the back,”

Jackie added with a wave.

“Three recipes for trouble, coming up.” By the time Ash slipped onto a vinyl bar stool, the bartender had already expertly poured Ashline’s drink and was 55

measuring an indulgent amount of gin into Jackie’s.

“And how is that
geological research
going?” he asked.

“Stimulating.” The corners of Ashline’s mouth twitched upward in a quick smile. Two months ago, when Ray, the bar owner, had attempted to make small talk during their initial visit, Ash had identified the trio as a team of geology majors from UCLA on a semester abroad mission to study the local strata. She hoped she’d chosen a boring enough backstory that it would prevent any further inquiry from the bartender during future visits.

Ash’s best guess was that Raggedy Ray had caught on to their shenanigans the moment they’d first entered the Bent Horseshoe but welcomed the fresh younger blood in his bar, since the regulars seemed to recycle the same discussions on retirement, saltwater fishing, and weather patterns.

“And what’s your topic of study this week?” Ray humored her.

Ash stirred her straw in the amaretto. “The effects of erosion in the Great Fern Valley, and the continued hunt for fossils.”

Darren and Jackie both snickered and carried their drinks over to a nearby high-top, where a group of other Blackwood students were playing a drinking game that involved dice, a stack of poker chips, and an empty pint glass.

“You know . . .” Ray lowered his voice and leaned over the counter. “I don’t know why you bother going all the way into the park to do your studies.”

56

“Why’s that?” She took a long pull from her drink.

“Because,” he said, glancing to the right and to the left before he winked at her, “I’ve got more old fossils in here than I know what to do with.”

Ash couldn’t help it—she laughed so hard that amaretto spurted out her nose before she had time to cover up.

Ray nodded to the back corner of the bar, where they kept the pool tables. “Some of your fellow ‘researchers’

arrived earlier.”

“That so?”

Ray rolled his eyes. “Marine biologists, I believe.”

Ash slipped out of her seat and scooped up her drink.

“Better go have a bit of shoptalk with them.”

“Aye, they probably have a bone or two to pick with erosion, I’d imagine,” Ray said with another cough-like laugh. Then he scurried away to tend to a few mugs that needed refilling at the end of the bar.