Those Who Wish Me Dead

by Michael Koryta

  POLICE EN ROUTE TO PILOT CREEK TRAILHEAD. ONE SURVIVOR FOUND. MEDICAL CARE ADMINISTERED ON SCENE, AMBULANCE EN ROUTE.

  Ethan said one word to the boys: “Alive.” He meant to explain it in more detail, but he could not. They seemed to understand. He typed a response.

  WE ARE ALSO EN ROUTE. SURVIVOR STABLE?

  He could have called her his wife. Could have called her by name. There was no need for the formal protocol, but it felt safer, as if it removed him from reality just enough to allow him to walk around the edges, aware of it but never looking it in the eye.

  The message disappeared and he had to wait for an answer. He looked up at the boys, blinked at them. Headlamps glaring at him like a circle of interrogators.

  “I’m sorry, guys. This is…this is the real deal. What we’re doing here. Middle of the night, walking in the dark, an emergency. A leader who is…who is struggling. You’re doing great. You’re doing great. Survivors, each and every one of you. None of the dying kind here.”

  A chime.

  SURVIVOR STABLE. TRANSPORTED TO BILLINGS HOSPITAL. UNDERSTAND ADDITIONAL POLICE ARE ALSO ON SCENE.

  They were still confused in Houston, but at least they knew a little. Maybe more than he did. Enough to understand it was not an electrical fire or a gas leak. Now they were the ones hinting around the edges of reality. Not sure what they could tell him. It occurred to him then, for the first time, that he was next in line. An obvious thought that had simply not mattered until he knew Allison was alive. All of this violence at his home had its reason. The reason traveled with him.

  “We’re going to walk down and meet the police,” he said. He was looking around at all those white beams. Counting them. Two, four, six. He blinked and counted again. Two, four, six. His own made seven.

  “Everyone turn your light on, please.”

  The beams turned and looked at one another. No additional light went on.

  “Names,” he said. “Guys? I can’t see you all in the dark.”

  Marco, Raymond, Drew, Jeff, Ty, Bryce.

  “Where is Connor?” Ethan said.

  Only the night wind answered, whistling through the pines.

  “When was the last time anyone saw Connor?”

  A beat of silence, and then Bryce said, “He was packing up right next to me, and he was walking in the back. I didn’t hear him say a word. He was right there. Right with me.”

  Well, Ethan thought, that answers that.

  The killers had come for Connor, and Connor was gone.

  16

  The dream that night was as it always was, a dance between vivid memory and something spectral and mythic. Around Hannah there was only the smoke at first, and somewhere inside it the hiss of distant hoses, like snakes, and then the smoke parted and there was the canyon that separated her from the children. In reality it hadn’t been so deep, maybe fifty feet below the ridge on which she’d been standing, but in the dream, the ridge always took on the feel of a balance beam and the canyon stretched on endlessly beneath it, a bottomless pool of black. As she crossed the ridge, the hissing of the water rose, the snakes becoming creatures that could roar, and then inside the smoke were ripples of red and orange heat, and still she walked, crossing that expanse of blackness.

  When she saw the children in the dream, they were silent, and somehow that was worse. In reality they’d been screaming, they had shrieked for her help, and it had been terrible; at the time she could not have imagined anything worse. Then came the first dream, their silent eyes on her through the smoke and the flames, and that was a far more powerful pain, always. Scream for me, she wanted to tell them, scream as though you believe I will get there.

  But in the dream they already knew she would not.

  The dream children vanished, lost to blackness filled with hundreds of minuscule red dots, tiny embers that floated toward her on a blanket of heat. She woke at the same point she always woke—when the heat seemed to become real. It built in the back of her mind, came on and on, and then suddenly the whisper was a scream and she knew that it was too hot, that she was going to die, that the flesh was actually beginning to melt from her, peel away in long charred strips from her bones.

  She gave voice to the screams that the children could not and then she was awake. The heat was gone, those blazing lead blankets whipped away, and she was aware of how cold it was in the cab of the tower. Her breath fogged as she took rapid, hysterical gasps, stumbling to her feet. She always had to move, had to run, that was the first instinct. If you could run, run.

  The night it happened, she could not run. Or did not. Others had. She’d looked up the side of the mountain, saw the litter of deadfall, massive downed pines the whole way. It was breccia rock up high, loose and prone to sliding. Behind them, the fire caught a southwestern wind and howled; she would remember that sound until the day she died—it howled. Inside the flames, spectacular, horrifying things were happening—eddying colors, deep red to pale yellow, as the fire fought itself, adjusting for position, seeking fuel and oxygen, which was all that it needed for life once someone provided the spark. It had been given the spark, and then the wind gave it the oxygen and the dried-out forest gave it the fuel, and the only thing capable of stopping the monster’s growth was Hannah’s crew.

  There was a choice, waiting there in the drainage, in an area they never should have approached: Break protocol and run, or hold protocol and deploy shelters. It was evident to everyone by then that the fire was gaining speed and was not going to be stopped. They all fell silent for a few seconds, recognizing what they had done, the way they’d trapped themselves, and she believed that more than a few of them also remembered the way it had happened, the way Nick had decided they would not descend into the gulch and Hannah had convinced him otherwise. There was a family down there, and they were trapped, and Hannah had believed they could be saved. Nick hadn’t. She’d won the debate, and they’d descended into the gulch, and then the wind shifted into their faces.

  A quarter mile away, on the other side of a too-shallow creek, the family of campers looked at them and screamed. And Hannah screamed back, telling them to get into the water, get under the water. Knowing all the while that there wasn’t enough water to save them.

  Her crew scattered then. A unit so tight they usually moved as one, but panic was a devastating thing, and it was upon them now. Nick was shouting at them to deploy fire shelters; some were shouting back that they had to run; one guy was telling them all to dump everything, every bit of gear, and sprint for the creek. Another one, Brandon, simply sat down. That was all. He just sat down and watched the fire burn toward him.

  Hannah watched them make their choices and then disappear. Someone grabbed her shoulder and tried to tug her up the mountainside. She’d shaken him off, still staring at the family they’d come down here to help, this foolish family who’d camped in the basin, who’d pitched their tents inside the monster’s open fist. The screaming children seemed to be addressing her personally. Why? Because she was a woman? Because they saw something different in her eyes? Or because she was the only one dumb enough to just stand there and stare?

  It had been Nick’s voice that finally registered with her. “Hannah, damn you, deploy or die! Deploy or die!”

  The shouted words were nothing but surreal whispers in the midst of the fire’s roar. The heat registered next, a staggering wave of it, and she had the sense that the wind had picked up again, and she knew that was bad. She looked up the slope and saw the backs of those who’d elected to run and then Nick shouted at her again and finally he’d deployed his own fire shelter and shoved her into it. The shelter popped up like some tinfoil joke tent. The heat was all around her and oppressive then—a deep breath found nothing; the oxygen had been scalded out of the air. She crawled inside as the first tongues of flame advanced through the drainage like a scout party. The rules were simple: You got inside, you sealed yourself off, and then you waited, waited, waited. When the roar of the fire was past, that did
not mean that the fire itself was. You could step out thinking you were safe and still be scorched.

  She was facing southwest, into the wind, as she brought the flap of the fire shelter down around her. The last thing she saw, other than the living wall of fire marching toward her, was the boy. He was the only one left. The girl and her parents had ducked into the tent, evidently imitating the procedures of the firefighters on the other side of the creek. There was only one problem—their tent wasn’t fireproof. The family had pressed it beneath a ledge of stone, hoping to somehow duck the fire, but the boy fought off his parents and stayed outside, terrified of waiting for the flames. He wanted to run, wanted to get into the water.

  She watched him splash into the creek, running just ahead of the fifteen-hundred-degree orange-and-red cascade behind him. That was the last thing she saw before Nick sealed her in. She was grateful for that. Grateful that he’d still been running. He made the creek too. Got under the water.

  Boiled in it.

  She didn’t know that until the board of inquiry’s investigation.

  Hannah had stayed in the shelter for forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes of the most intense heat she’d ever felt, surrounded by human screams and fire roars. The blaze tried to kill her, it tried its very best, chewing tiny holes through the fireproof shelter material. She’d watched them develop, a hundred glowing dots, like a sky of bloodred stars.

  They’d been trained to wait for release from the shelters by the crew boss. By Nick. She didn’t know then that the crew boss was dead.

  “My God,” she said in her fire tower now, and she started to cry again. How long did a thing like that chase you? How long would memories like that keep their hands tight around your throat? When would they decide it was time to let you go?

  She laid her head down on the Osborne, the copper bezel cool against her skin.

  The man Jace hated most was Ethan Serbin.

  Forget about the two coming after him, and his parents, who’d brought him here and promised he’d be safe, and the police, who’d agreed to the plan. The one Jace absolutely despised once his tears stopped was Ethan.

  Because Ethan’s voice wouldn’t go away.

  All those silly rules and mantras and instructions, falling on his ears day and night since he’d arrived in Montana, wouldn’t stop even though their source was no longer around. The lessons lingered behind like floodwaters. He wanted them gone. He was tired and he was scared and he was alone. It was quitting time.

  There is no such thing as quitting time. Remember that, boys. You rest, you sleep, you pout, you cry. You’re allowed to get mad, allowed to get sad. But you’re not allowed to quit. When you feel like it, remember that you are allowed to stop, but not to quit. So give yourself that much. Stop. Just stop. And then, remember what STOP is to a survivor—sit, think, observe, plan. Spelled out for you, right there at the moment of your highest frustration, is all you need to do to start saving your life.

  Jace didn’t want to do any of those things, but the problem was the waiting. He didn’t know how far off his killers were, how long he’d have to sit here before they found him.

  It might be a long time.

  He was doing the things he needed to without even intending to do them—he had sat; and he was of course thinking, he couldn’t avoid that, not once the tears were done; and without meaning to, when a light went on in the darkness, he found himself observing.

  It grabbed his attention because it didn’t belong. There was another human presence on the mountain. Someone with electricity. Distant, but not so far away as to be unreachable. He stared in confusion, trying to comprehend how it had come to exist, and then he remembered the lunch break and the landmarks Ethan had used to help them orient themselves to their position on the map. You had to pick things that were unique, features that didn’t blend in with the rest of the scenery, and then you triangulated your position using the map and the compass. Pilot Peak was one unique point, and Amphitheater was another, but for the third, they had not used a mountain. They’d used a fire tower.

  Jace observed the light and began to see possibilities he hadn’t noticed before, possibilities he hadn’t even wanted. There had seemed to be two choices—hike down with the others to the death that was waiting for him, or stay back alone in the mountains and wait for death to come to him.

  The light beckoned, though. It told him there were other ways this might end.

  You’ve got to observe the world you’re in to understand what parts of it may save you. At first, it may all seem hostile. The whole environment may seem like an enemy. But it isn’t. There are things hiding in it waiting to save you, and it’s your job to see them.

  The fire tower was within reach. What it contained, he didn’t know. Maybe somebody with a gun. Maybe a phone or a radio, a way to call a helicopter in and get him off the mountain before anyone even knew he was missing.

  Despite himself, Jace was beginning to plan.

  But in his mind he saw his pursuers again, heard those detached voices, so empty and so in control, and he knew in his heart that he shouldn’t have been allowed to get away even once from men like those. They didn’t leave witnesses behind. Even the police had said that, had told it to his mother, to his father, had scared them so badly that they agreed to send their only son into the wilderness to hide. He’d escaped once and no one could escape them twice, certainly not a boy, a child.

  But I made fire. I’m different now. They don’t know it, but I do.

  It was a small thing, a silly thing, and he knew that, but still the memory gave him the faintest touch of strength, and he thought of the hiking he’d done and the fire tower that beckoned and he wanted to surprise them all. Not just the evil pair behind him. Surprise them all. The police, his parents, Ethan Serbin, the world.

  Nobody got away from those two. But Jace already had once. He’d been lucky that time. They hadn’t been certain he was there, and the clock was ticking for them. But he hadn’t known they were coming then either. He’d been unprepared. He’d been weak.

  He was prepared now, and he was stronger. There was no need to pretend to be Connor Reynolds anymore, but while Jace Wilson had once been the secret within Connor Reynolds, now it was reversed. Connor and the things he had learned in these days in the mountains were the secret within Jace Wilson.

  And the two evil men coming for him weren’t prepared for that. They were expecting to find the same boy they’d left behind once, the boy who’d hid, and waited, and cried.

  A boy who looked just like the one on the trail now.

  “We don’t have quitting time,” Jace said aloud. These were the first words he had spoken since he’d been awakened by Ethan’s shout. His voice sounded small in the darkness, but at least it was there. It reminded him of his own existence, in a strange way. He wasn’t dead yet. His body still worked. It could speak.

  And it could walk.

  17

  Allison could feel hands on her, and the hands hurt, but then they hurt less, and she knew that a drug had been in the mix. At first she was on the ground, and then they moved her with care, guiding her out of the wreckage that had once been her home. She heard them complimenting her on her hiding place. She’d done a good job with that, it seemed. Common sense, she thought. She’d just wanted to get to water. In the end she hadn’t even turned it on, hadn’t been able to, but the shower floor was a good place to curl up. She was low for the smoke, and the tile in the room was unappetizing to the flames. They had moved on in search of fuels more to their liking and then they had been interrupted before they had a chance to return to her.

  That perfect bathroom, the granite-tiled room and its porcelain tub with a mountain view, the finishing touch of their golden home together, had saved her. She hadn’t gotten any water, but there was plenty in there now—a hose jetted streams of it through the shattered window, steam rising in angry response.

  Out in the yard, the paramedics worked on her some more, and no one was a
sking questions yet, they were just trying to fix her. The questions were coming, though. She knew that and she knew that she had to give the right answers.

  When they brought the backboard out, she was terrified. It was something you didn’t belong on unless you were hurt very bad, or dying. She tried to pull away from it and she told them that she could stand and they held her down and told her that she could not.

  “Tango’s been standing for three months,” she told them. The logic seemed sound to her, but it didn’t alter their decision. She was lifted and lowered onto the backboard and then they were carrying her out through a dizzying whirl of colored lights and toward an ambulance. One of the paramedics was asking her how the pain was, and she started to tell them that it was bad, but then stopped. No more drugs. Not yet.

  “Need to talk to my husband,” she said. Speaking allowed long needles of pain to enter her face through her lips and slide all the way up into her brain.

  “We’ll find your husband. He’ll be here soon. Just rest.”

  Most of her wanted to accept that. It would be good to see Ethan, and she wanted to rest, she wanted to do the things they kept instructing her to do—rest, relax, be still. That all sounded excellent. It was a little too soon for it, though.

  “He has a GPS messenger,” she said; she was in the back of the ambulance now, though the ambulance wasn’t moving, and the paramedics seemed to be working hard to ignore her, but thank God there was a police officer present, one she knew, one Ethan had worked with on rescues before. His name was well known to her but she couldn’t think of it. That was embarrassing, but she hoped he would understand. She gave up on finding his name and settled for direct eye contact instead.