“Welcome back to the Ritz,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” Jamie said. Her voice was barely audible and she was looking at the damage out of the corner of her eye, as if she couldn’t face it head-on.
Allison didn’t answer her. She was staring at the house and remembering passing sheets of shingles to Ethan on the roof as an early-autumn snow flurry fell. They’d slept in a tent that night, as they had every night until the roof was done; they’d made a pact not to sleep in the house till it was finished, but they’d made that pact when it was warm and their bodies didn’t ache from the work of it yet. They’d both regretted it in the final weeks, and then the roof was done, and suddenly it made sense again.
“Where do you want me to go?” Jamie said. “I’m not sure why we’re here.”
Allison put the window down, and the air that filled the car was heavy with smoke. Some of it was stale, traces of the flames that had been hosed out of her home, but more of it was fresh. The mountains were burning, and the wind carried notice of it.
“They’ll have the road closed,” she said.
“We’ll get past them.”
“For a quarter of a mile, yes. And then you’re going to run out of road, Jamie.”
“So what’s your plan?”
“Have you ever ridden a horse?”
Jamie Bennett turned to her in the shadowed car and said, “Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“No. I have never ridden a horse.”
“You’re about to.”
Jamie put her foot on the brake but didn’t put the 4Runner in park. The headlights were fixed on the burned-out cabin but beyond, in the darkness, the stable stood, and inside it, unless someone had moved him, and Allison couldn’t imagine that they had, Tango stood as well.
“That sounds crazy,” Jamie said. “We don’t need to—”
“They’re in the mountains,” Allison said. “Not at a campground. It’s not a park, do you understand? It’s wilderness. You can get us down the road. But nobody is down the road.”
Jamie killed the engine. The headlights stayed on.
“We’ve got to go up,” Allison said. “And I can’t walk fast enough to do it. I thought about an ATV, but it’s the same story—you need a rough trail, at the very least. We could go only so high. We aren’t going to get behind the fire, not in a car, and not in an ATV. We can get there on the horse.”
Could they, though? Tango hadn’t carried a rider in months. Now she was going to ask him to carry two, up a mountain and into the smoke?
“All right,” Jamie Bennett said, and then she opened her door and stepped out. Allison followed and they walked through the ashes of her own yard to the stable. When the headlights went off, the yard was dark but the frequent lightning in the west showed enough of the path. She heard Tango before she saw him, a soft chuffing breath.
“Give me a minute,” she said.
Jamie stood alone in the yard while Allison stepped into the stable; she fumbled with her good hand along the shelf just inside the main door until she found the flashlight that rested there. She clicked it on and aimed the beam at the ground, shielding it with her hand so that the light didn’t blind the horse. He was looking at her from the darkness, his eyes a reflected glow, his breath faint steam.
“Hi, baby,” she said. “I’m home.”
He gave a soft snort and lifted his head and lowered it in trademark Tango fashion, always tilting it slightly to the side. She’d wondered if his vision was bad in one eye, because he always seemed to want to look at you from an angle, but the veterinarians had tested him and proclaimed his eyesight fine. He was just a horse who wanted a different perspective, apparently.
“Can you do it?” Allison asked. “You have a last ride in you, kid?”
That sounded bad, sounded awful, and she corrected herself, as if he might be offended. “Another ride,” she said. “Another ride, baby, that’s all I meant.”
Snort, snort. He shifted as much as the tethers allowed, eager for her to come closer, to touch him. She walked to the stall and laid her undamaged palm on his snout.
“Please be strong,” she said. She was looking at his leg. “Oh, please be strong again.”
Out beyond the stable, Jamie Bennett was moving around in the dark. Allison glanced at her shadow and felt a chill, memories of the shadows that had appeared in her yard last night returning.
She removed the horse’s mouth bit and then unfastened the tethers that held Tango in place and that had kept him from lowering himself for three months. He tossed his head as if relieved to be free of them. Then she moved to his leg, speaking softly, well aware that he might be uneasy when touched on his damaged foreleg whether it caused him pain or not. She removed the soft wrap that had replaced the cast, and then he was standing free and unprotected. He regarded her calmly, no trace of pain.
“Let’s see you walk,” she said. A simple thing, in theory. But it had been so long.
She replaced the protective bit with a standard version and then opened the stall door and led him out. He walked smoothly, without a limp, but his gait was tentative.
“You’re doing fine,” she said. “You’re doing great.”
“What’s going on?” Jamie Bennett called from outside, and Allison felt an irrational annoyance at the disruption of her private moment with Tango.
“Fine,” she said. “Just give me a minute.”
She led Tango from one end of the stable to the other and watched his stride carefully. There was no trace of weakness. She’d been told that there wouldn’t be any, she’d been promised that the bone had healed well, but still, it was wonderful to see.
Could he hold a rider, though? Let alone two? He wasn’t supposed to have any weight-bearing work for several weeks still. The rehabilitation process moved slowly. If you rushed it, you risked the horse. And if the foreleg fractured again…
“I need you to try,” Allison whispered. She rested her face against the horse’s neck, feeling his heat, remembering the way he had warned her of the arrival of the Blackwell brothers in the night. What if he hadn’t, what if she’d not had a chance to at least grab the bear spray? He’d saved her once already, she realized, and she was asking more of him. She was afraid it would be more than he could give.
“I’m hurting too,” she told the horse. And Lord, but it was true. The pain had risen steadily since she’d left the hospital and now it was distracting in its power. Just standing filled her body with jagged aches, and she thought of the jarring that would be required on horseback and wasn’t sure if she could bear it.
If he could, though…if Tango could bear it, she knew that she could too. When your own well of strength was emptied, you had to draw from other sources.
“Let’s try it,” she said. “And, baby, if you can’t do it, show me now. Please show me.”
Her voice broke and she stepped away and found a saddle. He seemed pleased to have it on his back again, and it made it harder, somehow, to see how enthusiastic he was. She’d ridden Tango with a child behind her, so she knew he wouldn’t necessarily object to a second rider—some horses did—but two adults might be different.
She walked him out of the stable and into the darkness where Jamie Bennett waited.
“I’m going to mount him first,” Allison said. She tried to keep her voice steady. “Watch how I do it.”
“All right.”
Allison handed her the flashlight and then put her left foot in the stirrup. She paused, waiting to see if Tango would respond negatively. He had no reaction at all. She swung her right leg up and over him as a bell choir of pain sounded through her body, enough to make her gasp.
“Are you okay?” Jamie said. “If you can’t make it, you need to—”
“I’m fine. We’ll see if the horse can make it.” She slid forward in the saddle, clearing some room, and said, “Are you ready?”
“I think so.”
“You’ll be fine,” Allison said.
> “I’m not afraid of him.”
Allison had actually been speaking to Tango. When Jamie Bennett swung her weight onto the horse’s back, Allison closed her eyes, certain she would hear the dry-wood crack of his foreleg snapping.
He made no sound. Shifted a bit, but less than Jamie, who was trying to arrange herself in a saddle that was designed for one and coming close to sliding right off the horse.
“How am I supposed to stay on?”
“You hold on to me.”
Jamie reached with tentative hands and took a loose hold of Allison’s waist, the touch of a shy boy at his first dance.
“I wasn’t kidding when I said hold on to me. You’re going to fall off otherwise.”
“I feel like…”
“What?”
“Well, you’ve got a lot of bandages.”
“I sure the hell do,” Allison said. “And, no, it’s not going to feel good. Any of this. But we need to move.”
She gave Tango the faintest pressure with her heels, and he started forward at a walk. Even at that pace, Jamie was jostled and she finally realized that she was going to bounce off the horse if she didn’t hang on. She slid closer to Allison, wrapped her arms tighter around her, and squeezed, and Allison felt the bell choir of pain return, playing with gusto this time. Allison let out a slow breath, trying not to show how much it hurt. She was watching Tango step in the darkness. So far he was moving solidly. Still, his only activity for months had been exercises to prevent muscle atrophy, and she wondered if he could carry them for long. She wasn’t sure how long it would be. Wasn’t even sure if there was a chance of this working. What if Ethan was wrong and the boy hadn’t tried to use the escape route at all?
She nudged Tango to a faster pace, a trot that made her wince with each step, both from her own pain and from imagining his. As the horse sped up and lightning flashed in the west, Jamie Bennett clung to Allison tighter, and Allison could feel a hard object pressing into her spine.
“Are you wearing a gun?”
“Of course.”
“Can you shoot it? I mean, can you shoot it well? Anybody can pull a trigger.”
“I can shoot it well, Mrs. Serbin.”
“You may need to. If we see them…they aren’t the kind you run from. They’re the kind you have to kill.”
“It would be my pleasure,” Jamie Bennett said. “You find them for me, and I’ll kill them. You’re right—running and hiding doesn’t work. I’m done trying that approach.”
The words sounded right, bold and brave, and maybe Jamie believed them. Allison wanted to as well, but she couldn’t. If she saw them again, she knew she wouldn’t be walking away. Not twice.
Survivor-mentality requirement: gratitude.
You had to find small things to be grateful for even in the worst of circumstances, because that large thing—the simple, obvious statement of I am alive—didn’t always win the day; there were times when you did not want to be alive. As the three of them worked their way up the base of Republic Peak, Ethan made a point to be grateful to whoever had passed this way for the tracks they had left. The trail led up the slope like a divine path. It was not hard to follow, even in the night—when people hiked over a scree, they caused rock displacement with virtually every step, exposing the dark, damp undersides of stones; there were long gashes where feet had slipped, and the places of dirt between rocks trapped clear prints. One of the hikers was outfitted with poles, and those punched holes in the dirt here and there above the footprints.
Because it was convincing enough for the Blackwells, because they did not know Connor’s boots, they were content to follow it. Ethan was able to move faster, killing time no longer a problem, because he was eating up plenty of it by chasing a false path.
The moon was entirely hidden now, and most of the stars. The famous Big Sky vanishing to blackness as the storm front swept ahead. They were two-thirds of the way up the slope when Ethan saw a strike near Amphitheater, the next peak west. White light like a flicking snake’s tongue. Ahead of them there was a sound like hard rain, and he believed it was hailing just a bit higher up.
“I know pace is an issue to you,” he said. “But we’re going to be at high risk up there right now. High risk. Twenty minutes of pause should be enough. Let that lightning go over, and then we carry on. But if we keep climbing, then—”
“We’ll keep moving,” Jack Blackwell said. His breathing was heavy now, ragged even, and Ethan savored the sound, enjoying every rasp of pain.
“Here’s the thing,” he said. “They won’t be moving. They’ll do the sane thing and take shelter. I suspect they have already. We won’t be losing time.”
In truth, he was growing damned curious about who these two hikers were and where in the hell they had camped. He knew what the prints told him—two women, most likely, or one woman and one boy or a very small man, but not Connor Reynolds. He couldn’t make sense of the route, couldn’t see what the average backpacker might hope to achieve by taking it. If the goal was Republic Peak or Amphitheater, there were better ways in. It was a curious trail.
“What do you think the odds of Ethan’s being struck by lightning are?” Jack Blackwell said.
“Slim. It’s a possibility in our current environment, certainly, but still slim.”
“And his odds of dying if he decides to delay us needlessly?”
“Oh, I’d say they are substantial. I’d also point out that the high pressure is moving away from those peaks. I suspect Ethan knows this, so the storm might be a bit of an excuse.”
Ethan paused. It was a fascinating observation, for two reasons. First because Patrick had made it, and there weren’t many men who could make such a proclamation about a high-pressure system while on the move through the wilderness, and second because he was wrong.
It was called Buys Ballot’s law. In the Northern Hemisphere, if you stand with your back to the prevailing wind, the area of low pressure will be on your left and the area of high pressure on your right, because wind travels counterclockwise inward toward a center of low pressure. The directions are reversed in the Southern Hemisphere. Patrick had made the observation but drawn the wrong conclusion.
A mistake, Ethan wondered, or are you not from this place?
He thought then of their voices, that oh-so-careful speech. Flawless English, but too clean of accent. They seemed to come from nowhere.
Southern Hemisphere, he thought. You are far from home, boys.
Patrick’s world was backward here. His observation about the storm might not cost him—or it might cost them all—but this was good to know. If Ethan was right, this was very good to know.
“My thoughts exactly,” Jack was saying. “Do we take a vote, then, or do we leave it up to Ethan? I’m a firm believer in democratic process.”
“This I know.”
“But at some points, clear leadership must be taken. For the greater good. So perhaps—”
Ethan began to move before they reached a decision. Up ahead, the clattering on the rocks was louder, and he felt the first stinging lashes on his own skin. Definitely hail. He watched ice gather and melt in the beam of his flashlight.
The men followed him, and up on the rock scree, everyone was silent; gasping breaths filled the night amid the sounds of the hail on the rocks and the wind whistling and moaning around them and the oncoming thunder. The world was lit time and time again by brilliant flashes. At the top of the rock scree, on the plateau at the base of Republic Peak, the hail was gone and all that remained was the lightning and whatever chased after it.
Ethan’s mind was no longer on the storm, though. It was on those hikers ahead of them. The false path, the decoys. Their behavior was making less and less sense to him the higher they climbed. The prints up here were fresh. Not just recent, not just left within the day, but left within maybe an hour.
The grass held depressions from where two people had removed packs and sat on the ground. Those depressions were dryer than the rest of the
plateau. That meant that their bodies had acted as shelters from the hail. That meant they were not far ahead at all.
Who was willing to hike toward a mountain peak in the dark and during a hailstorm? Who was willing to climb the ladder to meet lightning?
It’s not him, Ethan insisted to himself. I know that boy’s boots, and these tracks do not belong to him.
Survivor-mentality requirement: an open mind. Rigidity was the door to death.
Ethan looked at the depressions again as the plateau was illuminated in a series of four rapid-fire strobes of lightning, and he saw his mistake. He’d underestimated them.
He’s wearing new shoes. He’s wearing a pair of her shoes.
It was a wise precaution and a handsome trick, and if they’d been chased by anyone else, it would have worked, or at least bought them some time. A good tracker would have seen those prints and disregarded them, knowing they were not the same as the boy’s.
The only problem was that Ethan and the boy were both trying to be clever. The boy was trying to protect himself by changing his trail, and Ethan was trying to protect him by chasing a trail he knew wasn’t the boy’s. Now he’d not only found the boy’s trail for his killers but closed the gap between them.
35
It was the humming that finally shook Hannah free from the fog, a loud electric buzz, like an alarm clock, that called her grudgingly into reality.
“What is that?” Connor shouted. “What’s that sound?”
It fell around the mountains like a trapped ancient chant, something stumbled upon in a place where humans did not belong. They had hit some invisible trip wire and now the wilderness was being called to respond to the intruders, the high hum a siren announcing their presence on the peaks.
“The corona effect,” Hannah said. She spoke slowly, and though she knew she should be in a rush, a panic even, that felt beyond her now. She was aware that the choices had already been made, and the avenues of escape already ignored.
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