China Lake

by Meg Gardiner

  Then, like a banshee, a revenant, Tabitha’s thin form appeared above us and started kicking Chenille. She bashed her ribs, her buttocks, her legs with a steel and force I could not believe she possessed. The look on her face was unhinged. She kept kicking, completely forgetting the pistol in her hand. Chenille guttered and groaned and let go of Luke.

  I dove on Chenille and punched her in the face. Her head banged back with a thud.

  I yelled, ‘‘Go, Tabitha. Get him out of here!’’

  But Tabitha staggered above us, teeth out like a feral animal. ‘‘Kill her!’’

  I knew I couldn’t hold Chenille. Even battered, she had a meaty strength and was trying to bunch herself under me. I said, ‘‘Go!’’

  Tabitha suddenly remembered the pistol. Shouting at me to move, she brought it around with a shaking hand and pointed it at Chenille. That was when Chenille whipped into a wrestling move, flipping me, knocking us both into Tabitha. She cried out, fell backward, and the gun went flying into the bushes.

  It was absurd, three women wrestling in the dirt while a fire was booming in our direction. I looked up at Luke and said, ‘‘Run!’’ Then I grabbed Chenille by the hair and pulled. She yelled and windmilled her arms at me, a huge, rage-knotted human who smelled like smoke and sweat. I pulled harder, keeping her focused on me, and Tabitha managed to squirm out from under the dogpile. She gripped Luke’s hand and together they ran up the trail, climbing away from us.

  I watched them grow hazy in the thickening smoke. Beneath me, Chenille squirmed. I punched her, kneed her, bounced on her chest, appalled at my enthusiastic barbarity, keeping it up until I felt her weaken. Then I scrambled off her to follow Tabitha and Luke.

  She grabbed my leg.

  I looked down and saw her hanging on to me, her face gnarled. Her lips drew back and she said, ‘‘Demon!’’ She clawed her way up my leg. ‘‘You’re defying scripture. Give him back!’’

  I grunted and cried, trying to break free. Her hold was terrific.

  ‘‘He should be mine!’’ Her voice was half scream, half sob. ‘‘Brian used me, him and all the rest, used me up. He owes me!’’

  She sank her teeth into my calf.

  Screaming, I fell to the ground. She spun and pounced on top of me. Lowered her face close enough to kiss me. She looked catastrophic. She pulled something shiny from her pocket and waved it in front of my eyes. It was a vial.

  ‘‘Well, sister, screw you,’’ she said. ‘‘Welcome to the Apocalypse.’’

  She brought the vial down on a rock next to my head, smashing it. Started to cry, then to laugh, then to scream.

  Holding my breath, I shoved her off me. She didn’t resist. I crawled away, started to run, trying not to breathe, but gasped, wondering if I was about to drop dead. Kept going, climbing uphill. I shot a glance back over my shoulder to see if she was coming after me. She wasn’t. She was standing on the trail with her fists raised, like a boxer celebrating a victory, as the fire swept toward her down the mountainside.

  I ran up the trail, climbing the far side of the ravine. Thinking, It doesn’t matter whether Chenille just poisoned me, because I can’t do a thing about it. All I can do is run. I’ll live, or I won’t. Inshallah, whatever God wills.

  Thinking, Will me out of here. Come on, God, get behind me, dammit. The trail was steep, the brush clinging, the smoke choking. I felt desperately thirsty. Uphill I saw Tabitha struggling beyond exhaustion, out of fuel if not out of grit, carrying Luke on her back. Then I looked back downhill and felt an emotional blast. Digging in, I climbed toward Tabitha with everything I had, knowing how much everything was going to have to be.

  The flames had jumped the bottom of the ravine and started ascending the hill behind me, only a hundred yards back. And fire, unlike human beings, accelerates when running uphill.

  Beyond Tabitha rose the crest of the ravine. If we could reach the crest, we could make it. When the fire hit the top the wind might catch it, might shift it to run along the ridgeline. We could get the downhill slide, get a breather, get out. But the ravine was steep and we were slowing, fighting every step.

  I looked back again. The flames were closer.

  I drew in a hot, hard breath. Throw the dice, Delaney. Bet you can outrun the bitch, the beast coming behind you. Screw fire as purifier, renewer, ecological balancer. I didn’t want to be purified, renewed, recycled, turned into potting ash, carbon, fossil fuel. Forget all that circle-of-life crap, and run.

  I yelled aloud and pumped my arms and legs, hard, harder than I thought I could, knowing I had to find the strength or there wouldn’t be anything left to hold back for. At the sound of my cry Tabitha accelerated, only to slip on the trail. She fell to her knees. Jolted, Luke slid off her back to the ground.

  I reached her, pulled her to her feet. Behind us the flames swallowed chaparral and jumped from treetop to treetop, leapfrogging toward us, roaring like a freight train. Smoke and terrible heat pressed down on us. Hot ash and sparks stung our skin. Luke sat on the trail like a zombie, staring at it.

  I crouched down. ‘‘Get on, piggyback.’’

  His face looked numb with terror. But he climbed on my back, and I ran with him clinging to me like a second skin, a second heart. Behind me Tabitha fought to keep pace, wheezing, saying, ‘‘Hold on, sweet pea.’’ Any scrap of hostility I still felt toward her dropped away. I simply couldn’t carry it.

  Upward, upward, freight train running at us, thirst deepening, smoke lowering, heat. The crest, I prayed. The crest. It was hidden in the smoke, but I knew it was there, pushed on, tears streaming from my eyes, coughing. Then, for a moment the wind cut, shifted, cleared the smoke. I stumbled to a halt, feeling as if I’d been stabbed. We were almost at the top, but the trail petered out into a line of boulders that ran along the crest like battlements, blocking our path.

  A sob escaped Tabitha’s mouth.

  The flames were fifty yards behind us now, a howling maw. I saw no alternative. Over the roar I yelled, ‘‘We have to climb them. It’s our only chance.’’

  Her chest was heaving. She nodded.

  We scrambled up to the boulders. They were sandstone, ten feet high, rough, chunky, normally easy to climb. But not with Luke on my back. I got three feet and a loose hunk of rock broke under my foot. Off balance, I said, ‘‘Hold on!’’ and jumped back down.

  I grabbed Tabitha’s arm. ‘‘I’ll climb up and you hand him to me.’’

  She nodded. Her face no longer looked delicate, but jewel-hard. She took him in her arms and I started climbing again, awkwardly, feeling a shudder in my arms and legs, desperate to get up without knocking loose more rock, hearing Tabitha’s voice like a snare drum below me, rolling in cut time. ‘‘Hurry, Evan. Hurry, hurry, hurry.’’

  Then my hand topped the boulder. I winched up, and through the smoke I could see the downhill slope—the air clear, the land untouched. I stretched myself flat on top of the rock and reached down for Luke.

  My arms weren’t long enough. He reached up but was three feet short.

  Tabitha spoke to him and he started a rickety monkey climb onto her shoulders, balancing precariously, fingers digging into her hair for balance, small chest gulping in and out. She took a step onto the first boulder. I kept stretching down, still too far away, and she strained another step. The flames surfed ever higher, swaying, roaring, leaping into the trees just behind her. Luke stretched his hand. His eyes were empty, as though looking at me through a wall beyond time and space.

  Still out of reach. Tabitha stepped up onto a loose rock. It tilted. She yelled, threw herself forward against the boulder, and caught herself. Her legs were shuddering wildly, doing an Elvis. Her tank was running on fumes. She met my gaze. In her eyes should have been desperation, but instead I saw brilliance, lightning: faith.

  ‘‘Reach down for him, Ev.’’ Her voice was shaking. ‘‘Luke, climb.’’ But Luke was frozen, clinging to her, starting to cry. She shouted, ‘‘Come on! Hold on to the rock. Reach for Aun
t Evvie, and go! Now!’’ Slowly his hand came up toward me. I stretched and grasped his wrist. She said, ‘‘Climb, climb!’’

  His feet started windmilling against the boulder, and he grabbed me with both hands. I pulled him up.

  He scrambled into my arms. For a second I clutched him, then said, ‘‘Keep going; scoot down the far side of the rocks. It’ll be safer there.’’ He clambered away. I turned back, knowing I’d have to help Tabitha to the top.

  I lay flat again and stretched down. The flames were almost on us. Twenty feet behind Tabitha a tall tree had ignited, backlighting her with an insane bloom of fire, a monstrous red stripe switching and thrashing at the sky. She reached for my hand. Her fingers, warm with my brother’s blood, touched mine. Above her came a cracking sound, the noise of a heavy limb about to break off the flaming tree. She looked up, saw it twist and swing toward her. I said, ‘‘Look out!’’ and she jumped down, just getting clear before the limb crashed against the rock where she’d been standing.

  She landed on all fours but got up again, checking the line of boulders for somewhere else to climb, wiping her sweaty curls off her face with one hand. Spotting a route, she started to the right. The burning tree gave way and swept down like a great red tail, embers arcing out behind it. It crashed on top of her.

  I scrambled to my knees but she was gone, swallowed up. My voice mixed with the howl of the fire, screaming.

  I slid down the far side of the rocks. Luke was standing at the bottom. I grabbed his hand and ran, downhill now.

  ‘‘Where’s my mom?’’

  ‘‘We have to run; we have to keep going.’’

  I said nothing else, but ran until grief overtook me and I had to look back. The flames were cresting the lip of the ravine, ready to barrel down, having taken one game woman and getting a taste for it. This was it, the truth. It was the instant when the universe shrugs. It’s the moment when you’re running on desire and a belief in free will, and you feel a tap on the shoulder, and turn to find inevitability standing there.

  We staggered out of the brush and onto a road, into the path of a firefighting crew pulling up the hill.

  30

  The firefighters bundled us into the cab of their truck. They put an oxygen mask on Luke. He kept looking up the mountainside, waiting for Tabitha. The crew chief, a rugged man with a white handlebar mustache, got on the radio and called the sheriffs to evacuate us.

  I touched the sleeve of his khaki turnout coat. ‘‘My boyfriend’s trying to get down the pass to get my brother to a hospital. He’s been shot.’’

  He stared at me, incredulous and hard-eyed. Then he said, ‘‘The pass? The highway, or the old road?’’ A Highway Patrol car had been cut off by flames on Old San Marcos Pass Road.

  I was numb and exhausted, but when I heard that, the panic began crawling through me all over again. I said, ‘‘The highway.’’

  He grabbed the radio, put out the call.

  Luke pulled down the oxygen mask. ‘‘Aren’t they going to get my mom?’’

  The firefighter hung in the doorway of the truck, poised, tense. ‘‘Somebody else is out there on the mountain? A woman?’’

  Luke said, ‘‘My mom.’’

  I looked the man in the eye and shook my head. Gathering Luke in my arms, I told him the truth.

  Luke walked by my side, small hand in mine. He wouldn’t let it loose. That was what kept me going. Nikki had an arm around my shoulder, pacing me through the big double doors into the emergency room at St. Francis Medical Center.

  This was our last stop. End of the line. I had phoned hospitals and the Highway Patrol, had searched the frantic ER at Cottage Hospital, and no one had seen Jesse or Brian. They had gone into the smoke and hadn’t come out.

  St. Francis was bright and sterile. A television in the waiting room showed the mountains raging red, hysterical reporters, houses burning, girls fleeing down main roads on horseback. My head buzzed. I walked toward the desk, where a nurse in pink scrubs was speaking briskly over the phone.

  ‘‘Excuse me,’’ I said.

  She raised a finger, indicating just a minute.

  Nikki’s arm held me up. ‘‘Excuse me,’’ she said to the nurse. ‘‘We need to know if you have a gunshot wound here, Lieutenant Commander Brian Delaney.’’

  Her voice could have driven fence posts into the ground. The woman looked up. Nikki said, ‘‘And we need to know right now, because otherwise we have to get a rescue crew to go into the fire and find him.’’

  The nurse took a good look at me and Luke: grimy, reeking of smoke, coughing and ragged. She hung up the phone.

  ‘‘I’ll check,’’ she said.

  She disappeared back into the ER, through another set of double doors. I leaned my head against Nikki’s shoulder. Luke stood mute, his fingers warm in my palm. How, I thought, how would I tell him if Brian was gone? I blinked, staring vacantly past Nikki, looking through the open double doors down a long hallway. I heard myself say, ‘‘Oh.’’

  Straightening, I headed through the doors and down the corridor. My eyes were welling. Luke trotted to keep up with me, fingers squeezing mine. The grief, the pain, all I’d been straining to suppress, rose and spilled out. A sob broke from me and echoed off the walls.

  At the end of the corridor an orderly was pushing a gurney. A nurse walked alongside it adjusting an IV bag, and a doctor in blue scrubs, talking to the man stretched out on it. It was Jesse.

  I started running. ‘‘Wait.’’

  Jesse turned his head and saw me. He told the orderly to stop. I rushed to him, threw myself across him, weeping.

  The orderly said, ‘‘Ma’am, we got to get this man to X-ray."

  ‘‘Hold on,’’ Jesse said. His voice was a hoarse whisper. He lifted my face to his and kissed me like nothing before. Everything was in that kiss: need, distress, relief, love, all at once, overwhelming. He pulled back, still holding my face. His eyes were bloodshot and filling with tears. I had never seen him cry before.

  He said, ‘‘I wrecked the Jeep. Coming down the pass.’’

  ‘‘Brian?’’ I looked from him to the doctor, helpless.

  The doctor said, ‘‘The gunshot victim?’’

  ‘‘My brother.’’

  ‘‘He’s in surgery.’’

  My jackhammer heart drowned out the rest, the cautions, the we’ll have to wait and see and they’re doing everything possible. Brian was alive. Jesse had driven through miles of rough terrain and reached the highway. He’d gotten Brian out; he’d gotten help.

  ‘‘Too fast,’’ he was saying, ‘‘missed the curve—’’

  He kept talking in that hoarse, ragged voice, as though words would seal off his tears, and I knew he wasn’t upset that he’d crashed Carl’s Jeep. He had thought I was dead. I stroked his hair.

  ‘‘—on this empty stretch of road, grille’s smashed, radiator blowing steam, and your cell phone rings.’’

  ‘‘What?’’

  ‘‘Your phone. I didn’t even know it was in the car. I thought, with my luck, it was an insurance agent cold-calling to offer me cheap collision coverage, but you will not believe this. It was that reporter, Sally Shimada. She was looking for a quote from you, and ends up calling the paramedics instead.’’

  Words weren’t working. The tears kept coming. I wiped them off his face.

  He said, ‘‘Brian’s in bad shape, Ev.’’

  I took his hand. He squeezed my fingers, wanting to say something else.

  ‘‘But he’ll make it—I’d bet my life on it. He’s a tough son of a bitch.’’ He looked at me and at Luke. ‘‘Like all you Delaneys.’’

  31

  The fire burned for days. The sky hung red and the air-attack planes thundered. It leveled homes and businesses, laid a charred shroud across the mountainside. They called it the Camino Cielo Fire, a name insufficient to describe what I had experienced, and what it had done.

  Tabitha’s body was found under the tree that had crushed he
r. She was lying faceup, the coroner told me. Reaching for the mountaintop, I thought.

  Chenille Wyoming was not found. Though Isaiah Paxton’s scorched bones were recovered from the ashes of the cabin, no other body was found on the hillside. She had disappeared.

  With her, so went the Remnant. The church dissolved into chaos. Shiloh and the Brueghel triplets were arrested near Reno and charged with kidnapping. Curt Smollek survived his wounds and was booked for the murder of Mel Kalajian, as well as for various assault, weapons, and animal-cruelty charges. No one rose up to liberate them or to strike out at new targets. Leaderless resistance flopped. The Remnant needed the whip; without Chenille they were like a sack of headless snakes. Dawn came; that was their problem. The lithium sunset did not ignite.

  However, their cry—‘‘Justice for Pastor Pete!’’— was answered. Garrett Holt was arrested for killing Peter Wyoming. Charged with capital murder, plus theft of government property and national security violations, he confessed under a deal that spared him the death penalty.

  Holt was not a religious fanatic, but a man driven by greed and resentment against the navy. He had joined NCIS after washing out of navy flight school, and nurtured a grudge about failing to make the cut as a pilot. It bred the loathing that Brian had recognized in him, and the envy. When he posed as an aviator, he wasn’t just lulling me into trusting him; he was indulging his ego, bringing a ruined fantasy to life.

  But beyond spite and jealousy, Holt was also corrupt. Bribery was his middle name. At China Lake he had uncovered a ring of petty thieves, enlisted men who were selling equipment through a fence in town. Instead of arresting them, Holt took money to look the other way. Then, when the Remnant started nosing around, shopping for military hardware, he grabbed the chance to enrich himself at the navy’s expense. He took control of the theft ring. Getting the enlisted men to do the heavy lifting, he started selling firearms and munitions to the cult.

  Inevitably the navy realized how much ordnance and ammunition were going missing, however, and Holt’s game turned dicey. Then came an event he hadn’t counted on: the rift between Chenille and Pastor Pete. Their battle to control the Remnant ultimately destroyed his scheme.