~~~
Don had to give a few directions to his brother Jon here and there as they made their way through Saco on the valley floor and up into the highest elevation town along the front, Woodville, the sister city on the foothills to Maple Springs. Once they’d made their way to the main mountain road that served as the main street of Woodville though, Jon was on familiar ground. He took a turn at the old gravel pit and up the service road that climbed another nearly one-thousand feet in elevation before they came to the security gate.
Oddly, they found the gate closed but totally unlocked. Jonathan wondered if the guardsman had just vacated his post for some Halloween festivities or something. Yet there were no vehicles and the building was absolutely dark except for the few electronic lights and displays left on to run the place.
Don hopped out and swung the gate to full open and Jon drove through. Climbing back into the cab’s passenger seat and closing the squealing door he shrugged and said, “Maybe some hunter cut the chain? Some guys do do that, ya know.”
“Maybe,” Jon agreed. “Or maybe they’ve opened it to do a search and rescue, or whatever those lights are.”
Nodding, his brother went quiet as they drove up the gravel road. There were no more city lights. There were no luxuriant mountain homes. No people out walking trying to get the last of the Halloween candy from neighbors or friends that might not quite have gone to sleep yet. It was absolutely silent and dark except for the shadows trickling through the trees from the moon in half height in the sky.
Cutting his lights down to just the parking lamps, Jonathan slowed his speed and he and then Don unrolled their windows with the manual cranks to see better to the sides of the cab. The air had definitely gotten crisp but snow was not due for two more days and it had not gotten uncomfortable yet while they wore coats. Their eyes adjusted better to the environment outside without white headlights creating a blinding spot before them.
A deer crashed from the upper slope from Jon’s driver’s side through the trees, across the road and into the lower side by Don. Neither brother truly jumped but it did put them on sharper edge. They weren’t really on BLM land yet so they couldn’t have gone for any deer on this part of the mountain anyway. But the uneasiness they felt about the lights from down in the valley was trebled now that they were up among the trees yet unsure of what they were looking for.
“Hey!” Donald finally blurted out his window with his hand cupped around his mouth. Had anyone tried to answer from any distance they never would have heard it because the old Chevy motor was rumbling at near idle up the hill and making the whole chassis of the cab reverberate with each bump of its large displacement pistons thumping away. “Anyone out here?”
Jon snickered. “Who are you expecting to answer you? We haven’t seen any of the lights yet here.”
“I dunno. Just thought if there was search and rescue out maybe they’d hear us in the canyon here.”
The road had indeed looped around the face of the tower peak and had headed into the canyon that was cut between the two mountains to climb further in elevation. The trees in the canyon were more evergreen than deciduous and the old fire road was pretty dark under the canopy.
“Don, I think at the pass here above us I’m gonna have to stop and we’ll be on foot. How far ya wanna go to find out what’s going on instead of wait to see if there’s something on the news when we get back from the trip?”
The younger brother thought about it for a moment and was about to say it was time to turn around, when a light flashed on a ridge only a few hundred feet above their elevation and back out the canyon on the opposite side towards the valley opening.
“Did’ye see that?” He exclaimed.
“Sure did,” Jon answered. “But I don’t think I can get this old truck all the way up there. The carb’s not jetted for 8000 feet and the engine’s already old and tired. If you wanna check it out we’ll have to walk for a while.”
They sat in the cab idling in the middle of the road pondering for just a minute watching the light flash several times more. If there was a reply going it was around the mountain out of their view.
“Well,” Donald finally formulated his answer, “let’s take the guns and if we don’t see something up there, let’s scout and setup a deer stand along one of the trails and just spend the night there. It should be warm enough.”
“Alright,” Jon agreed. He gassed the truck a little and it reluctantly rumbled up the road further.
Eventually they found the wide spot in the road hunters and tower service engineers called ‘the pass’ and pulled over hugging the side of the mountain as best as Jonathan could. He knew there was a slight risk someone might have to come up and check the tower for something in the next day or two and then their truck might get reported, or even hit by a college kid engineer making the drive up on their part-time job at too high a speed for the gravel road. But it was on the inside of a bend and the old truck was struggling to make the last few steeper grades.
Shutting down and locking up, the two brothers grabbed a couple blankets and a pack with some food out from behind the bench seat. They threw in a couple beers and took their guns from the rack. Then they headed up the road for a while to get as close as they could to where they had just seen the lights flash again.
The Goblin Queen's Cache: An IPMA Adventure for Halloween 2014 Page 2