Falls Like Lightning

by Shawn Grady

  ———

  Silas doffed his flight suit and depressed the button on the King radio strapped in his chest pack. “Jumper crew, this is Kent. Sound off for par.”

  He released the button and listened. Half a minute later he stretched his neck from side to side and then repeated the transmission.

  Still no answer.

  He needed to get to higher ground, evaluate his position and estimate the landing points of the crew. Radio communications might be more effective on a ridgetop anyway. He stowed his jumpsuit at the base of the tree his chute hung in and pulled from it a few useful items—an LED headlamp, a couple carabiners, fuchsia ribbon flagging, some flint, and a pair of soot-stained white leather gloves.

  He headed in the direction his crew should have landed. He felt his pulse inside his head, every systolic compression drumming on the inside of his cranium. A smoky haze hovered in his path. The acrid air made his eyes water. Sunlight waned from the forest floor, replaced by shadows and flying insects and the growing din of crickets. How long had he been unconscious in that tree?

  The forest ahead began to look just like the forest all around. Silas tore off a piece of flagging and tied it to a fallen log. As he cinched down the knot, something dark and wet dripped onto his hand. Overhead, the canopy stood shadowed, a thick network of branches and limbs. The drip fell again, splashing onto his skin. He stared closer at it. In the fading light he discerned a rusty red color.

  Realization soaked in, slow and thick. He stumbled backward, stared again into the canopy, his head spinning with a sense of vertigo. He made out a twisted chute blocking the fading sunlight. Below it hung the twisted form of a smokejumper’s body.

  “Hey!” Silas waved. “Hey! I see you. Can you hear me? Hang on. I’ll find a way to get to you.”

  The body was a hundred feet up a sequoia that had a trunk as thick as an airplane hull. He had no idea how he could get up there. He searched the immediate area, as if a pair of crampons and climbing gear would suddenly appear. Maybe he could work his rope around the trunk and counterbalance off of it, slowly make his way up. . . . He stared at the tree trunk and the distance up. No way.

  “If you can hear me, wave a hand or a foot.”

  No movement.

  No sound.

  Another blood drop hit the log beside him.

  Silas stretched his fingers across his brow. The path he’d followed to that point blended into black. He strapped his LED light on his head and clicked it on.

  No communications. No contact with the rest of the crew. What more could he do here?

  He was torn. Night was falling. Continue in the direction of those who jumped before him, or turn around and hike in the direction Jumper 41 went down.

  Not counting whoever was in that tree, there were five other jumpers who should be in close proximity of each other. Elle, on the other hand, would be completely alone.

  That settled it.

  He wrapped the sequoia three times with the bright pink flagging and set off for Crystal Lake.

  “I’ll be back for you.”

  Pale blue light diffused over the ground in front of him. He tied off flagging to saplings and manzanita bushes every couple thousand feet, trail markers as he made his way.

  ———

  Caleb cursed.

  Cleese shifted his gaze from the tree canopy to Caleb, his helmet brim shadowing his face from the light strapped to the front of it. “I’d say Monte looks good as dead.” He spat. “And I reckon he didn’t flag his own tree.”

  “I’ve got footprints over here.” Rapunzel waved Caleb over. A set of prints tracked onward into the forest, the boot print matching the brand of Whites they all wore.

  Caleb ran his hand over his chin. This was not going well. “How in the—” He cut himself off, fuming with anger. Either Silas had somehow survived his jump or they had unexpected company. He already had one injured crew member and now another was dead.

  Refined, a gold brick weighed seventy pounds. Add in the weight of unrefined ore, and they were going to have to move thousands of pounds. He’d secured a Huey, so the weight wouldn’t be a problem for transport out. It was getting the gold from the prospector’s cache to the helicopter landing zone. Thanks, Monte.

  Rapunzel mumbled, “Leaves a bigger cut for the rest of us.”

  Sippi shook his head and stared at the hanging body. “I would have gladly paid Monte to carry his share. God rest his soul.”

  Rapunzel slapped the back of Sippi’s helmet. “Listen to you, talking like a minister. You don’t even know what you’re say—”

  Sippi punched him.

  Rapunzel reeled backward, then tackled Sippi at the waist. The two scuffled in the dirt, light beams streaking in wild patterns.

  A gunshot fired.

  The group froze. Their eyes fixed on Caleb, who stood with his semiautomatic Ruger pointed at the ground.

  The smell of gunpowder met Caleb’s nostrils. “None of you is of much use to us dead. Now can we focus, please, on our mission? Accomplish this one simple task and you will have enough money to go wherever you want, for as long as you want. If you want to kill each other after we finish our mission, that’s your prerogative. But until that gold cache is loaded on a helicopter, we all need each other. That second charge failing to blow has thrown us off course. Now Monte’s dead, Bo’s hurt, and we all have to carry more than our own share of the weight. That’s the way it is. We’ve got a hike ahead and time working against us. So let’s focus and get this done. Is that understood?”

  Rapunzel nodded, eyes toward the dirt. Sippi said, “Yeah,” and looked away. Bo gave acknowledgement with a subtle nod. Cleese, still behind Caleb, remained just out of peripheral view.

  Sippi cracked his neck. “So what do we do with Monte?”

  “Nothing. His body will corroborate our story. Plane went down with engine trouble. We made an emergency jump, and it took us several days to establish radio communications with the repeater burned up. Monte’s death will make it look legit.”

  Caleb set the safety on his Ruger and holstered it at the bottom of his pack. “We still need to head a decent way from here. Let’s hike on.”

  ———

  Silas paused in the blackness. Was that a gunshot? He clicked off his helmet light. It had been faint. Distant. What else could it be? A fallen tree? Rock slide? An explosion from Jumper 41?

  Crickets chirped. Rodents skittered. Pine needles whispered, swaying in the smoke-scented breeze. And the creek rippled soft, cool as it flowed from the place he was heading.

  Stars that would’ve peeked through the treetops were no longer visible, hidden behind a smoky veil.

  The fire wasn’t far.

  Silas turned on his light and angled his route closer to the creek. He had to focus. Find higher ground and reestablish radio communications. Follow the creek toward Crystal Lake to find Elle. If he could make the ridge bordering Crystal Lake, he could kill two birds with one stone. A vision played in his mind of Elle’s plane smashing into a mountainside. He shook his head to clear the thought, forcing instead a picture of her skimming Jumper 41 across the surface of the water and swimming to safety on the shore.

  She’d been descending so fast . . .

  He’d go crazy if he thought of only that all night. His pace quickened. He needed to slow a bit to conserve energy and avoid any pitfalls in the pitch-black of the forest floor. Who knew what was out there, beyond the radius of his helmet light.

  The dark edge blurred reality and possibility. The landscape as he thought it should be became something wrought in the cauldron of his imagination. As such, and in the way that dreams were, subtle details began to shift and twist logic. Before long he found himself in a waking sleep state, too tired to raise his wrist and check the time, too determined to stop and sleep. The substance of his fears and longings formed in the unseen all around.

  Elle . . .

  Images flooded his mind like the waters of Crystal Lake must have the
plane. What was better . . . for her to have died suddenly on impact, or to have borne a tortuous combination of injuries that simply delayed death into the night?

  He hoped and prayed, selfishly, that no matter the extent of injuries she might still be alive. That he could see her again and hear her breathe and say the things that needed to be said.

  CHAPTER

  28

  Madison . . .

  Elle’s daughter consumed her thoughts as the last of the heat left the dark granite slab she lay out on. Diffuse moonlight spread through the smoke-filled sky. Her clothes stuck to her body, the dampness sending chills across her skin with the downslope breeze blowing toward the lake a short walk away.

  Would Maddie think she’d forgotten about her? Left her there alone in the hospital? She shook the thought from her mind. Maddie had Carol Weathers. She was in good hands. But still . . .

  She tried to think of any scenario in which Silas could have somehow grabbed a parachute before being thrown from the plane. She shook her head, eyes growing hot. She didn’t want to think about it. This place was a curse, taking from her the only men she loved.

  Yes . . . she couldn’t deny it or hide from it. Loved.

  She sat up, wiped her eyes, and studied the smoky clouds. Visibility would hamper any immediate rescue efforts. For the next day or two, the best she could hope for was to reunite with the rest of the jumper crew, take an inventory of supplies—find a way to survive. But for the immediate future, she was on her own.

  Gone was Jumper 41, along with her survival pack and tools. She had no radio, no food, no shelter. At least it was summer and she had fresh water to drink.

  She recalled a childhood memory of once being separated from her father at a campground. After their evening walk, they’d stopped so he could use the restroom. She heard a skittering from behind what she thought was their friends’ camp. She went to inspect it and her flashlight started to cut out. A couple wrong turns and soon she was on an adjacent road. It was a campground loop within a loop. But to her, at nine years old and in the black of the evening, it all looked the same.

  Wandering that loop for fifteen minutes, with a dimming incandescent flashlight that she had to shake to keep on, felt like the entire night. She was sure she was lost in a vast wilderness and would never find civilization again. When her father found her she was sobbing and shaking and refused to let go of him until they reached their tent.

  Lying on the granite slab, she watched glints of moonlight breaking through a slim crack in the expansive smoke cloud, dancing on the water’s surface. The wind carried the scents of burnt timber and foliage. Elle brought her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them.

  The manzanita below her rock shook and rustled. She held her breath. That wasn’t the wind. The bushes shook again and a black bear cub toddled out. Her eyes widened. If baby was here that could only mean one thing.

  Momma wasn’t far behind.

  A low rumbling huff sounded to her side. She heard the sound of sniffing and a heavy exhale. The manzanita shook again, though this time it didn’t rustle so much as bend and crack. The form of a full-size black bear emerged not ten feet from her.

  The animal stopped broadside and turned her large head toward Elle, her face lit by a wash of faint blue. Large, round, and black, the mother bear’s eyes fixed on Elle. As the bear exhaled through her snout and huffed, Elle swallowed and worked to recall the things her father had taught her about bears when they hiked. If they saw one, her father had explained, he would raise his arms in the air and make as much noise as possible, trying to look as large as possible, and she should do the same. Black bears usually weren’t aggressive, he’d said. Unless it’s a mother with her cubs and she feels surprised or threatened.

  Elle’s instincts cautioned against trying to scare off the bear. She had to hope the mother had picked up Elle’s scent a long time ago—had watched her since dusk and decided she wasn’t a threat.

  The mother huffed again and shook her head before swinging down toward the pond to follow the cub to the shore. Elle watched the bear’s massive hindquarters wobble down the bank.

  Apparently, Elle didn’t come across as dangerous to the bear, a trait at the moment she was thankful for. In the moonlight that reflected dimly off the water, she could make out more detail on the bears. Water dripped from the cub’s snout while the mother stood watch. Her ears twitched and shifted with the varied sounds of small forest creatures.

  Elle’s heart pounded in her chest. She felt both exhilarated and petrified. Her muscles were exhausted. Sleep hung heavy on her eyelids, but she didn’t dare shut them. She couldn’t risk lying down. Not with the forest alive and shuffling about and a mother bear only fifty feet away.

  No. It was going to be a long, long night.

  CHAPTER

  29

  Silas’s tongue tasted like dust.

  The creek bubbled close by. He worked his way over to it and dipped his hand into the dark water, his headlamp reflection a waving blue orb on the surface. He splashed his face and unscrewed his canteen. Dirt receded in brown streaks across his hands. The sound of conversation filtered through the trees. He rose and squinted in the darkness. Five figures appeared at the edge of the lamplight.

  “Hey.” He coughed and cleared his throat. “Hey. Over here.”

  ———

  Bo shook his head, watching Silas buying off on Caleb’s compliments.

  “You made it. So glad we found you, brother.”

  Silas smiled, shook hands, and patted arms.

  The pain in Bo’s side burned like a brand. He winced and pressed it with his palm to stabilize.

  If only that fool spotter had a clue. Little did he know that his walking on terra firma constituted a miracle to these men who’d just tried to kill him. He moved among thieves, liars, and murderers, and there wasn’t one of them who didn’t want him dead.

  A fresh trickle of blood rolled down Bo’s flank.

  The overlapping headlamp lights produced an artificial moonlight glow among the group. Cleese squatted in the duff, tracing fingers along the edge of his woodsman’s knife. Sippi spat tobacco in the stream. Rapunzel leaned against a tree by Silas and Caleb.

  Bo sucked a deep breath. He trusted that the Lord had a plan in all this. But it would be one, he feared, that again involved saving the hide of this knuckle-headed white kid.

  Bo walked to the creek and crouched to fill his canteens. Erratic winds were already picking up. The smell of smoke stronger.

  Down the bank, Caleb squeezed Silas on the shoulder. “Monte’s not your fault or mine or anybody else’s. The engine failed. We all made the best jump we could. It’s a stroke of luck that any of us survived.”

  Silas shook his head, regret painting his down-turned face. “I can’t stop thinking about—”

  “Captain Westmore?”

  Silas nodded.

  “We’ll get to her. I’ll make sure of it.”

  Silas glanced over at Bo. He shook his head. “We’ve got an injured member. It can’t be good for him to keep this pace. We should split into teams, one head back to Monte, in case he’s still alive.”

  “He ain’t.” Cleese sheathed his knife.

  Silas turned. “How do you know?”

  “I seen his eyes.”

  Silas swallowed and glanced at Caleb.

  Caleb nodded. “Fixed and dilated.”

  Silas ran a hand over his mouth. “Still. Someone should stay with the body. Bo’s the logical choice.”

  Bo couldn’t let them be separated. Silas’s good intentions worked in spite of himself. Bo mustered his best ability to stand upright and appear healthy. “I can hold my own. I ain’t leaving you all.”

  Silas tightened his brow. “And if I give you a direct order?”

  “There ain’t one of us who’s going to get out of this wilderness in less than two days’ time. Monte’s body is safe where it is. Would you rather leave me, an injured man, alone that long?”<
br />
  Silas shook his head. “You’re right. Okay, but let me know if you can’t keep the pace. If we need to split up, we will. Finding Elle is our first priority.”

  Bo nodded. Atta boy.

  Silas cleared his throat, drew a composed breath, and addressed the group. “I know we’ve all been impacted by the loss of Monte. But there’s a chance our pilot is still alive. So here it is—our first mission is to locate her and render aid as . . . if, needed. Our second priority is to reestablish communications and get ourselves out of here. Given the condition of our crew and lack of supplies and tools, it’s obvious that our former mission of corralling the southern flank of this complex is aborted. Any questions?” He scanned their faces. “Okay. Fill your canteens and pack up. We’ll follow the creek toward Crystal Lake where she hoped to land.”

  The men shifted positions and secured their packs. Bo crouched alongside Silas at the creek.

  Bubbles escaped his canteen underwater. “Who said a spare tire was good for nothing?” He gripped a handful of fat on his unwounded side. “Plenty of padding. Few stitches and I’ll be fine.” He glanced behind him and lowered his voice. “You should know, these boys ain’t the forgiving type. You best wake up and realize you is—”

  Caleb walked past them, shouldering his pack.

  Silas rested on his haunches and dunked a canteen into the creek. He studied Bo, then whispered, “You knew the plane was going down?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “Why is the question.”

  “And?”

  Bo arched his back and looked away. With his index finger he scrawled in the muddy bank.

  Gold.

  Silas kept his eyes fixed on the dirt.

  Bo stood, placed a boot on top of the word and pivoted. Silas let out a breath and screwed the lid on his canteen.