The buzz of anxious runners swarmed over the field like mosquitoes, irritating Caleb considerably. Why can’t they listen to the energy all around them, he wondered?
“I’ve been working all winter for this,” a wiry woman said to Caleb, laughing, “and now I don’t want to do it.”
Caleb did not respond. Around him he heard the names of leading ultrarunners. The other name he heard everywhere was Steve Brzenski, whose death from a broken back had ended this event years ago.
Caleb inhaled hard, and jumped up and down. It did not matter whether it rained. It did not matter which elite runners were here. It did not matter whether someone had died. Caleb was not running against rain or Scott Jurek or the park. He was running into himself. He stood still, arms dangling at his sides. Later, Kevin Yu would say that the absence of his usual focus was obvious. But that morning, everyone had been concerned with his own race.
Barry Strong began speaking through his bullhorn, but it was hard to care about anything he said. In the sky a pink wave appeared like the wake of oncoming jets, revealing the distant peak of El Capitan rubbing against the belly of the sky.
He did not hear the gunshot. He just felt the crowd surge tentatively into the forest. Caleb shouldered past other runners, wove in and out until he was out front on the hard-packed dirt of Big Oak Flat Road. He should not be running this fast, he understood, but he had to get himself some space.
As Caleb disappeared into the park, Scott Jurek gestured at him, shaking his head. Someone else said that they would pass him heaving over a rock by Crane Creek.
Caleb, of course, never heard them.
• • • • • • •
At ten o’clock that morning, Shane dismantled his lab.
His golf shirt stuck to his back like a desperate lover as he bent over the open cardboard boxes, which lay everywhere, tops flapping like hungry birds.
He had told himself he had no time for melancholy. He double-checked each box to make certain the right equipment was returned to the right company. Microscopes and Bunsen burners, beakers, corks, the stuff he had ignored in middle school, now forever symbols of his life’s greatest risk.
He dumped the large bottles of media into the double sinks. The petri dishes full of multiplying black miracle spores he tossed into the garbage can. He did discover an emotional attachment to the chairs he had assembled in December and decided to leave them for whoever was renting the lab next.
But the gloves and droppers, the big computers, the cables, went into cardboard boxes, which he assembled one by one with packing tape and an X-ACTO knife. He stacked the boxes outside in the hall by all the other closed doors, like a freshman expelled from college. UPS was supposed to be picking it all up in an hour.
Except for the cooler. Fifty milligrams of Prajuk’s humanized drug in small glass vials rested contentedly in a styrofoam nest inside, chilling at a perfect 51.7 degrees.
“It’s seventy degrees outside,” Prajuk had explained, his voice high and slow. “The solution must be kept cold. You cannot be stuck in traffic.”
Shane agreed, feeling extremely off-balance. “I’ll blast the AC.”
He rode the freight elevator down, carrying the cooler in his arms. It was more difficult than he had anticipated. Heavy, awkward, slippery, it was difficult to maintain a proper grip. He was breathing hard and felt unwell. The six months of worry and stress, that someone at Helixia would find out about the lab, of ignoring Janelle and Nicholas, of underperformance at work, over if what they were doing here would work, and Caleb not returning his calls, had all been far too much. It had launched an attack upon his systems. His sinuses throbbed, and he felt the stirrings of fever.
He desperately wanted to wipe the sweat dripping down his forehead as he stepped out into the bright day. Trying to get a better handle on the styrofoam, he blinked into the parking lot sun ricocheting off a dozen windshields.
Who was that, he squinted, leaning on his car?
“Hey,” Shane said as he approached.
A thin man with short blond hair was watching him, affecting friendliness. “You’re Shane Oberest?”
Shane’s fingers squeezed the cooler.
“Can you get off my car?”
The thin man pushed himself off the Civic and walked right up to him, violating norms, Shane thought, of personal space.
“What are you doing up there, guy?”
In this sun he couldn’t quite see the man’s expression, but his voice was tinged with acid.
“Excuse me,” Shane said, pushing past him.
The man grabbed his shoulder, and Shane whirled around, his fingers slipping down the cooler. Sunlight careened off the myriad of car mirrors, creating the effect of being inside of a moving marble.
“Do you know who I am?” the man asked.
“I have no idea.”
“Jon Benatti. From Helixia.”
The name struck Shane as somewhat important.
“I’m Deputy Director of Science. You’re in a lot of trouble, boss.”
“You want to let go of me now.”
Benatti considered him and then took his hand away, and pointed at the building behind him. “You’ve got stolen property up there.”
“What are you talking about?”
Benatti’s voice rose. “You took a protein from our gene library. One of our centrifuges. God knows what else. Whatever’s in that box belongs to Helixia.”
Shane stared at him in disbelief. “It’s medicine for a baby.”
“Give it to me.”
There was no choice at all. He shouldered Benatti hard, knocking him backward, and started for the passenger door. He balanced the cooler on his left knee, found his keys in his pocket, and pressed his keypad. He slipped the fingers of his right hand out from underneath the cooler to lift the trunk.
He felt the contact just after he registered the rush of wind, and the peculiar energy of a human being in full motion. The ugly feel of Benatti’s bony body against him. The horror of the cooler slipping out of his hand, falling onto the parking lot blacktop, the styrofoam top flying off.
The sickening sound of the vials spilling onto the ground, the cracking of glass, and the sudden spilling of liquid.
9
• • • • • • • • • • • •
The trail wove through the forest like fine brown thread.
Caleb scanned the ground for rocks, loose roots, the occasional yellow lizard, anything that might trip him. Small bright birds darted out of the foliage, and red-tailed hawks floated above as if covering the race for ABC.
His stride was metronomic. His feet hit the earth lightly on their balls, regardless of whether he was leaping over a rock, or hit an unexpected dip in the ground. His breathing was perfect, his spine straight as pipe. A great confidence enveloped him; he had reached the point in his run where the cells of the body bind with those of the trees.
The first aid station came at Tuolumne Grove. A gray-haired official yawned in a chair behind a fold-up table. Plastic bowls of M&M’s, energy gels, and bananas sat on the table; a cooler lay underneath. Hank was waiting for him beside the table. Hank was a huge live-music guy, always grabbing people for a run up to Catacombs, one of the happier and most helpful of the house. Caleb always blew by the first aid station, he knew, so he had prepared himself to start running as soon as he saw him cantering close. But surprisingly, Caleb stopped at the tent, grabbed a bottle of Powerade, and sat in a folding chair.
Other runners ran by for a bottle of water and back to the course; some didn’t stop at all.
Hank took a tentative step toward him, his hand held out, as if about to touch a wound, when suddenly Caleb snapped his brown and earthy eyes open. He took the time to pour a salt packet into his sports drink. Then he stood and nodded, and they ran back onto the trail.
Hank ran out in fr
ont. He knew his role was to slow Caleb down, keep him from burning out. But Caleb never challenged him. In fact, turning around at one point, Hank had seen Caleb almost fifty yards behind him.
The course corkscrewed into a series of stunning ascents along narrow mining trails that had been closed for half a century. A yard to Caleb’s left, the cliff dropped straight down to a canyon. On his right rose a solid wall of large pink-sheened granite rippling with blue veins. Rae had been right, of course; injury here would be fatal.
Eventually, they wound down into a canyon. With utter amazement, Hank watched Caleb run this stretch with his eyes fluttering closed.
Then he screamed.
Caleb whipped his head around. Hank was leaning against an oak, clutching his ankle, looking at the bottom of his sneaker.
“What?”
“Fucking acorn,” he said in a calmer voice, sweat pouring from his crew-cut head. “Let’s just go.”
Later, Hank told Mack that he had been surprised by his ability to keep up with Caleb. They hit Jacob’s Furnace just before noon, a shelf of exposed dark rock seven thousand feet in the air, under the burning midday sun. Caleb drained the last bottle of water in his pack and walked across the shelf trail. A wide stream circled below, taunting him with cool water to dive into. After a brutal hour he discovered himself at the top of a breathtaking gorge. Happily he watched hawks flying underneath him.
“Beautiful, right?” Hank smiled. “What a course.”
Alice was waiting to replace Hank at the next aid station. She handed Caleb a banana, and took off with him into the afternoon. The course flags marked a path down to a fast-moving stream. White caps gurgled where its water met the rocks. No rope line had been fixed; this was either a major oversight by Barry and Mack, or their first hint of just how dangerous this race would become.
Alice looked around. “No good,” she muttered.
Caleb waded into the water; immediately its force shoved him downstream. This was the answer. Rather than expend energy fighting the current, he let it push him like commuters exiting a subway as he walked, and crossed on a sharp diagonal, reaching the opposite bank two hundred yards downstream.
Alice followed him, but by the time she made it across, he was already disappearing into the distance, his long legs loping over the slippery gray rocks. Alice tried to pace him, but she was small, with stout legs, and when Caleb leapt like a palomino over a fallen stump, it was difficult for her to match him. Five miles in, she fell forever behind.
The light in the park turned a godly green. Prisms shone through the pine. Night, Caleb saw, was coming. At the Antibes aid station there was no one from Happy Trails waiting to meet him. Caleb found his drop bag, retaped his feet, put on a GoLite shell, fresh sneakers, and clipped a black rubber flashlight to his waist. He drank two cups of chicken broth, filled his water bottle, and left by himself.
Somewhere near Tamarack Flat, Caleb understood he had left the course. His eyes tried to adjust, but it was such a perfect blackness that he could not see the roots, rocks, or the steepness of the inclines. He stopped, enraptured by the woods around him. Above he saw a crescent moon among an initial gathering of stars. The world ahead felt like black water; Caleb imagined he could push his arms through it and swim upward, break the surface, and arrive somewhere entirely new.
In his peripheral vision he could make out pale purple silhouettes of sequoias, like pillars holding up Heaven. He stuck out a hand and stroked one; a tree that had stood here since Plato. In each of these trees, millions of insects were birthed, lived, mated, died, none aware that he was off of his trail, off his course. He felt he had it made it somewhere he had always guessed existed. He might wander in any direction, encounter any magic.
Caleb swept his flashlight around him, trying to find the small blue glow sticks that marked the course. He caught only the bizarre depths of nature, no less mysterious than space. In the distance—he hoped it was the distance—he heard the howl of something doglike.
And then, at last, his flashlight revealed a cluster of five blue glow sticks, removed from the trail and grouped together with definite intent. He closed his eyes thankfully.
When he opened them again, June was standing in front of him.
The moonlight bathed her face in alabaster. Caleb kissed her, stroked the back of her head.
“Okay,” he whispered, and they turned into the backcountry.
PART FOUR
Ultrathon
1
• • • • • • • • • • • •
Caleb and June wove through an impossible density of forest.
Between the redwoods, oaks, and underbrush, no moonlight availed itself to them. He found June’s fingers in the dark and squeezed them. It was necessary to take her hand here, to protect her, and himself. It had been so long since he had touched her. A well of emotion rose through him and nearly burst. But he did not have time to nurture it.
Pine needles scratched their eyes, thorns scraped their thighs. As dangerous as it was to run blindly through the night, Caleb knew they had to hold off on using his flashlight until they were farther away from the aid tent and the hundred runners making their agonized way through the darkness. No one could see any beam of light bounding away from the course.
They were headed toward a parallel trail that Caleb had seen on one of Mack’s blown-up maps. It was a popular hiking trail tourists strode with digital cameras and bottles of purified water. This wide, smooth trail would take them along easier ground and merge with a wider path back to Big Oak Flat. Search and Rescue would never think to look for them here, and any tourists who might remember them would be sleeping now. They had until the park opened in the morning to get out. Which, Caleb estimated, gave them around eight hours. This was significantly less time than it had taken him to reach this point, but the trail would be significantly faster than the insane demands of the course.
But now, in the backcountry, they were in acute danger, intruders upon the natural order. There were cliffs. There was water. There were animals.
During the drive from Boulder, when Mack had stayed behind in Elko, Caleb had run beside her.
“June,” he had started. “Can you listen to me?”
When she had turned to him, tears were forming in her eyes.
She had told him what had happened inside of Mack’s room. Caleb had suspected this for years.
“He said he wants Lily to start early. If he wants her to start running marathons when she’s six, what will he want her to do when she’s thirteen? Do what all these other women do? I don’t like how he’s seeing her.”
“We can get to Shane,” he’d whispered, “from Yosemite.”
At the weigh-in, while Mack worked the crowd and the press, he had seen her standing near John. On the way back to the lodge, he had been able to whisper a plan.
As Mack had instructed, June would run the first leg. Feigning injury, she would volunteer to work the isolated Antibes aid station, where Caleb guessed he would be when darkness fell. He planned to arrive there alone, rested. While she waited, she would gather blue course markers and cluster them at the first small clearing off the trail she could find. Walk half a mile into the woods. And then she would listen for his footsteps in the forest.
Somewhere after midnight, the trail dipped drastically, and he knew they could not dare to run blind any longer. He switched on the flashlight clipped to his waist, let go of her hand, and they began moving faster.
By this time, Caleb knew, he would have failed to check into the next aid station. Word would be out that he was lost or hurt at night. With communications so poor, Mack might not hear of it for an hour. Then Mack and Barry Strong would begin frantically plotting to keep this from ABC’s reporters.Or, he considered, seeing drama for the cameras, perhaps plot to involve them. Either way, Yosemite Search and Rescue would not begin operations until first light of
dawn. And then, they would be searching for one man, hurt, confused. They would have heard the story of him falling off of Engineer Mountain, of training too long and hard, and look for him to be in a similar situation. They would have no idea to look for a couple running confidently the other way, along the easy trail out of the park.
But when Mack learned that June and Lily were also missing, he would understand it all, and his fury would be boundless.
He heard a noise, something heavy and deep. A bear, was his first thought. June froze mid run and looked to him. He unclipped the flashlight and waved it in circles above his head and shouted a roar of his own. They heard another sound, clearly alive, but moving away from them. After some time they started jogging again through the trees.
Finally, they broke through the dense woods and met a dirt road. This was the trail he had found on the map. At least he hoped it was. Otherwise they might go off in the wrong direction, daylight would come, the park staff would be alerted to find them, and it would all end badly.
In the thin light of the stars Caleb could see a hand-painted, arrow-shaped sign pointing toward famous vistas. June fished through her pocket for some energy gels, which they swallowed as the widening trail made a grand turn, revealing a waterfall. He was lost in its churning aural symphony when they heard the engine.
He pulled June off the path into the dark forest. Headlights appeared fifty yards in front of him. The park rangers had the authority to hold them; he supposed they could be forceful.
Squatting in the wood he could feel his body slowing down dangerously, and he knew June’s must be too. A green Jeep approached slowly. As with a bear, it seemed wise not to look it in the eye. When it finally passed, he retched. He had finished his water hours ago, his kidneys could fail any time. It was one thing to run an ultra, where every aid station held the promise of pacers and sustenance. It was another to run like this unaided.
Race Across the Sky Page 23