Burning Bright

by Nick Petrie

  She didn’t relax her arms. Finally, she spoke again. “How did you find me?”

  “I wasn’t looking for you,” he said. “I was hiking north and a grizzly bear chased me up a tree. I kept climbing. I saw your rope.” He shrugged. “I got curious.”

  “You’re a bad liar. California grizzlies are extinct.”

  “He might have been on vacation from Montana,” Peter admitted. “But he was brown and very big and he took a bite out of my boot. Here, I’ll show you.” Peter slowly unfolded his legs and held up his boot so she could see the bite mark in the sole. It was fairly dramatic.

  She glanced at the boot, then looked Peter up and down with a critical eye.

  He wore fast-drying hiking pants thinned down by the trackless miles, and a high-tech T-shirt that was supposed to keep him warm wet or dry, but after several months of almost continuous wear it had begun to smell like a goat’s ass. Washing his clothes in a stream helped with the dirt, but not the stink. He figured it was some kind of chemical reaction with the technology of the fabric. He’d carried cleaner clothes in his pack that he usually wore after he stopped hiking for the day, but they were probably shredded and covered with grizzly drool now.

  “Well,” she said. “You don’t look like one of them.”

  Her voice was rough and scratchy for her years, which he put at late twenties to early thirties. Around Peter’s own age. She didn’t look like a chain-smoker. From her T-shirt logo, he figured it was from screaming at punk rock shows. Or maybe smoking Humboldt County’s finest. Northern California was filled with strange characters gone a few extra steps around the bend. Like a Riot Grrrl in a tree with a bow and arrow.

  “What do they look like?” he asked.

  She just shook her head. “Better you don’t know.”

  “Give me a hint,” said Peter. “Bikers? Dopers? Cops? Aliens?”

  The corners of her mouth quirked up in the hint of a smile. She let the tension out of the bow, but still held the arrow nocked to the string. Her shoulders sagged, and for the first time he saw how tired she was.

  “Can I put my hands down?”

  “No,” she said. “You’re leaving, back the way you came. The only question is, are you going slow, or the express route?”

  “I’d prefer slow,” he admitted. “What are you doing up here, anyway?”

  “I don’t know you well enough to have this conversation,” she said.

  “I’ll tell you anything you’d like to know,” Peter said. “I was born outside of Bayfield, Wisconsin. My dad’s a builder. My mom’s an artist and a teacher. I was a lieutenant in the Marine Corps, honorably discharged. My hobbies are backpacking, carpentry, and current events.” He smiled winningly.

  Her mouth quirked again, just slightly. Maybe she wouldn’t put an arrow into him.

  “Not many people could free-climb it up here,” she said grudgingly. Then, “Not many people would be that stupid.”

  “I prefer the term ‘eccentric,’” said Peter. “How did you get up here?”

  She turned the bow slightly. “See the fishing reel?”

  It was bolted to the composite above the grip. Peter had known guys who went fishing with a bow with the same kind of setup, although this seemed like an odd place to do it.

  “You shoot a weighted arrow through the bottom loop in that green rope, which pulls the fishing line through the loop. Use the fishing line to pull a leader rope, then another rope large enough to climb. Clip on your ascenders and up you go. The only challenge is when you have to jump the knot. Then untie the first rope and pull it up behind you. Keeps the local idiots from climbing up and killing themselves on our gear.”

  Peter was clearly the local idiot in this scenario.

  Something caught his eye, a kind of golden glint in the sky. He looked out over the undulating land. A half-dozen turkey vultures rode the thermals with their broad square wings, using their superb sense of smell to search for carrion to eat. But they weren’t the source of the flash. It was something high above them. He shaded his eye but couldn’t make it out. Maybe a small plane?

  “Am I boring you?”

  He looked back to Riot Grrrl, still holding the bow. “Sorry, I was watching the birds. You have an excellent view.”

  From far below, over the sound of the breeze through the branches, Peter heard a hard staccato sound. Takatak. Takatak.

  He’d heard the sound before. Automatic rifles in disciplined bursts. Takatak. Takatak. Then sustained, magazine-emptying fire, multiple weapons. Takatakatakatakatakataka.

  He didn’t hear the distant roar of Mr. Griz. If Mr. Griz hadn’t woken up and wandered off, Peter figured the last California grizzly was dead or dying by now. He hadn’t thought it would make him so sad.

  He looked at Riot Grrrl. “You hear that?”

  From the way her eyes had gone wide, she’d heard it. Scared but trying to play it cool.

  She sighed. “They’re not fucking aliens, all right?”

  Peter figured she should be gearing up to get herself out of there. But she wasn’t moving. The bow hung from her hand, her feet seemed glued to her branch. He knew the look. She was paralyzed.

  Peter kept talking. “So who are they?”

  She looked past him at the reaching limbs. She sounded tired. “I don’t know. I’ve seen them three times. My mom’s lab, on the street, and at my mom’s house two days ago.” She put her hand to her face. “I didn’t think they’d find me here. I’m running out of places to go.”

  “How many?”

  “Four so far. Men in dark suits. Two black Chevy SUVs.”

  “Sounds like government.”

  “Their IDs say they’re from the Department of Defense. But I don’t believe them.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m pretty sure DoD employees don’t use stun guns to try to kidnap journalists in broad daylight.”

  “That happened to you?”

  Her eyes jumped back to him. “Yes.”

  He saw the anger blazing there, and heard it in the hard edge of her voice. Anger was good. Anger was action. He could work with that.

  “Why would they try to kidnap a journalist?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t had a chance to do much digging yet.” But there was something there, something she wasn’t telling him.

  “What do you write about?”

  “Technology. Big data. Information privacy in the modern age. Investigative stuff.” She shook her head. “But I don’t think that’s why it happened.”

  “Okay,” said Peter. “We should go take a peek. See who’s down there.”

  “We?” She stared at him, and he felt that focus again, like the heat of the sun.

  He looked right back at her. “Hey, I’m your prisoner,” he said. “Under the Geneva Convention, that means my health and safety are your responsibility. First, I’d like a large cup of strong coffee and a breakfast burrito. Then you need to protect me from those mean men with guns.”

  She didn’t look away. He saw something change inside her, some decision made. “You really want to go down there?”

  “Not all the way,” he said. “Just far enough to get a look. I don’t suppose you have any binoculars in that bag, do you?”

  4

  JUNE

  He sure looked different, June thought. Not some overfed goon in a suit, like those fake G-men. Definitely not the deliberately casual costume she saw so often in the tech industry, hoodies and expensive jeans on the technical types and golf shirts on the money men.

  She fucking hated golf shirts.

  This guy Peter looked kind of raggedy, although that wasn’t quite right. Definitely not the golf shirt type. Hair all shaggy, his rough beard not a hipster fashion statement. You’d never describe him as fashion-forward. Too lean and ropy, but with a kind of lightness to him
, like one of those uncluttered man-shaped sculptures made of scrap steel.

  His clothes were worn to threads, but good stuff, not cheap. So he wasn’t broke. And he was fairly clean, especially if you took into account that he’d been in the woods for a while. So he had decent hygiene, again in contrast to many in the tech industry.

  No, she thought. Not raggedy.

  Lived-in. The man looked lived-in.

  Like that pair of old Levi’s she’d had since college. Frayed but comfortable, washed a thousand times, and fit her hips like they were custom-made.

  She caught herself and sighed.

  That’s fucking great, June.

  You meet some guy in a tree and now you’re thinking about your hips.

  I know you’re approaching your sexual peak, honey, but really? Don’t you have more important things to focus on right now?

  Like those assholes still chasing you?

  She found herself feeling self-conscious, with the bow and arrow. Maybe even a little silly.

  She snapped the arrow back into its quiver and jumped from her branch to the platform netting. Her landing made him bounce on the trampoline material. She liked that he didn’t look startled.

  He seemed like the steady type.

  She went directly to the dry bags she’d insisted Bryce buy and dug through them for the gear she needed. Everything was still clean and dry. Rotten rope was a bad thing if you were three hundred feet up a tree.

  She found Bryce’s old narrow climber’s pack, four coils of 9-mil rope, and the heavy clanking bags from Mountain Rescue. “Hey,” she said to make sure she had Peter’s attention, and tossed him a knot of webbing. “That’s a climbing harness. You ever wear one before?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Put it on,” she said. “I’ll check you. How about Jumars, figure eights? Ascenders and descenders?”

  “Most of my rope work involved jumping out of helicopters,” he said. “But I know the gear.”

  She dumped out her own pack and sorted her belongings. She laid out rope and gear, divided it up, and made a pile for him with Bryce’s old bombproof pack. “Here, take this. You’re going to need it.”

  She collected her gear, made sure the compound bow was tightly lashed to the back of her pack, and pointed him back the way he’d come. The bow would make it more difficult for her to travel through the tree, but she wasn’t going to leave it behind.

  She liked that he was packed and ready when she was.

  They followed the path of red marking ropes past the burnt stub of the original lightning-struck spire, and down through the lower crown. He moved lightly in the tree, found branches that would support his weight without cracking or breaking, and didn’t use his boots to kick footholds into the bark. He moved, in other words, like a real climber, even on this easy path.

  The next routes wouldn’t be so easy.

  But if he’d really free-climbed a 9-mil rope twenty stories after climbing sixty feet up a redwood sapling, he was plenty capable.

  Now they could hear fragments of voices from below, although the wind in the branches drowned out the words. How many men were there?

  She wondered if they were the same men from the SUV, and how badly she’d hurt them. Part of her felt remorse about hitting them with the stun gun. A small part, but still. She didn’t want them dead, just unable to ever threaten her again. She hoped these were different men.

  Conscious of sound now, she used simple hand gestures to direct him to the Perch. It was a massive limb, six feet in diameter, and horizontal for ten feet before it angled upward toward the sun.

  This was the lowest point of decent lateral structure in the tree. She’d run strong webbing from the main trunk to the vertical leg of the Perch, so they had a drop point well above their footing. On their research trips, she’d clipped ropes and pulleys on the webbing for hauling gear up and down in a system she’d privately called the freight elevator. When you had four academic biologists three hundred plus feet up in a tree for two weeks at a time, you hauled a lot of freight. Not just camping gear and sample cases, but all supplies in and all garbage out, including their poop in plastic bags, triple-wrapped.

  June wasn’t a biologist, wasn’t part of that team, but it had been a way to spend time with Bryce. She’d started free-climbing boulders and trees during her lonely tomboy childhood in rural Washington. When she moved to California to live with her mom, she’d joined a climbing club and turned into a serious rock monkey. Ascending tall trees with Bryce was just another way to feed the rat.

  As it turned out, she’d also written some of her best articles up there in the high canopy. Surprisingly, her laptop’s cell modem caught a signal just fine up there. The trick was getting enough sunlight in the temperate rain forest for the solar chargers to keep her gear powered up.

  The green rope hung down into the mist, and voices filtered up, louder now but still indecipherable. Three of them? Four? The wind had dropped. It smelled like rain.

  He spoke in a soft voice. “We need to get closer.”

  June shook her head. She wasn’t going down there. She could still see the date rapist’s leer, his piggy little eyes. And now there were more of them.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll go.” He seemed so calm. How could he be calm?

  “They have guns,” she hissed.

  “And I don’t,” he said. “So I’ll be very quiet.”

  Her mouth opened, but she didn’t know what to say. Why was he doing this for her?

  So she said it. “Why are you doing this?”

  He gave her a toothy grin. “Why not?” he said softly. “Maybe we’ll learn something.”

  “I don’t know if I trust you yet.”

  “Tell you what,” he said. “If you decide you don’t trust me, you can always cut the rope.”

  What the fuck was she supposed to say to that?

  He was already wearing his harness, but he tucked one of her Jumar ascenders into each of his cargo pockets, she assumed so they wouldn’t clink together on the harness. Then he pulled a bight from the big rope into a figure 8 descender, ran it around the bottom, and clipped it into a locking carabiner on his harness. From the way he screwed down the lock and checked it, she could tell he’d definitely done this before.

  He smiled, held a finger to his lips, took the bottom rope and wrapped it around the small of his back. He was left-handed, she noticed. Then he stepped backward off the Perch and down toward the ground, slowed only by the friction of the rope through the descender and the pressure of the rope around his body.

  June watched him slide down the rope, thinking he’d missed something, skipped some step. Then she realized he hadn’t attached the ascenders’ safety lines to his harness.

  Their locking carabiners lay on the wide branch at her feet.

  5

  PETER

  Where the hell is this chick? Is she some kind of ninja or what?”

  One of the men held an electronic device in one hand. He turned in a slow circle, looking from the device to the rugged landscape and back to the device.

  Another stood with his foot on the bloody corpse of Mr. Griz. “Hey, somebody take my picture.” He held the unmistakable form of a compact semiautomatic rifle, maybe a Steyr or a Heckler & Koch. Either one a very good weapon, and expensive.

  “Yo, shut up,” said a third man, a similar rifle slung across his chest, studying the remains of Peter’s gear spread around the base of the sapling he’d climbed. “I’m telling you, I think this goddamn bear ate her.”

  The man with the device kept turning, kept looking. His rifle was slung across his back. “What, it swallowed her whole? Where’s the bones? Where’s the remains?”

  A fourth man stepped deliberately around the perimeter, eyes out. He had a different weapon, with a fat barrel and minimal magazine, something out of
a sci-fi movie. Like the other three men, he was dressed in hiking clothes so crisp and new he might have stepped out of REI and onto the trail. Four big internal-frame backpacks lay against a fallen trunk, out of the way. They were new, too.

  Peter hung at the bottom of the rope, one foot in the loop, sixty or seventy feet up, at the edge of the fog. The wind didn’t penetrate the lower canopy, and their voices were soft but clear in the hush. Peter couldn’t see their faces, just the tops of their heads.

  He didn’t want to see their faces.

  If he could see their faces, they could see him.

  Peter was mostly worried about the guy at the perimeter. He was the one most actively searching the landscape. It might occur to him to actually look up.

  Peter reached into his left pocket for an ascender. It was a simple device, basically an aluminum handgrip with a channel for the rope. The channel had a locking mechanism so the rope would only move in one direction. Push it up the rope, and the grip would hold while you pulled yourself up. Much easier than shinnying up hand over hand like he’d done earlier that day.

  He held the lock open and set it on the line. Closed the lock with his hand fully engaged to dampen any sound. These men would definitely notice a metallic click in this environment.

  They were hunters. Serious people.

  Hunting Riot Grrrl.

  Four on one. Not exactly fair.

  What had she done to attract their attention?

  They weren’t trying to pass for government, like she’d said they’d done before. They were trying to look like backpackers, although with all that new gear they might pass as tourists. The assault rifles gave a different kind of impression. But that’s what the backpacks were for. To hide the weapons until they were deep in the forest.

  And the handheld device. Some sort of locator.

  So they had funding, and technical support.

  They were definitely pros.

  Riot Grrrl was in serious trouble. And now Peter was, too. But it wasn’t his first time.