Burning Bright

by Nick Petrie

  “I just got back from a long backpacking trip,” said Peter. “You know how you can lose track of time in the mountains. Can you tell me, what day is today?”

  The Yeti shook his head and chuckled. “I stopped keeping track myself,” he said. “That’s one thing I love about living in this valley. Time just about stops here.”

  “Actually,” said Peter, “I was gone so long I missed the presidential election, and I haven’t seen a newspaper. Who won?”

  The Yeti looked thoughtful for a moment. “I thought it was George W. Bush,” he said. “But it seems like he’s been president forever. Did some black guy win, can that be right?”

  June clutched Peter’s arm, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  The man wasn’t faking it.

  Peter had thought the Yeti was a chess player, ten steps ahead of him.

  Peter was wrong.

  But if this wasn’t the Yeti’s play, whose was it? Chip Dawes, trying to hijack some technology? Maybe so. He wouldn’t be the first. But how did the Yeti come into it?

  Maybe he’d never know. Maybe it didn’t matter. He still had to shut down whoever kept coming after them. If it was Chip Dawes, he’d be along anytime. Then they’d figure it out.

  He said to June, “You need to talk to Sally.”

  “She was hinting at this, wasn’t she?”

  Peter nodded.

  This whole time the Yeti hadn’t let go of Peter’s hand. Now his grip tightened. Peter looked back and something had changed in the big man’s eyes, as if an infinitely thin film had been momentarily peeled away. He peered intently at Peter’s face.

  “I know you,” the Yeti said quietly. “You’re the man by the river, in California. With my daughter.”

  “Yes,” said Peter. Very aware of the size of the man, how close he was, and the fact that he seemed to have just awakened from a long sleep. His grandfather had gone in and out of the present, too. Peter had learned to recognize these moments of clarity, of connection. “She asked me to help her,” he said. “Was that you, watching? Overhead?”

  The Yeti smiled, just a little. “Son, you don’t have the clearance for this conversation.”

  “Dad?” said June. “We need to know what’s going on.”

  The Yeti let go of Peter and turned to his daughter, his face infinitely gentle. “Honey,” he said. “You really don’t have the clearance. You don’t want the clearance. These are not good people. In fact, you should go.” He looked at Peter. “Can you get her out of here? I’m not in charge here. I can’t protect her anymore.”

  “Goddamn it, Dad.” June stamped her foot, hands on her hips, eyes blazing. “They killed Mom. They tried to kill me. Leo, the guy you hired to be my landlord, helped them track me through my phone and laptop. They burned down my apartment, behind the house you bought in Seattle. So I have the fucking clearance, okay? I need to know what’s going on.”

  He looked at her.

  “What?” she said.

  “I just want to remember this,” he said. “I want to remember your face. My daughter all grown up.”

  She flew at him and buried her face in his chest and held on tight. He wrapped his enormous arms around her and closed his eyes. Father and daughter. They stayed like that for a long moment.

  Peter watched the trees, leaves moving in the breeze.

  Then the Yeti opened his eyes and cocked his head, listening to something Peter couldn’t hear. “Why don’t you get your truck off the road,” he told Peter, and pointed his chin at a patch of dirt corrugated with tire tracks. “Now would be good.”

  49

  Peter hustled to move his pickup and limped back to the wide cement apron in time to see a shadow flash up the road toward them.

  Chasing the shadow twenty feet above the pavement came something like a giant bird, blue-gray on its underside, completely silent and very fast. Its wingspan was considerably wider than the road.

  “Holy shit,” said June.

  It pulled up at the last moment to rise again in a steep, elegant ellipse, shedding velocity on the turn, wingtops parallel to the high granite scarps and gleaming gold in the morning sun. It circled back over the orchard, lined itself up with the road, then dropped down and down to finally merge with its shadow on a skeletal tripod of wheels.

  Peter and June just stood and stared as it rolled up the road.

  As it lost momentum, Peter heard the soft sound of a window fan on a summer day. Bending down, he could see the blurred propeller pushing it the last few yards to the concrete apron between the barns. Peter walked over, wanting to get a closer look as it passed, the medical boot an unwelcome weight on his foot.

  On the ground, the plane was maybe four feet tall, and from Peter’s standing position it appeared as a single shimmering gold wing with a long tapering sparrow’s tail. Its stretched skin was printed with delicate circuitry. The body hung below, a streamlined pod like a welder’s acetylene tank with an asymmetrical instrument package at the nose and a giant propeller now motionless at the rear.

  Peter had seen military drones up close several times. This little plane had as much resemblance to a Predator or Reaper as a Model T had to some sleek, gull-winged concept car still being dreamed up by an engineer on Ecstasy.

  It looked like some version of the future.

  When the propeller stopped, the Yeti walked around his creation. “It’s doing a self-diagnostic,” he said as he bent to sight along the wing, crouching on the concrete to inspect the instrument pod. He looked comfortable with the drone, very much in his element. More comfortable than he probably was with people, thought Peter. Or even the reality of the present.

  Like Peter’s grandfather with his boat motors.

  As the Yeti worked his way around the machine, he kept talking. “The Predator drone burns jet fuel in what’s basically a souped-up lawn mower engine. Powered flight, but limited time, one to two days. I was trying to build a plane that could power itself, that could travel long distances or stay on station, observing, for weeks or months at a time. See those solar panels? They’re printed on the skin, and they’re superefficient. The wings are different, too. This bird is essentially a glider with an electric motor. Most of the time it just rides the wind, charging its batteries. Only the dense parts show up on radar. It looks more like a couple of geese flying in formation.”

  “You work for the government?” asked June.

  Always the investigative reporter, thought Peter. Trying to find out about her own past.

  “We were supposed to be a research group,” said her father. “Like a think tank. Independent. I needed to do something with the last of the money I made in software. I gave out grants, brought smart people together, or that was the idea. To work on the difficult problems. For the public good.”

  “But something happened,” said June.

  “Yes,” said the Yeti. “Something happened. A small government agency offered us funding, and we took it. They saw that I was solving a difficult problem. Then they saw that I was having trouble with my memory, and other things. So they stepped in.”

  “Your memory troubles,” said June. “Can you tell me about them?”

  “They come and go,” her father said, frowning. “I leave myself notes, they help me remember.” His face lit up. “Wait,” he said, and pulled the notebook out of his sagging jacket pocket. Some pages were marked with colored tags. Peter saw big block lettering on the bookmarks, with labels reading “EVERY DAY” and “THINGS THAT HELP.” The Yeti opened his notebook to a page near the front, marked “WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME?”

  He read from the paper. “I had some problems with the blood vessels in my brain,” he said. “I forget things. Sometimes I get stuck in the past. Sometimes I imagine things that aren’t true. It was my own fault. I was very stressed at work. I took medication that I should not have taken, for a long period of time
. I damaged my brain. But there are things that help. If I do those things, I can manage my life. I can still do creative work.”

  “When did it start?” June’s voice was soft. “How long ago?”

  He lifted his eyes from the page to look directly into his daughter’s face. “Before I left the software business,” he said. “You were about five. I had those microseizures and lost my pilot’s license. It got worse over time. I took a lot of stuff to try to, you know, to medicate myself. I didn’t really understand what was going on until after you left to find your mother.”

  June’s childhood was ruled by a man who didn’t know his own brain was damaged. Peter watched June assimilate this new knowledge. It was like watching the forms for a house foundation bulge slightly as they filled with wet concrete. Containing all that liquid weight.

  God, she was tough.

  She was even tough enough to ask the next question.

  “Do you remember that Mom died last week?”

  Peter was glad she brought it up, because he sure didn’t want to. But somebody had to while the Yeti was still more or less in the present.

  He covered his eyes with his big hand, long white hair cascading down.

  “I forget,” he said. “First I forget that she left. If I manage to remember that she left, I’ve forgotten that she died.”

  And every time he remembered, thought Peter, would be like learning it for the first time.

  How would that be, discovering that your wife was dead, over and over?

  “I’m sorry,” said June. “You still loved her.” It wasn’t a question.

  “I did,” he said. “I always loved her. It wasn’t her fault she left. It was mine.”

  “Do you know who killed her? And why she died?”

  “I . . .” The Yeti looked at his notebook, at the page markers labeled in his neat engineer’s handwriting, but didn’t appear to find anything to help him there. “No. I don’t.”

  Peter heard a soft rattle and turned. Behind him at the black stone barns, both wide roll-up doors rose on their tracks. The golden drone’s propeller came on again and pushed it forward to some predetermined point, where it turned and rolled into one barn. From the other barn, another drone emerged, the slight sound of its propeller hidden by the sinuous clatter of the roll-up doors closing again.

  The new drone turned to line itself up with the road, then rolled forward. As both doors came to a halt, the fan noise became louder, and the golden bird picked up speed, faster and faster until it lifted smoothly into the air, two feet, four feet. Then the tail dipped slightly and the drone leaped upward like a hawk in mid-flight, chasing its inevitable prey.

  “Where’s it going?” asked Peter.

  “I don’t know. The first drone, the one that landed, is my new prototype. Better wings, better glide, more lift. I told them it needed field testing.” He gave June a shy smile. “I just wanted to see my daughter. The one that just took off is the previous generation. They changed the encryption protocols a few days ago. I haven’t had control for a long time. But something big is happening now. You need to leave.”

  “I’m not leaving,” June said fiercely. “I just got here.”

  Peter looked up at the bare granite ridges surrounding the little valley. He could see the waterfall where the river came through from the higher elevations to the west, but he didn’t see anything that looked like a trail. He had no idea where Lewis and Manny and his people would cross over.

  He hoped they were already here.

  Somewhere under the cover of trees.

  To the Yeti, he said, “Will you take June inside with you? She’ll be safer there.”

  June said, “You’re not the boss of me, Peter Ash.”

  “I know,” he said. “You’re the boss. But that drone is their eye in the sky. Maybe you and your dad could make a run on their encryption, turn off those cameras?”

  She looked at him. Of course she understood. “Okay.” She turned to the Yeti. “I’ll go inside with you. We could use a little help with something.”

  “Hey,” said Peter. “Take your laptop with you.”

  She flashed him a smile. “Waaaay ahead of you.”

  “We should all go,” said the Yeti. “It’s not safe out here.”

  “You’re probably right,” said Peter. “But I have a few things to do.”

  50

  LEWIS

  He’d made good time at first, even though the narrow path started out nearly vertical and mostly mud. His boots were broken in and his legs didn’t mind the workout. He’d been running a rugged up-and-down trail along the Milwaukee River for years, a ten-mile loop over broken terrain with a forty-pound steel plate in his ruck. His load today wasn’t hardly heavy at all, mostly rifle and ammunition.

  His concern was the dude behind him.

  The path wasn’t much of a path, and once you passed the little string of primitive campsites, there was no good reason for anyone to be out here. The dude definitely had some skills. Lewis had sped up and slowed down and doubled back and all the rest, lost some time along the way, but had only seen the dude twice, both times on long doglegs wrapping broad inside curves where the mountain folded back on itself, and even those were just glimpses of something moving. Lewis heard him maybe four times, each time through some oddball trick of alpine acoustics, on those wide stretches of scree where the loose rocks rattled underfoot and echoed off those high granite walls.

  Otherwise the dude might have been a ghost.

  By midafternoon, Lewis figured he was just gonna have to outhump the motherfucker. So he hit the gas and hauled ass.

  Lewis was city born and bred, didn’t come up with this wilderness bullshit. He got a fair amount of practice during two long deployments as a PFC in the Afghan boonies, which was actually a lot like this country, steep and bony and mostly dry. Long views over rocks and scrub to improvised enemy firing positions that changed every five minutes. He’d liked it when nobody was shooting at him, but that wasn’t often, not where he’d been. His army time taught him mountains and tactics and weapons, which came in handy there and afterward. He’d also learned, if he hadn’t known it already, that nobody was gonna look out for him but his own self. He’d taken that knowledge back to the world and created some opportunities that might not occur to just any old soul. The work wasn’t strictly legal but did give a particular kind of satisfaction and didn’t hurt no civilians, neither. Might even help some, you took a certain point of view.

  Then he’d met Peter and they’d run into that mess in Milwaukee and everything changed. Dinah and her kids, something Lewis had never imagined possible. He was grateful as hell, but it was a shock, this new life. Making lunches and meeting teachers and getting kids to school and sports practice. Had its rewards for sure but excitement wasn’t exactly one of them. Not like he was used to.

  He’d thought of this trip like a booster shot, giving him a dose to see him through the next year. When things were wrapped up here, he told himself, he’d be ready to go back to Dinah and the boys and domestic tranquillity. That was what he told himself, anyway.

  By late afternoon, Lewis hadn’t seen or heard from the ghost in two hours. He munched handfuls of trail mix as he walked a long upward traverse, then over a broad saddle and up again, eyes and ears open ahead and behind. He was supposed to meet Peter’s friends in the upper snowfields by nightfall so they could get an early start at that pass where the river dropped a couple thousand feet. He could see the waterfall on the map, but nothing that looked like a way down. June had said she’d done it, but that was almost fifteen years gone. Rockfall, avalanche, the workings of ice and snow, no way to know what it looked like now.

  Things could change fast in the mountains.

  His path had thinned down to nearly nothing when it leaped upward again in a long series of switchbacks. At the top he stopped for a drink of water a
nd could finally see the figure clearly below him, head down, walking steadily without pause or hesitation.

  Then he knew. Shit, the dude was no ghost. And he was keeping up.

  He could have been some local, out for a hike. Mailman on his day off. It was possible.

  Not likely. But possible.

  Lewis took out his new Nikons and glassed the man. It was hard to be certain through the screen of trees, but he thought he saw a black barrel sticking out of the top of the man’s pack.

  Lewis didn’t like that.

  He was locked and loaded, the rifle assembled and strapped to his ruck but easy enough to get at. He could fire from here and likely kill the man, remove that particular problem.

  Or maybe kill some dumbass civilian out hunting squirrels for his stewpot.

  Maybe also miss his shot, which was possible even for Lewis, firing downhill with an unfamiliar weapon, and start some run-and-gun bullshit. Have to duck and dive and generally fuck up his timetable.

  Either way, not worth it. Not yet.

  So he left the trail, heading straight upslope through the thinning timber, trying to gain some distance with the shortcut and make the upper snowfields before dark.

  When he came to the wide white bowl, he could hear the sound of meltwater running somewhere under the snow. Bare black boulders poked up here and there where they’d fallen from the high granite peaks above. The light was fading but he could still see a line of bootprints walking away from him in the knee-deep snow.

  More than one set of prints, he figured those were Peter’s friends. There was no way the ghost dude had gotten ahead of him. But the man could still be behind him, and Lewis had no desire to make his own trail so visible, and even less desire to skylight himself against the frozen white moonscape still hanging on at this altitude.

  He ducked back into the cover of the stunted little evergreens and began to skirt the perimeter of the big windblown bowl as he watched behind him for the dude and in front of him for Peter’s friends. He could get killed as easily by a friendly sentry as by the ghost dude, and that would be a goddamn shame for himself in addition to leaving him unable to do the job he’d promised Peter.