Primal Threat (23 page)

39

M
uldaur heard the crash behind him and began to decelerate. It had sounded like a house rolling down the road, metal grinding, trees snapping, glass breaking, and, buried in the middle of the insanity, one man screaming.

He coasted another 150 yards before he found a widening of the road where it was flat enough to turn around, then began riding back up toward the accident site.

The grade was like a wall in spots, and he marveled at how recklessly he’d been descending. He used his lowest gear and slid forward on the saddle so he wouldn’t tip over backward. The slopes on the left side of the road were peppered with Douglas fir, and there were trees off to his right amid the gullies. Farther up there’d been bluffs and death-defying drop-offs, but they’d crashed at a spot where a screen of trees caught them.

He and Zak had separated earlier at a place where the road dropped like the dip in a roller coaster, and at the bottom of that dip was a hairpin curve to the left, a turn Muldaur had barely negotiated. There’d been a bailout road mostly overgrown with grass and saplings, which Zak had taken partway back up the hill while Muldaur continued left. Neither said a word. It was simply understood that Zak couldn’t make the corner.

Now Muldaur saw a long strip of chrome on the edge of the road and found scuff marks in the dirt where the Land Rover had gone into a stand of immature trees. The trees had netted the SUV, bringing it to a halt before it could tumble farther down the mountain. It was on its roof, nose pointing toward the road, small trees crumpled under it.

Muldaur laid his bicycle on its side, then carefully picked his way down the rock scree toward the crash site.

They’d all been flirting with disaster, but for some reason the reality of the accident hit him now like cold water. His heart was in his mouth, sweat dripping off his nose and out of his helmet. It was a weird feeling, walking down to this wreck he’d precipitated, almost as weird as seeing Chuck Finnigan step off the bluff this morning and not being able to do anything about it.

The Land Rover’s roof was caved in, the undercarriage facing up. Muldaur lay on his belly in the rocks and peered inside. As his eyes damped down from the bright sunshine, he recognized a man inside, his shoulders and head showing. He was pinned in the twisted sheet metal.

“You okay, buddy?” Muldaur said. “Hey, buddy. Buddy?”

“Can’t breathe,” gasped the man in the car. His lips and face were dark with loss of oxygen, his features bloody, battered, and unrecognizable, his eyes open but filled with blood and earth from the crash so that it was impossible to know if he was gazing at Muldaur or his maker. The interior of the Land Rover reeked of gasoline, beer, fresh pine needles, and mountain dust. Muldaur knew there’d been two men in the Land Rover, Scooter and Ryan Perry, but he had no clue which this was.

“Listen, we’re going to get you out of there.”

“Can’t breathe.”

“Get up, motherfucker!” Muldaur looked up from the position he’d taken on his stomach to see Scooter standing over him with a rifle. Scooter’s forehead was bruised and swelling, and blood ran down his face from his scalp. “Get up, you idiot! Move!”

“He needs help.”

“And you’re going to give it to him?”

“Look, the two of us can get the jack out and pry some of this loose. We can at least give him some space so he can breathe, but we have to move fast.”

Scooter considered the notion for a few seconds and then pumped a cartridge into the chamber of the rifle. “Stand up before I do you right here.”

“But he’s suffocating.”

Scooter fired the rifle into the rocks behind Muldaur, then motioned for Muldaur to move away, kept motioning until Muldaur was fifteen feet from Scooter. It was an effective tactic, Muldaur thought, because the rocks would slow him considerably if he tried to rush the other man.

After Muldaur had moved away, Scooter peered into the crushed SUV. “Ryan. Ryan? You all right?” He reached inside with one hand, came out with a handful of dirt, then a shoe. He looked at Muldaur. “You killed him.”

“He’s not dead. We can get him out. I’m telling you.”

“You’re not telling me anything, you moron. Get up the hill.”

“No, let me check. I can—” Scooter fired another bullet into the rocks, this one closer than the last. He did it carelessly, as if he didn’t mind kneecapping Muldaur or shooting one of his toes off.

As they climbed through the rocks to the road, Muldaur conjured up several stratagems to take the gun from Scooter, but Scooter kept his distance, and the muzzle remained trained on his target.

Scooter gestured for him to kneel in the road in the classic assassination pose. “Get down, motherfucker.”

Before he could comply, Scooter walked behind Muldaur and struck him across the shoulder blades with the butt of the rifle. The blow knocked him to the ground on his face, the Styrofoam helmet crunching against the rocks. “Up! Up, you bastard!” As soon as Muldaur got to his knees, Scooter hit him again. He smacked Muldaur in the head until the helmet came apart, leaving only a system of straps and a couple of strands of Styrofoam. One of the lenses on the sunglasses popped out.

The gun came down again on the back of Muldaur’s neck and threw him to the roadway. For a moment he thought he wouldn’t be able to get back up. The blow could easily have paralyzed him. Scooter kicked him in the ribs. “Where are they?”

“Where are who?”

“Your friends.”

“I don’t know.”

Scooter kicked Muldaur again, and Muldaur, thinking about the appropriate time to make a grab for the rifle, covered his head with his hands and curled into a fetal position. “Just tell me where your friends are hiding!”

Scooter barraged Muldaur with blows, kicking and slapping and swinging the rifle down hard while Muldaur slapped back ineffectually, hoping to grab the rifle but coming up empty each time.

40

Z
ak knew the Land Rover had crashed but didn’t know how badly, and a minute after he heard all the noise, he managed to find a vantage point in the road where he spotted Scooter wandering in the trees with a rifle. The Land Rover was wrecked. Muldaur and the other occupant were nowhere in sight, and Zak knew that if he exposed himself, he’d be shot at. So he waited. Seven minutes later, when he saw Scooter marching Muldaur out of the trees at gunpoint, something in his gut rolled over.

From his vantage point he couldn’t see all of the beating, but what he did witness threw him into a state of disbelief—Scooter swinging the rifle at Muldaur and knocking him to the ground, then knocking him to the ground again.

Zak made his plan as he rolled down the hill and saw a natural ramp on the road directly above Scooter. If he picked up enough speed, he might get airborne, and if he got airborne and timed it properly, he might take Scooter down. At the very least, he would crash into him, and if Zak kept to hard surfaces, Scooter might not hear him coming until it was too late.

When Scooter did hear him, Zak was already barreling down the mountainside at almost thirty miles an hour, Scooter jacking a cartridge into the chamber, sighting along the barrel, pointing the Winchester toward Zak’s chest as Zak bounced down the road. Somewhere in the middle of it the gun went off.

The crash was a blur, and strangely it was silent in Zak’s brain. He was in midair when the explosion occurred, and he definitely felt the heat of the gunshot on his bare leg, but he didn’t hear it. Later he figured the bullet had gone harmlessly between his legs. He must have hit Scooter with one of his pedals, because he felt a jolt in the crank arm. The force twisted Zak and the bike around in midair and flipped him. It was a rough fall—he’d been higher than Scooter’s head when it started.

Now Scooter was on the ground cradling his bloodied head, Muldaur standing over him with the rifle, while Zak lay on his back trying to assess the damage he’d incurred. The wind had been knocked out of him, and his left hip and rump burned with road rash. Both shoulders were sore, but the helmet had protected his head, even though he had a headache. His right ankle was scraped, and he could feel blood seeping through the sock.

Zak rolled over and then got to his hands and knees slowly, bending his joints, counting his digits, inspecting himself for wounds. He stood slowly and limped over to his bike and found that, miraculously, except for a bent brake lever, it was mechanically sound. Zak picked it up and walked it up the hill toward Muldaur, testing his legs and glancing down at the blood oozing out his arm. A crash at such a speed should have been a lot worse. Fortunately, the impact with Scooter had absorbed much of his momentum.

Except for a large tear in the left leg of his cycling shorts, Zak’s kit was intact, as were his sunglasses.

Lying on his side, Scooter groaned and said, “Don’t hurt me. Please don’t.” Muldaur had the rifle now.

Following Muldaur’s directions, Zak headed down the dirt scree toward the flipped Land Rover, aware that the closer he got to the vehicle, the more nervous he became. It was as if he were walking through a trapdoor directly into his childhood. This wasn’t anything like coming up on a wrecked car while riding Engine 6. He didn’t have a crew backing him up. He didn’t have protective equipment, and he didn’t have the profession propelling him forward. Here he was free to let fear take full rein. And for reasons he would mull over for years to come, take over it did.

Ten feet away from the wreck, he froze.

Zak peered into the half-crushed Land Rover. He edged forward, his legs quivering. He was having a difficult time breathing. He wanted to move forward. He wanted to squirm into the crushed passenger’s compartment and find the occupant, but, hypoxic and shaking, he stared into the vehicle in a daze.

There was no telling how long his stupor lasted. When he finally came out of it, he forced himself to creep forward and touch the Land Rover. If he could touch it, perhaps the feel of warm metal in the August heat would bring him back to his senses. When he put his palm on the Land Rover and pushed gently, the vehicle tipped slightly. He knelt and peered inside at a man who, if he was alive, probably didn’t have more than a few minutes left. Zak had met him a month earlier at a picnic at the Newcastle estate: Ryan Perry, one of the tagalongs who followed Kasey and Scooter everywhere. Nadine once told him Kasey divided his friends into two groups, those he genuinely liked and those he tolerated but made fun of when they weren’t around. Perry was firmly in the latter camp and always had been.

He appeared to be dead, but Zak would have to check for a pulse to be certain, which meant crawling inside.

Okay,
he said to himself.
Get inside, check his carotid artery, and then get out. No problem. You’ve done it a hundred times. Just do it.
Perry’s eyes weren’t exactly open, but they weren’t closed, either. Zak knew if he were in uniform, he’d be inside by now, but he wasn’t in uniform and he’d fallen into a well of fear he couldn’t climb out of. It was impossible for him to put into words why he couldn’t go into the wreck, what the fear was all about.

And then he was astonished to see a drop of liquid splash in the dust at his feet. Then another. Liquid was running off his face, which he mopped with the back of his cycling glove.

As soon as he realized he was crying, he entered into a transcendental moment in which he wasn’t quite sure if he was kneeling beside a car with his dying sister inside, or kneeling beside a car in the woods seventeen years later. A good portion of his brain wasn’t sure if he was twenty-eight or eleven. What made it worse was that his situation gave him a flash forward into the rest of his life. From now on there would be a hundred things he wouldn’t be able to do. The car was only the first of myriad successive cascading dominoes. In the future he might not be able to go into fires. He might not be able to climb tall ladders. Zak Polanski—the sniveling coward who let his sister die because he couldn’t crawl into the car to unfasten her seat belt.

“What are you doing, Zak?” Muldaur yelled from the road. “Hurry up. They’re on the walkie-talkie. They’re headed this way. We have to get moving.”

Zak heard himself say, “He’s dead.”

“You already went in?”

“Yeah,” Zak lied. “He’s dead.” Zak headed back up the hill, stepping carefully over the rocks so he wouldn’t twist an ankle. In the space of two minutes he’d turned into a coward
and
a liar. He’d been waiting for it his whole life, it seemed, and now it was here, the fait accompli. As he walked up the hill, he wondered if it showed on his face.

Scooter was standing now but didn’t look like any kind of threat, blood gushing from his nose, his shoulders hunched as if he’d been beaten. “You’re going to pay for this, Polanski, you fuck. You broke my goddamn collarbone. You almost killed me. You’re going to pay big time.”

With the rifle laid horizontally across his handlebars, Muldaur headed down the hill. “Come on, Zak. They’re right behind me.”

Giving Scooter one last look, Zak caught Muldaur a hundred yards down the mountain. “Are they really coming?”

“Yeah. I got one of their walkie-talkies in my pocket.”

“Com One to Com Three. Where are you? Come in?”
When nobody replied, the speaker said,
“Com One to Com Three. We’re halfway down the mountain. Where are you?”

“If they’re halfway down the mountain, they’re right behind us,” said Zak. “You think they’ll stop at the wreck or keep coming?”

“They’ll pick up Scooter and check on the dead guy.”

“I hope so.” Zak wondered if Ryan Perry was really dead.

“Back there. That was the most awesome piece of riding I’ve ever seen. Scooter came damn close to blowing your nuts through the roof of your mouth when you came down the hill.”

When they got to the bottom of the mountain and the road leveled out, they heard the white noise of the river. Stephens had told them it was a mile from the bottom of the mountain to the crossroads, but Zak wasn’t thinking about the crossroads. Freezing up outside the Land Rover scared him in a way nothing else had in almost two decades. It scared him more than any of the close calls he’d ever encountered in the fire department, and he’d had his share.

Even if it hadn’t cost Ryan Perry his life—which it might well have—in his own mind his failure would always stand between him and Nadine. Zak had been waiting for the day when the cowardice he’d discovered in his childhood would infect his adult life, and this was that day.