“Slim. It’s a possibility in our current environment, certainly, but still slim.”
“And his odds of dying if he decides to delay us needlessly?”
“Oh, I’d say they are substantial. I’d also point out that the high pressure is moving away from those peaks. I suspect Ethan knows this, so the storm might be a bit of an excuse.”
Ethan paused. It was a fascinating observation, for two reasons. First because Patrick had made it, and there weren’t many men who could make such a proclamation about a high-pressure system while on the move through the wilderness, and second because he was wrong.
It was called Buys Ballot’s law. In the Northern Hemisphere, if you stand with your back to the prevailing wind, the area of low pressure will be on your left and the area of high pressure on your right, because wind travels counterclockwise inward toward a center of low pressure. The directions are reversed in the Southern Hemisphere. Patrick had made the observation but drawn the wrong conclusion.
A mistake,
Ethan wondered,
or are you not from this place?
He thought then of their voices, that oh-so-careful speech. Flawless English, but too clean of accent. They seemed to come from nowhere.
Southern Hemisphere,
he thought.
You are far from home, boys.
Patrick’s world was backward here. His observation about the storm might not cost him—or it might cost them all—but this was good to know. If Ethan was right, this was very good to know.
“My thoughts exactly,” Jack was saying. “Do we take a vote, then, or do we leave it up to Ethan? I’m a firm believer in democratic process.”
“This I know.”
“But at some points, clear leadership must be taken. For the greater good. So perhaps—”
Ethan began to move before they reached a decision. Up ahead, the clattering on the rocks was louder, and he felt the first stinging lashes on his own skin. Definitely hail. He watched ice gather and melt in the beam of his flashlight.
The men followed him, and up on the rock scree, everyone was silent; gasping breaths filled the night amid the sounds of the hail on the rocks and the wind whistling and moaning around them and the oncoming thunder. The world was lit time and time again by brilliant flashes. At the top of the rock scree, on the plateau at the base of Republic Peak, the hail was gone and all that remained was the lightning and whatever chased after it.
Ethan’s mind was no longer on the storm, though. It was on those hikers ahead of them. The false path, the decoys. Their behavior was making less and less sense to him the higher they climbed. The prints up here were fresh. Not just recent, not just left within the day, but left within maybe an hour.
The grass held depressions from where two people had removed packs and sat on the ground. Those depressions were dryer than the rest of the plateau. That meant that their bodies had acted as shelters from the hail. That meant they were not far ahead at all.
Who was willing to hike toward a mountain peak in the dark and during a hailstorm? Who was willing to climb the ladder to meet lightning?
It’s not him,
Ethan insisted to himself.
I know that boy’s boots, and these tracks do not belong to him.
Survivor-mentality requirement: an open mind. Rigidity was the door to death.
Ethan looked at the depressions again as the plateau was illuminated in a series of four rapid-fire strobes of lightning, and he saw his mistake. He’d underestimated them.
He’s wearing new shoes. He’s wearing a pair of her shoes.
It was a wise precaution and a handsome trick, and if they’d been chased by anyone else, it would have worked, or at least bought them some time. A good tracker would have seen those prints and disregarded them, knowing they were not the same as the boy’s.
The only problem was that Ethan and the boy were both trying to be clever. The boy was trying to protect himself by changing his trail, and Ethan was trying to protect him by chasing a trail he knew wasn’t the boy’s. Now he’d not only found the boy’s trail for his killers but closed the gap between them.
I
t was the humming
that finally shook Hannah free from the fog, a loud electric buzz, like an alarm clock, that called her grudgingly into reality.
“What is that?” Connor shouted. “What’s that sound?”
It fell around the mountains like a trapped ancient chant, something stumbled upon in a place where humans did not belong. They had hit some invisible trip wire and now the wilderness was being called to respond to the intruders, the high hum a siren announcing their presence on the peaks.
“The corona effect,” Hannah said. She spoke slowly, and though she knew she should be in a rush, a panic even, that felt beyond her now. She was aware that the choices had already been made, and the avenues of escape already ignored.
“What is it? What does it mean?” Connor was almost screaming.
“It’s electricity,” she said. “There’s a lot of it in the air.”
But it meant more than that. It meant there was already a ground charge. It meant one of those lightning bolts had met the mountain. They were connected now, earth to sky, and Hannah and Connor between. They were almost to the rim of the glacier that lay between the peaks. Far below them the crimson and scarlet ribbons of the fire still glowed, but that wasn’t the light that concerned her anymore. There was suddenly a blue luminescence to the rocks all around them. The white of the glacier looked like glass over a Tahitian sea.
Saint Elmo’s fire. The eerie light that had haunted sailors for centuries, scaling the masts of tall ships in empty oceans. Now, far inland, it crackled on the high rocks to their left, sparked upward in a cobalt cloud that climbed and then was snuffed out in blackness, overeager in its attempt to claim the sky.
And all around them, that possessed hum. Not a static sound but dynamic, the pitch rising and falling, though the air was flat and still. Lightning flashed and vanished and flashed again and the mountain quaked from thunder. She felt a tingle then, not the kind born of panic but the kind that should create it. When she looked at Connor, she could see that the hair on the back of his neck was standing straight up, the arched fur of a defensive cat.
“Run,” she said.
But he couldn’t run. They were too high and it was too steep and all he could do was take three unsteady steps before his feet caught and sent him stumbling to his knees. The blue world boomed with thunder and then bloomed with an aggressive flash of white before fading back to blue. Hannah hadn’t moved, hadn’t taken a single step, and below her, Connor was still trying, crawling on his hands and knees now, to get back down the mountain.
She thought of the boy who’d boiled in the river trying to reach her.
Connor tried to push himself up. Braced his weight on his hiking sticks, and she fixed on them: an aluminum pole in each hand. A lightning rod in each hand.
“Connor!” she shouted, and now she was moving, finally untethered from the fog, stumbling and slipping after him. “Drop the poles! Drop the poles!”
He turned back and looked at her and then registered the instruction and shook his hands free of the wrist straps. The poles bounced down the mountain. She took a step from one rock to the next, heading toward him.
Then she was on her back.
She stared at the night sky and realized her boots were in the way of the sky. Why was she looking at her boots? Why was she upside down? She was upside down on the mountain and somehow Connor was above her when before he’d been below. He was also down. The high hum was back—had it ever been gone?—and her body ached.
You got hit,
she thought in wonder.
You got struck.
She tried to move, expecting that she wouldn’t be able to, but her body responded, and she saw that Connor was moving as well. They hadn’t been hit. The mountain had been hit, again, and it had absorbed the strike for them, again. It might not continue to.
She crawled toward Connor and stretched out her hand. “Come on.” When his hand met hers, the touch carried a static jolt. She tugged him toward her and they began descending the slope together, and then the crawling turned to falling and they slid down, jarring pains and jolts as they gave in to the gravity they’d fought the whole way up here. She knew that they didn’t have long to fall—one of the drainages awaited, and she was braced for the impact when they hit it.
The landing was less painful than the trip down. They smashed into a crevice of rock, and Connor took most of the impact for her. They were wedged in the rocks now some forty feet below the peaks. Connor tried to struggle upright but she held him down.
“Stay low,” she said. “Stop moving and stay low.”
They huddled there in the rocks together and above them the world boomed and bloomed, boomed and bloomed.
No rain fell.
It wasn’t a salvation storm. It was a flint-and-steel storm. Down below, the fire crews were watching it and waiting for rain, although they probably realized by now that it would not come. All that wind carried was dry lightning, the worst kind for a red-flag day. There would likely be new flare-ups now, with all these strikes around them. It was what could happen when you put your faith in a cloud.
She held on to Connor and pressed them both into the rocks and watched the electric storm pass and felt true hatred. She’d trusted in it and it had turned on her and become an enemy. She’d met enough enemies along the way. They chased behind and loomed ahead, and she did not need them to fall out of the sky above as well.
“We got hit,” Connor said. He’d been silent for some time, watching. The worst of the storm was moving on, it seemed, though Hannah knew you couldn’t count on that, not when the skies could throw something deadly at you that was an inch wide and five miles long.
“No, we didn’t. The mountain got hit.”
“But I felt it.”
“I know. I did too. You okay?”
“I can move. You?”
“I can move.”
She looked at him in the darkness and then looked at the scarlet snakes of fires below. There was a hotshot crew down there. They might have reached them before daylight if she’d just committed to it. Instead, she’d stayed high to avoid the fire and nearly killed them both.
“If we can both move,” she said, “we should. It’s time to get you out of here, Connor.”
“We’re going down here?”
“Yeah.”
“The drainages are tough walking,” he said, but he didn’t continue arguing for once, even though it was true.
“I know they are. But we’ve done some tough walking to get here. I know you can make it. You do too, right?” When he didn’t answer she said, “Connor?”
“I can keep going. We’ll be walking straight down into the fire, though.”
“Yes.”
“To find the firefighters?”
“To find the firefighters. They’ll get us out fast.”
She pushed herself up on the heels of her hands and considered the long, winding drainage ahead of them. It was the worst kind of climbing, steep and filled with windfall. But it led straight down too. It was the sort of path you could follow even in the darkness.
“We’ll have to get close to it.”
“Yes.”
“I can smell it so strong from here. Is it even safe? Is it safe to get that close?”
A crimson tree flowered in the darkness and then faded. Spot fires flaring in the burned-out area, trailing the main blaze, as if they’d been separated from the herd and were starving fast because they could not share in the meals.
“There’s a risk to everything,” Hannah said. “I know something about what’s in that direction. The men behind you, I don’t know anything about.”
“I do.”
“There you go. And you think they’ll kill us.”
“They will kill me. I don’t know about you.”
“There’s no you or me anymore, Connor. Not at this point. Just us. It would seem like the best chance for us is to walk toward that fire.”
He might have nodded. In the darkness she wasn’t sure. He didn’t speak, though.
“We’ll make it, Connor,” she said. “Listen to me: I promise you, we’re going to make it down there, and you’re going to get out of this place and never see it again. Not unless you want to. You ready to get out of these mountains?”
“Yes.”
“Me too.”
They’d left the fire tower a few short hours earlier, walking with a plan. This time when they started out, they were crawling. As the storm faded and dawn came to replace it, they moved out of their old world and into a new one, as if the lightning had bridged the divide and taken them over to another land. It was all gray, this world, from both the light offered by a sun still trapped behind the mountains and the smoke rising to meet it. Once they made it out of the drainage, they found a flattened stretch of land, and it was Connor who realized its significance first.
“This is the trail,” he said. “This is the Republic Pass trail.”
So it was. Four miles to go. Roughly the same distance they’d covered since leaving the tower, and yet it would—or should—feel like a tenth of that. They’d be walking downhill on a trail now, not fighting over the peaks and into a storm.
“Almost home,” Hannah said, “and nobody’s behind us yet.”
W
hen the lightning began
to strike the peaks, even the Blackwell brothers knew it was time to pull back.
“Just for a bit now,” Jack said in a soothing singsong, as if urging a sick child to rest. “Just a few minutes is all.”
They knelt below a shelf of rock carved out by an ocean some thousands of years before, and for the first time, they were all within arm’s reach of one another.
Survivor mentality: appreciate the opportunities the environment gives you.
But what were those grand opportunities? Ethan could grapple with one brother in the dark and wait for the other to kill him.
The mountain trembled with thunder, and the wilderness was illuminated again and again in a rolling strobe of light. A few hundred yards away, one of the lightning bolts connected with a jack pine; it went up in a glitter and then part of it fell to the ground and continued a slow burn, half of it standing, half of it down on the mountain. Wildfire season. This was how most of them would begin. Dry, angry fronts like these. Isolated strikes in desolate lands.
“Seems to be passing,” Patrick said.
“The worst of it is over, at least,” his brother said. “A bit more lies behind.”
“Enough that we should waste the time?”
“At some point there’s a measure of risk to be assumed. You think we’ve reached that point?”
“We’re close to him. It’s still dark. I’d hate to waste those things. Too much has been going on behind us since morning. When they come for him tomorrow, they’ll come big.”
“Let’s finish it, then.”
Ethan watched them slide out from under the rock shelf and then separate, as was their way, and whatever chance he might have had was gone. He didn’t move right away. He stayed crouched beneath the rocks and watched the lightning and smelled the smoke and thought of how close they were to the boy now.
“Ethan?” Jack Blackwell called, congenial. “I hate to press you, but we’re on a bit of a deadline here.”
He slid out from under the rocks. Thunder cracked again but it lacked its earlier bass menace as the storm drifted eastward. The lightning flashes were still there, sporadic but still there, and not a single drop of rain had fallen.
“That’s the peak you wanted,” Patrick Blackwell said, indicating Republic as it lit up in another flash. “Correct?”
“Yeah. But there’s no point going up there now.”
“I thought you were certain that was their destination. The trail seems to agree.”
“They’d have gotten off the peaks when the lightning started.”
“If I might interrupt,” Jack said, “I seem to recall Ethan’s notion about the visibility afforded up there. The idea that we might be able to see anyone in the vicinity.”
“He did have that notion, you’re correct, Jack.”
“Worth the climb, then, I’d imagine.”
Ethan didn’t know where Connor and the woman from the lookout were, but he was certain they would be within visible range of an observer at the top of Republic Peak. Would fall within the crosshairs of the scope on Patrick’s rifle.
Ethan thought again of his father, and for the first time he had an answer to the man’s question.
How will I know that it works? Connor Reynolds can tell them. When he walks out of these mountains alive, he can tell them that it works.
“You climb first,” he said to Patrick, nodding at the steep wall of rock that now lay in shadows, knowing what the response would be.
“No, no. We’ve entrusted you with leadership. You go on and climb. Don’t worry, Ethan. We’ll be right behind you.”
Where Republic Peak turned from a steep walk into a true climb, Patrick Blackwell slung his rifle over his shoulder and stayed close to Ethan, and Jack fell back. They did it without discussion but Ethan understood it, and of course it was the right move, they never seemed to make anything but the right move. On the rocks a rifle shot would be awkward and difficult, while the pistol, requiring just one free hand, was much more functional.
Ethan watched it take place and saw it for what it was: his last chance extinguished. Any hope of killing them both, always minuscule, was now nonexistent. He could take one, though. When Ethan died, he wouldn’t die lonely.
The brothers were silent for once, focused on the climb, reaching for hand- and footholds in the shadows. Hand and foot, rock to rock, on toward the sky.
To the east there was a thin band of pink, and the black sky of the storm had lightened to a pale gray that allowed them to see just well enough; the rocks were still dark, but their shapes were clear. The forested hills fell away behind them and they climbed to meet that lead-colored sky, more than two vertical miles in the air now. It was a climb Ethan had made many times and always enjoyed and he wished that it would go slower, because it was his last climb and it seemed he should be allowed time to think. There were prayers and wishes and whispers required, but they were moving too fast and he couldn’t sort them out, couldn’t even land on an image of his wife; everything was simply another rock with his hand closing over it and the summit getting nearer and with it the end.
That was fine, then. It would end with a hand on a rock anyhow, so focus on that, he decided, think of nothing else: hand on rock, rock on skull—all he had left to achieve. He was hoping that his own rock was still on top of the summit pile, the last one he’d held, the one he’d been imagining for so long on this hike, when Patrick Blackwell swung away to the left and scrambled past him.
The sudden speed came without a word or a warning. All along Patrick had been content to remain just below, hovering near Ethan’s feet, following his path, and then as the summit neared, he’d moved away and onto a more difficult path but he moved faster, and now he was in the lead and Ethan was between them both and Patrick was not looking back, but moving faster still, as if he were in a race over the face of the rocks, like so many of the boys Ethan had watched, each determined to be the first one to the summit.
No,
Ethan thought,
no, damn you, I had to get there first, you were doing just what you should have been doing, you were staying just in the right place…
He tried to match him then, tried to catch him and pass him, and below him, Jack Blackwell saw it and called, “Patrick.” That was it, just his name.
Patrick Blackwell glanced back at Ethan and said, “What’s your hurry?” as he pulled himself up onto a ledge below the summit and slung the rifle free.
Ethan stopped with the barrel a foot from his face, Patrick’s hand casual on the trigger, his back braced against the rock, where he would have no trouble shooting. Below them, Jack had stopped moving.
“Everything all right, Ethan?” he called. “Seemed to become a race there for a moment. Why don’t we let my brother take the summit first. He’s always been the competitive sort. It would mean something to him.”
Patrick Blackwell was smiling at Ethan. Understanding some of it, if not the specifics.
“Maybe you can relax a minute?” Patrick said. “You just relax.” He slid sideways on the ledge a few feet, far enough to clear the rifle out of Ethan’s reach, and then he turned and grabbed the rock above him and pulled himself up, one fast springing motion, dragging his rifle over the stone, and then he was at the summit and standing upright again, and at his back was the pile of loose stones on which Ethan had pinned his hopes.
“Come on the rest of the way now,” he said.
Ethan looked at the rock in hand. A slab of stone, useful for holding on to the face of the mountain, useless as a weapon. His weapons were waiting above, and he was below, and he felt as if it had always been that way.
He climbed up and straightened and stood and there they were at the top of the dark world. Patrick Blackwell held the rifle on him until his brother had also reached the summit and then he moved several steps away and lowered his eye to the rifle scope and began to search the slopes. Jack had his handgun drawn and was looking at Ethan with curious amusement.
“You seem flustered,” he said. “Have we troubled you?”
Ethan moved to the pile of stones, the pyramid that marked 10,487 feet in the air. He was facing Yellowstone now, his back to the Beartooths and his home. He looked at the rocks and told himself the job would have been impossible to accomplish even if he’d beaten them to the top, even if something, anything, had gone according to plan.
There will be another chance,
he told himself.
Getting down, maybe, there will be another chance, another way, a better one.
“Jace, Jace, my old friend,” Patrick Blackwell said, staring through his scope. “So good to see you. So very good.”
Jack turned from Ethan and looked at his brother, and the amusement left his face.
“You can see him?”
“Indeed. He’s with a woman. His friend from the lookout tower, I imagine.”
“You’re sure it’s him?” Jack asked.
“If there’s another pair like them hiking toward a forest fire, I’d be rather surprised, but come have a look. It’s the first time we’ve seen him live, after all. You’re entitled, brother.”
Jack moved away from Ethan and toward his brother. Patrick was kneeling with the rifle braced on the rocks, facing the northern slope.
Why did they go high,
Ethan thought,
why in the hell did she take him high? I was supposed to be buying them time. I was supposed to be winning this.
Jack walked over, knelt beside his brother, and accepted the rifle while passing Patrick the handgun, keeping them both armed. The right move. They never made the wrong move.
Except for their eyes. For the first time since the hospital, Jack Blackwell’s eyes were not on Ethan. They were on the rifle scope, and Patrick’s followed, both of them gazing north, away from Ethan. He looked down at the pile of stones and saw that his own was no longer on top. Someone had been here since and covered his with a bigger piece, a jagged slab. He reached down and picked it up. He did it slowly and gently, so as not to make a sound. Neither of the Blackwell brothers turned.
“It would seem to be him,” Jack was saying. “An interesting route they’ve taken. Why go up to go down? But no matter.”
“I can take them both.”
“From this distance?”
“Yes.”
They were still facing down the slope, and Ethan had advanced four steps almost soundlessly, though he didn’t know if a sound would have mattered; they had stopped regarding him as a threat at this point and were focused on their quarry. They were close together, finally.
“I hate to see it end from here,” Jack Blackwell said. “But I suppose it doesn’t matter that the boy won’t know. His mother will.”
“Yes.”
“A miss would be bad, if it gives them time to take cover. Prolong things and carry us farther in the wrong direction.”
“I won’t miss.”
“Hate to see you do such fine work for free. I’ll pay you a dollar for each.”
“Deeply appreciated.”
They would have to trade weapons again. It was clear that Jack deferred to his brother in regard to the long gun. There would be a moment of exchange, a moment when both of them held guns but were not prepared to fire them, and that was all Ethan sought. He was five feet away. The rock in his hand was heavy but not heavy enough to slow him down if he rushed at them. He could swing it, and he could swing it with force.
Get the handgun,
he told himself, because the handgun could be fired quickly in the chaos. His breathing had slowed even as his heart rate quickened, and he focused on the back of Patrick Blackwell’s skull, because that was where it would have to start, everything would begin and end from the spot where Ethan could place the rock against those bones.
“Earn your dollars, then,” Jack said, and he sat up, both knees planted on the rocks, and passed the rifle to Patrick, who lowered the handgun to make the transfer, and there was the moment, both of them unprepared and vulnerable and finally, finally, close enough together for both to be at risk at the same time. When he began to move, Ethan felt astonished that such an opportunity had presented itself, because he’d never imagined that he could get more than one of them, and yet here they were, his for the taking.
He traded silence for speed over those last five feet, drawing the fist with the rock in it back and then slinging it forward, focused on that skull, ready for it to shatter.
The skull wasn’t there by the time he reached it.
They were fast men. Lord, but they were fast.
He’d surprised them and still they knew what to do; their instinct, these two who made one united force, was always to part. Patrick rolled left and Jack rolled right and then there was distance between them and the guns somewhere in the middle, and Ethan’s rock missed Patrick entirely and found air where he was supposed to be, Ethan falling with the force of the blow. A hand flashed out and found his neck in what was no doubt supposed to be a killing blow, or at least a crippling one, but here Ethan benefited from his own stumble and the hand chopped at the side of his neck instead of the center of his throat.
A choice to be made then, split-second, he had to look either left or right, because you couldn’t do both simultaneously, and so he stayed with the target he’d come for and swung the rock again and this time found success, caught Patrick Blackwell full in the face and felt jawbone shatter beneath the rock, tore the flesh of his own hand on Patrick’s broken teeth as he punched through his mouth. The rock fell free and then Patrick was silent and down in the darkness and somewhere behind them Ethan could hear Jack scrambling.
Guns,
he thought stupidly, urgently,
there are guns and you need one.
But he couldn’t find one, and it was happening too fast and he knew Jack was quick and deadly and so he did the only thing he could think of and wrapped one arm around Patrick Blackwell and then rolled with him and heaved him upright, thinking that if he had one brother between himself and the other brother’s bullets, he’d be fine. He could feel the metal barrel of the rifle under his arm, pinned against Patrick’s limp body, and thought that if he got a little space and little time, just a little, he could not only equalize this situation but control it.