Those Who Wish Me Dead (7 page)

T
hey watched through a modified
gun sight as the boys hiked, watched them in silence and marked their course on the map, then took their bearing and heading.

“That’s the basics,” the bearded twenty-something-year-old named Kyle said. “Of course, if it’s smoke, you’ve got a lot more to report. Not just the bearing.”

Hannah Faber straightened and stepped away from the Osborne fire-finder and nodded, wetting her lips and looking at the door of the fire-tower cab and wishing that Kyle would walk out through it and leave her here alone, wishing he could grasp that if there was anything she did not need coaching on, it was Wildland Fire 101. His words washed over her: he had worked for the forest service for two years and was tired of the grunt labor they offered him and had thought this would be relaxing, a chance to maybe do some writing, he knew he had a novel in him or maybe a screenplay but sometimes poems seemed best…

All of this poured out of him as asides as he took her on a tour of the place, which certainly didn’t need much commentary. Bed here, table there, woodstove. Check, check, check. The closer he got to her and the more he talked, it seemed as if she could actually feel the nerves fraying inside her, peeling in overstretched threads, not much left. Fire season. It was back and it was close. She wanted to be alone.

He’ll be gone soon,
she told herself.
Just make it through a few more minutes.

Kyle had stopped talking and was eyeing her pack, and that annoyed her. Sure, it was only a backpack, but it held the contents of her life, and Hannah had grown awfully private about her life in the past ten months.

“Some damn serious boots you brought to sit up here,” Kyle said.

Tied to the back of her pack was a pair of White’s fire-line boots. To those who laid trench lines and swung Pulaskis, they were the stuff of legend. She’d tried to save some money the first year by buying cheap boots, only to have them blow out within two months, and then she followed the lead of the experienced crew members and bought the White’s. The pair on her pack was brand-new, waiting for action they would never see. She knew it was stupid to have brought them, but she couldn’t leave them behind.

“I like nice boots,” she said.

“I’ve heard women say that. Usually talking about a little different look, though.”

She managed a faint smile. “I’m a little different woman.”

“You spend a lot of time in this area?”

“Been up a few times,” she said. “Let’s get to it, shall we? You were going to talk me through the radio protocol.”

Then it was on to the radio, his eyes away from her pack and from the fire boots. Finally they moved to the topographic maps on a chart table.

“When you see smoke, you call it in. So your first job is to see it, obviously, and then you have to give them the right position. That’s where this little thing comes in.” He indicated the Osborne again, which was essentially a round glass table with a topographic map underneath it. On the outside of it were two rings, one fixed and one that rotated. The rotating ring carried a brass sighting device, just like a gun sight.

“Harder to demonstrate with no active fire,” Kyle said. “That’s why we used that camping group or those Boy Scouts or whoever they are. Think you can find the mountain they were hiking beneath on your own?”

She found it again. Immediately.

“Good work,” Kyle said. “Now comes the harder part. Try to guess, without using the map, what distance they are from us.”

Hannah stared out the window and off to the south, locating the peak above the group, and while she didn’t look at the map, the map was in her mind. She studied the mountain, let her eyes trace a creek running down from it, and said, “Seven miles.”

“Seven?” Kyle smiled. “You like to be precise, right? Well, you’ll like Ozzy, then.”

“Ozzy?”

He shrugged. “You get bored up here, you start nicknaming shit, I don’t know. Point is, it will let you be a lot more precise. Here.” He rotated the bezel of the table and lined the brass sight up with the group of hiking boys again. She knelt and peered through, taking the boys in as a whole, not wanting to focus on any particular one—she couldn’t have the memories that might shake loose, absolutely could
not
revisit those memories here, in front of him.

“Okay. Got them.”

“Great. That was fast. Now pretend they’re not a group of kids but a fire. Something in there could burn you. You’re flustered, you’re scared, something out there is
dangerous.
You’re pointing at a hundred and sixty-one degrees, see that? So now you know it’s at a hundred and sixty-one degrees from your tower. Now look at the map and show me where you think it’s burning.”

She studied the topographic map, its gradients showing elevation changes, and found the most visible peak near the blaze, then worked down and pointed with her index finger.

“Around there?”

“Pretty close. Actually…wow, that’s real close. An inch is two miles on that map. Use the ruler there and tell me how many inches it is from us.”

It was just a shade under three and a half inches. Seven miles.

“Damn,” Kyle said softly. “Good guess.”

She allowed a smile. “I’ve watched some smoke in the past.”

“In towers?”

“No.”

“Where, then?”

“Hotshot crew.”

He tilted his head. “And now you want a tower?”

She’d said too much. Her pride had reared up, but it had been a mistake to mention the crew, because now Kyle understood. He’d listened to enough radio traffic to understand the food chain. When the regular-hand crews got into a blaze they couldn’t handle, the hotshots would roll, and the only ones higher up on the food chain than them were the smokejumpers. Bunch of guys parachuting in behind walls of flame.
Cheaters,
Hannah had said to Nick once, watching them descend.
We had to
walk
our asses in here.

Nick had laughed hard at that. He’d had a beautiful laugh. At night, she went to sleep hoping that his laugh would come to her in her dreams instead of the screams.

It never did.

She kept her eyes away from Kyle’s when she said, “Yeah, the fire line is more than I can handle these days. So, listen, when I see the fire, I call it in, and what else?”

“Hang on,” he said. “Hang on. You’re Hannah Faber, aren’t you? Were you at Shepherd Mountain last year?”

“There were a lot of fires last summer,” she said. “I was part of some of them.”

He must have sensed her desire to short-circuit the conversation, because he ducked his head and spoke briskly. “You’d report the distance and heading. That way, when they send a plane out for a look, they can pinpoint it easily. Then you use this breakdown to clarify for them.”

He showed her a clipboard that contained checklists of information for each sighting—the distance, the bearing, nearby landmarks, and then three categories of information about the smoke:

“You report all that,” he said, “and then you sit back and listen to them sort it out.”

“No bad ones yet?”

“None. Late-season snow helped. But it melted fast, and it’s dried out since then. Temperatures started climbing, and the wind started blowing. No rain. If that holds, they think it’ll be a busy season. Lately the winds have been up. Trust me, you’ll feel that. This thing seems solid until the wind starts to blow. Then it’ll sway on you pretty good. So if the weather keeps on like this? Yeah, it’ll be busy. Supposed to be a run of storms early next week. If those develop, it could be trouble.”

He was right. You would think rain would help, but thunderstorms were trouble. They were sitting on top of the world here. Lightning didn’t have to travel all that far to make contact. And when it made contact with dry timber…

“Could be a busy summer,” Hannah said. Her heart was beginning to hammer now. He was standing too close to her, making the small room feel smaller. She wet her lips and took a step back. “Listen, I don’t want to be rude, but I’ve had a long walk out here and—”

“You want me out?”

“No, I’m just saying…I’m good here. I understand it, you know? And I’m tired.”

“Okay,” he said. “Guess I’ll get on the trail, then. You’re sure I didn’t rush you too much? I was supposed to show you all of the—”

“I’ll figure it out. And I love it up here already.”

He gave a wry smile. “Get through a night before you say that, okay?”

She ignored that and returned to the Osborne, peered through the gun sight and, because there was no smoke on the peaks, located the group of hikers once again. She watched them plod along and she pretended that they were fire.

C
onnor Reynolds was a
different kid than Jace Wilson, and as the days passed, that began to take on a certain appeal.

The kid he had to pretend to be now was the kind of kid he’d always wanted to be. Tough, for one. Fearless, for another. Jace had spent his life trying to be good and fearing the trouble that would follow if he slipped up. His parents had split when he was so young, he hardly remembered it. Two years later came the accident, a chain on a forklift letting go, a pallet falling, his dad earning a life of eternal pain in a few quick seconds because of somebody else’s mistake. He still had a job at the same warehouse, a foreman now, but the pain followed him and so did the mistake. His obsessiveness with procedure had seeped into Jace, who knew he came across to people as a nervous kid—double-checking locks, insisting on using seat belts in the third row of a friend’s parent’s SUV, reading the instructions on a model-plane kit five times before he even opened the bag of parts. He knew how he seemed to people. The kind word was
cautious.
The mean one (real one?) was
scared.

But Connor Reynolds was not scared. Connor was
supposed to be
a bad kid. There was a kind of freedom in that. You could say what you wanted, act how you wanted. Jace tried to embrace it without pushing it. He didn’t want to draw attention, and, truth be told, he didn’t want to get his ass kicked. After the initial flare-up with Marco, Jace had kept his distance and given him enough respect to appease him, evidently. He tried to do it without showing any fear, though. Kept his sullen stares and silence. The longer he wore them, the better he felt.

He was glad to be out of the camp and on the trail too. He always felt better on the trail, felt like he was vanishing, every trace of Jace Wilson disappearing, nothing left but Connor Reynolds. Today, Ethan was telling them about bears, and everyone was listening, even the loudmouths like Marco, because all of them were scared of bears. It almost made Jace laugh. If the other boys had had any idea who might be following them, they wouldn’t have given a crap about any bears.

“When we come into a blind curve or a dark area, one of these thick stands of trees, or when we break out of them and into a meadow, we want to advertise our arrival,” Ethan was saying. “Talk a little louder, give a few claps, make your presence known by sound. They’re more eager to avoid us than we are to avoid them, believe it or not. They’ll have no problem with us hiking through their territory, assuming we understand them. That’s our job. In this situation, understanding them is largely limited to one word:
surprise.
We do not want to surprise the bear, because then he will not have the chance to react with his true personality. He’ll turn aggressive even though he’d prefer to be passive, because he will feel that’s what we’re forcing him to do. So we make a little noise to advertise our presence in the right areas, and we pay attention to our surroundings so we don’t go into areas that we should avoid.”

“All our surroundings look the same to me,” Ty said.

“They won’t in time. And it requires all of your senses. All of them. You watch, of course, you keep scanning the landscape. Drew, back there, he’s key, because he’s guarding the rear for us. He’s got to turn around and double-check for us now and then.”

Drew seemed to puff up at that, and Jace wondered if he realized that being the guy in the back also meant you were the first guy the bear ate.

“We have to listen,” Ethan said, “because the last thing we want to run into is a tangle between bears, and if that’s happening, we should be able to hear it. We have to use our sense of smell—”

“You can probably smell bears at, what, two miles? Three miles?” This was from Ty, another of the jokers, contending with Marco, and he said it seriously but while winking at Connor, who gave him dead eyes in response. Jace Wilson would have laughed, but Connor Reynolds wasn’t a laugher.

“I cannot smell bears,” Ethan said, “but I can smell crap. That helps. Sometimes, you see, a bear takes a crap in the woods. I’ll let you check it out as soon as we find one, Ty. I’ll give you plenty of inspection time.”

Now Jace really wanted to laugh, and the rest of them did laugh, but he stayed silent. He’d decided that was Connor Reynolds—strong and silent. And fearless.

“I’m also interested in the smell of something rotten,” Ethan continued. “A carcass gone bad. If I can smell it, you better believe a bear can—they actually
can
detect odors from over a mile away—and we need to stay far from that, because what smells nasty to us smells like a free meal to them. No hunting required. Bears are lazy; they appreciate free meals. We’ll be talking
a lot
about this once we set up camp and store the food.”

“That’s three senses,” Jeff said. He was one of the few who’d dared to express any real interest so far; the rest were maintaining their wilderness-camp-is-bullshit attitudes, for the most part. “And if I have to taste one or touch one to know it’s a bear, I’m a pretty huge dumb-ass.”

The rest of them burst into laughter, and even Ethan Serbin smiled with them.

“I won’t argue that point, language aside,” he said. “But you might taste a few berries along the trail. Might see a thicket of berries and try one and think,
Dang, these taste pretty good.
Remember—if it tastes good to you, it does to the bear as well. Be more alert, because you are in a feeding ground.”

“What about touch, then?” Jeff asked.

“Feel the wind. Always, always, always be aware of that wind. Because bears rely mostly on their sense of smell, and if you are downwind of them, you’re going to be able to get pretty close before they can smell you. What else is wind taking away from them?”

“The sound of us,” Jace said, and regretted it immediately. He wanted to avoid all attention, but sometimes out here he got caught up in things despite himself. This was the sort of thing he loved, which was where the whole idea had come from. All the survival books, the adventure stories, the way he’d taught himself how to tie more than thirty knots with his eyes closed—his parents thought that they could hide him up here and have him be happy. And, he had to admit, there were moments when they were almost right.

Then the voices of the men in the quarry would return.

“Exactly,” Ethan said. “We always need to be aware of which way the wind is blowing. That’s a help with bears, but it’s critical to everything we do. We set up camp based on the way the wind is blowing, we anticipate weather changes based on what the wind does, we build our fires with the utmost respect for the wind. If you do not respect the wind in the backcountry, you will not last long.”

It was interesting, hearing all of the things that Ethan Serbin held in his mind. Jace was paying attention all the time, because if the killers came for him, he wanted to be ready. They’d come expecting Jace Wilson, the scared kid, and they’d run into somebody new: Connor Reynolds, who could make it on his own in the woods, who could outlast them. Connor Reynolds, a survivor. That’s who he was now.

Montana was better than the safe houses, better than being surrounded by people who
knew
you were in danger. That just fed the fear. They’d thrown every distraction they could at him, from movies to music to video games, and none of them worked, because none of them could pull his mind away from those memories, a dead man’s hair fanning out in the dim quarry waters, a knife tugging through the muscles of a throat, and, above all, a pair of oddly musical voices discussing where Jace might be and whether they had time to find him and kill him.

This was better. He hadn’t believed that it would be, because he’d be out here without anyone he knew, but he’d been wrong. Montana was better because it forced distraction. Video games and movies hadn’t been able to claim his mind. Out here, the land
demanded
his mind leave the memories. He had to concentrate on the tasks of the moment. There were too many hard things to do for any other option.

Connor Reynolds marched along the trail, and Jace Wilson rode secretly inside of him, and both of them were safe.

There were times, in the first week, when it felt like any other summer to Ethan. Or better, even. A good group of kids, by and large. He watched them and enjoyed them and tried not to think too much about the one who was there to hide. He’d heard nothing from Jamie Bennett, and that was good. Things were going smooth on her end, and he expected them to remain smooth on his.

They spent the first five nights at camps in five different meadows within a mile of their base. This was not the way it usually went. In a standard summer, the boys always slept in the bunkhouse, not on the trail, during the first week, allowing them some time to adjust and, hopefully, form bonds—sometimes they did, often they did not. Every day they went into the mountains, but every night they returned.

Not this summer. This summer they returned briefly by day and were back into the dark mountains by night because Ethan refused to be lulled into complacence by any promise of security he had been given. He believed Jamie Bennett, and he believed the summer would pass without incident. But he’d been tasked with being prepared and he did not take that lightly.

In an ordinary summer, he’d have more boys and a second counselor out here, and his route and campsites would be known to the county sheriff and shared with Allison on a GPS tracking device. This summer, he’d instructed the sheriff to speak to Allison if he needed to reach Ethan, and he’d turned off the computer tracking on his GPS. It still had a messaging function, allowing him to reach her through short text messages, but even his wife would be unaware of his precise location.

During those first days, they discussed first aid, studied with topographic maps and compasses, did all of the classroom work that Ethan knew they’d forget the instant they were in trouble on the trail. You couldn’t replicate the wilderness, though Ethan did try. His favorite exercise was a game he called the Wilder—a mispronunciation of an archaic word that was supposed to be pronounced “will-der.” Over the years he’d given up on saying it correctly, because the altered version felt right.

He explained the origin of
bewildered.
The word that described that sense of confusion and disorientation did not come from a term meaning “incomprehension” or “surprise” but from the same root word as
wilderness
. Those who were lost in a frightening and foreign land were the bewildered. Or they had been, back when wilderness was so common as to demand its own words for the experience of being lost in it. The word had been hijacked by civilization, of course, as everything had been. You could now say you’d been
bewildered
during a text-message exchange. But the term could be traced back to the verb
wilder.
That was the act of intentionally leading people astray, of causing them to become lost and disoriented.

When he started the game, Ethan would pick one of the boys and say, “All right, you’re the wilder for the day. See what you can do.”

The boy’s job was simple: Lead the group off trail in whatever direction he chose, for whatever reason he chose. Keep on going until Ethan brought it to a stop. Then Ethan would turn to the others, who were generally pissed off and irritated by the route that had been chosen—it was
far
more fun to be the wilder than to follow him—and he’d ask them to lead the way back.

This would begin with bungled efforts involving the maps and compasses. It rarely led anywhere good. They’d progress day by day, learning to read the terrain as they went, learning to create a mental archive of key landmarks, points of change. Learn little tricks, such as the rule that almost everyone, when faced with the choice between climbing and going downhill, went downhill. This was unwise, because hiking through a drainage was a hell of a lot more difficult than walking a ridgeline, but it was the standard choice of inexperienced woodsmen.

The game was useful prep for Ethan as well, useful for the real search-and-rescue calls, because he had the chance to watch how the boys reacted to the unfamiliar, to watch the mistakes in live action, and to understand the reasons for them. In the course of a game he demonstrated all the critical mistakes he had seen over the years, showed them how simple slips could become deadly, and taught them how to recover from the mistakes they made. Anticipate and recover, anticipate and recover. If you could do the first well, you were ahead of most people. If you could do both well? You were a survivor.

Some of the boys loved it. Some rolled their eyes. Some bitched and moaned the entire way. That was fine. The lessons were being ingrained, slowly but surely. Today they’d been at it for four hours straight, stumbling through the brush and learning fast just how difficult this country was to traverse when you got off trail, and they were thoroughly worn out when they got to the campsite he’d selected.

“Burning daylight,” he said. “We have to get shelters up.”

Groans in response; the kids were stretched out on the ground, sucking air.

“We’re all tired,” he said. “But we don’t rest right now. Because, of the priorities of survival, shelter is number three. Positive mental attitude is number one. We understand that. But without shelter, gentlemen? Without shelter, you’re going to be corpses. Proper shelter will keep you alive. Anyone remember the chain? The order of our priorities?”

The wind was beginning to push a little harder as the sun went down, putting a nice chill in the air, and he could see that the last thing any of them wanted was a lecture. That was fine, though. They had to remember these things.

“Jeff?” Ethan said, going right at one of the quiet boys, forcing him to engage.

“Food,” Jeff said.

“No.” Ethan shook his head. “Food is
last,
in fact. Ask most people to rank things you need in a survival situation, and they’ll say water first, and food second. But the reality is, your body can go a hell of a long time without food, and it can go awhile without water. Certainly, it can go long enough for you to die by other means.”