Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [126]
I ran thirty paces in the direction of my house before I heard the first shouts of alarm behind, oddly enough from my own daughter.
53. CATCH ME IF YOU CAN
Nobody warned me Stevenson had been a running back on his high school football team or that Ron Holgate, who looked overweight, jogged five miles a night and competed in 10K races, that in the past five years he had twice run down suspects on foot. I found all this out later, after I dashed past the rubble that had been my house, past the two sad-eyed volunteers standing guard over Achara’s fire-stiffened body.
Lurching into the darkness in the field behind our house, I plotted a path toward the bank of the Middle Fork two hundred yards away. The moonlight was hazy under a pall of smoke that represented our vaporized house and belongings. There were firs in the middle of the field and a few more at the south end, but I was headed for the small cluster of deciduous trees on the riverbank.
The riverbed of the Middle Fork was mostly rock at this time of year, and you could wade across the stream in a multitude of places, although if you got caught in the deeper sections, the current could sweep you away. About once a summer we pulled a body out, usually some hapless local teenager who got trapped under a log and couldn’t escape because of the immense pressure of the flowing water.
“Stand in your tracks, asshole!” yelled Stevenson. I ran faster. He yelled twice more, as did Holgate, their voices giving away their positions. Both were close and getting closer, especially Stevenson, whose last words sounded as if they’d come from my hip pocket.
I swore to myself that if he knocked me down, I was going to fight. I had one day left on the planet, and I wasn’t going to let small-minded suspicions and bureaucratic megalomania steal those precious hours from my girls. I’d already robbed them of enough time myself.
I wasn’t the swiftest runner, but I was flying tonight.
Toward the center of the field, we would cross a series of furrows. Obscured by tall grasses, they would be hard to see even if you were expecting them. They were perilous during the day, worse in the dim moonlight.
I stepped into the first furrow, stumbled, righted myself, and leaped up onto the ridge beyond it, then down into the next ditch, quickly establishing an up-and-down rhythm, as if riding a miniature roller coaster. I was panting now, gasping for air, windmilling my arms wildly to maintain balance.
Behind me, one man screamed, “Oh, shit!” and I heard the thwack of a body striking the soft earth.
The other voice was still close. “You asshole!”
Stevenson didn’t sound nearly as winded as I was, but even so, I had gained ground on him. I could swear I was breathing so hard my lungs were bleeding. My legs were about to buckle.
I was almost to the riverbank when I heard him closing in on me again.
Barely visible in the moonlight, the path ran downstream along the bank for maybe a hundred fifty yards before it came to a dead end. On hot summer afternoons teenagers jumped off the steep dead end into a deep greenish-blue pool, skinny-dipping and drinking beer. For years a rope swing had dangled over the pool. I could only hope it was still there tonight. Behind me, I heard Stevenson cursing as branches and blackberry vines slapped at him.
I was breathing so hard, I could hear only two things now, the air rushing in and out of my throat and the slap of Stevenson’s shoes on the rocky path as he closed in.
“Thought you were . . . going to . . . get . . . away . . . didn’t . . . you . . . ?” he said as I reached the end of the pathway and launched myself out into space over the river. I couldn’t see the rope swing, but I knew where it should be out there in the dark over the river, and as I sailed out on faith I reached out for it, clawing at the air like a drunken Superman, just as if I could see it, the rope, hoping some Good Samaritan