Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [100]
All morning they’d been moving so fast he hadn’t had time to think through the repercussions the day might impose on the rest of his life, but with this respite, the rest of his life was all he could think about.
Zak couldn’t escape the feeling this entire mess was his fault. Scooter had engineered the Jeep trip so he could harass, embarrass, and possibly do physical harm to Zak—but Scooter’s belief that he could get away with it was rooted in Zak’s inaction during the past two months when Scooter had been stalking Nadine.
The moment he saw Scooter and Chuck on the side of the mountain that morning he should have retreated to a safe haven. After Nadine left the night before, he should have convinced the others either to ride back into town in the dark or move the camp to another location—anything except remaining passive and letting events dictate their destiny.
Zak couldn’t help seeing this from the point of view of the authorities, for surely everything that had happened would be judged by outsiders: police, district attorneys, defense lawyers, judges, relatives of the deceased—the ever-growing number of deceased—and newspaper readers and television news junkies all over the Northwest. Eventually this would be graded by strangers, and there would be two competing stories, of that he was certain. He didn’t know precisely what Scooter’s story would entail, but he knew it would be attested to by every one of his friends. Their clique stuck together.
As he lay on the ground in a dizzying stupor, Zak underwent a series of epiphanies, recognizing behaviors and parts of his history that looked and sounded to outsiders totally different from the way he had always pictured them in his head. Certainly he was a dedicated firefighter, an athlete a couple of notches below national caliber. He was socially skilled but uninterested in pursuing much social interaction. He cast girlfriends aside with a casual abandon that amazed his friends and sometimes himself. Even though his sister had lived with him for more than a year and his father for almost three years, he was basically a lonely individual, or at least he had been before Nadine showed up. Even during the times when he had a girlfriend, he’d been lonely, yet he never quite knew why.
In many ways loneliness was his defining characteristic. And now that the chase across the face of the mountain had eased, he realized the only time he hadn’t felt lonely was during the weeks he’d known Nadine. Funny how one person could become the whole world. Zak recalled what Muldaur had said earlier in the day while they were climbing. “That girl’s the best thing that ever happened to you.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Just the way you’ve been since you met her. It’s like you’ve bloomed.”
“I’ve had girlfriends before.”
“Yes, you have, but they never made you happy.”
“No, they never did, did they?”
Muldaur was right. Zak never found anybody who would make him happy, probably because he never thought he deserved happiness. In the year after Charlene’s death, when his parents’ marriage dissolved, he’d become a believer in the fragility of relationships. Zak had always marveled that so many of his friends, co-workers, and acquaintances lived their lives in the sure knowledge that somewhere a mate was waiting for them, thinking that if they hadn’t found that mate yet, it was only a matter of time, while Zak had grown up assuming he would live the bulk of his life alone.
Prior to Charlene’s death, his family was so normal and centered that in retrospect it seemed to Zak like a fantasy: two devoted parents, a stable home, meals lovingly served, happy moments shared. They even had