Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [109]
Zak knew from the night before that this descent would take at least ten minutes, probably longer because of the smoke. As they wended their way along the treacherous roads, the smoke grew thicker until at one corner they almost piled into one another, Giancarlo only five or six feet in front of Zak now. At one point on one of the tightest switchbacks on the mountain, he caught a glimpse of the Ford and the Porsche, both with their headlights on, the Porsche running its windshield wipers. Shortly after that, smoke blotted out everything behind them.
“This is getting crazy,” said Stephens.
“I know,” Zak said.
“Maybe we should slow down!” Stephens yelled.
“You want to get shot,” Muldaur shouted over his shoulder, “you slow down.”
“We’re all going to crash.”
At the next bend it became a moot point, because the air cleared up and they were able to increase their speed. By the time the trucks came into view, the cyclists had picked up considerable distance on them, approaching one of the steepest sections of the mountain, a part of the road that seemed to drop almost straight down, arching to the right as it fell. As Zak recalled, it would get less steep around the corner. The two men in front of him actually accelerated. And then Zak did, too. It was foolhardy, and he could hear Stephens losing ground behind them as he griped about their recklessness. Then Giancarlo was skidding off to the right. Muldaur skipped to the left, and Zak found himself on a collision course with a three-point buck standing in the center of the road.
Zak missed the deer by inches, close enough to catch fleas. In front, Giancarlo continued to slow and so did Muldaur, because the road was filled with animals. A rabbit. A squirrel. Three more deer staring at the cyclists as if in a hypnotic trance.
All four riders ended up within feet of one another, standing in a bank of rolling smoke. Giancarlo was coughing the loudest, though Stephens wasn’t taking it well, either. “It was a miracle nobody hit that deer,” said Muldaur.
“What deer?” said Stephens, in between coughing bouts. Zak could barely see Stephens and couldn’t see Muldaur at all. He could see the rear wheel on Giancarlo’s bicycle, but Giancarlo’s torso was a smoke-shrouded blur. The ambient temperature at the lake had been in the low triple digits, but it had increased significantly down here.
“You think there’re more clear spots?” Muldaur asked nobody in particular. “Like if we went forward it might clear up?”
“I think there’s more smoke,” said Zak.
Zak heard the sound of Stephens’s inhaler. And then, farther down the mountain, the fire crackling like a dinosaur snapping two-by-fours in its jaws.
“How close do you think the fire is?” Giancarlo asked.
“I think it’s close,” said Muldaur.
“Okay,” Giancarlo said, turning his bike around and walking it up the hill. None of them would be able to remount because of the pitch. “I don’t care what happens up there, I’m not riding into a forest fire.”
Without further discussion they turned around and hiked back up the hill, pushing their bikes, coughing, and trying not to inhale too much smoke. Zak and Muldaur pulled their jersey necks up over their faces to filter out the worst of it.
“This is fucked,” said Muldaur.
“Anybody read Young Men and Fire?” Giancarlo asked. “It’s about the Mann Gulch Fire in Montana back in the ’fifties. A group of smoke jumpers got caught out in the open with a fire coming up a slope the same way this is coming at us.”
“The ones who survived were the ones who could run uphill the fastest,” said Zak. “The slower guys got caught and died.”
50
Because they’d been proceeding blindly into the miasma, the unspoken assumption among the four cyclists was that the trucks behind them had turned around,