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By Root 918 0

too. In addition to the smoke and the almost unbearable heat, the winds had picked up with gusts Zak estimated at close to sixty miles an hour, perhaps as high as eighty. At one point a large stick blew across the road from somewhere and jammed into Stephens’s rear wheel and derailleur; it took two of them to dislodge it. They’d been in the smoke longer than they should have, and Zak had doubts that they would be physically able make it back up the hill. He guessed they’d descended to within half a mile of the camp, which meant they would be climbing for at least half an hour longer to reach Lake Hancock again. Descending had been a bad move, but given the choices they’d been facing, there hadn’t been anything else to do.

For all they knew, this was the end of their lives. Zak could see it in the faces of the others, and he was afraid they could see it in his. It wasn’t something he wanted to show. Firefighters took a great deal of pride in maintaining an appearance of nonchalance under all circumstances, and Zak knew he and Muldaur had been full of bluster all day. Now the smoke was incapacitating them.

They heard a loud crash above them, and then through the smoke Zak saw the outlines of the two vehicles, driver’s doors winged open. The vehicles were only thirty feet away. The Porsche had rear-ended the pickup truck, and both were more or less blocking the roadway. An air bag had deployed from the center of the steering wheel in the Ford, and there were droplets of blood on it. Jennifer was sitting on the ground outside the truck, while Kasey remained in the driver’s seat of the Porsche holding his bloody nose in one hand, a pair of broken sunglasses in the other. Scooter was on the ground on the far side of the Porsche, rocking back and forth in agony. His airbag had deployed also, and judging by the way he was acting, it must have whacked his broken collarbone pretty good. Bloomquist was sitting dismally in the back of the Porsche like a child in the time-out corner.

Zak reached inside the pickup and turned the motor off, then knelt beside Jennifer, who was sitting on the rocky ground as if she’d been thrown there, while Giancarlo walked to the far side of the Porsche and stepped back with a rifle in his hands.

“You okay, Jenn?” Zak asked.

“I’m okay.”

“You get thrown out?”

“No. I stepped out and just sat down. I don’t know why, but I’m having a hard time getting up.”

“It’s the smoke. It makes you sick.”

“What happened to my face?” Jennifer touched her upper lip, which was beginning to swell.

“Air bags deploy at a hundred eighty miles an hour. Don’t worry. It’s minor.”

Jennifer stared at Zak as if he were a creature she’d discovered at the zoo. “You guys shouldn’t be here.”

“Too late now.”

As they spoke, a gust of hot wind whistled through the area and lifted the smoke enough that they could see one another clearly for the first time. Fred was in the bed of the pickup with his rifle held at his waist, while Giancarlo, in the road below him, was pointing the rifle he found at Fred’s chest. Fred’s teeth were limned with blood. The ropes and belt he’d used to lash himself into the back of the truck had tangled so that he had a loop over one arm and another around his neck. Even if he wanted to, he wouldn’t have been able to react in time to keep Giancarlo from shooting him. “You just throw that out of there,” Giancarlo said, “or I’ll shoot it out of your hands.”

“You don’t shoot that well.”

“I think he does,” said Muldaur. “He’s been hunting since he was eight.”

Oblivious to his surroundings, Scooter was still writhing in pain on the ground. Jennifer was sitting below Kasey who’d bounded out of his Porsche, probably so everybody could see he wasn’t armed. Bloomquist was cowering in the backseat of the Porsche. None of them had expected to see the cyclists up close, and now the only weapons in sight were the rifles Fred and Giancarlo wielded.

While the nine of them waited for something to happen between the two men with guns, a mature elk clambered up the hill, hooves clanking on the rocky road, snorting