Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [116]
As the fire to their right began working its way up the mountainside in front of them, they could hear what sounded like the crinkling of giant plastic wrappers. Aside from the occasional tongue of yellow leaping into the air over their heads and then vanishing into the atmosphere, they saw little flame. The fire was like a monster behind a door and seemed to be marching up the gully alongside the road faster than they were traveling. For almost a minute the noise was fifteen yards in front of them. Zak’s greatest fear was that the fire would suck all the oxygen from the road and they would suffocate. He didn’t mind dying, he told himself, but he wanted a fair shot at outrunning the fire, not that anything about this day had been or was going to be fair. Still, if they could get back to the level of the lake, they might have a chance.
It angered him when he thought about the two vehicles making it to safety without them. Kasey and the others were probably up to their necks in icy lake water right now. Zak had been so hot for so long that a dip in a snow-fed, ice-cold lake seemed like a slice of heaven.
At any moment the fire speeding alongside in the trees might cross the road and block their exit. Should that happen, investigators would find four charred bicycles, eight melted tires, four corpses. The only reason they weren’t getting scorched now was that the winds were carrying the heat in a hundred directions, and most of the heat was on the far side of the trees. Even when the flames bore down on them once or twice, all they felt was the same hot wind they’d been suffering all day.
They were riding faster now, the three of them in a line, Stephens pedaling with a ferocity Zak had never seen from him, wobbling from side to side and running off the smooth sections on the road in his haste. If there had been any doubt before, there was none now—they were riding for their lives, and Stephens seemed to know this better than any of them. Zak remembered having once read about studies done concerning airplane crashes. Scientists had wanted to discover who survived and why, and it turned out that in order to survive a cabin fire in a passenger jet you needed to be one of the strongest men on board—the survivors were almost always men. It didn’t take researchers long to figure it out. If someone is on fire, every ounce of gallantry and any other civilized trait go out the window. The brain reverts to the Neolithic when survival is on the line. Zak knew they were getting to that place, if they weren’t there already.
They had an eighth of a mile to go to reach the crest.
Suddenly Zak’s legs found renewed strength. Muldaur’s must have, too, because together the two of them chugged up the road like a matched team of plow horses. The wind was howling in their faces, so Zak let Muldaur take the first pull, then when he swerved to the side, went through and rode in front for as long as he could hold it. They continued to switch off, working together until—in less than a hundred yards—they left behind the last of the burning treetops. Without meaning to, they also left Stephens, but they couldn’t worry about Stephens any more than they could worry about Giancarlo.
For the last eighth of a mile Zak and Muldaur rode side by side, moving faster and faster, each waiting for the other to crack. In the end Muldaur pulled ahead, and, when he did, Zak cast a look over his shoulder. Stephens was two hundred yards back, but oddly there was no evidence of fire behind him; just the smoke that had been molesting them all along. There was no trace of Giancarlo. Absolutely none.
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