Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [118]
“You okay, buddy?” Zak asked.
“I’ve been better.”
“We couldn’t wait for you.”
“I know. Don’t worry about it.”
“We wanted to, but…”
“Hey. I wouldn’t have waited.”
“We thought you were finished,” Muldaur said. “I thought we were dead, and then we made it and turned around, and truthfully…I never expected to see you up here.”
“It died down just long enough for me to get away.”
“Maybe there is a God,” said Zak.
“You know there is,” said Giancarlo. “He just pulled me up that hill.” Stephens was in front in the drifting smoke, having left the lip of the mountain before any of them.
Zak had never seen Giancarlo this tired. The dressing on his leg was filthy with blood and ash. His face was sooty. There was a dried ring of white around his mouth, probably salt. He wondered how much more riding they would have to do and whether Giancarlo would hold up. Then he wondered whether he would hold up.
55
Headlights bright, the white Ford came plowing through the bank of gray and almost struck Stephens, who swerved at the last moment; and then the truck braked to avoid the sudden apparition and went partially off the road. It was hard to tell who was more stunned, Scooter, who was driving now, or Roger Bloomquist who was sitting beside him. “You’re not headed back down?” asked Zak. “We were just down there, and it wasn’t pretty.”
“We know there’s going to be some flame,” said Scooter, addressing Stephens instead of Zak, “but we’ll just have to blast through. We’ve been watching the fire line. It’s not very deep. We can get through.”
“People have tried to get through that kind of flame in a vehicle before,” said Zak. “It never works.”
“The hell.”
Before they could say anything more, Scooter gunned the motor, and the Ford shot dirt out from beneath its tires, heading for the brow of the hill. Zak could see that although their warning had hardened Scooter’s stance, it had weakened Bloomquist’s to the point that he looked near tears.
“I wonder where the rest of them are,” Muldaur said.
The walkie-talkie in Zak’s jersey pocket began squawking. “Scooter? We’re at the south end of the lake, and it doesn’t look good. Did you check the north side?”
The cyclists proceeded slowly through the smoke so the next vehicle wouldn’t hit them. Zak began to rethink his tentative plan to jump into the lake. It wouldn’t do much good to escape the flames if they smothered in the smoke. “We’ve already taken enough smoke,” Muldaur said, as if reading Zak’s mind.
“You thinking about the lake, too?”
“It seemed like a good idea while we were climbing.”
Zak drank from his hydration pack until he’d sucked it dry. It held a hundred ounces and had been full an hour ago. He tried to think through their options, but rational thought eluded him. It was a sign of how much the smoke, the exertion, and the loss of water weight through sweating had confused his brain. He knew there were a limited number of paths they might take off this plateau, and he knew they were approaching a three-way intersection, but no matter how hard he tried, he could not wrap his brain around where the various roads led. It was frightening to realize just how badly his cognitive processes had failed. It would be the second or third time they’d gone through the intersection in the past hour.
Without the threat of a major forest fire on their tails, the others—except for Stephens, who had disappeared in front again—were riding a whole lot slower now, each feeling this was a time to reassess and, if possible, recover.
They heard the accident before they saw it. The bike had bounced off the Porsche’s front fender, but Stephens, who had rolled to the side of the road and was already getting up, didn’t appear to be too injured. The headlights of the Porsche looked bright yellow until Zak took off his sunglasses.
Fred was already