Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [124]
Some of the trees behind them were tall—a hundred feet or so—and he knew how dry they were and how fast they would burn once ignited. Every year after the holidays, he burned his Christmas tree out behind his house, and it never failed to go up like a Roman candle. They were driving up an entire mountainside of them. As if to emphasize the point, a gust of wind dropped a chunk of burning material in front of the Porsche.
Kasey ran over one of the rain-diversion culverts at speed, and their heads all bumped the roof. Stephens bit his tongue. Fred cursed. Jennifer cried out. Kasey slowed enough to regain control of the vehicle, then sped up again. “Watch out for my friends,” Stephens said. “They’re probably on this road.”
“I thought we were your friends,” Fred said, elbowing Stephens hard. Stephens tried not to stare at his enormous arm muscles or at Fred’s hair and eyebrows, which were bleached from too much sun.
This was, he thought, a weekend of curious allegiances: first to the cyclists, because his commonality with them was their commitment to physical fitness, exercise addicts who congratulated themselves on their addiction, telling themselves how fortunate they were not to be addicted to something worse, like booze or drugs or gambling. His connection to Newcastle and these others had more to do with class than behavior. They were all of the same class, some by virtue of birth, but all by virtue of income. While it was true that each of these people, except perhaps Jennifer Moore, had been born to privilege, Stephens had accumulated enough money and investments during the past fifteen years that he felt at ease, if not at one with them.
Stephens knew by the amount of dust flying around on the road in front of them that they were gaining on the white Ford. If that was true, they were gaining on the cyclists, too.
The smoke had thickened and was blacker. The wind was picking up. From the way the road arched around the face of the mountain, Stephens realized the fire they were running from might soon be alongside them. On this stretch, they could not see far enough through the trees to know where the blaze was for sure, but judging from the smudges in the sky, it was on their left and moving forward quickly.
“There’s one now,” said Fred, leaning forward until his nose was nearly touching Jennifer’s earlobe. “Run him down. Run that murdering bastard down.”
Kasey increased his speed as he passed the cyclists, and for one terrible moment Stephens thought he was going to hit them, but Kasey made no move to sideswipe the bikes. As they overtook the first cyclist, a sweep of heat, smoke, and jagged orange flashes reached up through the trees on their left and licked the roadway. Stephens began to feel the heat from the flames through the broken-out rear windows.
They drove through the gauntlet of burning trees and kept going, and as they did so it grew deathly quiet inside the Porsche. It was clear to everyone that they were leaving the cyclists to die.
No matter how hard he tried, Stephens couldn’t stifle the thought that they were all going to die. He’d been scared earlier in the day, and a couple of times he’d been close to panic, but until this