Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [129]
“Shit,” Zak said.
“What is it?” Muldaur asked.
“Kasey’s still in the car. He probably thinks that’s the safest place. I’m going down.”
“You’ll never find him in all this smoke,” said Muldaur.
“If you go down, you’ll never make it back up,” added Giancarlo.
“I have to go. He’s stuck in the car.”
“Maybe he was stuck,” said Muldaur. “But he must have gotten out by now.”
“I can’t take that chance.”
The way Zak saw it, things boiled down to Nadine and how badly he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. If her brother died up here, Zak would lose her. Until he met Nadine, he’d never understood the expression wanting to grow old with, but this was the woman he wanted digging in the garden outside his window when he was creaky and aching and his digestion had gone bad…although to be truthful he had no idea whether Nadine liked to garden or not.
“Where’d the fire go?” Zak asked. “Why didn’t it keep coming up?”
The second wildland firefighter, a reedy young man who had been looking nervous since the moment Zak first saw him, said, “We’ve been watching it all day. These mountains have magnified the effects of the wind. There’s no telling. There’s no telling where it’s headed next. I mean, it’s just as likely to hit a section as it is to skip over it. You get anywhere close to it, and it’s going to be like a blowtorch. Down below, they had winds of almost sixty miles an hour. One direction. Then another. It’s the weirdest fire we’ve fought all summer. It’s a bellows effect of the pass that keeps changing things so quickly. You got wind coming through there like a hurricane. They had to close I-Ninety this morning because of the winds.”
“What about the helicopter? We saw a helicopter earlier.”
“They’ve got engine trouble. They’re back in Fall City working on it.”
“So there’s no truck or anything up here?”
“Not unless you brought one.”
“Don’t do it!” Muldaur said.
He got up to speed in fifty yards, and then, as soon as he hit the smoke, he held his breath for as long as possible, finding his first intake of smoky air even more foul tasting than he remembered. As he descended, the smoke continued to grow thicker.
There were alternating patches of burnout on the mountainside, so that half a mile down he found a huge charred area, both sides of the road scoured clean, timbers smoldering, and then a quarter mile later the trees were green and unspoiled again. He went through two clean sections and two burned ones. Then the smoke thinned and the wind picked up, and he found himself with a death grip on his handlebars. He knew the fire came right behind the wind and that he was coasting into the most dangerous area.
The mountain had an indentation with a small gully on the right that the road builders had filled in and which became a crease as it climbed the mountain on Zak’s left. It was on this section where Zak found the first body. The fire had roared up the gully, burning everything he could see below and most of the trees in the crease above. The body was facedown in the center of the road, and he couldn’t tell who it was until he turned it over. The clothing that had been pressed against the dirt had kept almost all of its original color, and unless he’d given his Hawaiian shirt to someone else, this was Roger Bloomquist.
Zak let the body sag back to its original position and remounted. On the trip down the mountain he’d been gulping air when there was air to gulp, but now he was holding his breath for the simple reason that he was in shock. He’d been a firefighter for seven years, but aside from photos in some early training sessions, he’d never seen a burn victim, at least not a dead one. As he coasted into the bowels of uncertainty, he tried to think about what Bloomquist must have gone through in his last few minutes. He wondered what his last thoughts were, and he wondered, too, what his might be when he got caught by the flames.
The second body was within shouting distance of the first, and had it not been obscured by smoke he would have seen it