Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [14]
“Isn’t it?” Muldaur said.
“They’re right down there.”
“Who’s down where?”
“The Jeeps. Just below us. Looks like they’re getting ready to spend the night.”
“Are you shitting me?” Muldaur rolled his bike toward the near side of the debris pile so he could peer down the hill. Zak followed until they were both able to peek directly over the lip of the landing. To their surprise, four vehicles were parked less than a hundred yards away in a tiny clearing at the end of an overgrown spur road: a Porsche SUV, a Ford pickup with gigantic tires, a Jeep, and a Land Rover that looked as if it had never been off a paved road until today. The vehicles were parked helter-skelter and coated in dust except for muddy eyeholes polished on the windshields by the wipers. One tent was already set up, and two people were working on another. Somebody had started a small fire.
“Jesus,” said Muldaur. “Of all the fucking luck. There must be fifty square miles out there, and these assholes park so close they’ll hear us snoring.”
“It’ll be okay,” said Giancarlo. “They’ll be down there and we’ll be up here.” He smiled ironically at Muldaur. “Besides. The waterfall makes enough noise that we probably won’t hear each other.”
“There’s a statewide fire alert,” said Muldaur. “They’re not even supposed to be here.”
“Neither are we,” said Zak.
“We’ll be all right,” said Giancarlo. “If we’re lucky, they’ll never even know we’re here.”
“Fat chance.” While Zak pulled out the tent he and Muldaur were going to share, Muldaur took a small, folding handsaw from the items Stephens had sent up for camp maintenance and rode back up the mountain with it. Nobody questioned him, probably because everyone but Zak thought he was having a hissy fit over the other campers.
Zak set up the tent, washed the dust off his legs under the waterfall, and changed into a clean pair of cotton shorts, sandals, and a loose-fitting T-shirt he’d received as part of the entrance package at a bike race earlier in the summer. Then he began exploring. The forty-foot waterfall zippered a sheer wall very close to where they’d camped, then meandered straight to the cliffs and lapped over the edge in a sorry dribble. To the west, jutting out from the edge of the mountain with a sheer drop on three sides, stood a bluff, a narrow bridge to nowhere. The first part was the narrowest with a drop of sixty or eighty feet; then the land fell away, and the distance to the jagged rocks below grew to more than a hundred feet.
Anyone going out onto the bluff had to jump a five-foot gap with a small gully directly under it. Still in his sandals, Zak leaped to the first outcropping, strolling out onto the bluff, which, at its widest, was as wide as a man was tall and twenty-five feet long. “Geez,” said Giancarlo. “What if that rock’s bad? What if it crumbles?”
“Then I’ll be dead,” Zak said nonchalantly.
“I guess I will be, too,” Giancarlo said, making the leap.
The view from the outcropping was magnificent.
Giancarlo said, “Look over there.” It took Zak awhile to spot it, but off to the south, where they’d seen the last houses when they were riding up, white smoke was pouring off a hillside. “Is that a forest fire?”
“A small one. Look how it stretches along there. I don’t think they’re going to tap it with a pump can.”
Zak heard a dog bark again, closer this time, and as he glanced at the side of the mountain where the Jeep group was camped, he noticed a man on a rocky outcropping, a pair of binoculars aimed at them. Zak waved, but the binoculars didn’t budge. Thirty minutes later when Muldaur showed up, the man was gone. “Where you been?” Zak asked.
“Nowhere.”
“Just thought you needed some more miles?”
“I don’t want to take advantage of you youngsters by being too fresh tomorrow. Jesus. Look at that fire.”
“We’ve been watching it.”
“You know these campers below us have a fire going, too?”
“Plus a couple of boom boxes that are