Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [3]
2
August
Pedaling up into the first of the foothills, Zak felt a droplet of sweat trickling out of his helmet and down the side of his face, dangling for just a moment on the tip of his chin. The others had been sweating heavily all along, especially on this ferocious uphill. At some points on the gravel road they found themselves pedaling up grades so steep your average Joe would have a difficult time walking them, much less riding a bike—so steep that if they got off they would not be able to remount, each of them fighting hard to control his bike on the washboard fire road, each breathing in his own labored and painful rhythm.
The five riders were bonded by affection for this type of grueling exercise, intoxicated by the adventure of hard workouts, and addicted to the endorphins exercise produced. While other northwesterners spent the three-day weekend lounging around the house or semicomatose on a blanket at the beach, Zak, Muldaur, Stephens, Barrett, and Morse would be logging two hundred miles in the mountains, climbing fifteen to twenty thousand feet on fire trails, county roads, and overgrown logging roads.
For Zak and Muldaur it would be a calculated shock to their systems to help them prepare for a twenty-four-hour mountain bike race they planned to enter in three weeks. For Stephens, who lived nearby, and for his friend Morse, the ride was an end in itself. Always game for an adventure, Barrett had tagged along almost as an afterthought.
Zak had been riding last in the string of five men, a position he took up from time to time in order to size up the opposition. Opposition. He liked that word. They weren’t actually enemies—in fact they were friends—but he knew each climb on this trip would be a contest, and the best place from which to size up the other contestants was at the back. They were all competitive and more than a little vain about their prowess on a bicycle, and thus competition would be fierce.
The Northwest was suffering through the last days of August, and afternoon highs in western Washington had been languishing in the mid-to high nineties, briefly touching a hundred in some counties. In the mountains the evenings would be cooler, but the midday sun would also be harsher. Their plan was to traverse from the western side of the Cascade Mountains to the east, ending in Salmon La Sac, a journey Muldaur had promised Zak would be similar to running three or four marathons back-to-back.
Zak, Jim Muldaur, and Giancarlo Barrett were firefighters, while the other two were businessmen, friends of Muldaur’s. Besides the five years they’d put in together working on Engine 6, Zak and Muldaur had raced mountain bikes and competed in road races together, traveling to and from many of the events in Muldaur’s Subaru Outback with their bikes on a roof rack, so they knew each other’s habits and predilections like brothers. At 160 and 165 pounds, respectively, Zak and Muldaur were the fittest in the group. In biking the most critical single factor in climbing performance was the combined weight of bike and rider. A pound or two might not make much of a difference in football or basketball, but people paid hundreds of dollars to shave a couple of ounces off bicycle components.
Muldaur’s friend Steve Stephens was the chief financial officer for a successful local biotech company; his salary, bonuses, and stock options placed him in an income category none of the others could match, although his buddy Morse, a freelance labor negotiator, came close.
Thursday afternoon before Labor Day the five of them met at Stephens’s house in North Bend, a burgeoning hamlet at the base of the Cascades and the last town before Snoqualmie Pass and the ski areas. Stephens lived under Mount Si, a rocky, four-thousand-foot monolith that jutted almost straight up from the valley floor. Originally eight men and one woman had signed up for this weekend, but the woman and one of the men bailed for family reasons. The last two jumped ship after hearing that the woods in western Washington