Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [76]
All four of them listened to the rush of the wind in the treetops and their own hearts thudding—and then, in the stillness of the mountains, the noise. It was a long way off so it took each of them a moment to recognize it, but within seconds they knew they were listening to the distant sounds of a chain saw.
“God, this is turning into a crappy trip,” said Zak.
“You just noticed?” said Muldaur.
“The trouble with you guys,” said Giancarlo, “is that you’re pessimists.”
The others followed Muldaur, Zak pulling alongside Giancarlo as they rode. “Does your leg hurt?”
“Yes, but the good news is it’s not bleeding much.”
“Can you handle the pain?”
“Why? Do you have some morphine?”
“No, but…”
“Then I can handle it.”
“It’ll feel better when they start shooting at us again,” Zak said.
“Yeah. I can hardly wait.”
Everything they’d said about pacing themselves went out the window now. The chain saw was still running, so they knew the crowd below wasn’t moving yet, but Stephens was going for broke anyway. He passed Muldaur, who would, Zak realized, ride slowly only long enough to get warmed up again. The objective here was to protect the machinery for as long as possible. Warm up the motor. Run within its limits. Save your engine as long as possible.
By the time they got to the level part of the road that bordered Lake Hancock, Stephens had vanished ahead of them through a thick stand of trees. The three slowed near the top, cocking their heads trying to hear whether the saw was still running. “Is it?” Muldaur asked.
“We’re too far away,” said Zak. “You got a plan now?” he asked Muldaur.
“I think so.”
“You going to let us in on it?”
“In a minute.”
Riding as a trio, they increased their speed significantly, Muldaur leading, Zak and Giancarlo drafting, their speed picking up as Muldaur, the strongest rider, began doing the majority of the work. By the time they caught Stephens at the three-way intersection, they were flying, and Stephens, who had slowed and was balancing in the road waiting for them, couldn’t sprint hard enough to catch their train. He shouted at them to stop, but Muldaur hooked a left at the intersection without losing any speed. From the reconnoitering they’d done the day before, Zak remembered another quarter mile of relatively flat road prior to the lake and then a spot where, despite the drought, there were puddles in the road, probably from an underground spring. The puddles were near a turnoff that led down to the lake. They were on the same route Zak and Muldaur had taken to the top of the mountain the previous day.
“Where are we going?” Stephens asked as they slowed and he caught them, then splashed through the springwater the rest of them had circumvented.
“Well,” said Muldaur, “the plan was to go around that puddle so we wouldn’t leave any tracks, but now that you’ve tracked it, we need to turn around and go the other way.”
“Why?”
“Because you left tracks telling them which way we went. There’s only two routes off this plateau, and you’ve muddied one.”
“Oh. So we were going to make them think we took the other road?”
“Right. Now we’re going to make them think we took this one,” said Muldaur, circling in the road and making his own tracks through the spring, then riding north until his tires stopped printing mud. Zak and Giancarlo did the same thing. Then, before they could stop him from making a fifth set of tracks, Stephens did it again. Once their tires had been ridden dry on the rocky trail, they turned around and bypassed the mud hole so as not to leave tracks going in the other direction. If they were lucky, the others would think they’d taken the northern route. They rode fast, Muldaur in the lead again. Zak had a knot in his stomach, knowing this was the most dangerous part of their ride so far, because they would be backtracking for a while and might easily run into the trucks. After two minutes of hard riding Zak pulled forward and towed the pace line, giving Muldaur a breather. They reached the three-way intersection