Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [85]
Having stumbled upon one of the primary routes back down the mountain, they’d stopped at a ledge and gazed out over the panorama of Seattle’s skyscrapers far in the distance, unsure whether the trucks were below them or in the woods behind them and not knowing which direction to take.
They’d spent most of the morning climbing, getting shot at, and then meandering around this huge, forested plateau on various logging roads in an effort to keep one step ahead of the Jeeps. After escaping from the Lake Hancock basin a mere thirty seconds ahead of the trucks, they’d climbed one of several offshoot roads Stephens later said ended at three of the best fishing lakes in the state. They had been forced to hide, and not very well, when the trucks came roaring up behind them. Although the trucks didn’t stop, Zak could have sworn they’d been spotted by the guy in the Jeep who’d been last in line, Ryan Perry. He looked right at Zak, eyeball-to-eyeball, but kept going. It was the closest they’d come to getting caught, and Zak wondered if he’d really been spotted and Perry, for some unknowable reason, was covering for them.
Once the trucks had passed, they descended the twisty mountain road at breakneck speeds, expecting the vehicles to be on their heels, yet they didn’t come back down for quite some time. Had the cyclists continued to the top, they would have been trapped where the trees thinned out at just over five thousand feet. Two hours had passed since the close call, and now they were on the lip of the Cascades looking out at most of western Washington, including Seattle, Bellevue, and parts of Puget Sound. “We could go down the hill here,” said Zak, “but we might be riding into their laps.”
“I think we should stand in the road and talk to them,” said Stephens. “They’re not going to shoot us. At least not with us looking them in the eye.”
“You want to bet your life on it?” said Muldaur.
“They’re not psychos.”
“No, they’re not psychos,” said Zak. “But for some reason they’re acting that way.”
“What they are,” said Giancarlo, “is a bunch of out-of-control, spoiled rich kids who got pissed off and decided to take the law into their own hands.”
“Easy there on the rich-kid stuff, Giancarlo. You’re starting to sound like Zak.” Muldaur laughed.
Muldaur had, over the course of the past hours, become the de facto leader of the quartet. It was natural for Zak and Giancarlo to take orders from him—they both knew him as a lieutenant in the fire department—but where Stephens worked he was the boss, and he clearly resented taking a backseat. Still, in the last hour they’d worked as a cohesive unit under Muldaur’s leadership.
Stephens looked around the group. “I think they’re behind us.”
“There are no recent car tracks anywhere here,” said Giancarlo, stooping over the road. He’d become their unofficial tracker by virtue of his hunting experience and had already twice shown them where they needed to cover their tracks in the dust to keep from giving away their route.
“No tracks doesn’t mean they’re not below us,” said Zak. “They could have taken another road.” Zak figured they could see at least fifty miles to the west, south, and north. To the east behind them lay an area clogged with old stumps that stretched for fifty yards before the dark woods began.
“Hear that?” said Zak. “A truck!”
“Which way’s it coming?” Giancarlo asked, mounting his bike.
Muldaur glanced down the hill and said, “Not from down there.”
“Which way do we go?” Stephens was on his bicycle. “Down or back? I have to warn you, this is a nasty downhill.”
“Let’s head for those trees over there,” said Muldaur,