Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [91]
He appeared to be dead, but Zak would have to check for a pulse to be certain, which meant crawling inside.
Okay, he said to himself. Get inside, check his carotid artery, and then get out. No problem. You’ve done it a hundred times. Just do it. Perry’s eyes weren’t exactly open, but they weren’t closed, either. Zak knew if he were in uniform, he’d be inside by now, but he wasn’t in uniform and he’d fallen into a well of fear he couldn’t climb out of. It was impossible for him to put into words why he couldn’t go into the wreck, what the fear was all about.
And then he was astonished to see a drop of liquid splash in the dust at his feet. Then another. Liquid was running off his face, which he mopped with the back of his cycling glove.
As soon as he realized he was crying, he entered into a transcendental moment in which he wasn’t quite sure if he was kneeling beside a car with his dying sister inside, or kneeling beside a car in the woods seventeen years later. A good portion of his brain wasn’t sure if he was twenty-eight or eleven. What made it worse was that his situation gave him a flash forward into the rest of his life. From now on there would be a hundred things he wouldn’t be able to do. The car was only the first of myriad successive cascading dominoes. In the future he might not be able to go into fires. He might not be able to climb tall ladders. Zak Polanski—the sniveling coward who let his sister die because he couldn’t crawl into the car to unfasten her seat belt.
“What are you doing, Zak?” Muldaur yelled from the road. “Hurry up. They’re on the walkie-talkie. They’re headed this way. We have to get moving.”
Zak heard himself say, “He’s dead.”
“You already went in?”
“Yeah,” Zak lied. “He’s dead.” Zak headed back up the hill, stepping carefully over the rocks so he wouldn’t twist an ankle. In the space of two minutes he’d turned into a coward and a liar. He’d been waiting for it his whole life, it seemed, and now it was here, the fait accompli. As he walked up the hill, he wondered if it showed on his face.
Scooter was standing now but didn’t look like any kind of threat, blood gushing from his nose, his shoulders hunched as if he’d been beaten. “You’re going to pay for this, Polanski, you fuck. You broke my goddamn collarbone. You almost killed me. You’re going to pay big time.”
With the rifle laid horizontally across his handlebars, Muldaur headed down the hill. “Come on, Zak. They’re right behind me.”
Giving Scooter one last look, Zak caught Muldaur a hundred yards down the mountain. “Are they really coming?”
“Yeah. I got one of their walkie-talkies in my pocket.”
“Com One to Com Three. Where are you? Come in?” When nobody replied, the speaker said, “Com One to Com Three. We’re halfway down the mountain. Where are you?”
“If they’re halfway down the mountain, they’re right behind us,” said Zak. “You think they’ll stop at the wreck or keep coming?”
“They’ll pick up Scooter and check on the dead guy.”
“I hope so.” Zak wondered if Ryan Perry was really dead.
“Back there. That was the most awesome piece of riding I’ve ever seen. Scooter came damn close to blowing your nuts through the roof of your mouth when you came down the hill.”
When they got to the bottom of the mountain and the road leveled out, they heard the white noise of the river. Stephens had told them it was a mile from the bottom of the mountain to the crossroads, but Zak wasn’t thinking about the crossroads. Freezing up outside the Land Rover scared him in a way nothing else had in almost two decades. It scared him more than any of the close calls he’d ever encountered in the fire department, and