Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [97]
Zak didn’t like the thought that they’d climbed almost a mile up a mountain without cause. That was the initial idea for the weekend—to ride their butts off—but now that the situation had changed, they were trying to husband as much energy as possible, to hold something in reserve in case the others got close. Zak and Muldaur turned around and lowered their saddles for the descent, then gazed down at Lake Hancock, surveying the woods and the ancient logging scars on the mountain opposite, reviewing the roads for trucks or small movements that might turn out to be angry young men with scoped rifles.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” said Muldaur.
“I could think of worse places to die.”
“Me, too.”
By the time he and Muldaur began their descent, Giancarlo and Stephens were halfway down the mountain. At the bottom the four of them regrouped and rode back around the lake. When they reached the three-way crossroads at the head of the lake, they stopped while Giancarlo searched for signs that the trucks had passed by. “Hard to tell,” he said after scanning the road surface. “There’re so many tracks. I know they came by a couple of times earlier, but I can’t tell for sure if they’ve been around recently.”
“Okay. So here’s my take on it,” said Stephens, looking around at the other three. “This probably isn’t going to surprise anyone. I think we should ride down the hill and head back into town. If we run into them, we’ll just stop and put our hands up. What are they going to do, murder us?”
“That’s exactly what they’re going to do,” said Muldaur.
“Murder us?”
“Have you not been paying attention? Look at my helmet.”
“Gimme a break, you guys. They’re not going to murder us. We’re civilized. They’re civilized.”
“The problem with riding back into town,” said Zak, “is that we were down by the river and we got a good look at the roads. They’re not passable, and they won’t be for a long, long time.”
“So we’re going to have to hide out up here until it is passable?” said Giancarlo.
“That’s how it looks.”
“I was wondering where you got that rifle,” said Giancarlo.
“I’ll tell you all about it after we find someplace to hide.”
They took the road on the north side of Lake Hancock, this time skirting the spring entirely. When they reached the turnoff to the lake, their choices were to either continue up the mountain on the same route Zak and Muldaur had taken the previous evening, venture through the trees in the direction of the lakefront itself, or pursue the narrow, gated road that ran along the north side of the lake, where there were a dozen or so small cabins.
“We could hide out in one of those shacks,” said Stephens. “Of course we would leave money and a note for whatever we took.”
“I’d rather be out in the open,” said Muldaur. “What about you, Zak?”
“I want to be able to run in more than one direction.”
“Giancarlo?”
“The only reason I’d go to those cabins would be to look for firearms.”
“You guys are turning this into a war,” said Stephens. They ended up climbing the switchback road that rose up out of the plateau to the north, the same road Zak and Muldaur had ridden the afternoon before, a mountain on their right-hand side. As they began the ascent, Stephens pulled alongside Giancarlo. “It could be worse, I guess. At least if those fires get close, I’m with three firemen.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know. I’ll be with professionals.”
“These are wildland fires.”
“Yeah. So?”
“So we work in Seattle. We’re structural firefighters. We don’t know anything about wildland fires.”
“Same principles, right?”
“Are you kidding? You know as much about what’s going on out here as we do.”
44
The road climbed for almost an hour before feeding onto a rolling plateau at about four thousand feet, which was essentially the top of the foothills butting into the Cascade Mountains. The plateau was laced with an intricate maze of logging roads, many of them overgrown dead ends. Once on the plateau the worst of the climbing would be over, especially now that they weren’t following the original plan to forge a path all the