Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [98]
The road started off steep and grew steeper, running in a straight line for a quarter mile through a gauntlet of dark green Douglas fir. There were at least two other major roads that connected to this, one coming up from below from the left—probably from the river—and another joining from above. They wouldn’t reach either for a while, though. As they climbed, the group once again separated into a hierarchy based on leg strength and conditioning, with Zak and Muldaur in the lead, Stephens farther down the grade, and Giancarlo out of sight behind. Not being a complainer by nature, Giancarlo hadn’t said anything, but it was clear the dog bite was hampering him, and all of them knew that if the truckers came from below, they would reach him first. They might have given him the rifle, which he was fully capable of using, but the extra weight would have hampered him further, so he said he didn’t want it. At this point, they had no idea where the trucks would be coming from, or even if they were on the mountain.
They had briefly considered riding as a foursome, but Zak and Muldaur thought it better to go ahead and use the extra time to scout, which they did, finding several overgrown side roads, most of which petered out quickly when they followed them. About a third of the way up the mountain, Zak found a road and explored it while Muldaur waited for the others. “Looks like a good place to hide out,” Zak said when he came back. “It leads to an old mine.”
“Do you think we need to stop?”
“I think these two are doing the dying swan.”
“I don’t know how they thought they were going to make the whole weekend.”
“They would have made an ordinary weekend, but not in this smoke, not with all this stress. Plus, Giancarlo’s got that leg wound from the dog.”
“I suppose so.” Stephens was laboriously making his way up the hill, head bobbing with each pedal stroke, while Giancarlo wasn’t in sight yet. “Let’s go in here, then. I doubt they’re going to check every little dogleg, and if they do, I have the rifle.”
“For all we know they went back to town.”
As if on a signal, they heard the first walkie-talkie transmission in twenty-five minutes. “Kasey? You guys check that one, too?”
“Already got it. Stay off the air.”
“Right.”
“They’re at the cabins,” Muldaur said. “Right behind us.”
The four of them ended up walking their bikes through a stand of reedy saplings that had grown through the rocks. Then 150 yards of overgrown road fed them into an open mine pit just large enough to use for a shooting range, which people had obviously done in the past, for there were hundreds of broken bottles and other consumer items filled with bullet holes against the far wall, and thousands of spent .22 brass cartridge cases under their feet. It was a horseshoe-shaped pit that might have been scooped out by a meteorite instead of miners with shovels. Trees rimmed the crater, and there was at least one spot to the east above the pit where they could see a piece of an old logging road on another face of the mountain. Here and there on the floor of the pit lay rusted chunks of abandoned machinery.
The road had a hump in it just before it reached the mine, and it was from this hump that they turned around and discovered the best view into the valley from this side of the mountain Zak had seen yet. If it hadn’t been so hazy, they would have been able to glimpse Seattle and the Olympic Mountains beyond the sound, but as it was all they saw was a cotton-candy haze that stretched for thirty miles.
“Jesus,” said Giancarlo.
“Your leg?” Muldaur asked.
“No. The