Those Who Wish Me Dead (28 page)

I
t was the wrong way
to die. Jace knew that before he got into the shelter, and once he was inside and he couldn’t see Hannah anymore, he was sure of it. It would have been better for all of them to sit there and wait, and then she would not be alone, none of them would be. Right now, it was just like the quarry, hiding and waiting, and if he was going to die like that, then he should have let it happen long ago.

“I’m getting out,” he said.

“No, you’re not.” Allison Serbin had her arms tight around him, and he began to fight her, kicking and wriggling. She fought with him until they heard Hannah’s voice.

“Connor!
Connor!
Get out here.
Fast.
”

“Listen to her!” he said. “Let me listen to her!”

Allison Serbin either gave up and released him or he finally fought free of her; he wasn’t sure and it didn’t matter. He was out of the awful shelter again, back into the world, and while it was a terrible world, filled with the smells of smoke and heat and blood, it was better than the tent. He’d come out facing what remained of Jack Blackwell’s head; there was not much of it to speak of, and he felt a strange, savage happiness, although once such a thing would have made him ill.

At least he didn’t get me. Neither of them did.

But it was his brother’s fire. He’d said so himself.

Hannah said, “You told me you could build a fire. You told me you were good at it.”

He had no idea what she was talking about. He just turned to her and nodded.

“Were you telling the truth?” Her voice was urgent, her eyes clear for the first time since the bullets had found her legs. “
Do not lie to me now.
Can you build a fire and do it fast?”

“Yes.”

“You’re going to need to do it.”

“What?”

“You have one chance,” she said. “You can save yourself and save her. But, buddy, you’ve got to be able to do it, and do it fast.”

He nodded again. He felt light-headed, glad he was on his hands and knees, anchored to the ground.

“Listen to me,” she said. “You’re the one who doesn’t make mistakes, right? You can’t make one now. You’ve got to listen and do exactly what I say. If you do that, you’re going home. I promise.”

“I’m listening.”

“Okay. You see the grass down there? That little plateau?”

He followed her pointing finger. She was indicating the last thing between them and fire in the trees. A circle of grass that died out at the rocks where they sat now. It was maybe a hundred yards away from them, and just fifty in front of the fire.

“Yes.”

“You’re going to make a fire there,” she said. “And you’re going to let it spread.”

He looked back at her. Was she in shock? Was this what happened when you went into shock?

“It will work,” she said. “Here’s why: You’re stealing what the fire needs. Do you understand that? It’s going to need—”

“Fuel and oxygen,” he said, thinking of the brace piece, the way you’d give it that lift to provide fresh air, keep the flame from drowning. The way the fire was smothered by larger pieces of wood. But this was no campfire. This was a monster.

“Yes. You’re robbing it of the fuel.”

“It won’t work. Not on that. It’s too big! It will never burn out.”

“No,” she said. She wiped her face with her hand and left a streak of blood across her forehead. “It won’t burn out. The fire will move faster. That’s what we need. It has to go over that shelter
fast,
do you see?”

He wasn’t sure, but before he could answer, she said, “Go down there and start a fire, Connor. Can you do that?”

“I can do that,” he said. He didn’t think his legs would hold him when he stood, but they did. The fire steel was in his pocket. He removed it and held it in a sweating, shaking hand and said, “I’ll go make a fire.”

Allison tried to go with him. Tried to
stop
him, actually, but when Hannah Faber yelled at her, she paused, turned back, looked in her eyes, and saw the truth in them.

“It’s your only chance,” Hannah said. Very soft. “If he can do it, you bring the shelter down and set it up in the ashes.”

“Won’t it melt?”

“Not down there. Not at that heat. Just set it up the way you have it, and make sure it’s as close to the center as you can. Once the fire gets there, it’s going to race. It will have no choice.”

Allison looked away from her and back down to where the boy walked alone. He seemed smaller than ever before, his silhouette framed against the orange sky.

“You believe this,” she said.

“It’s the only chance. And, listen—when you get back in there with him, you hold him tight, understand? You’d better hold him tight.”

Allison looked at Hannah’s blood-soaked right leg and the devastated left foot, then back into her intense eyes, and nodded. “I won’t let it be for nothing.”

Jace picked up a brace piece as he walked, a perfect length of deadfall, and he was thinking that he didn’t have time to get kindling, there was no way he had enough time, but then he remembered that it didn’t matter. All he needed to do was make the grass catch. He wasn’t trying to build a campfire. Just burn the grass.

Every step was hotter, and louder. His mouth was so dry, his tongue felt fat and swollen against his lips.

I can save them.

He walked on, closer, closer, and only when he was in the middle of the ring of grass did he stop. He knelt then and dropped the brace piece—he didn’t need it, just the spark—and he tore handfuls of dry grass out and set them in a loose pile at his feet. He held the fire steel and prepared to strike it, knowing that he could do it, that he could get that shower of sparks.

He dropped the tool on the first strike. His hands were shaking too badly.

You’re going to kill them.

He grabbed it again, and that was when he heard the scream. It was loud, but it didn’t last long. It came from the woman who’d been thrown off the horse.

The fire had found her.

That’s what’s going to happen. That’s what it will feel like, Jace, that’s how you’re going to die.

Stop being Jace. Be what Hannah still called him. Connor Reynolds could start this fire; he had before.

He gripped the fire steel in his left hand and the striker in his right and this time he didn’t drop it when he made contact. Sparks fell in a shower into the grass.

Died immediately.

He was starting to panic, but then he remembered the first day, Ethan telling him to slow down, slow down, and he tried again, and then again, and on the fourth time, some of the grass caught.

He lowered his face to the ground and blew on it and it smoked white and then he blew some more and watched it glow red and then he added more grass, trying to move slow, trying not to smother it.

The fire was already spreading, though. Already pulling away from him, the sun-scorched grass going up fast, spreading out in an expanding ring. He stood and looked up into the rocks and saw Hannah Faber lifting a hand, one thumb up. He ran then, out of his own fire and back up the rocks to her.

“Told you I could,” he said when he reached her. He was out of breath, gasping.

“Never doubted you, buddy. But you just saved some lives. Now you two go down there and put the shelter up right where you started that.”

“It won’t make it up here,” he said. “There’s nothing to burn now. It’s just like you said.”

“Right,” she told him. “But it’s protocol, Connor. We go ahead and deploy, just in case.”

“Then why are we moving the—”

“Because it’s the right choice,” she said. “I’m fine. Look at this! There’s nothing for it to burn. It’s just rock. I can sit here all day. It might get a little warm, but I’ll be fine.”

“Okay. Then we can all stay.”

Hannah said, “Connor? I need you to help her. I
need
you to.”

He looked at Allison, then Hannah, then back at his fire. It had caught the full force of the wind and found its slope and gathered speed, then sprinted to meet the rocks and foundered there. Behind it, the main blaze was very close.

“Finish the job,” Hannah said. “You can’t quit halfway through. Now help her get the shelter up.”

He didn’t say anything. Couldn’t come up with words, let alone get them out. He knew she was lying to him. At least about some of it.

“Get back in,” she said. “Connor, get back in, and this time, you
stay there.
I’m fine. Know that I’m fine, I’m not going anywhere. And thank you. You saved people. You don’t understand it yet, but I promise you that you did.”

“Then we don’t need to go down to—”

“You’re why I’m here, do you get that?” she said. “I’m here to make sure you get in that shelter and
stay
in it. Both of you. Now listen to me. You do
not
leave that shelter until you hear the sound of my voice. You’ve got to promise me that. It will seem like the fire’s gone, like everything is done, but you won’t know that for sure, not inside there. You won’t know what to trust. So you wait on the crew boss to release you, all right? And right now, buddy, I’m the crew boss. You wait on my voice.”

T
hey had the shelter
up in the ashes before the fire broke the timberline. Hannah watched it come on and she knew that it was up to the wind now.

She’d spoken with Nick only once about the possibility of dying in a fire. It had been the day he confessed that he would never deploy a fire shelter, that he didn’t like the idea. She’d argued with him then, told him how stupid it was, told him that attempting to run away from a forest fire was like running from the very hand of God—you knew you had no chance, so why would you try? All he would become, she had said, was another cross on a mountain. And his answer, with the sly smile that defused the debate before it could become a fight, was that he just wanted to make sure his was the highest cross.

I want to be winning the race at some point, at least,
he’d said.
Bury me high.
Because he’d stayed to get her in the shelter, though, his had been the lowest cross at Shepherd Mountain in the end.

She couldn’t have run now if she’d wanted to, but she didn’t want to. She needed to watch. She owed them that.

God, it was gorgeous. A thirty-foot-high wall of orange and red dancers. She wondered vaguely if any of them at Shepherd Mountain had appreciated its beauty at the end. Thought that Nick would have, maybe. That seemed possible.

She knew it would pick up pace once it broke the tree line, but she had forgotten just how fast it could go. The astonishing thing was the way it raced uphill. Gravity owned much of the world, but it did not own fire. The flames broke the timberline in a rush and found what should have been a field of grass.

All that remained was ash.

It seemed to anger the fire.

A quarter of the way up the slope, the fire doubled its speed, advancing as if zipping along a fuse cord, rushing toward its detonation point. It reached the fire shelter at that speed and then she couldn’t see the shelter any longer. She could feel the wind, though, and the wind was good, it was gusting, it was what they needed, a fast-and-holding wind. There was nothing back there for the fire to eat, and so it wouldn’t stay. The smoke was thick but she could see the silver shimmer of the shelter, and she knew that the boy was alive inside.

“He’s going to make it,” she said. “He’s going to make it home.”

No one argued. The ghosts circled behind her in silent, respectful fashion and watched the flames move on, faster than would have been possible if the grass had remained, racing past the fire shelter, riding that beautiful wind up the mountain and on to meet her.

Nick came and sat beside her, close enough so that they were just barely touching, that graze of contact that gave her butterflies the first time and never stopped. She leaned against him and felt his warmth, and neither of them said a word. They didn’t need to. They could watch in peace now.

The job was done and the boy was safe.

H
e insisted that he’d
heard her voice. His story never changed. At first nobody had seen the point in trying to change his mind—what did it matter? Later, Allison wondered if it was possible. If she could actually have called to him in the end.

All that Allison had heard was the fire. It had thundered over them and sounded and felt like nothing else she’d experienced in her life. It was like lying on the tracks as a long freight train scorched above you and somehow none of the wheels ever made contact.

Jace had tried to get out of the shelter and she had fought him. It wasn’t easy to hold so tight; it hurt terribly, but she had told Hannah that she would hold him tight and so she did and eventually he stopped fighting and held her too as the fire thundered on and on and the shelter began to feel like a burning coffin.

The sound faded but did not go away, and Allison was sobbing and terrified that they were running out of air; there didn’t seem to be enough oxygen.

“Air,” she said. “Air. We’ve got to get this thing open.”

He fought her again then, but it was different, he was holding her in, not the other way around. Allison wanted to claw her way out, even if the flames still waited, anything for a breath.

“Not until we hear her voice,” he kept shouting, “not until we hear her voice.”

She wanted to scream back that they were never going to hear her voice, because Hannah was dead and they would be too if he didn’t let her open the shelter. He kept fighting her, and then, just when she was certain she could bear no more, he said, “That’s her. That’s Hannah. Go on and open it.”

Allison had heard nothing but the fire and the wind, but she wasn’t going to argue the point, she
had
to escape that shelter, and so she fumbled it apart gratefully and they fell out into a world of smoke.

The fire was gone. The charred landscape showed where it had run on past them, and orange flames burned in the drainages on either side of them, but there on the hillside, all that was left was smoldering embers.

They were alive.

It was there that firefighters found them an hour later, after they’d been spotted by a helicopter. Two of the three survivors on the mountain, they told her.

“Three?”

“Two of you and a man on top. He signaled the helicopter, otherwise we might have been a long time finding you in all this smoke.”

“Ethan,” she said.

“I don’t know his name.”

But she did.

“You’re lucky,” he said. “You’re damn lucky. Three survivors, but we’ve got four bodies too.”

“No,” Jace said. “No, there are four survivors. If Ethan is up high, then there are four of us.”

The firefighter didn’t want to answer that, and Jace began to shout at him then, saying there were four, he knew that there were four because he’d heard her, because she’d called to him to tell him that it was safe, and then Allison held him again, and she did not let go until they were off the mountain.

The bodies told the stories that witnesses never could have, even though they had come to the mountains to eliminate witnesses. In the hospital, in a haze of pain and blood loss and medication, Ethan told anyone who would listen that the brothers were not American, and he knew this because one of them read the winds wrong. Nobody paid much attention. Ethan was saying a lot of things at that point.

Their DNA connected the brothers to names long unknown and long discarded even by them. Thomas and Michael Burgess.

They were Australian. They knew different skies, it was true, though it had been a long time since they’d operated beneath the ones under which they were born.

Thomas was Jack, the elder brother, a figure in the Sydney crime world until he traveled to America at the turn of the twenty-first century to kill a man and liked the place enough to stay once the man was dead. His brother, who had washed out of the Australian army for dishonorable conduct, joined him, first in Boston, then New York, then Chicago. They wore many names during those years but settled on Blackwell for reasons unknown. Jack and Patrick were names they’d given each other in childhood while passing through various foster homes after their father was murdered. He was shot through the windshield of his car with a semiautomatic rifle when Jack was nine and Patrick six. They’d watched it happen from the steps of their front porch.

Their sister had joined them in the country ten years earlier. She’d tried—unsuccessfully—to become a U.S. marshal, a position they saw great value in her having, given their line of work. They’d had a contact in the U.S. Marshals, a man named Temple, but now he was gone and they needed a replacement for him. It didn’t work out, but she moved into the world of executive protection as a private consultant, a job that took her to some interesting places and once to Montana to be taught survival by Ethan Serbin while she silently protected a witness who later disappeared, a rumored high-dollar hit.

In Chicago, the brothers had met a police sergeant named Ian O’Neil, who also needed some witnesses to disappear. Ian O’Neil was currently on the board as an unsolved homicide victim himself.

The Burgess brothers died on the slopes below Republic Peak as the Blackwell brothers, Jack and Patrick, and the task of connecting their DNA with the crime scenes of unsolved homicides began slowly and then bore steady fruit, starting that summer and going on into the autumn and the winter and the year beyond.

The Ritz was not finished yet, though it could have been. Ethan and Allison lived in the bunkhouse while they completed the main house. Originally, Ethan feared that it would be home to nothing but horrifying memories, and he wondered if they should go somewhere else entirely. Allison talked him out of that.

Their bodies had healed by summer’s end, and in the fall, as the tourists left and the first snows teased the slopes and padlocks were placed on the doors of the fire towers, they worked together, measuring and cutting boards and driving framing nails. There were new aches and new weaknesses for both of them, and the work was harder now than it had been but, on some days, maybe a little sweeter too. They got as far as they could before winter shut them down, and then in spring they resumed, and by then they understood better what they hadn’t been able to give voice to at first. The house had to be rebuilt, and they had to do it, because to do so was to heal, and it was either that or run. The two of them were rebuilding everything. Doctor visits were constant—burn specialists and plastic surgeons for Allison; physical therapists for Ethan—and even in their words, their touches, it was not a matter of reclaiming but rebuilding. Things were broken now, but not irreparable. And so they went about repairing, and the house became a part of it, and then it became the central part of it as the doctor visits fell away and the words between them came easier and with less weight and the touches were familiar and not desperate again.

It was, Ethan realized, what he’d never understood about survival in all these years of studying it and teaching it.

Survival didn’t end when you were found. The arrival of the search-and-rescue teams wasn’t a conclusion. Rescue, rejoice, rebuild.

He’d never known the last step.

It was summer again and the sun was hot and Ethan was shirtless as he worked laying shingles on the roof, Allison sanding drywall tape along the ceiling below him, on the day when Jace Wilson arrived with his parents.

The boy was taller, in that startling way that children between certain years could achieve. Voice huskier. He looked good, but he looked guarded, and Ethan knew why. It was the rebuilding season for him too.

His father was named Chuck. His mother, Abby, worked for a bank in Chicago, where last year she’d been approached by a professional bodyguard, a woman with kind blue eyes who’d said she’d heard about Abby’s son’s situation from her police contacts and thought she could help with the problem. Jace’s parents had divorced when he was young, but this summer day, they all made the trip together, and whatever tensions there might have been were well below the surface, where they belonged. They all had a good afternoon and a good quiet evening and after the sun went down behind the mountain, and Jace went to sleep in the bunkhouse, the adults had glasses of red wine on the porch of the unfinished house and there Allison asked Jace’s parents if they wanted to know what had come of the identification of the corpses of those who had pursued their son so relentlessly. And so they listened and learned of the exploits of the Burgess brothers and their sister. As far as Ethan could tell, the only questions that had been answered were which men had been paid how many dollars to kill which other men. But it mattered to Jace’s parents, it was part of their rebuilding season, and so Ethan listened as Allison told what she could of the story, even though Ethan knew, and was certain that she knew, that they had all parted ways with the story on Republic Peak on a hot June day when the western wind breathed fire across the mountains.

The next morning they rode back to the place where Jace and Allison had survived the fire. They borrowed extra horses from a friend, but Allison rode Tango. The burned riding the burned. She told Ethan that she was curious to see if the horse would remember the spot. Ethan didn’t ask her how she would know, but he believed that she would.

They rode out just after sunrise to the ravaged slopes below Republic Peak, and all around them was the grim gray of the burnout. Ethan was worried about the visual effect, was trying to come up with a way to balance the sorrow, when Jace said, “Her grass is already coming back.”

He was right. In the land of burned timber, there was a circle of green, an acre of grass. It had fallen victim to the flames faster than the trees, but it had come back faster too. Jace looked at it for a long time, and then his mother asked, gently, if this was where he wanted to put the cross. It was the first time anyone had mentioned it, though he had been carrying it with him the whole ride.

“Nobody died here,” he said. “She was higher than that.”

And so they went higher, up past the withered and blackened remains of trees, over a ridge of rock, and onto a short plateau. They dismounted there and Ethan knew that the boy had studied the maps that had been released during the inquiry into the fire, because he knew exactly where she had fallen. Ethan was sure of it too because he’d made a trip here himself in the fall, a long slow walk, and then he had sat alone among the black rocks and spoke aloud when he thanked Hannah Faber for his wife.

That was just before the first snow.

Now Jace Wilson cleared a spot in the earth and took a hammer and began to pound the cross into the ground. It was rough soil and he had some trouble, but when his father and Ethan offered to help, he said that he would do it himself. In time he did, but then he decided it wasn’t straight enough, and they waited in silence until he got it aligned in a way that pleased him. He ran his hands along the surface of the wood and then turned back and looked down the slope and said, “She made a good run at it. She made a really good run.”

They all acknowledged that yes, she surely had.

For a long time he sat there and looked at the burned mountain below and did not speak. Finally he got to his feet and got back onto the horse.

“It’s a good place for her cross,” he said. “You can see the grass from this spot. You can see where we were. I know that she did. She was high enough to see us.” He looked at Allison then and said, “Did you really not hear her voice?”

Allison never took her eyes off him as she said, “Did you really hear it?”

Jace nodded.

“That’s all that matters,” Allison said.

They rode down from the cross then, and over that circle of healthy green grass, and even beneath the blackness, you could see the rebirth beginning, if you looked hard enough. The land would hold the scars for a long time, but it was already working on healing them and it would patiently continue to do so.

That was the way of it.