Windigo fire, p.16
Windigo Fire, page 16
“You hit me!” Barry cried.
“You betcha, you stingy little lizard. I know you’ve got a bottle hidden in here.” A banging and thumping of desk drawers. “Bingo!”
“Put that down. That’s for guests.”
The chair rolled and slammed into the wooden wall between the office and spare room, making Rachel jump.
“Set your bum down, we’ve got business to discuss,” Santa said.
“What-what business?”
“Don’t play me about. The money you borrowed from me to set up your special websites. The ones you host and sneak a long peek at when you kid yourself nobody’s looking, you pathetic pervert.”
“Oh, those websites.”
“I need my money back and I need it now. Plus a little sweetener, say five thousand or so, to stop me from telling dear, sweet Sergeant McKenna all about your nasty little hobby.”
“I don’t have to pay you a thing.”
Another wet slap. “Keep messing me about and I’ll turn really ugly.”
Rachel pressed closer to the door, listening intently.
“It’s all over. She was already here.” Barry was sobbing now. “I sat up all night erasing my drives.”
“You cretin,” Santa said at last. “I watched that copper drive off from the Galaxy last night. She had that old native waitress from the caff with her. And that kid Logan was passing off as his granddaughter. The kid wore a shirt from your precious camp. I say she belongs here and the copper was bringing her back. I say, the copper knew damn all about your computers.”
“She knew everything. I saw it in her eyes.”
“It’s her job to make you feel guilty. Besides, a smart copper can read your drives even after you erased them.”
“I’m not paying you a thing. I couldn’t even if I wanted to. I don’t have the money.”
“You lying little worm.”
“I need therapy.”
“I’ll give you therapy.”
More slaps. Rachel clapped her hands over her ears; she didn’t want to hear any more.
“For starters, I’ll take that poufy hybrid car of yours,” Santa said. “Give me the keys.”
“I don’t have them.”
Barry let out a shriek of pure pain. Rachel rolled the nightstand onto the cot and shoved the bed over to the window.
“What’s that noise?” Santa said.
She jumped onto the mattress, took a big breath and heaved up the nightstand. She crashed it against the large upper pane of the window.
The boom of shattering glass. Pain stung her bare arms and legs like a cloud of bees.
“Bloody hell!” Santa shouted behind the door. “What’s going on? Give me the key!”
“Here, take it!” Barry said.
Rachel threw the grey blanket over the jagged glass sticking up from the bottom of the window frame. She stepped onto the window sill.
The grind of the key in the lock.
She clutched the top of the window frame. Balancing on the sill, she kicked over the bookcase. It crashed face down onto the floor in front of the door.
The door opened, banging uselessly against the fallen bookcase. Santa swore, ramming the door against it again and again. She heard Barry run out of his office.
No choice: she had to jump.
I’m cannonballing into the lake.
She swung her legs through the opening and dropped down into space.
24
The ground had grown treacherous, sharp rocks breaking through the thin soil under a cover of slippery pine needles. Danny picked his way in silence, swatting at the deer flies and mosquitoes that landed on his bare skin whenever he slowed his pace.
“You ever buy white crystal?” Ricky asked behind him.
Not in a million years.
“Well, did you?” he repeated.
“No, only morons get into that stuff.”
“Oh, yeah? I bet you jerks in Red Dog Lake eat hemorrhoid cream just to get high.”
“Right, sure, every day of the week. Why don’t you admit it? You and Anderson and Curtis, all of you were stoking up on white candy. Giving yourselves a fake rush for a fake bear hunt, you bunch of pathetic losers!”
“Look who’s talking.”
“Some narks cross over the line. When did you?”
“I don’t need drugs. The kill is enough.”
“Yeah, right.”
“You’re a local dude buying weed from Santa,” Ricky said, shifting his bow to his other shoulder. “So when did that fat Aussie SOB switch from green to white gold? I know he’s cooking meth at Santa’s Fish Camp. Come on, who’s gonna hear you way out here?
You can tell me.”
“Ask Santa yourself. You’re the cop.”
They had reached a spot where the forest floor sloped up steeply to their right. Danny stopped to get his bearings, feeling the pull of gravity in his calves. Should he climb the hill? If they were lucky, its summit would reach above the trees and he’d have a clear view of their surroundings. Maybe he’d spot the mine.
Or see how fast the forest fire was eating through the bush behind them.
He wiped his face. What if he climbed up and found that the hilltop lay below the treetops after all? He’d have worn himself out for nothing. And lost critical time …
“Hey, heads up,” Ricky handed him the knife with the compass.
He’d offered it willingly, at least that was something. But Danny still couldn’t get the compass to work. “I’m going up,” he said, handing it back.
Ricky grimaced. “After you.”
They hiked up the hill slowly. To Danny’s hopeful eyes, the light filtering through the trees seemed to be getting stronger the higher they got.
He climbed faster, breaking their pace, he couldn’t help it. After twenty minutes, he ran into a sharply rising stretch of broken granite.
He looked up. Hovering high over the trees, he could make out a round patch of silver sky. Too hard to tell, even at this height, if the outcropping reached over the treetops or not.
“I’m going up the rest of the way,” he said. “You coming?”
“Wait,” Ricky tilted his head, listening. “I hear water.”
On the edge of hearing, a slight gurgle. Danny closed his eyes, focusing on the sound, gauging its direction. “There!”
He scrambled over the stones at the base of the fractured granite rise and pushed through a patch of alder bushes. Water was seeping through a crack in the rock, oozing over a muddy fan of pebbles and weeds. No time to worry about dirt or parasites. He knelt down and drank. The water tasted like a slurry of grit.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Ricky said above him. “That’s sewer water.”
Danny kept drinking, absorbing the precious moisture. “We could really use a water bottle,” he said, wiping his mouth.
“I told you. I left it on the island.”
Drink what you can. As much as you can.
Danny tried to keep drinking, but his stomach rebelled. He staggered up, dropped the pack to free his hands and shoulders, and started up the rock face before he could change his mind. He heard Ricky follow him.
Once on the rock his feet kept slipping, he could barely find a grip. Gravity dragged on him, forcing his heart to beat wildly. Far above his head, the treetops waved against the silver sky: clouds or a haze of smoke blotting out the sun?
Halfway up, he became aware of a strange clacking noise. He paused, hands scraped and burning.
“Stop for a minute,” he shouted down to Ricky. “I hear something.”
Below him, Ricky paused and looked up. Danny strained to hear past the American’s gasps for air.
There! The clacking wasn’t random, but rhythmical. What the hell was it? It couldn’t be human. No people out here.
He took a deep breath to ease the thumping of his heart. Odd things happened out in the woods. Once he and his dad had followed a weird noise for miles only to find that it was a broken branch rubbing against a half-fallen tree.
As Danny and Ricky climbed higher the strange sound stayed with them, growing then waning, sometimes vanishing altogether.
A flat smooth area dead ahead. Danny flopped face down onto it, breathing hard. He rested on his belly for a few moments, rolled over and sat up.
He’d reached the top. All around him the forest stretched out in a swelling green sea.
“We did it,” he yelled down to Ricky. “We’re above the treetops.” Only the top of a single, tall pine tree broke his view. It rose twenty feet away from him, directly in front of the outcropping.
Breathing easier now, he saw that he was balanced on a flat, narrow ridge of stone. The side he had climbed was sharp but negotiable. The opposite side, the one he was staring down now, had a much steeper smooth stretch of rock that broke off into a sheer cliff, tumbling down to the forest floor thirty feet below.
He stood up, keeping well back from the dangerous edge, shielding his eyes against the brightness. Far to the west, black smoke shrouded the trees. So the forest fire had hit the mainland. Damn it, why did he have to be right all the time?
He scanned the northeastern woods. Where was the mine? It had to be there.
A flash of light at the point where the trees met the horizon. Could that be sunlight reflecting off a glass window in the abandoned mine building?
“I think I found it!” he shouted to Ricky who was labouring up the last piece of the climb. “Hurry up, I need your binoculars.”
The clacking noise started up again. Now he heard a second sound, a strange cawing, like a deep-throated baby crying, coming from the cliff side of the ridge.
The single pine tree in front of the ridge lurched and swayed. He got back down on his hands and knees and cautiously peered over the edge.
In the tree, about mid-height, he spotted a brown shape. Hard to make out what it was through the thick tree branches.
The shape moved: it was a baby bear.
“Heads up.” Ricky heaved his bulk onto the ridge, face slick with sweat, his vest muddy. He crawled over to the spot next to Danny.
The tree thrashed violently. It sounded close to breaking.
“What the hell is that?” Ricky pointed down at the tree.
“It’s an animal. Ignore it.” The cries burst out again, frantic, fear-stricken. “Give me your binoculars.”
“We don’t need ’em. I know what that is. Fresh meat.” In a fluid motion, Ricky stood up and pulled the crossbow off his back.
“Are you crazy? It’s a bear cub. Leave it alone.”
Ricky slid a steel bolt into the bow.
“I said stop it.”
Ricky lifted the bow and took aim. Danny lunged at him.
The bolt exploded out of the bow and winged over the treetops, wildly off course.
“You little jerk!” Ricky shoved him hard. “That’s a stainless steel bolt you owe me.”
“Stop it! Mama Bear just showed up.”
Down on the forest floor, a dark shape melted out of the trees. At first glance, it looked like a matted black rug slung loosely over a wooden frame that had mysteriously come to life. The mother bear looked nothing like the round, well-fed animals scooping up spawning salmon in wildlife documentaries. Starvation had melted the stores of fat from her body.
The bear swung her head back and forth, sniffing the air, uttering the strange clacking sound Danny had heard on the way up.
“Keep quiet. For God’s sake, don’t move,” he whispered.
“What’s Mama Bear gonna do?” Ricky said at full volume.
“Climb up and eat us for dinner?”
“Yes! Bears can climb anything. And she’s hungry for two.” “Bull crap.”
“She’s trying to rescue her cub out of the tree. If she sees us, she’ll go for us. Get back! Keep out of sight.”
The mother bear rubbed her snout against the trunk of the pine tree, crying to her cub. A branch gave way. The cub let out a shriek and tumbled. A nest of branches broke its fall a few feet down the trunk.
The mother reared up into the tree. More caws and cries. The cub began an ungainly backwards struggle down the tree like a trapped house cat.
“Hey, Ugly Face,” Ricky screamed down at the bear.
“Shut up, you idiot.”
The cub let out a screech, bounced out of the tree and rolled onto the ground. The mother nuzzled it, coaxing it up onto its feet.
Ricky slid a fresh bolt into his bow. “Heads up, Mama Bear. Yeah, you too, Monster Baby. The nice hunter’s brought you a big surprise.”
The mother bear huffed at the air, instantly alert. She gazed up at the ridge.
Oh, hell, Danny thought.
His first instinct was to scramble back down the side they’d just climbed up and run for it, but that wouldn’t help. Black bears could cover ground at thirty miles an hour. If he and Ricky managed to escape into the woods, the thickly growing trees had bare, thin trunks with no low branches they could use for climbing. And even if by some miracle they were able to get up a tree, black bears had powerful claws. And they were expert climbers.
The mother bear padded over to the cliff, rolling effortlessly over the rocks, the cub behind her. She reared up onto her hind legs, looking for a way up.
Ricky raised the bow. “I call this a two-fer. Two for one.”
“Put that bow down.”
“Pray I get her first strike or she’ll be chewing your skinny butt for dinner.” Ricky narrowed his small blue eyes, aiming. “Oh, sweet baby, Daddy’s gonna bring you down.”
Danny smashed his fist into Ricky’s meaty cheek with everything he had.
Ricky staggered back. Spun with startling swiftness. And crashed the bow down on Danny’s shoulder.
Pain shot through his arm. He fell and hit the stone platform. Momentum hurtled him out and over the ridge.
He threw out his arms, clutching madly at the rock face to break his slide. Gravity sucked him down, scraping him over weeds, gravel and stone. He dug in his heels, twisted and rolled.
Miraculously he stopped moving.
Pain screamed from his torn and bloody hands. He had landed sideways across the rise, wedged between a boulder and the granite face. Looking up, he could make out the outline of the ridge about fifteen feet above him.
He flexed his arms and legs; nothing seemed to be broken.
An unearthly roar rattled through the woods. The mother bear.
Gotta get back up there.
He dragged himself out of the niche behind the boulder and started crawling back up, ignoring the pain from a dozen scratches.
The bear roared again, a bellow of rage.
Pasha was dead. Two more animals were about to die because of Ricky’s grotesque sense of entitlement, his aggressive, egotistical greed.
White-hot fury spurred him up the last few feet.
But when he reached the ridge, the stone platform was empty. No Ricky, no crossbow. He dropped down on all fours and bellied across the ridge to look down the opposite side.
Ricky was clinging spread-eagled to the steeply pitched stretch of rock that broke off into the cliff.
And below him the mother bear was closing in, showing her cub how to hunt.
25
“Ricky!” Danny shouted. “Are you OK?”
“No.” Ricky winced, let out a cough. A thin worm of blood tracked down from his nose. “Guess you’re gonna let me slide over.”
“Hang on, I’ll pull you back up.”
“Forget it.”
Danny crouched down. “Heads up, where are you hurt? Can you move?”
“Yeah, but …” Ricky licked his lips. “Gotta a thing … gotta a thing about heights.”
Danny lay flat and leaned down over the steep rock face, bracing his weight on his hands, trying to get a closer look at where Ricky had landed.
From what he could see, nothing but friction was holding Ricky up. Ricky had travelled down the smoothly sloping rock to a spot where his boots rested six inches from the sharp cliff edge. If he slipped any further, he’d tumble thirty feet straight down into the bear’s waiting jaws. As if on cue, she let out a cry that rattled through the trees.
The noise shattered Ricky out of his daze. His hands twitched on the rock. “Where is she? Is she coming up?”
The bear stood on the forest floor directly beneath him. She stretched her neck, sniffing and huffing at the air, working out the best way to reach the protein hanging so tantalizing overhead. The cub mimicked her motions, barking like an oversized dog.
“She’s just wandering around and crap,” Danny said. No point in panicking Ricky further.
“Guess you’ll laugh when she spreads my guts out over the forest,” Ricky said.
“Shut up. What’s holding you up? I can’t see from here.”
“A big piece of rock jammed up my butt.”
“You’ll have to do better than that. Help me out here.”
Sweat soaked Ricky’s cropped hair. He squinted as though he were seeking a ship on the horizon. “OK, my right knee is wedged in a crack or something,” he said.
Danny levered his body back to the safety of the ridge. He rubbed his face, trying to think. “Have you got a rope in that big vest of yours?”
“No, uh-uh. Nothing.”
“OK, give me a minute.”
He’d have to climb back down to the forest floor and cut a thick branch long enough to reach Ricky. The bat-winged skinning knife would work perfectly, but it was out on the cliff with him.
“I’m sliding, man,” Ricky called up. “If you’re gonna help, now would be a good time.”
Near the far end of the ridge, Danny spotted a crest of stone rising up from the edge. Ricky had at least fifty pounds on him, but if he could wrap his arm around that piece of rock and brace himself, he might be able to counterbalance the excess weight.
Quickly he tore off his runners and stripped down to his skivvies. He knotted one leg of his jeans firmly around his right forearm, got down on his stomach and curled his left arm around the rise of stone. He flung the free leg of his jeans down over the steeply sloping stone to reach Ricky. The frayed cuff brushed the top of the American’s left hand.
“Grab onto my jeans. Use them like a rope,” Danny shouted down. “I’ll try to pull you up.”
