“Give me a hand! I can’t hold on,” Rivera said. Ben dropped to his stomach and reached downward, grasping the other man’s left hand. He gritted his teeth, summoning all his strength, and began to pull.
The edge of the fissure wasn’t solid rock, and as Ben pulled Rivera upward, the sides of the cliff eroded and fell away. Ben struggled with the angle for a half minute, then stopped.
“Give me your other arm,” Ben shouted down to Rivera, “and try to hang on to this stump as I get you high enough over the edge.”
The young man’s eyes burned with a fear so intense Ben couldn’t look at them. He focused on the job, working to pull the man up and onto flat ground. Rivera’s arms began to shake, and Ben willed himself to pull harder, grasping at a strength he wasn’t sure was there.
Just then, an aftershock trembled through the woods. Ben lost his grip for a moment, but found that Rivera had indeed held onto the root. He reset his position on the ground, using his tall frame as leverage to pull up the other man.
As he reached out to him once again, the tree root broke loose and snapped away from the dirt. Rivera looked up into Ben’s face as he realized in that instant what had happened.
The tree root fell, and Rivera with it. Ben lunged downward, reacting to the freak accident, but it wasn’t enough. He missed Rivera’s collar by inches, and his hand slammed back into the wall of the cliff.
Rivera fell out of sight within seconds, and Ben called down to him. There was no answer. He lay on the edge of the cleft, stunned, for a full minute before rising and walking back to the truck.
Chapter Six
“What do you mean, crack?”
Ben paused, then looked up from the couch. “Crack. Fissure. A hole in the earth.”
“Carlos Rivera fell into a hole in the earth?”
Ben nodded. The officer sighed, then turned to a partner. The second officer stepped forward, resuming the line of questioning. “And you said you two were moving — relocating — a ‘nuisance’ bear?”
Ben’s boss, George Randolph, jumped in from the opposite side of the room. “A nuisance bear is a bear that’s caused no harm or considerable damage and just needs to be relocated to a more remote area. Mo, the grizzly, has three strikes against him now, but we were trying to get him far enough away that he’ll stay put.”
The officers wrote everything down, muttering amongst themselves. Ben sat motionless on the lounge couch, the only remotely comfortable place in the entire room. The lights above the gathered local officers, park rangers, and staff burned down on him like the sterile lighting in a hospital wing. Ben felt trapped, out of place, and anxious.
All the staff on duty during the explosion had been summoned to this staff building to “debrief,” as the local police called it. A SWAT team was on its way, due to arrive any moment. Ben also saw a few men and women milling about whom he didn’t recognize, talking quietly to individual members of the Yellowstone team about the morning’s events.
Government, he thought. One of the women walked toward him. Slim, fit, and wearing a tight suit that matched her demeanor, she seemed tightly wound and looked like the kind of person who took herself too seriously.
When the woman didn’t deviate from her course, Ben almost groaned aloud.
The words left her mouth before she’d even stopped moving. “May I ask you a few questions?”
Ben didn’t respond. He glanced at her quickly, top to bottom, and aimed his eyes at the only window on this side of the building.
“Mr. Bennett, correct? Harvey Bennett?” she asked.
Again, he didn’t answer.
“People usually call you Ben, though, right?”
He frowned.
“Mr. Bennett, you’re a ranger here at Yellowstone? You’ve worked here for thirteen years, correct? First as an intern of sorts, then of course moving into your current role.” Ben knew she was no longer asking questions, but merely verifying the information some subordinate had given her. “You were nineteen, moved your life up here, and now live in a trailer just outside the park’s perimeter. May I ask what you were running away from?”
Ben clenched his jaw and continued to stare out the window.
“Later, then. What about Rivera? Mr. Carlos Rivera, twenty-three years old, from Albuquerque, New Mexico. How long had you worked with him?” The woman’s emphasis on the word “had” was not lost on Ben.
“Are you going to ask any questions you don’t already know the answer to?” he shot back.
The woman hesitated, then nodded once. “Fair enough. Mr. Bennett, can you talk about what you saw up there this morning? The explosion?”
Ben thought for a moment. “Looked like a bomb. Mushroom cloud and everything.”
“Right. And what reaction did you and Mr. Rivera have when you noticed it?”
“We didn’t have time to react to it — there was an earthquake, and then…” Ben didn’t finish the thought, but the woman in front of him didn’t push it. “Who are you?” he asked.
“I’m with the Centers for Disease Control, BTR Division, local out of Billings, Montana.”
Ben stood up from the couch. “Listen, uh, CDC… BTR… whatever, lady,” he said as he walked past her. “I’ve answered questions now for almost an hour. If you want more information, just read the reports.” He walked through the gathering of people, heading for the door. He pushed it open and stepped down onto the patio, not looking back.
As he left the patio, he heard the outer screen door slam closed, then creak back open again. He sighed as footsteps quickly pounded over the patio and down the steps. Within seconds, the woman was next to him. He didn’t slow down.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Bennett, I know you’ve had a rough morning, but —”
“A rough morning?” Ben stopped and wheeled around to face her. “A rough morning is what Rivera’s family is having. A rough morning is what the families of the — what, one hundred or so — people who were killed in that explosion are having. I’m just trying to have a morning, but it’s apparently not going to be possible.”
“I–I know, Mr. Bennett, I just —”
“Stop calling me that.”
“Okay, Ben, I just need to ask you some —”
“Right, I get it. You and everyone else need to ask a bunch of questions, hoping that someone here knows something different than what you’ve already figured out. A bomb went off and a lot of people died. It caused an earthquake, opening a fissure in the ground that Rivera fell into. What else do you need from me?”
The woman stopped, letting Ben gain distance from her, and spoke to the back of his head. “I just want to know exactly what happened.”
Ben sucked in a deep breath and turned to face her. “I tried to save him, okay? I had his arm, and he fell. What? You think I’m a suspect in a murder investigation or something?”
She paused, then lowered her voice. “No, I don’t, Ben. But my boss isn’t the kind of man who will just let things be. He’s going to ask some questions — some very specific questions — and I need to be able to answer them to his satisfaction. I just want to get back to Montana, back home.”
Ben kicked at a stone at his feet, then met the woman’s eyes again. “Where exactly is home?”
“Outside Billings, small town called Lockwood.”
He thought for a moment. “You do me a favor, uh —”
“Julie. Juliette Richardson.”
“Right. Can you do me a favor, Julie?”
She waited.
“Can you make sure I don’t have to talk to anyone else about this mess? I’ll tell you what I know; what happened, and that’s all I can do. But I don’t want to screw around with the other government types like you or anyone else. Fair?”