“Very good,” he said. “Pepper spray. Very good. But Mrs. Serbin? As proud as I am of you for the effort, you’re pointing it the wrong way.”
The muzzle of the spray canister was facing away from him, back toward Allison herself.
She spoke to him through a mouthful of blood. “No, I’m not.”
She closed her eyes then and depressed the trigger, aimed not at his face but at the open door of the woodstove just behind her head, and the living room seemed to explode. A cloud of fire rolled out of the stove and over her and the flames caught her jacket and hair and then found her flesh.
She willed herself to keep holding the trigger down. Keep spraying. Keep feeding it. Knowing even in the agony the thing that she had known from the start: the pepper spray was not weapon enough to fight these men.
Fire might be.
The flames rolled across the living room and drove them away from her, pushed them back toward the front door. The canister exploded in her hand then, and new needles pressed into her nerves. The shotgun was just to her left, still leaning against the couch, still loaded. She rolled to it and when she grabbed the metal barrel, it seared her palm, but she was hardly aware of the pain. Her right hand didn’t respond the way she wanted it to, didn’t seem to respond at all, so she braced the butt of the gun against her stomach and dropped her left hand to the trigger. The flames rose in a wall before her but she could see twin shadows on the other side of it. The cabin was bathed in scarlet light. She pulled the heavy trigger back with two fingers of her left hand.
The shotgun bucked wildly and she dropped it, which was bad because she had wanted both shots, but she was on fire now and that thing that she had treasured-time-was no more.
Roll, she thought. Roll, roll, roll.
Common sense. A child’s knowledge. If your clothes were on fire, you rolled to put them out.
But what did you do when everywhere around you was more fire?
She had no answer for that, and so she continued to roll, out of the scarlet and into the black.
They stood in the yard and watched the cabin burn.
“You’re bleeding pretty well.”
Jack looked at his side. Against the black shirt, the blood was hard to see; it was just added shine. He removed the shirt. A scattering of birdshot. Small-gauge shotgun, smaller load.
“It’ll stop.”
“I’ll go back for her.” Patrick lifted his pistol and gestured at the cabin. “Don’t know if I hit her or not. I was walking backward, she was rolling. I’ll go finish it.”
“I think she finished it herself. And if she didn’t? Well, we’ll come for her again. Not now. Time to ride.”
“I’d like to know it’s done.”
“I’d like to be gone when they answer that distress call. Somebody will. And you know how I feel about this highway.”
“I do.” Patrick was staring into the burning house.
“You’re displeased, brother. I understand. But I’m shot. Let’s head out.”
They walked together into the darkness and away from the orange light. The truck was a half a mile away and they covered the ground swiftly, not speaking. Jack’s breath came heavy and uneven but he did not slow his pace. When they reached the truck, he handed the keys to his brother.
“Right or left?” Patrick asked.
“We go right, we have to go through the gates into Yellowstone. It’s the only way.”
“Yes.”
“I’d expect there are more police in the park. More places to close the highway too.”
“Left is longer. All those switchbacks. Even driving fast, we’re on the road for a good while.”
Jack nodded. “As I said, I don’t care for this highway. We’ve found ourselves in the only part of the country that has just one damned road.”
“Call it, and call it fast.”
“Left.”
Patrick gunned the motor to life and turned on the lights and swung out of the gravel and back onto the asphalt. On the hill above them, the firelight flickered through the pines.
“Havoc,” Jack said. “We are leaving havoc in our wake. Could be trouble.”
“We’ve never left one standing before. Not like this.”
“I doubt she’s standing.”
“We don’t know. We need to be sure.”
“She set herself on fire, and the fire is still burning.”
“Regardless, they may know we’re coming now. Serbin and the boy.”
“They may.”
“We could leave. Call it off,” Patrick said.
“You’d consider that?”
Silence filled the cab and rode with them for a time.
“Yes,” Jack said at length. “That was my feeling on it as well.”
“We came a long way for him.”
“We did. And we came in good health. Now I’m burned and bleeding. That leaves me even less inclined to call it off. Leaves me, in fact, completely unwilling to do so.”
“Understood.”
“This will bring him down, you know. Out of the mountains. He’ll have to come back for her, and he will have to bring the boy with him.”
“Yes. And the boy will vanish again quickly. They’ll move him fast.”
“It would seem we should be there, then.”
“It certainly would.”
Part Two: Point Last Seen
14
The message came for him in the dead hours. Predawn, when the night sounds had dulled but the gray light of day hadn’t yet broken.
He knew the GPS chime was bad before he opened his eyes. Middle-of-the-night phone calls scared you with possibilities. Middle-of-the-night distress calls didn’t even tease you with possibilities; they promised you the truth.
He sat up, bumping against the plastic and showering himself with drops of the condensation that had gathered on it overnight, and fumbled in his pack for the GPS.
It told him no details. Just that Allison had issued a distress call. When the SOS went out, it was shared with Ethan’s device as well as with the emergency responders. There were two ways to call for help on the GPS-send a message with some details, or send one with none. The whole point of the advanced unit was that it let you add those details.
Allison hadn’t.
He sat there looking at the GPS and tried not to imagine the scenarios in which this could happen. His breathing was slow and steady and he was on the ground, still half wrapped in his sleeping bag, and yet it felt as if he were no longer connected to the earth, as if he were drifting away from it fast, as he stared at the glowing screen that told him his wife was calling for help.
From their home.
“No,” he told the device reasonably. “No.”
The device didn’t change its mind. The screen went black in his hand and he was alone in the darkness. Through the milky-white plastic, the night woods looked like something from another world. He pushed the plastic back and rose from his shelter and stood in the cold air and tried to think of what could be done. If he ran all out and left the boys behind, he could reach town in perhaps four hours. Perhaps.
He clicked the GPS messenger back on. Sent a one-word text.
ALLISON?
There was no response.
Her message would have gone to the International Emergency Response Coordination Center. An underground bunker in Texas, just north of Houston. Staffed every minute of every day, operating on an independent and backed-up electrical grid. Painstakingly designed never to fail a call.
He sent the next message to them.
RECEIVED DISTRESS SIGNAL. WHAT IS RESPONSE STATUS?
Above him in a beautiful night sky an unseen satellite inhaled his Montana message and exhaled it toward Texas. The satellite would check for a response in sixty seconds.