I wish they were dead, he thought as the first hot tear leaked from the corner of his eye. I wish they’d been with the one I saw in the water, I wish they were dead.
And they wished he was.
The reality of that was still hard for him to process. He understood it, always had-he was a witness and therefore he was a threat-but the idea of someone wanting to kill him was so bizarre that at times it didn’t seem real. They wish me dead. They honestly wish me dead.
He was beginning to cry harder now and slowed his pace so that the others would not hear him. It was hard walking here even in the daylight, and in the darkness the narrow beam of the headlamp required all of your attention, so nobody saw him fall back.
He reached up and wiped the tears away from his eyes with his right hand and watched the group pull away from him and thought of the men who would be waiting somewhere in the darkness, and then he made his decision: he needed to be alone when they found him.
He’d hated some of the boys at the start. But as he looked at them walking ahead now, he felt sad for them, felt like he needed to apologize, catch up to them and shout that this was his fault and they needed to let him go off on his own because he was the one they wanted, the only one, and once they had him, they would leave the others alone.
Ethan wouldn’t accept that, though. Jace knew that, despite the anger he’d heard in the man’s voice. He would say a lot of silly things to Jace if he heard the truth, and Ethan would believe them all. Survivor mentality, all of that. He would talk of plans and backup plans and escape routes and fail-safes, and he would think that one of these would work, somehow.
That was because Ethan had never seen them or heard them.
Jace stopped wiping at his tears and lifted his hand to his forehead and clicked off the headlamp. He thought that the vanishing beam of light might stop them, that someone might notice the darkness had grown a little deeper. Instead, they carried on along the trail as if his light had never been a part of theirs at all.
Jace sat down on the trail as the lights pulled away from him and he waited for what would come out of the darkness.
They walked down the mountain in silence except for the sounds of hard breathing as the boys fought to match Ethan’s pace. He wanted to break from them and run. Once glaciers had carved the mountain on which he stood, and he understood now how time had felt in that world.
“We good?” he said a few times. “Everybody good?”
They muttered and mumbled and continued to struggle along the trail. He knew he needed to stop and give them a break but the idea of standing still was too terrible.
If they could reach the Pilot Creek trail, there was the chance that ATVs could be brought up to help them. The trail was closed to motorized vehicles but maybe the police would make an exception. Maybe not, though. You had to protect your wilderness. Those who entered it were supposed to be aware of the risks.
They’d gone just over a mile when the GPS chimed again. The boys stopped without being told. Watched him and waited. He saw a few stepping back, probably remembering the outburst that had woken them. Fearing him. He freed the GPS from the carabiner that held it to his pack and read the message.
POLICE EN ROUTE TO PILOT CREEK TRAILHEAD. ONE SURVIVOR FOUND. MEDICAL CARE ADMINISTERED ON SCENE, AMBULANCE EN ROUTE.
Ethan said one word to the boys: “Alive.” He meant to explain it in more detail, but he could not. They seemed to understand. He typed a response.
WE ARE ALSO EN ROUTE. SURVIVOR STABLE?
He could have called her his wife. Could have called her by name. There was no need for the formal protocol, but it felt safer, as if it removed him from reality just enough to allow him to walk around the edges, aware of it but never looking it in the eye.
The message disappeared and he had to wait for an answer. He looked up at the boys, blinked at them. Headlamps glaring at him like a circle of interrogators.
“I’m sorry, guys. This is…this is the real deal. What we’re doing here. Middle of the night, walking in the dark, an emergency. A leader who is…who is struggling. You’re doing great. You’re doing great. Survivors, each and every one of you. None of the dying kind here.”
A chime.
SURVIVOR STABLE. TRANSPORTED TO BILLINGS HOSPITAL. UNDERSTAND ADDITIONAL POLICE ARE ALSO ON SCENE.
They were still confused in Houston, but at least they knew a little. Maybe more than he did. Enough to understand it was not an electrical fire or a gas leak. Now they were the ones hinting around the edges of reality. Not sure what they could tell him. It occurred to him then, for the first time, that he was next in line. An obvious thought that had simply not mattered until he knew Allison was alive. All of this violence at his home had its reason. The reason traveled with him.
“We’re going to walk down and meet the police,” he said. He was looking around at all those white beams. Counting them. Two, four, six. He blinked and counted again. Two, four, six. His own made seven.
“Everyone turn your light on, please.”
The beams turned and looked at one another. No additional light went on.
“Names,” he said. “Guys? I can’t see you all in the dark.”
Marco, Raymond, Drew, Jeff, Ty, Bryce.
“Where is Connor?” Ethan said.
Only the night wind answered, whistling through the pines.
“When was the last time anyone saw Connor?”
A beat of silence, and then Bryce said, “He was packing up right next to me, and he was walking in the back. I didn’t hear him say a word. He was right there. Right with me.”
Well, Ethan thought, that answers that.
The killers had come for Connor, and Connor was gone.
16
The dream that night was as it always was, a dance between vivid memory and something spectral and mythic. Around Hannah there was only the smoke at first, and somewhere inside it the hiss of distant hoses, like snakes, and then the smoke parted and there was the canyon that separated her from the children. In reality it hadn’t been so deep, maybe fifty feet below the ridge on which she’d been standing, but in the dream, the ridge always took on the feel of a balance beam and the canyon stretched on endlessly beneath it, a bottomless pool of black. As she crossed the ridge, the hissing of the water rose, the snakes becoming creatures that could roar, and then inside the smoke were ripples of red and orange heat, and still she walked, crossing that expanse of blackness.
When she saw the children in the dream, they were silent, and somehow that was worse. In reality they’d been screaming, they had shrieked for her help, and it had been terrible; at the time she could not have imagined anything worse. Then came the first dream, their silent eyes on her through the smoke and the flames, and that was a far more powerful pain, always. Scream for me, she wanted to tell them, scream as though you believe I will get there.
But in the dream they already knew she would not.
The dream children vanished, lost to blackness filled with hundreds of minuscule red dots, tiny embers that floated toward her on a blanket of heat. She woke at the same point she always woke-when the heat seemed to become real. It built in the back of her mind, came on and on, and then suddenly the whisper was a scream and she knew that it was too hot, that she was going to die, that the flesh was actually beginning to melt from her, peel away in long charred strips from her bones.
She gave voice to the screams that the children could not and then she was awake. The heat was gone, those blazing lead blankets whipped away, and she was aware of how cold it was in the cab of the tower. Her breath fogged as she took rapid, hysterical gasps, stumbling to her feet. She always had to move, had to run, that was the first instinct. If you could run, run.