“Yes.”
“Me too.”
They’d left the fire tower a few short hours earlier, walking with a plan. This time when they started out, they were crawling. As the storm faded and dawn came to replace it, they moved out of their old world and into a new one, as if the lightning had bridged the divide and taken them over to another land. It was all gray, this world, from both the light offered by a sun still trapped behind the mountains and the smoke rising to meet it. Once they made it out of the drainage, they found a flattened stretch of land, and it was Connor who realized its significance first.
“This is the trail,” he said. “This is the Republic Pass trail.”
So it was. Four miles to go. Roughly the same distance they’d covered since leaving the tower, and yet it would-or should-feel like a tenth of that. They’d be walking downhill on a trail now, not fighting over the peaks and into a storm.
“Almost home,” Hannah said, “and nobody’s behind us yet.”
36
When the lightning began to strike the peaks, even the Blackwell brothers knew it was time to pull back.
“Just for a bit now,” Jack said in a soothing singsong, as if urging a sick child to rest. “Just a few minutes is all.”
They knelt below a shelf of rock carved out by an ocean some thousands of years before, and for the first time, they were all within arm’s reach of one another.
Survivor mentality: appreciate the opportunities the environment gives you.
But what were those grand opportunities? Ethan could grapple with one brother in the dark and wait for the other to kill him.
The mountain trembled with thunder, and the wilderness was illuminated again and again in a rolling strobe of light. A few hundred yards away, one of the lightning bolts connected with a jack pine; it went up in a glitter and then part of it fell to the ground and continued a slow burn, half of it standing, half of it down on the mountain. Wildfire season. This was how most of them would begin. Dry, angry fronts like these. Isolated strikes in desolate lands.
“Seems to be passing,” Patrick said.
“The worst of it is over, at least,” his brother said. “A bit more lies behind.”
“Enough that we should waste the time?”
“At some point there’s a measure of risk to be assumed. You think we’ve reached that point?”
“We’re close to him. It’s still dark. I’d hate to waste those things. Too much has been going on behind us since morning. When they come for him tomorrow, they’ll come big.”
“Let’s finish it, then.”
Ethan watched them slide out from under the rock shelf and then separate, as was their way, and whatever chance he might have had was gone. He didn’t move right away. He stayed crouched beneath the rocks and watched the lightning and smelled the smoke and thought of how close they were to the boy now.
“Ethan?” Jack Blackwell called, congenial. “I hate to press you, but we’re on a bit of a deadline here.”
He slid out from under the rocks. Thunder cracked again but it lacked its earlier bass menace as the storm drifted eastward. The lightning flashes were still there, sporadic but still there, and not a single drop of rain had fallen.
“That’s the peak you wanted,” Patrick Blackwell said, indicating Republic as it lit up in another flash. “Correct?”
“Yeah. But there’s no point going up there now.”
“I thought you were certain that was their destination. The trail seems to agree.”
“They’d have gotten off the peaks when the lightning started.”
“If I might interrupt,” Jack said, “I seem to recall Ethan’s notion about the visibility afforded up there. The idea that we might be able to see anyone in the vicinity.”
“He did have that notion, you’re correct, Jack.”
“Worth the climb, then, I’d imagine.”
Ethan didn’t know where Connor and the woman from the lookout were, but he was certain they would be within visible range of an observer at the top of Republic Peak. Would fall within the crosshairs of the scope on Patrick’s rifle.
Ethan thought again of his father, and for the first time he had an answer to the man’s question. How will I know that it works? Connor Reynolds can tell them. When he walks out of these mountains alive, he can tell them that it works.
“You climb first,” he said to Patrick, nodding at the steep wall of rock that now lay in shadows, knowing what the response would be.
“No, no. We’ve entrusted you with leadership. You go on and climb. Don’t worry, Ethan. We’ll be right behind you.”
Where Republic Peak turned from a steep walk into a true climb, Patrick Blackwell slung his rifle over his shoulder and stayed close to Ethan, and Jack fell back. They did it without discussion but Ethan understood it, and of course it was the right move, they never seemed to make anything but the right move. On the rocks a rifle shot would be awkward and difficult, while the pistol, requiring just one free hand, was much more functional.
Ethan watched it take place and saw it for what it was: his last chance extinguished. Any hope of killing them both, always minuscule, was now nonexistent. He could take one, though. When Ethan died, he wouldn’t die lonely.
The brothers were silent for once, focused on the climb, reaching for hand- and footholds in the shadows. Hand and foot, rock to rock, on toward the sky.
To the east there was a thin band of pink, and the black sky of the storm had lightened to a pale gray that allowed them to see just well enough; the rocks were still dark, but their shapes were clear. The forested hills fell away behind them and they climbed to meet that lead-colored sky, more than two vertical miles in the air now. It was a climb Ethan had made many times and always enjoyed and he wished that it would go slower, because it was his last climb and it seemed he should be allowed time to think. There were prayers and wishes and whispers required, but they were moving too fast and he couldn’t sort them out, couldn’t even land on an image of his wife; everything was simply another rock with his hand closing over it and the summit getting nearer and with it the end.
That was fine, then. It would end with a hand on a rock anyhow, so focus on that, he decided, think of nothing else: hand on rock, rock on skull-all he had left to achieve. He was hoping that his own rock was still on top of the summit pile, the last one he’d held, the one he’d been imagining for so long on this hike, when Patrick Blackwell swung away to the left and scrambled past him.
The sudden speed came without a word or a warning. All along Patrick had been content to remain just below, hovering near Ethan’s feet, following his path, and then as the summit neared, he’d moved away and onto a more difficult path but he moved faster, and now he was in the lead and Ethan was between them both and Patrick was not looking back, but moving faster still, as if he were in a race over the face of the rocks, like so many of the boys Ethan had watched, each determined to be the first one to the summit.
No, Ethan thought, no, damn you, I had to get there first, you were doing just what you should have been doing, you were staying just in the right place…
He tried to match him then, tried to catch him and pass him, and below him, Jack Blackwell saw it and called, “Patrick.” That was it, just his name.
Patrick Blackwell glanced back at Ethan and said, “What’s your hurry?” as he pulled himself up onto a ledge below the summit and slung the rifle free.
Ethan stopped with the barrel a foot from his face, Patrick’s hand casual on the trigger, his back braced against the rock, where he would have no trouble shooting. Below them, Jack had stopped moving.