Then Jack advanced toward Allison, and Ethan kept those black knees in the center of the crosshairs and let his index finger graze the trigger and pull it home and the world exploded on him.
Now, scope to his eye again, he had the world back, if in a bloody haze, and he could see his wife and the boy and…he could see Jack Blackwell.
Jack Blackwell was down.
Ethan started to laugh, and then he realized it sounded more like sobbing, and he tried to stop but couldn’t.
Got him, got him, got him. Got them.
But beyond the survivors was a rising scarlet cloud. The fire was pushing hard and fast. They needed to move.
For a few seconds, no one made a sound. Then Jamie Bennett let out a low moan and fell to her knees and stretched her hands out to her brother as if she could put the pieces back together. She dropped her gun when she reached for him and Allison had the slow, stupid thought Someone should get that, but she didn’t move. Jace was still sitting on the ground, and though he’d registered that Jack Blackwell was dead, he seemed catatonic. His focus on the woman Jack had shot was total. He was whispering to her, and Allison couldn’t hear the words. The woman had her eyes closed and was breathing through her teeth.
“Who shot him?” Jamie Bennett said. “Who took that shot?”
There was no one in sight. The mountain was empty.
Jack Blackwell was gone, but the fire was not, and the sound of it was louder now, a roar beneath the black smoke that boiled out of the tree-lined ridge below them. The heat was intensifying every minute. Jamie Bennett got to her feet and looked at Allison and then the other woman.
“It wasn’t supposed to go this way,” she said. “This one was supposed to be easy.”
Nobody answered. She began to walk away with a weaving, unsteady stride. She almost went down once, caught a tree, held herself up. Nobody moved or spoke or attempted to stop her. The kill shot from nowhere had stunned them all. Jamie steadied herself and continued walking toward Tango. The horse turned to meet her.
Allison finally moved, crawled over the ground for the two guns that lay there in the blood, got her hand around the pistol, and then looked back at Jamie when Tango let out a whinny. Jamie was trying to mount him. It took her three tries but she got into the saddle, and then she began to kick him. Trying to drive him downhill.
He was already uneasy from the fire; the only reason he was still there at all was Allison, and he did not want to carry another rider. Now he was trying to rid himself of Jamie Bennett; it was as if he understood what Allison had not been able to. Jamie stayed on the horse maybe fifty yards before he succeeded in throwing her. She landed in the rocks and her leg snapped beneath her and when she tried to rise, she let out a cry. The horse hesitated, as if he felt guilty despite himself-Tango was nothing if not a good horse-but then he began to gallop, into the trees and out of sight.
Jamie Bennett tried again to rise, and this time her scream was louder and she went down faster and then she was silent and they couldn’t see her anymore and it was just the three of them left there as Jack Blackwell’s blood poured down the slope and dripped toward the fire.
Allison looked at what remained of his skull and then up into the mountains and said, “Ethan is alive.”
42
There were ghosts on the mountain now.
Hannah could see her old crew, all of them, but it was better this time, better than it had been. There were no screams and no one was running, and even Brandon was on his feet again-he hadn’t given up, was standing tall and strong.
And watching her.
They all were.
Nick came down close and looked at her patiently and said, “Hannah? Deploy or die.”
He’d screamed it the last time she’d heard the command, but this morning he was calm. They all were. It reassured her. They were the best, after all. Hotshots. If they were not panicking, then she shouldn’t. They were the best.
Nick said it again, his blue eyes earnest, imploring: “Hannah? Hannah?”
He left her then, and the spoken name remained, but the voice was different and the face was different. The boy. Hannah looked at him and thought, Thank you, God, he made it across the creek. I didn’t think that he would. I didn’t think he had a chance.
“Hannah?”
Wrong boy. Wrong mountain, wrong day. Hannah blinked and looked into a tear-streaked face and said, “Yeah.” It came out as a croak and she wet her lips and tried again and this time it was easier. “Yes, Connor. I’m fine.”
“Tell me what to do,” he said. “I’ve got the first-aid kit, but it’s so bad, and I don’t know what to use, I don’t know what to do, you’ve got to tell me what to-”
“Stop,” Hannah said.
He stopped talking, waited on her. Hannah blinked and breathed and now she saw the woman behind him, and for an instant she was afraid, because the woman held a gun. Her eyes held no harm, though. The woman’s face was wrapped in bandages and she looked down at Hannah and said, “We’ll get it fixed. It’s not going to kill you.”
“Of course not,” Hannah said. She didn’t look where the other two were looking, though, at the places where it felt as if her legs were on fire. That was a trauma basic-let somebody else look. You didn’t need to see it yourself.
So everything was good, then. Everything was fine.
No.
Nick’s voice, maybe. Brandon’s? She couldn’t tell. It was so faint.
Look.
Who was talking? And whoever was talking was wrong, she wasn’t supposed to look, it wasn’t going to help a damn thing. She wished she could hear him better, the voice was too soft and the sound of the fire was a roar now, advancing through the timber, and-
Oh. That was it. Yes, that was it.
“I need to look at the fire,” she said. “Help me.”
“No,” the woman said. “Lie still. Let me see what I can-”
“Let me see the fire.”
They helped her while she turned. The pain turned with her-it wasn’t about to let her sneak away. She got her first glimpse of her wounds without intending to, managed to keep her eyes away from her knee, where the pain was worst and the bleeding heaviest, but she saw her left foot, the beautiful White’s fire boot now with a jagged hole in the black leather, blood bubbling through it. A surge of nausea rose but she looked away and fixed her eyes on the flames, and while the pain didn’t step aside, the sickness did.
The fire was near the edge of the timberline now, and then it was open grass, and then it was them. The route Hannah had wanted to take originally, backtracking into the high rocks, was no longer an option. They’d been delayed long enough to allow the fire to find the drainages, and it was moving through them fast.
If you died in a fire, you died at two speeds, Nick had told Hannah more than once. One was measured with a clock, and the other with a stopwatch. Your death began in the poor decisions you’d made that led you to the place you did not belong, and your death ended in the poor decisions you made trying to escape it. They were on the stopwatch now, and she knew it was running fast.
Time, time is our friend, because for us, there is no end…
“Hannah?”
She was aware then that Connor had been saying her name over and over, and she blinked hard and refocused and said, “I’m fine. I’m just thinking.”
“We go back, right?” Connor said. “Isn’t that what you said we should do? I can carry you. We can carry-”
“We’re not going to get high enough, fast enough.”
“We’ll run,” he said.
“It will run faster.”