Those Who Wish Me Dead Page 5

  He laughed at her then, something that he would recall over and over in the days to come, the serious weight of her warning and how melodramatic it had sounded to him there in the darkened bedroom with her body pressed to his and the cabin full of warmth and wood smoke.

  “You’ve been back to the folklore books?” he said. They were a favorite of hers, and she’d spoken countless times of her envy of those with the gift of premonitions, which was always a source of amusement to him, both that she believed in it and that she desired it. “What do you see, baby? Shade of the moon, shadow of a spider, the way the cat holds his tail?”

  “No,” she said. Her voice soft. “Nothing like that. But I feel it, all the same.”

  “I haven’t gotten killed in these mountains yet,” he said. “And it won’t happen this year.”

  She was silent.

  “Baby?” he said. “It…won’t…happen.”

  “All right,” she said. “All right.” But her tone was still heavy and somber. He touched the side of her face gently and she kissed his palm and said it a third time. “All right, Ethan.”

  He meant to ask her more then, because she was so serious. Not that she would have had answers for a feeling that rose from someplace inexplicable or primal or, hell, maybe mystical, for all he knew. She slid her hands down his chest and over his stomach and found him, though, and then any questions that were on his lips faded, first within her cool palm and then within her warmth, and later she was asleep on his chest and he didn’t want to disturb her, but he had to be out at the fire to meet the boys, so he slipped out quietly.

  They did not speak of her unease again before he entered the mountains.

  6

  Jace Wilson was dead.

  He’d perished in a quarry, and Connor Reynolds needed to keep that in mind. The hardest part of the new name wasn’t remembering to identify himself by it; it was reacting when other people called him by it.

  “Connor? Yo? Connor? You, like, coherent, dude?”

  They were on the first trail day when the loud kid, Marco, started talking to him, and Jace was focused on the countryside around them, in awe of the sheer size of it. The distances were staggering. He’d hiked a lot in Indiana and thought he was familiar enough with the idea. There, though, you’d come up over a ridge and look ahead to the next point in the trail and then it would be maybe five, ten minutes until you were there. Up here it would be an hour, an exhausting, sweating-and-gasping hour, and you’d stop for a water break, turn around, and realize you could still see the place you’d started from. It looked like you weren’t gaining any ground at all.

  They were walking in a shallow gulch with mountains looming high on each side, and he didn’t mind looking at the peaks from down here. He’d been unnerved at the start, fearing they were going out on some sort of mountain-goat trail where a fall would be your death—even the highway had felt like that; he’d had to pretend he was asleep to keep from watching the switchbacks, with all the other kids awake and talking and laughing about it—but so far the trail hadn’t been bad. Had been, honestly, pretty cool. And he felt safer out here, which was strange. Up in the mountains, he had the sense that nobody was going to sneak up on them. Certainly not on Ethan Serbin, who seemed to notice every out-of-place pine needle. So he was feeling pretty good, pretty secure, and then the loud kid started calling him by his new name, and he didn’t respond.

  By the fourth time Marco yelled the name, they were all watching him. Even Ethan seemed interested. Jace felt a panicking sensation that he’d blown it already, they were onto him, and he’d been reminded time and again that this was the only way it could go bad up here in the mountains. If he let anyone know the truth, let anyone know he wasn’t who he was pretending to be, that was when the men from the quarry would arrive. He thought of them now and heard their voices in place of Marco’s and as the panic rose, it brought with it the realization that he had to explain this somehow, come up with a reason he was ignoring this kid. He couldn’t just say he was distracted or hadn’t heard him. It wasn’t enough. He had to play his role.

  “If I wanted to talk to you,” Jace said, staring right at Marco, “I would.”

  Marco pulled his head back, eyes wide. “The fuck? Hey, man, I—”

  “Stop it!” Ethan Serbin thundered. “Both of you, stop talking. Now. And you’re going to owe me for the language, Marco. You’ll enjoy that once we get back to camp. Hope you like gathering firewood. You can call the logs whatever you’d like.”

  “Man, this kid—”

  Ethan held a hand up, silencing him. Everyone was still staring at Jace, and he felt exposed but tried to keep a tough expression, tried to look like what he was supposed to be: a problem kid with a bad attitude, worse than the rest of them. If he was the worst, they’d leave him alone.

  “Connor? What’s your problem today? Is there a reason you feel the need to disrespect your friends?”

  Got to stick with it, Jace told himself, even though he hated acting the part in front of Ethan Serbin, who had this powerful way of showing disappointment through silence that reminded Jace of his dad. And Jace had to please his dad, because his father worked long hours and he worked in pain and he took pills to help but they never did. Jace had learned early that the more he did on his own, the more problems he fixed by himself, the better. It wasn’t that his dad was mean, or angry all the time. It was that life hadn’t been kind to him, so Jace tried to be.

  So while the Jace half of him said, Please, Ethan, the Connor half of him said, Give him what he thinks you are, and Jace was smart enough to listen to that half.

  “He’s not my friend. We’re not up here because we’re friends. Or because we want to be. Everybody knows that.”

  It sounded good to him, sounded right. Fit the part, fit the part. That had been his dad’s advice. Of course, a key element of fitting the part was remembering your own name.

  “All right,” Ethan Serbin said. “It’s not your choice. I remember being deployed in more than a few places that weren’t my choice either. And in a survival scenario, Connor? You think it’ll be your choice if a plane goes down? Will that be anybody’s choice?”

  Jace shook his head.

  “So we work with what we have,” Ethan continued. “That’s true with the elements, the weather, supplies, all of it. Certainly, it’s true with your companions. You work with who you have. Not friends yet? Fine. Maybe you will be. Maybe not. But one thing we can’t tolerate—because in a different situation it could get us killed—is disrespect. You keep disrespecting Marco, then how’s he going to look at you when you need him? When you’ve got a broken leg and need him to haul your butt out of here? You think you’re going to wish you’d shown him a little more respect then, a little more courtesy?”

  Jace shrugged, trying to look sullen and unimpressed.

  “I think you will,” Ethan said. “And when the two of you work together to get all of our firewood tonight, him for his language, you for disrespect, maybe you’ll consider that.”

  “Maybe,” Jace said, still trying to show just enough attitude to get by. Ethan looked at him for a long time, and then he turned away.

  The rest of them were all watching Jace, and Jace knew the look in their eyes and knew what it meant. He had seen it on Wayne Potter’s face enough times. He was a target now, not just of the men from the quarry, but of the boys he was supposed to spend the summer with. All because he couldn’t remember his own fake name.

  “All right,” Ethan Serbin said, “time for somebody to tell me where we are.”

  Ethan would do this often enough, stop abruptly and challenge their awareness of the land around them, but this time Jace had the sense that he was doing it to draw the attention of the others away from him, as if Ethan, too, knew that trouble was brewing.

  “No maps, no compasses,” Ethan said. “Tell me which way we’re facing.”

  They were facing a mountain. Behind them was a mountain. To their left and right, more
mountains. Which direction? This should be easy enough. Jace looked for the sun—was it rising or descending? That would tell him east or west.

  “What are you doing, Connor?” Ethan asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “What were you looking at?” Ethan said patiently.

  “The sun.”

  “Why?”

  Jace shrugged again, still not willing to give up the attitude, and Ethan looked disappointed but didn’t press him.

  “Connor’s instinct is the right one,” he said.

  “Good little Boy Scout,” Marco whispered.

  Yes, it would get bad from here.

  “The sky will reorient us when we’re lost,” Ethan was saying. “At night, you’ll use the stars, and during the day, the sun. But right now, I suspect Connor is a little confused. Because where is the sun, guys?”

  “Straight up,” Drew said.

  “Exactly. We know that it rises in the east and sets in the west, so those times of day are easy. But right now? High noon? How do we know which way we’re facing?”

  Nobody had an answer.

  “The shadows will tell us,” Ethan said. He lifted his hiking stick, a thin pole with telescoping sections to change the length, and drove the tip into the dirt so that it was sticking straight up out of the ground. “Drew, grab a stone and mark the shadow. The very end of it, the tip.”

  Drew dropped a flat stone where the shadow faded into dust.

  “Two things we know are always true,” Ethan said. “The sun will rise in the east, and it will set in the west. You could be having the worst day of your life, everything about the world might have just imploded on you, but, boys, the sun will still rise in the east and set in the west. And an object placed in the sun is going to make a shadow. You each have a shadow right now.”

  Jace felt an uneasy chill. No, they didn’t each have just one shadow right now. Jace had his own, and he also had two others. They were out there somewhere in the world, and they intended to catch him.

  “In the Northern Hemisphere, that means that shadows move clockwise,” Ethan said. “So give the sun just a little time. We’re going to wait on that shadow to move.”

  They stood around and sipped some water and waited on the shadow to move. Eventually it crept away from the stone and found the dusty earth beside it. Ethan ate some trail mix and stared at the ground patiently while everyone else fidgeted or gave up and sat down. Jace stayed on his feet, watching the shadow.

  “Okay,” Ethan said at last. “Drew, mark it again, with another stone.”

  Drew laid a second stone beside the first. They were nearly touching. Ethan pulled his hiking pole from the dirt and laid it across the stones, then knelt and withdrew a long-bladed knife from its sheath on his belt. He laid the knife across the hiking stick so that the tip of its blade was at right angles to the hiking stick.

  “Take a look now,” he said. “What does this setup look like to you?”

  “A compass,” Ty said. “Four points, four different directions.”

  Ethan nodded in approval. “And we know what about the sun? It will never lie to us about what?”

  “How it’s moving,” Ty said. “East to west.”

  “Exactly. We watched it move just a little bit, not enough to tell us much if we’d just stared up at it, but by using the shadows, we have one stone marking the general east, and another marking the general west. Those directions give us the others, of course. So somebody tell us which way we are facing.”

  “North,” Jace said. The knife blade pointed north.

  “You got it. Now, this is hardly as precise as a compass, but it will give you the cardinal directions. And if you ever put your stick in the ground and don’t see a shadow at all, that means the sun is due south. You might not see the shadow, but it is still telling you the directions.”

  They began hiking again, and the incident with Marco was gone from Jace’s mind; he was hiking along and thinking of the men from the quarry and comparing what he remembered of them with what he knew of Ethan Serbin. He thought that if anyone had a good chance against those two, it was probably Ethan. The problem, as Jace saw it, was simply a matter of numbers: two against one. The odds would be in his hunters’ favor if they came. But maybe out here in his element, Ethan Serbin was good enough that it evened the odds. Maybe he’d see them coming, be aware of them before they were aware of him, and that would turn things in Ethan’s favor. If it came to that—and Jace had been promised that it wouldn’t—he felt that he should probably tell Ethan who he was. His only instruction was to be Connor, but if the men from the quarry arrived, instructions wouldn’t matter. He’d need to be part of the team then, he’d need to help Ethan work with—

  When Jace’s feet went out from under him, he had his head up and his hands gripping the pack straps. He wasn’t prepared, and he fell forward onto the rocks, a little cry coming out, not from pain but from surprise. By the time Ethan and the others looked back, he was already down, and nobody up front had seen what had happened: Marco had tripped him.

  “You all right?” Ethan said.

  “Yes.” Jace was back on his feet, brushing the dirt off and trying to show no pain. It hadn’t been a bad fall, and ordinarily he would have been able to catch himself without really going down, but the weight of the pack was new and threw off his balance, so he’d landed hard. There was a warm wet pulse below his knee that had to be blood. His ripstop pants hadn’t torn, though, so the bleeding was hidden from Ethan’s eyes.

  “What happened?”

  Ethan was already looking past him, back to those kids in the rear of the line, Marco and Raymond and Drew.

  “Just tripped,” Jace said, and now Ethan’s eyes returned and focused on him.

  “Just tripped?”

  Jace nodded. Marco was standing right behind him; he had made a big show of helping him up and then hadn’t stepped back, was so close Jace could smell his sweat.

  “All right,” Ethan said, turning away and starting to walk again. “We have our first man down. Let’s talk a little about how we walk, and how we land when we fall. That second part is the most important. Remember that the pack doesn’t affect just your balance, it affects how hard you go down, so if you can, try to—”

  Marco whispered, “Stay on your feet, faggot,” into Jace’s ear as they marched along, and Raymond and Drew laughed. Jace didn’t say a word. His right calf was warm with blood, and drops of it showed now on his boot.

  Your own fault, he told himself. You can’t even remember your name.

  He kept his head down and counted the drops of blood as they appeared on his boot, and with each fresh drop, he reminded himself of his new name.

  Connor. Connor. Connor. I am Connor, and I am bleeding, I am Connor, and I am alone, I am Connor, and two men want me dead, I am Connor, and Jace is gone, Jace is gone for good.

  I am Connor.

  7

  They watched through a modified gun sight as the boys hiked, watched them in silence and marked their course on the map, then took their bearing and heading.

  “That’s the basics,” the bearded twenty-something-year-old named Kyle said. “Of course, if it’s smoke, you’ve got a lot more to report. Not just the bearing.”

  Hannah Faber straightened and stepped away from the Osborne fire-finder and nodded, wetting her lips and looking at the door of the fire-tower cab and wishing that Kyle would walk out through it and leave her here alone, wishing he could grasp that if there was anything she did not need coaching on, it was Wildland Fire 101. His words washed over her: he had worked for the forest service for two years and was tired of the grunt labor they offered him and had thought this would be relaxing, a chance to maybe do some writing, he knew he had a novel in him or maybe a screenplay but sometimes poems seemed best…

  All of this poured out of him as asides as he took her on a tour of the place, which certainly didn’t need much commentary. Bed here, table there, woodstove. Check, check, check. The closer h
e got to her and the more he talked, it seemed as if she could actually feel the nerves fraying inside her, peeling in overstretched threads, not much left. Fire season. It was back and it was close. She wanted to be alone.

  He’ll be gone soon, she told herself. Just make it through a few more minutes.

  Kyle had stopped talking and was eyeing her pack, and that annoyed her. Sure, it was only a backpack, but it held the contents of her life, and Hannah had grown awfully private about her life in the past ten months.

  “Some damn serious boots you brought to sit up here,” Kyle said.

  Tied to the back of her pack was a pair of White’s fire-line boots. To those who laid trench lines and swung Pulaskis, they were the stuff of legend. She’d tried to save some money the first year by buying cheap boots, only to have them blow out within two months, and then she followed the lead of the experienced crew members and bought the White’s. The pair on her pack was brand-new, waiting for action they would never see. She knew it was stupid to have brought them, but she couldn’t leave them behind.

  “I like nice boots,” she said.

  “I’ve heard women say that. Usually talking about a little different look, though.”

  She managed a faint smile. “I’m a little different woman.”

  “You spend a lot of time in this area?”

  “Been up a few times,” she said. “Let’s get to it, shall we? You were going to talk me through the radio protocol.”

  Then it was on to the radio, his eyes away from her pack and from the fire boots. Finally they moved to the topographic maps on a chart table.

  “When you see smoke, you call it in. So your first job is to see it, obviously, and then you have to give them the right position. That’s where this little thing comes in.” He indicated the Osborne again, which was essentially a round glass table with a topographic map underneath it. On the outside of it were two rings, one fixed and one that rotated. The rotating ring carried a brass sighting device, just like a gun sight.