Читать книгу Stony Mesa Sagas - Chip Ward - Страница 21

Chapter 14

Nolan Mikesel held his flashlight close to the ground. It was easy to read their tracks. They were fleeing through pinyon and juniper trees, threading their way uphill to the top of a ridge above the ranch. Just like tracking deer. Same thing, follow until they are tired and turn, until they wait for you.

He could tell they were running from the way their footprints were gouged into the sandy soil, the depth and the wreckage of dirt around their tracks, the length of their strides. Hooves do that, too. Nolan Mikesel was familiar with the calligraphy of fear.

They ran bent and low, hoping the gunman couldn’t see them behind dark bushes and moonlit trees. The slope was a maze of gnarly old juniper trees, half alive after a century of giving up limbs to droughts, insects, and other assaults that caused them to concentrate their life-giving sap into whichever branches were most viable. Ghostly gray limbs twisted through resilient green. The trees grew amazingly long roots across the hard soil that weaved in and out of the earth like thick serpents swimming through an ochre sea. The trees were survivors, only rooted instead of running like the fleeing couple. Enormous boulders that were spit from volcanoes eons ago then broken and polished by glacial ice loomed in the moonlight, watching the frantic human race with an unblinking indifference.

Just over the ridge, Hoppy and Luna hid behind some rocks and tried to catch their breaths and slow their racing hearts. Nolan let them. He preferred to wait until dawn and get a daylight shot. The memory of missing them in the dark was still fresh. At first light, Luna and Hoppy ran down a slope, crouched behind sage and serviceberry bushes, and made their way to the mouth of Rope Canyon. They were not aware of his exact location but they knew Nolan Mikesel was not far behind them. They had run from Bo’s guest house when they saw him step into the yard light next to the main house.

He didn’t have a clear shot though the scrubby brush and he knew that sooner or later they would cross open ground. Nolan saw them clearly as they entered the canyon. “Stupid move,” he said to himself. “No way out. So stupid, queenie.”

But it was deliberate and not so dumb after all. Yes, the canyon dead-ended at a huge pour-over about a mile up its serpentine wash. But Luna knew a route they could climb out and gambled that their pursuer did not. She had explored and climbed Rope Canyon years ago as a teenager sentenced to a year of camping. She strained to remember the hidden passage they took to the top. Once they were on the rim above him, he wouldn’t have a shot at them—if they took just two steps back from the rim they would be out of sight.

Nolan stalked them slowly, confident they had nowhere to go. He looked up at the tall redrock walls on either side of the wash. Tourists loved those walls for the play of sunlight on texture, the abstract patterns made by stains and erosion, and the magnificence of bare stone soaring hundreds of feet above them. That’s why Nolan hated those walls. They made him feel small, ant-like. He’d had enough humbling experiences in his life and didn’t need any reminders of how puny human life can be. He preferred roughing up roads in his four-wheel drive truck so he could feel the motorized thrust and power of himself against the unfriendly landscape. Hiking was for sissies. Backpacking was for birdwatching suckers. Real men rev engines, kick up dust, and proclaim their presence loudly.

Luna and Hoppy raced ahead through the morning’s first light. She knew they had to get to the route she remembered before the crazed man with the gun caught up to them. The first section going up that route rose along a thin ledge where they would be very exposed and he’d have a clear shot at them. Once they were about sixty feet from the floor of the canyon they could slip into a crevasse that was dark and obstructed from view. It was easier to climb with ropes and gear for safety but they could free climb it easily enough. The last part would also entail some exposure but by then they’d be two hundred feet above the shooter and coming in and out of his view. None of this could be discussed because they were too busy running. Luna told Hoppy she knew a way out and he trusted her and followed.

They reached the route Luna remembered and she signaled to Hoppy by pointing up. He nodded and she led the ascent. Hoppy tripped on the first section of the steep and broken path and planted his hand flat onto a prickly pear cactus. There was no time to pull the spines from his hand or complain. He grimaced, swore, and kept moving. Up. Up. Panting and scared, they clawed at shallow hand-holds in the rock wall with desperate concentration.

When they reached the crevasse they looked back and saw Nolan coming around the last bend in the canyon before their escape route. He held the rifle in front of him with both hands, barrel pointing forward, ready to raise the stock to his shoulder and shoot quickly. He saw them, too, swung his rifle upwards and fired twice, both shots clattering into the slope of rocks they had just climbed. They fit themselves into the cool, dark slot and climbed as fast as they could, grunting with the effort, scraping knees and elbows recklessly against the narrow walls. In one long passage they put their backs to the wall, pressed their feet against the opposite wall, and shimmied up to a ledge they could reach. If the gunman caught up to them while they were in that narrow chimney he would have an easy shot—they would be the proverbial fish in a barrel—but if they were too hasty in their climb they could slip and fall and surely that would mean broken bones, game over.

Nolan realized he was about to be out of firing range. He needed to get up there before they could exit the narrow passage. He could point his rifle straight up under them and shoot them down. He saw it in his mind’s eye. She would scream, maybe plead. He felt himself getting hard.

Up he went, the rifle in one hand and his other grabbing at every handhold he could find. About fifty feet up from the floor there was a short traverse over a thin ledge. He took it too quickly and lost his balance. He reached out and grabbed ahold of a hank of rice grass to steady himself and regain his footing. The rice grass held him for a second before it tore loose. He spun hard and dropped about ten feet onto a boulder. There was a sickening snap and a pain shot from his ankle up to his hip.

He paused to assess the damage. A sprain, he thought, just a sprain. But when he stood up and took a step, his leg buckled and he tripped forward, pitched over a dead juniper log, rolled twice downhill and was airborne. He hit the canyon floor feet first and his knee was driven up into his chin. He lost consciousness briefly. When he regained it he was spitting blood. He brought a finger to his mouth and discovered a massive tear in his tongue and the jagged edge of a broken tooth. He gurgled blood and spat. When he looked down he noticed that the toe of his boot was pointed to where his heel should be. He reached down and felt a raw bone protruding underneath his denim pant leg.

When the Earth’s atmosphere became overloaded with the CO2 and methane emitted by a carbon-based civilization, its oceans overheated and pushed the river of air flowing above them into wildly oscillating waves. The atmospheric currents that had regulated the benign flow of seasons and weather for thousands of years were overwhelmed. Whiplash waves drove Arctic air due south where it collided with warmer southern currents, spawning clusters of tornadoes and monster storms. Whole landscapes caught fire or were underwater from one season to the next. Droughts here, hurricanes there, it seemed like extreme weather was the new norm on an unpredictable helter-skelter planet. A clustering of consequences was at hand.

The southwest had always had a monsoon season marked by dramatic thunder and lightning shows that Luna referred to as “our daily cloud opera.” But now the thunderheads rose even higher and faster until they collapsed in pounding rainstorms that the landscape could not contain. The morning that found Luna and Hoppy running for cover was like most other hot summer days, hardly a cloud in the sky. In just a couple hours the sun sucked moisture into the sky and clouds like a herd of fluffy white bison grazed across the blue. Their bulk became so great that they pulled on one another, coalesced into an anvil-shaped monster cloud that became so thick it turned a bruise-colored purple at its core.

Nolan looked up from the sandy wash where he lay broken and twisted. He saw a darkening sky. Thunder boomed and rolled away into the distance. Rain started slowly, big wet drops splattered down and polka-dotted the ground. There was a brief pause and then all hell broke loose. Rain came down in sheets so thick he couldn’t see twenty feet away and so hard that the sand where Nolan lay was bouncing. Water poured down every slick surface of redrock. Rills and rivulets of rain braided together as they swept downward across bare stone and poured over canyon rims, making a universe of waterfalls.

Nolan tried to pull himself up above the canyon floor before the flash flood that was surely building arrived. He tried to stand but his bent leg would not hold him. He crawled but any effort he could make to get above the wash was too slow, too painful, too late. I’m pathetic, he thought. A fucking loser.

Rocks thudding underwater and the shush of dry leaves and dead twigs pushed forward by the flood’s advancing tongue told him it was coming closer. He read a faint change in the air pressure close to the ground and then he smelled its moist breath. Flood! It looked so odd coming toward him, a dry wall of sticks and branches, dead grass and leafy detritus, rolling almost lazily. The flash flood was pushing the debris it had scoured from the canyon floor ahead of itself. The wall roiling toward him was neither dry nor slow despite appearances. Behind the debris was a wet fury he would not survive.

His last words before it swallowed him were, “Oh fuck!”