The only easy day was yesterday. Where had Chase heard that? It couldn’t be a coincidence.
When he’d left the SEALs and married Emily, John Masters had put all that behind him. It wasn’t until the lightning strike that it had all come back. He had even thought about reenlisting.
But where would that have left Chase?
Chase came to with a hammering headache, ash and bile in his mouth, and something tickling his face. His eyelids fluttered open. The thing tickling his face was Pepe’s tongue. He didn’t move as he tried to put together what had happened. He’d been talking to the two guys with the rags wrapped around their heads. One of them had pointed at the quad. Chase had turned to look and the lights had gone out.
He sat up very slowly, but not slowly enough. He threw up. He thought his head was going to explode. He felt the back of his skull and discovered a hard lump the size of a chicken egg.
He looked up the road. The quad was gone. He felt around his neck. The respirator was gone. So was his helmet and his go bag and … He felt his pockets. They were turned inside out. They had taken the sat phone and everything else.
In a disaster, desperate people do desperate things.
One of his father’s warnings.
What was I supposed to do? Blow right by them without stopping?
He wished he had now.
Pepe barked.
He looked down at him. “Yeah, yeah, I know. You had them pegged. I should have listened to you.”
Pepe barked again.
“I’m not picking you up. If I bend over, my head might roll off my neck.”
Pepe did a backward flip.
“Nice trick. I’m still not picking you up.”
Chase looked at his watch. He had been out cold for five minutes.
John dropped over the edge as soon as Nicole and Mark took off on the quad. It was an easy rappel, but being among the broken elephants was much worse than seeing them from the road. Swarms of flies covered the carcasses, rising in a black mass as he made his way to the tractor. The respirator kept the dust out, but not the stench of rotting flesh.
He walked past the colorful trailer, which was now nothing more than a pile of twisted metal. The tractor was on its side several feet from the trailer. The fuel tank had ruptured, coating the tractor with slick diesel. One of the men had been ejected through the windshield and was lying twenty feet from the tractor. Two other men were seat-belted in the cab. Both were just as dead as the man on the ground.
He looked up at the road. He could see more clearly now how it had happened. A good portion of the outside lane had collapsed.
It must have happened at night, John thought. They came around the corner, thinking the worst was over, then the world dropped out from under them. Looking at the shattered bodies, he could not help but think of another accident on another mountain thousands of miles away. His wife and daughter, Emily and Monica, both killed on impact, while he had walked away without a cut or a bruise. Unscathed. Safe. Why? He shook the memory off, as he had so many times before. He was about to climb back up to the road, but a glint of metal farther off in the trees caught his attention. He reached it with some difficulty. It was a second semi, smaller than the elephant truck but equally destroyed. Two dead men crushed in the cab. It was impossible to get to, or even see into, the sleeper behind the men. He called out and listened. There was no reply.
He looked up at the road again. He could barely see it from this position, which is why they hadn’t seen the second truck from the road. He walked over to what was left of the trailer to see what they had been hauling.
Cats.
The ground was littered with lions and tigers. Some were still in their cages. Others had been thrown out onto the ground. He counted seven lions and three tigers. All dead.
Heartbreaking.
He did a thorough search of the area to make sure he hadn’t missed anything, but when he finished, something was still nagging at him. He returned to the cat trailer and counted again.
Seven lions. Three tigers.
He called Nicole to find out how many cats the show had. She didn’t answer.
Probably can’t hear above the noise of the quad.
He called Mark. Again no answer.
He counted the cats for the third time, then he counted the cages.
Ten cats. Eleven cages.
He called Nicole and Mark again, and again there was no answer.
He climbed back up to the road as fast as he could.
The tiger watched the man climb the rope. The man had climbed down the rope faster than he was going up. The tiger had seen this countless times before in the big tent, from the humans who swung and walked the rope in the air. This man was not like the ones in the big tent. He did not sparkle and glitter in the light. And he was a new man. The tiger had not seen him before. The tiger had thought about coming out of hiding as he watched the man wander among the dead, but had waited instead. Since the fall in the dark, everything was new. Nothing was as it had been. The ground had shaken. The sky rained dust. The tiger was afraid of this new world, but also intrigued by it. And hungry. He heard the truck door close and the engine rumble and the tires move along the pavement above. He waited until the sound faded away, then came out of hiding. He walked to the stream and drank. A movement to his right caught his attention. A deer bounding up the steep bank to the road. He knew deer, but not like this. At the farm during the long days of stillness with no man in the ring snapping the whip, making him do things, he was sometimes given deer to eat. But this deer was full of life. It moved with strength and grace up the mountainside. The tiger was hungry. It followed the deer.
Nicole drove the quad slowly down the left lane of the highway, with Chico clinging to her front, and Mark clinging to her back.
“Not so close to the edge,” Mark reminded her for the twentieth time. “I’m not wearing a helmet.”
“A helmet won’t do you much good if we plunge over the side.”
“Thanks for reminding me. And that’s exactly what I’m afraid of. Scoot over!”
“If I get too far over, we won’t be able to see into the ravine.”
“Then at least keep your eyes on the road. I’ll watch the ravine and tell you if I see anything horrible.”
It was hard for Nicole to imagine what could be more horrible than four dead elephants and a smashed circus truck. The image would be tattooed in her memory forever. If they hadn’t stopped where they had, they probably would never have seen the elephant rig. She dreaded seeing her mother and sister’s crushed camper, or any of the other circus rigs, but she felt compelled to keep peering over the edge. Chico had gotten away from the clown rig. Pepe had gotten away from the dog rig. She hoped they weren’t the only survivors.
She eased the quad around a sharp curve and nearly fell off the seat. There were at least thirty cars, campers, and Rossi Brothers’ Circus trailers blocking the highway. She throttled the quad to full speed and came to a sliding stop in the midst of the vehicles.
“Thanks for that experience,” Mark said.
Nicole jumped off the quad and ran toward a tall, thin man wearing a red wig, oversize floppy shoes, and clown makeup.
“Doug!” she shouted.
“I can’t believe this!” the clown shouted back. He threw his long arms around her and Chico, who seemed as happy to see Doug as Nicole was. “What are you doing here? How did you get here?”
A crowd gathered around them. Mark unwrapped the bungee cord securing his camera to the back of the quad and started videotaping.
“Where are my mom and sister?”
“Mexico City. I’m sure they’re worried sick….”
“They’re not in Mexico City. We were just —”
“Maybe they got stuck at the village.”
“What village?”
“The Lake of the Mountain. It’s up near the rim of the volcano.”
“Lago?”
“Yeah, I think they called it that. It??
?s Arturo’s village.”
“Why would they go up there?”
“The orphanage. Your mom took the dog act, Chico, and a few clowns to … Wait — how did you get your hands on Chico?”
“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Nicole interrupted. “You go first. From the beginning.”
“All right.” Doug took a deep breath. “The day before yesterday, a priest shows up at the matinee in Puebla with a half dozen kids from an orphanage. He could only bring a few of the kids because he doesn’t have a way to transport them all.” Doug smiled. “You know your mom, she’s a sucker for kids. So she offers to do a free show for the orphanage. You know, a mini show. Some clowns. The dog act. Ponies for the kids to ride. The priest invites them to spend the night. Your mom and her crew take off for Lago halfway through the big show. She wants to get up to the village at a decent hour so they can get some sleep, get up early, and do the show. She wants to get over to Mexico City by early afternoon. The priest offers to lead them to Lago, which he says is kind of hard to find in the dark.
“We finish the last act, strike the big top, and decide to drive straight to Mexico City. Maybe get there at three in the morning and have a day off to do laundry, look around, you know … Anyway, we’re driving down the highway in a caravan and everything’s fine and then suddenly it feels like the world’s coming apart. We pull over, wait it out, gather our wits, and take off again. We get maybe a quarter of a mile up the road and run into this gigantic landslide. We try to get ahold of your mom, but all the cells are dead. We turn around and come back here because it’s a good place to pull the rigs off the road. The elephant guys decide to go back to Puebla. Because we were heading straight to Mexico City, they hadn’t bothered to load up with hay and grain. The cat guys decided to go with them. Don’t ask me why. They leave with a promise to find out if there’s another way to Mexico City. No point in all of us going to Puebla until we find out.
“By noon the next day, we still haven’t heard from the elephant crew or the cat guys, so we send a car to Puebla to find out what’s up. They don’t get very far either. They run into a landslide bigger than the one in front of us. They drive back and tell us what’s up. One of the tumblers crawls over the slide in front of us and finds out the bridge up ahead is out. We can’t go forward. We can’t go backward. We’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. Then the ash starts coming down, so we set up tents to keep it off us and our new friends.” He pointed to some of the people standing around. “Not everybody here’s on the show. We took in the locals who got stranded with us. A couple of us are clowning to entertain the kids and keep the grown-ups’ minds off the situation.”
“I was wondering why you were clowning,” Nicole said.
“The concession trucks are with us, so we have plenty of food. There’s a stream down in the gully running along the road. We’ve been hauling water up, so we aren’t going to die of thirst any time soon. I figure we can last a couple of weeks if we don’t get sick of hot dogs before then.”
“I wouldn’t drink that water,” John Masters said. No one had noticed him pull up.
Nicole looked at him with hopeful eyes.
John shook his head. “They didn’t make it. How many cats does the show have?”
“Eleven,” Doug answered. “Seven lions and four tigers.”
“One of the tigers is missing,” John said, then explained what he had found upstream.
“Stop!” Cindy shouted.
Tomás slammed on the brakes.
“There are no tire tracks in front of us,” she said in Spanish.
Tomás looked through the windshield and nodded. He pointed at her sat phone.
Cindy looked down at the phone’s screen. “No satellite signal.”
Tomás put the truck into reverse and turned it around. A couple miles down the road, they found the disturbed ash. They got out for a closer look and found the tire tracks going back in the direction Chase had come from.
“Footprints,” Tomás said.
“And animal prints,” Cindy added.
“Muy pequeño.”
“Very small,” Cindy agreed.
They got into the truck and followed the tracks all the way back to the slide. There was a man sitting on the rubble, wearing Chase’s respirator and helmet. Sitting next to him was Chase’s go bag. Tomás was out of the truck in a flash. The man got up and tried to run away but fell. Tomás yanked him to his feet, slapped the helmet off of his head, and tore the respirator off his face.
“I think his leg is broken!” Cindy shouted.
Tomás either didn’t understand or didn’t care. He dragged the blubbering man over to the edge of the road. The quad was smashed against a tree thirty feet below them. Lying next to it was another man.
“¿Muerto?” Tomás asked.
“Si,” the man said. He looked at Cindy. “My friend is dead.”
“So you speak English,” Cindy said with absolutely no sympathy for him. “Where is our friend?”
“We left the boy on the road.”
“Alive?”
“Yes.”
“He had better be.”
Tomás marched the man to the truck and pushed him into the bed, ignoring his protests.
“We go,” he told Cindy.
Cindy ran to the passenger door and jumped in. She was afraid that in his present mood, Tomás would leave her behind.
Tomás stepped on the gas, but they didn’t get very far. A hundred yards down the road, the right front tire exploded.
Chase walked up the road in the direction of Lago with Pepe at his feet, stirring up tiny puffs of ash with each dainty step. He was no longer limping.
Where are Tomás and Cindy? What’s taking them so long?
It had been over an hour since he had told them it was clear.
Maybe Tomás found a better way up and is in front of me. But where are the tire tracks?
The only tracks in front of him were the thieves’ boot prints reminding him how stupid he’d been. The pounding in his head had diminished to a dull thud, but his anger had not. He came around yet another curve in the winding ash-covered road and stopped. In front of him was a crack in the earth that ran across the road and up the mountain as far as he could see. White steam billowed out of the crack. It was as if the ground had been unzipped, leaving a gap thirty feet across. In the middle of the gap were two upended trucks with the Rossi Brothers’ Circus logo painted on their sides. One truck had a camper on the back. The other truck had been pulling a trailer, which was now a twisted wreck. Scattered around the smashed trailer were at least a dozen dog crates. The wire-mesh doors were all hanging open. Chase looked inside one of the crates and saw what looked like dried blood. There was a second trailer just off the road. Inside were four dead ponies.
Pepe barked.
“I hear you,” Chase said. “You were lucky to get away with an injured paw.” He looked at the trucks. The passenger’s and driver’s doors were open, just like the crates. “Looks like everyone got out.” He scratched Pepe’s ears. “This explains how you got up here, but it doesn’t explain why you were up here, or where everyone went.”
The trucks formed a bridge across the gap, which the circus people must have used to get to the other side.
And there’s no doubt the thieves used the same bridge to get to my side, Chase thought. He was still angry, but looking at the steam coming out of the crack, he couldn’t really blame them. The mountain was coming apart. The two men had been in a panic, with a long, dangerous walk ahead of them. He just wished they had left the go bag with the sat phone and his water. He was thirsty and he was sure the others were wondering why he hadn’t checked in or answered the phone.
Chase looked down the road where he had come from. The curve was sharp. With the ash flying around, there was a good chance Tomás wouldn’t see the crack before he crashed into it. Chase had to warn them. He thought about walking back and flagging them down. But what if they didn’t drive up the roa
d? What if something had happened to the truck? A flat tire, mechanical breakdown, getting mired in the soft ground … The possibilities were endless.
He looked up at the sky. It was getting darker, and it wasn’t just the ash. The sun was getting lower. It would be pitch dark in a couple of hours. He couldn’t wrap himself in toilet paper like they had the air filters. His eyes were swollen, his throat was sore. He needed water. He needed shelter. And he needed both of them soon.
You’re no good to anybody if you’re dead … including yourself.
Another of his father’s favorite sayings. He wondered if that one was a Navy SEAL deal too. The SEAL motto Cindy had told him about was certainly holding up. The only easy day was yesterday. The hardest thing they’d done the day before was move a lion and slap a bear on the butt, and it was Momma Rossi who had slapped the bear.
“Guess I better get my own butt in gear,” Chase said.
Pepe barked and ran into one of the crates.
“I’m not carrying you in one of those, but I will carry you across the junkyard bridge so you don’t fall into the steaming crevasse.” He squatted down. “Let’s go.”
Pepe gave him another bark, but didn’t budge.
Chase got an idea. He reached into the crate and pulled Pepe out.
“I need this.”
He picked up Pepe’s crate and a couple others, then jogged back down to the spot where the curve straightened out. It was roughly thirty yards from the crack. He came back and picked up a few more crates, then returned for a third and fourth load.
“Fifteen crates,” he said. “We’re going to build a pyramid.”
Chase set out five crates in the middle of the road, then four on top of the five, then three on top of the four, then two on top of the three, topping it off with Pepe’s crate, which was the smallest.
Pepe did a backflip and landed on the first tier.