Wildside

  “To be honest,” I said, “I expected some suits to show up when they finally tracked us down—FBI or federal marshals. The armed invasion seemed, uh, excessive.”

  “It is.” He blinked, then said, “Charlie, there’s the chance that they can’t afford to let us talk about it.”

  I swallowed. “We’ve discussed the possibility.”

  Dad shook his head. “The thing to do is to keep things calm, cool them off before they do something stupid. Er, make that before they do something else stupid.”

  I raised the radio and looked down at the monitors. They were showing the real-time feed from the video cameras in the tunnel. “Time for the snapshot,” I transmitted.

  Joey’s voice came back. He and Rick held the gate controls. “You count it off, Charlie.”

  “Right. I’m in ‘deadman’ mode. As before. One, two, three, four—”

  It did not go right.

  On the monitor the gate opened. There was a flash of light from the bottom of the gate typical of something being at the terminus as it opened or shut and an explosion and something nearly as wide as the tunnel moved forward very fast. Over the top of it I saw the lights of the tame side tunnel appear and then disappear as the gate shut down and then there were soldiers falling forward hard—some tumbling, some landing on their hands and knees.

  And they were on this side of the gate.

  “We got trouble!” I shouted into the radio. The soldiers were slow getting to their feet. The large object behind them had fallen forward and I could see mattresses roped to some sort of rigid platform—the back of it was smoking.

  One of the soldiers raised a handgun and seemed to point it right at me, out of the screen. He fired, killing the camera, and the screen dissolved in static. Another soldier did the same thing to the other camera.

  Dad pulled me by the shoulder and we ran toward the small door set into the left-hand hangar door. He was swearing. “Those idiots! They’re going to get somebody killed.”

  I paused in the middle of the hangar and fired two quick shots at the power line going to the generator. The lights went out in the hangar and, consequently, the tunnel.

  The light from outside outlined the edges of the door. Dad pulled it open and I went through it right behind him. Behind us, the door to the tunnel slammed open at the same time I shoved the door shut again, plunging the hangar back into darkness. There were several folding chairs between the tunnel and the door we’d just shut. I had hopes.

  I shoved Dad toward the Maule, which was waiting, Rick holding the back door open, and I ran for the Coyote. As I reached it, I heard the Maule’s engine sound suddenly increase in volume and it pulled away down the runway, throttle to the firewall.

  I hit the starter button and the throttle even before I was in the seat. I shoved the gun into the other seat and slammed my foot down on the left rudder. The engine caught with a roar and the plane moved as soon as I released the brake, swinging around. The wind seemed to have shifted to the north—I kept compensating for it as I taxied—and I really should be running up the same runway the Maule had used, but to get to it, I would’ve had to taxi past the soldier at the hangar. The tail lifted and I flipped the flaps to full and pulled the left half of the seat belt into my lap, then got the other half and tried to connect them one-handed.

  I wondered seriously if I had enough runway.

  I felt the grass dragging at the wheels, but the controls felt “alive.” I reached the end of the runway and pulled back the stick gently. The wheels lifted off the ground and the seat belt clicked shut at exactly the same time. The long buffalo grass beyond the end of the runway hissed across the landing gear and then I was above it, barely above stall speed, but flying.

  I looked back at the hangar and saw soldiers running around the corner. The Maule was over the river, running low and fast, straight away from the hangar. I saw a flash of dark horse streak through the grass. Clara was heading due east, keeping the hill between her and the soldiers.

  I looked back at my instruments. My airspeed was high enough to climb and I eased the stick back, rising sharply at a thousand feet a minute.

  Again, I looked back at the hangar, and saw flashing lights, like little camera strobes. Christ, they’re firing at me!

  And they hit me.

  The first shot went through the overwing plastic fuel tank. The cabin suddenly reeked of gasoline fumes. Right after that, the engine stopped. Not died—it stopped dead with a horrible cracking sound and enough transferred torque that the plane jerked over, right wing down, so it must’ve taken a bullet or two. Two more bullets passed through the plastic windshield, but I didn’t care. I was too busy killing the master electrical switch and saying, “Please, no sparks, no sparks, no sparks,” while I trimmed the plane for minimum sink, maximum glide.

  I was about three hundred feet above the ground with the wind off to my left—north. I banked shallow and turned into it, dropping fifty feet in the process. The ground below me was covered with scrub live oaks and mesquite. I could hear the gunshots, now, full-auto, and saw several tear through the aluminum engine cover. A bullet hit a metal strut in the fuselage behind me and I heard a ‘Va-whoomp!’ as fuel-soaked dacron caught fire.

  “Ohmigod. Ohmigod. Ohmigod!” I said, expecting the flames to reach the fuel tank any second and blow me to kingdom come, but the slipstream was keeping the flames to the rear of the aircraft. I shoved the stick forward, sacrificing altitude for speed, then pulled up in time to slam the landing gear into the ground.

  The wings tore off, caught by trees, and the landing gear folded and the plane was sliding hard through the brush, a great crackling sound that was part breaking branches and part flames. I unbuckled the seat belt and kicked the door up while the plane was still moving, then dove out. I bounced once and the flaming horizontal stabilizer clipped my shoulder as it slid by overhead, then I was rolling until I fetched up against a tree.

  Hard.

  The plane stopped in another forty feet and the flames finally reached the tank. The pressure wave rocked me, and a blast of heat forced me to my feet, despite a left knee that wasn’t working right, to stumble away from the flames.

  After a moment, I heard more gunshots, much closer. Were they after me already? Then I realized it was my shotgun, in the plane, the ammo exploding in the flames.

  And I was injured, stumbling through the brush that could hide anything from dire wolves to saber-toothed tigers, with no weapon.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “THERE ARE BONES, CHARLIE—HUMAN BONES.”

  The flames were spreading south, fanned by the north wind. I went past the flaming wreckage upwind and limped east, away from the hangar. My knee, which had taken the brunt of my impact with the tree, was swelling. My shoulder, where the flaming horizontal stabilizer had struck it, was slightly burned, a large patch of my shirt charred off, but my rolling over and over had apparently put out the flames.

  I had my harness, complete with radio, pepper Mace, air horn, and survival kit, as well as several rounds of ammo for a gun I no longer had. We were supposed to maintain radio silence unless we needed help. This seemed to qualify. I picked up the radio, set it to the low-power five-watt setting, and transmitted. “Clara?”

  “Charlie! You okay?” She was crying.

  “Shaken, not stirred,” I said. “You?”

  “I thought…” I heard another sob and she stopped transmitting.

  “Can you come get me?”

  “I’m already on my way. Five minutes.”

  “You know where I am?”

  “Everybody knows where you are.”

  I looked back at the flames. Dark smoke lifted into the sky. “I’m heading east,” I said.

  “Understood. Out.”

  “Out.”

  I limped on, watching carefully, the can of pepper Mace in my hand. I hoped the soldiers hadn’t been listening—we’d left the base radio tuned off of our operational frequency, but, as Clara said, they had
eyes and the smoke was visible for miles.

  I got a couple of hundred yards away from the wreck and climbed into a low mesquite tree, complete with thorns. My head was barely over the brush line. When I looked back toward the hangar, all I could see was the control tower. Back at the wreck, I saw a flash of green that was too green for this landscape. Then a camouflaged soldier walked between two trees, intent on the smoking wreckage.

  I scanned north and east, looking for Clara, but I couldn’t see her. I looked back at the wreck and saw two soldiers looking my direction. One of them suddenly pointed at me. Swearing, I dropped from the branch, trying to land on my good leg, but I went off-balance and sprawled on the ground.

  I got to my feet and limped northeast, hunched over like Quasimodo. I tried to stick to the thickest brush, but it was thinning the farther north I got, opening up into grassland.

  There was a shout from behind me, as another of the soldiers spotted me. I kept expecting to hear gunfire, to feel high-velocity bullets enter my back, but they held their fire.

  Come to think of it, I might not hear the bullet that got me. It would certainly arrive before mere sound.

  The scrub oaks thinned out completely and I was limping painfully through knee-high grass. I glanced over my shoulder and could see five soldiers now, coming toward me at a run, covering three steps for every one of mine.

  Clara’s head and shoulders rose out of the grass ahead of me. As I got closer, I saw that a ravine cut across the grass, ten feet deep where a shallow stream wet its bottom. Clara was sitting on Impossible, her head eight feet off the ground. I slid down over the edge, dirt crumbling down around me.

  Clara took her foot out of her left stirrup and said, “Come on.”

  The soldiers were less than fifty yards behind. I gritted my teeth and, gripping the back edge of the saddle, got my left foot into the stirrup, then heaved myself up.

  I yelped with the pain, but managed to swing my right leg over Impossible’s rump, straddling a gap between the cantle of her saddle and her bundled survival gear. Impossible danced sideways, eliciting a stream of curses and commands from Clara, coming to a stop in the bottom of the ravine, front feet in the water. The minute I grabbed Clara’s waist, she kicked my bad leg out of the stirrup, inserted hers, and jabbed Impossible in the sides. My knee, bent around the curve of Impossible ribs, screamed, and I nearly passed out.

  Impossible took off at a gallop, running down the streambed, water spraying out in sheets to either side.

  I twisted, to look behind. The first soldier over the edge of the ravine saw us and jerked his gun to his shoulder, and cut loose a burst. He was firing low, perhaps at Impossible, for a line of waterspouts erupted from the stream next to us. Then we were around a bend in the ravine, and out of the line of fire.

  I attempted to straighten my leg, to take some of the stress off of it, but it was no good. The up-and-down motion was jarring the knee every time Impossible’s rear feet pushed off the streambed.

  Clara galloped for several turns—then the rocks in the streambed became large and irregular.

  She slowed Impossible to a walk.

  “We need to get out of this gully,” she said. She looked at the sides, but as we’d moved the gully grew deeper, the sides less passable.

  “Where’d you enter it?” I asked through gritted teeth.

  She gestured over her shoulder with her thumb. “Back where I met you.”

  “We could climb out, but I doubt Impossible could.”

  “Why are you talking like that?” she asked, twisting to look at me. “What’s wrong? You’re white as a sheet! You didn’t get hit back there, did you?”

  I shook my head. “No. Banged up my knee in the crash. Galloping hasn’t helped it any.”

  She stopped Impossible completely, then pulled her right foot out of the stirrup, passed it over the pommel of the saddle and slid down off Impossible to splash in the shallows. Impossible took a step sideways then dipped his head into the water.

  “Oh, no you don’t, greedy pig,” said Clara and pulled him up on the bank away from the water.

  “Which knee?”

  “The left.”

  She touched it and I winced. “Puffy. Very hot. Looks like it’s about to split your pants, it’s so swollen.”

  “That’s no good.” I handed her my pocketknife. “Cut the fabric so it doesn’t block circulation.”

  She took it and cut a small hole below the knee, in the loose cloth over my shin, then tore sideways with both hands to split the pants leg up over my knee. The skin was purple.

  “I don’t think I can walk,” I said.

  “And you wanted me to leave Impossible on the tame side. Shift up into the saddle, it will strain your knee less.”

  I struggled over the cantle. She was right—raised higher above Impossible’s back, my legs didn’t have to stretch as much.

  She gave me four ibuprofen out of her personal survival kit. Then she thrust the reins into my hands, “Hold him a second.” She scrambled up the side of the gully, pulling herself up using brush and roots. She took a look back and then dropped back down, sliding down the side, dislodging dirt and rocks.

  She took the reins from me and started walking down the gully, leading Impossible. “They’re following the gully from on top, which lets them cut some of the bends. Fortunately, it’s relatively straight in here, but they’re moving pretty fast.”

  “Umm,” I said. I was concentrating on keeping my leg still, but even at a walk, it hurt a lot.

  The ravine got deeper and wider, but the sides were still too steep to take Impossible out. The brush in the ravine turned to trees—cottonwoods, cedars, and willows, and the streambed changed back to sand.

  Impossible’s breathing slowed again and Clara let him drink a bit from the stream then, using a convenient boulder, mounted behind me. She held the reins around me and started Impossible out at a trot, which sent my knee into spasms again.

  The wind down in the ravine was a light breeze mostly in our faces, the gully meandering northwest across a north wind. Impossible jolted around a bend and stopped dead. Clara swore and put her heels into his side. He shied sideways, snorting, but balked at going forward. Clara took the flat of her hand and slapped Impossible’s rump hard and he jumped forward, going, not to a trot, but a gallop.

  “What’s got into you, horse?” Clara said, hauling back. She was thrown back and her arms, hands still gripping the reins, squeezed against my side to stay on. I tightened my grip on the pommel to keep us both from going off. Impossible shook his head, refusing to stop, moving down the stream in plunging fits and starts.

  Then I smelled it, too, a rank smell, much stronger than dog.

  They’d been lying under the trees on the left side of the stream, sleeping I suppose, but Impossible’s whinny and splashing hooves got their attention, even though we were approaching from downwind.

  They were ridiculously large, taller than my waist at their shoulders and probably each as heavy or heavier than me. They were stout, with massive shoulders and blocky snouts.

  Dire wolves.

  Impossible plunged past them as they stood or sat erect. One of them, lying relatively near the water, received a spray of water from Impossible’s hooves and flinched away, shaking. At first they didn’t seem to know what to make of us, more curious than anything, but they trotted after us as we passed them and their interest became more active.

  Clara saw them and said, “Oh, shit!” She stopped fighting Impossible and encouraged him in his headlong, plunging flight.

  I nearly screamed at the beating my knee was taking. I thought about grabbing the shotgun but there were only five rounds in it. There were at least seven of the wolves. I took the large can of pepper Mace off my harness, held it at arm’s length out to the side, aimed backward, and squeezed down the plunger and held it.

  The wind was light, but in our teeth, carrying the growing cloud of noxious spray back toward the wolves. I twisted, to look b
ack, past Clara, as they ran into it, mouths open, tongues hanging. The first one fell over, kicking up dust and leaves as it rubbed suddenly at its snout and eyes with its front paws.

  Three others, right behind, had similar reactions. All of them stopped and backed up, trying to get away from whatever it was that was plaguing them. The other three, who’d been running through the trees, came on, missing the cloud.

  I shifted my aim and created a wider bank of pepper Mace in their path. It had the same effect.

  It stood to reason, I guess, since their sense of smell was a thousand times better than ours. The whiff I’d gotten was bad enough. I couldn’t imagine how bad it was for them. I wondered if they thought we were some giant form of skunk, perhaps, or stink beetle.

  It took another quarter mile before Clara could get Impossible to slow to a walk, then finally stop. She jumped down, and led him at a walk, to cool him down.

  I took the shotgun out and held it across my lap, head twisted to look back. Impossible’s walk felt different to me—halting.

  Clara said, “He’s favoring his left hind, Charlie. I need you to get off while I look at it.”

  I looked back, looking for wolves or soldiers, but didn’t see any. “Okay.” I slid off and stood, one-legged, then hopped and limped over to a boulder in the shade, and sat.

  Clara clipped Impossible’s lead rope onto his bridle and tied the other end to a tree, then lifted the left hind foot. “Rock in the frog,” she said. She popped it loose with her hoof pick, then led Impossible around in a circle, to see how it felt. He still favored that foot, but not as badly.

  “It wasn’t very deep. I think he’ll be okay in a—”

  Behind us, in the distance, came the sound of automatic weapons and the screams of wolves.

  Impossible shied again and Clara had her hands full, keeping him from bolting. I wished my knee wasn’t as banged up—I wanted to climb out of the ravine and see what could be seen. After several seconds, the gunfire stopped. Then there was a heart-wrenching howl of an animal in pain which cut off abruptly with two more closely spaced gunshots.