“Community emergency channel,” he said. “Why?”
“I think there’s an emergency.”
“That’s why Elizabeth hasn’t answered,” John suggested. “She must have switched over to 13.” He gunned the ATV ahead and gave Zula a few hundred yards’ rough ride to a spot where the trail swung around a root of the mountain and gave them a view—albeit distant, dusty, and cluttered by trees—down into the valley. Sporadic gunfire and sounds of roaring engines were spiraling up from below.
The voices on channel 13 were a bit clearer now, but still fragmentary as different transmissions stepped on each other. A man kept breaking in to insist on the need for radio discipline. “Cut the chatter!” “Copy.” “Pennsylvania plates…” “Come again?” “Multiple vehicles…” “Black SUV, two subjects…” “Frank is dead, repeat, they ambushed him in his truck…” “Camry…” “Full auto…”
It required a minute or two for Zula to absorb this. She assumed at first that word of Jones’s approach had preceded him into the valley and that she was listening to the sounds of the community preparing to be invaded from out of the north. But this could not be reconciled with all that she was hearing about vehicles—vehicles that had to be coming up out of the south.
“He must have friends,” she concluded, “come up here to meet him.”
John knew who he was, and approximately what he was doing, because Zula had been giving him an update during the ride. He considered it and shrugged. “It’s not like he was going to hitchhike around the U.S. He’d have to have confederates. I guess they’re here.” He thought about it some more, gazing back at Olivia and Jake who were huffing and puffing along in their wake. “I wonder what they were expecting. Probably just empty logging roads. Jake’s community doesn’t have a name, doesn’t show up on maps. Still, it’s odd that they would come in shooting.”
Jake had not heard the radio traffic, but the gunfire coming up out of the valley was clear enough, and he had a look in his eye that Zula hoped she’d never again see on a loved one’s face. He was up here, and his wife and children were down there, where the fighting was.
John saw it too. “They know what to do,” he reminded his kid brother. “You can be sure that they’re bunkered down and they’re fine.”
“I have to get down there,” Jake said.
Without a word John hopped off the ATV, turning it over to Jake. Zula rolled off the back and came up on her feet, a little unsteady but feeling much better.
Jake turned off the trail and began plunging down the slope, cutting across switchbacks wherever he could.
“It’s about one click from here,” John said. “Descending steep slopes is not my strong suit. I suggest you healthy young ladies proceed together and I’ll bring up the rear.” Slung over his back had been a hunting rifle of the old school, with a brown wooden stock and a telescopic sight. Zula knew he had carried it along only in case he needed it to deal with an enraged bear. He now stripped this weapon off his shoulder and held it out to Zula. “Pump action,” he said. “Thirty ought six, four rounds in the magazine.”
Some part of Zula—the small-town upbringing—wanted to say, Oh no I couldn’t possibly, but she stifled it; the look on the face of her uncle—who, for all practical purposes, had been her father for the last fifteen years—said that he would not brook any argument. She remembered, just for an instant, the day that the meth heads had come to the farm to steal their anhydrous ammonia.
So she only uttered a single word, which was “Thanks.”
OLIVIA TURNED OUT to be pretty spry—more than a match, anyway, for Zula in her current condition. They hewed mostly to the trail and occasionally crossed tracks that had been carved across it by Jake in his impetuous plunge. Zula’s expectation that Jake would soon get far ahead of them turned out to be wrong. When the ATV moved, it moved faster than they could run, but he seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time hung up on obstacles or working his way around slopes too steep for it to negotiate. Its sound was always there, just a bit ahead of them, occasionally drowned out by gunfire. Some sort of weird, inappropriate family-competitive instinct made Zula want to catch and surpass it. But before this happened, they came in view of the cabin itself, its green sheet-metal roof nestled among the peaks of the surrounding trees, and then it became all about getting there as fast and as directly as possible.