Where it is good hardpan, a naturally cementitious clay, the unpaved forest-service road will likely remain passable to an all-wheel-drive vehicle for hours yet. In this fierce deluge, however, where the roadbed is a more porous soil, even the Rover, jacked up on wide tires, will be at risk of bogging down.
Asher has the same trail maps that the escapees are using, and he knows the best place to lie in wait for them. At the end of a box canyon, two ridgelines meet—the one they headed for after breaking out of the church, and the second ridge that intersects with the first at the end of the canyon. This service road crosses ridge number one a quarter of a mile from that junction. But if Asher becomes stuck before he gets there and has to proceed on foot, he will never catch up with Poole and Fielding.
His best option is to turn around while he is still on firm hardpan—even that is getting greasy—hurry back to Zipporah, and go overland to the county road. Open fields, thatched with grass and weeds and brambles, offer sufficient traction to ensure he will make it to the paved highway.
Even though the storm has gotten so powerful so fast that he is forced to change his plan, he isn’t worried. If they have chosen the best trail—the one leading most directly out of the mountains and down to Lake Sapphire, to the nearest inhabited ranch, Rustling Willows—he can be at the eastern shore of the lake maybe two hours before they are. He’ll be ready to cut them down with the shotgun, load their bodies in the SUV, and take them back to the basement of the church, to add them to the necropolis, where they belong.
If the boy has been foolish and set out on another, harder trail, Ophelia won’t be able to meet the challenge, being a soft suburban girl in pink-and-tan running shoes. She’ll wear out quickly or take a fall and break a bone. Even if the damn kid doesn’t become burdened with her, he won’t have the skills or strength to take on the mountains and storm without his father, the renowned historian and man of action now flavoring the corpse stew under the church.
In any case, Nature does not favor them as she favors Asher, for they have not cut from themselves the power to breed and ruin the world. As a reward for Asher’s supreme sacrifice, green Nature will bring gray death to the snarky bitch and the boy, either by her hand or by Asher’s.
69
These were the moments for which the Tac Light batteries had been saved: the bald and weathered stone so smooth in places that the rain waxed it to a dangerous slickness, other places where the broad crest abruptly narrowed and the former slope became a sheer drop to one side or both. Now the ridge brought them to a two-foot-wide cleft that testified to the power of an ancient seismic action that people of its time might have cited as proof that giants slept in the earth and, when troubled in their sleep, caused havoc on the surface. The light revealed the gap, and in the light, they leaped.
The dangers of this trail were acceptable, because ridgelines afforded hikers a quicker route than lower land. Fewer trees allowed a more direct path, as did less underbrush. Up here, there were no deadfalls, no slopes of brittle shale or loose gravel stone to slide underfoot.
For the most part, the path was wide enough to allow Colson to keep Ophelia at his side rather than lead her and then have to look continually back to be sure she hadn’t fallen behind or gotten in trouble. The trek wasn’t easy on her, but she was game enough, and more than merely game. She didn’t complain, didn’t want to pause to catch her breath or massage sore muscles, and though her inadequate shoes probably caused her pain, she gave no voice to it. Maybe she went to the gym regularly or was a long-distance runner.
Terror and the survival instinct could blunt pain, facilitate greater endurance. Colson had read about that in a science magazine. Maybe it was true, although not everything you read was true just because it was written by a scientist or another expert. His father had taught him as much by comparing how different historians wrote about the same events.
Of course, Ophelia was also driven hard by what happened to her sister. For her, this was about making sense out of a senseless accident, while Colson was motivated by a thirst for vengeance. She wanted to find meaning in tragedy, hope in the face of loss. What he wanted was for his dad’s murderer to suffer horribly and die slowly in the most gruesome manner he could devise. He knew her motive was pure, and his was not. He didn’t care. His father would have told him that he should care, and maybe one day he would. But right now, it was not caring about indulging in vengeance that gave him greater endurance. He was, after all, just thirteen years old, which not long ago his dad had teasingly called “a barbarous age.” When this business was done, he would have a lot of time to make himself into a better man.