Ridley Pearson - Killer Summer

“No way,” she hissed, resisting.

“Way,” he said. “I may need you to save me.”

“Right…”

“Remember, you’re the prize, not me. We can’t let you get caught.”

He eased her down the steps, found their way along the stack of firewood, and reached the tarp. It smelled pleasantly of oiled canvas, triggering memories of his father and camping trips.

He sat her down. “Stay here until I come back for you.”

“And what if you don’t?” She sounded angry.

“If we get separated,” he said, not answering her directly, “then we meet at the far end of the runway near the jet. You still have your key. There are radios on the jet as well.”

He pulled the tarp over her head before she could reply. He tucked it around her. He flicked the light once to make sure she was covered, then waited a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the dark again.

“… ud… uck…” Her voice muffled by the tarp. She’d either said “Good luck” or “Get fucked.”

Kevin headed back to the door that led into the lodge.

Walt paced the Incident Command Center. His father had come through with the last-known whereabouts and vectors for the jet. The Mountain Home Air Force Base refused to admit they had radar capable of seeing into the mountains, so none of the information that Walt was given was official. And, since it wasn’t official, Walt wasn’t supposed to know that a pair of fighters had been scrambled to find the jet and shoot it down, if necessary, because it had been stolen. Walt reminded his father that he’d delayed reporting the jet as stolen in order to avoid what to him was a predictable response. His father had told him he couldn’t have it both ways, and to meet him in sixty minutes when he landed.

Evelyn Holmes, a civilian employee of Walt’s who typically ran numbers, approached Walt.

“Evelyn,” he greeted her. He had no time to discuss budget but didn’t want to seem dismissive. As a civilian, she had no business being in the Incident Command Center, but he wasn’t about to throw her out.

“Word is, you’re looking for someone to calculate a flight path.”

“As it’s been explained to me,” he said, not wanting to insult her, “it’s complicated stuff. Speed in the air, speed over ground, rate of descent, the fact that the engines are constantly losing thrust…”

“May I take a look at the data?”

“Sure. I don’t mean this the way it sounds, but, from what Steven Garman says, it is rocket science.”

“I was awarded my Phil-D in astrophysics from Imperial College, London.”

“You have a Ph.D.,” he said.

“And a master’s in material sciences.”

She was working for him for just a few dollars more than minimum wage.

“This valley…” he said.

“My son wanted to compete at the national level in snowboarding. His father and I made some sacrifices.”

“But you’ve been here-”

“Six years, yes. He broke his ankle and blew out his knee in his second season. His snowboarding career was over. But we all fell in love with this place. No way we were going back to southern California.”

He showed her what little information they had on the Learjet.

“I need to predict possible airports and landing strips,” he said.

Evelyn gave a cursory look at the data and grunted. “Okay, I’m on it,” she said.

A deputy knocked and entered the room. He hesitated at the threshold under the glare of everyone’s attention.

“Well?” Walt called out.

“EOC has a report of a UFO… That’s right, Sheriff, you heard me right… Seen south, southeast of Stanley. A yellow light, not running lights, that just hovered there in the sky for about a minute, then sank slowly over the horizon and vanished. EOC thought it might be your jet.”

“Give what you’ve got to Evelyn,” Walt said.

“The guy making the call is retired Navy. Made a big point of that. Didn’t want to be taken as a quack. He gave us his location in lat/long.”

“In order for it to appear not to be moving,” Evelyn said, accepting the note from the deputy, “he would have had to have been directly behind it, looking in its exact line of flight. I can work with that.”

Walt referenced a map that was projected on one of the overhead screens as Evelyn drew a line north, northwest across Stanley.

“There’s nothing out here,” he said. “No airports. There aren’t even roads.”

“Given the jet’s rate of descent, it went down somewhere here,” Evelyn said. She drew a line perpendicular to the first line, like crossing a T. She glanced at the wall clock. “Twenty to twenty-five minutes ago.”

“Went down?” Walt said.

Kevin opened the door that led from the garage/storage into the lodge, listened for signs of life, and, hearing none, sneaked inside. Adrenaline-charged and terrified, he hoped to find a phone or a radio. Since the death of his father, he’d manipulated his mother, banked on friends’ pity, bargained for better grades from his teachers, and underperformed for his employers. Only his uncle wouldn’t cut him any slack. And now, of all the people, it was his uncle that he found himself emulating.

Coats hung on pegs to the left, boots were lined up neatly next to a rough-planked bench. The coats were all big, the boots all the same size: large. Kevin worked his way down the hallway, past the kitchen, and into a living room. It was furnished with couches, overstuffed chairs, and a dining table and chairs. In the oversized fireplace, the remnants of a summer night’s fire glowed.

The room was unintentionally shabby chic. The furniture didn’t match; there were wrought-iron lamps with cowhide lampshades, a deer-antler chandelier over the table. There were no bright colors or flowers. The tone was more hunting lodge than family getaway.

While the cowboy appeared to live alone, this notion was contradicted by a better view of the kitchen, with its eight-burner range and twin refrigerators.

He was the caretaker, was more like it.

Searching for a phone and not finding one, Kevin didn’t panic. Summer had told him about the radio and portable GPS in her father’s emergency bag on the jet. If Kevin struck out here, with the right distraction he might be able to return there.

Just when he was about to give up, he spotted a radio atop of a walnut cabinet. Its face was dark, and a handheld microphone on a spiraled black cord was hanging from it that reminded him of the CB radio in his uncle’s Cherokee.

Kevin heard deep voices rumbling through the wall, and he looked out the window to the top of the stairs, where the cowboy was talking to the copilot from the jet. The two men turned toward the lodge.

He now rushed to the radio, switched it on, grabbed the microphone, and hit the TALK button.

“Mayday! Mayday!” he whispered. “I’m at some lodge… on the Middle Fork, I think. Our plane went down… a jet. There are guys after me… the guys who took the jet.”

He heard the cowboy’s boots and the pilot’s shoes clomping up the steps of the lodge.

Replacing the microphone, ducking down, and making for the nearest door, he looked back to see he’d left the radio on. At that moment, the front doorknob was turning. Only then did he spot the open gun case to the far right of the door. It held at least five rifles.

He hurried through the door and found himself in the study, with its two-person couch, beat-up recliner, and flat-screen television mounted on the wall. There was a cowhide under the harvest-table desk, and on the walls a pair of snowshoes, a brass clock, and some old black-and-white photographs. The fireplace was constructed of river rock, with a wide hearth for sitting close to the flames, and nearby was a closet with sliding doors. The room smelled sweetly of pine sap and pipe smoke, and it felt like it would be a cozy place to spend a long snowed-in day.