Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

“I’m glad I couldn’t see, or I’d have probably died of fright.” He helped her get her feet on the step, then wrapped his arm around her and lifted her down to the ground. “Man, you’re a sight for sore eyes.” He held her close, resting his head on hers and breathing in the scent of her hair. Breathing. He was still breathing.

Metal creaked, and the pickup shifted. Trent grabbed the open door and pulled down on it again, and he was just about to ask Donna to grab the rope from the camper when he spotted the other one already tied to the roll bar right above her head. Donna had put it there so he could tie down the tires once they’d used their air, but he hadn’t needed it.

They needed it now. “Grab that rope and run it up to that tree,” he said. “I don’t want this thing going over again if we can help it.”

“Damn right.” She pulled the loose end of the slipknot and backed up the hill with the coil, ran it around the closest tree and pulled it tight, then wrapped it around the trunk again and started a bowline knot. The tree looked stout enough; a foot thick at the base, and at least thirty feet tall. There were just a few branches up high, all pointing up at the same angle, which gave the whole tree the look of a huge arrow that had buried itself point-first in the ground. The branches looked a little like the trees themselves, bare and straight except for a tuft of needles at the outer end of each one.

Beyond the tops of the trees, a bird circled high above the top of the ridge. The sky was dark blue, darker than Earth’s sky even in Rock Springs, where the elevation made it bluer than most places. The air was definitely thinner here. There were still clouds, though; a couple of puffy ones out in the distance and some high wisps of horsetail overhead.

“Try that,” Donna said when she finished her knot.

Trent let up on the door. The rope tightened, and the pickup shifted, but it didn’t go over, even when he let the door swing closed.

“Whee-oo,” he said, standing back and looking again at the hillside they had come down. “That was some pretty damned good driving, little girl.”

“I didn’t do half of it,” she said, picking her way carefully back down toward him. The hillside was dotted with round-topped rocks that looked good and slick, so she had to watch her footing. “We were jouncing around so bad, I only got my hands on the wheel a couple of times.”

“Well, that was a couple of trees we didn’t hit. You did great.” The pickup had come to rest in a pretty good pile of rocks, too, but it seemed to have shoved most of them aside rather than bouncing over them. That was good; without the rear tires, it wouldn’t take much to smash the wheel motors.

Trent was sweating like a pig inside his Ziptite suit, even though the air temperature was probably only sixty degrees or so. He peeled the suit down around his waist, then sat down on the ground and pulled it off his legs. He helped Donna out of hers, rolled them up together, and took them inside the camper. While he was there, he popped open the fridge, which was a total mess inside now, and rummaged through it until he found a couple cans of beer. He wiped off the orange juice against his pants and carried them back outside.

“Now there’s a good idea,” Donna said, taking one of the cans from him.

“Careful when you open that,” he said. “It got shook up pretty good.”

“No shit.”

Trent let the pressure out slowly, then opened the can and took a long swallow. This was what beer was supposed to taste like, and this was just about the best occasion for a beer he had ever had.

“Here’s to landings you can walk away from,” he said, tapping his can against Donna’s.

“Walk is the word,” she said. “I think our four-wheelin’ days are probably over in this truck.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” he said. “This is a tough old beast. We may not have a lot of battery juice left, but once I get the wheels back on ’er, we can coast a hell of a long ways.”

He peered around the side of the camper to see just how far that might be, and wasn’t surprised to discover that they were maybe a thousand feet up a mountainside. It was peppered with more arrow-shaped trees and rocks and bushes, and the slope led down toward a valley that led out to an open plain.

Now that he was on the driver’s side, he could see why the pickup was listing so far over. It wasn’t just the slope of the hill; the left front wheel was missing, too. With only one lug nut holding it on, and loosely at that, it was no wonder. The first sideways impact had probably stripped the nut right off the bolt, and the tire had bounded down the hill on its own.

He looked for signs of it below. There were marks on the trunks of some of the trees where stuff had tumbled down the slope and smacked into them, but it was hard to tell what was done by rocks and what might have been from the tire. Wherever it had gone, though, it was a long ways downhill.

Donna came up beside him. “I was trying for that flat stuff out there,” she said, pointing, “but we were so close to the atmosphere and so far inland that it was almost on the horizon by the time I could get the crosshairs lined up on it. The computer must have thought I was pointing at the mountains.”

Trent shivered at the memory of hanging onto the door frame while the top of the atmosphere tried to blow him loose. He said, “Given how fast you had to pick a place, I’d say you did pretty damned good.”

“Well, thanks for saying so.” She turned once around, taking in their surroundings. “So now what?”

“Parachute first,” he said, setting his beer on a rock. The rock shifted a little, and he thought better of using it for a table, digging the can into the dirt beside it instead. He and Donna lifted the nylon parachute free of the bushes and stretched it out along the hill beside the pickup, then folded it up. The pickup was leaning over so far that Trent was able to pack the chute into its pod without climbing up onto the cab, which was a good thing because he wouldn’t have trusted the rope to hold it with his weight on there as well. As it was, he got the job done as fast as he could and backed away again. Last thing he needed was to get crushed by his own pickup after all the other things that had happened today.

He looked for his beer, found it a foot or so farther away from the rock than he’d remembered setting it, but didn’t give it a second thought. His mind was on the pickup.

“We need to lift this thing up and get it level again,” he said. He set his beer back down next to the rock, went around to the back and got the jack out of the camper, then pulled the tire out and laid it flat on the ground, too. If he put that on the left front side, the pickup would be nearly level.

He had to go around front to find a spot where he could fit the jack in under the shock mount, thanking his lucky stars that he had a screw jack. There was just room to slide it in between the dirt and the flange. He fit the crank into the slot, then backed out as far as he could and spun it a couple of times until it started to lift, but just as he expected, the pickup began to slide forward. He would need to chock the tires—well, the one remaining tire—to keep it from taking off downhill.

The rock he’d set his beer next to would be perfect. He went around to the back and picked it up, surprised at how light it was. Was the gravity lower here than on Earth? He hadn’t noticed much difference in his own weight, but then he was so pumped on adrenaline at the moment that he wasn’t sure he could tell.

Light or not, the rock had a good flat bottom. It was shaped a little like an army helmet, only half again that size. It was smooth as a river rock, which made Trent wonder what it was doing on a mountainside, but that didn’t matter as long as it would serve as a wheel chock. He carried it around to the passenger side, where he wedged it in front of the tire, then he went back to the camper for a handful of lug nuts and the wrench. Might as well snug down the tire that was already mounted before he put any more weight on it and snapped off its stud, too.