The Hunter

Cal swings the car hard left, up the mountain road. He says, “Shut your fucking mouth or I’ll kill you myself.” What he means is If anything’s happened to the kid I’ll kill you myself. He’s not clear on how exactly this is Johnny’s doing, but he has no doubt that it is.

Up the road in front of them, too close, is the fire. It backlights the trees with a ruthless, pulsing orange. Cal is wishing for Trey with such ferocity that every time they round a bend he truly expects to see her in the headlights, loping down the path, but there’s no sign of any human creature. He drives one-handed to check his phone: nothing from Lena.

At the fork where Rushborough was dumped, Cal hits the brakes. He doesn’t dare take the car any farther; they’ll need it safe to get them out of here, if they come back. He grabs his water bottle and the raggedy towel he keeps for wiping down his windows, soaks the towel, and tears it in two. “Here,” he says, tossing half at Johnny. “You’re coming with me. It might take two to get her out. Give me any hassle and I’ll throw your ass in there.” He jerks his chin uphill, at the fire.

“Fuck you,” Johnny says. “You were only a lift. I’d be here with or without you.” He jumps out of the car and starts up the path towards his house, wrapping the towel round his head, without waiting for Cal to catch up.

Cal has never been near a fire before. His old job brought him to the aftermath of a few, soggy black ash and sour reek, sulky threads of smoke curling here and there, but that was no kind of preparation for this. It sounds like a tornado, a vast relentless roar sliced through by crashes, squeals, groans, sounds that gain added terror from their incomprehensibility. Above the treetops, smoke boils in great rolls against the sky.

Johnny can only be a few paces ahead, but the dusk is coming down hard, the air is hazy, and the fluttering glow confuses everything. “Johnny!” Cal yells. He’s afraid Johnny won’t hear him, but after a moment there’s an answering shout. He heads for it, makes out a shape, and grabs Johnny’s arm. “Stay close,” he yells in Johnny’s ear.

They hurry up the path with their elbows clumsily locked together, heads bent, like they’re fighting through a blizzard. The heat charges at them like a solid thing trying to wrestle them back. Every instinct in Cal’s body is clawing at him to obey; he has to force his muscles to keep moving forward.

He knows Trey could already be long gone, by some hidden back trail, or else trapped behind the flames where he’ll never reach her. The air is blurred with smoke and whirling with blazing scraps riding the currents. A hare hurls itself across the path, practically under their feet, without a glance their way.

The crackling roar has grown to something almost too furious to hear. Up ahead, the path disappears into a billowing wall of smoke. They come to a standstill, without meaning to, in the face of its immensity.

The Reddy place is behind that, and everything behind that is gone. Cal twists the wet rag tighter around his head and takes a deep breath. He feels Johnny do the same.

For a splintering second, the thing hobbling out of the smoke looks like no living human. Blackened, lopsided, juddering, it’s one of the mountain’s hidden dead, woken and animated by the flames. Cal’s hair rises. Beside him, a sound comes out of Johnny.

Then Cal blinks and sees Trey, smoke-blotched and limping, one arm spasming from the pressure of her makeshift crutch. Before his mind even figures out whether she’s dead or alive, he’s running for her.

—

Trey’s senses have split apart. She sees Cal’s eyes and for some reason her dad’s, she hears their voices saying words, she feels arms across her back and under her thighs, but none of those things connect. Smoke floats between them, keeping them separate. She’s nowhere, moving too fast.

“Keep her foot up,” Cal says. There’s a hard bump as her arse hits the ground.

It jolts things back into focus. She’s sitting on the dirt, with her back up against the tire of Cal’s car. Her dad, bent over with his hands on his thighs, is panting. Thin streams of smoke drift, unhurried, down the path and between the trees. Below them, twilight covers the road and the heather; uphill, the mountain is blazing.

“Kid,” Cal says, close to her face. His head is covered in something red and white; the parts of his face that show are smudged and sweaty. “Kid, listen to me. Can you breathe OK? Anything hurt?”

Trey’s ankle hurts like fuck, but that feels irrelevant. “Nah,” she says. “I can breathe.”

“OK,” Cal says. He stands up, pulling the towel off his head, and winces as he rolls one shoulder. “Let’s get you in the car.”

“Not me, man,” Johnny says, lifting his hands, still breathing hard. “I’m not chancing my arm going back. I was lucky to get outa there alive.”

“Whatever,” Cal says. “Trey. In the car. Now.”