Fire on Headless Mountain, page 13
Virgil couldn’t see where he was going, and he didn’t turn around to look. When he tangled his feet in a pile of branches and sprawled onto the culvert’s floor, the mountain lion bounded toward him. It covered six feet in one leap, another six in a second, and crouched to leap again.
“No!” shouted Virgil.
It stopped and stared at him. Its tail swung slowly back and forth. It snarled that hiss and growl that made Virgil cold with fear.
The helicopter still hovered outside. Certain that it would leave at any moment, Virgil moved right back to the end of the culvert. He took a glance over his shoulder—just a glance—and saw a tangle of crisscrossing branches clogging the exit. In that moment, the mountain lion moved four feet toward him.
Virgil’s shoulders were against the branches, and he couldn’t go any farther. He turned around and started tearing them loose from the metal.
Through the first gap that he made, he saw the shadow of the helicopter cast onto the smoke like a giant dragonfly.
“Wait!” he screamed. “Don’t leave!”
He pulled away another branch, not even looking back at the mountain lion. But through the next gap he made, Virgil saw a metal bar.
Behind the branches, the culvert was blocked by an iron grate welded to a hoop.
Virgil grabbed the bars and shook them. They rattled in their hoop with a clang that echoed through the culvert. When he looked over his shoulder he saw the mountain lion crouching, less than fifteen feet away.
“Go away!” he shouted. But the mountain lion didn’t move. With its yellow eyes glaring, it pulled back its lips and let out that terrifying shriek that had come from the forest, that scream like a tortured woman’s.
“No,” said Virgil. “Please.” He pressed himself back against the grate and yelled through the bars, hoping someone in the helicopter would hear him. “I’m in here. Help me!”
The mountain lion swished its tail. Its eyes narrowed, and its ears pulled back.
“Go away!” Virgil shouted again. He tore branches from the grate and hurled them at the mountain lion.
It lowered its head and crouched on the mud, ready to leap right at him.
41
A Flash of Orange
The helicopter tipped back and reeled across the road. Joshua looked down through the window as it tilted, and he saw Rusty lying on its side.
The grass at the side of the road was on fire. White smoke billowed over the Boneyard, hiding everything below.
With a flash of orange, the van exploded. The shock wave tossed the helicopter six feet higher and sent it spinning over the trees.
42
Down Here!
The explosion shook the grate. A rush of air blasted through the bars, hitting Virgil from behind. It slammed him face down in the mud.
It made the mountain lion turn and race away.
When Virgil looked up he saw it dashing down the culvert with its claws screeching on the metal. A streak of yellow with its tail between its legs, it leaped from the culvert and disappeared into the smoke.
Virgil grabbed his bundle and followed it. Like a hunched little gnome, he waddled down the pipe. With his ears ringing from the explosion, he couldn’t hear the helicopter or anything else. He tumbled from the culvert, jumped to his feet, and flung his hands toward the sky.
“Down here!” he shouted. “I’m down here!”
He was half a minute too late. The helicopter was soaring up above the trees. In a moment, it was gone.
Just down the road, Rusty was a burning hulk. The tires were burning, the canvas was black and charred, and the roof was a splintered chunk of shattered fiberglass.
With the fire all around, Virgil had nowhere to go except back into the culvert or down the road. He thought of the mountain lion somewhere nearby, looking for its own place to hide. He imagined it coming back, trapping him inside the culvert. He could still get away from the fire, but what chance would he have with a hungry mountain lion?
“There’s nothing more dangerous than a mountain lion.”
Without another thought, Virgil started running. Past the burning van and on along the Boneyard, he ran for his life.
43
All Alone on the Boneyard
Virgil had never felt more alone. Smoke covered his world in a white fog and soaked up the sounds. The crunching of his shoes on the gravel sounded unnatural, and the blustery breath of the fire seemed to come from every direction.
He passed the sign for Mile 47 as the road curved downhill. Worried that the mountain lion might be stalking him, he walked right down the middle, watching the bushes on either side. But there seemed to be nothing alive in that world except for him. There were no birds to sing or chatter, no bugs to whine around his head. There were no shadows and there was no light, only the endless gray of the smoke, as thick as chowder. Tree branches loomed from the fog one after the other, shaggy arms reaching out to grab him.
Before he passed Mile 49, Virgil saw a sign for the Sasquatch museum. Below the silhouette of a shaggy, slouching Sasquatch, the sign promised ice cream and frozen bait, “half a mile ahead.”
The thought of ice cream made his mouth water. But Virgil thought he would walk right past the museum without stopping. He remembered his mother’s fear of the place, her eerie inner sense that something awful would happen there.
But in that half mile, everything changed.
The smoke took on a thick, red glow. Virgil heard the fire storming through the forest behind him and felt himself on the edge of fear, wanting to run as fast as he could. He let himself jog, though the smoke made him cough as it thickened around him.
Soon he couldn’t see from one side of the road to the other, so he kept close to the edge. When the skull of a bighorn sheep loomed beside him, staring back with gaping holes where the eyes had been, he knew he’d arrived at the Sasquatch museum.
The skull still had its long, curled horns attached. Pinned beside it were the leg bones, arranged in the X from a pirate’s flag. Every ten feet there was another skull, or another arrangement of bones, all held to the fence with zip ties. As one faded behind, another appeared ahead.
Virgil remembered his mother’s reaction the last time they drove past the museum, how she shivered at the sight of the skulls. The fog faded in his mind, replaced by a sunny day.
---
He’s rolling down the Boneyard in Rusty, his whole family looking forward to a picnic at the lookout overseeing the Bigfoot River.
They know they’re getting close to the Sasquatch museum. Joshua says, “Can we stop for ice cream?” He knows they won’t, because they never do. He’s asking just for a laugh.
Virgil’s mom closes her eyes and covers them with her hands. “I’m not going to look,” she says. “Tell me when we’ve passed it.”
She does the same thing every year. But no matter how hard she tries, she can’t stop herself from looking. She cracks her fingers apart, opens one eye, and peers at the skulls tied to the fence, at the things that hang from the trees.
It’s like passing an accident with people still stuck in their cars. Dad can’t help slowing the van and turning his head to gawk. Neither can Kaitlyn nor Joshua. Neither can Virgil, though looking makes him feel dirty somehow, as though he’s seeing things he shouldn’t be seeing.
“This place gives me the willies,” says Mom. “I’m sure something bad will happen here.”
“That’s not very scientific,” says Kaitlyn.
Mom agrees. “No, it’s not. I can’t explain it, but I know it’s true.”
---
Virgil could barely see the things in the trees. They hung far enough from the road that they might have been only shadows. But they gave him the same queasy feeling that he’d felt the first time he’d seen them, through Rusty’s window years before. His dad had wondered why anyone would do a thing like that.
At the museum’s driveway, a sign was nailed to a post.
ICE CREAM
PIZZA
FREE PARKING
When he saw it, Virgil slipped back to their very first trip down the Boneyard.
---
They’ve passed the skulls and the bones and the things in the trees, and they’re all a bit shocked. When Joshua sees the sign, he points it out with a laugh.
“Hey, there’s free parking, Dad,” he says.
“Well, as tempting as that is,” says Dad, “I don’t think we’ll stop here.”
Mom isn’t even smiling. She stares grimly at the sign as they pass it.
“In India there’s an animal called the mugger crocodile,” she says. “It lives in a pond surrounded by trees. In the springtime, when the birds begin nesting, it arranges sticks across its nose and lies in wait by the water. When the birds come gathering sticks, they find a nice selection at the crocodile’s pond. But when they land to get them, they get eaten instead. This place reminds me of that.”
---
Through the smoke in the driveway, Virgil could just make out the ATCO trailer that housed the museum. He didn’t want to go any closer, not with his mother’s words fresh in his memory: “Something bad will happen here.”
That was the only time she’d ever claimed to have a premonition. She had never believed in that sort of thing. But Virgil did, and he wondered if the terrible thing his mom had seen was about to happen right then.
He was scared—not just of the museum and the Bugaboo Man but of the fire coming behind him. He was thirsty and hungry and tired and sore, and it would be too hard to turn away and keep walking down the road. Virgil switched the bundled box to his left hand and started up the driveway.
He heard the purring of a generator as he reached the ATCO trailer. Up three wooden steps, he came to a little porch made of moldering wood. There was one window in the wall, with iron bars across the glass. A light was burning inside.
Virgil knocked on the door, but nobody answered.
He tried the handle. It turned easily, and the door swung open.
Inside was one big room, with a wooden Sasquatch standing on a platform covered with moss and river rock. Carved by a chainsaw, from a single log, it was tall enough that the top of its head nearly touched the ceiling.
Display cases with glass tops were arranged along the walls. A set of shelves was stuffed with T-shirts and ball caps, and in the corner stood an ice cream cooler. The sight of it made Virgil drool.
“Hello,” he shouted. Then again, louder. “HELLO?”
The cooler switched itself on with a click and a hum. The ceiling lights flickered, then brightened again as the sound of the generator murmured through the wall.
Virgil walked straight to the cooler and put his hands on the cold lid. Staring down through the glass, he saw one lonely looking Bomb Pop lying on a wire shelf.
He felt like a bird looking at the mugger crocodile’s tempting sticks. But he couldn’t stop himself from opening the lid. A thin cloud of cold air spilled from the cooler, frosting the glass.
Only once in his life had Virgil ever taken something without paying for it. He’d been in kindergarten then, and he had stolen a candy bar from the corner store. His dad had found out and had made him go back to pay for it. And apologize. “You can’t steal from anyone without stealing from yourself,” his dad had said. “You rob yourself of dignity.”
Virgil looked over his shoulder. For a third time, he shouted hello. When nobody answered, he reached down and took the Bomb Pop.
He ate it right there, as fast as he could, without even bothering to close the cooler. He loved the cold, crunchy zing against his teeth, the icy thrill of each bite sliding down his throat. The Bomb Pop was gone in a moment, but Virgil’s hunger was still there, aching in his stomach. Reaching down into the cooler, he broke off the film of frost and ice at the bottom and ate that as well.
Only then did he close the lid and look around the museum. He wandered along the row of display cases, barely stopping as he passed them. The first held a plaster casting of a big footprint, the second a clump of hair that might have been a dog’s, the third a collection of blurry photographs. As he leaned on the glass to study them, he heard rain patter heavily against the trailer.
It was the nicest sound that Virgil had ever heard, and it made him smile and sigh. Hoping to soak himself in a downpour, he ran outside. But the smoky air looked as hot and dry as ever. It wasn’t raining at all.
This made no sense to Virgil until he walked around the back of the trailer. A mobile home sat in a sea of junk, with a radio antenna poking up above the roof and an old Dodge truck parked beside it. Sitting on the open tailgate was a man as round as Humpty Dumpty. He had a huge, round belly, no neck at all, and skinny little legs sticking out from a pair of shorts. He was spraying the ATCO trailer with water from a garden hose, and he was drinking Mountain Dew from a plastic bottle. A half-empty case sat beside him.
He didn’t look very scary for a Bugaboo Man. He was wearing a baseball cap—the same as the ones in the museum—and a colorful T-shirt that his made his belly look like a beach ball balanced on his lap. A pair of yellow flip-flops dangled from his tiny feet.
The water spewing from the hose made a glistening rainbow as it drummed on the roof. Virgil wanted nothing more than to stand in that spray and get wet, to drink till he couldn’t drink any more.
The man turned his head and looked right at Virgil. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “Don’t you know there’s a fire coming, you dumb kid?”
“I’m trying to get away from it,” said Virgil. “I was hoping you could help me.”
“Maybe.” The man looked slowly down to Virgil’s feet and slowly up again, as though measuring him. “Yeah, I think I can help you.”
“Do you have a telephone?”
“Nope. Phones don’t work down here.”
“A radio?”
The man shook his head.
Virgil nodded toward the mobile home. “You’ve got an antenna.”
“It’s busted.”
“How can an antenna get busted?” asked Virgil.
“I mean the radio, dummy.”
Virgil wondered what sort of help the man could give him. “Can you drive me out in the truck?” he asked.
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“Busted.”
It seemed that everything the man owned was busted. But the generator kept humming away, powering the water pump and the ice-cream cooler that now sat empty in the ATCO trailer. Virgil felt the same unease that his mother had talked about.
The man was watching him. Every time he breathed, his lip fluttered back, showing his teeth. Virgil decided to keep going to Little Lost Lake. But, first, he craved water.
“Can I have a drink?” he asked.
The man tossed the hose at Virgil’s feet. It writhed like a green snake, hissing water from the nozzle. Virgil caught it by its head and took a long drink that tasted of rubber. But to Virgil it seemed delicious.
“Wet your shirt,” said the man.
“Why?” asked Virgil.
“It lets you breathe.” The man pulled the collar of his T-shirt wide open. He ducked his mouth inside it.
Virgil understood right away. The wet shirt would do more than filter the smoke. It would make an oxygen mask as the water evaporated. Virgil drenched his shirt, and when he pulled it over his mouth he breathed clearly and deeply for the first time that day.
The man held out his hand. “Give me back the hose.”
Virgil hesitated. What if the man grabbed his hand instead of the hose? As fat as he was, he looked powerfully strong.
“Bring it here,” said the man, waggling his fingers.
But Virgil didn’t move any closer. He threw it onto the tailgate, and it landed across the man’s legs.
As it slithered away, the man had to scramble to catch it. He aimed the spray of water at the wall, playing it from side to side. “So what’s in the bundle?” he asked.
Virgil tightened his arm around the wooden box. “My mother’s ashes.”
“Show me.”
Virgil opened the bundle just enough to uncover the wooden box.
The man grunted. “So why are you lugging your mother’s ashes around in a burning forest?”
“We were taking them to Little Lost Lake,” said Virgil. “Then our van broke down and we—”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“My brother and sister and me.”
“So where are they?”
“My brother went for help,” said Virgil. Then he added quickly, “My sister’s right behind me.”
The man looked off toward the road, then back at Virgil. His eyes were puffy, ringed with folds of fat. Whenever he breathed, his lip curled back, showing his teeth. “Now I don’t think you’re telling the truth,” he said. “I think you got separated somehow, and nobody knows where you are.”
“We’re supposed to meet up,” said Virgil.
“Yeah. Down at the lake, I’m guessing.”
Virgil fiddled with the towel that wrapped up the box. He was afraid the man could see through his eyes and know what he was thinking. “I’m going to keep going,” he said.
“To the lake?”
“Yeah.”
“You won’t make it,” said the man. “Not with this fire. She’s going to burn up the whole valley.”
“Then why are you still here?” asked Virgil.
“It’s my home. It’s all I got.” The man gestured at the rundown trailer and the piles of junk. “The National Guard came to get me in a helicopter. I told them, I’m not leaving. I’m going to fight it, I said. They said okay, but you’re on your own.”
“What are you going to do?” asked Virgil.
“I’m doing it.” The man played the water across the wall and up on the roof again. “I’ll soak it down till the fire comes. Then I’ll sit inside and wait her out.”
Virgil had seen the forest burning and the van exploding, and he didn’t believe the plan would work. “I don’t think you can help me,” he said. “I’m going to the lake.”
“No. Wait,” said the man. “I’ll show you something.”
