Fire on Headless Mountain, page 2
The Lightning Strike
The lightning storm sparked seven fires in the fifty miles around Headless Mountain. Thunder was still booming in the valley as hotshot crews headed off to fight them.
They started with the ones that threatened homes and buildings, the ones that were easy to reach, the ones that a helicopter could put out with a single bucket of water. But they didn’t need to fight them all.
Fires are good for the forests. They clean out the old, dead wood and make room for new growth. Just as people build new cities on top of old ones, forests flourish on the ashes of others. So a few are left to burn for days or weeks at a time.
The most remote of those seven fires began with the last lightning bolt that Virgil had spotted through Rusty’s windshield. On the other side of Headless Mountain, in the valley he couldn’t see, a giant tree was burning.
It was a Douglas fir as old as America. When Paul Revere set out on his midnight ride, it was a sapling with a trunk as thin as a finger. By the time Virgil was born, it was as tall as a building with twenty-five stories. Centuries of fire, wind, and snow had blackened its bark and chopped away its limbs. A survivor of summer drought and winter storms, of fire, flood, and plague, it had seemed immortal—until the lightning struck.
A billion volts of electricity shot through the tree, and in that instant it exploded. The branches blew off; the top sheared away; the trunk split open for a hundred feet. Inside, the sap began to boil, and clouds of steamy smoke wrapped around the tree like the windings of a mummy.
Though nearly chopped in half, the tree was still standing. Deep inside the splintered trunk, yellow flames flickered at the dark core known as the heartwood. A column of old, dead cells stronger than steel, it made up the backbone of the tree. If the storm brought rain, or if firefighters arrived in time, the tree could still survive.
But if the flames ate through the heartwood, it would soon come crashing down.
3
Old Rusty
Kaitlyn kicked off her sandals and plonked her bare feet on the dashboard. Her skin was darkly tanned, tattooed with white strips where the sandal straps had been. Her toes reminded Virgil of little brown sausages, and he cringed at the sight of them pressing against the windshield. His mom had sat in that same way in that same place, and the soles of her sneakers had printed checkerboard patterns on the glass. They were still there, though as faint as tire tracks on a rainy road, and Virgil didn’t want anything to rub them away.
Kaitlyn wriggled her toes, rubbing those little sausages against the windshield. Virgil wanted to yell at her, “Don’t do that!” But he knew she wouldn’t understand. She would turn toward Joshua with that look Virgil hated, the smile that said, Do you think Virgil will ever grow up?
He looked away. Through the window above the tiny sink, he stared at the blur of trees going by. Every three minutes a yellow sign with black numbers appeared, counting the miles from the highway.
At Mile 24, Joshua picked up the imaginary microphone of an imaginary CB radio. “Breaker, breaker,” he said. “This is Big Virgil.”
From Kaitlyn he got a grin and a bright little laugh. But Virgil only groaned.
Every year it was the same thing. Somewhere along the Boneyard, Joshua clicked that imaginary microphone and reminded everyone of the time that Virgil had pretended to be a logging-truck driver. With a paper plate for a steering wheel, he had guided his big rig down the road from Rusty’s back seat, calling out the miles as the signs went by, warning oncoming trucks that he was coming. His microphone had been a potato peeler, his gear shift a wooden spoon. At the time, it had seemed as real as his memories. He’d imagined the thundering roar of a big Cummins diesel; the answering crackle over his radio from another driver roaring toward him loaded with logs; the throttling sound of his engine brake as he edged over to let the other truck go by. Now it embarrassed him to think about it.
With every sign that passed, they were another mile farther from the highway, another mile deeper into the wilderness. At Mile 28, he began to worry. He remembered a sentence he’d read in a book just two days before; he heard it in his head.
“People go into that valley and disappear.”
The passing trees became a hypnotizing blur, and Virgil’s eyes took on a faraway look as he slipped into his memories.
---
Kaitlyn is in the living room, stretched out on the couch with a book in her hands. The TV is on, blaring laughter from a sitcom, but she’s not watching it.
“What are you reading?” he asks.
She tilts the book just enough to let him see the cover. The title is written in huge red letters: Blood in the River.
“What’s it about?”
“How Headless Mountain got its name.”
“Oh, everyone knows that,” he says. “It looks like the top was cut off.”
“Wrong.”
“That’s what Mom told me.”
“I know. She told me that too. But it’s still wrong.”
He holds out his hand for the book. “Let me see.”
“No.” Kaitlyn pulls it closer to her chest. “You don’t want to read this, Virg.”
“Why?”
“You’ll have nightmares.”
He scoffs. “Yeah, right.”
“Seriously. I know how you are. You’ll never want to go there again.”
The more Kaitlyn tells him not to read the book, the more he wants to see inside it. But she doesn’t give him a chance until that evening, when she goes out with Josh to meet their friends.
Upstairs, violin music is wailing from the study. Virgil’s dad is locked up in there, writing poetry or something. As quietly as he can, Virgil opens the door to Kaitlyn’s bedroom. He slips inside and closes it softly, holding the handle so the latch won’t make a sound.
He finds the book on her nightstand and sits on the bed to read it. On the back is a blurb in capital letters.
AN EMPTY TENT WITH ITS SIDE TORN OPEN. A DEAD MAN WARMING HIS HANDS AT A FIRE. TERRIFYING SCREAMS IN THE NIGHT.
THESE ARE THE STORIES OF HEADLESS MOUNTAIN AND THE RIVER CALLED THE BIGFOOT. SOMETHING SINISTER LURKS IN THE VALLEY WHERE THE BIGFOOT FLOWS. PEOPLE HAVE TRIED TO EXPLAIN THE STRANGE SOUNDS AND STRANGE SIGHTS. BUT ONLY ONE THING IS KNOWN FOR SURE.
PEOPLE GO INTO THAT VALLEY AND DISAPPEAR.
He knows his sister is right. If he reads the book, he’ll be sorry. But now he can’t stop himself. He cracks it open warily, knowing that something will leap from the pages and scare him.
He finds that thing right away, in a blurry picture and a startling caption. “The way a person hunts animals, a Sasquatch hunts people.”
That word has always frightened him: Sasquatch. Half man, half ape, standing nine feet tall, it bounds from the book and into Virgil’s imagination. Every page he turns to holds a new fright that he knows he’ll never forget.
“It dragged her out of the tent feet first. It hauled her into the forest, into the darkness. She was screaming.”
“I never heard anything like that before, and I hope I never hear it again.”
“It tore off his head. Pssht! Like twisting a cap from a bottle.”
---
A yellow flash in Virgil’s window shocked him from his memory. But he turned his head too late to read the number, and it seemed forever until the next sign appeared. Mile 30.
Eleven miles to go, he thought. At Mile 41 they would cross Trickleback Creek, where Kaitlyn’s book had begun with the most frightening story of all. They would rumble over the old log bridge that his mom had hated so much, and he would feel safer then, with the creek behind them.
“It was at Trickleback Creek that the killing started.”
The words from Kaitlyn’s book still haunted him; he thought they always would.
“When the sun went down the thing came back. One by one it killed them all.”
Virgil didn’t want to think about it. He watched for the mile markers as Rusty barreled down the Boneyard in its cloud of dust. The sign at Mile 31 was peppered by shotgun pellets, and the next was twisted and bent. “Nine more miles to go,” said Virgil to himself. Behind his seat, under the cushions of the folding bed, below a metal cover, the engine clattered away with its throaty roar. But Virgil found comfort in the sound. It made his closed-in world feel warm and safe. Until they passed Mile 33. Then Virgil heard a tiny click he’d never heard before. No louder than a snapping twig, it seemed to him as alarming as a gunshot.
“I think something’s wrong with the engine,” he shouted.
Joshua peered at the gauges on the dashboard. “It looks okay,” he said.
“But—”
“Come on, Virg, it’s good old Rusty.”
That was what their father always said. The van had taken them thirty thousand miles across twenty-two states, and at the end of each trip he’d patted its side and told them, “Good old Rusty. He’s going to run forever.” But Virgil had learned every sound the engine made, every tick, every tock, every rattle and jingle. And he knew that tiny click was just not right.
At Mile 34 he smelled a sweet hotness that tickled his throat. When he looked back he saw a whorl of mist rising from the engine compartment.
“Josh!” he yelled. “It’s smoking!”
Joshua’s face appeared in the rearview mirror, and his eyes suddenly widened. On the dashboard a red light started flashing, and Kaitlyn cried out at the same moment, “You’d better stop!”
“I can’t,” said Joshua. “Not here.”
The road was cut into a hillside, with the forest falling away on the left. On the right the foliage pressed in close to the road, leaving no room to pull over. Joshua kept his foot on the gas, his hands on the wheel, guiding Rusty round a curve.
“There!” shouted Kaitlyn. She pointed ahead at a small gravel pit bulldozed into the slope.
It came up suddenly. Joshua jammed his foot on the brake pedal and spun the steering wheel. Rusty skidded sideways toward the gravel pit and shuddered to a stop at the edge of the road.
Virgil unfastened his seat belt, flung open the sliding door, and tumbled out like a soldier from a helicopter.
The heat of the sun baking down on the Boneyard took his breath away. He looked at Rusty and groaned. “Josh, you’d better come and see this,” he said.
A puddle was oozing out from under the van. Black and steamy, it might have been an alien creature trying to crawl across the gravel. When Joshua saw it, he clamped his head in his hands and groaned.
“Can you fix it?” asked Virgil.
“I don’t know.” Joshua stood in the sunshine with his hands on his head, as though he’d already surrendered. Under his arms, sweat stains made big moon shapes on his T-shirt. “I guess I’d better take a look.”
He walked to the back of the van, opened the hatch, and shoved the cushions aside. When he lifted the lid from the engine compartment, waves of heat shimmered around him, stinking of antifreeze and hot oil. For a moment he staggered backward, then he stepped forward again and leaned over the engine.
“There’s oil all over the place,” he said. “It’s like the engine blew up or something.”
To Virgil, watching from behind, his brother could have been a surgeon bending over a patient. When Joshua thrust his hands down among Rusty’s rubber intestines, Virgil actually believed for a second that he would heal the old van.
But as Joshua poked at the battery cables and jiggled the wires, Virgil realized that that would never happen. Wanting to help, he got down on his knees at the back of the van and leaned underneath to study the engine.
“Get up,” said Joshua. “That stuff’s poisonous. It kills dogs.”
“But I can see where it’s leaking out,” said Virgil.
“Where?”
“Right here. Look.”
Joshua knelt beside Virgil. He peered into the shadows under the van, at a trickle of oil and water dribbling down from the engine. In Spanish he said, “Ay, maldito.”
Virgil didn’t know any Spanish. “What does that mean?” he asked.
“It means I can’t fix it.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s no good. It’s a piece of junk.”
With a sigh, Virgil stood up and walked away. His brother and his father had a lot of things in common: not only a love of language and a deep laugh, but a short fuse as well. For both, it was always quick to fizzle out. But when either sounded frustrated, the best thing to do was leave him alone for a while.
At the side of the road, where it bulged out into the gravel pit, Kaitlyn was jabbing at the screen of her iPhone. She smiled at Virgil as he came up beside her. “Don’t feel bad,” she said. “He’s mad at the van, not at you.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Virgil. He kicked at the gravel, stirring dust with his toes. “I wish Uncle Birdy was here.”
He didn’t mean for his brother to hear him. But Joshua got up from the road with his knees all dusty, tiny grains of gravel stuck in the palms of his hands, and he told Virgil, “Birdy couldn’t fix it. Nobody can.”
“Why?” asked Kaitlyn. She spoke gently, calmly, in a little girl’s voice. “What’s wrong with it, Josh?”
“I don’t know,” said Joshua. “But it’s bad.”
“Could we still drive it?”
“We could start it,” said Joshua. “It just wouldn’t go very far.”
“Why?” she asked, in the same quiet way. “What would happen?”
Exactly as his dad would have done, Joshua sighed and shrugged. “It would seize up for sure. It might even explode. I told you; it’s junk.”
“So what are we going to do?” asked Virgil.
“What do you think?” said Joshua. “We’ll call Dad.”
“Not from here.” Kaitlyn held up her phone. “There’s no signal.”
“Oh, great,” said Joshua. “Then I guess we just wait for someone to come along.”
They stood in the middle of the dusty Boneyard, all three in a row with their shadows so black and perfect that there might have been six people there. All at once, they turned their heads to look up the road, then turned their heads to look down the road. Virgil imagined that his brother and his sister were thinking the same thing that he was thinking.
No one was going to come along.
4
The Lookout
On the other side of Headless Mountain, on the edge of the avalanche chute, a lookout tower poked high above the trees. With a wooden hut perched on four long legs, it looked as spindly as a Tinkertoy set down on the mountainside. Through sixty years of summer storms, a fire watcher had sat at the top with binoculars, scanning the valley for lightning strikes.
From there, the smoke from the burning tree was clearly visible. Pinned down by the high pressure of the summer air, it flowed through the treetops and tumbled slowly into the valley.
But there was no one at the lookout to see the smoke. It had been closed down at the end of the last fire season, decommissioned to save the cost of a fire watcher. The nearest people in any direction were the Peppers, and they were on the other side of Headless Mountain, nearly twenty miles away.
Unseen by anyone, the shattered tree spat fire like a sparkler. All along the heartwood, yellow flames stretched into the air. The whole top section—three times the height of a normal house—was toppling sideways. The wood creaked and splintered, flinging off embers that spiraled away in trails of smoke.
5
House of Horrors
Huge bluebottle flies buzzed back and forth above Virgil’s head. He lay stretched out on Rusty’s back seat, watching them tap at the windows. When he heard footsteps in the gravel, he turned his head to see his brother appear in the doorway.
Joshua’s face was red and sweaty. “You should come outside,” he said. “It’s too hot in there.”
Virgil didn’t move. “It’s not so bad.”
“All right, suit yourself,” said Joshua, too hot to argue. From his pocket he pulled out his cell phone. “I’m going to walk up the road and see if I can get a signal.”
“I’ll go with you!” cried Virgil, already rolling himself off the seat.
Joshua looked surprised. “I thought you wanted to stay here.”
“I changed my mind,” said Virgil.
But Joshua wouldn’t take him along. “You’d better stay here with Kaitlyn,” he said. “In case someone comes by.”
Virgil watched his brother walk away up the Boneyard, so dwarfed by the wilderness that he looked smaller than a Lego man. The sky was open all around, but trees blocked the view in every direction. Only the very top of Headless Mountain rose above them, nearly hidden by branches. When Joshua vanished round the first bend in the road, Virgil felt a deep and sudden loneliness. He called out for his sister. “Hey, Kait?”
“Over here,” she answered.
He had to look around to find her, shading his eyes from the sun. She had crossed the clearing and climbed up the slope to find shade below an alder tree. He walked closer.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I was just thinking,” he said. “What if nobody comes by? What will happen then?”
“Aw, Virg, don’t worry about it. Those big logging trucks drive past here all the time.”
“No, they don’t. It’s been days since one went by.”
“You don’t know that,” she said. “One might have gone by an hour ago.”
Virgil waved his hand toward the other side of the road. “Then why’s there no dust in the trees? Why are there no tracks in the gravel?”
Kaitlyn stood up and walked to the edge of the slope. She stood with her hands on her hips, looking down at the road. It was obvious that he was right. Wherever the logging trucks went, they churned up clouds of dust that coated everything. But there was nothing on the grass or the bushes or the trees beyond them.
“We could be here forever,” said Virgil.
“I don’t think so,” said Kaitlyn. “If no one comes by we can walk. It’s only thirty miles to the highway.”
“Thirty-four.”
“Well, whatever,” she said. “If we left first thing in the morning we’d get out before dark.”
The lightning storm sparked seven fires in the fifty miles around Headless Mountain. Thunder was still booming in the valley as hotshot crews headed off to fight them.
They started with the ones that threatened homes and buildings, the ones that were easy to reach, the ones that a helicopter could put out with a single bucket of water. But they didn’t need to fight them all.
Fires are good for the forests. They clean out the old, dead wood and make room for new growth. Just as people build new cities on top of old ones, forests flourish on the ashes of others. So a few are left to burn for days or weeks at a time.
The most remote of those seven fires began with the last lightning bolt that Virgil had spotted through Rusty’s windshield. On the other side of Headless Mountain, in the valley he couldn’t see, a giant tree was burning.
It was a Douglas fir as old as America. When Paul Revere set out on his midnight ride, it was a sapling with a trunk as thin as a finger. By the time Virgil was born, it was as tall as a building with twenty-five stories. Centuries of fire, wind, and snow had blackened its bark and chopped away its limbs. A survivor of summer drought and winter storms, of fire, flood, and plague, it had seemed immortal—until the lightning struck.
A billion volts of electricity shot through the tree, and in that instant it exploded. The branches blew off; the top sheared away; the trunk split open for a hundred feet. Inside, the sap began to boil, and clouds of steamy smoke wrapped around the tree like the windings of a mummy.
Though nearly chopped in half, the tree was still standing. Deep inside the splintered trunk, yellow flames flickered at the dark core known as the heartwood. A column of old, dead cells stronger than steel, it made up the backbone of the tree. If the storm brought rain, or if firefighters arrived in time, the tree could still survive.
But if the flames ate through the heartwood, it would soon come crashing down.
3
Old Rusty
Kaitlyn kicked off her sandals and plonked her bare feet on the dashboard. Her skin was darkly tanned, tattooed with white strips where the sandal straps had been. Her toes reminded Virgil of little brown sausages, and he cringed at the sight of them pressing against the windshield. His mom had sat in that same way in that same place, and the soles of her sneakers had printed checkerboard patterns on the glass. They were still there, though as faint as tire tracks on a rainy road, and Virgil didn’t want anything to rub them away.
Kaitlyn wriggled her toes, rubbing those little sausages against the windshield. Virgil wanted to yell at her, “Don’t do that!” But he knew she wouldn’t understand. She would turn toward Joshua with that look Virgil hated, the smile that said, Do you think Virgil will ever grow up?
He looked away. Through the window above the tiny sink, he stared at the blur of trees going by. Every three minutes a yellow sign with black numbers appeared, counting the miles from the highway.
At Mile 24, Joshua picked up the imaginary microphone of an imaginary CB radio. “Breaker, breaker,” he said. “This is Big Virgil.”
From Kaitlyn he got a grin and a bright little laugh. But Virgil only groaned.
Every year it was the same thing. Somewhere along the Boneyard, Joshua clicked that imaginary microphone and reminded everyone of the time that Virgil had pretended to be a logging-truck driver. With a paper plate for a steering wheel, he had guided his big rig down the road from Rusty’s back seat, calling out the miles as the signs went by, warning oncoming trucks that he was coming. His microphone had been a potato peeler, his gear shift a wooden spoon. At the time, it had seemed as real as his memories. He’d imagined the thundering roar of a big Cummins diesel; the answering crackle over his radio from another driver roaring toward him loaded with logs; the throttling sound of his engine brake as he edged over to let the other truck go by. Now it embarrassed him to think about it.
With every sign that passed, they were another mile farther from the highway, another mile deeper into the wilderness. At Mile 28, he began to worry. He remembered a sentence he’d read in a book just two days before; he heard it in his head.
“People go into that valley and disappear.”
The passing trees became a hypnotizing blur, and Virgil’s eyes took on a faraway look as he slipped into his memories.
---
Kaitlyn is in the living room, stretched out on the couch with a book in her hands. The TV is on, blaring laughter from a sitcom, but she’s not watching it.
“What are you reading?” he asks.
She tilts the book just enough to let him see the cover. The title is written in huge red letters: Blood in the River.
“What’s it about?”
“How Headless Mountain got its name.”
“Oh, everyone knows that,” he says. “It looks like the top was cut off.”
“Wrong.”
“That’s what Mom told me.”
“I know. She told me that too. But it’s still wrong.”
He holds out his hand for the book. “Let me see.”
“No.” Kaitlyn pulls it closer to her chest. “You don’t want to read this, Virg.”
“Why?”
“You’ll have nightmares.”
He scoffs. “Yeah, right.”
“Seriously. I know how you are. You’ll never want to go there again.”
The more Kaitlyn tells him not to read the book, the more he wants to see inside it. But she doesn’t give him a chance until that evening, when she goes out with Josh to meet their friends.
Upstairs, violin music is wailing from the study. Virgil’s dad is locked up in there, writing poetry or something. As quietly as he can, Virgil opens the door to Kaitlyn’s bedroom. He slips inside and closes it softly, holding the handle so the latch won’t make a sound.
He finds the book on her nightstand and sits on the bed to read it. On the back is a blurb in capital letters.
AN EMPTY TENT WITH ITS SIDE TORN OPEN. A DEAD MAN WARMING HIS HANDS AT A FIRE. TERRIFYING SCREAMS IN THE NIGHT.
THESE ARE THE STORIES OF HEADLESS MOUNTAIN AND THE RIVER CALLED THE BIGFOOT. SOMETHING SINISTER LURKS IN THE VALLEY WHERE THE BIGFOOT FLOWS. PEOPLE HAVE TRIED TO EXPLAIN THE STRANGE SOUNDS AND STRANGE SIGHTS. BUT ONLY ONE THING IS KNOWN FOR SURE.
PEOPLE GO INTO THAT VALLEY AND DISAPPEAR.
He knows his sister is right. If he reads the book, he’ll be sorry. But now he can’t stop himself. He cracks it open warily, knowing that something will leap from the pages and scare him.
He finds that thing right away, in a blurry picture and a startling caption. “The way a person hunts animals, a Sasquatch hunts people.”
That word has always frightened him: Sasquatch. Half man, half ape, standing nine feet tall, it bounds from the book and into Virgil’s imagination. Every page he turns to holds a new fright that he knows he’ll never forget.
“It dragged her out of the tent feet first. It hauled her into the forest, into the darkness. She was screaming.”
“I never heard anything like that before, and I hope I never hear it again.”
“It tore off his head. Pssht! Like twisting a cap from a bottle.”
---
A yellow flash in Virgil’s window shocked him from his memory. But he turned his head too late to read the number, and it seemed forever until the next sign appeared. Mile 30.
Eleven miles to go, he thought. At Mile 41 they would cross Trickleback Creek, where Kaitlyn’s book had begun with the most frightening story of all. They would rumble over the old log bridge that his mom had hated so much, and he would feel safer then, with the creek behind them.
“It was at Trickleback Creek that the killing started.”
The words from Kaitlyn’s book still haunted him; he thought they always would.
“When the sun went down the thing came back. One by one it killed them all.”
Virgil didn’t want to think about it. He watched for the mile markers as Rusty barreled down the Boneyard in its cloud of dust. The sign at Mile 31 was peppered by shotgun pellets, and the next was twisted and bent. “Nine more miles to go,” said Virgil to himself. Behind his seat, under the cushions of the folding bed, below a metal cover, the engine clattered away with its throaty roar. But Virgil found comfort in the sound. It made his closed-in world feel warm and safe. Until they passed Mile 33. Then Virgil heard a tiny click he’d never heard before. No louder than a snapping twig, it seemed to him as alarming as a gunshot.
“I think something’s wrong with the engine,” he shouted.
Joshua peered at the gauges on the dashboard. “It looks okay,” he said.
“But—”
“Come on, Virg, it’s good old Rusty.”
That was what their father always said. The van had taken them thirty thousand miles across twenty-two states, and at the end of each trip he’d patted its side and told them, “Good old Rusty. He’s going to run forever.” But Virgil had learned every sound the engine made, every tick, every tock, every rattle and jingle. And he knew that tiny click was just not right.
At Mile 34 he smelled a sweet hotness that tickled his throat. When he looked back he saw a whorl of mist rising from the engine compartment.
“Josh!” he yelled. “It’s smoking!”
Joshua’s face appeared in the rearview mirror, and his eyes suddenly widened. On the dashboard a red light started flashing, and Kaitlyn cried out at the same moment, “You’d better stop!”
“I can’t,” said Joshua. “Not here.”
The road was cut into a hillside, with the forest falling away on the left. On the right the foliage pressed in close to the road, leaving no room to pull over. Joshua kept his foot on the gas, his hands on the wheel, guiding Rusty round a curve.
“There!” shouted Kaitlyn. She pointed ahead at a small gravel pit bulldozed into the slope.
It came up suddenly. Joshua jammed his foot on the brake pedal and spun the steering wheel. Rusty skidded sideways toward the gravel pit and shuddered to a stop at the edge of the road.
Virgil unfastened his seat belt, flung open the sliding door, and tumbled out like a soldier from a helicopter.
The heat of the sun baking down on the Boneyard took his breath away. He looked at Rusty and groaned. “Josh, you’d better come and see this,” he said.
A puddle was oozing out from under the van. Black and steamy, it might have been an alien creature trying to crawl across the gravel. When Joshua saw it, he clamped his head in his hands and groaned.
“Can you fix it?” asked Virgil.
“I don’t know.” Joshua stood in the sunshine with his hands on his head, as though he’d already surrendered. Under his arms, sweat stains made big moon shapes on his T-shirt. “I guess I’d better take a look.”
He walked to the back of the van, opened the hatch, and shoved the cushions aside. When he lifted the lid from the engine compartment, waves of heat shimmered around him, stinking of antifreeze and hot oil. For a moment he staggered backward, then he stepped forward again and leaned over the engine.
“There’s oil all over the place,” he said. “It’s like the engine blew up or something.”
To Virgil, watching from behind, his brother could have been a surgeon bending over a patient. When Joshua thrust his hands down among Rusty’s rubber intestines, Virgil actually believed for a second that he would heal the old van.
But as Joshua poked at the battery cables and jiggled the wires, Virgil realized that that would never happen. Wanting to help, he got down on his knees at the back of the van and leaned underneath to study the engine.
“Get up,” said Joshua. “That stuff’s poisonous. It kills dogs.”
“But I can see where it’s leaking out,” said Virgil.
“Where?”
“Right here. Look.”
Joshua knelt beside Virgil. He peered into the shadows under the van, at a trickle of oil and water dribbling down from the engine. In Spanish he said, “Ay, maldito.”
Virgil didn’t know any Spanish. “What does that mean?” he asked.
“It means I can’t fix it.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s no good. It’s a piece of junk.”
With a sigh, Virgil stood up and walked away. His brother and his father had a lot of things in common: not only a love of language and a deep laugh, but a short fuse as well. For both, it was always quick to fizzle out. But when either sounded frustrated, the best thing to do was leave him alone for a while.
At the side of the road, where it bulged out into the gravel pit, Kaitlyn was jabbing at the screen of her iPhone. She smiled at Virgil as he came up beside her. “Don’t feel bad,” she said. “He’s mad at the van, not at you.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Virgil. He kicked at the gravel, stirring dust with his toes. “I wish Uncle Birdy was here.”
He didn’t mean for his brother to hear him. But Joshua got up from the road with his knees all dusty, tiny grains of gravel stuck in the palms of his hands, and he told Virgil, “Birdy couldn’t fix it. Nobody can.”
“Why?” asked Kaitlyn. She spoke gently, calmly, in a little girl’s voice. “What’s wrong with it, Josh?”
“I don’t know,” said Joshua. “But it’s bad.”
“Could we still drive it?”
“We could start it,” said Joshua. “It just wouldn’t go very far.”
“Why?” she asked, in the same quiet way. “What would happen?”
Exactly as his dad would have done, Joshua sighed and shrugged. “It would seize up for sure. It might even explode. I told you; it’s junk.”
“So what are we going to do?” asked Virgil.
“What do you think?” said Joshua. “We’ll call Dad.”
“Not from here.” Kaitlyn held up her phone. “There’s no signal.”
“Oh, great,” said Joshua. “Then I guess we just wait for someone to come along.”
They stood in the middle of the dusty Boneyard, all three in a row with their shadows so black and perfect that there might have been six people there. All at once, they turned their heads to look up the road, then turned their heads to look down the road. Virgil imagined that his brother and his sister were thinking the same thing that he was thinking.
No one was going to come along.
4
The Lookout
On the other side of Headless Mountain, on the edge of the avalanche chute, a lookout tower poked high above the trees. With a wooden hut perched on four long legs, it looked as spindly as a Tinkertoy set down on the mountainside. Through sixty years of summer storms, a fire watcher had sat at the top with binoculars, scanning the valley for lightning strikes.
From there, the smoke from the burning tree was clearly visible. Pinned down by the high pressure of the summer air, it flowed through the treetops and tumbled slowly into the valley.
But there was no one at the lookout to see the smoke. It had been closed down at the end of the last fire season, decommissioned to save the cost of a fire watcher. The nearest people in any direction were the Peppers, and they were on the other side of Headless Mountain, nearly twenty miles away.
Unseen by anyone, the shattered tree spat fire like a sparkler. All along the heartwood, yellow flames stretched into the air. The whole top section—three times the height of a normal house—was toppling sideways. The wood creaked and splintered, flinging off embers that spiraled away in trails of smoke.
5
House of Horrors
Huge bluebottle flies buzzed back and forth above Virgil’s head. He lay stretched out on Rusty’s back seat, watching them tap at the windows. When he heard footsteps in the gravel, he turned his head to see his brother appear in the doorway.
Joshua’s face was red and sweaty. “You should come outside,” he said. “It’s too hot in there.”
Virgil didn’t move. “It’s not so bad.”
“All right, suit yourself,” said Joshua, too hot to argue. From his pocket he pulled out his cell phone. “I’m going to walk up the road and see if I can get a signal.”
“I’ll go with you!” cried Virgil, already rolling himself off the seat.
Joshua looked surprised. “I thought you wanted to stay here.”
“I changed my mind,” said Virgil.
But Joshua wouldn’t take him along. “You’d better stay here with Kaitlyn,” he said. “In case someone comes by.”
Virgil watched his brother walk away up the Boneyard, so dwarfed by the wilderness that he looked smaller than a Lego man. The sky was open all around, but trees blocked the view in every direction. Only the very top of Headless Mountain rose above them, nearly hidden by branches. When Joshua vanished round the first bend in the road, Virgil felt a deep and sudden loneliness. He called out for his sister. “Hey, Kait?”
“Over here,” she answered.
He had to look around to find her, shading his eyes from the sun. She had crossed the clearing and climbed up the slope to find shade below an alder tree. He walked closer.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I was just thinking,” he said. “What if nobody comes by? What will happen then?”
“Aw, Virg, don’t worry about it. Those big logging trucks drive past here all the time.”
“No, they don’t. It’s been days since one went by.”
“You don’t know that,” she said. “One might have gone by an hour ago.”
Virgil waved his hand toward the other side of the road. “Then why’s there no dust in the trees? Why are there no tracks in the gravel?”
Kaitlyn stood up and walked to the edge of the slope. She stood with her hands on her hips, looking down at the road. It was obvious that he was right. Wherever the logging trucks went, they churned up clouds of dust that coated everything. But there was nothing on the grass or the bushes or the trees beyond them.
“We could be here forever,” said Virgil.
“I don’t think so,” said Kaitlyn. “If no one comes by we can walk. It’s only thirty miles to the highway.”
“Thirty-four.”
“Well, whatever,” she said. “If we left first thing in the morning we’d get out before dark.”
