Primal Threat Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY EARL EMERSON

  COPYRIGHT

  For Sandy, who keeps me sane.

  For practical purposes, we have agreed that sanity consists in sharing the hallucinations of our neighbors.

  EVELYN UNDERHILL

  Adapt, migrate, or die.

  LIEUTENANT JAMES MULDAUR, SFD

  1

  February

  In later years Zak Polanski found it odd that he could divide his life into chapters separated by fatal or near-fatal automobile accidents. The first occurred when he was eleven, and it reflected in the dynamics of his family even today. Wreck number two was the accident that catapulted him into an unexpected summer romance with Nadine Newcastle.

  The call had come just after twenty-three hundred hours on a cold night in February. There were only three firefighters riding Engine 6, so after they arrived Zak quickly laid a hose line in the street while the driver put the transmission into pump; the lieutenant scouted the wreck to see how many patients they had, and whether or not any of them would require extrication. Then came the part Zak dreaded, the part where he flopped onto his belly and squirmed into the vehicle to tend the patient.

  Everyone on the crew thought Zak exhibited an uncanny bedside manner at wrecks, displaying a sense of calm to patients that helped pull them through the ordeal in a way nobody else in the department could. It was a tribute to his ability to sequester his feelings and get the job done, because around a car accident Zak was actually the most insecure person in the fire department.

  Zak wouldn’t get the tremors here in the bowels of the wreck, but he would later at the station when he slipped back into his bunk. It was his practice afterward not to think about any of the auto extrications he’d been involved in, for every one of them terrified him. His auto-crash anxieties were something he would never confess to a buddy, nor to a priest, and probably not to a wife. For all of his adult life and the bulk of his childhood Zak had entertained an abnormal fear of dying in the tight confines of a car wreck, trapped, defenseless, perhaps even bawling. For as long as he could remember, his mental picture of hell was the scrambled interior of a wrecked vehicle, and here he was inside his worst nightmare once again.

  It was a Lexus SUV, upside down, a car–pole accident. After Zak had crawled in and turned on his flashlight, he saw his patient’s leg trapped in the crushed door and realized that the weight of her body, as she slowly slid out of the seat, would soon be wrenching her pinned leg. If the pain wasn’t excruciating now, it would be within minutes. He removed his helmet and flung it outside the vehicle, then scooted under her and gave support to her shoulders, easing some of the pressure off her leg while doing his best to keep her spinal column aligned. It wasn’t an elegant position for either of them, but as soon as he had his hands on her, she ceased whimpering.

  She was young, and he had the feeling his touch was both a surprise and a novelty. He explained what he was doing and why, and then told her how many more firefighters and machines would be arriving, warning her there was no place noisier than the interior of a vehicle with a crew of firefighters working to cut her free. “You okay with all that?” he asked.

  “I guess I’ll have to be.”

  “Good. What’s your name?”

  “Nadine Newcastle.”

  “Hello, Nadine. My name is Zak. Now, I don’t want you to worry. I’ve been to dozens of wrecks, and most were a lot worse than this one, so we’ll get you out. Actually, this will be fairly easy.”

  Zak could see her breath in the dark interior of the car. Even though it was early February, she was clad in shorts and a short-sleeved blouse and was shivering, partly from the influx of cold night air and partly from shock. Her femur looked intact; her knee was aligned and normal looking, but below that her tibia and fibula were not visible in the twisted metal.

  She started crying again, a desperate series of hiccuping sounds that almost resembled giggling, tears glissading off her upside-down face. “I want out. I want out of here.”

  “Don’t worry. It’ll just be a few minutes. Then we’ll both be out of here, but we’re going to have to be patient.” He smelled gasoline, and even though the motor was off he had an ominous feeling that the car was going to flame up with them inside, a feeling he always entertained while working inside a wreck. Without letting go of her, he reached up with one hand and tried to remove the keys from the ignition, but they wouldn’t come loose. Even with the car off, he would feel better with the keys in his pocket.

  “Can you wiggle your toes?”

  “I think so.”

  “On both feet?”

  “Yes. I’m so scared. Please get me out, Lord. I know You know what’s best, but I don’t want to die like this.”

  “Listen to me,” Zak said. “Nobody’s going to die. We’re getting you out, and I’m going to stay right here with you until it happens.”

  “Honest?”

  “Of course. That’s my job.”

  “Pardon my saying so, but I think you have a lousy job.”

  “Well, I’m glad I have it tonight, because it offers me the chance to help you through this.” As he spoke, her cheek brushed his, her long hair falling into his face. Her teardrops cooled his neck as if they were tiny splashes of alcohol.

  “Do you ever get scared?” she asked. For a moment he thought maybe she’d felt something in his touch that conveyed his own terror. “Of course you don’t. You’re a trained professional. It was stupid to even ask.”

  “No it wasn’t. But listen. You’re going to be fine. Let’s just try to keep weight off that leg. That’s our goal right now.”

  As they waited for help and as Zak inhaled the aroma of shampoo from the girl’s hair, his hands felt a steely strength in her shoulders, and he wondered if she was a swimmer. He explained that a truck company would arrive with a Holmatro tool, which they would use to strip the door off its hinges, that the car would shake and there would be noise, and that once they had her leg free she would be lowered onto a backboard and remove
d from the vehicle. All standard operating procedure.

  “Jesus, just please let me get out of this. Please, Jesus.”

  “We’ll get you out. Jesus and me,” Zak said, with a pinch of sarcasm she either didn’t notice or noticed and refused to be offended by.

  A minute and a half later a lieutenant he didn’t recognize poked his head inside and eyeballed Zak and the patient. “Wha’dya got?”

  “Her leg’s pinned under the door. Everything else is free. Tib–fib, I’m thinking. No loss of consciousness.”

  “Okay.”

  The officer stood up and shouted something to his crew.

  “I’m not feeling so well,” the girl said.

  “These guys will have us out of here in a couple of minutes, Nadine.”

  “I like how you say us.”

  “That’s right. I’m not leaving until you do. You and me all the way.”

  As soon as the power unit for the Holmatro started up, the noise level increased tenfold. It was always somewhere around this point, always with a lot of people looking on, that Zak began to get overwhelmed with a desire to scramble out of the vehicle and run away. He had never been to an accident scene without the sense of wanting to flee, but so far he never had, at least not in the fire department; still, that didn’t mean it wouldn’t happen tonight. His vision of sprinting down the street was so clear and stark, it might as well have been a recent memory instead of a fantasy.

  Peering around the interior of the cabin, Zak spied a Bible, some schoolbooks, a handful of CDs, and a tennis racket in a monogrammed leather case.

  “I’m going to die. I know I’m going to die,” she said.

  “Nobody’s going to die. We’ll have you out of here in minutes. After that you’ll be on your way to the hospital, and everything will be hunky-dory. I’m sure your parents or your boyfriend or whoever will meet you there. You’re doing just fine.”

  Zak wasn’t sure what the truck officer’s plan was, though he could hear the crew talking it over as they worked, shoving blocks of wood inside, cribbing the vehicle lest the weight cause it to sink onto Zak and his patient. Getting crushed by an SUV was just one more thing for him to think about.

  “You guys were out late.”

  “We were at Bible study class.”

  “This late?”

  “It goes on for hours sometimes.”

  “There’s a tennis racket here, too. You play tennis?”

  “I live for tennis.”

  “So you’re pretty good then?”

  “Third seed on the Seattle U team, but I’m going to challenge and take second. I’m pretty sure I can. By the end of the year I’m planning to be first.”

  “You ever play guys?”

  “I play anybody.”

  “Good. I bet you can’t beat me.”

  “You’re on, buddy.”

  “What do you want to bet? Lunch?”

  “It’s against my religion to actually wager. But I’ll play you anytime you want. And you won’t win.”

  “Okay, then. We’ve got a date.”

  “Not a date. I have a boyfriend. Just a tennis match.”

  “Right.”

  When they began using a small electric saw to cut through the sheet metal, it got significantly noisier inside. It didn’t take long before Zak saw large slabs of the night sky appear, and it wasn’t much longer before Nadine’s leg was free. Somebody slid a backboard partway into the car and asked Zak which direction was most appropriate for sliding her out of the vehicle. He directed them toward the passenger’s side, knowing it was crucial to keep her spine aligned and immobile. Another firefighter grasped her leg, and they carefully eased her out of the driver’s seat and onto the backboard, which made harsh sounds against the particles of broken glass when they slid it out. Nadine blew air through her clenched teeth but other than that was silent, holding Zak’s hand until they pulled her from the vehicle.

  Zak crawled out in time to see her placed on a gurney and wheeled toward the back of a nearby medic unit, another firefighter having taken traction on her neck. Even though they’d agreed to play tennis, he doubted she would remember it or that it would actually take place. She was a Bible thumper, and he’d already had one too many Bible thumpers in his life.

  Perhaps because he’d grown up in a household full of women, Zak never had any trouble talking to them, which was a good thing, because Zak lost girlfriends almost as quickly as he acquired them. Muldaur, his lieutenant, once said he was so relaxed around the opposite sex it was almost as if he were gay. “Zak could pick up women in a garbage dump,” Muldaur said. “And they’d be gorgeous, too.”

  Though he’d had plenty of relationships, Zak would have given anything for a stable situation that would endure as long as the twenty-five-year marriage Muldaur basked in. What he got instead was one unsatisfactory fling after another. Zak’s routine was to meet a woman, take her out a few times—or once—before falling into bed with her, and somewhere in that twilight space after they’d become intimate but before they became friends, he would simply forget her. It wasn’t exactly that he lost interest; he actually forgot. It was pathological and he knew it, but so far he’d done nothing to stop it.

  At twenty-eight, Zak had never moved in with anybody and never let a woman move in with him. He’d never been close enough to loving someone to contemplate it. He wasn’t proud of the multiple liaisons and did not boast to his friends about them the way some men did; he was in fact embarrassed by the relentless train of relationships, viewing each as another dereliction in a long line of derelictions. In view of his history, he found it odd that he’d become so attracted to a patient he’d been with less than ten minutes.

  2

  August

  Pedaling up into the first of the foothills, Zak felt a droplet of sweat trickling out of his helmet and down the side of his face, dangling for just a moment on the tip of his chin. The others had been sweating heavily all along, especially on this ferocious uphill. At some points on the gravel road they found themselves pedaling up grades so steep your average Joe would have a difficult time walking them, much less riding a bike—so steep that if they got off they would not be able to remount, each of them fighting hard to control his bike on the washboard fire road, each breathing in his own labored and painful rhythm.

  The five riders were bonded by affection for this type of grueling exercise, intoxicated by the adventure of hard workouts, and addicted to the endorphins exercise produced. While other northwesterners spent the three-day weekend lounging around the house or semicomatose on a blanket at the beach, Zak, Muldaur, Stephens, Barrett, and Morse would be logging two hundred miles in the mountains, climbing fifteen to twenty thousand feet on fire trails, county roads, and overgrown logging roads.

  For Zak and Muldaur it would be a calculated shock to their systems to help them prepare for a twenty-four-hour mountain bike race they planned to enter in three weeks. For Stephens, who lived nearby, and for his friend Morse, the ride was an end in itself. Always game for an adventure, Barrett had tagged along almost as an afterthought.

  Zak had been riding last in the string of five men, a position he took up from time to time in order to size up the opposition. Opposition. He liked that word. They weren’t actually enemies—in fact they were friends—but he knew each climb on this trip would be a contest, and the best place from which to size up the other contestants was at the back. They were all competitive and more than a little vain about their prowess on a bicycle, and thus competition would be fierce.

  The Northwest was suffering through the last days of August, and afternoon highs in western Washington had been languishing in the mid-to high nineties, briefly touching a hundred in some counties. In the mountains the evenings would be cooler, but the midday sun would also be harsher. Their plan was to traverse from the western side of the Cascade Mountains to the east, ending in Salmon La Sac, a journey Muldaur had promised Zak would be similar to running three or four marathons back-to-back.r />
  Zak, Jim Muldaur, and Giancarlo Barrett were firefighters, while the other two were businessmen, friends of Muldaur’s. Besides the five years they’d put in together working on Engine 6, Zak and Muldaur had raced mountain bikes and competed in road races together, traveling to and from many of the events in Muldaur’s Subaru Outback with their bikes on a roof rack, so they knew each other’s habits and predilections like brothers. At 160 and 165 pounds, respectively, Zak and Muldaur were the fittest in the group. In biking the most critical single factor in climbing performance was the combined weight of bike and rider. A pound or two might not make much of a difference in football or basketball, but people paid hundreds of dollars to shave a couple of ounces off bicycle components.

  Muldaur’s friend Steve Stephens was the chief financial officer for a successful local biotech company; his salary, bonuses, and stock options placed him in an income category none of the others could match, although his buddy Morse, a freelance labor negotiator, came close.

  Thursday afternoon before Labor Day the five of them met at Stephens’s house in North Bend, a burgeoning hamlet at the base of the Cascades and the last town before Snoqualmie Pass and the ski areas. Stephens lived under Mount Si, a rocky, four-thousand-foot monolith that jutted almost straight up from the valley floor. Originally eight men and one woman had signed up for this weekend, but the woman and one of the men bailed for family reasons. The last two jumped ship after hearing that the woods in western Washington had been declared off limits because of fire danger. The drier eastern half of the state had been in a condition of fire alert for the past month, but until recently spotty rainstorms had shielded the western half from sanctions. Now all the backwoods in the state were officially off limits to motor vehicles, hikers, bikers, and riders on horseback. Forest fires had consumed a record number of acres in eastern Washington, Idaho, and Oregon, and the governors of the three states had asked for federal help to finance fire-suppression efforts.

  “It’s bullshit,” Muldaur said when they gathered in Stephens’s driveway to discuss it. “We’ve waited too long. And now comes Labor Day weekend and the weather’s going to be perfect and we can’t go? We’re not going to have a campfire, none of us smokes, and bicycles don’t throw off sparks. The ban is to keep the morons out, and we’re not morons.”