Rise of the Phoenix novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Truck

In a stolen guard truck the heater scalds Garth, so they ride in the open bed skin to skin; headlights close in behind them.

The nine took the prisoner van.

A big man in the group said he used to drive a gravel truck.

He climbed behind the wheel.

The others piled in after him.

The woman who looked like my mother grabbed my sleeve before she got in.

"Whatever you are," she said, "thank you."

"Get to a road," I said. "Any road. Call someone who isn't him."

The van's tires spun once, bit, and carried them down the mountain into the dark.

That left me, Garth, and a green guard pickup with its keys in the ignition.

I got him into the passenger seat, and I turned the key, and the dash lit up.

The heater roared on.

Garth made a noise I will remember for the rest of my life.

It wasn't a scream, but it was close.

He twisted away from the vents so hard his shoulder hit the window.

A thin red mark bloomed along his cheek where the first hot air had touched it.

I slammed the heater off with the heel of my hand.

"What was that?" I said.

"Warm," Garth said through his teeth. "Warm air. It feels like a skillet."

"It's sixty degrees in here."

"It's sixty degrees on a man who's ninety-one inside." He pressed his palm over the red mark on his face.

"Anything hotter than the snow burns me. Stoves. Sunlight. Soup. A hand."

"My hand?"

"Yours is the only one that doesn't."

I stared at him.

He looked back with a face.

"Three years," he said.

"They did something to me, and I stopped making heat."

"My body stays at whatever the room is, and then it drifts lower."

"That's why you were shaking."

"That's why I'm still shaking."

I put the truck in gear and took the first switchback down.

The road was one lane of packed snow with a cliff on one side and a wall of black pines on the other.

My headlights found nothing but white.

"Give me your hand," I said.

"I'll freeze you."

"Try."

He put his hand on my forearm, above the scars.

It was being touched with an ice cube, and then it wasn't.

Something under my skin woke up, the coal, turning over, drawn toward him.

My arm grew warm.

His fingers loosened, and his shoulders came down from around his ears, and the blue in his lips went a little pink.

"There," he said, almost to himself. "There it is."

"Are you okay?"

"I'm better than I've been in three years." He laughed, a surprised, rusty little laugh. "Don't take it back."

"I'm not planning on it."

We went down two switchbacks like that, me with one hand on the wheel, him with his palm flat on my arm.

I could feel every part of it.

I was twenty-five and I had been kept in a box.

A man's hand on my arm was undoing something that fourteen months in the dark had wound very tight.

"You hum," Garth said.

I almost put us into the cliff.

"What?"

"At night. When you can't sleep. Always the same song, off key. I think it's Dolly Parton."

"It's Dolly Parton."

"Nine to Five."

"It was my crew's song. We sang it in the bus after a bad shift." I swallowed. "You listened to me hum for a year?"

"It was the only thing in that place that sounded like a person." He said it without any sort of smile.

"I knew your voice before I knew your name."

"I didn't know yours at all."

"You knew it."

I did.

I had talked to that wall about everything.

I'd told it about the fire at Lolo Creek, and how my crew boss had called me by my last name like a rank.

I'd told it about a dog I'd had when I was nine.

It had never once told me to shut up.

"You never said how you got there," I said.

"Rook finds wolves who can't run, and a wolf who can't run is a wolf in a cage."

He stared out at the dark.

"I'll tell you everything. Once there's more road between us and that mine."

"Why me?" I said. "You said you've been waiting a year to open my door. Why not just leave?"

"Because they were going to burn you tonight."

"Would you have gone without me?"

He turned his head, and his grey eyes held mine in the green dashboard glow.

"No."

Then I saw it, over his shoulder, in the side mirror.

Headlights.

One pair, then two, then four, strung out along the switchbacks above us.

"Garth," I said.

"I see them."

"How many?"

"Five trucks." He had already turned in his seat. "That's Rook's hunters, and the one on the roof of the lead truck is a lynx."

The shape on the cab of the first truck stretched, long and low, and its eyes flashed back at me.

It was running along the roof at forty miles an hour, and it wasn't holding on.

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