There was gunfire upcanyon.
Jimbo raised his rifle again and I elbowed him because across the gulf, Eric had appeared. He had both hands wrapped around his service weapon, leveling it at the bear.
And now the bear and I had two marksmen to worry about. A shooter with a glass eye and the knowledge that accuracy is not his trademark, but he’s got a whole lot more firepower than the other shooter, who’s armed with a weapon meant to knock down mechanical targets.
Eric sidled along the road. The bear turned, nose into the air, and zeroed on Eric. They were no more than a couple of truck-lengths apart. Eric eased forward, waiting, it seemed, for the bear to lift its chin and present its best target.
I wanted to scream.
There was gunfire, again, upcanyon. The bear reared up.
And now the crowd behind Eric convulsed, and five Guardsmen trotted into the clearing, one behind the other like a line of geese. They carried heavy artillery and the cinnamon hardly had time to shift its focus to this new threat before they’d wheeled into a firing squad. The bear seemed to flinch, and then the sound of automatic weapons swamped all else, even its roar of surprise. The shooters fired for what seemed minutes, shredding the bear until the wall of snow behind it was splashed red and cratered with plugs of fur.
Jimbo fumbled to eject his clip. “Let’s go.”
He was shoving me, everyone was shoving again, back the way we’d come, back toward the cars. I didn’t need shoving, I had plenty of adrenaline pumping me along. And then someone said “bears” and Jimbo caught it — bears, plural — and my dumbshit brother turned with his rifle under his arm and fought his way back toward Eric. By the time I caught up Eric was saying, “Bears are all down, bears aren’t the problem.”
I said, sick on adrenaline, “What is the problem?”
“Pileup.” Eric pointed back toward town, the way we’d come. “Back in that throat where the canyon starts.”
I looked. Vehicles to the horizon. No access.
“How big?” Jimbo asked.
“Big.”
I said, “How big is big?”
Eric met my look. “It’s all clear up ahead. Be ready to move in fifteen minutes.”
I was looking back, toward the throat of the canyon. I said, my own throat constricted, “No way out.”
“We’ll get them out,” Eric said.
“Walter’s back there.”
“I’ll check,” Eric said.
“No, I will.” I started off. Vehicles to the horizon, and way back there, beyond the throat — beyond the pileup — vehicles waiting to get out. Walter was in the group behind ours. How many neighborhoods to a group, how many vehicles to a neighborhood, how many miles back in the canyon was Walter’s Explorer? Beyond the throat? I started to run.
Eric caught my arm. “I’ll find out where he is, Cass. I’ll see him on his way. If he’s behind the pileup, we’ll get him out. We got a lot of people stuck back there and you can be damn sure we’re not going to leave any of them behind. I give you my personal guarantee.”
I shook my head. “I’m going to check.”
“Aw shit, man,” Jimbo said, “you want a sister?”
Eric said, “No.”
I tried to move.
Eric tightened his grip and said, weary, “You see those guys?”
There were Guardsmen moving our way, monitoring the flow of the crowd. They moved like they were under fire. I saw one guy look up the canyon walls. He was skinny — all helmet and uniform. He planted his hands on his wide fatigue belt and scanned the cliffs far above. He looked like he was expecting a bomb to fall. His head snapped down. He spat. He didn’t want to be here. He looked like he wasn’t going to be patient with anyone who slowed him down.
“There isn’t an option,” Eric said.
Death by traffic jam.
With a sense as strong as I have ever had of making the wrong choice, I let Jimbo tug me back toward our cars.
CHAPTER FORTY
Alone, in a cute little motel room in Bishop. Chintz pillow shams, wildflower walls, street view through white ruffles. There was the sound of TV coming through the thin wall from Jimbo’s room next door. When he’d left my room he’d said he was going to get some sleep. Not likely. I heard the tattoo of his fingers drumming a table. I felt the thump-thump-thump of his feet bouncing the floor.
Unlike me — I was glued to the set and I didn’t move a muscle.
I watched King Videocable’s live action team on the spot at the intersection of highway 203 and the chasm blasted across it where the bridge had been. Highway 203 had been severed about halfway between town and highway 395.
On the Mammoth side of that wound there was an endless line of parked vehicles — the vehicles not caught in the pileup, the vehicles blocked by the pileup and forced to reverse direction on Pika and head back into town. They’d fled as far as they could, from town out highway 203 until they were stopped by the chasm. I searched for Walter’s red Explorer but the line of vehicles stretched too far for the camera to capture.
Refugees swarmed past parked vehicles. Refugees on foot, on skis, on snowmobiles, every one of them laden with bundles and casting ghostly shadows under the intense white of the big CalTrans lights. Refugees pausing to look at the ground when a quake hit, and then moving a little faster. And when the live action team zoomed in for a closeup, the refugees squinted into the cameras and groped for a sound bite. I recognized most of them. Knew them well, or casually, or enough to greet in passing. I didn’t care. Didn’t care that my old high school teacher Jack Altschul was leaving Mammoth with nothing but the pack on his back.
I waited for Walter.
On the other side of the chasm, the refugees were hustled into vans and trucks and buses and ferried down 203 to 395, and then the forty miles south to Bishop. If I shifted my view from the TV to the street outside I’d see them rumble through town.
My eyes stayed on the tube. The next refugee fixed in the lights would be Walter.
The camera cut to an aerial view of Pika Canyon, the live action team’s eye in the sky floodlighting the pileup of vehicles that choked the narrow throat. Vehicles entangled with vehicles, vehicles on top of vehicles, vehicles looking like they’d tried to crawl up the canyon walls. There was a patch of burnt-out vehicles, where quakes had shaken the unstable edifice and the friction of metal on metal had sparked leaking gas tanks. The smoking skeletons were dusted with Forest Service fire retardant.
I searched for Walter’s Explorer in the mess.
The camera cut to an aerial of highway 395. The evacuees had overflowed Bishop and were now on the way to the next towns south, Big Pine and Independence.
The camera cut to Adrian Krom, as it’s been doing every half-hour or so through the night. He was framed in front of the burnt husk of a truck on its side. He wore the same clothes I’d seen on him twenty hours ago at the intersection of 203 and Minaret. Now he seemed to sag within the big parka. Now the pelt hung loose. His face was washed quartz-halogen pale, his eyes squinty. He looked like he’d had a rough twenty hours. He looked beat.
He looked beaten. The interviewer, some ingratiating Bishop news anchor, was saying “you couldn’t have foreseen the bears,” and Krom seemed to shrink. He said no but he took responsibility nevertheless. I sat forward on the nubby chenille bedspread and if I could have reached through the screen I would have taken him by the neck and screamed you lost, you were supposed to get all of us out and you didn’t. But I didn’t have to throttle him. He knew. He looked beaten.
There was a big quake, and the camera jimmied.
I heard a shit through the wall.
When the camera steadied again on Krom, he’d changed. Maybe the anchor didn’t catch it, but I did. Krom was rallying. He leaned into the microphone and answered a question the anchor hadn’t asked. “We’ll have them out by dawn,” he said, voice nearly burnt out.