The Fire Tower Medic

• Chapter 1: The View from Station Nine
• Chapter 2: Static on the Line
• Chapter 3: Fallen Jumpers
• Chapter 4: The First Symptom
• Chapter 5: Echoes of the Ridge
• Chapter 6: Blood in the Canopy
• Chapter 7: A Medicine Chest in the Woods
• Chapter 8: The Ranger's Warning
• Chapter 9: Quarantine at Base Camp
• Chapter 10: The Dead Zone
• Chapter 11: Autopsy under Candlelight
• Chapter 12: Whispers of War
• Chapter 13: Smoldering Soil
• Chapter 14: The Contaminated Stream
• Chapter 15: Midnight Convoy
• Chapter 16: Isolation Protocol
• Chapter 17: The Missing Manifest
• Chapter 18: Fever in the Valley
• Chapter 19: Below the Tree Line
• Chapter 20: The Army's Shadow
• Chapter 21: Patient Zero
• Chapter 22: Burning the Evidence
• Chapter 23: The Antidote Gamble
• Chapter 24: Storm over the Summit
• Chapter 25: Out of the Ashes
• Chapter 26: The Final Lookout

The glass-walled cab of Station Nine smelled of aged pine, cold lamp oil, and the sharp, metallic tang of an old brass Osborne Fire Finder. To Daniel Cole, that mixture of scents was the finest medicine in the Pacific Northwest. It was late July 1947, and the air across the Bitterroot Range had turned brittle and dry, hazy with the blue sheen of distant timber fires.

Daniel leaned over the azimuth ring, resting his forearms against the cool metal rim. Below him, the forest dropped away into a sea of Douglas fir and western larch that stretched forty miles to the horizon, broken only by the jagged white teeth of the higher peaks. It was vast, silent, and wonderfully indifferent to human trouble. For a man who had spent the winter of 1944 up to his thighs in the freezing mud of the Ardennes, cutting wet wool trousers off shattered legs while German artillery pulverized the treeline, the absolute silence of the peak was a sacred thing.

He took a sip of black coffee from his enamel mug and picked up a pair of heavy brass binoculars. The glass swung smoothly, bringing the world into sharp focus. Three ridges over, near the clear waters of Blackwood Creek, a thin plume of grey smoke was curling lazily into the afternoon sky. It wasn't a flare-up—just a stubborn remnant of yesterday’s lightning strike, being watched by a ground crew.

Daniel set the binoculars down and recorded the bearing in his logbook. His hands were broad and calloused, the knuckles scarred from hurriedly opened surgical kits and sharp shell fragments. The Army had offered him a pension and a quiet desk job in Seattle, but after three years of screaming men, crowded field hospitals, and the smell of Gangrene, he couldn't stand the idea of walls. Up here, seventy feet off the ground in a wooden tower anchored to granite, he had four walls of clear glass. If a man felt trapped here, it was his own damn fault.

The copper-wire telephone on the wall let out a sudden, dry ring. Daniel didn't jump. War had cured him of jumping at loud noises; now he merely grew still, assessing the sound before he moved. He crossed the small cabin, stepping over his narrow cot, and unhooked the heavy earpiece.

"Station Nine, Cole speaking," he said. His voice was low, gravelly, carrying the flat cadences of the Midwest.

"Dan? It’s Ben over at District Base." The voice came through thick with static, scraping over forty miles of bare wire stapled to trees. "Got your eyes on the Blackwood burn?"

"She’s behaving," Daniel replied, glancing back out the glass. "Smoke’s white, leaning east. Ground crew’s got it corralled."

"Good. Don't go getting bored up there yet. Region Six called down from Spokane twenty minutes ago. They’re dropping a stick of smokejumpers into the north drainage of Cougar Ridge. Scout plane spotted a sleeper hot spot near the ridge line."

Daniel pulled a grease pencil from his shirt pocket and marked the glass wall in front of him. "Cougar Ridge is steep country, Ben. Snags everywhere from the '36 burn."

"Tell me about it," Ben muttered. "Base Camp dispatched the Ford Trimotor out of Missoula an hour ago. Six guys coming down. Keep your glass on the drop zone if you can. It’s right on your northern edge."

"Will do," Daniel said. "Who’s leading the stick?"

"Frank Miller."

Daniel smiled faintly. Frank was a former paratrooper from the 82nd Airborne, a broad-chested kid from Montana who had traded his olive drab chute for a canvas jump suit and a heavy leather helmet. He was one of the few men in the district who didn't look at Daniel like he was a ghost when they talked about the war. "Frank’s a good hand. He’ll get 'em down safe."

"Yeah, well, keep the phone clear," Ben said. "Call it in if the wind shifts. Base out."

The line clicked dead. Daniel hung the earpiece on its hook and adjusted the pencil behind his ear. He stepped back out onto the cat-walk—the narrow wooden balcony that encircled the cab—and felt the wind against his face. It was warm, carrying the dry scent of sun-baked needles, but deep underneath there was the cold bite of the snowbanks that still lingered in the northern couloirs.

He reached into his canvas shirt and pulled out a small, worn leather pouch. He didn't smoke cigarettes anymore—the smell reminded him too much of the aid stations—but he kept a piece of dried spruce gum in his cheek to keep his mouth wet.

To the north, the dull hum of an engine broke the quiet.

Daniel raised his binoculars. The heavy, tri-motored plane came lumbering over the serrated spine of the ridge, floating like an oversized iron goose against the pale sky. It made a wide sweep over the green carpet of the valley, checking the wind drift. A small white streamer dropped from the door, fluttering down to indicate the air currents.

A moment later, small black specks detached themselves from the belly of the plane.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.

The silk canopies blossomed above them—bright white mushroom caps catching the mountain sun. Daniel watched with practiced professional interest. Jumpers were a new breed. The Forest Service had only been using them in force for a few years, mostly ex-airborne boys who missed the rush of falling through the air or couldn't settle back down into plowing fields and pulling shifts at the lumber mill. It was dangerous, violent work. They dropped into high-altitude forests carrying axes, crosscut saws, and rations, fighting fires in places where no truck could ever drive.

The six parachutes drifted steadily toward a small meadow nestled in a high saddle below Cougar Peak. From Station Nine, Daniel had an unobstructed line of sight.

The first three jumpers cleared the treeline smoothly, their boots kicking up dust as they hit the mountain turf and tumbled to spill the wind from their chutes. The fourth and fifth drifted slightly west, disappearing behind a thick stand of lodgepole pine, but their chutes collapsed normally a second later.

The sixth chute, however, behaved oddly.

Daniel tightened his grip on the brass barrels of his field glass. The sixth jumper—who had cleared the door last—seemed suspended strangely beneath his canopy. Most jumpers kept their hands high on the risers, pulling hard to steer themselves clear of the lethal timber. This man hung completely limp, his legs swinging like dead meat.

"Come on, pull," Daniel muttered under his breath. "Steer left, damn it."

The jumper did not steer. The canopy drifted helplessly, carried by a sudden updraft toward a patch of scorched, skeletal snags left behind by an old fire. The man collided heavily with the top of a dead larch. The white silk shredded on the sharp wooden spike, catching the wind for a fraction of a second before collapsing entirely.

The figure dropped fifteen feet into the thick brush at the tree's base and did not move.

Daniel stared through the lenses for five long seconds. Down in the meadow, the other white chutes lay sprawled on the grass, but no one was running toward the fallen man yet. They were still unstrapping their heavy gear, hidden by the rise of the terrain.

"Station Nine to Base," Daniel said aloud to the empty air, turning on his heel and stepping quickly back inside the cab. He picked up the crank handle of the phone and turned it vigorously three times.

"District Base," Ben answered almost immediately.

"Ben, I’ve got a jumper down on the north slope of Cougar Ridge," Daniel said briskly, his voice shifting instantly into the sharp, economical rhythm of an Army triage station. "Looks like his chute hung up on a dead larch, dropped him from the canopy. He went down limp before he hit the tree."

There was a brief pause on the line, followed by the sound of paper shuffling. "Limp before he hit? What, did he pass out?"

"I don't know," Daniel said. "He didn't make a move to steer. He hit the brush near the base of the snag. The rest of the crew is down in the saddle, about three hundred yards south. They haven't reached him yet."

"Shit," Ben spat. "Alright. I'll get on the radio to their portable set once they assemble it. Keep your eyes on him, Dan."

"I'm going down," Daniel said flatly.

"What? Dan, you stay at your post. You’re the eyes for the whole district right now."

"The Blackwood burn is out, Ben. The sky is clear except for Cougar Ridge. I’ve got my kit, and I can be at that saddle in forty minutes if I take the old sheep trail. Those jumpers have basic first aid, but if that boy broke his neck or ruptured his spleen, they’ll end up killing him trying to move him."

"Dan—"

"I'm leaving the phone hooked," Daniel interrupted, already pulling his heavy leather medic's pouch out from under the cot. It was an old army issue M-3 bag, dark with age and stuffed with morphine, field dressings, splints, and a rolled-up sulfa kit he’d quietly kept when he was discharged. "I'll take the portable radio. If anything lights up, call me on the pack set."

Before Ben could argue further, Daniel set the receiver down on the table, hoisted his pack over his broad shoulders, grabbed his wooden walking staff, and strode out the door of the cab.

The mountain air hit him like a cold towel as he descended the steep wooden staircases hanging off the side of the tower. His boots clattered rhythmically on the timber treads.

Down on the granite shelf at the tower's base, the earth took over from the wood. Daniel didn't run—running in the high country was a quick way to break an ankle—but he set a relentless, long-legged pace down the narrow switchbacks of the north ridge trail.

The forest closed in around him, swallowing the wide panorama of the valley and replacing it with the close, dark shadows of mountain hemlock and whitebark pine. Sunlight filtered down through the canopy in dusty yellow shafts. The ground was soft with decades of accumulated needles, muffling the thud of his boots.

As he walked, his mind cleared, falling back into the cold, analytical state that had kept him alive in France. Injury was just a puzzle of pressure, bone, and blood. You stopped the leaks, supported the framework, and kept the air moving. You didn't think about the pain, and you certainly didn't think about who the man was until he was sitting up and complaining about the coffee.

Twenty minutes down, the trail flattened into a high saddle where the timber gave way to mountain scrub and granite outcroppings. The smell of hot pitch and ozone was stronger here.

Up ahead, through the trees, he heard voices—shouted commands, sharp and anxious.

Daniel broke into a steady trot, rounding a outcrop of grey rock.

The smokejumpers had assembled near the edge of the clearing. Their heavy canvas jump jackets were unbuttoned, revealing sweat-soaked shirts, and their parachute silk lay crumpled on the grass like dead parachutes after an airborne drop. Two men were standing near a thicket of brush surrounding a tall, bleached tree snag. One of them was Frank Miller.

"Hold his head, damn it! Don't let him twist!" Frank was shouting, kneeling in the brush.

"Drop your hands, Frank!" Daniel called out, stepping through the scrub.

Frank snapped his head around, his face slick with sweat and streaked with soot. "Dan? Where the hell did you come from?"

"Saw him drop from Nine," Daniel said, dropping his M-3 bag onto a patch of dry moss and dropping to his knees beside the fallen jumper. "Don't move him yet."

The man lying in the brush was young—barely twenty. His leather jump helmet had come off in the fall, revealing a head of cropped sand-colored hair. His face was unnaturally pale, slick with a clammy sheen of sweat that had nothing to do with the summer heat.

"His name's Bobby Vance," Frank said, wiping his forehead with the back of a canvas glove. "He was fine on the plane, Dan. I swear to God he was. He was cracking jokes when we loaded up in Missoula. Then he jumped, and he just... went soft."

Daniel didn't answer. He was already working. He unhooked his pocket knife and sliced cleanly through the heavy straps of Vance’s jump harness, peeling the thick canvas away from his chest.

"Is his back broken?" Frank asked quietly.

"Let's find out," Daniel said. He pressed his fingers firmly along the young man's neck and spine, feeling for the step-offs or deformities that signaled snapped vertebrae. The spine felt intact. He ran his hands over the ribs, feeling the sharp, rhythmic rise and fall of the chest. No flail segments, no wet crunch of broken bone.

"He hit the branches on the way down," Daniel noted, tracing a long, bloody scratch across the kid's forearm. "Broken wrist on the left side. Simple fracture. But that’s not why he dropped."

Daniel peeled back the boy's eyelid. The pupil was dilated, reacting slowly to the dappled sunlight.

"Bobby," Daniel said loudly, tapping the boy's cheek with two fingers. "Bobby, can you hear me?"

The boy let out a wet, shallow groan. His lips were dry and cracked, tinged with a faint, bluish hue at the corners. His skin felt cool—too cool for a man who had just spent forty-five minutes in a thick canvas jump suit fighting air currents.

"Was he sick before you loaded?" Daniel asked, reaching into his kit for a blood pressure cuff and a stethoscope.

"No," Frank said, shaking his head firmly. "I checked the manifest myself. He had his physical in May. He was fine. He worked a spot-fire over on the Blackfoot River three days ago, came back to base, slept twelve hours, and said he was ready to go."

Daniel wrapped the black cuff around Vance's upper arm and pumped the bulb. He set the diaphragm of the stethoscope against the crook of the boy's elbow and listened. The pulse was thin, rapid, and threadlike—fluttering like the wings of a trapped bird.

"His pressure is eighty over fifty," Daniel muttered. "He's in shock. Deep shock."

"From the fall?"

"No," Daniel said, unbuttoning the boy's cotton shirt to listen to his lungs. "He went into shock in the air. That’s why he didn't steer his rig. He was unconscious before his boots touched the tree."

He pressed the diaphragm against the left side of the boy's chest. What he heard made him freeze.

It wasn't the clean, double-thump of a healthy heart, nor was it the crisp whistle of an asthmatic lung. Deep inside Bobby Vance’s chest, there was a heavy, wet rattling—a sound like wet gravel being shifted around in a bucket.

Daniel shifted the scope to the right lung. The same wet, bubbling rattle filled his ears.

"What is it?" Frank asked, watching Daniel's face closely.

Daniel pulled the stethoscope from his ears and let it hang around his neck. He looked down at the boy. There were no obvious signs of trauma to the chest, no chest wounds, no crushed ribs. Yet the lungs were filling with fluid at a terrifying rate.

"He's drowning," Daniel said plainly.

Frank frowned. "Drowning? Dan, we're at six thousand feet. There isn't a body of water within five miles except the creek at the bottom of the canyon."

"I know where we are," Daniel said evenly. He reached into his kit and pulled out a small glass ampoule of atropine and a syringe. He snapped the neck of the ampoule with a quick, practiced flick of his thumb, drew the clear liquid into the barrel, and plunged the needle straight through the cotton of the boy's sleeve into the shoulder muscle.

"That'll help clear his airway a bit," Daniel said, backing off slightly to watch the boy's breathing. "We need a stretcher. We need to get him down to the road at Base Camp before his lungs completely clog up."

"We've got the canvas litter in the drop gear," Frank said, turning to the other jumper standing nearby. "Pete! Get the litter over here. Unpack the radio and tell Base we need an ambulance at the trailhead."

The second jumper nodded and jogged back toward the meadow.

Daniel remained on his knees, watching Bobby Vance. The boy's breathing eased slightly as the atropine took effect, but the pale, waxy color of his skin did not improve.

Daniel pulled a clean piece of gauze from his bag to wipe the sweat from the boy's forehead. As he pulled the cloth away, he noticed a tiny, dark spot on the skin just behind Vance's left ear.

He leaned in closer, flipping the boy's ear forward with a thick thumb.

It was a small, angry red puncture, surrounded by a faint, purplish ring of bruised tissue the size of a nickel. It looked almost like an insect bite, but the skin around it was dead and grey, as if the flesh had been scorched by a drop of acid.

"Frank," Daniel said, keeping his voice quiet. "Did he say anything about getting bitten by something at base?"

Frank leaned over to look where Daniel was pointing. "Bitten? No. The bugs are bad this time of year, but nobody says anything about a mosquito bite."

"That’s no mosquito," Daniel said. He reached down and gently pressed the tissue around the purple mark. A drop of dark, almost black blood oozed from the central puncture.

A cold feeling—a familiar, unwanted knot of dread—formed in the pit of Daniel's stomach. He had seen hundreds of blast injuries, thousands of bullet holes, and every form of rot that wet trenches could breed in the human body. But he had never seen a localized lesion turn the flesh grey like that while the lungs filled up with fluid in a matter of minutes.

The young jumper on the ground suddenly gasped, his legs jerking violently. A thin trace of pink, frothy foam bubbled up between his lips.

"Get that litter over here!" Daniel shouted, leaning forward to turn the boy onto his side so he wouldn't choke on his own blood. "Now!"

As the men rushed over with the folded canvas stretcher, Daniel looked back up toward the clear blue sky above Cougar Ridge. The wind had picked up, rustling the high needles of the Douglas firs with a long, whispering sound that suddenly felt very cold.

The haul up the rocky spine of Cougar Ridge was brutal, back-breaking work. Four men carried the canvas litter, their boots skidding on loose scree and dry pine needles, while Daniel walked alongside, keeping one hand firm against Bobby Vance’s chest to monitor the shallow, labored hitch of his breathing. The boy’s skin had turned from waxy grey to a bruised, bluish pale, and every few yards a fresh bubble of pink froth spilled over his chin, which Daniel wiped away with a frayed piece of field bandage.

"Keep his head elevated!" Daniel barked over the crunch of footsteps and the heavy breathing of the crew. "If he slides down, he’ll drown before we hit the trail!"

Frank Miller was at the head of the litter, his jaw set, sweat coursing down the soot-stained tracks on his neck. "We're almost to the saddle gear, Dan. Pete got the antenna up."

They broke through the tree line onto the open bench where the jumpers had cached their gear bags. Sitting on a flat granite slab was the portable radio—a heavy, olive-drab Forest Service SPF model with a long whip antenna swaying against the sky. Pete, a young jumper with grease on his forearms, was kneeling beside the metal box, cranking the generator handle with frantic, rhythmic jerks while holding the heavy bakelite handset to his ear.

"Base! District Base, this is Cougar Crew," Pete was yelling into the mouthpiece, his voice cracking with desperation. "Do you copy? Over!"

The small speaker on the front of the unit produced nothing but a harsh, tearing screech—a wall of white noise that rasped like fine sandpaper over iron.

"What's wrong with it?" Frank asked, dropping his end of the litter onto the soft scrub and wiping his face with a bandanna. "Is the battery dead?"

"Battery's fine, cap," Pete said, turning the frequency dial with a trembling thumb. "The sky’s wide open, but the bands are full of junk. It’s like somebody's grinding gears inside the receiver. Base! Come in, Base!"

Daniel knelt beside the litter and placed two fingers against Vance’s carotid artery. The pulse was still fast—over one hundred and forty beats a minute—and dangerously thready. He pulled the rubber tubing of his stethoscope out of his pocket, snapped the ear tips into place, and pressed the cold metal disk against the boy's neck near the strange purple mark behind his ear.

The sound in the ear tubes was wrong. Usually, an arterial pulse sounded like a clean, rhythmic thump. Here, beneath the muffled thump of the artery, was a tiny, high-pitched hiss—a faint, continuous murmur that sounded almost like steam escaping from a pinhole in a radiator.

Daniel pulled the scope back and frowned, staring down at the mark. The purple ring around the small central puncture had expanded slightly in the last fifteen minutes. The flesh in the center was no longer just grey; it had taken on a dry, leathery texture, completely devoid of sweat or natural skin oil.

"Give me that handset," Daniel said, standing up and reaching out his hand to Pete.

Pete handed over the bakelite receiver. Daniel pressed the push-to-talk button on the side and held the cup to his ear. The receiver roared with a crackling, erratic hiss. Through the static, he could hear a faint, distorted rhythm—a repeating pattern of pops and whistles that didn't sound like ordinary atmospheric interference. It wasn't the steady hum of a distant electrical storm. It sounded metallic, patterned, like the rhythmic spark of a misfiring engine or high-voltage lines shorting out in a gale.

"Base Base, this is Station Nine on Cougar Ridge set," Daniel said into the transmitter, keeping his voice level and clear. "Ben, if you hear this, we have a Category One medical emergency. Jumper Vance is unconscious, exhibiting severe pulmonary edema and deep shock. We need a vehicle at the trailhead at the foot of Creek Trail immediately. Acknowledge, over."

He released the button. The static surged, loud and abrasive.

For a long five seconds, there was no reply. Then, buried deep beneath the roaring hash of the frequency, a voice drifted through—thin, stretched out, and metallic, like sound traveling down a long tin pipe.

"...Station Nine... repeat... line is... heavy... say again..."

"Ben!" Daniel pressed the button hard. "Clear the line! Send the wagon to Creek Trailhead! We are bringing Vance down by hand. He needs oxygen and a suction pump! Do you copy?"

"...static... all across the... valley..." Ben’s voice fragment slipped through, then was swallowed whole by a high, squealing tone that made Daniel pull the receiver away from his ear. The tone rose in pitch, vibrating through the small speaker, before snapping into a wall of flat, lifeless hum.

"Line's dead," Pete whispered, staring at the radio panel. "The whole frequency just collapsed."

"It didn't collapse," Frank said, looking up at the clear, cloudless blue sky above them. "There ain't a thunderstorm within fifty miles. How can the band be jammed up like that?"

"Sunspots, maybe," Pete offered uncertainly. "Or the repeater on Bald Mountain blew a tube."

"It doesn't matter right now," Daniel said, handing the receiver back to Pete. He picked up his wooden walking staff and slung his medical bag over his shoulder. "The radio isn't going to save him. We've got four miles of steep switchbacks down to the creek road. If Ben didn't catch the location, we'll be carrying him all the way to the district office."

Frank looked at the four other jumpers. They were young, fit, and tough, but their eyes showed the sudden, bewildered fear of men who were used to fighting fires with shovels, not watching a comrade choke on his own lungs in the middle of a clear afternoon.

"You heard the doc," Frank barked, his old airborne sergeant's voice snapping over the clearing. "Rig the straps on the litter. Double-time! We take turns on the handles—two-man teams, switch out every ten minutes so nobody stumbles. Pete, leave the heavy radio and the drop gear here. Wrap it in a tarp and mark the spot. We move light."

The crew moved with sharp, sudden efficiency, stripped of their confusion by direct orders. Within three minutes, the canvas litter was hoisted again. Two jumpers took the front grips, two took the rear, while Frank led the way to clear low-hanging branches with his heavy belt axe.

Daniel fell into step right behind the head of the litter, keeping his eyes glued to Vance’s chest. The boy's breathing had slowed down—a bad sign. The atropine he had administered earlier was wearing off, and the wet, gurgling sound in the chest was returning with a vengeance.

They dropped off the high saddle, entering the dense shade of the old timber line. The heat of the sun vanished, replaced by the damp, cool draft that always pooled in the deep couloirs. The tall trunks of Douglas fir rose like cathedral pillars around them, shutting out the open sky.

As they descended, Daniel noticed something strange about the forest around them.

Usually, the high country in late afternoon was filled with sound—the sharp chatter of Douglas squirrels, the wind rubbing the high pine boughs together, the occasional knock of a woodpecker against a snag. But as they descended into the deep ravine of Cougar Creek, the woods were dead silent. Not a bird sang. Not a chipmunk moved in the brush. The only sound was the heavy, rhythmic thud of eight boots, the rustle of trousers against ferns, and the wet, continuous gasping of the boy on the litter.

"Doc," Frank said quietly, slowing his pace slightly so Daniel was walking beside him at the head of the file. "What is it? And don't give me the medical manual talk. Is it a snake? A spider?"

"I don't know, Frank," Daniel said frankly. "Snakebite usually brings localized swelling, severe pain, discoloration. That mark behind his ear has grey tissue, but there's no swelling around it. And I've never seen a snake venom that causes lungs to fill with blood and fluid in twenty minutes without killing the heart first."

"Could it be something from the gear?" Frank asked. "Something left in the canvas from the warehouse in Missoula?"

"Chemicals?" Daniel pondered the thought. "Certain industrial toxins can cause sudden pulmonary edema if inhaled in concentrated doses. Phosgene gas did it in the war. Chlorine does it. But he was in open air, dropping at ninety miles an hour. Any gas would have dissipated instantly."

"He was fine on the plane," Frank repeated, his voice dropping low so the younger jumpers carrying the rear of the litter wouldn't hear. "I talked to him right before he stood in the door. He gave me a stick of gum, Dan. He was laughing."

Daniel didn't answer. He reached down and felt Vance’s bare wrist. The skin was clammy, but the fingernails were starting to turn a dark, mottled purple—a classic sign of cyanosis. The oxygen in his blood was dropping rapidly.

"Faster," Daniel said to the litter bearers. "We need to hit the road."

They broke into a heavy trot down a series of tight switchbacks. The trail was narrow, cut into the steep dirt bank of the canyon wall. Roots jutted out like thick cables, and loose rocks skittered out from beneath their boots, tumbling down into the dark greenery of the creek bed hundreds of feet below.

Ten minutes later, they reached the floor of the canyon, where the trail straightened out alongside the roaring white water of Cougar Creek. The air down here was thick with the smell of wet moss and rotting vegetation.

As they rounded the final bend that opened onto the dirt logging road, Frank suddenly stopped dead in his tracks, raising a hand.

"Hold up," Frank muttered.

The litter bearers pulled up, breathing heavily, their shoulders slumped under the weight.

Parked in the middle of the dirt road, thirty yards ahead, was the District Base utility truck—a heavy, olive-green Dodge Power Wagon with the Forest Service shield painted on the door. Its engine was idling with a strange, uneven chug, coughing out thin plumes of bluish exhaust into the quiet air.

The driver’s side door was wide open, swinging gently on its hinges.

"Ben!" Frank called out, stepping forward. "Ben, is that you?"

There was no answer from the truck. The only sound was the uneven, metallic knock of the idling engine.

Daniel moved past Frank, his wooden staff held firmly in his right hand, his M-3 medic bag slung tight against his ribcage. He walked up to the side of the truck and looked into the cab.

The front seat was empty. A clipboard with the daily fire log was lying on the floorboards, its papers fluttering faintly in the draft from the open door. On the dash, the commercial radio receiver was turned on, its red dial light glowing in the shadow of the cab.

Just like the portable pack set on the ridge, the truck's radio was spewing out a wall of harsh, jagged static—interspersed with that same strange, rhythmic whistling tone that sounded like metal scraping on metal.

"Where the hell is the driver?" Pete asked, coming up behind them with the rear of the litter.

Daniel stepped around the front bumper of the Dodge. The dusty ground of the logging road showed clear tire tracks where the truck had braked hard and pulled over to the side.

In the dirt right next to the driver's running board, there were two deep boot prints where someone had stepped out in a hurry. A few feet past that, lying in the middle of the road, was a heavy brass flashlight, its glass lens shattered on a stone.

And right beside the shattered flashlight, stamped clearly in the dry grey dust of the road, was a set of drag marks—two wide, parallel grooves trailing off away from the vehicle and disappearing into the thick, dark underbrush at the base of the mountain.

Daniel knelt in the dirt, touching the edge of one of the drag marks. The earth was fresh, freshly turned over within the last few minutes.

"Frank," Daniel said softly, his eyes searching the dense, shadow-drenched hemlocks that crowded the edge of the road. "Get the boy into the back of the truck. Now."

"What about whoever was driving?" Frank asked, his hand dropping instinctively to the heavy sheath knife on his belt.

"We aren't searching these woods in the dark," Daniel said, standing up and opening the rear tailgate of the Power Wagon. "Get Vance inside. We’re driving straight to Base Camp."

The jumpers didn't argue. They hoisted the heavy litter up into the wooden bed of the Dodge, climbing in after it to secure the canvas. Daniel sprinted around to the driver's side, slammed the door shut, and put his foot on the clutch.

He reached for the gearshift, but as he did, his eye caught the truck’s dashboard instruments.

The ammeter needle was bouncing wildly back and forth between charge and discharge, vibrating so violently it was tapping against the glass cover. The temperature gauge was pinned past the red mark, even though the engine had only been idling for a few minutes.

And from the radio speaker mounted under the glove box, the rhythmic, whistling static suddenly cleared for two brief seconds.

A sound came through the speaker. It wasn't speech. It was a long, dry, rasping breath—the sound of someone drawing air through a wet, constricted throat—followed by three sharp, rhythmic clicks.

Then the static slammed back in, loud, flat, and deafening.

Daniel shoved the heavy transmission into first gear, popped the clutch, and slammed his boot down on the accelerator. The heavy Dodge lurched forward, its tires spitting gravel into the silent woods as it roared down the narrow mountain road toward Base Camp.

Behind them, in the bed of the truck, Bobby Vance let out a low, shuddering sigh, and the wet rattle in his chest suddenly fell completely silent.

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