Breaking Point

looked on as if paralyzed.
    Joe ducked around Farkus and threw himself at McLanahan and rode him down to the ground, where he landed on his side. Both Joe and Butch flipped the ex-sheriff to his belly and threw handfuls of dirt on McLanahan’s back. As the man writhed, they whacked at the flames with open hands until the fire was out. The flesh on the ex-sheriff’s back was wet crimson, and large yellow blisters were blooming. The tatters of his shirt were scorched black.
    As McLanahan moaned beneath them, Butch looked up with a red-eyed squint and said, “Joe, I hope we’re getting close.”
    —
    B ECAUSE THE FIRESTORM CREATED its own ecosystem, occasionally the wind reversed for a few seconds. When it did, the air cleared and the intensity of the heat was reduced, and Joe could see ahead along the rim.
    After McLanahan had staggered to his feet again, his face a mask of pain, the wind stopped blowing for a moment. Joe cautiously pushed through the juniper to peer into the canyon itself. The palms of his hands stung on contact with the brush because he’d burned them slapping out the fire on McLanahan’s back. But he managed to part the branches and poke his head through them. He wanted to drink in and remember every feature of the canyon before the smoke came roiling back.
    When he looked straight down, he could see the river, which looked like a twisted thin strip of sheet metal in the shadow of the canyon floor.
How cool it must be down there,
he thought.
    And when he looked ahead a quarter-mile upriver from where he stood, he could see a number of tepee poles scattered haphazardly along the side of the cliff. They looked like silver toothpicks because of their age, and they were still there ten years later, just as they’d been there for the previous hundred and fifty years. He’d chosen the right direction.
    “Found it!” he hollered back.
    “The trailhead?” Butch asked hoarsely.
    “Yup.”
    “Thank God.”
    Joe said, “There’s still the ‘getting down’ part.”
    As if to highlight his statement, the wind whirled around them and resumed blowing south and the flames roared toward them, advancing by jumps from tree to tree.
    —
    W ITHIN FIVE MINUTES, the toe of Joe’s boot thumped against the rock he’d been looking for. It had been completely obscured by the juniper bush. Edging toward the abyss, Joe parted the brush until he could locate the two-foot ledge just over the rim. He recalled Stewie standing on the ledge after he’d tripped on the rock.
    Only half the ledge was there—a one-foot-by-two-foot outcropping. The other half had fallen away. That would make it difficult to lower themselves down the face of the wall to where the trail actually began.
    “Oh, man,” Joe said.
    “Hurry, hurry,” McLanahan cried in full panic.
    Joe looked back and saw why. The fire was less than ten feet behind them, and tendrils of it were shooting across the ground toward them, igniting pine needles and tufts of dried grass.
    “Listen to me,” he said, trying to stay calm. Three sets of bloodshot eyes bored into him from masked, soot-blackened faces.
    “There’s a flat rock down here no bigger than the top of a stepladder. You’ll need to use it to lower yourself off the edge to the trail below. Stay tight to the side of the wall, because the trail isn’t any wider than a foot or so. Drop down to that trail and keep your balance. Got that?”
    Nods. Scared-but-frantic nods.
    “I’ll go first,” Joe said. “I’ll try to steady each of you when you lower yourself down. Don’t panic, and don’t start thrashing around or you might take both of us over. Okay?”
    “Just fucking hurry,” McLanahan said through his mask. Joe could tell his teeth were clenched as he said it.
    “How far is the drop to the trail?” Butch asked.
    “Seven feet or so, if I remember,” Joe said. “But it will seem farther when you’re dropping through the air.”
    “Sweet Jesus,” Farkus moaned.
    —
    J OE GRIMACED as he lowered himself on the shelf to grasp the ledge. His legs and back weren’t as flexible as they’d been ten years before. Even if he dropped safely to the trail cut into the canyon wall, he had no idea if stretches of it—like the ledge itself—had dropped away. He tried to not even think of what it would be like for the four of them to be isolated on the trail itself with no way to get down, their only other choice being to try and work their way back to the top and burn to