The Call of the Mild

Chapter Thirty-Two

Gus slipped his arms through the straps of his backpack and shrugged it tight against his shoulderblades. Once he’d fastened the chest and waist straps, the pack balanced so well it seemed weightless, and when he stood up, it felt like it was being lifted by a skyhook. “Let’s go.”

They walked over to the clutch of lawyers bickering across the clearing.

“Why can’t you understand this?” Mathis was saying, beads of sweat dripping down from his artificially tan hairline. “The only thing to our east is the desert. If we go down that way, we’re going to die in the wilderness.”

“If we don’t stop before we hit Nevada,” Savage said, not bothering to hide the contempt in his voice. “We’re hiking down the mountain, and when we reach our destination, Rushton will be waiting for us. He knows we’re not skilled mountaineers, so he’s going to want us to take the safest and easiest path down. If you look, you’ll see that’s the eastern route.”

Gus looked in the direction Savage was pointing. There was a faint trail that threaded its way through a lunar landscape of enormous boulders before disappearing into a pine forest a long way below. In other words, it looked exactly like the paths leading off in every other direction from the summit.

“What makes you think the eastern route is the easiest?” Gwendolyn demanded. “If you have the map, you have a moral obligation to share that information with us.”

“And then you’ll have a moral obligation to share that information with Rushton,” Balowsky said. “You’re not fooling anyone.”

Jade looked like she was about to burst into tears. Gus wondered if they would have a green tint, too. “Guys, we need to make a decision,” she whined. “We should just strike out. If there was a wrong way, Rushton would have told us. So let’s go west. Or north. No, let’s split the difference and go northwest.”

“It’s a simple fact of natural law,” Savage said, ignoring Jade as if she were a bright green mosquito. “The eastern side of this mountain gets far less rain than the western side. Less rain means less runoff, which means less erosion, which means an easier hike down.”

“Hike down to nowhere,” Mathis said. “When we were flying up here, I saw buildings on the southern approach. That must have been the park entrance, and that’s going to be where we can expect to find other people.”

“And you know this because you’re such an expert on California, Mr. Detroit?” Gwendolyn said. “You do a lot of mountaineering in Motown?”

“I’ve got eyes and a strong desire to survive,” Mathis said. “And unlike some of the people here, I’d rather be alive than see someone else die.”

“Guys,” Jade said again. “We don’t have that many hours before it gets dark. We’ve got to start moving.”

Again, her voice seemed to have the same effect on the others as a mosquito’s whine. Shawn stepped up to the pack. “Do any of you have any balloons?” he said. “Because as long as you’re putting out all this hot air we could use it to float down the mountain.”

Even with that friendly opening, the assembled lawyers did not seem pleased to have Shawn join them.

“You’re the psychic,” Gwendolyn said. “Why don’t you just beam us off the mountain.”

“You know, that’s a common misconception about my powers,” Shawn said. “Believe it or not, I can’t actually teleport anyone.”

“That’s the one thing I would believe about you,” Balowsky said. “Oh, and that even in this vast, trackless wilderness you’re a waste of space that should be used for something more beneficial to society. Like another rock.”

“Yeah, I get that a lot,” Shawn said. “If I could only be useful. Like the person who’s got the map.”

“We don’t know who that is,” Gwendolyn snapped. “If we did, we could be halfway down the mountain by now.”

“And you’d be two-thirds of the way down, running to tell Rushton before anyone else could,” Savage said.

“Let’s not bicker,” Shawn said. “Or maybe I should say let’s not bicker anymore.”

“We are having a serious intellectual argument about the proper route to take,” Balowsky said. “We are adressing the issues one at a time, searching for answers to the problems they present, and coming up with a solution. We do not bicker.”

“He’s right,” Gus said, stepping up next to Shawn. “Once you charge more than two hundreds bucks an hour, it’s not bickering anymore. It’s deliberation.”

“Two-hundred-dollar deliberation is fine if you’re suing over who is responsible for a traffic accident,” Shawn said. “But when it comes to climbing down a mountain, I prefer a two-dollar map. And one of us has it.”

“What good does that do us?” Gwendolyn said. “Whoever has the map can’t reveal that fact. And as long as that person can’t prove he or she is arguing from real knowledge and not from some half-assed Boy Scout training, there’s no reason to value anyone’s word over anyone else’s.”

“Rushton said it was so you’d learn to trust each other,” Shawn said. “But I’ve known you all for less than a day and I know that’s never going to happen. So he must have had something else in mind. Maybe we should reexamine exactly what he said.”

“I believe his actual words were to the effect that if the map bearer revealed the map to the rest of us, we’d all be fired,” Gus said.

“Yes,” Shawn said. “If the map bearer reveals that he or she has the map, that’s it. But he didn’t say that anything bad would happen if someone else revealed who had the map.”

“So what are we supposed to do?” Mathis said. “Tear through each other’s packs?”

Gus slapped his forehead. “If only we had a psychic here who could tell us who was carrying the map.”

“Why, that would be a fine thing,” Shawn said. “But where would we look for such a psychic?”

“We wouldn’t have to,” Gus said, “if Mr. Rushton hired a psychic detective and sent him along on this trip.”

“Wait a minute,” Shawn said. “Didn’t he do something just like that? If only we could remember who that psychic was, maybe he could help us out.”

“Maybe he could help us by shutting up and letting us determine the right trail,” Savage said. “Which happens to be the eastern one.”

Before the arguments could start again, Shawn pressed his fingertips to his temple and squeezed his eyes shut. “I need you all to blank your minds,” he said. “Don’t think of anything. Let the vibrations flow.”

“There’s something flowing, all right, and it isn’t vibrations,” Balowsky said. “And my brain is never blank.”

Shawn squinted one eye open and took a quick glance at Balowsky. Took a quick glance and saw. Saw the way his hands trembled slightly and sweat beaded the palms. Saw the pallor in his cheeks. Saw the tiniest difference in the size of his pupils.

“What’s that I hear?” Shawn said to the sky. “There’s something talking to me. It’s a ghost. No, a sprite. No, wait, it’s a spirit.”

“If it isn’t carrying a map,” Mathis said, “tell it our smallest billing increment is ten minutes, so unless it wants to be on the hook for a sixth of our combined hourly charges, it should go away.”

“No, wait,” Shawn said. “Not one spirit. Spirits. Glasses of spirits. Quarts of spirits. Gallons of spirits. They’re calling to one of us here. Join us, join our party. No one has to know.”

Shawn opened his eyes and leveled his gaze directly at Balowsky. “I think that message was for you. You wouldn’t happen to be in the habit of cavorting with spirits, would you? Because they really want to meet up with you as soon as possible, and they say that will happen much faster if you all stop arguing for one minute and let me do this.”

Gwendolyn let out a snort of derision. Shawn looked over the group of lawyers. Balowsky was staring at the ground, his hands twitching more than before. Savage was gazing eastward, as if still figuring out their route. Mathis fumbled in his pack, pulled out a bandanna, and wiped the sweat that was still trickling down from his hairline. Gwendolyn was the only one who was looking back at Shawn. She met his gaze with an intensity Gus had seen only once, at the reptile cage at Santa Barbara’s zoo.

And then there was Jade. Rushton had provided her with hiking clothes and boots in her trademark color, and it occurred to Gus that once they were in the woods, it would be extremely difficult to see her. But right now she stuck out like a bowl of lime Jell-O at a rock convention. She fidgeted nervously, her hands sliding in and out of the pockets of her dress, glancing furtively between ground and sky, and doing everything to proclaim her innocence short of whistling a jaunty tune.

“I’m seeing a trail,” Shawn said. “It’s long and it’s hard. It’s mysterious and confusing. But most of all, it’s green.”

The other lawyers turned as one to face Jade. She took a step back. “Why are you looking at me?” she said. “I don’t have the map.”

“Sure, you don’t,” Gwendolyn said. “Now, are you going to hand it over, or do we toss you over the side of the mountain and just follow the way you fall?”

“I can’t,” Jade said. “Even if I had the map, and you will all notice I’m not saying that I do, I couldn’t possibly show it to you without our all being fired. We’ve got to work together to figure out the right way to get off this mountain.”

“I agree with her,” Savage said. “We don’t need a map, anyway. We just need to work together to reach a consensus. And I vote that we all go whichever way Jade says. Who else?”

There was a moment of hesitation; then Mathis raised his hand. Balowsky nodded.

“Fine, we’ll follow the green freak,” Gwendolyn said. “But if she doesn’t have the map, or if she does but she’s so stupid she gets us lost anyway, I guarantee I will not be the first to die out here.”

“Isn’t it nice when we can all work together like this?” Shawn said. “Mr. Rushton would be so proud.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Mathis said. “Which way?”

Jade looked around nervously. She glanced up at the sun, then down at the various trails that led away from them.

“Not that I have the map or anything like that,” she said.

Gwendolyn groaned. “Oh, for God’s sake.”

“But if I had to follow my own instincts, I’d say that we should take the trail that goes to the northwest,” Jade said.

She gave them all a big smile and set off down the path to her right. After a few paces she looked back to see that everyone was still standing in place. “I thought we were all following my instincts.”

“Your ‘instincts,’ yes,” said Savage. “Your sense of direction not so much. Northwest is that way.”

He pointed at a trail that ran off to their left. Gus was mildly disappointed to see that when Jade blushed, her face actually turned red, not another shade of green.

“And isn’t this the very definition of ‘teamwork’?” Shawn said. “One of knows the directions, and another one of us knows what they mean.”

The lawyers all glowered at Shawn as they trudged past him towards the northwest trail. Gus let them all start down the trail before he whispered to Shawn.

“If Mathis really is the killer-”

“He is,” Shawn said.

“Fine, then he needs Jade alive until he can get the map away from her,” Gus said. “And unless he’s really good at hiding his wilderness skills, he needs Savage alive to interpret her directions. But does he have any reason why he shouldn’t try to kill us before we expose him?”

“Only our charm and good looks,” Shawn said. He hoisted his pack and started down the trail.