Dark Mountain Read Online Free PDF

we can always back up.”
    “Oh, wonderful.”
    Scott’s foot jumped off the accelerator as the camper came down the center of the road straight at them. In a reflexive move, he pulled at the wheel as if to raise the nose and shoot above the oncoming vehicle. His car remained earthbound. He stepped on the brake, and eased to a halt.
    The camper moved over close to the mountain’s wall andstopped, blocking two thirds of the road. An arm poked through the driver’s window. It waved Scott forward.
    “Can you make it?” Karen asked.
    “Sure,” he said. “Just to be on the safe side, though, I want you out.” He looked over his shoulder. “Everybody out.”
    “I’m not scared,” Benny said.
    “No arguments.”
    With a sigh, Benny opened his door. When he, Julie, and Karen were outside the car, Scott unbuckled his seat belt. The trio walked ahead of him, Karen nodding and speaking to the man behind the wheel. At the rear of the camper, they stopped and turned around to watch. Karen straddled the road’s edge, her eyes fixed on his right front tire. Her lips were drawn back in a grimace. She wiped her hands on the sides of her corduroy shorts.
    This must be really bad for her, Scott thought as he inched forward. Karen knows no one’s immune to an accident. She’d barely escaped death in a car crash three years before, and her fiancé had been killed.
    With the fingers of his left hand curled around the door lever, he steered alongside the camper. He watched its gleaming side as he slid past it, no more than an inch away. If the car should start to tip, he realized, he wouldn’t be able to get his door open.
    Not at first anyway. He might find an instant, though, just before the car slipped over the edge.
    He glanced at Karen. Her hand was covering her mouth. Benny looked relaxed. Julie was squatting down, hands on knees, staring at the tire.
    Ice fishing when he was a kid, Scott drove out on the frozen Saint Lawrence River with his father. Sometimes, the ice creaked and groaned under the weight of the pickup truck. They always kept their doors open for quick escapes. Everyone did, driving on the river. Everyone but fools.
    He wished he had his door open now. A little precaution like that could save a man’s life.
    The front of his car was even with the rear of the camper. He fought an urge to speed up, and kept to a steady crawl until he cleared the vehicle. Then he swung to the left and stopped in the road’s center.
    Benny climbed in first. “Boy, Dad, that was really close.”
    “A piece of cake,” he said, and backhanded the sweat off his upper lip.
    “Hope we don’t have to go through
that
again,” Julie said.
    Karen slumped in the passenger seat with her knees against the dash. She stared straight ahead. Her lips were a tight line.
    Reaching out, Scott rubbed the side of her neck. “You okay?”
    “I guess,” she muttered.
    After another traverse, the road curved around the mountainside to a high, wooded valley. A weathered sign, caught in a patch of sunlight, read BLACK BUTTE RANGER STATION, 6 MI .

C HAPTER F IVE
    The forest, pressing in close on both sides of the unpaved road, opened up. Karen saw two cars ahead, parked under trees. One, a dusty Mazda resting at a rakish angle, had a rock at the base of each rear tire to keep it from rolling.
    “Guess we beat them to it,” Scott said.
    “What do they drive?” Karen asked.
    “Probably the Plymouth station wagon.”
    Karen imagined a station wagon trying to squeeze past the RV on the thin strand of road along the mountain slope, and her stomach tightened.
    Scott swung off to the left. He pulled forward slowly, the tires crunching over fallen limbs and pine cones. He parked with the bumper close to an aspen, and shut off the engine. “Let’s leave everything here for now, and check out the ranger station. We can pick up our fire permit while we’re waiting.”
    They climbed out of the car. After the air-conditioning, the heat outside felt