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  "So you got off easy. What's wrong with that?"

  Carter shook his head, and instantly Nate knew that there was something more to the story that Carter wasn't telling.

  "I need to get you drunk before you'll spill it?" he asked.

  "Maybe," Carter answered, and his voice was so damned quiet what with the rain falling that Nate had a hard time hearing him.

  "Say it," Nate said harshly, partially from frustration and partially because he thought he might get through to Carter that way. "Whatever it is. Just say it."

  "It's not..." Carter's voice started out faint and then grew stronger after a minute, like he was gathering speed going downhill. "I was in a cell. By myself. But they only had two, and there were three of us, so the other... the other two guys were in together. I don't know why they were there -- no one said anything to me about it. But one of them was completely smashed. He couldn't even walk; two of the cops had to carry him into the cell between them. His feet were just dragging on the ground. They left us there and shut the door."

  Nate waited, and after a while Carter started talking again.

  "I didn't look. When I first heard it -- the sound -- I wanted to, but I didn't know what would happen, and I was lying down and I thought -- I hoped -- he'd think I was asleep. But I heard the zipper, and the drunk guy kind of made a noise and I heard fabric moving... and then they both groaned and one was... like pain. And I could hear the... rhythm, you know. But there wasn't any struggle, I don't think, or if there was he was too out of it for it to be very effective..." He trailed off again.

  Now Nate got it. He didn't think it was right -- not Carter letting it bother him when there was probably nothing he could have done, not Carter continuing to let it bother him when it was over and finished and unfixable -- but he got it. "Um... yeah," he said finally. "That, um... that sucks."

  "Fuck off," Carter said in a weary tone, as if he didn't have the energy to work up sufficient heat to sound angry. "Boy, you're just brilliant at the sympathy thing, huh. Too bad you didn't decide to become a therapist."

  Geez, try to help a guy out. Well, okay, Nate hadn't been trying to help so much as willing to listen for some mysterious reason, but still. He was trying. Shouldn't that count for something? "You fuck off," he said, and then winced because he sounded like a five year old. A five year old with a dirty mouth, but still.

  Carter set the beer bottle down carefully on the dashboard -- on its side, so Nate figured it must be empty -- and started to open the passenger side door. Before he could do it, Nate grabbed his arm, pulled him back, and kissed him. Just once. Hard.

  Then, "Sorry," Nate said.

  Carter looked at him warily. "Sorry for what?"

  "Don't know. I just am."

  "I've got to get some sleep," Carter said, after they'd continued to sit there for a minute or so more. "Thanks for..." He gestured meaninglessly with his hand.

  "Yeah." Nate didn't have any idea what Carter was thanking him for, and he didn't think Carter did, either. "You go ahead."

  After Carter left, Nate sat in the car for a long time. The rain came down gently, a fine mist that was hard to see landing on the windshield and yet ran down it in rivulets anyway. A bunch of tiny things all coming together to make something much bigger. Nate didn't doubt his ability to see the big picture, but damned if he could identify the little things that made it up. He sighed, and drank the rest of his beer, and watched the rain run but not fall.

  * * * * *

  Carter lay flat on his back on the bed for a while, his mind racing and his heart doing its best to keep up. He'd tried for a long time not to think about what had happened... on the few occasions when he had thought about it, part of him had wondered if that experience was something that had delayed his acceptance of being gay. It was a perfectly reasonable thing to assume -- if he associated that horrible observation with what it was like to want to touch other men, then no wonder he'd wanted Shannon so badly.

  He didn't want her now.

  * * * * *

  Carter spent most of the next day talking with the kids. They weren't actually kids, of course, although they seemed ridiculously young to him. They were so earnest and interested and determined.

  They bothered the crew as much as they could without doing enough to actually get themselves thrown off site. At least they had enough sense to stay out of the brush -- they either hung out in the place where they'd pitched their tents, or near the landing, making comments that annoyed Nate and Keith and Flash and whoever else happened to be unlucky enough to have to come up to the landing for whatever reason.

  Carter didn't wait for one of them to approach him -- he just went right up and started talking, asking questions, trying to see what group, if any, they were affiliated with. The kids acted defensively initially, insisting that they were just a few concerned citizens who were worried about the fate of the planet and wanted to do whatever they could to stop the logging that was destroying the rain forest and the habitats of endangered animals. Despite his own interest in the topic, Carter couldn't help but repeat "blah, blah, blah" in his head. No wonder people didn't listen, if this was what environmentalists sounded like. Like they were reciting from something they'd learned from some pamphlet or something.

  "If you're really interested, I have some reprints of articles you can have." The brown haired girl, Julie, was eager, her eyes flashing at him hopefully.

  "I don't think I need to read any articles," he said.

  "But you can't keep doing this to the forest!" Julie responded. "It's not just unethical, it's immoral! Did you know that -- "

  Carter cut her off before she could go into another long spiel. "First off, I'm not doing anything to the forest. I'm not a logger, I'm an author. I'm just here doing research for a book I'm writing."

  "Really?" Julie sounded genuinely interested. "What have you written? Anything I might have read?"

  "I don't know." Carter shrugged. "This is the first book. I've written for a lot of magazines, though."

  She looked at him thoughtfully. "Under what name?" she asked finally, carefully, as if she was trying to feel the situation out.

  "Gabriel Carter."

  "Really?" she said again, this time excitedly. "You wrote that article about the Spotted Owls."

  "I wrote one of many, many articles that exist about Spotted Owls," he corrected her.

  "Yeah, but I actually know you."

  What followed was an embarrassing gushing of how great he was, how he'd done so much for "the cause," and then an even more embarrassing replay of the whole scene with a few more of the kids added for good measure. Not that it wasn't nice to be told you were great and respected and that a bunch of young people wanted to be just like you when they grew up. It was more that he didn't like the idea of them thinking he was someone he wasn't. Which was almost certainly the case, on some level or another.

  "Robin! Come over here!" Julie called to one of the young men who was off taking photos with a camera not nearly as nice as Carter's.

  Seeing it reminded him that he should really get his out of the trunk of his car and take some pictures himself.

  He took that as his cue to bail -- the thought of going over all of it even one more time was exhausting. "I've really got to go and do some, um... work," he said quickly. "But I'll talk to you later, okay?"

  As he headed down toward the bus, he made a mental note to ask them about their intentions when he did talk to them again. If they thought he was on their side -- which they clearly did, and which he mostly was -- they'd be more likely to tell him what they were planning. Assuming it was something more than just hanging out and trying to annoy the crew, which he really hoped was the extent of their plans. He wondered if he'd be able to get them to admit it if they had already done something to some of the equipment. They seemed like good kids, but then he figured he had, too, and that hadn't stopped him from getting way too involved in something that he hadn't completely understood and that he'd been in no wa
y prepared for.

  Nate came down and found him a short while later. "What do you think?"

  "About them?" Carter had to gesture with his head toward the tents because his hands were full of paper and pen. "I don't know. They seem okay."

  "Don't think they're gonna do any damage?"

  Carter sighed. Was he supposed to read their minds? "I don't know," he repeated. "They seem fine. A little overly-dramatic, but who can tell? I don't know them."

  "Yeah." Nate went back to the landing without saying anything else.

  Charming. The guy was just a study in manners.

  * * * * *

  After dinner that evening, Carter tried to read for an hour or so, but eventually gave up and moved on to the more academic pursuit of staring at the ceiling. He'd just started to doze when a loud thud and a shouting voice jarred him up out of sleep. He heard what sounded like Nate's voice, cursing, and another door crashing into a wall.

  Still dazed with almost-sleep, he staggered out into the hallway. Jared was kneeling on the floor trying to tie his boot, and there was more shouting from what he thought might be the open front door.

  Nate stormed past him, followed closely by Keith, both of them pulling on jackets.

  "What's going on?" Carter asked.

  "Fire up at the side," Nate said tersely.

  "What?" Carter ran back for his own boots, then had to run to catch up with Nate as he went out the front door. "How do you know?"

  "Sent Don and James up to check, make sure those idiots weren't gettin' up to anything up there." Nate climbed into the SUV and Carter jumped into the passenger seat without question. "James came back, said there was a fire. Logs on the landing. Don stayed to try to deal with it."

  Nate backed out, put the car into drive and pressed the pedal to the floor, or at least that was how it felt to Carter as they accelerated quickly and started up the road at a much faster pace than the bus had managed in the times Carter had ridden in it.

  He looked out the back window at the bus, which was starting to follow them. "Is there stuff up there? Fire extinguishers? How the heck are we gonna put out a fire?" Belatedly, he pulled on his boots and tied them.

  "Keith called it in to the town fire department. They'll get there when they get there. Until then we'll do the best we can to contain it." Nate's words were clipped.

  Carter's brain was trying to wrap itself around this new development, refusing to believe that it could be a deliberate act on the part of the young people. He didn't want to think it was possible that he was one of the most gullible people on earth.

  He rolled the window down, and minutes before they got there he could smell it. Any question that he'd had about whether or not it was intentional vanished as soon as the smoke hit them -- it was thick and heavy with something chemical, something that reminded him of lighter fluid or gasoline or... whatever it was, it was something that didn't belong. It made the air acrid and bitter.

  "Shit," Nate muttered under his breath. "Shit, shit, shit."

  Carter couldn't disagree. Not only would a big fire destroy the trees that had already been cut and couldn't be saved anyway, but it would also destroy the living ones, and therefore the places where birds and small animals made their homes. What the hell had those kids been thinking, that they believed this was some kind of solution?

  When they rounded the corner and could see the landing, there was no sign of the cars, and the tents were gone, too. The fire had spread enough that it took Carter's breath away.

  Don was using a fire extinguisher on the flames that were licking at the landing area, and two people were standing near him, beating at the flames with some kind of cloth.

  It was Julie, the brown haired girl, and one of the guys -- Carter thought it might have been Robin, but he wasn't sure. Why had they stayed?

  Don threw the fire extinguisher he was holding away from himself and took a few steps to the side to grab a second one. "It's too big!" he shouted at them as they got out of the car and ran toward him. "We can't control it with this, we're gonna have to wait for the firefighters to get here!"

  Carter looked around for something he could do to help. "Can't we just leave it?" he yelled to Nate. "I mean, some wood's gonna burn, but is a little while going to make a huge difference?"

  Nate shook his head, looking at the flames and how they were spreading. "No, you're right," he said, coming over closer to Carter. "At this point there's not much -- fuck! The Cat!"

  "What?" For a minute, Carter didn't understand what Nate was talking about, but Nate headed toward the Cat and he realized that the fire was moving right toward it, the wind causing the flames to lick at the small amounts of flattened brush that it was sitting on top of.

  "No, don't!" Julie yelled, pausing in her attempts to beat the fire out with what looked like a blanket.

  Nate either didn't hear her or decided not to listen, because he continued on determinedly. Carter took a dozen quick steps to Julie's side and grabbed onto her arm. "What is it?" he asked her, giving her a shake. "Tell me!"

  Her eyes turned to his, clearly reflecting her anguish. Beside her Robin continued to beat at the flames. "They poured it everywhere. We were supposed to light it and then get out, but Robin and I -- and we stayed and they left without us. But the lighter fluid -- they used a whole case of bottles. They wanted the equipment to burn, too."

  Carter grasped what she was saying before she'd finished speaking, and started in the direction of the Cat. "Nate!" he shouted. "Get out of there!"

  Don must have sensed his urgency, because he dashed toward the Cat as well, waving his arms to try to get Nate's attention. Nate was climbing up onto the machine, obviously intent on starting it and moving it out of harm's way.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Carter saw the bus come around the turn just as the Cat exploded.

  10.

  Carter'd always thought that when cars and trucks blew up in movies and on TV it was kind of fake -- that they wouldn't really explode so dramatically in real life, that there'd just be some flames and a whooshing sound and then a lot more flames and lots of burning. Maybe that would have been the case if the Cat had caught on fire just from the burning brush. As it was, the generous amounts of lighter fluid that had been spread around caused what would have been considered an impressive explosion, if you hadn't actually been present for it.

  His immediate reaction was to duck, and it was a reaction that he didn't think he could have controlled even if he'd been ready for the explosion. The sound of it was like a muffled whump followed by metal ripping itself into bits, the light a sudden flare that lit up the night sky like a beacon. There were crashing noises, and Carter heard voices that must have been the rest of the crew.

  As soon as he realized what had happened, really realized it, he was up on his feet and moving toward the place where the Cat was. It was still there, even though it was about half the size it had been and looked like a toy some gigantic child had crushed in his careless hand. Carter looked around wildly -- there were several large pieces of twisted metal on the ground, but no sign of Nate.

  Carter staggered a few more steps, trying to run, and then caught sight of Nate lying crumpled on the ground. Even as Carter started toward him, Nate moved and groaned, pushing himself up onto his elbows.

  "Oh, fuck," Nate said, dazed, and his voice sounded like he'd swallowed gravel. "Was that -- ?"

  "Holy shit, it blew up. It just fucking... exploded, like something from an action movie. Holy shit, I've never seen anything like that in my life." Carter was on his knees next to Nate, his hands moving over Nate's arms and chest, instinctively searching for injuries. "Are you hurt?"

  * * * * *

  Nate headed for the Cat, his jaw tense with determination. He thought he heard someone shouting at him, saying his name, maybe, but he had to get the thing out of the way of the fire. He didn't have time to mess around.

  Don was moving toward him waving his arms, but he had to move the Cat. He had to. He c
limbed up onto the machine, digging the keys out of his pocket at the same time. He fumbled for the right one and started to slip it into the ignition. His eyes were so focused on what he was doing that he didn't see anything else.

  There was a dull roar, and a really bright light, and the sickening sensation of flying through the air. The crunch as he hit the ground was even worse, and he lay there for a long minute, trying to force the air back into his lungs through sheer willpower. He could feel a branch digging into his right shoulder blade. The part of his brain that had enough oxygen to keep working reminded him, loudly, that everything around him was still on fire. His arm hurt and his back ached and if he didn't stop being such a fucking wuss he was gonna burn, and he'd probably deserve it.