into a high, rounded hill. The hill was taller but less steep and jagged than the one Jack had descended. It was dotted with stands of timber, unlike the opposite side with its scant sprinkling of low, scraggly brush. The far hill was crowned with an abundance of the shaggy blue-green foliage of pine trees.
The hilltop provided the only real cover in the valley. It was a place where Jack could hide and shelter if he reached it before the green gas took effect, whatever that might be. He had little doubt that hostiles would come looking for him. The Silvertop strike force was unlikely to leave any surviving witnesses to the raid. And that was the optimistic view, assuming as it did that Jack would survive the green gas.
He was alive now and would continue to act on that premise unless and until circumstance proved otherwise.
The bank was a few feet above the creek bed. He hopped down off it, raising a splash in the shallow water. A scattering of silver droplets fell back to the surface in what seemed to be slow motion.
Jack started across the creek, stepping carefully to avoid slipping on the smooth, rounded stones lining its bottom. Water milled around his ankles, rising to slop over his boot tops in mid-stream.
He clambered up the side of the muddy west bank and began jogging across a long stretch of open ground that rose only a few degrees on its way toward the base of the hill. The green grass of the bank quickly yielded to short, dry, yellow- brown turf. It felt springy under his feet.
He angled across the tilted flat instead of crossing it directly, making for a spot at the bottom of the hill that was in line with a clump of trees higher on the slope. He wanted to make use of what minimal cover was available as soon as possible.
These first trees were about twenty yards above the bottom of the hill. Jack climbed to them. They were skinny pines about fifteen feet tall with a few sparse, forlorn-looking boughs. The trunks at their thickest were the width of a thin man’s leg. Jack grabbed one to help pull himself up.
The wood writhed in his grip.
Jack pulled his hand back, recoiling. He thought for an instant he’d grabbed a snake that was curled around the trunk and had wriggled away at his touch. He looked at the tree he’d grabbed and the ground surrounding it. He saw no snake. He circled the tree carefully, looking at its far side and the ground at its base.
No snake.
He held out his hand palm- up, the one that had done the grabbing, and looked at it. It was the hand of a stranger.
Perhaps he’d never looked at it properly before. He stared at it. It seemed to swell and grow, then to dwindle and shrink.
A fascinating phenomenon. He continued to watch it. The hand continued to expand and contract in size. He realized that the cycle of expansion and contraction was in synchronization with the beating of his heart. It was an awesome revelation.
Awe turned into anxiety. He must be crazy to waste time staring at his hand when he should be climbing the hill as fast as he could!
Jack turned his face toward the slope and readied himself to continue. He examined the ground ahead to make sure there was no snake there. It came up clean and he strode briskly forward, mounting the hillside at a quick pace. He made a point of not looking at his hands as he climbed.
He was one-third of the way up the hill when he realized his error. He’d planned to use the trees for cover and here he was walking out in the middle of the open where anybody could see him!
He shook his head at his own carelessness, changing course toward the right and another clump of trees. They had some waist-high bushes at their bases. He hurried toward them but slowed as he neared them, just in case they harbored snakes.
There was a snake! He stopped short. No, it was only a dead tree branch.
Jack stood still but the hillside kept moving. Solid ground seemed to flow like water racing uphill and away from him. Earthquake!
They didn’t have earthquakes in Colorado, did they? He blinked and the illusion vanished. The earth was solid and motionless beneath his feet.
Jack made the conceptual breakthrough: the illusion vanished. That’s all it was, an illusion. Unreal, like the other phenomena that had been bedeviling him throughout the climb.
It was all in his head and the reason it was in his head was because the green gas had put it there. The green gas was a hallucinogen.
The breakthrough was thrilling and alarming. Thrilling because it gave him a handle on the weird things that were happening to him. Alarming because of its implications.
His awareness snapped into focus with an almost physical lurch. He was Jack Bauer and he was experiencing the effects of exposure to a hallucinogenic gas. An airborne psychedelic whose effects were something like LSD only stronger.
His training as an agent had included advanced courses in resisting hard interrogations. Drugs were frequently used to break a subject’s will and the trainees had been dosed with a variety of psycho-chemicals to strengthen their resistance and give them a sampling of the techniques that might be used against them in the event of being taken alive by the enemy.
Now that Jack knew what was happening to him he could fight it. No, that was wrong. The drug had him in its sway and its effects could not be willed away, no more than a swimmer in the sea could will away a giant wave that was about to come crashing down on him.
He couldn’t fight it but he could surf it, ride that wave out until it had spent itself and washed him safely up on shore.
He looked back the way he came, across the valley to the ridge bordering Silvertop. The sky above it was blue, free of any taint of the green.
The green was in his head now. He had to stay on top of the wave, maintaining his sense of self and purpose, stay flexible and adapt to whatever came his way until the drug worked its way out of his system.
The creek wound its way through the valley bottom like a giant snake, sunlight glistening on its surface in countless myriad swirls.
All illusion, the trick of a drugged mind.
Jack pointed himself toward the hilltop and resumed his climb. It was not unlike escaping the tunnel after the dynamite blast. You took one step forward and then another and kept on doing it until you reached your goal.
The weird physical and visual effects were Alice in-Wonderland trimmings on bedrock reality. A rock was still a rock and a tree was still a tree, even if the rocks were made of jelly and the trees were swaying, with their branches wriggling in snaky motion.
The ground leveled out as he crested the summit of the hill. He was on a plateau, a wooded flat that spread out for miles in a sprawling pine forest. These were real pines, tall and towering with thick trunks and abundant foliage.
The pine scent was heady, intoxicating. The edge of the forest was a solid wall but when Jack approached it the trees spread apart in a maze of paths and trails. Not manmade trails but game trails.
He entered the woods. They were filled with pools of cool shadow and hot sunlit glades that alternated in a checkerboard pattern if one had the wit to see it. They were never silent but quick with life and motion: birds flitting, pine cones dropping, boughs creaking.
Jack followed a trail into the depths of the forest. It wound through the trees, around mossy boulders, down into hollows carpeted with dead pine needles and up into rises that broke into columns of sunlight shafting through spaces in the canopy of trees. It was a place of mystery and enchantment where time lost all meaning…
Somewhere, somewhen, somehow the scene began to stabilize and come back into focus. The initial, overpowering rush of the drug, a physical onslaught of raw sensation that sent Jack reeling among the big trees, reached its peak. The wave crested, broke, and ebbed.
The trail went up a low rise and into a clearing, a broad grassy open area about fifty feet in diameter that was enclosed by a thicket of trees.
Jack slipped through a wall of foliage to enter the glade. The grass was emerald-green, and above the treetops stood a circle of blue sky. It was an idyllic nook, like a woodland scene depicted in an illustration for a children’s storybook.
He was well into the clearing before he realized he was not alone. There was a purposeful rustling motion in
