Firestorm Page 5

  “Let’s do it,” Stephen said.

  The words were followed by a low rumble. Faint, visceral, it was like the sound of a freight train coming down the tracks. The noise welled up from the bottom of the canyon. They looked back as one.

  The far side of the ravine blossomed in fire. A mushroom cloud poured up in a deadly column and fire spun a tornado of destruction through the forest’s crown, pulling oxygen from the air and creating weather of its own. Flame boiled down into the canyon bottom.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Lindstrom whispered. “Firestorm.”

  CHAPTER

  Four

  NEVER HAD ANNA seen anything so beautiful. Raw, naked power blooming in red and orange and black. Tornadoes of pure fire shrieking through the treetops, an enraged elemental beast slaking a hunger so old only stones and gods remembered.

  Exhilaration rose in her throat, a sense of revelation, of sharing the divine. “Whoa,” she said, and heard the bubbling laughter of her voice mixing with the roar of Armageddon.

  A scream brought her back and the fire of the holy spirit turned to fear that coursed through her with such violence she felt her bowels loosen. The scream had been ripped from Hamlin when Len Nims dropped his end of the litter. Anna could see him barging up the hill through the manzanita. She grabbed up the foot of the fallen stretcher. Hamlin’s weight pulled a cry from her, the movement an answering groan from Newt.

  “Deploy?” Lindstrom was shouting.

  “Not a good place.” LeFleur. “Too much brush. Run. Go for the ridge. Run.”

  Lindstrom held the head of the stretcher, Anna the foot. Both stared stupidly at Newt Hamlin, his only safety between their hands.

  “We can do it,” Lindstrom screamed.

  The hell we can, Anna thought, but she held on to the litter. Newt said nothing. His brown eyes stared into her face, then Lindstrom’s, and Anna knew she was witnessing an act of courage. Not bravado—he couldn’t loose his jaws to tell them to go—but the courage to keep them closed against the words that would beg them not to leave him.

  “We can do it,” Anna said.

  “Get the fuck out of here,” LeFleur shouted. The roaring pushed his words like foam on the tide. “Go.” The crew boss brought the handle of the pulaski he carried down hard across the bones of Stephen’s wrists. The litter fell. Anna couldn’t hold on and her end dropped as well.

  “Go. Go.” LeFleur was striking at them with the handle, herding them like goats. Jennifer started up the hill, slowly at first, then beginning to run. “Go, God damn it!”

  Anna started to climb, Stephen with her, pounding up the slope. Fear took over. John, Newt, everything behind was blotted out but for the fire. She wanted to turn back, to look at it, but an odd memory from Sunday school of Lot’s wife turning to a pillar of salt stopped her.

  Loping on all fours like a creature half animal, half human, she scrambled over downed logs crumbling with rot, plowed through brush. Ahead of her, in that narrow scrap of world between eyes and hands that still existed, the ground turned red. She thought of “Mars,” a short story her sister had written about the red planet. Close on that thought came another: how strange it was that while she was running for her life, she was thinking of Mars.

  And she was running for her life. The idea snapped sharply through the sinews of her body and she became aware of the stretch of the muscles in her legs, the hardness of the ground, the slipping as her boots tore at the duff, the strain in the big muscles of her thighs and that slight softening that heralded fatigue. She wondered how long she could keep going.

  A scrap of trivia surfaced. Fire, unlike anything else known to man, defied gravity. It traveled faster uphill than down. The length of a football field in a minute, that stuck in her mind. How long was a football field? A hundred yards? Fifty? Third grade. Johnstonville Elementary. She’d won a blue ribbon for running the fifty-yard dash in ten seconds flat. She was older now. Stronger. Older. Maybe only the young would make it.

  A thicket of manzanita filled her vision and Anna plunged in. No time to find another way. Breath was cutting deep, each pull of air tearing a hole in her side. Branches scraped her face, plucked hanks of hair from under her hard hat. Nothing registered, not pain, not impediment. Anna felt as if she could claw her way through a mountain of stone.

  Then her feet went from under her and she was down, her jaw cracking against a stone or a root. Her head swam with it, her mouth was full. She spit and blood, colorless against the flame-drenched earth, spilled out. She wondered if she’d bitten her tongue off.

  “Up, goddam you, up.”

  LeFleur. He pulled at the back of her pack and Anna came to her knees. “Go. Go.” Anna ran again. The thickets were close to the ridge. Close. If she could make the ridge, maybe…

  Roaring drowned even thought. Heat scorched her back, she could feel the burning through her left sleeve below the elbow. Air, sucked deep into her lungs, scalded and she screamed without sound. Her legs were growing heavy, sodden. Instead of carrying her she now had the sense of dragging them.

  The ridge top rolled beneath her as if she’d flown in. Suddenly she was aware the way had grown easier: the beaten earth of the old camp. Paula’s truck, the hood up, was parked where they’d left it. Two gasoline cans sat by the front wheel. Both were puffed up like roasted marshmallows, ready to blow. It crossed Anna’s mind to move them before any of the others reached the ridge but she knew if she touched them she would die and she kept running.

  Across the camp, clear of the pines, and over the crest of the ridge, Anna could see Jennifer ahead of her crashing down the slope toward the creek bed. Anna stumbled after, falling and pulling herself up time after time. Like a woman in a nightmare, she thought, like the Japanese maidens in monster movies.

  Howard Black Elk ran out of the trees just above. He’d lost helmet and gloves. His hands were over his ears trying to protect them from the burning. Both arms were seared, the flesh hanging in ribbons.

  Anna caught him by the shoulders.

  “The creek,” she gasped. “Fire’ll slow when it reaches the ridge.” While she talked she ripped her bandanna in half and bound Black Elk’s hands. The last of the water from the bottle on her belt she poured over the bandages.

  “The creek,” she repeated.

  “Safety zone,” Black Elk said. He hadn’t panicked. He knew where he was going. Together they ran again, flying downhill on legs that felt made of rubber and sand. Anna slid on rocks, fell over bushes and swung around trees. She heard the gas cans explode and looked back to the ridge top.

  Flame was cresting in a wave. Burning debris shot over, tumbling down and starting new fires. A hundred yards and Anna would reach the creek. She turned to run and felt a sharp pain shoot through her ankle.

  Fuck, she thought, I’ve broken it. Fear narrowed to that one place in her body and she put her weight on it. It held. The pain melded into the others as she ran.

  The creek was sunken, the banks several feet high and she tumbled over the lip into the sand. Already it was hot to the touch.

  “Deploy!”

  Maybe it was LeFleur. Smoke blinded her. Hacking coughs tore the air from her lungs. Fumbling behind her back, Anna pulled her plastic-encased shelter from its pouch. She hadn’t checked it in years. They were supposed to be checked every two weeks but no one did it. No one thought they would have to use them.

  Ripping it out of the plastic, she clawed it open; a small silver pup tent. Firefighters called them shake ’n’ bakes. It no longer struck Anna as funny. Scorching wind snatched at the flimsy shelter, threatening to wrench it from her grasp. Fire poured down the mountain, burning embers exploding in its path.

  Anna dragged the silver tent over her and anchored it with her boots to hold it down. Pulling it along her back and up over her head, she gripped the front edges in her gloved hands and fell face forward into the sand.

  The roar engulfed her. Scouring sand and debris rasped on her shelter and she felt the ski
n on her back begin to burn. Pressing her face into a hollow in the sand, hoping for air cool enough to breathe, she thought of her sister. If she didn’t get out of this alive, Molly would kill her.

  CHAPTER

  Five

  FOOTAGE OF THE firestorm was on the six o’clock news. The shots were from a distance of several miles and cut short when the helicopter carrying the cameraman hit rough weather. Still the explosive sense of power carried through, the might of nature unleashed.

  Frederick Stanton relaxed in the living room of his one-bedroom apartment in Evanston, Illinois. An overstuffed couch, bought for comfort, not looks, dominated the room. In the grate of a defunct fireplace, a television took the place of logs. The hearth of the nineties. Hardwood floors, recently refinished, picked up the reflection from the screen. No other lights were on.

  Long legs draped modestly in a battered terrycloth robe, Stanton lounged with his feet up and a glass of scotch—neat, no rocks. His bifocals were pushed down to where he could see over them. An aqua budgerigar with black tail feathers hopped down the length of one of Stanton’s long arms, murmuring and pecking as if the man were made of delicious crumbs.

  In the fireplace flames burned silently behind the anchorman’s head as he read the news: “The storm front blamed for the blowup brought snow and sleet in its wake, damping the fires and grounding air support. Due to the weather and hazards caused by burned snags falling across the twenty miles of steep and twisting logging road that leads in to the remote spike camp thought to be in the path of the blaze, no machinery will be sent up until morning. A ground crew carrying food and medical supplies has been dispatched up the beleaguered fire road on foot. At present ten firefighters are listed as missing.”

  The anchor turned and looked expectantly at a blank wall behind him. After a second’s delay film of a base camp in northern California was shown.

  Frederick sat up. The budgie twittered in annoyance and flew several feet before landing on a bare knee to continue its foraging. One of Stanton’s hands strayed to the black receiver of an old-fashioned rotary phone, a movement as unconscious as it was natural to a man who lived by the exchange of information.

  The station cut to a commercial for fabric softener and Frederick pawed through a disintegrating hill of newspapers and magazines obscuring the coffee table. Outraged, the budgie flew back to his cage with a noisy flapping that metaphorically slammed the wire door behind him.

  “Sorry, Daniel,” Frederick said absently. The magazines began to slide and an avalanche of paper cascaded down around his ankles and over long white feet half concealed in slippers trod flat at the heels. The disturbance uncovered the remote control. Stanton caught it up and began clicking through channels. National coverage was over for the evening. All he could find was Chicago news.

  For a few minutes he stared at men in blue-and-white football jerseys running from other men in purple and white. The Bears and the Vikings. Usually Frederick forced himself to watch the highlights and memorize the scores on the off chance he had to pass as one of the boys at some point the following day. Now he wasn’t aware of what was on the screen. Behind his eyes he watched a small-framed, middle-aged woman, streaks of gray through the infernal braid she used to incarcerate her hair, crumpled naked in a shower crying and swearing at him.

  More fun than petting a bobcat, he thought, and smiled. Somewhere in the heap of materials he’d dumped on the floor was a letter from her. He’d put off answering it one day at a time for three weeks. Too much to say and no way to say it that was guaranteed to charm and amuse. Several drafts had already been consigned to the trash as sophomoric. With Anna he had to use his best material, the new relatively honest stuff. From the beginning he sensed she’d spot anything glib—or worse, would know if he tried too hard.

  In the short time he’d known her, he’d had the heady sense of being an angler with a particularly wily and powerful fish on his line.

  Not that Frederick fished, except as a less than biblical fisher of men, but this was how he imagined a deep-sea fisherman might feel with a muscular iridescent marlin on the end of his line. A glimpse of rainbow sparkling through the gray of an ocean wave, a sense of triumph. The line suddenly slack; the prize eluding. Exhilaration at feeling the tug once again.

  Frederick felt that tug now. Sipping delicately at the scotch, he wondered who had whose hooks into whom.

  His right hand strayed back to the telephone. Pushing a button on the remote, he muted the television. He didn’t turn it off. Whenever he was home the TV was on. Sound, color, the electronic simulation of life kept him company. Over the years he’d grown so used to it the place felt cold, haunted without it.

  He dialed the Bureau’s number from memory. Timmy Spinks answered and Frederick was relieved. Spinks was young but he was sharp and, Stanton hoped, just inexperienced enough not to realize Frederick was about to use Bureau equipment and personnel to his own ends.

  “Timmy, Frederick Stanton. Get me everything you can on the firefighters caught in that burn out in California. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  “Yes, sir. It was all over the news.”

  “That’s the one. I want to know what anybody else knows. Who is missing. If anybody’s dead and who. What’s being done. Everything.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sir. Timmy made Stanton feel old but since it was old and revered the FBI agent let it pass. “Call me at home. I’ll be in all evening.”

  Stanton hung up and looked at pictures of beautiful women and shiny cars move silently across the television.

  The San Juan Plateau crew would be out of the Colorado/New Mexico area. That much was obvious. Anna had mentioned in her letter that half the rangers in the park were fighting fires out west. What were the odds Anna was on a fire? On the Jackknife?

  A thousand to one. With Anna those odds didn’t settle Stanton’s nerves.

  He could always phone her. There couldn’t be too many Pigeons in southern Colorado. Information should have no trouble tracking her down.

  I’m curious, not concerned, he told himself. If I reached her I wouldn’t have much to say. But it was the specter of saying it badly that stayed his hand.

  He fixed himself supper and ate in front of the TV, placing bits of food on the edge of his plate for Daniel to share. The little bird kept up a running conversation in a low and liquid warble but Frederick was lousy company.

  Until the phone rang, and it occurred to him he had no recollection of what he had eaten or what he was watching, he didn’t realize he had been waiting.

  “Agent Stanton,” he said as if he were at his desk in the office.

  “Hi, Dad. It’s Candice.”

  Frederick forced the disappointment from his voice. “Hiya, sweetheart. What’s up?”

  There followed a long and rambling account of triumphs and political coups on the student newspaper at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. After she hung up, Frederick scanned his memory. He was relatively sure he’d made all the right noises but he hadn’t really been paying attention. Parental guilt prodded. A gentle poke: Candice was his one success out of three children. Through the divorces and the moves the two of them had managed to stay close.

  “I love my girl,” he said to Daniel.

  The bird cocked its head and looked up out of one bright beady eye expecting attention, but the exchange was over. Frederick’s eyes were back on the television, his mind in neutral.

  When the phone rang a second time half an hour later he answered “Hello,” cognizant of where he was.

  “Agent Stanton? It’s Timmy. Tim.”

  Stanton felt a familiar tightness in his belly. He’d first noticed it after he’d become a father for the second time. Driving home late—back in the days when home was populated by more than a bird and TV set—the last block before he turned onto Oakland Avenue where he could see his house, he’d get a slight clutch wondering if good news or bad news or no news awaited.

  The house h
ad always been standing, no burned-out shell, no roofless statistic in the wake of a tornado, no children with scarlet fever or black plague. But the tightening was there till he’d closed the door behind him. It was a game he played with himself.

  “What’ve you got for me?”

  “Not a whole lot. Events conspired, you might say.”

  Frederick crushed mounting impatience. “Begin at the beginning.”

  “Evidently the fire was a bit of a sleeper. It’d just been creeping along for several days. Pretty routine. About two this afternoon a cold front came in. The National Weather Service forecast it. They were counting on the precip to put the fire out. That’s what gets most of them out—not as glamorous as I’d thought. This time the winds got bad, sheared in a canyon, fuel was dry and boom! The thing just exploded. Like a bomb. A squad—half the San Juan Plateau crew—was building line on about a two-hundred-acre finger of the fire. Sort of a thumb-shaped burn. When the wind sheared it blew up from two hundred acres to thirty-five hundred acres in less than an hour. Must’ve been awesome.” Timmy’s youth crept through the professional recital.

  Frederick was pushing the receiver against his head, bruising the delicate if generous ear tissue. He loosened his grip. “The crew?”

  “They were cutting back the whole operation. The San Juans were camped out a ways—twenty miles or so from the main camp. One squad had already been taken off the fire as well as two other guys, one with bronchitis and one with back problems. The other squad—about half the crew—was finishing up a section of fireline they’d been building. They may have gotten caught in the path of the fire when it went out of control. They’re the ten missing.”

  “May have? No one’s checked?” Frederick was angrier than he had a right to be and it bled into his voice.

  Affronted, Tim was all business when he responded and Frederick made a mental note to be effusive in his thanks once he’d gotten what he wanted.