Firestorm Read online

  “No, sir. They can’t. The fire burned over the camp, the helispot and the road for they don’t know how many miles. The storm pushing the winds came in with snow at the higher elevations and sleet and rain in the valleys. Winds are still high. Visibility nil. Aircraft are grounded and they can’t get machinery up the road. Some have started up on foot but there’s no news yet and there’s been no radio contact from the missing crew. Word is they have handheld radios but they’re only good for line-of-sight. They’re meant for the crews to talk to each other. The commander said they might be able to reach the Incident Base camp if they were high enough. So far they haven’t called in or responded. I talked with Gene Burwell. He’s the incident commander. He said as soon as the weather breaks they’ll get helicopters up there. According to the National Weather Service it should start clearing mid-morning tomorrow.”

  Frederick digested that. Tim Spinks waited silently.

  The incident commander, not the information officer; Timmy must have cloaked himself in the armor of the Bureau. Frederick felt a small stab of embarrassment. He’d headed up enough bad situations to know how costly and irritating it was to have to shift mental gears to talk with other agencies. Especially those not directly involved.

  “Good job, Tim,” he said, and meant it. “Have you got a list of the missing crew members?”

  “John LeFleur, Crew Boss, Newton Hamlin, Leonard Nims, Howard Black Elk, Joseph Hayhurst, Jennifer Short, Lawrence Gonzales and Hugh Pepperdine.”

  No Anna Pigeon. Frederick felt a wave of relief so strong it surprised him and he wondered why he hadn’t asked for the names first. Mentally he wrote it off to the orderly progression of his mind but he suspected it was pain avoidance.

  “Read them again.” Jennifer Short rang a bell. He’d worked with a ranger with that name in Mesa Verde. “Again.” This time he counted on his fingers as Tim read off the names. Eight.

  “How many in a crew?”

  “Twenty, sir.”

  “A squad?”

  “Ten.”

  Twenty total, ten demobed, two invalided out. That left eight. “You said there were ten missing. Who are the other two?”

  “Emergency medical technicians running the medical unit. A Stephen Lindstrom out of Reno, Nevada, and an Anna Pigeon from Colorado.”

  There it was. Frederick felt the tightness harden into a knot. “Are you on all night, Tim?”

  “Yes, sir.

  “Keep an eye on things. Call me if there are any changes.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Thanks a bunch, Timmy. You’ve been super,” Frederick added sincerely, remembering his promise to himself. Vaguely he wondered why he always waxed dopey in gratitude. It disarmed people. He’d used the technique so long it had become habit. A self-made nerd, he said to himself without rancor. Whatever worked.

  Absently he turned the sound back on the television, banishing the emptiness of the room. Danny hopped along the back of the sofa and onto Frederick’s head where he chirped happily, picking through the fine dark hair.

  Of course Anna was on the Jackknife. Never had Frederick met a woman with such a propensity for disaster. In high school he’d known a kid like that, Desmond Gallagher. He hadn’t thought of Desmond in twenty years but now he was clear and lively in Stanton’s imagination. Desmond himself was a slight, pleasant, intelligent boy but he seemed a vortex for strange events. If Desmond walked by a liquor store there was a ten to one chance it was being robbed. If he sat too long at a bus stop odds were a nearby water main would break or a passing Brinks truck would lose its brakes and careen into a fruit stand.

  Anna apparently had that lightning-rod quality.

  She attracted you, Frederick thought, then wondered why he equated himself with a natural disaster.

  Danny still on his head, Stanton rose and shuffled into the tiny kitchen. Dishes were washed and dried and put away and the stove top wiped clean. The one-man breakfast table, like every other flat surface in the house, was piled with papers and magazines.

  Frederick had to read them before he allowed himself to throw them out. Information: one never knew what might be important. Stanton tried to assimilate it all and he was blessed—or cursed—with an excellent retention and retrieval system. At Trivial Pursuit he was unbeatable.

  He dumped his unfinished scotch in the sink, then washed and dried the glass. Alcohol didn’t hold a tremendous appeal for him but it seemed a man ought to have at least one vice to come home to and he never took to tobacco.

  He put the glass in the cupboard with four others exactly like it stacked two by two, and stood staring into the shelf as if waiting for a floor show to begin on a miniature stage.

  He was worried for Anna’s safety, for her comfort, for her life. To a lesser extent, and perhaps more impersonally, he felt a kernel of sadness for the others, Jennifer Short, the Newts and Johns and whoevers. Those were the honorable emotions floating up into the dark of his mind like the messages that used to float up into the black window of a Magic 8 Ball he’d been given as a child.

  Less than honorable and more compelling was anxiety for himself, for his future. “Future” wasn’t quite right. Destiny, Frederick thought, and smiled without being aware of it. To lose Anna Pigeon would be to lose some elusive possibility, some potential fate that was grander, more satisfying than the one that trickled in through his windshield and across his desk every day.

  The woman represented a chance.

  A chance at what, Frederick wasn’t sure. Maybe the all-encompassing “brass ring.” A chance he couldn’t bear to lose. At forty-four, twice divorced, there might not be many chances left.

  CHAPTER

  Six

  A ROAR FILLED Anna’s ears. She didn’t know if she was screaming or not. Probably she was. A terrible fear of being crushed by the immensity of what was coming poured through her and she had to fight down a panicked need to throw off the flimsy aluminum shelter and run. Nowhere left, she told herself. And she remembered her father’s voice from childhood telling her if she ever became lost to stay put and he’d come find her. Stay put, she told herself.

  She must have spoken the words aloud because fine, burning grit filled her mouth and throat. Each breath scorched the membranes of her nose and fired deep in her lungs.

  Wind grabbed at the shelter, tore up the edges, thrusting fistfuls of super-heated air beneath. Pushing her elbows and knees against the bottom of the shelter where it folded under, Anna fought to hold the shelter down, the fire out.

  Her mind rattled, grabbed onto a prayer long forgotten: now I lay me down to sleep—The end flashed like a telegram behind her eyes before the first words were formed and she jettisoned the rest as too prophetic.

  I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America…She filled her mind with soundless shouting. An impotent wizard fending off genuine magic with a barren incantation.

  All hell broke loose above and around her.

  Fire pierced the aluminum tent in a dozen places. Sparks were falling, burning through: the shelter was a scam. Soon she would burst into flame. Spurts of adrenaline racked Anna’s insides. With the odd unpleasant thrill came a stray thought: how much of the stuff could one gland secrete? Surely a quart had been pumped through her veins in the last hour.

  Red, burning, a spark fell on her sleeve. She flicked her arm but couldn’t dislodge it. No smolder of cloth followed, no burning through to the flesh. With a jolt of relief that brought tears to her eyes she realized the sparks were not sparks, not embers, but pinholes along the folds in her shelter. The orange light was the light of the fire, but outside glowing through. Classes in fire behavior she’d thought long forgotten came back to her. All shelters had these pinpricks, signs of wear and age. Normal. Okay. Normal. One nation under God, indivisible…

  A slap as of a giant hand smashed down on her shoulders and breath gusted from her lungs. She sucked in fire and clamped her jaws closed against it. The shelter pressed down on her back, the sa
ving pocket of air squeezed away. The yellow pack she wore protected her spine but the skin on her shoulders bubbled and Anna bucked. The tent was pushed up off her back and the searing dropped to a tolerable level.

  Her nose and eyes were packed with ash and dirt. Through the thick leather gloves the little fingers of both hands, flat on the ground and holding down the shelter, began to throb. They kept the tent down, the devil out, and Anna didn’t dare pull them away from the heat.

  With liberty and justice for all.

  Burrowing blind as a mole, she pushed into the sand and blessed all events social and geological that had formed the creek bed and led her into it before the storm broke. Sand wouldn’t burn. A mental image of the creek bed melted, a ribbon of molten glass with their bodies burned into it like flies trapped in amber, flickered through her mind and she started again: I pledge allegiance…

  The blessing hadn’t extended to Hamlin. The ledge they’d left him on was covered in brush, half a foot deep in leaves and litter. LeFleur: maybe he’d cleared a space for the boy, covered him with a fire shelter. But it was no good. It would only prolong the burning. Newt Hamlin was toast. A ludicrous cartoon version of Wile E. Coyote burned to a crisp sprang up from Anna’s subconscious.

  And to the republic for which it stands…

  The air was too hot to breathe. Anna pressed her lips to the sand, sucking slowly as her grandmother had once taught her to suck tea through a sugar cube. The little fingers of both hands hurt so bad she would have wept but there was no moisture in this convection oven shroud. No sweat, no tears. What was the temperature, she wondered. Five hundred degrees stuck in her mind but she didn’t know if she’d read it, heard it or was making it up.

  Five hundred degrees. Anna pushed her mind back to the days when she was still a meat eater. Chicken was baked at three-fifty. Roast beef at maybe four hundred. Twenty or thirty minutes for each pound. One hundred and eighteen pounds at five hundred degrees Fahrenheit—two thousand minutes. Numbers scrambled and Anna gave up the exercise. It would be a while before she was fully baked.

  One nation…

  Pinpricks of light on the right side of her tent swelled, the burning orange pushing through with such intensity they painted her sleeve like the beams from the laser sight on a high-powered rifle. The skin on her little fingers burned. In her mind’s eye she saw it curling away, blackened and seared, leaving only the clean white of finger bones.

  Noise crested, became solid, clogged the machinery of her ears and mind. Her head filled with the roar till it seemed it must explode. Her lungs were crushed with it, the bones of her body shaking, softening as if the molecules vibrated against each other. Anna hunkered into the sand, thought, like breath and sight and hearing, blasted away.

  When Anna had grown accustomed to the idea of death the roaring seemed to lessen. She sensed it not so much with her ears as with her body. An infinitesimal lifting of the weight, a tiny shift in the crush. That something in the eastern sky that, while not yet light, somehow flaws the perfect hue of the night. The black of the noise was flawed. The firestorm was past the creek. And Anna was still alive.

  This is good, she thought. This is good. Elation brought hope up from the depths of her soul and hope brought fear. Anna was sick with it.

  Prying open grit-encrusted eyes, she rolled her head to one side. Within the shelter the sparks had moved like stars across the night sky. Orange glared through pinpricks, the small imperfections in the shelter, on her left side now. The fire had jumped the creek bed; it was moving on.

  Anna held what fragments of painful breath there were left in her lungs, irrationally terrified that should she move, make even the smallest of sounds, this ravening beast that was fire would turn back, dig her out of her lair and devour her as wild dogs would devour a rabbit.

  “Get a grip,” she said through cracked lips.

  Most assuredly she was alive. Her lungs hurt, she had to go to the bathroom—if she hadn’t already—her hands and her shoulders burned, her stomach threatened to empty, but worst was the thirst. Dust stuck in her throat till she couldn’t swallow. Lips and tongue were as unyielding as old leather. Her very skin and hair and fingernails felt parched. If she could have immersed herself in water she had little doubt that she would soak it up like a sponge, swell up half again, in size.

  “Anybody alive out there?”

  Anna thought the words were in her mind, in someone else’s voice, and she wondered if this was where the angels came or one’s life flashed before one’s eyes.

  The message was repeated: “Anyone alive?”

  It was her radio, impossibly far away on her belt. More than anything in the world, Anna wanted that voice to continue. Inching one gloved hand away from the shelter’s edge, she tried to get to the Motorola. Winds jerked the aluminum up and a sandblast of heat and ash choked her. She felt the shelter being peeled back, the fire coming back for her. Abandoning the radio she clawed the tent down again.

  “Anyone?”

  The voice sounded plaintive now and, to Anna’s fevered mind, farther away. Salvation was slipping from her. The rescue plane flying over her raft without seeing it. Rolling to one shoulder she used her weight to pin down the embattled tent. Where she pressed against the shelter wall she burned. Still she held out till she’d wrested the radio from her belt. Facedown in the sand again, she pushed the Motorola up close to her mouth and forced down the mike button with a clumsy gloved finger.

  “I’m alive. Is that you, John?”

  “Some roller-coaster ride.”

  Anna wanted to kiss him, cry all over him, marry him, have his children. “Who else has radios?” she asked.

  “Howard’s got one. Black Elk, are you alive out there?”

  Radio silence followed.

  “He’s alive,” Anna said, not because she believed it but because if he was he’d need reminding. “His hands and arms got burned. He probably can’t get to his radio.”

  “Keep the faith,” LeFleur said. “I’m on the far side of the wash from spike. It sounds like it’s past me. I think that was the worst of it.”

  “Gee, ya think?” Anna said sarcastically, and the crew boss laughed. A wonderful sound: heaven, honey, nectar. “How long have we been in these things?” she asked.

  A second or two ticked by and Anna got scared something had silenced John LeFleur. “Twelve minutes,” he replied.

  “Bullshit. I was sixteen when I crawled into this fucking thing, now I’m seventy-four.”

  Again the laugh. Anna had to bite her lips to keep from telling this stranger that she loved him.

  “Black Elk,” LeFleur was saying, and Anna cradled the radio to her ear for comfort. “Hang in there. This is the worst of it. Don’t get out. Nobody get out. It’s still hotter than hell out there.”

  Literally, Anna thought.

  “I can still see the fire through my shelter,” she said, because she needed to say something.

  “We still got fire,” LeFleur agreed.

  Anna was comforted. She lay hurting in the sand with the radio pressed close to her lips. For the next hour she and LeFleur talked, keeping their courage up, hoping Howard Black Elk still had ears to hear them with. John had seen Joseph Hayhurst and Lawrence Gonzales stumble into the gully. Paula Boggins and Neil Page had been in the wash when LeFleur arrived. He’d shown them how to deploy the shelters Page had had the sense to salvage from the supplies before they’d run from the ridge.

  Anna guessed Jennifer Short had made it, she’d been ahead of Anna when she crested the ridge. Stephen Lindstrom, Leonard Nims and Hugh Pepperdine were still unaccounted for. Anna didn’t ask about Newt Hamlin.

  Every growl and crack of the fire was described and discussed back and forth and slowly, with the flames, the terror passed. In its wake were all the burns, twists, scrapes and bruises that Anna counted herself lucky to be able to feel.

  Finally LeFleur said he was going to leave the shelter. Anna was to wait. Science fiction settled over her
brain and she laughed at herself, feeling as if she waited in a sealed space capsule while the captain ventured out on an unknown planet. Laughter dried up when images of “B” movie monsters took over her mental landscape and she realized how tired and afraid she was. Close, she suspected, to hysteria. She willed herself away from that edge.

  “Come on out.”

  Briefly, suddenly, Anna didn’t want to go. All the safety she’d ever known seemed summed up in the tinfoil shelter. The emotion passed as quickly as it had come and she pushed one hand out from beneath the tent, shoving up the edge. Smoke rolled in but it was no thicker or hotter than that inside. It took all of her strength to push herself to her knees, her house crumpling down over her back.

  Then the foil was being lifted away. Again fear pierced deep: the fire was back, ripping at her safety, her flesh. But it was John LeFleur peeling the shelter off of her, helping her to her feet.

  “You don’t look much the worse for wear. All parts still working?”

  “I guess,” she croaked, and took the water he offered. LeFleur’s face was completely black, like the “darkies” in the old minstrel shows. Mucus and tears had muddied the soot around eyes and nose and a thin trail of blood cut through the black from the tail of his left eyebrow. Through the soot his blue eyes shined bright as opals in whites so bloodshot they showed pink. “You’re the best-looking thing I’ve ever seen,” Anna said from the heart. She shed the yellow pack like a turtle crawling out of its shell and started to pull off her hard hat.

  “Leave it,” LeFleur said. “The Jackknife’s not done with us yet.”

  Anna rebuckled the chin strap and took her eyes from him for the first time to look around.

  Science fiction: it was another planet. Where there had been the green of living trees, the gold of needles, the red of manzanita, the blue of the sky, there was only gray and shades of gray and black. Instead of ponderosa, fir and sugar pine, black skeletal bones poked cruelly toward a sky gray with smoke or cloud. The ground was white, as white as death and bleached bone. Feathers of ash smothered everything, burned so deep and hot the soil itself was dead. Smoke, colorless in a colorless landscape, curled into a sky of the same hue, breathed out like the poisoned breath of a dying planet. Here and there, in a mockery of life, bright beautiful orange-red flames licked at what was left of something once living, cleaning the bones of the carcass.