Smoke Season

CHAPTER 22

July 13

5:00 a.m.

True got up with the sun, or what she could see of it, which was essentially zero. The rapid tag had been burning a hole in her pocket all night. Longer, really ... ever since Mel had assured her that she could gain access to Temple Bar herself.

She’d delivered Astor back to Sam at Highline yesterday afternoon; as True expected, Sam had gone white as she’d described what she could of their interaction with Fallows at the Eddy.

“I don’t understand,” he said, peppering Astor with questions. “Are you hurt? What did he say to you? Why was he back there? None of this makes sense.”

True shot him a look. “Don’t interrogate her, Sam,” she said in an undertone. With every word, she could see Astor reliving the ugly encounter. And it was True’s fault the animosity had been stirred back up between the Bishops and Fallows. True’s and Mel’s. The guilt felt thick enough to reach up through her gut and choke her. What if Astor internalized blame, too?

But before she departed, Sam pulled True aside again by the door. “That confrontation last night, and now this ... Fallows has never shown the least interest in my kids. Thank God,” he added. “So why now?” His expression clouded just as it had at the Eddy, Sam sensing something didn’t add up. She’d been privy to the same look whenever Sam confided in her about his marriage. Why wasn’t it working? What had he done wrong? Why did two and two never add up to four?

It wrenched at her gut. “Stop it,” she begged him. “You’ll never make sense of Fallows, Sam.” It was true, just not as true as her own culpability. “I should have been more diligent with Astor,” she added. “It’s unforgivable, and I’m so sorry, Sam.”

She squared her shoulders, preparing herself for more blame, but instead, Sam palmed his own skull, raking his fingers roughly through his hair. “I should have known he’d slink back around. I should never have left.” He looked over at True, and she sensed him wrestling with something again. She feared more questions, but in the end, he said, “Just ... stay away from that man, True,” his voice thick with defeat. “Please.”

Instead, True had entertained every fantasy she could dream up for how to get to Fallows and make him suffer for what he’d done to Astor while Mel took care of the ammo box. The problem was, no matter how inventive her imagined revenge, it didn’t change the fact that she and Mel were still puppets on a string. A warning of Sam’s echoed in True’s brain. Fallows would sacrifice anyone.

But what had Fallows himself told her? I protect my assets. True would bet money someone was still holed up at his property, tasked with defending it from fire. Even more than a few someones ... seasonal trimmers, undocumented ag workers ... maybe even Fallows himself.

While Mel retrieved the ammo box, True could utilize her rapid tag to gain entry to the river and the Outsider , positioning herself perfectly for a faster, and hopefully final, handoff.

With any luck, she told herself this could all be over today. Not that luck had exactly been flowing down the river corridor this week.

Mel eased out of her sleeping bag on the hard ground across the Outlaw from Wonderland Lodge. She was instantly alert, her priorities already splintered cleanly in two: today, her crew could finally tackle this blaze in earnest, now that evacs had been issued, and she could finally find a way to continue down the river road to Temple Bar.

She stood and shook out her sleeping bag, a sprawl of firefighting humanity at her feet: dirt and soot-encrusted, mustard-yellow-shirted bodies lying prone atop unzipped bags on the dewy ground. Her own crew members lay sprawled next to private Dust Busters and Firestorm crews; only the hotshots, Mel knew, would have segregated from the rest. She could glimpse their neatly rolled bags about fifty yards away, already strapped to their packs in anticipation of another strenuous day with their own specialized agendas.

She nudged Lewis gently with the heel of her boot as she rose, just to make sure he got up to help her unearth the MREs from the truck cab, then made her way between sleeping bags to the back of an outbuilding. Squatting behind cover, she relieved herself.

When the rest of the crew began to stir as the sun made a weak attempt to show between the hazy pine boughs over the river, Mel tossed her own share of the morning rations toward Deklan and Ryan, who accepted the unexpected generosity with twin whoops. Teenagers were always hungry, even when faced with ravaging wildfire. Mel, however, seemed to have lost her appetite.

At 0600, they got an update from the overnight hand crew: She’s keeping us busy on the west side . Gonna finish this line, then move toward you as conditions permit. Mel read the update aloud to Lewis, then waved her crew in for a morning debriefing. Giving her next orders was easy: they needed to cut an insurance line here at Wonderland, then make sure the access road stayed clear of debris, so the hand crews and hotshots could move their way downriver. At the mention of clearing the road, Deklan cast an eager eye toward the truck panel storing their power saws. “Not so fast. The line, remember? You’ll need your Pulaski first, kid.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered, already rubbing at his sore biceps. He tugged his Buff up over his face to block both the smoke and his sour expression.

They’d cross as a unit back over the bridge to the fire-plagued north bank to cut the containment line needed just east of Wonderland Lodge, for the purpose of protecting the building listed on the National Registry of Historic Places. If time permitted, White informed them via radio from his position at the command station closer to town, they could work their way back upriver until they met the hand crew, which Mel estimated should be somewhere near True’s property in the acreage between Buck Peak and the river. Mel hoped to God she wasn’t there, utilizing the rapid tag she had been assured she didn’t need, but knowing True ... Mel pushed back the thought. Busy as they were with all hands on, and this deep in the river corridor, she had no way of knowing. Just as she had no way of knowing how Annie was faring this morning up on the hill at Highline, where Astor even was at this point, any of it.

Trust Sam, she told herself. Whenever her work had to take over—to pay the bills, to have insurance—she’d always had to, hadn’t she? Even when they’d been at their worst. What were they now?

“What do we think of this weather?” Lewis asked, cutting in and saving her from rhetorical—not to mention redundant—thoughts as they all filled their canteens and loaded their packs. He frowned as he glanced upward at the dense smoke.

Mel looked up at the sky. Lost in her own agenda, she hadn’t paid the weather any attention. It had to already be at least eighty degrees, and even more humid than the night before. Sure, humidity in and of itself could help their cause, but ...

“You thinking fireclouds, Lewis?” Hernandez asked, confirming Mel’s worry.

“What’s a firecloud?” Ryan asked, his skeptical tone suggesting he figured Lewis was pulling his leg. Of course, that was José’s MO, but their driver engineer’s duties lay elsewhere today.

“It’s what you fart after eating all those MREs,” Deklan guffawed, subbing in.

“It’s when smoke rises, then condenses in the upper atmosphere,” Mel supplied. “The water already in the atmosphere combines with water evaporating from the burning trees and brush, forming a dense cloud called a pyrocumulus, or firecloud.”

“In other words, a hot mess ... literally,” Lewis supplied.

“But not, like, made of fire ...” Ryan’s sentence trailed off, doubt adding an upward lilt to his voice that probably hadn’t been heard since puberty.

“’Course not, dumbass,” Deklan said. “This isn’t World of Warcraft.” But he turned to Lewis all the same. “Right?”

He made it a point to keep his own tone even, but everyone could hear the trepidation that crept around the corner of his question.

Sly slapped him on the back. “Hey now, since when has a cloud ever hurt anybody?” he said with obvious false cheer. “It may lead to rain.”

Or more lightning. Mel clamped her mouth shut hard on the word.

“Plus,” Sly continued, “those hotshots are pros. They’ll have things under control.” More baloney he’d promised Doris to set her mind at ease, no doubt, but Mel let it go.

Lewis snagged the water bottle midair to drop it back into Deklan’s hands. “So stop fooling around and get ready to roll out.”

Mel’s own mission would be harder to accomplish. And she was acutely aware that if everything didn’t go exactly right, it could compromise her team. Even cost her her job. She swallowed hard. Even when it was hell, even when she felt pulled impossibly far away from her kids, she needed this job. Her whole family did.

But then she thought of True, risking exposure and even arrest out on the river each week, and her resolve strengthened, even if her nerves still churned as she ran her toothbrush under a conservative stream of water from their Gatorade jug mounted on the side of the engine. She dipped her head under the flow next, for only the count of three seconds before hastily shutting it off and running her hands through her hair, slicking back strands still stiff with dust-caked sweat. And to think she’d just had a shower yesterday morning at the station.

She sat down heavily in the passenger seat of the truck cab, toying with the radio, worrying the thick cord between her fingers. Thinking. Scheming, more like. She slammed one hand down hard on the dash in a sudden burst of frustration, making herself jump at the violent yet satisfying crack. Dammit. Mel hated what she had to do.

There was no way around it, far as she could see: getting away from her team would require a lie. Two lies, she forced herself to amend, one outright to Lewis, her second-in-command out here, when she told him Hernandez had called her away on a side job, and another of omission to whoever Lew told her to take with her, enabling her to disregard Carbon Rural’s buddy system. She’d never thought she’d see the day.

I’m doing this for my family, she reminded herself fiercely as she dug into the MRE stash to count out rations. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Lewis refilling the water jugs. Doing his duty, unaware that his colleague, his comrade in arms, planned to shirk hers. Mel forced herself to think of Annie at her worst: hooked up to machines, disappearing on a rolling gurney down long, shiny hospital corridors, her body impossibly tiny under a thin sheet. I’m doing this to protect the girls and True. Because where would her best friend be if Mel failed to retrieve the ammo box and its contents? She thought of Fallows’s ominous presence at the bar and doubled down on her resolve.

They rolled out on foot, Mel leading her crew over the bridge and up the embankment on the slope adjacent to the lodge. When she looked back, the tired-looking souls trudging after her in a stoic line made for a sorry sight. “Here’s good,” she called out eventually, after the last of the rookies had crossed the dirt access road leading into Wonderland. They’d use this road as a launching point for the containment line that would protect the lodge. From this vantage point on the ridge, Mel gauged the distance to be about 200 yards to the riverbank. Doable, though brutal, even with power tools at their disposal.

She waited for Deklan and Ryan to lift their axes and begin to stab unenthusiastically at the earth before doing what she knew she had to do.

“Be right back,” she told Lewis, who worked his side at the front of the line, feigning a bleep from the radio on her chest that hadn’t made so much as a squawk. She walked exactly five steps, turned her back, unstrapped the walkie like she meant to speak into it, waited another count of five, restrapped it, then walked back. To Lewis, she said, “Gotta move downriver, do a sweep.”

“What? Why?” His confused expression made Mel’s stomach lurch.

“Hernandez is on my ass again. Whataya gonna do.” She couldn’t look Lewis in the eye, so she settled for staring down at his dirt-encrusted boots.

“Take one of the kids, hmm? Deklan, how about?”

“You just want him outa your hair,” Mel accused, trying for a laugh. She managed a wan smile, which Lewis had a hard time returning. And no wonder: Who found things funny forty-eight hours into a fire? Containment was barely at 20 percent. They’d slept on the damned ground. Ain’t nobody happy, least of all the battalion chief and her first assistant. “Sure,” she told him. “I’ll grab him as I leave.”

But she waited for Lewis to disappear along the line, up and over the top of the hill, then strode toward her truck without pausing as she passed Deklan and Ryan. She didn’t need the deadweight. She certainly didn’t need to answer Deklan’s persistent questions. Both boys were bent to their task, finally working without whining, as Mel turned the key in the ignition, feeling her truck roar to life underneath her.

She pointed the nose of the truck west, putting the fire at her back, lurching along the river road from Wonderland toward Temple. Other than river shuttles, hardly anyone drove this route save for the Martins, dropping off guests to fish at the boat ramp, or the few Carbon folks with fishing cabins out here. Like Fallows’s contacts, whom True had to deal with. But also like Colby Phick, who had water rights out this way, and the Wrights ... good people, if determined to keep to themselves. Mel hoped they’d evacuated by now. She had forgotten how severely this route twisted and turned as it sought out the path of least resistance amid the ridgelines and cliffsides, and she found herself fighting a sense of misplacement, like she was going in the wrong direction. Probably because she was. Firefighter training, like Sam’s Army training, was harder than one would think to shake off, even to save one’s own skin, and it felt horrible to be driving away from her crew instead of toward it. Just like being away from her daughters felt horrible, and working with Fallows felt horrible. Yes, every move she made this summer took her one step closer to Annie’s final surgery and health—but simultaneously one step farther from herself.

The smoke lay as dense here on this road as everywhere else, and Mel’s headlights shone through the gray-black trees with an eerie lack of impact, even in daytime. The wind had picked up, too, blowing the boughs of the trees. She swallowed another rush of nerves and uncertainty. You’ve come this far, she told herself firmly. Because she couldn’t forget what else the academy had taught her: You never, ever abandon a mission. And certainly not one this important.

The closer she got to Temple Bar, the heavier the sense of wrongness lay on Mel’s conscience. She was taking this risk for her family, but where would they be if something happened to her out here? Something worse than risking her job? The catch-22s just kept coming.

It didn’t help that the electricity in the air now felt like a living, breathing thing, charging every move she made. She envisioned the usual chaos of the boat launch in daylight, then adjusted the picture in her head. Today, the morning light was nonexistent. The launch would be a ghost town. She didn’t like being alone, which was rich, considering the lengths she had gone to to evade having company on this mission. At least with the boat ramp deserted, no one would bear witness to her playing hooky from her team. From her carrying out her little errand. At least she was still heading away from the blaze, not toward it.

She made the turn at the dirt junction between the river road and the spur to Temple and was straining forward at the wheel, trying to discern the parking lot through the smoke, when she heard it: the telltale crack! of wildfire. At first, she thought she had imagined it, she was so jumpy out here on her own. Because this crack was not at a distance, as she’d heard droning on all morning. This deafening roar reverberated off the nearest ridgeline; the Flatiron Fire proper, crashing through forest. Jumping a line.

Impossible! She’d just heard the hotshots, working with the hand crews on the ground, report they had this all in hand not even an hour ago. And yet this sound was unmistakable, even if it was indescribable to anyone who hadn’t heard it, especially to anyone who hadn’t heard it in the field, in the expanse of the wilderness. Hearing it alone, shaking the cab of the truck, was nothing short of terrifying.

The roar felt so close by, the sound and vibrations hit Mel before the smell and sight. When she did see it, the wall of fire looked angrier than ever, and her terror doubled. Her heart hammering so hard in her chest she could feel the pounding in her pulse in her neck and head, she watched as ponderosa trunks broke like twigs; she could glimpse their flaming tops falling to the forest floor somewhere in front of her. Had the fire jumped further west, into the path of the road? She had no way of knowing until she came upon it, swerving this way and that. Had all her deep misgivings about this mission been on point? Was she going to die out here, her truck crashed into a tree trunk or over the riverbank? Would her remains be identified in a burned-out rig, with no one, other than True, to explain why she’d been here, on her own, betraying her team, in the first place? The thought of that very viable reality was almost more than Mel could bear.

On the ridge above her at her two o’clock, the underbrush and madrone trees and sage were ablaze in a blanket of red. Somehow, impossibly, the Flatiron Fire had burned right past the line created by her crew to beat her here.

Skidding to a halt, she cast a desperate glance toward the road in front of her—the path to Temple Bar—and then behind her, where smoke billowed and tree trunks cracked parallel to her under the pressure of two-thousand-degree heat. Mel found herself smack in the middle, in the worst game of pickle ever played. The ammo box lay just before her, not a quarter mile further down the road. And True was counting on her. True, who might be in danger right this minute as well, thanks to Mel, who should never have given her that rapid tag. But closest to this blaze was her crew, her Carbon Rural family . Had they been caught by surprise at Wonderland? Were they scrambling, right this very moment, to fight this new breach?

Thinking of them shifted something vital in her brain, and her training kicked in. She reached for the radio on her hip, just to come up empty. Fuck! She must have forgotten it back at Wonderland Lodge after her mock call.

Never had Mel felt so alone. So untethered. So out of control. Her brain spun through all the bad options at her disposal in a blur. Should she turn back? Push for Temple anyway? She’d already sacrificed so much, putting herself in such danger. This road would not remain passable for long, and she was so close to achieving her mission, she could practically taste it in the ashy air. She shifted the truck back into drive and was just preparing to floor it when the handheld on the dash screeched to life. She’d forgotten it even existed in this old truck.

Relief sluiced through her. “Bishop here!”

Lewis’s voice crackled through the speaker, the poor connection scrambling every other word. “Mel. Thank God. You accounted for?”

“Affirmative. What happened?”

“Heard . . . break . . . as we cut containment . . . rendezvousing with . . . crew 8 at . . .”

Mel gripped the handheld harder, as if she could force the words to emit more clearly. “Lewis! Rendezvousing where?”

“. . . cross river at . . . bridge.”

Mel nodded. Her team wouldn’t have tried to combat this blaze without backup. They’d have recrossed the Outlaw, escaping to the south bank. To safety. Which meant she could still make a run for Temple. She eyed the road in front of her, willing it to stay clear enough to see.

“What’s . . . yo . . . ETA?” Lewis asked.

She glanced automatically at her odometer, which she belatedly realized she’d forgotten to set before departing Wonderland, another standard protocol. “I’m fifteen out, at least,” she told him. “Near the end of the line at Temple.”

“Temple?” Lewis repeated the word like he assumed he’d misheard. “What’s happening out there?”

She squeezed her eyes tight, wishing she could drown out the sound of cracking trees and the roar of the blaze. “I have eyes on her,” she admitted, willing back a fresh wash of fear and nerves. Because she did. The fire was right there . But the ammo box was also right there, just around the corner.

“Circle back!” Lewis shouted, and that never-ceasing tension between loyalties in Mel ripped further at the seams. To follow orders again would be a relief in this free fall she was in, but how could she let down Annie?

Lewis misread her hesitation. “I got ’em,” he added, his voice still cutting out intermittently. “Did ... count three times. We’re at eighteen ... cluding ... self.”

Eighteen? Mel sat up straighter in her seat. Lewis knew they ran a crew of twenty. Always twenty. “Who’s missing?”

“What? No one!” Lewis’s voice raised as the sound of a siren cut through the speaker on his end. “I’ve counted ... eighteen, minus you and the rook. Deklan.”

Deklan. Mel’s heart seemed to stall in her chest before lurching like a transmission stuck in the wrong gear. God, why hadn’t she thought of Deklan sooner? Her stomach lurched next: had she eaten an MRE this morning, she would have lost it.

“Bishop?” Lewis shouted. “Bishop, come in!”

But Mel had dropped the handheld. It dangled from the dash by its cord like a live wire, and she fished it back out of the air numbly. “I’m coming,” she said, though not to Lewis, who had clearly lost connection. Every fiber in her being spoke to Deklan, somewhere out by Wonderland, abandoned by his crew. Neglected by his chief. All thought of making a dash for the ammo box evaporated from her mind like Phos-Chek gel in one-hundred-degree heat. “I’m on my way.”

With a cry of frustration and a slam of her palms on the wheel, she swung a wild U-ey right there on the dirt. She pressed harder on the accelerator, focusing her full attention on keeping the wheels out of the ruts of the road. In the smoke, the lack of landmarks disoriented her. What would she find there when she did arrive at Wonderland? Had the crew’s containment line held well enough to protect the lodge like a storm jetty from a tsunami? Certainly, this demon of a fire was already eating its way through any fishing cabins or storage structures that might be unfortunate enough to stand in the wilderness in between. She visualized Deklan stranded in the parking area, trying to hide his fear behind teenage machismo and a fiery attitude. Please, please let him be there.

She strained to see whatever else she could through the windshield, though she shouldn’t have bothered. Sparks poured down on her from the fire burning above. On the other side of Wonderland Lodge, the trees would be burning, blocking the road where they fell. Mel could still hear the crash of conifers as they surrendered like dominos, some having stood hundreds of years.

She gunned the engine of the truck, trying to outrace the destruction, intent on her goal of reaching the Wonderland parking lot before the fire consumed it. The singular mission put everything else momentarily on hold, clearing her head somewhat even as her heart continued to pound and she breathed like she was running a race, not driving a vehicle.

Her brain leaped to her personal emergency shelter, stashed in the cargo compartment of the truck, within reach near the dash, ready to deploy at a moment’s notice, and she tightened her jaw. After undergoing hours upon hours of wildland training with that thing—the Shake ’n Bake, they called it—Mel hoped to God she’d never need to use it. She wasn’t going to die like that, cooking from the inside out.

And then suddenly she was there, peeling out on the dirt as her tires skidded along the last turn into Wonderland. Which still stood, she registered with a jolt of relief, whole and untouched. The team’s efforts at cutting a line must have paid off.

But the parking area sat empty. Tire tracks crisscrossed the dirt, evidence that the heavy Carbon Rural rigs had bailed out of the parking lot at sudden speed, but though Mel scanned the area frantically, no rookie, face bright red with indignation, waited ready to give his chief hell. She leaped out of the truck anyway, just to be sure, coughing as she ran blindly through the dense smoke. “Hallo! Deklan!”

Why yell, when there was clearly no one there to hear? Maybe this was just what humans did, Mel figured, when faced with potential tragedy alone in the world. Even a firefighter trained and ready for such incidents needed to bounce disaster off someone else.

“Dek!”

Visibility was gone. Sound was gone. All Mel heard was the incessant roar. All she saw was smoke. Think! She forced herself to draw a ragged breath through her Buff and pause long enough to allow a fragile trail of logic to catch up with her frantic mind. The ridge where she’d last seen her crew cutting the containment line had been abandoned, as best she could tell. But the flames had spread east—she could testify to that thanks to her harrowing drive. It was possible the fire had already consumed what it could below the ridge. Which meant patches of “cold black” might remain, smoldering in its wake.

Seasoned wildland fighters knew to seek out these patches of already burned-out brush in the forest. Little safety zones, the black’s barrenness promised life to the fire crews instead of death. Mel had always found the dichotomy poetic, but now, she just hoped to God Deklan had remembered enough of his training to utilize this resource. If not ... if he had panicked and the unthinkable had happened, it would be her fault. All her fault.

She looked back at her truck, still idling. Looked toward the bridge over which her crew had fled, still passable. Retreat, the echo of Lewis’s order shouted in her mind. She was solo. She lacked assistance. She had no business doing anything else. But with Deklan in the wind, retreat wasn’t an option.