Smoke Season

CHAPTER 23

Mel deployed the latch on the storage compartment on the truck’s dash and snagged her day bag, groping into the cavernous space once more for the damned Shake ’n Bake. Shouldering the bag and bivvy shelter, she abandoned the truck, the heat and wind hitting her with blunt force. She pushed onward anyway. Her vehicle would be useless where she was going: in the direction she’d last seen Deklan and the crew, up on the ridgeline—in the previously burned cold black.

She’d follow the containment line that seemed to still hold the flames at bay, and make sure Deklan hadn’t decided to keep battling the blaze on the other side of the ridge. Somehow he’d become separated from the others, and she had to cross at least this sobering possibility off the list of horrors in her head.

She scrambled up the embankment, hands grasping fistfuls of dirt, feet skidding out on the uneven terrain, blindly gasping thick, ash-filled air. The smoke caked her lungs, her Buff a sieve doing her little good. She thought of Annie; was this how breathing felt to her when her symptoms acted up? She flashed upon a story Sam had told her of being a kid here in Carbon, stuck in the truck cab of his dad’s Chevy while Mark chain-smoked Marlboros. He must have felt as helpless and trapped as Mel did right now.

She felt her way along, keeping the recently cut containment line on her right shoulder like both a safety net and a guideline—the encroaching fire just beyond—until she crested the ridgeline. No Deklan. Standing, she spun in a circle, eyes smarting, tears streaming as she wiped at them angrily, trying to see through the smoke. Instead, she saw only flames where the Flatiron Fire consumed the narrow canyon on the downhill side of the slope—a pocket, they called it—between the ridgelines. She shivered, despite the sweat that poured down her back and along her neck. If any member of her crew had descended into that pocket, they weren’t returning.

Lewis would never direct them there, but again, Lewis hadn’t known he was responsible for her rookie. The real question was: Would Deklan have attempted the pocket? And even if so, what the hell had happened that he’d ended up alone? Guilt churned with the sharp fear in her belly, bringing nausea with it. She forced herself to pause and steady herself. Shielding her eyes with soot-covered hands, she scanned the terrain as best she could and got her answer. Or at least, a clue: about thirty yards down, she could make out a scab of cleared earth, a swath of containment dismayingly similar to Deklan’s mediocre work.

Deklan could be somewhere in the thick of all this, belly to the searing ground as the fire ate up everything in its path below him, bivvy shelter melting into his standard-issue yellows. Praying? Swearing? Crying out for the comfort of his mother?

Gasping, Mel fought back another wave of helplessness and self-loathing. She wanted to yell out again, but there was no point. The sound of the fire still drowned out all else, rushing with an angry hiss of wind through pines; it didn’t help that the pitch sounded reminiscent of a human cry. That injured wind screamed and screamed over the top of a deeper growl in the undergrowth, almost in the earth itself, like whitewater over the stones of the Outlaw. Every few seconds, an urgent pop! sounded as sap burst from the burnt, cracked trunks of pines, leaving the trees to bleed out in inky, ghoulish streams. Continuing down into the pocket would be even more dangerous than her fire-and-adrenaline-fueled drive back on the river road, an even greater risk for her, for her family, for Annie. But what else could Mel do?

She made her way down gingerly, sidestepping debris and skidding through brush. The fire hadn’t consumed the undergrowth here yet, but it would be here within minutes, relishing the new fuel. The smoke was the thickest she’d experienced yet, and even through her Buff, her lungs screamed. She considered her emergency oxygen canister in her pack and decided to hold off. She might need it more on the ascent back up, especially if she was running by then.

Ten yards down, she could make out Deklan’s Pulaski, left behind in the dirt. Fifteen yards and she caught a flash of silver, which confirmed her fears. “Deklan!” she yelled, as loudly as her lungs would allow. “Dek!”

She came upon his prone form, wrapped like a burrito in his metallic Shake ’n Bake, the very second she saw the hired hand crew approaching from the other side of the ridge, the fire to their left flank, their mustard-yellow coats a filtered, almost surreal sight. Her senses all went on overdrive with the roar of chain saws biting into bark, the wind whipping embers and ash. The screaming static of radios at full decibel, the rasp of lungs, the shouts of men and women swallowed whole by the cacophony of sound.

“Dek!” She gasped, sinking to her knees in the dirt. The flames might not have gotten here yet, but that didn’t mean he was unharmed. Prematurely sheltering could lead to asphyxiation.

You should know that! she wanted to yell at him, but she also knew that panic and fear could chase even the best training out of a rookie’s head. She reached for his bivvy and shook hard, connecting with a shoulder or maybe a hip. With a cry, he responded, flailing out of his bivvy, sucking in smoky air and coughing.

“Deklan, stay still. Calm down.”

“Chief?”

Crying and shaking, he reached out his arms to her, and she pulled him out of the suffocatingly hot bivvy with an awkward grunt. He was just a child. A child. And she’d sacrificed his safety for what? An ammo box? Cash for the Fallowses? Even Annie’s chance at surgery did not restore the balance.

All because Mel hadn’t been there with him to warn him away from the pocket. To ensure he retreated to the cold black and then across the river with the others.

“You’re alone?” she confirmed, hands gripping his shoulders. Because what if Lewis had miscounted? What if Ryan, or one of the others, had followed his lead?

Deklan nodded his head, though more like his vision was foggy than in certainty. “Ryan ... Lewis ... they all went up, but by the time I saw, I was down here, too far ...” He gasped. “Are they okay?”

“They are,” she told him, even while yanking him back uphill. “Everyone’s all right.”

“I didn’t think I could retreat,” he said. “I didn’t know where the fire was.”

“It’s easy to get disoriented,” she agreed. Fighting wildland fire is like scuba diving, Hernandez had once said, which had struck Mel as ridiculous at the time. Fire and water? But he’d been right: up looked like down in this level of smoke. It was easy to swim toward danger instead of away from it.

Deklan reached blindly for his Pulaski.

“Leave it,” she commanded.

She half pulled, half pushed him back up the hill until a trio of hand-crew members appeared through the haze to assist, one pressing an oxygen mask to Deklan’s face, holding the canister while they climbed to the ridge. Mel thought about her own O2 again, but without a free hand there was hardly any point. She gripped Deklan’s coat arm instead.

At the top of the ridge, Deklan bent at the waist, hands on his knees, and vomited into the dirt. One of the hand-crew kids nodded, like he understood all too well what Deklan grappled with.

“He saw it hit,” he said. “I mean, we heard it, you probably heard it, but his team? They got the full fire show.” He slapped Deklan on the back. “And we all knew: once the Flatiron blaze hits the pocket? It consumes everything in its path. You’re lucky, kid, that you have a chief to come save your ass.”

Deklan looked up, wiping his mouth with the back of one filthy hand. “You ... you came back for me?” He stared at Mel in horror between gasping sobs. “I put you in danger. I’m such an idiot. A fucking idiot. Lewis always says so.”

He absolutely did not, but Mel’s guilt swelled tenfold anyway, threatening to bring her to her knees as well. “Listen to me, Deklan. When something goes sideways in the field, the blame is always on the leadership. Always. You got that?”

Deklan stared at her and nodded as the crew members murmured their agreement.

“My fault,” Mel repeated for good measure. “All mine.”

The appearance of the wildland engine, lights, and siren running just over the bridge in safety might have been the most beautiful sight Mel had ever seen. Beyond it, she glimpsed the remaining truck and her crew, some members pacing in agitation, some leaning against the hood of the engine, eyes on the blaze across the water. When she hit the brakes, slamming the vehicle into park, she heard Lewis’s whoop even over the din of the fire and the whine of the siren.

“Thank God!” he laugh-yelled. Mel could feel the relief his entire being seemed to dispel in waves. He looked shell-shocked, coated in soot and sweat, but beautifully whole. “Figured you’d find us if we kept the lights going.”

He greeted her with an arm thrown tight around her shoulder, describing the way the wind had changed direction, turning back on the crew at forty-five miles per hour as they cut containment in the canyon, out of sight of the flames. “It reached the trigger point so fast, you woulda gotten whiplash,” he said numbly, eyes pinched closed, hands cradling his skull. “Still, I called for evac, but with rookies on the comms, it was chaos. We scrambled to the ridge before we could be caught in no-man’s land, forced to deploy shelters.”

It must have been the haunted look shining in Mel’s eyes that had him adding, “What took you so long to get here, anyway?”

“I’m sorry,” Mel managed. “I was ... I checked the ridge first.”

“Shit.” His tone fell flat. “Why on earth would you do that?” He finally looked beyond Mel to see Deklan climb out of the truck cab on shaky legs and added with a frown, “What’s got the kid ready to soil his yellows?”

How badly did Mel want to answer with a Rookies will be rookies quip? How easy would that be to sell? Instead, she squared her shoulders and said, “I went back because you said you were eighteen, and I knew that meant Deklan wasn’t with you. And that meant I had to go back because, Lew, he wasn’t with me, either.”

“What do you mean, he wasn’t with you?” Lewis’s face had gone white.

How could Mel explain herself? She couldn’t. “I found him about halfway down the pocket. He’d deployed his Shake ’n Bake, like you said you might, and was sheltered in place.”

“Bishop,” Lewis said. “I don’t understand.”

“I was on the ridge,” Deklan answered, “with you all.” He trailed off, his eyes still glassy, his face still flushed from a lack of oxygen.

Lewis looked like he wanted to shake him by the shoulders until whatever the hell played behind his eyes came pouring out of his mouth. “Talk, son.”

“I knew we were trying to connect with the hand crew, so I kept moving forward. Downhill. I couldn’t hear a damned thing out there, and then ... and then ... you all were gone.”

Lewis couldn’t seem to decide whether to yell or soothe. “I do remember you there now, cutting a shit containment line. With Ryan. But then ...” He pivoted toward Mel, his face a study in agony. “Then the shit hit the fan, and when I saw Ryan return, my brain only seemed to recall you taking Deklan with you.”

“I was all right, Chief,” Deklan said robotically. “I sheltered in the scrub.” But he sounded as though he were still there, on the slope, caught in that fold in the earth, now smoke-choked, that wedge of flame yawning.

What was it they said about the chaos of war? Being in the midst of it made you crave all you stood to lose. But what if it wasn’t war? What if the chaos had been of your own making? Orchestrated by your own selfish agenda? Mel deserved to lose her career and more.

“I made a grave error in judgment,” she told Lewis, choking, even before the sentence was fully out of her mouth, on the inadequacy of these words.

At first, Lewis just stared at her, uncomprehending. “Meaning ... what? You didn’t update me, give me an accurate count?” He spoke slowly, as though walking them both through a stubborn but solvable logic problem, coaching Mel toward the answer they both wanted to hear: Deklan had been accounted for by someone. His crew’s leadership hadn’t put a young life at risk. This was the only formula that made sense, after all. “Bishop, did you lose track of him?”

“No, no, no, no,” she muttered, rubbing at her eyes, which were stinging from the smoke. From ash. “Listen, I can’t explain it,” she said, while watching Lewis’s respect for her slide off his face. Worse: watching pity take its place.

“I know it can get tough out here,” he said carefully. “Confusing and chaotic.”

God, now she was being patronized. Which was still nothing, nothing , compared to how she’d compromised her crew. Compromised Deklan.

“But you’re the battalion chief, Bishop,” Lewis said. “You’ll have to explain it, eventually, before the safety board if not to me. If not now.”

“I know. And I will.”

Mel turned away, stumbling on the uneven ground of the gravel staging area, unable to mount any further defense. A rush of tears rose so fast, they ran unchecked down her filthy face. She felt her stomach heave once more as she retched, vomiting what little water she hadn’t sweated out onto the brittle bushes along the side of the road.