Smoke Season

CHAPTER 26

The Flatiron Fire was officially promoted to megafire status at hour 1500. Sam heard the announcement over the radio from Chief Hernandez himself, and like every longtime resident of Carbon, he knew what it meant: the original fire had not only gained ground and size in the hot wind but had now merged with the new, smaller fire he could see burning just shy of his ridge on Highline.

“At least one hundred thousand acres so far,” he repeated hollowly, listening to the PSA. “My God.”

And with no meaningful containment in sight. His first thought went to Annie as the public-announcement warning on the radio screeched its awful EEEEEEK EE EE EE that always made your stomach flip and your heart rate spike, even when it was just a test of the broadcasting system. But upon hearing the words Level 3 spoken by the radio DJ in the same sentence as Highline Road , that spike became his new baseline, and for the first time since this nightmare had begun, Sam’s fear expanded to the physical safety of his entire family. Astor was at risk. Claude. Sam himself. Mel, somewhere out there. He squinted through the kitchen window into the abyss of heat that was now Flatiron, absorbing the reality that this fire actually could, with reasonable probability, even take the house.

No longer would it provide them with even inadequate shelter from the smoke. He looked automatically at his watch. 15:40. He hadn’t been a firefighter’s spouse for nothing: Level 3 meant he had thirty minutes, tops. Sure, he’d been Level 2 ready for two days now, but actually mobilizing was another thing, requiring a shift of mental and physical gears that wouldn’t be easy with two small kids. Hell, he could barely manage the task on the average school morning. He calculated what needed doing in one part of his brain while counting minutes on one hand. He could have the girls ready by 15:50, if he hustled. He’d want the car loaded by 1600, giving him five minutes to double-check they had everything and another five for a buffer.

Which he’d need, because already Astor was upon him, worry pitching her face. She pointed to the radio. “That means we have to go, right, Dad? Do we have to go?”

Her voice quavered, and behind her, Annie cried softly, her hands clamped over her ears.

“Make that noise stop, Daddy.”

God, if only he could. You can do this, he told himself firmly. Stay calm, work through it, and just get it done.

He turned down the volume on the radio, scooped up Annie under her armpits, and deposited her on the couch. Trusting the TV remote control into Astor’s hands, he said, “Find something for her.” She opened her mouth to protest, and he silenced her with a rare “Stop!” He sucked in a breath. “Find something for her, then come find me. You can help.”

He consulted the handwritten list on the Post-it note he’d already stuck on their primary go bag, a rare thankfulness for their complicated custody schedule rushing through him. Handing Astor and Annie off every week did keep them organized. He and Mel always kept a written record of Annie’s most essential medications, just to make sure nothing fell through the cracks.

God, Mel. He wasted precious seconds peering out the window again, fear for her churning in his gut. Where was she? Whom was she with? Lewis? He was good ... that made Sam feel the tiniest bit better. But what if she was with the rookie teens? A volunteer? That asshole Doug White, who couldn’t stand her? The fear in Sam swelled, lurching him forward again. Astor. Annie.

The former was back at his side, and he tasked her with piling ice into the cooler, which sat by the Goal Zero by the door. Meanwhile he found the backup heart monitor in the top cabinet over the dishwasher, and even though Sam tried his best to work methodically and calmly, he pinched his finger on the stupid plastic child lock on the cabinet door as he reached for it too quickly. Next, he fished in their kitchen fridge for the meds that had to remain cold until the last minute, then scooped up the emergency vials of morphine, which he’d stashed out of reach in the cupboard. The hour, unfortunately, was upon them.

As Astor dripped water all over and Annie continued to cry and cough from the couch, her “Ingrid blankie” wrapped around her like a tortilla, Sam reached for the overdue and outdated stack of insurance paperwork and medical bills next, then hesitated. What exactly happened next if the entire pile burned to ash? He kind of wanted to find out.

What else? What else? Besides the scrapbooks and framed photos that already sat by the door with Annie’s go bag, was there anything else he couldn’t live without? What about all the tools he’d inherited from his old man? They were worth a ton, which was more than he could say for Mark Bishop himself. What about his fly-fishing gear or his bow? It was time to make those final decisions about what came with them on the ride down Highline and what he could be prepared to lose forever.

Everything, as it turned out. Sam took full stock, from the comfortably cluttered living room with its windows that still awaited curtains to the exposed drywall of the half-finished addition he’d insisted on building as a one-day sunroom. His eye lingered on the entryway through which he’d ushered first Mel, then both Astor and Annie from Carbon General Hospital as newborns—well, Astor as a newborn, Annie as a three-month-old graduate of the NICU—and Sam knew with a sense of certainty that had eluded him his entire adulthood that he was prepared to lose everything if only he could keep his girls safe. It was so obvious to him now. His family made Sam the man he was, just as it had made Mark Bishop the man he wasn’t, not a house. Not even this house.

Thinking of family shifted his thoughts back to Claude. He lacked a radio, so Sam needed to let him know about the evac order, too, a task he hadn’t factored into his time frame.

“Astor?” he called, and she was right there, right away, her face pink, color high on her cheeks from her exertion in the increasing smoke. Eight going on thirty-eight ... another of True’s quips, and she wasn’t wrong, as sorry as Sam was for it.

“I need to go talk to Claude again,” he told her.

“Leaving me alone?” Her lips quivered in a rare show of childlike vulnerability, which only made Sam feel worse.

“I’ll be right back, I promise. Everything will be fine.”

Because this had to be true. It had to be.

He couldn’t tell if Astor believed it. She was still watching him carefully as he took a deep breath before opening the door—the smoke was worse than ever—then ran up the driveway at as fast a jog as he dared, one hand over his mouth. Breathing in this air was dangerous for everyone now, respiratory compromise or no.

Crossing the newly mowed field, he kept his eyes on his feet; he could see the uneven terrain under the Muck boots he’d tossed on, for lack of a more readily available choice by the door, but if he glanced up, the smoke had already obscured his usual view of Buck Peak to the north and looming, imposing Mt. Shasta, situated behind Flatiron. He could only make out the shape of the latter because the fire cast a glow that burned through the dark, choking haze.

Mel is somewhere out in that haze. He knew he had to stop fixating on this fact, but he couldn’t shake it. She should be here. They were a family, and Mel walking out the door and Sam failing to bring her back didn’t change that. None of that mattered right now.

This thought carried him to Claude’s door, and he pounded on it, relaying his evacuation message in a coughing fit. “Just loading up, and then I’ll be at your door with my truck,” Claude called back. “We can fit more into it.”

Sam didn’t take the time to do more than acknowledge this before sprinting back across the field, tripping once in the uneven terrain, hardly able to see even his hand in front of his face. The wind whipped hot on the back of his neck, but at least the lightning strikes from the earlier afternoon had ceased. Now there was only ash and smoke and heat. So much heat.

Back through his own front door, he sputtered as he yanked the Buff from his face and yelled out his return to Astor, his mind already casting around for something more adequate to cover Annie’s face with when the time came to move her. We have more N95 face masks stashed somewhere. Could he double hers up? Another quick glance at his watch told him there was only time for the priorities, but Annie? In this smoke?

He heard Astor answer him, but her voice was mostly drowned out by the still-wailing radio on low, and besides, the N95-mask search had gone straight to the top of Sam’s to-do list. He rummaged like a crazy person through his bathroom drawer, then tried the medicine cabinet in the kitchen, pushing aside plastic bottles of children’s Tylenol (sometimes Annie’s fevers got stubborn) and Ace bandages and Band-Aids to finally unearth the extra N95s at the back of the shelf.

Astor appeared back in the kitchen. “Dad!”

The radio continued to screech on the kitchen counter—he wanted to turn it all the way off but didn’t dare, in case he missed any new updates—and outside, they could hear the increase of traffic on Highline. The last of their neighbors, better prepared than the battalion chief’s husband for an evac notice? Firefighters, en route to Flatiron from the south? Dare he hope ... Mel?

Sam threw a glance out the window, remembered he couldn’t see farther than the end of his own nose out there, and rechanneled his energy. “This fire is close enough that we’re going to go into town right now, sound good, Astor?”

“Yeah, but, Dad! Listen to me!” She waved him over. “You need to check Annie.”

“Why?” Sam shot back. But then he stopped, and really looked at her. Astor’s expression edged closer to panic than he had ever seen from his competent, ice-water-in-her-veins firstborn. Even closer than earlier, first hearing the siren. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

Astor’s voice quavered. “One of her spells.”

Fuck, no. Sam was already halfway into the living room before the expletive had fully formed in his brain, and at Annie’s side before he could yell back to Astor, “Her med bag! I just put it next to the cooler!”

Annie’s cheeks were blue, her lips were blue, her nose was blue. Her constant coughs now racked her small body so hard, her chest and abdomen bucked with the effort of each one. She cried hysterically, or would, if she could draw breath, panic causing her eyes to widen at Sam in terror as her hands clawed at his shirt, at her blanket, at the couch.

“Baby, baby, okay,” Sam tried to soothe. “You’re okay, you’re okay,” he chanted numbly as his brain screamed, Help! Help! Help! Because he knew: it was Annie’s panic that threatened his daughter most. It was her panic that was going to force him to sink the morphine into her arm, just as soon as Astor brought the goddamned vial back to his side.

He had to stay calm for his child’s sake, but at the sight of Annie’s cyanotic state, her agony became his agony, her desperation to draw a breath his desperation. Annie’s needs folded into his own right at the seams, her comfort sewn directly into the sinew of his bones. If he could, he would drain all his pumping blood into her waiting veins.

“Here!” Astor thrust the little glass vial of morphine and the already prepped syringe at him; she’d even torn open the plastic at the top of the syringe, so all he had to do was extract it, stab it into the top of the morphine vial, and sink it into Annie’s flesh.

She screamed as he did it—she always screamed—but within seconds, her body stopped spasming as the meds hit her blood system and her lungs relaxed. As her face went slack. As her shoulders slumped. Astor, too, had sunk to her knees at the side of the couch, quietly crying.

“I always hate this part,” she said.

Sam did, too. It was even worse than the screaming. Sometimes, just to ease them all through it, he would try to joke with Annie, once the sting of the needle was past them.

“Where’s Wonder Woman?” he’d asked her gently, leaning in to coax her up like the doctors instructed. The low dose should never knock her out completely. “I only see Slug Girl.”

“I like being Slug Girl,” Annie usually murmured.

Thank God for Astor, Wonder Woman from day one, though she should never have to be. As Sam eased Annie into his arms, he waved Astor over as well, enfolding her into his embrace for a brief second before having to ask her to repack the meds and drag the cooler to the front door.

It was a good thing they’d still been here when the tet spell hit, in the house where Sam could access the meds so easily, but it also punctuated anew just how fragile Sam’s tenuous hold on his family was. His house still stood, for now, but he could lose Annie anyway. It had served as a sanctuary during the tet spell, but it wasn’t the magical “safety” in the game of life Sam had tried to make it be. They were now precious minutes behind schedule, the buffer Sam had built into their evac eaten away by the medical emergency.

He consulted his watch. 16:22. They’d lost ten minutes.

Claude pounded on the door, and Annie whimpered against Sam’s shoulder as Astor let him in. He looked ragged, mud staining his jeans where he must have fallen, but immediately, he noted Annie’s condition and crossed the room to assess her. Sam saw what he saw: lips still tinged blue, but not the indigo they’d been moments ago. And Annie’s fingers were pink again, against his arm.

Claude nodded gravely. “Let’s go.”

“To the Eddy?” Astor asked.

“I don’t know,” Sam told her. “Let’s just go, okay? We gotta go.”

A sudden noise sounded again outside, but instead of a pounding, this was a crunch of metal, accompanied by the shatter of glass. Sam flung back open the door.

“My SUV ...” Sam gasped. The cedar tree in the driveway had fallen directly on top of it in the wind and heat. “How ...”

But Claude didn’t waste a second’s time analyzing. He’d already turned back toward his truck with a load of gear. “We’ll take my truck! Keys are in it. I’m going to start your water out front,” he said.

It was standard Level 3 preventive protocol to assist the eventual first responders by soaking the roof and grounds before an evac, but at Claude’s age, he shouldn’t be outside at all, let alone running hoses. And there wasn’t time: Sam’s watch now said 16:32.

“Forget it!” he yelled. “Take Annie so I can load everything up!” She was crying softly again against his shoulder, stabilized enough to leave her uncomfortable but still too listless to walk on her own. Thanks to the tet spell, someone would have to carry her from here on out, and she was too heavy for Astor, who was already sprinting back and forth from the SUV to Claude’s truck, tossing in duffels and boxes with rapid speed despite the heat, wind, and smoke.

Claude turned back, tripped on the loose stones of the walkway, staggered, and fell.

“Claude! Are you—”

But then Astor was there, helping him up, and Claude was reaching for Annie. “Give her here! I got her, I promise.”

“Astor! Go to the truck with them,” he ordered, grabbing more boxes himself. One held the extra N95s, which he pressed into Astor’s free hand. “You put one of these on, too.”

Astor didn’t need to be told why: she tugged it over her ears and onto her face between coughing fits and immediately got back to work. Sam didn’t notice the tears still in her eyes until they’d both stooped to pick up the last of the gear at the same time. “It’ll be okay, honey,” he managed.

By the time they had everything— did they have everything?—Highline Road was eerily quiet, save for the wind. Even the heartiest, most stoic of Sam’s neighbors had already rolled down in a caravan of trucks, minivans, and cars. Everyone else had mobilized faster than him. They don’t have two kids—one with medical needs—and an elderly man to assist.

He ran to the truck to check on him and Annie, but Claude waved him away, his eyes shadowed by soot and worry and dirt smudges. Under his Buff, his face must be doing that worried quiver Sam always hated to see in his aged expression. Which he hadn’t seen much since Ingrid had died, actually.

“You go take a final check,” Claude said, his breath labored, nodding toward the house, “and then let’s go!”

But Sam shook his head. He didn’t need a last glance inside to know his revelation from earlier still held. Everything that mattered was already in Claude’s truck.

Gasping and coughing, he eased himself in next to his girls and Claude, all of them squeezed onto the single bench seat. It wasn’t until he had groped in the dark and smoke for his seat belt that he looked up through the windshield and saw what had struck new fear into Claude: the Flatiron Fire. Not on the ridge. Not on the slope on the other side of the road.

Right here. Upon them.