Firestorm

by Nevada Barr

  Anna brought her eyes back down from the ruined hillsides. She had deployed her shelter downstream of a fork in the creek. Above where she and LeFleur stood she could see a boulder the size of a trailer house that had originally divided the creek in two. To the right was a silver-black corner of fabric where someone else had deployed. Whoever was within didn’t move.

  John laid a hand on Anna’s arm. She didn’t grab onto it but she wanted to.

  “Where is everybody?” she asked.

  “Some are downstream, I think,” LeFleur said. “And there’s a branch over there.” He pointed south across a hump of devastated ground oozing smoke and heat. “Not far. Five or six yards. It joins the creek at the boulder. Most are there. I think.”

  For a moment longer they stood without moving. The only two people on this desolate world.

  “Let’s go,” LeFleur said.

  Time to see who had lived and who had died.

  CHAPTER

  Seven

  WIND SWIRLED ASH around their ankles. In places the sand was completely hidden. Flakes of soot eddied down on air currents as wild and changing as Medusa’s locks. Cold drafts struck icy reminders of the storm front yet to come. Warm whirlwinds, sudden and smoke-filled, attested to the firestorm just past.

  Clouds and smoke pressed close and the visibility in the bottom of the canyon was limited. Anna had yet to shake the feeling that she walked on an alien planet. Plowing through air so mobile and viscous, it wasn’t a great leap of imagination to think it had a will—or wills—of its own.

  She wanted to hold John’s hand and, from the drawn look on his face, she doubted he’d mind. Too bad they were grown-ups. Side by side, shoulders almost touching, they trudged through the sand. Ahead, where the creek split at the boulder, wind curled around the stone in a sudden gust and formed into a shape that was almost human.

  “Hold up,” John said quietly, and Anna was afraid. The shape continued to shift and settle. Finally it coalesced and she caught a flash of yellow.

  “Hey!” she shouted as Stephen emerged from the choking mist. They ran and hugged and pounded backs and laughed like old friends meeting after long years.

  “Looking good. Looking good,” Stephen said over and over. His eyes were too wide. Whites showed all around the soft hazel pupils. Soot and dirt obscured his skin but for a racoonlike patch over his eyes where his safety goggles had clamped out the worst of the grime. This delicate flesh was stretched tight and the same dirty gray color as the ashes that made up the world.

  Shock. Anna reminded herself to be on the lookout for the symptoms in herself and the others. If there were others. Shock would kill as surely as fire but it was a cold death.

  Lindstrom grabbed Anna’s hand, holding it so tightly the roasted pinky throbbed. It would have taken more than that to persuade her to pull away.

  The tinfoil hut by the boulder began to stir and they stumbled over it to drag Howard Black Elk from his aluminum cocoon. Howard was in bad shape. The hasty bandaging job Anna had done on the run down the slope had been scraped away by his struggle to keep his shelter down. Without gloves, his sleeves in rags, the man’s hands and arms to above the elbow were badly burned. How much of the charred-looking flesh was third-degree burns and how much dirt, Anna couldn’t tell without water, light and a closer examination.

  “It don’t hurt much,” Black Elk said, and Stephen and Anna exchanged glances. When a burn didn’t hurt the news was bad. The nerves had been destroyed.

  “We’ll get you fixed up,” Anna said, and was appalled at how halfhearted the promise sounded.

  “You’re looking good,” Stephen repeated. He didn’t sound any better than she did.

  “Thanks for talking,” Black Elk said. “On the radio, I mean. It was better than being alone.”

  “George and Gracie,” Anna said. Howard stood there expressionless, his wounded hands held in front of him like paws. The big man swayed on his feet. “Get him down.”

  Stephen and John helped Howard to sit, out of the wind, his back to the sheltering rock.

  “Where are you going?” he asked as the three of them straightened from settling him. Terror was clear in his face and voice.

  “Not far,” Anna promised.

  “John’s got to round up the rest of his flock,” Stephen said.

  Black Elk didn’t look reassured. LeFleur knelt beside the injured man, reached down and turned the firefighter’s radio on. “There’s some down the creek. Watch. Call me if you see anybody. Don’t let them wander by, Howard. Don’t let them get lost.”

  The crew boss made it sound as if he was addressing Horatio on the bridge or the little boy with his finger in the dike.

  Black Elk pulled himself together. Anna could see it happening: fear and pain pushed aside by strength and purpose.

  “Split up?” Lindstrom asked LeFleur.

  “No. You and Anna stay together. You’ve only got the one radio between you. You go on up the creek. I’ll go back down where we were.”

  He pointed toward the arm of the creek meandering off south of the boulder roughly parallel to the section of creek where he’d met up with Anna. “We’ll check there last. And nobody goes far. Anybody you find, you send back here. Howard will field them in, keep them together.” LeFleur looked at his watch. To read the face, he had to scrape off the soot.

  “Takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’,” Lindstrom said. Anna silently voted him the man she’d most like to survive a wildfire with.

  “Don’t walk more than twenty minutes. Whoever didn’t make the creek before that…didn’t make the creek,” LeFleur finished.

  “Got a light?” Anna asked as she and Stephen started up the creek bed.

  “Don’t tell me you want to smoke?”

  “Headlamp,” Anna said. “Mine’s in my yellow pack.”

  Lindstrom stopped obediently and Anna dug the battery-powered light out of his backpack for him.

  September had brought shorter days. Smoke and cloud robbed the last light of its strength. Though it was only a little after four it would soon be dark. Anna had ambivalent feelings about that. Darkness had been her cloak of invisibility, her protector more than once. When she was a little girl she’d been afraid. Her mother once asked her of what, and Anna answered, “Of the things that jump out at people.” Her mother had looked complacent. “I always figured I was the thing jumping out,” she’d said. Since that time Anna and the dark had become old friends.

  “This’ll be a night full of ghosts,” she said aloud.

  “Anna, cut that out.”

  “Right.”

  Sneezing and hacking pulled them forward at a faster pace. Jennifer Short staggered out of the murk coughing as if her lungs would spew out onto the sand. “If I got an orifice that’s not running, I don’t know where it is. I swear I didn’t think a person had this much snot in their head. Disgusting. Anybody got a clean hankie?”

  “Blow your nose on your fingers,” Stephen suggested.

  “My, aren’t we down-home?” Jennifer drawled. “Shoot. Gotta do something. Don’t tell Momma.” She cleared her sinuses.

  In the strange half-light Anna noted the red of blood through the soot-impregnated glove.

  “I’m an EMT, can I help?” she asked, parroting the accepted introduction of emergency medical personnel coming onto an accident scene. Stephen laughed, they all laughed way out of proportion to the feeble pleasantry.

  “It’s nothin’,” Jennifer said. “You can patch it up when we find a spot to perch.”

  “Anybody back where you were deployed?” Anna asked.

  “Lawrence and Hugh. I didn’t walk back down. I came toward your voices. They deployed when I did. How close, I’m not sure. I haven’t been paying many social calls just recently.”

  Drawn by the sounds of the living, two more zombies stumbled out of the smoke. Veiled in gray, soot blackening their faces, they were unrecognizable to Anna until Jennifer called out their names. Once labeled, their individua
l characteristics came back and Anna could see the men behind the dirt.

  Lawrence Gonzales was a slight man in his early twenties with soft straight black hair and clear brown skin. If he spoke, it wasn’t ever to Anna, but he smiled enough so that she thought him shy rather than sullen.

  Hugh Pepperdine wasn’t much older, if any—maybe twenty-three or-four at most. He was soft and white and pudgy. Nobody could figure out how he’d managed to pass his step test to become a red-carded firefighter. Pepperdine talked too much and worked too little, from what Anna had gathered. The crew nicknamed him “Barney” after the treacly purple dinosaur. It was not a term of endearment.

  Right now Hugh didn’t seem to know whether he was a hero or a victim. While Gonzales coughed and spit and murmured “pardon me,” Pepperdine babbled.

  Venting, Anna knew, and neither she nor Lindstrom made any effort to stop the flow of words. Blame for the burn-over was cast on everyone from John LeFleur and Newt Hamlin to the National Weather Service and the National Interagency Fire Center out of Boise, Idaho. Somebody somewhere had screwed up and Hugh wanted his pound of flesh. Mixed in with his diatribe was a thread of personal heroics of the tiny real variety: falling down but getting up again, running and getting away. Chances were good the story would improve over time and Pepperdine would undoubtedly dine out on it for the rest of his days.

  “Put a cork in it, Barney,” Jennifer snapped when they’d all had enough. She shrugged out of her yellow pack. Pepperdine spluttered to silence and the five of them walked back up the creek to where Black Elk waited by the boulder.

  Through the dim light Anna couldn’t tell who was gathered around the rock but it was a goodly number and she dared to hope they’d all made it. All but Newt Hamlin, she corrected herself. Guilt tried to cut her but she pushed it away. No time for that now. Six dead heroes wasn’t a better deal than one dead boy and five living if fallible human beings.

  “Gonzales, Short and Pepperdine accounted for,” Lindstrom said as they walked up to the others.

  Paula Boggins sat near Howard, shivering in a white tee shirt and shorts. Second-degree burns covered the backs of her thighs and calves and the outside of her forearms. Liquid was seeping through the coating of grit.

  “Somebody give me a brush jacket,” Anna said. Pepperdine looked away as if he hadn’t heard. LeFleur dug his from his yellow pack and Anna wrapped it around the girl’s shoulders. Lindstrom’s went over Paula’s legs. Covering so much of her body, even second-degree burns were a serious injury. Hypothermia and shock were very real threats. “We’ll get you fixed up,” Anna heard herself saying again, and wondered with what. The only medical supplies not burned up in the fire were the personal first aid kits they all carried, wallet-sized plastic containers with a handful of Band-Aids and little else.

  Neil Page had fared better than Paula. Long denim pants and a long-sleeved wool shirt had protected him from burns. The lower half of his face was covered in blood and the front of his shirt was stained with it. The blood was from a nosebleed, he said. He got them when he got excited.

  “You’re entitled,” Anna said. No doubt that there had been some excitement.

  Joseph Hayhurst had come through with nothing worse than the scratches and bruises they’d all gathered fleeing the fire. He sat quietly beside Black Elk, an alert look on his face and a strange little half smile on his lips. A well-mannered, well-brought-up man willing to lend a hand. The urbane pleasantness was jarring against the blackened face and wild Apache hair.

  While Anna and Lindstrom were inventorying the injuries sustained by the San Juans, LeFleur attempted to contact Incident Base on his handheld. “No dice,” he said as he stepped back into the defensive circle they’d formed. “Maybe from higher ground. Have we got everybody?”

  Silence followed. Minds were numb. Too much stress, too little oxygen had made them stupid.

  “Everybody,” Gonzales said.

  “Where’s Len?” The question came from Jennifer. “He was with us carrying Newt out.”

  No one asked where Newt was.

  “Len didn’t make it,” Hugh said.

  “Did you see him?” John asked.

  Pepperdine opened his mouth as if to say something then closed it and shook his head. “I just figured maybe the fire caught up with him.”

  Again the silence. They all looked at one another, everyone expecting someone else to speak.

  “Last I saw of him was all ass and elbows high-tailing it up the hill,” Jennifer said. “I didn’t see him reach the wash.”

  Anna looked around. Heads shaking. No one saw him reach the safety of the sand.

  “Did anybody check the southwest fork of the creek?” LeFleur asked.

  “You told us to meet back here first.” Anna knew she sounded defensive but there was no way to retract. She wrote it off to fatigue.

  Reluctance to go in search of Nims was palpable. Anna didn’t know if it stemmed from the man’s unpopularity or if they were all loath to leave this small island of security, the first they’d felt in a while.

  “Stephen,” Anna said. “Let’s go. If he’s there—” He might be in need of medical attention was her thought, but without tools and supplies there was little she and Lindstrom could do that was beyond the capabilities of anyone else present.

  Lindstrom levered himself up and put on his hard hat.

  “Keep trying Base,” LeFleur said to Howard Black Elk as he got up out of the sand to join them. Howard’s hands were so badly burned Anna thought the task would have been better given to Joseph till she saw the big man’s face. Work, being needed, was all that was keeping Howard going.

  “Lawrence, you and Hugh go back up the creek and collect the shelters and anything else we’ve left. We may need it. It looks like we’ll be here all night,” LeFleur said.

  Paula started to cry. “Stop that,” Jennifer snapped.

  “Fuck off,” Paula said, but she stopped crying and Anna was relieved.

  Anna switched on her headlamp. Dust and smoke absorbed the light, rendering it virtually useless. Wreathed in glowing gray, she, LeFleur and Lindstrom spread out and began combing the width of the south fork of the creek that ran parallel to where Anna had ridden out the firestorm.

  They all saw the shelter at the same moment. It lay perfectly deployed in the middle of the sand. The tent ridge was erect and the edges held firmly down. Ash had blown around it like a drift of dead snow.

  “Len!” LeFleur called. Nothing stirred and not one of the three of them moved. “Len Nims!” Cold gray stillness settled back into the silence as the crew boss’s voice died away.

  “Let’s do it,” Anna said after a moment, and broke the line they’d formed upstream of the shelter.

  Adrenaline hangover, post-traumatic shock syndrome, the dying light, the devastated landscape—something had robbed Anna of her nerve and she approached the silvery structure as if it housed poisonous vipers. There’d been a tent in Texas, where she’d worked backcountry in the Guadalupe Mountains, filled with diamondbacks. She thought of that now and half believed she heard the threatening rattle of tails.

  “Len?” she said as she tentatively pinched up one edge of the shelter. A gloved hand in a yellow sleeve was exposed.

  LeFleur, unable to stand the suspense, stepped up beside her. Grabbing the tent ridge in both hands, he jerked it up. Straps and edges tangled around the limbs of the man inside and a tumble of green, yellow and silver was stirred into the sand as the man rolled onto his side.

  “Christ,” LeFleur hissed. Anna and Lindstrom dropped to their knees and began pawing the foil away.

  Light had been leached from the sky. The bottom of the gully was deep in a shrouded dusk. Beams from the lanterns on their hard hats danced confusingly across the prone man’s shoulder and cheek.

  “It’s Len, all right,” Lindstrom said.

  Silence fell on that, the three of them locked up with their own thoughts. “Did he have a wife?” Stephen blurted out suddenly.r />
  John nodded. “Separated, I think. Got six or eight kids. Good Catholic boy. His yellow pack is gone,” the crew boss added.

  Anna had taken her glove off and pressed her fingers down on the carotid artery in the side of his neck. “Nothing.” She tried again. “Nope.”

  “This is a hell of a note.” LeFleur was leaning over, his lamp shining on Nims’s face. Like their own, it was blackened, the blue eyes staring from red-rimmed eyes.

  “Smoke inhalation?” Lindstrom offered.

  “The rest of us made it,” the crew boss said.

  “Heart attack?” Anna tried.

  “Could be.” LeFleur straightened up, dug a Pall Mall out of his shirt pocket and struck a match. “Christ!” he said as the match flared. He dropped it, the cigarette unlit. Fumbling, he pulled his hard hat off and the light from it. Rolling the body onto its belly he shined his lamp on Leonard Nims’s back.

  A knife handle was sticking out just below the man’s left shoulder blade. Blood, mixed with soot and dried to a brown crust, colored the shirt and the sand.

  Anna looked to Lindstrom, Lindstrom to John. The crew boss shook his head, struck another match and lit his cigarette. His hands were shaking.

  “No way this could have happened,” he said as if that would make the situation go away.

  Anna turned off her headlamp, whether to save the battery or shut out the dead man she was unsure.

  “What now?” LeFleur said.

  “You’re the crew boss,” Anna returned.

  “You’re in charge of security.”

  “Damn.”

  CHAPTER

  Eight

  WIND SNATCHED UP a handful of ash and blinded Anna with it. Somewhere on the far side of the ridge, probably melted into a puddle, were her safety goggles. She thought of them now and remembered the scrape of manzanita across her face. She must have lost them in that thicket.