Firestorm

by Nevada Barr

  Anna hung her head and tried to blink the grit away.

  “What’re we going to do about this?” LeFleur pointed to Len Nims.

  “I’m thinking,” Anna grumbled. The open eyes of the corpse were slowly filling with grit. “Pull the shelter over him, for Chrissake.”

  LeFleur drew the aluminum tent up over the body. Ash from his cigarette joined the feathery relics of pine and fir in Nims’s hair. Ashes to ashes, Anna thought. Nims was beyond caring. Anna was too, she realized with a pang of guilt. Nims in life was a coward and a pain in the ass. In death he continued in the latter function. His staring eyes were a vicious reminder of mortality, his body a logistical problem, his murder a horrific complication. Anna hated him. Sorry, Len, she addressed the spirit world above the wash. It’s just that I’ve had a real bad day.

  LeFleur smoked. Anna’s eyes finally cleared and she looked at Stephen. In the uncertain light of the crew boss’s headlamp his face looked strained, exhaustion dragging down his cheeks and the corners of his eyes.

  “We can’t stay here,” Anna stated the obvious. “It’s too cold to mess around and too dark to do any good. I guess this is a crime scene. Shit. We’ll leave it as is. Let somebody deal with it in the morning.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” LeFleur agreed. None of them made any effort to leave. The sheer impossibility of the knife, the dead man, held them to the spot waiting for some rational explanation to manifest itself.

  “Somebody must’ve knifed him when he got to the wash,” John said, flicking his cigarette end into the darkness beyond their little cabal. “Maybe a fight of some kind over something—space—something. Len lost.”

  Anna could tell John liked that explanation. Both hope and finality colored his words. She liked it too, but it wouldn’t fly.

  “He’s in the shelter,” she said. “Even if the murderer got an attack of remorse and decided to stick the body in its shake ’n’ bake, the thing would have blown off. I had a hell of a time holding mine down. Nims’s shelter wouldn’t’ve lasted five minutes without him alive inside.”

  Silence was agreement. Lindstrom and LeFleur had battled the fire’s winds.

  “After the fire passed us somebody must have killed him,” LeFleur said. “Jesus. You’d think they’d be too glad just to be alive.”

  “Blood is all dried up, brown and crusty,” Anna pointed out. She didn’t lift the silvery shroud to show them. They would remember.

  “What of it?” LeFleur was belligerent.

  Anna didn’t blame him, her voice was sharp when she answered. “So it didn’t happen in the last twenty minutes. The heat from the fire dried it, cooked it.”

  LeFleur stuck his hands in his pockets and looked toward the ridge where spike camp had been. Out of reflex, Stephen looked too. They were all wishing themselves elsewhere.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” LeFleur said finally.

  The meeting was adjourned. Using stones, they weighted down the shelter that covered Nims’s body then trudged up the creek without light or conversation, saving their batteries figuratively and literally.

  Clearly not before.

  Definitely not after.

  Nims had been knifed during the firestorm.

  Since that was not possible, there didn’t seem to be a whole lot left to talk about.

  “What are you going to tell the crew?” Lindstrom asked LeFleur.

  “The truth.”

  That was easy, Anna thought. Too bad nobody had the faintest idea what the truth was.

  Gonzales, Pepperdine, Black Elk, Hayhurst, Paula Boggins, Jennifer Short and Neil Page were clustered in the lee of the boulder. Some clear-thinking individual—Joseph Hayhurst, probably—had begun to organize a bivouac. Two of the shelters Hugh and Lawrence had retrieved were spread to make a drop cloth to keep out the chill of the ground. The others were pressed into service as blankets. Temperatures were dropping rapidly. Mid-forties, Anna guessed. With the wind it felt colder.

  Paula Boggins huddled miserably under the two brush jackets, shivering and hot at the same time. Tracks of tears streaked the black on her face and her jaw was clenched to keep her teeth from chattering. Sucking on a cigarette and letting the smoke trickle out his nose, Neil Page sat beside her, the blackened silver of a shelter pulled around him to shut out the wind. At every drag he coughed deep in his chest, mouth closed to keep in the smoke.

  Paula and Neil concerned Anna. Paula was hurt but it was more than that. No firefighter expected to run from a holocaust the likes of which had caught them, but it was understood that there would be nights on the line with little or no comforts. Everybody got stuck out occasionally. Most times there was the luxury of a “Good Boy” box, a box of provisions helicoptered on for the night. Sometimes there wasn’t. That was the deal. Firefighters tacitly agreed to discomfort when they signed on. The same was not true of Paula and Neil. Mentally unprepared, they were at a disadvantage. The mind could keep the body going a long time on will alone. Or it could shut it down.

  Black Elk, cloaked in another shelter, cradled the radio on his lap between his elbows. Someone had draped a filthy neckerchief over his hands. Probably more to hide than protect them. That was good, Anna noted. A man at a car wreck she’d worked had been up and functional, talking, then went into shock and died when his left arm, severed at the elbow by a cable, was placed on the stretcher next to him by an idiot EMT. It was better Howard didn’t see the ribboned flesh of his arms any more than he had to.

  Jennifer Short sat cross-legged on the edge of the shelter used as a tarp. The yellow of her brush jacket, kept relatively clean inside her pack, provided a cheery note. The animation surviving the fire had lent her was gone. Her eyes were unfocused and her mouth crunched into a sad line. Only this morning, Anna recalled, she had heard her brother was dead, killed in the same fire that had taken its best shot at them.

  Lawrence and Joseph had emptied the contents of the yellow packs—with the exception of Hugh Pepperdine’s—onto the makeshift ground cloth. From the closed bitter expression on Hugh’s pudgy face and the care the others took not to look at him, Anna expected there had been words over his hoarding.

  Her brush jacket was on the heap they were inventorying and Anna leaned over Jennifer’s legs to get it. “I’d offer it to you guys,” she said to LeFleur and Lindstrom, their jackets gone to cover Paula, “but it’s an extra small.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Lindstrom returned.

  Anna folded herself into the sand beside Jennifer and dumped her hard hat and gloves in front of her. Jennifer came out of her stupor enough to look up. She shined her headlamp in Anna’s eyes and mumbled, “Sorry,” when Anna winced. “You look just about as awful as a woman can look and not be dead,” Jennifer commented. “Do I look that bad?” Anna opened her mouth to reply but Jennifer cut her off: “Don’t tell me. Anybody here got mirrors, you keep ’em to yourself.”

  That burst of life spent, Short sank into herself again.

  In an attempt to get warm, Anna shoved her hands deep in jacket pockets. Her fingers closed around something disgusting and she jerked them back out. Brown ooze coated her fingertips. For a second her mind blanked, revulsion the only emotion registering. Too much horror for one day. Then she stuck her fingers in her mouth. Chocolate. Sugar hit her bloodstream like a drug and she realized how hungry she was.

  “We need to get some food into us,” she said.

  “Can I lick your fingers?” Stephen asked.

  “You can lick my pocket. What have we got?”

  Lawrence drew back from the cache of goods he and Joseph had collected, looking to Hayhurst to speak. Joseph tossed out two MREs—meals ready to eat—that someone had the foresight to carry in their yellow packs. LeFleur and Black Elk: the old-timers carried tools, socks and food. There was hard candy as well.

  “That’s enough to keep our blood sugar up,” Anna said. “Nobody will starve by morning.”

  “Did you find Len?” Black Elk, easily the most
severely injured, was holding up better than half the others.

  “Bad news,” LeFleur said. He pulled out his cigarettes. Two left.

  “Give me one of those,” Page said.

  LeFleur tossed him the pack. To take a man’s last cigarette; Neil Page, never high on Anna’s list, slipped down a notch. Disaster brought out the best and the worst in people, she reminded herself. She’d not exactly been Little Mary Sunshine over the past hours.

  The men lit their smokes while the rest waited for LeFleur’s bad news. There was little tension. They could guess Len Nims was dead. Just not how.

  One knew, Anna realized with a jolt. One of them had knifed Nims in the back. Because her mind was overloaded and because what had happened was impossible—nothing flesh and blood could have moved through the firestorm to commit murder—it hadn’t come home quite so graphically as it did at this moment that Nims had been killed by one of the people sitting in the sand.

  In her career as a park ranger, Anna had dealt with murderers several times but never with such immediacy. Before she’d confronted them, the killers had time to regroup, begin—or finish—their justifications and rationalizations. The thin veneer of civilization had reformed over their faces.

  As LeFleur shook out his match and, still standing, began his recital, she studied the faces of the others. Surely, had one of them done the unthinkable—not to mention the impossible—in the last few hours some remnant of the deed would remain.

  Anna was disappointed. Hugh Pepperdine registered something resembling peevish annoyance. Neil Page sucked on LeFleur’s last Pall Mall as if he hadn’t heard. Maybe Paula’s shock deepened slightly but Anna couldn’t really tell. As for the others, they met it much as Anna had, with disbelief. It was too absurd to fit into an ordered mind. And they all fought in their own way to restore some kind of mental order.

  Ever the good host, Joseph Hayhurst passed around hard candy as the crew boss explained the knife in the ribs. His story finished to the quiet crackling of cellophane as they unwrapped their butterscotches. LeFleur sat down. Small snacking sounds defined the circle. Overhead the winds whistled.

  “Somebody’s got to radio Base. Nobody knows if we’re alive or dead.” Pepperdine’s voice was a whine. He gave them someone to focus their fear and anger on. Anna could feel the group warming to the idea of a scapegoat. Hugh Pepperdine was born for the role and Anna felt like giving him a swift kick herself but couldn’t see that it would further any cause.

  “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas,” a sweet tenor voice sang. Anna looked up to see who had slipped the surly bonds of earth. It was Joseph. “Snow,” he explained.

  Mixed with the windblown ash were icy flakes. Minute hissing sounds as the sleet hit hot coals corroborated his assessment. Bad weather could give their adventure another ugly turn.

  Anna sighed. “’Scuse me,” she said. “I’m going to go find what’s left of the ladies’ powder room.”

  BY THE TIME she got back LeFleur had worked wonders with their makeshift camp. Shelters were rigged into a tent attached to the elbow of the boulder providing shelter from the winds.

  Lawrence and Stephen had taken shovels into the burn and brought back live coals that they’d heaped in a sand fire pit inside the tent and the temperature approached comfortable.

  “Not much left in the way of fuel,” Lindstrom said. “But we can mine coals from now till doomsday. Even with the snow, it’s a hot motherfucker out there. Pardon my French,” he said to Jennifer. Stephen didn’t wax obscene from habit, it was by design and for effect. This time he’d evidently hoped to get a rise out of Jennifer but she didn’t come out of her lethargy enough to acknowledge him.

  When the chores were done, Anna told herself she should talk to Short. Or, better yet, make Lindstrom do it. He was a touchy-feely nineties kind of guy.

  LeFleur and Hayhurst were rigging one of the shelters to improve the natural windbreak created by the boulder. Paula and Black Elk had been moved to the snuggest corner. Food and water, not enough to satisfy but enough to survive, had been salvaged.

  Anna cannibalized all of the first-aid kits and came up with seven rolls of one-and-one-half-inch gauze. She used a quart of water to cool and flush some of the debris from Howard’s hands and arms. His palms and the spaces between his fingers were in decent shape. The back of his left hand and arm was swollen, the blisters ripped open and liquid oozing from tattered flesh. Regardless of what the man would admit, this one had to be hurting like a son of a bitch. The knuckles of the third and ring finger of his right hand were burned down to the bone. His right forearm was charred along the ulnar bone, the meat burned black in a strip an inch wide and three inches long. Around the third-degree burns were blisters the size of silver dollars and heavy with pus.

  Anna dressed his hands and arms with hope, a couple of nondenominational prayers and five of the rolls of gauze.

  “Don’t bust open the blisters,” she told him.

  “Got to let ’em drain,” Black Elk said.

  “No you don’t. Don’t do it. Are you going to quit doing it?”

  “You betcha.”

  Anna saw the twinkle in Howard’s brown eyes and knew he was pulling her leg. He wouldn’t mess with these blisters.

  Paula’s burns weren’t nearly so severe but they covered a good chunk of her small body. Anna recalled the rule of nines from her EMT training. Second-degree burns were considered minor if they covered less than fifteen percent of the body and the face, hands, feet and genital areas weren’t affected.

  Arms were nine percent of the body, legs eighteen. A little mental arithmetic let Anna know Paula barely retained her minor status. Between ten and twelve percent of her body was burned. Barring any unforseen incidents Boggins should be all right. Anna was careful to drum that into the girl’s head lest her own fear be her undoing.

  Jennifer’s left palm had a nasty cut where she said she’d fallen on the blade of her pulaski. Anna cleaned it, closed it with butterflies and bandaged it. Unless infection set in, it would heal.

  By the time they’d finished it was full dark. Joseph distributed the food. Anna scored a can of beanie-weenies and marveled as she wolfed it down what a wonderful sauce hunger was. Lindstrom made Jennifer eat a can of Polish sausages, then set her to work feeding Howard slimy cold chop suey from a plastic MRE bag. Being of service would probably do Short more good than the nourishment would the big Arapaho.

  When they’d finished eating, the firefighters threw their trash into the darkness beyond their enclave. Littering went against the grain for Anna but, with a touch of childish rebellion, she threw her empty tin toward the smoldering Jackknife.

  “I’m going to try and make the ridge,” she announced. “See if I can reach Base.”

  “Wait till it’s light,” LeFleur said.

  The rebellion in her soul wasn’t quelled and Anna could feel her metaphorical heels digging in.

  “Somebody should go,” Hugh said. Everybody ignored him. Pepperdine had dined in solitary splendor out of the sanctity of his yellow pack. Any shred of credibility he might have retained was destroyed in that instant.

  “It’s not more than a quarter of a mile,” Anna said. “Maybe a hundred yards to the heli-spot. There’s a road from there.”

  Silence argued for her. The rest of them craved contact with the outside world as much as she did.

  “You’re not going alone,” the crew boss told her. LeFleur didn’t want to leave his crew and nobody else wanted to leave the safety of the creek.

  “Stephen will go with me.”

  “Thanks a heap,” Lindstrom said, but he was stirring himself up out of the sand as he spoke.

  “Go slow,” LeFleur warned. “Test each step before you take it. Those stumps are still burning underground. You wade into one, you’ll know it.”

  With that blessing and a pair of borrowed goggles, Anna and Stephen took two of the headlamps and walked out of the circle of light. At the bank of the creek
they stopped. Around them the murmur of the wind and the hiss of sleet on the burn pushed the dark close. Cold crept down the collar of Anna’s brush jacket and chilled her wrists between the leather of her gloves and the canvas cuffs.

  “This might not turn out to be one of your better ideas,” Lindstrom said.

  “I’m open to suggestion.”

  “Let’s go snuggle in with our compadres and wait till morning.”

  “Not that one.” Though tired to the bone, with a backache that made her stomach roil and two booted feet that felt like hamburger, Anna was pushed by the need to take some sort of action. There’d been a blowup. A boy was burned to death. A man knifed in the ribs by a means she could not make heads or tails of. To sit, to wait, to try to sleep was beyond her. No rational act left, she’d chosen the least irrational. With luck it would even prove productive.

  “Tractability is considered an attractive quality in a woman,” Lindstrom said as she sank her pulaski into the bank and pulled herself out of the wash.

  After half a dozen steps Anna was beginning to doubt her decision as well. It would be easy to get lost. All they had to navigate by was the slope. Ahead, the teeth of the fire were bared in hollow logs and stumps, glowing coals defying the petty attempts of the sleet to quench them. As winds eddied and shifted the coals brightened hungrily.

  More unsettling was the fire that lived high in the burned-out snags. The forest was still there but it had been stripped of skin and muscle. Bare bones, charred a shade darker than the night, rose all around like macabre grave markers. High in many of the snags the fire gnawed at the marrow. An occasional crack or fall let them know that a lingering branch had been chewed off, brought down.

  Anna kept climbing, pounding each step with her pulaski as John had told her. Behind her she could hear Lindstrom. He whistled “Ring of Fire” between his teeth.

  Visibility improved as they gained altitude and their lamps began to be of more use. The ground flattened out and Anna stopped to catch her breath. So changed was the landscape it took her a minute to realize they’d reached the heli-spot.