by Barr, Nevada
Vehicle access was less nostalgic. Roads had been hacked into the relatively dependable floor of the forest, but egress over the dunes was always chancy. Anna braced herself as Rick gunned the engine, building momentum to carry the heavy truck up through soft and sliding sand. Speed increased, the truck shuddered and screamed. Near the crest of the dune, when Anna thought surely Rick was going to roll the top-heavy pumper, he forced another few horses into the carburetor and they plowed through the peak of the shifting mountain.
“Well done!” Anna yelled as they fishtailed down the far side. Rick had his shortcomings but timidity was not among them. More than once Anna had gotten hopelessly stuck by chickening out and letting off the gas too soon.
From the vantage point provided by forty-five feet of altitude, she concentrated on the smoke, the tag end of road protruding from the greenery, the sun. Once the trees swallowed them, all sense of direction would be gone. Until they were right on top of the fire they would be unable to see—or probably even smell—the smoke.
Judging from the size of the gray smudge, the fire was still small, probably less than a tenth of an acre. The pumper truck carried two hundred gallons of water and a hundred feet of hard hose line. There was virtually no wind. Barring unforeseen circumstances, she and Rick should be able to at least contain the blaze until the others arrived.
Cushioning her chin with her finger lest Rick score another point, Anna raised the King and put in a call to Guy Marshall. He was on the western edge of the island, six miles from the burn. Though he was careful not to say, Anna guessed he was at Lynette’s. The interpreter had a cozy little cabin in the woods near the salt marshes that she shared with the fattest dog Anna had ever seen. Lynette insisted the beast was a Weimaraner, but Anna had never seen one wider than it was long. Personally, she suspected the dog’s mother of mating with one of the island’s feral pigs.
Oak leaves closed overhead, forming a tunnel of plant material. What light penetrated had a green and dusty hue as if viewed through old bottle glass. Unlike the northern forests Anna had known on Isle Royale, the colored light didn’t lend a watery feel. On Cumberland, shade provided no respite from heat, crushing humidity no relief from drought.
Fifty yards ahead the white tongue of sandy soil marking the lane forked. “Stay left,” Anna ordered. Rick wrestled the truck over the berm between the tracks without slowing. If there was any oncoming traffic Anna hoped it weighed significantly less than they did.
Dividing her attention between the odometer and the ceiling of trees, she counted off the seconds. Forest canopy refused even a glimpse of the sky. Only hope and habit kept her looking. When she estimated they had traveled about two and a half miles, she told Rick to stop. With no asphalt to screech his tires on, he made do with skidding on the washboarded road till the truck shuddered to a halt in a cloud of dust.
Anna started to say something rude but she could tell he was expecting it, so she forbore comment. “This is my best guess,” she said as residual quivers from the wild ride left her entrails. “To the east of this road and a half-mile in either direction.”
“Not much to go on,” Rick said.
She couldn’t argue with him. There was an illusion that fire was easy to find. Smoke, flames, crackling, popping, Bambi and Thumper fleeing in its path. This wasn’t true with smaller fires burning in deep or heavy fuels. At Mesa Verde more than one fire crew had wandered around lost within fifty yards of a fire until the helicopter came and planted itself over the burn, hovering till they got there.
“I don’t suppose that drug plane could help us out?” Anna wondered aloud.
“No ground-to-air,” Rick said, tapping the radio.
She knew that. She was just wishing. She radioed Guy to say they’d arrived somewhere in the vicinity of the fire; then, with less than their former enthusiasm, they climbed from the truck.
Anna rummaged behind the seat until she laid hands on a can of insect repellent. The stuff was almost pure DEET, guaranteed to rot the central nervous system if one was exposed to it over long periods of time. A primitive loathing of all bloodsucking creatures squelched environmental and health concerns, and she doused her boots and trouser cuffs. Rick took the can and repeated the exercise. When they were both thoroughly toxic they stood absolutely still, heads tilted back, nostrils flaring like stallions scenting for danger. Dust, DEET, and sweat were the only odors Anna could discern. Rustling stirred the duff somewhere beneath the tangle of brush but there was no way of knowing whether it was fire, rattlesnake, or raccoon.
Both sides of the lane were shoulder-deep in undergrowth. Without air to tickle their fancies, the bladelike palmetto leaves hung limp. Above them, pine and oak mixed to form a gray-green dome. The graceful twisting branches of the live oaks were furred with what looked to be dead brown plants. Resurrection fern, Anna had been told. With the first rains these apparently dead ferns would unfurl and turn green overnight.
“Walk the road a ways?” Rick suggested.
“May as well. Maybe we’ll get lucky.” Anna took a shovel and a Pulaski—the Janus-faced fire-fighting tool, axe on one side and hoe on the other—from the back of the truck. By virtue of his broad back, Rick inherited the piss pump, a five-gallon rubber water bladder rigged to be worn as a backpack with a hand-operated pump.
“No lightning,” Rick said. “What do you figure started it?”
“Kids?” Anna offered.
“Dirtbags.”
Rick’s dirtbag category covered so many suspects, Anna chose not to reply and they trudged back the way they’d come, both too engrossed to waste energy on words. Being cut off from the sky demoralized Anna. Being closed in under the greenery like a flea on a Saint Bernard’s back made her cranky. “A good burn would do this place a world of good,” she grumbled. “Open it up some.”
Rick said nothing. He’d stopped in the middle of the road, his head back, his eyes wide and unseeing as if he heard voices, the kind that tell people to walk into a Mc-Donald’s and open fire. “Smell it?” he asked.
Anna joined him in concentrated catatonia. After a moment she shook her head.
“Out there. It’s gotta be.” Rick turned abruptly and pushed eastward through the underbrush. Ten inches shorter than he, Anna flinched as the fronds slashed back against her face. She dropped back a pace and pulled the plastic goggles down from her hard hat to protect her eyes.
Within twenty feet the thicket petered out. Well-spaced trees formed the pillars of a cathedral-sized clearing. Underfoot, leaves and needles smothered lesser growth, carpeting the ground in red-gold. Along the short side of the rough rectangle, where the organ might stand were this indeed a church, was an old hog pen from the days when all-out attempts to rid the island of pigs had been in force. Around the pen the ground had been dug up in a belt ten feet wide and twice that long where modern-day pigs rooted their contempt of the old order. Of the many exotic species let loose on park lands, one could argue that pigs were the most destructive. Maybe because, like people, they were smart and adapted well.
In the center of the clearing Rick and Anna reenacted their idiot-savant tableau. “I smell it now,” Anna said, breathing in the unmistakable scent of smoke. “But I can’t tell from where.”
Rick snuffled in a professional manner; a connoisseur sipping the air. Evidently he hit on something, because he strode purposefully toward the pigsty. On faith, Anna followed.
Palmetto took them in its claustrophobic embrace, wrapping them in dust and webs. One of Cumberland’s celebrated residents was the Golden Orb spider, renowned for its enormous webs, some large enough and strong enough to ensnare small birds. The lady herself was famous not only for her ability to mend this impressive net but for her size. Tip to tail she could measure up to two inches, her long and many legs tufted with fur.
Anna repressed a shudder. All the really hellacious spiders would be scraped off by Rick’s bulky frame. At least that’s what she told herself.
Again the underbrush t
hinned, bushes growing far enough apart that she and Rick could walk between them. Anna pulled her goggles down around her neck and squeegeed the sweat from her forehead with the flat of her hand. A scrap of turquoise caught her eye. Cumberland’s forest, unlike Michigan’s and Walt Disney’s, was not filled with flowers. At least not in August. Nature exploited a palette of grays, tans, and greens, saving blue for sky and sea.
Mentally, Anna chalked the bit of color up to garbage. Though beautiful, Cumberland was not pristine. People had used her for their own ends since before the Spanish had landed in the 1500s.
Rick was pushing on. Anna ran to catch up. A second scrap of blue wedged head-high in the trunk of a pine tree jarred her brain from its single-minded pursuit of the fire. Above the blue material was a gash so fresh that sap oozed down, marking the tree with dark tracks on the bark.
“Rick!” Anna hollered.
He stopped and looked back, impatience clear on his face.
“What color was that drug interdiction plane that was buzzing around?”
Impatience hardened into annoyance. “How the hell should I know?”
Anna pointed to the damaged tree, the bit of painted metal.
“Shit,” Rick said. “That would do it.”
Understanding pulled the scales from Anna’s eyes and suddenly she saw the myriad clues her busy brain had overlooked. The tops of the bushes were broken in places. A section of cable her mind had written off as litter, a scar in the tree beyond where the blue flagged the path. As these pieces fell into place she became aware of a faint roaring, a hum like that of a vacuum cleaner in another room: palmetto burning hot.
Twenty yards farther on, heat hit them in a shimmering curtain. With it came the muted crackle of fire snapping the bones of the undergrowth. A wall of bushes six feet high and alive with flame blocked their way. Beyond the burning thicket, Anna could see the top of a small pine beginning to sprout blossoms of fire. Except for that, the trees had not yet caught.
She trotted parallel to the burn. Customarily she and Rick would have made a quick assessment and begun scraping a line in the duff, clearing away the combustible fuels to stop the fire from spreading, at least along the ground. With the plane crash, human life was factored in and the saving of property became secondary.
Anna talked on the radio as she ran, telling Guy of the new twist. After she’d signed off she heard him radioing headquarters. There was no reply. Next he tried Lynette. As the interpreter took over dispatching duties, Anna tuned their chatter out and turned all of her attention to breaching the flames separating them from the downed plane.
In less than a minute she was around the screen of palmetto and into a clearing scattered with young pines. The aircraft, a twin-engine prop plane, had rolled over onto its back and nosed into the ground. The belly of the airplane was painted white and looked vulnerable, like the underside of a landed fish. Wheels, popped loose from their housing, pawed at the air. Part of the left wing was crumpled beneath the fuselage, the metal curled and wrinkling. That was where the fire burned hottest and Anna guessed an in-board fuel tank had exploded on impact or shortly thereafter. Half of the right wing was sheared off, the engine thrust skyward in an angry metal fist. Left behind in the rush to demolition, the severed tips of the wings lay a distance from the aircraft. A stump of the tail remained, elevators hanging from torn cables.
From what Anna could see beneath and beyond the wings, the cabin was partially crushed, shards of Plexiglas squeezed out from the metal frames in the cockpit. It looked as if the airplane had cut through the canopy at an angle, left wing pointed toward the earth. When it struck, the force had driven the cabin into the ground, shattering the windows and smashing in the roof.
Fire poured from the lower engine and was taken up by the palmetto. Orange claws curved around the cabin, bubbling the paint and melting the broken windows.
The intensity of the heat and the knowledge that the plane’s second fuel tank had yet to explode paralyzed Anna. In her mind, as it had a year ago below Banyon Ridge, the fire mushroomed out from the trees in a storm of destruction. Terror roared through her insides, wiping her clean of morality, ethics, courage, and thought. Dropping the Pulaski, she turned to run.
Rick had come up behind her. Blindly, she smacked into him and lost her balance.
“Watch where you’re going,” he growled, knocking her unceremoniously back onto her feet.
The jolt snatched her back from the coniferous forests of northern California and the nightmare that only nine of them had survived. Breath was coming fast and her knees were shaking so bad she couldn’t move, but the cowardly retreat had been aborted; honor and face were intact. Though she’d never tell him, Rick had done her a great service.
Fighting to retain her equilibrium, she retrieved her Pulaski. “Okay, okay,” she said, as much to herself as to him. Somebody needed to take charge but Anna still had the shakes. She’d locked her knees but her insides twanged like cheap guitar strings. It was all she could do to tie one thought to another.
“Piss pump to the passenger side. The right,” Rick said, filling the void. “Maybe somebody’s alive. The fire’s circling back through the brush. You take it.”
Relieved, Anna nodded but didn’t move. “Cut the fuels away before the fire gets to the plane,” Rick spelled out for her, and gave her the shove she needed. Her first steps were stumbling, her legs still wanting to run. Movement burned away the residual fear and she began to function.
Lest panic again blindside her, Anna attacked the flames with a fury that, once the adrenaline subsided, would leave her with a strained back and a hyperextended elbow. Sweat fell like salt rain to turn to vapor on the superheated ground. Escaping from her hard hat, tendrils of hair singed and curled.
Ignited by the explosion, fire had burned out from the downed aircraft, cutting an angry swathe through the palmetto. Like a ravening beast, appetite unslaked, it doubled back from the point of origin and ran greedily toward the unburned tail of the aircraft.
In a dead-heat race with the flames, Anna chopped line, clearing to bare a soil path a yard and a half wide between the burn and the plane.
In the cabin were the dead or the dying. She suppressed that knowledge in her need to complete the physical task at hand. Dimly, she was aware of paint crackling, the groan of metal shifting and the snap of rubber and plastics, but her world had narrowed to the one tentacle of the dragon she had been sent to hack off. The writhing of the rest could be dealt with later.
The thicket wasn’t more than fifteen feet wide at the point where the plane had nosed in. Unless the shrubs ignited the live oaks, the fire would slow to a creep when it hit the duff beyond the underbrush. It wasn’t long before Anna succeeded in separating the plane from the fire. With her primary task accomplished, the scope of her world opened somewhat and she turned back to the mangled aircraft.
On the passenger side of the inverted fuselage, Rick stood in the angle where the wing stub met the cabin, squirting water on the metal. Not six inches from his fanny was a fuel tank, the only one remaining attached to the main part of the wreckage that had yet to explode.
A thin line of smoke, rising straight up in the still air, caught Anna’s eye. Beneath the duff, creeping almost unseen, fire from the palmetto was crawling through the leaf litter toward the fuel tank. Anna abandoned the secured left flank of the plane and, in a controlled frenzy of hoeing, began clearing away burning debris. Acrid smoke was sucked through the bandanna tied across the lower half of her face. Mucus ran from her nose and she breathed as sparingly as exertion would allow.
A shovel appeared in her peripheral vision. Dijon and Al had arrived. Dijon joined Anna and began throwing dirt on the trail of flame, broken free of the litter now and snaking toward the wing. Al manned a second piss pump, aiming his stream onto the metal cowling of the engine itself. Guy Marshall must have arrived at roughly the same time as the other two. When Anna looked past Al, he was there, Pulaski in hand.
&nbs
p; It was good to be among friends.
Through the bite of the smoke Anna became aware of the odor of gasoline. At that moment she heard Guy shouting “Fall back! Fall back!”
Fire had circled around Dijon and met up with a trickle of high octane fuel soaking through the mat of needles and leaves that had yet to be scraped away. Flame burned narrow and high with the intensity of a lit fuse.
“Fall back!” Guy shouted again.
Dijon threw a spadeful of dirt at the back of Rick’s legs to get his attention. “Back,” he and Anna yelled in unison; then they turned and ran.
CHAPTER Six
THE EXPLOSION, WHEN it came, was not so much heard as felt. A heavy and unseen hand slammed into Anna’s back, lifting her off her feet. Time slowed, a break in the space-time continuum, and, for that instant, it was as if she hung suspended in the air. To her right she could see Dijon, hands outstretched like a young black Superman, hanging in space. His face was set, determined, as if he flew toward a brick wall intending to smash through.
Anna noticed her left hand stretched in front of her clutching the Pulaski. Afraid she’d fall on one of the blades, she let it go. There was time, in that stopwatch moment, to see her fingers uncurl from the handle and the two-edged tool fall away.
Time caught up with itself. Dijon fell, the trees blurred, and Anna hurtled to the ground. The forest floor scraped the goggles from her face, shoved prickling needles down the collar of her shirt and dust up her nose. Something plowed into her booted feet and she thought a chunk of burning metal had crippled her till it began clawing its way up and she knew it was Rick.
“Everybody okay? Are you okay, Anna?” An obnoxious finger rapped against the plastic of her hard hat. She rolled one eye clear of the dirt to see Guy standing over her.