The Cowboy's Baby: Devlin Brothers Ranch

by Joanna Bell

  Back inside, I took Brody's face in my hands and knelt down to look him in the eye.

  "Listen to me," I told him. "Listen to everything I'm about to tell you..."

  I explained what was happening. Told him the fire was getting closer and we had to leave. When he asked if someone was coming to get us I told him lots of people were trying. When he asked specifically if his daddy was coming, that was when I took his hand and we ran up the stairs together.

  "Mommy!" Brody shouted when we were outside and I tried to pull him towards the dirt road. "The horses!"

  The horses' whinnying was frantic by then, closer to screaming than anything else. I looked down at Brody and then back at the barn that, although it was less than 40 feet away, was almost entirely obscured by smoke.

  I pointed at the road. "Run! Run down the road. I'm right behind you."

  "Are you going to let the horses –"

  "YES, BRODY! GO!"

  He started running and I went in the opposite direction, pulling my shirt up over my mouth as the smoke started to sting my lungs.

  I helped Lacey load the horses into the trailer less than an hour before, I knew the rest of them were in the small paddock attached to the barn and not in their stalls.

  A minute. If you can't free them in a minute, you have to turn around.

  But the gate to the paddock was easy to find, even in the smoke, and as soon as I threw it open the horses raced out. A coughing fit overtook me on the way to the road as the smoke from the fire suddenly increased, but I didn't stop.

  Brody was standing right at the edge of the yard, looking back towards me. He hadn't gone anywhere.

  "Why didn't you –" I started, but I already knew the answer. Because he was waiting for me.

  The moment came right there at the top of the road, while my son and I stood next to each other. It was the moment when there was simply no more time for anything but running. We didn't need to talk about it, we just had to do it. Animal instinct took over as the heat suddenly got so intense I honestly worried our hair or our clothes were going to catch fire. We ran.

  We ran down the road, stumbling at times, falling, and getting right back up. There wasn't even time to shriek over a skinned knee or a sprained ankle. We ran and ran and ran until I threw up from coughing and it went all over my shirt. I didn't even slow down.

  When Brody couldn't keep up, I picked him up. He wrapped his arms around my neck and clung to me and I stumbled and tripped down that track until my legs felt like jelly and my mind was starting to contemplate the kinds of things no mother should ever have to contemplate.

  As I slowed further and my lungs breathed air that was so hot it burned, Brody let out a sudden, terrifying scream.

  Behind us, the brush on either side of the road was bursting into flames. And just like in a nightmare when whatever unknown horror that's chasing you gets close, I could barely run.

  "MOMMY!"

  Brody is what kept me going. His screams are what stopped me from kneeling in the dust and accepting my fate. Because it wasn't just my fate, it was his.

  "IT'S OK!" I shouted, before dissolving into another coughing fit. "IT'S OK!"

  It wasn't OK. But my mom-instinct had taken over by then. Nothing mattered except keeping him safe. Nothing mattered except hiding my own terror from him, lest it make his own fear worse.

  An ember floated out of the smoke-blackened sky in front of me and landed in my hair. I brought my hand up at once, smothering the flame before it could take hold. I kept running.

  For some reason, I already thought I was crying. I thought I was crying because everything was hopeless and I was going to die and, worse, my son was going to die. But apparently I wasn't because it was a sudden, pulsating flash of blue and red light on the track that finally caused me to burst into tears. I didn't even have words anymore. All I could do was scream weakly.

  The beam of a flashlight came through the smoke and then someone was there – more than one person.

  "It OK," a male voice said, repeating the words I had just seconds ago spoken to my terrified child. "It's OK. We've got you."

  I crumpled into the strangers arms and wept.

  Chapter 41: Jackson

  There's a 6 month period or so around the time my mother died where I don't remember much of anything. I remember emotions, and I can still bring to mind the utter, terrifying emptiness I felt knowing she was gone, but I don't remember anything that happened. Conversations, what I was doing in school, trips to the grocery store or the feed shop – it's all gone.

  Someone once told me it was trauma making me forget. That when something terrible happens our minds will often erase specific details or even whole chunks of time – weeks, months, years – from our memory.

  I'm no expert and I don't know if it's true or not, but since the day of the fire I've often wondered if the opposite can happen too. Because I remember everything about the drive up to Malibu as the smoke thickened until it looked like I was driving into the apocalypse.

  I remember being enraged. At the traffic in the city, at the officials who had – as far as I could tell – waited way too long to issue an evacuation order for Malibu. At myself.

  Why didn't you leave sooner? Why didn't you insist on taking them with you in the first place? Because you were too busy feeling sorry for yourself, as usual.

  Rage and self-incrimination fueled that drive north, as much as any gasoline in the truck's tank.

  But it wasn't just rage. Not as the traffic thinned out – not many people heading into the fire zone – and the smoke got heavier. It wasn't just regret.

  It was love.

  And the closer I got to Sea Vista Ranch the quicker the heat and smoke seemed to burn away everything but that single, stark fact: it was love.

  I loved Brody. I loved his mother, too. I loved her completely, utterly, helplessly. I loved her so much I literally couldn't live without her.

  "Look at my life," I half-chuckled, half-cried as I drove north, talking to her as if she was right there beside me. "Look at me without you, Hailey. I can't do it. I can't do anything without you. Please be OK. Please hold on. Please, I'm coming."

  As I got closer to the turn-off that led to the ranch I suddenly spotted a couple of police cruisers through the smoke, their lights flashing uselessly. They were parked nose to nose, blocking the highway. I slammed on the brakes and skidded to a halt inches away from the one on the right, yanking my shirt up over my mouth before jumping out, waving my arms and screaming at the officers to move them out of the way.

  "I NEED TO GET TO SEA VISTA RANCH! IT'S A QUARTER MILE – JUST LET ME –"

  But the cops weren't having any of it. They weren't listening. One of them just kept repeating that there were fire crews in the hills already, evacuating people.

  "Let me through," I repeated. "I'll take responsibility. You don't have to come rescue me if it goes wrong. Please, my family is –"

  "SIR!" One of the officers shouted, finally putting his hands on me and physically pushing me back towards the truck. "Get back in your vehicle! There are crews in the –"

  "MY SON IS UP THERE!" I shouted, suddenly spotting the orange glow of the fire itself for the first time.

  A couple more police officers showed up. They weren't without compassion. Indeed, at least one of them appeared to be crying as I screamed and begged to be allowed past the roadblock.

  But they wouldn't budge.

  It was as I was being manhandled towards one of the cruisers that I suddenly remembered something.

  Sea Vista Ranch was criss-crossed with trails, some of them in regular use and good condition, some of them not so much. A couple of years before the fire I rode out on some of those lesser-used trails – just out of curiosity, to see where they led. Most just petered out into the high, dry scrubland around the ranch but there had been one that went downhill, following the path of a dry creek-bed down towards the sea. I remembered coming out on the highway.

  Where? Where
was it specifically? Where did it come out?

  I wracked my mind in the chaos. There had been a house on the other side of the highway. An older house, not yet sold to developers –

  Suddenly, a vision of the house appeared in my mind. I knew that house. Yellow fence, pink flowers alongside it. It was a half mile or so back down the road.

  "OK!" I shouted at the police offer holding me. "OK, I'll go! I'll go – let me drive my truck, alright? I need this truck, I use it to work. Please..."

  They let me go. I hopped back in the truck and turned it around before heading back down the highway in the direction I'd just come, my eyes flicking over the houses on the right, the ones that sat sandwiched between the highway and the ocean.

  Not even two minutes after leaving the roadblock I saw it. The yellow fence was almost obscured by smoke but still visible. And on the opposite side of the highway, the most beautiful thing I have ever seen: a trail, its entrance almost entirely obscured by brush. I yanked the steering wheel to the left and turned onto it, branches scraping against the sides of the truck as it started to bounce over the suddenly uneven ground.

  I've never been so intently focused in my life as I was on the drive up that old trail. On one side there was a steep ravine the truck could easily tumble into if I wasn't careful. Even with the high beams on the smoke was at that point almost impenetrable. I couldn't see 2 feet in front of the windscreen. The heat, too, was building to the point of almost being unbearable.

  And if it's unbearable in here, how hot do you think it is outside the truck? Gasoline is flammable, you know...

  I pushed ahead. There were a thousand obvious reasons not to, among them the possibility of the truck simply bursting into flame. And against those thousand reasons to stop, just one to keep going:

  Love.

  I don't remember at what point in that drive I admitted to myself that I was either going to find Hailey and Brody or die trying, but there was a point. There was a precise second when the truth occurred to me as naturally as the sun occurs to the dawn – without them, my life was not worth living.

  And with that sudden, shocking clarity – of the kind we humans only seem to be blessed with in the most dire circumstances – came a renewed determination. I wasn't just fighting for their precious lives. I was fighting for my own.

  How have you been so blind?

  I pressed my foot down on the accelerator as the truck bounced over a rock and bottomed out.

  How have you been so careless?

  The trail was narrowing. I was sweating. Tears were running down my cheeks, mixing with the sweat.

  This is what Lacey meant when she said you were too stubborn for your own good. This is what she meant. She meant you're the kind of man who doesn't see what he has until he's on the verge of losing it. This is what she meant, you fucking asshole.

  The truck's engine protested as the incline of the hill suddenly became much steeper. I stepped harder on the gas.

  You wasted your time with them. You wasted your life. Now you're going to die and she's never going to know that she's everything to you.

  "COME ON!" I screamed, punching the dashboard as the truck's engine revved but the truck stayed stubbornly in place. "FUCKING MOVE!"

  But my old pick-up was done. I reached back for the bottle of water lying on the backseat, emptied it over my head and t-shirt and got out.

  Why didn't you tell her? Why didn't you tell her you loved her? You could have given her that comfort and you didn't.

  I was closer than I thought. As the winds howled down the hills a quick break in the smoke revealed the main house up ahead, through the trees. I started to run, but even with the wet t-shirt over my mouth my lungs quickly filled with acrid smoke. I kept running even as I coughed and retched. I ran to the end of the trail, to where the ground under my feet changed from hard, baked mud and rock to the softness of the lawn.

  I think it was the lawn. Was it? I couldn't stand up anymore. I was dizzy, wheezing. I couldn't get enough air into my lungs. The skin on the right side of my body felt like it was on fire. I stumbled and fell forward...

  Hailey's face appeared in front of me. Her beautiful, smiling face. She was walking away from me, looking back over her shoulder. She wanted me to come with her.

  "Wait –" I tried to say, but no sound came out of my burnt lungs. Everything started to fade. And it was so hot. So hot.

  I love you Hailey. I love you Brody. I love you. I'm so sorry. I love you.

  Chapter 42: Hailey

  Me and Brody ended up on the Pacific Coast Highway surrounded by ambulances, police cars, emergency workers and other evacuees – and animals – who were lucky enough to escape the fire. I held an oxygen mask to my face as a paramedic tended to Brody. He was coughing – we were both coughing – but he was breathing. And after a few minutes of oxygen he pushed the mask out of the way and asked me something that made my blood run cold.

  "Is Daddy OK?"

  The immediate danger was past. Suddenly, I could think about things other than how to keep myself and child from being burned alive.

  So, where was Jackson?

  Because the last thing he knew, me and Brody were trapped at Sea Vista Ranch.

  My phone was still dead. But the emergency workers were using radios to communicate. I was on the verge of stopping a random cop to ask if I could borrow his radio when someone grabbed me from behind.

  Lacey. She was a mess, her hair and skin and clothing smeared with ash. I'm sure I looked even worse.

  "Oh my God," she whispered when she saw it was me and pulled me into a hug. "Oh thank God, thank God. Where's –"

  "Over there," I pointed behind me to the ambulance, where Brody was sitting in the back with his legs dangling over the edge, oxygen mask over his face. "I think – I think he's OK. We let the horses out, too. Before we ran, we let the rest of the horses out of the paddock. I don't know where they –"

  Lacey began to sob. I was safe, Brody was safe, she was safe. There was a good chance the horses were safe.

  What about Jackson?

  Lacey had the same question. Her phone wasn't dead, but she said she'd been trying him for the past hour and it wasn't even ringing.

  "Is the network down in the city?"

  "I don't know," I replied, even though it didn't sound likely.

  Lacey's eyes were filled with dread. "The last time I spoke to him, he thought you and Brody were trapped up at the ranch."

  I nodded. "I know."

  We didn't have to say it. We both knew the truth. We both knew Jackson came to get me and his son. The only question now was how far he'd gotten.

  Lacey tried his phone again. Still dead.

  I asked a random police officer if anyone saw a man in an older model red pick-up heading north within the past hour or so. He made a call on his radio and reported back that two of his deputies had turned a truck fitting that description back south about 25 minutes ago.

  For a second, I almost felt relief. I could see it on Lacey's face, too – the hope against hope that Jackson Devlin had, for once in his life, taken someone's advice.

  "He wouldn't have gone back," I said slowly. "He –"

  "No," Lacey agreed. "He wouldn't have."

  "So where would he go?" The cop asked.

  Lacey and I looked at each other.

  "He probably would have taken one of the trails," she said quietly. "He knows the property like the back of his hand, he knows the unmarked roads and old tracks all around this area. He wouldn't have gone back to the city. No way. Not if he thought you and Brody were still at the ranch.

  I closed my eyes and prayed it wasn't true. But it was. I knew it was.

  "We have to go back up there!" I said to the police officer. "He's at the ranch. Or – or he's trying to get there! You have – the fire crews have to –"

  "Ma'am," the cop replied, refusing to meet my eye. "The fire crews are busy. Do you see any spare trucks sitting around here? They're fighting the fire. They'r
e rescuing people from the fire right now."

  After asking Lacey to stay with Brody, I ran over to one of the fire crew members who was milling around on the highway, talking urgently into a walkie-talkie.

  "You have to go to the ranch," I told him, grabbing his arm when he ignored me and continued his conversation. "Hey! You have to go to the Sea Vista Ranch – right back up that track. I think there's someone else there. I think –"

  "You think?" he replied, turning to stare at me with an expression I never want to see on a human face again.

  "Yes! Yes. I think my – my boyfriend – drove up here to get to me. The police saw him a little south of here. They told him to turn around but I think –"

  "Well if the cops didn't let him come up here –"

  "He knows how to get to the ranch using the trails!" I cried. "Please! I'm sure he's there. You need to send someone up there to find him. You need to –"

  The man holding the walkie-talkie shook his head sadly. "With what?" He asked, gesturing around us at the highway, littered with people and animals and cars – and no fire trucks. "Every brigade within 400 miles is fighting this fire. I'm sorry, but I don't have a spare truck."

  "But he's there," I repeated, starting to cry because it was beginning to sink in how hopeless the situation was. "I'm sure – I'm sure he's there. I'm –"

  "If you really are sure he's up there," the firefighter replied, "the only advice I can give you is to start praying."

  As if on cue, a sudden loud whooshing sound filled the air and everyone turned to look northwards, where it was coming from. A wave of flame as sinuous as liquid had burst over a ridge, and already begun to sweep down towards the sea – and south, towards us. A couple of screams rang out. I ran back to the ambulance, to Brody and Lacey.

  "I think we have to get out of here," Lacey said urgently. "That fire's going to be here in ten minutes. Look – they're loading people into police cars."