Torch

by Roxie Noir

  “What’s her name?” I ask.

  “Delilah Clark,” the woman says. “I’m Kim Clark. She was spending the night at a friend’s house, and, you know, I’ve been so busy lately with the kids and work and school that I wasn’t watching the news or listening to the radio, and I didn’t know we were being evacuated...”

  “Kim, I’m gonna take you to the gym, where we can sort this out,” I say, even as a flutter of anxiety ripples through my stomach for Delilah. “She’s gotta be somewhere, and we can sort of it out there.”

  Kim just nods, her eyes lowering. She’s clearly about ten seconds away from total meltdown, and I lead her toward the gym where my bosses and the Red Cross volunteers are gathered.

  The short version is that Kim didn’t realize they were under evacuation orders, and let Delilah spend the night at a friend’s house in Coldwater. The moment she realized, she tried to call Delilah, the friend, the friend’s parents, but couldn’t find any of them.

  She drove over, but the house was empty, a red EVACUATED sticker on the front door.

  “That means Delilah is safe,” I say, pushing open the door to the gym.

  “From the fire,” Kim says. “I hope, anyway.”

  I’d be willing to bet fifty bucks that Delilah is safe and sound somewhere, and hasn’t been kidnapped into an international sex trafficking ring.

  I know better than to say the words international sex trafficking ring to Kim right now, though, even if I were trying to reassure her. We walk toward the knot of people gathered around folding tables in the corner.

  “Jen, Mike,” I say. “This is....”

  They both turn around and look at me, their faces so pale and stricken that the words die on my lips.

  “Clementine,” Jennifer says, her voice a scratchy whisper. “There you are.”

  Suddenly I feel like there’s a clamp on my chest, metal teeth bearing down. I forget all about Kim and Delilah, and I look from Jennifer to Mike and back.

  “What?” I ask.

  32

  Hunter

  I don’t question Porter, I just make for the boulder scramble as fast as I can. I know he’s right. If we can get down and around the shoulder of the hill before the fire reaches that point, we might make it back into the black.

  It’s our only chance, because there’s absolutely no way we can outrun a fire moving uphill. Even this is going to be very, very close, and it’s going to depend on moving as fast as we can, in the howling wind and rain, wearing heavy packs.

  We’re five feet down the scramble when my foot slips on a wet rock and I go down on one knee, hard. Pain flashes through my leg and I gasp, stars in front of my eyes. Porter stops and turns, just staring at me, waiting.

  After a few seconds, I force myself to stand. I put my weight on it, and it hurts like hell, but the leg holds. I bend it, and same thing: painful as hell, still functional. I nod at Porter, and he nods back.

  “Careful,” he says.

  “Thanks,” I say, and we start moving again, each glancing back at the fire every few moments.

  “We might have to deploy,” Porter says, panting for breath, his voice ragged.

  He means deploy our fire shelters, the silicon-and-aluminum bags that resist heat.

  They’re an absolute last resort, and a bolt of terror shoots through me at the thought: trapped, face-down on the ground, nothing but a thin layer between me and unimaginable heat.

  Earlier this year, a dozen men in Arizona died after deploying in the Kaibab fire. They lost sight of it, only to find it below them on a slope, and they were left with no choice.

  Kind of like we might be right now. I lower myself, knee a throb of pain, and hope that we get a choice.

  This is fucking unfair, I think, even though I know that fair doesn’t matter. It was across the river. There was a one in a thousand chance...

  “There’s a gravel fan at the bottom of the scramble that would be the best place to do it,” he goes on. “No flammable materials, up against a rock wall where—”

  Mid-sentence, he slips. I hear rocks clatter down the slope and turn just in time to see Porter go over sideways, his heavy pack making him go off-balance.

  Just before he hits the ground, I hear a dull crack.

  Porter’s leg bends the wrong way.

  For a moment, there’s total silence. I stand perfectly still, praying that it’s some kind of optical illusion, that Porter’s ankle is just sprained or something. That he can still get down.

  Then he screams, a horrifying, gut-wrenching noise, coming from one of the toughest men I’ve ever met. Porter was in the Army before spending ten years in the hotshots, and I’ve never heard him scream before.

  It jolts me back into action, and I cross the jagged granite toward him as fast as I can, careful not to fall myself. Porter’s just lying on his back, his face almost gray, his breathing shallow. He’s dripping with sweat, and I grab the bottom of his pants and pull the leg up.

  I have to close my eyes for a moment and collect myself, because no matter how much ugly, gory shit I’ve seen, a bone poking through the skin will always make my stomach turn.

  “It’s bad,” Porter whispers, his breathing still fast and shallow.

  “Breathe,” I tell him. He keeps panting. “Deep breaths,” I command.

  He takes one, long and shaky. His hands are still splayed out to the sides, and I can see them shaking. I can’t even imagine how much this must hurt.

  I sling my pack off my back, unzip a pocket, and pull out my field first aid kit, unrolling the gauze. There’s not that much of it, but it’s gonna have to do.

  “Casden, don’t,” Porter says, his voice thick and dull. “Go.”

  “This is gonna hurt,” I say, and stretch the gauze over his shin.

  “Just fucking —”

  He screams again, and I grit my teeth together, wrapping his lower leg as tight and fast as I can. It’s a pretty shitty job, but given the circumstances, I just want to keep him from damaging it more if I can. He’s panting for breath again, but as I finish wrapping his leg he catches himself and I hear another long, deep breath.

  Good.

  Something about emergencies always snaps my mind into perfect, crystal clear focus, and I know exactly what I’m going to do, like it’s already been written down for me. I put my gear on my back again, strap it on, and glance at the fire.

  It’s coming, fast, The heat and smoke buffeting my face. Sparks and embers float up toward the sky, conveyed on a river of gray-yellow wood smoke.

  But the sound. Jesus, the sound. Fires roar and howl as they make their own wind systems, and this one sounds like demons shrieking out of hell.

  “I’m gonna need you to stand,” I tell Porter.

  “You can’t get both of us down,” he says, his teeth clenched tightly. Sweat is running off his face and onto the rock below his head, and I can see every vein in his forehead standing out.

  I kneel on my good knee next to him and offer one hand.

  “Casden, go. That’s a direct order,” he says. It’s a last resort and he knows it, saying direct order like it’ll trigger some latent military switch in my brain and I’ll suddenly just leave him there.

  Instead, I laugh.

  “Fuck orders,” I tell him. “I don’t leave men behind.”

  Reluctantly, he takes my hand. I pull him into a sitting position, and then he uses my knee to push himself up on his good leg until we’re both standing. He’s unsteady, but he’s still got his pack.

  “This is gonna hurt,” I say, bending at the waist.

  “No shit,” he mutters, but he still gasps when I drape him over my shoulders and stand.

  Fucking hell, he’s heavy, but there’s so much adrenaline in my system right now that it doesn’t matter. I think I could lift a car if I needed to.

  I pick my way down the rock slope slowly, carefully, smoke and rain blowing over us, the fire raging nearby. My eyes sting and my lungs already hurt, but I keep fucking
moving.

  I remember hauling Clementine up the stairs to the fire lookout. She was a lot lighter.

  Hunter, I like your muscles, I think, and in the smoke and the rain and the heat, I smile.

  Next to me there’s a crackle, and then Porter’s talking quietly and urgently into his radio. He doesn’t mention that he’s on my back, just that we’ve got no choice but to deploy.

  The radio goes quiet.

  “Godspeed,” the man’s voice on the other end says.

  When we reach the gravel fan at the bottom of the slide, it’s almost unbearably hot, wind whipping against my clothes and face. I put Porter down as gently as I can, and he balances on his good leg and tears into his pack, bringing out the silver tent.

  I’m so utterly spent that I’m shaking as I get my pack off. Porter shouts something but I can’t hear him over the roar and the howl of the fire, the hot wind pushing us both against the rock wall. I swear I can almost feel my skin brighten and blister in the heat, but I don’t stop. I don’t even look at the fire.

  I grab my shelter and shake out the long half-cylinder. Porter does the same, leaning against the rock wall, unsteady on one leg, and I glance at the fire one last time, heat and smoke rolling toward us. An ember lands on the sleeve of my jacket and goes out, singeing it.

  Then, suddenly, everything seems very matter-of-fact, like there’s no more point in being afraid because I’ve got only one option left, and this is it.

  “Get in,” Porter shouts, and I pull the shelter over myself. I lie face-down on the gravel, my hands and feet anchoring it to the ground as best I can, and I press my face into the rocks, getting as low as I can.

  Now the fire is even closer, closer than I’ve ever been to a fire. It sounds like there’s a freight train bearing down on me, and I do the last thing I learned in training.

  I turn my radio off, just in case, and now I’m alone in this flimsy tube, holding it down as tightly as I can. Superheated air and smoke rushes through the gaps, no matter how small I try to make them, and the temperature is already sweltering, my skin starting to feel like it’s on fire.

  I press my face into the gravel harder and try to breathe, but even the stone below me is hot.

  I shift, trying to get a better angle, and I feel the lump in my pocket. Clementine’s rock, from the waterfall. I remember tossing her into the ice-cold water, her stretched out naked on that rock, and I grab the handles on my shelter and I press them down into the earth as hard as I can.

  33

  Clementine

  I look at the radio on the table, everyone standing around it. There’s a staticky, hard-to-understand voice coming out of it. He’s talking to Mike and Mike is talking back, but all I know is I heard the words have to deploy and everyone around the table went silent, even Kim.

  Hunter’s there, and he has to deploy, and I don’t even know what that fucking means but I can tell it’s very, very bad and the gym feels like it’s flickering in and out of reality.

  I clear my throat.

  “Deploy what?” I ask, my voice still a weird, foggy whisper.

  “Fire shelters,” Mike says.

  We’re all just staring at the radio.

  “Oh,” I say. No one answers.

  “Deployed,” the voice says after a few more moments. “Cutting communication.”

  Then the thing goes quiet. I look up at Mike, frantic, and he just shakes his head.

  “When they deploy they turn their radios off as a courtesy,” he explains.

  “Courtesy?” I ask, because my brain may as well be filled with sand right now. All I can think of is Hunter, face down on the ground, in a long tinfoil tube. Like a burrito.

  “So whoever’s on the other end doesn’t have to listen,” Mike says gently. “Just in case.”

  Then I get it, all at once.

  It’s so no one has to listen to a man possibly burn to death.

  I don’t respond. I just turn around and walk blindly. I push open a door and walk into a hallway and I walk through another door and down a set of stairs. It’s dark at the bottom, the lights out, and when I get there I go under the stairs and slide down the wall until I’m sitting on the cold, dirty tile floor.

  I’m coming back to you, I think.

  Hunter and I on that tiny cot, the morning we left the lookout.

  I’m coming back to you, once fire season is over.

  I sit very, very still. I keep breathing, and I don’t move, because I feel like if I move the dark around me might shatter, and the thick, inky blackness is the only thing that’s keeping me from screaming.

  You said you never loved me in the first place.

  I didn’t mean it.

  I inhale, I exhale.

  Please come back to me, I think. Please.

  34

  Hunter

  “CASDEN!” Porter’s voice shouts, barely audible over the screaming roar of the fire.

  I take a breath, my face crushed against the gravel, dirt between my teeth, and force myself not to cough.

  “WHAT?”

  “Who was your first grade teacher?”

  My skin feels like it’s boiling off, every nerve ending pulsing with pure, seething pain. It’s all I can do to stay still, because every last instinct I’ve got is screaming it hurts here, run!

  I can feel Clementine’s rock in my pocket, though, a small hard uncomfortable lump between my thigh and the ground. It presses into my leg, and I think about her, lying on my chest in the lookout, pointing at Saturn, and I stay down.

  “Mrs. Thomason,” I shout back.

  “Who was your best friend?”

  “I don’t know!” I shout.

  “Try!”

  I force my mind back. John G. Matthews Elementary school, the big white doors to the outside, the brick facade, the playground with the wood chips where I seemed to get a splinter a week.

  “Wayne,” I shout back. “I got that poor bastard in a lot of trouble, too.”

  “What kind?”

  I take another breath, skin burning, fire roaring. I inhale dirt and cough a little, but I try to remember the shit that Wayne and I got up to, even if I have no fucking clue why Porter wants to know all of a sudden.

  “One time I stole horse shit from my parents’ barn and put it on the principal’s windshield,” I shout. “And Wayne didn’t do anything, but he was standing there when I got caught, so he got into just as much trouble as me.”

  “Horse shit?” Porter shouts back. “When you were in first grade?”

  “Grew up on a ranch, had more access to it than eggs,” I shout.

  “How’d you get it to his car?”

  Suddenly, it dawns on me what Porter’s doing. He’s keeping me talking, keeping me as distracted as he can, even though he’s got a hell of a broken leg and is in the exact same position as me.

  “Used grocery bag,” I shout. “But once I got busted I had to clean it with my bare hands.”

  There’s a sound, and I think Porter is laughing. Everything still hurts like hell, but it’s working, even if only a little.

  “What was your first car?” I shout back.

  “A piece-of-shit Ford from the seventies,” he shouts. “But I could get it up to ninety-five on the interstate.”

  He tells me about cars. I tell him about horses and guns and schools, digging deep to remember details, anything to keep my mind off the fire, the pain, and most of all, the horror that I might burn to death.

  Clementine’s rock is still there, solid. As Porter and I shout back and forth, telling each other the inanities of our lives, I’m thinking of her, the little funny things she says: I feel like a noblewoman. I’m sorry the mountain lion doesn’t respect you.

  I think of her naked in the moonlight, of her lips around my cock, but mostly I think about just being with her, hiking or driving or just sitting around. God, I just like it when she’s around.

  I can’t give up without talking to her again. I can’t.

  Graduall
y, I realize the intense heat is lessening, the air that seeps in through the tiny cracks no longer quite as superheated. The roar has died down, and even though it’s still hot and loud, I realize: the worst is over.

  It might be a long time before we can get out, since the protocol is not to leave until someone outside gives the all-clear, but we’re going to make it.

  Holy fuck, we’re going to make it.

  35

  Clementine

  I don’t know how long I sit there. It feels like time has stopped, like I somehow escaped reality and this dark, cold stairwell is the only place where none of this is happening. My eyes adjust and the darkness sharpens into shadows.

  I count my breaths and force my mind blank. I have the feeling that I’m supposed to be upstairs, gathered around the radio, letting my coworkers and strangers hug me and reassure me that everything is going to be fine, that Hunter’s going to be fine, but I can’t.

  I can’t. If I could find a smaller, darker place I’d be in it.

  After five minutes or five hours, I hear voices above, echoing through the hall. Slowly, they separate, two people calling to each other.

  One is Jennifer.

  No: one is Jennifer, talking about me.

  “Have you seen Clementine?” she asks. “The truck is still here, so she hasn’t left, but I can’t find her and I’m getting worried.”

  “Sorry,” calls the other voice, one I don’t recognize.

  I clear my throat and take a shaky breath.

  “Jen,” I call.

  Silence, then footsteps on the stairs. She rounds the landing in a whirl, calling my name, and then the lights go on and I squeeze my eyes shut, shielding them with my hand.

  “There you are,” she says.

  I open one eye and look up at her, afraid to speak. Jennifer holds out one hand.

  “They made it,” she says softly.

  I lean my head back against the wall and take a deep breath.