by Linda Jacobs
The men dragged the hose toward flaming trees not fifty feet from the nearest building. Clare and Javier made sure the line did not catch on the bumpers of the few cars still on the lot. If the inferno reached them, their gasoline tanks would add fuel.
The heat was worse here. She pulled her bandanna higher over her face and wished she were up front where the water was. The humidity from the spray would be welcome relief to her parched throat.
As fire torched the nearby pines, she realized that they would lose this battle within minutes. From here, the North Fork need only spot across the parking lot and the inn would be in flames.
“We need another line,” Clare told Javier. She ran toward an engine parked at the base of the inn. The roof sprinkler system came on, letting water wash down the sides of the building.
As Clare sprinted past the grounded helicopter, she realized that Deering was the pilot. She hurried on, gasping for breath.
Getting to the engine, she grabbed a firefighter’s arm. “Help us on the perimeter.”
The man’s eyes went wide behind his smudged visor. “Are you kidding? We’re to stay by the inn.”
Clare looked back the way she’d come and realized that the North Fork had reached the storage shed. In the same moment, she saw a ranger running toward the crew she had left. He waved his arms and shouted, pointing away from the shed.
It was clear that the person he was screaming at did not understand, so he balled his fists together and then threw his hands apart in a gesture that conveyed an explosion.
The crew began to run, leaving the perimeter abandoned. She could tell that Javier didn’t see her as he ran for the largest open space to shelter.
“Can I help here?” Clare shouted to the man spraying the inn’s roof.
“I think we’ve done all we can,” he returned.
She ran for the chopper Deering sat in. Pulling herself up into the passenger seat of the Huey, she slammed the door.
Breathing hard, with a stitch in her side, she felt the futility. It was stuffy in the cockpit, but not as crazy as being out in the screaming gale. “Will we be safe here?” she asked.
Deering stared through the windshield. “We’re a ways from anything flammable right now, but if the inn starts to go up, we’ll need to abandon ship.”
“Okay.” Clare turned to study his pale face. “You look sick.”
Deering’s eyes were smoke-reddened. “I really am sick … or something. Garrett and I weren’t scheduled to land, but I …”
Clare put a hand on his shoulder. He shook as though he were on drugs, like some of the ODs she’d run to the ER in Houston. She’d told Deering there was nothing for them, to go back to his wife, but she hated to see him falling apart like this. “Have you seen Georgia?”
The chopper rocked as a gust struck it. More cinders pelted the windshield.
“I botched it.” He sounded broken.
Clare sat up straighter when she saw Garrett Anderson running toward them. He slid open the rear door and the wind whirled inside. Climbing into the back, he said, “Deering, the way the fire’s moving, I’m sure that it’s cut off those guys we saw counting plants or something.” He raised his index finger and circled it to mimic rotors. “Let’s pick ‘em up.”
Clare swallowed. Steve had gone to do something in the woods with his fellow biologists.
She waited for Deering to start flipping switches.
The chopper rocked again. “Can’t do it, Garrett,” Deering said. “In this wind, we’d crash.”
Devon jumped as an explosion reverberated across the Geyser Basin. Fire raged on three sides of the inn and darkness had fallen in midafternoon.
The North Fork swept steadily toward her perch on the roof of the inn. A building at the edge of the parking lot burned unchecked, after the firefighters who had been spraying it had retreated.
Another rumble rolled across the valley. “What is that?” Devon asked.
“Probably fuel storage tanks,” the tall cameraman with the ponytail replied. He hefted his video unit to his shoulder. “It’s time to get off this firetrap.”
Below, a helicopter sat on the parking lot. Its door opened and a small figure climbed out. Something about the determined walk of the person dressed in fire clothes made her scream, “Mom!”
Clare, if it was she, joined another man and headed away from the hotel. They looked strong and purposeful like all the firefighters, while Devon shook with fear. She must have been crazy to come up here.
A gust hit her like a fist. Her hand opened and the white napkin lifted and blew away.
God, she was falling, her arms windmilling toward that lousy knee-high rail. Heights had made her mindless since she was old enough to peer from the stair landing and scramble back for dear life.
She landed hard on her wrist and elbow. Lying on the rubber roof mat, she fought nausea while pain brought tears to her eyes.
Reaching her trembling good hand to the railing, she pulled herself up. A single dizzying glance over the edge told her if she had been next to the downwind side, she’d have tumbled fifty feet down the steep roof.
Her heart hammered. Looking at the faraway porch where she would have fallen, she suddenly realized that the shingle roof was ablaze.
Devon shrieked and nearly wet her pants. She ran for the stairs behind the ponytailed cameraman. Down one flight and just before she reached the door leading inside the inn, a flying cinder caught her in the chest. Feeling its sting below her collarbone, she raised a hand to slap it away. In the same instant, the singed foulness of burning hair filled her nostrils.
The cameraman, already halfway inside the inn, turned back. His video landed on the decking with a crash. Swiftly, he pulled off his jacket and wrapped her head and shoulders.
The burning heat on her skin sent agonized pulses that threatened to send her to her knees.
Her rescuer dragged her through the portal and inside the dim space beneath the roof. Devon stammered, “Thanks,” and shoved the jacket at him. She ran down the steps toward the tree house. Already a blister was rising on her chest above the curved neck of her tank top.
She had to find her mother. Mom would take her someplace safe. She’d bandage her burn and her wrist that was swelling and hurting more every second.
It seemed to take forever to stumble down flight after flight of stairs. Outside the inn, grit and ash bombarded her.
Raising her arm to ward off the onslaught, she looked for the chopper. An inferno surrounded the inn in every direction, while a clutch of tourists with their backs to the strong wind watched an eruption of Old Faithful. The ridge that formed a green backdrop behind the geyser was fully aflame.
Devon ran to the helicopter. “I’m looking for Clare Chance,” she shouted, as the man in the cockpit swung open the chopper door. “She’s my mom.”
“Yeah,” the slim, dark-haired man in an olive-drab flight suit answered without interest.
“I need to find her,” Devon insisted. “She was just here.”
The pilot removed his sunglasses and she saw that his eyes, surrounded by a sunburst of lines, were red. Of course, everybody’s were because of the smoke, but he looked wracked out. He studied Devon wearily. “I can’t help you.” She saw him take in her burned chest and irregular, singed hair. “You okay?”
“I will be when I find my mother.”
Clare followed Garrett across the parking lot, surprised that she had trouble keeping up.
“Those people you saw,” she said. “I think one of them might be Steve Haywood.” Having the inn in peril was one thing. If the North Fork threatened Steve and his friends …
“The guy who was drying out on Washburn?” Garrett grinned despite his speed. “The one I thought was sweet on you?”
A quick flash of last night’s all too brief embrace made Clare return, “He’s off the mountain now.” She got into the spirit of joshing in the face of danger, an old habit of hers and Frank’s. “Did I mention how kind it was of
you to tease me about him over the public airwaves?”
“Always happy to oblige.”
As they headed across the complex, Garrett’s continued banter helped keep her mind off his ominous statement that he believed Steve and the others had been cut off.
It was bad enough that she couldn’t find Devon, but there was no reason to believe she’d been caught out on the flat by the North Fork. An inveterate urban kid like her daughter would have been trying to pass for twenty-one in the bar rather than taking a wilderness hike.
Steve and his fellow biologists were another matter. She imagined them out there absorbed in their work, while the fire came on.
Steve surveyed the forty-by-forty foot area they had staked out, partly sheltered by a community of mature lodgepole. The trees exuded chemicals that discouraged the entry of other plant species into its neighborhood.
The balance of the tract had been cleared of forest by the pine bark beetle. A few snags stood, but most had gone down and were in an advanced stage of rot, providing homes for communities of fungi, grubs and termites. Growing lushly around the fallen were crested wheatgrass gone to seed, spreading fronds of bracken fern, and dense patches of red clover. A Monarch flitted around the clusters of late-blooming goldenrod.
Fly away, Steve told the butterfly. The rooted could only await the inevitable.
“Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty.” Moru finished his count of common Indian paintbrush in precise tones. He looked toward the sound of the approaching fire and broke into a smile. “I believe this one will burn.”
Summer intern Thomas Lee looked at the darkening sky through thick glasses and pressed his lips together. Steve thought Thomas wanted to head out, but didn’t want to be the first to suggest it.
Kelly Engels wiped sweat from her freckled forehead. “Let’s beat feet!” She tightened the cinch on her untidy ponytail, stowed her clipboard in her pack, and waited expectantly.
As Steve’s focus shifted from the plant community to the North Fork, a rising roar made him wish they had worked faster. Moru got to his feet with a worried look.
Kelly swiveled her head. “It’s jumped the highway!” she shouted. She took off, Thomas at her heels.
Moru was running now, too, leaping over logs behind Kelly and Thomas. Steve chased them, running awkwardly on his crippled knees. Behind them, the North Fork howled like a predatory animal.
Steve and Moru had fire shelters on their belts, but he hadn’t seen any on Thomas and Kelly. Maybe they had them in their packs, for at this rate they were going to need them. He hated the thought of going into a shelter for the second time in a week, but there it was. And from the wind velocity and the sound of it, the North Fork’s firestorm would burn far fiercer and hotter than the Hellroaring. If they were overtaken, they’d probably die.
Trying to think of a way out, he considered the layout of the complex. If they worked their way to the left, they might get ahead of the fire’s path and break into the open near the employee cabins.
The smoke grew thicker. Ahead, the visibility was down to just under a hundred feet when Thomas slewed to a stop, holding his out his hand. When Steve pulled up beside him, he felt the fire’s heat. As Kelly and Moru joined them, a flash of orange appeared through the trees.
“They’ll be heading for the easement,” Garrett predicted. From his neutral tone, she gathered he saw long odds against their making it.
This wasn’t goddamn fair. Last night she’d dared to believe that Steve was making a new start after losing Susan and Christa. A fresh beginning that she might have a stake in.
Her little voice whispered that life … and death … weren’t fair.
Garrett looked at the hellish red twilight and broke into a flat out run. Clare’s bandanna covered the part of her face not protected by goggles, but she felt the stinging impact of wind-borne cinders.
Not far from the south edge of the parking lot, the wide, treeless swath of easement headed into the forest. Clare strained and picked out four yellow Nomex shirts. They weren’t even wearing hard hats and she assumed they hadn’t believed the North Fork would move this fast.
She picked out Steve and uselessly added her scream to that of the fire. He waved an arm to signal that they were heading her way.
Clare started toward them, but Garrett grabbed her sleeve. “I wouldn’t.”
Although she’d come to appreciate his wisdom, this time she tried to pull away. “Steve!” she cried.
Garrett’s fingers held like a vice. “Rule number one,” he ground out. The commandment she’d preached to Jerry Dunn of Toro Canyon, about not jumping into the water to save a drowning victim unless you had the right equipment and were certain of conditions.
The one she’d ignored while struggling to uncover Frank, the one Javier had disregarded to drag her from danger. She struggled to get free, to go to Steve, but a wall of flame roiled up over the trees on the easement’s west side. Heat waves distorted the air.
Garrett pointed to the pipes running down the center of the corridor with sprinkler heads at intervals. “The irrigation system!”
Pete Cullen and his West Yellowstone volunteers had brought their equipment to protect the power lines, but no water flowed. “Why isn’t it on?” Clare shouted.
“Don’t know.”
She located the fireplug where the pipes were tied in to the four-inch connection. “I hope there’s pressure.” She ran for the nearest fire truck, parked thirty yards away. Instinct told her that she was running for Steve’s life.
No one was near the vehicle, a grim sign that this perimeter, too, had been abandoned, so quickly that nobody had moved the truck. She checked the back where the hose clamp was, but the plug wrench wasn’t in plain view. Moving to the side, she unlatched the shining silver cover of the nearest locker.
Nothing inside but air packs, with spare bottles clipped in place above. Clare started for the other side of the truck and realized that the wrench was on the rear step. She’d just failed to see it.
When she grabbed the two-foot steel spanner, she heard a man call to her and realized that someone was coming to save the truck. Without waiting to explain, she ran back toward the easement.
At the fireplug, she didn’t dare take time to assess Steve and the others’ situation. The look on Garrett’s face was enough as she read, “Hurry,” on his lips. The sound was torn away by the North Fork.
Clare fit the wrench head over the five-sided lug on top of the fireplug. She took three turns with her right hand to tighten the grip of the jaws, leaned into it, and prayed.
It was too late to outrun the fire, Steve realized. The North Fork relentlessly filled in the portions of black canvas not yet painted. He’d seen Clare across the burning barrier, for a bare second, but she was out of sight now.
He and the others had one last chance. To leap through the low, burning brush of the easement and sprint through the unburned woods to the Firehole River … immerse in the cold water and let the fire rage over their heads.
Steve began to run, hoping that his fire retardant clothing would prevent major burns. Within a few yards, his knees reminded him that he had already done far too much insult to his old wounds this day. Each step was as though a blade stabbed through his calf and emerged from the top of his thigh. He felt the heat, just ahead where he would have to plunge into the flames.
Clare waited for him, so close, and yet cut off by the enemy they’d been combating all summer. With a surge of anger, he decided that he, by God, was not going to die this way. For the first time in years, he had something to look forward to.
As he redoubled his efforts, he suddenly felt something he believed was impossible. Stinging droplets pelted him, spraying his face and forearms. It was rain, no, of course, it wasn’t; great black clouds were in the sky, but it sure as hell wasn’t raining.
He stopped, stunned. Falling water mingled with his sweat and dripped down his neck to his collar. Moru held out a hand, palm up, and watched the drops
land on his pale palm. The smile lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth grew deeper.
The conduit down the center of the easement spewed great fountains. Where water landed on the fires, a cloud of steam arose.
Clare saw them running along the pipeline. After thirty yards of slogging through thick brambles, Steve lagged the others.
The tall man gasping for breath waved thanks when he passed Clare and Garrett. The two young people didn’t stop running even when they were in the clear. As Steve staggered onto the pavement, his legs buckled.
Clare knelt beside him. “Give me a hand, Garrett.”
He bent to help.
Steve struggled to rise on his own, but Garrett grabbed him beneath his arms and pulled him up.
“Can you walk?” Her voice carried that element of business she used in emergencies, but she heard a trembling kind of timbre that said she was running on empty.
“Not sure,” Steve managed.
“Put your arms around us,” she urged, “just in case.”
Garrett hunched down so that the disparity between his and Clare’s heights would not throw Steve off balance.
“I wish to God those sprinklers had been on,” Clare said. “It would have saved me nearly having a coronary.”
Steve’s arm tightened around her shoulder. “You?” He gave a grin that turned into a grimace when he put weight on his right leg.
“Power lines can be restrung,” Garrett said. “I’m sure they needed the water pressure to defend the inn because it can’t be replaced.”
“Did it …?” Clare stopped. Had all their efforts to save the building she loved ended in a smoking ruin? She ran to the plug and turned off the flow, hoping it might help keep up pressure at the inn.
Ahead, the other scientists stared at something in the distance. Clare moved forward to see around the pines that blocked her view and she saw through the red haze. The inn was still there, with flags snapping on the ramparts.
Yet, all was not the same. A blackened ring would surround Old Faithful, long past all their lifetimes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT