Wildefire

by Karsten Knight

  of the dispatcher asked repeatedly for the nature of her emergency.

  Even as the sirens picked up from the south, even as the red and whites flickered over the lawn soon after, Ash lay still in the grass, letting the rain cascade down around her, hoping her mind would take her some place—any place—other than here on the lawn with a dead girl.

  37

  PART I: THE REDWOODS

  Eight Months Later

  SLEEPWALKER

  Thur

  sda

  y

  This certainly wasn’t the first time he’d been all over her, but this was the first time Ash recognized the feeling that had been growing within her all month: disgust.

  Here she was, trying to get some rest before tomorrow’s chemistry test, and she’d stupidly allowed Bobby Jones to sneak into the girls’ dormitory after lights-out.

  And now she was being groped.

  Sure, Ash had invited him into her creaky little twin-size bed. Sure, she knew he might get ideas with her roommate home in Pennsylvania for her grandmother’s funeral. Sure, she kissed him back when he touched her face and pressed his lips to hers.

  Six-one, long mop of dark hair, Italian features that made him look more twenty-one than sixteen—Bobby Jones was gorgeous. And, quite unfortunately, Bobby 41

  Jones knew that Ash knew he was gorgeous. This was a disastrous combination.

  “Ash . . . ,” he whispered. His lips traveled down her neck, and he pulled aside the collar of her polo. At the same time, she felt his hand, which had so coyly positioned itself on her waist, begin its not-so-stealthy ascent up her shirt.

  His lusty fingers made it as far as her rib cage before she diplomatically intertwined her fingers with his and pulled his hand out of her polo, guiding it back to the bedspread. At first he seemed to get the point, and his lips retreated to her earlobe.

  But then, like a zombie tentacle rising from a dark bog, his free hand slipped underneath the bottom of her polo again. Under the pretense of a back massage, his fingers rubbed in small concentric circles, tracing up her back, as if Ash were clueless as to their final destination.

  Ash let them brush the tag on her bra before she clamped her elbows down on his hands. “That stays on,”

  she said to him, firmly but with no condescension.

  His teeth stopped nibbling on her earlobe. He pulled back and appraised her from arm’s length. “But . . .”

  “The butt’s off-limits too,” Ash joked.

  He didn’t smile. “It’s not like it hasn’t come off before, Ash.”

  “Well, Bobcat,” she said. She enjoyed how he flinched at the nickname she’d given him. “That was one time in a janitor’s closet, and I’d had one too many ladles of punch.

  42

  This is the night before a chemistry exam, and quite honestly, I’m not feeling particularly frisky right now.”

  He rolled his eyes and climbed off her, dropping onto his back. “Christ, make a guy feel like a creep because he’s attracted to his girlfriend.”

  “No one’s calling you a creep,” she protested.

  He sulked. “Yeah, well, even after two months of dating, I feel like if I even look at you a way you don’t like, you’re going to blow the rape whistle.”

  Ash couldn’t help the sound of revulsion that bleated from her throat; she rolled up onto her knees. “Could you be a bigger baby? All this pissing and moaning because I wouldn’t let you round second base?” She squeezed her breasts for effect. “They’re boobs, Bobby. Grow up.”

  He slipped out of bed and began to furiously tie his shoes—Ash could sense the rant coming before he even opened his mouth. “You know, Ash, you’re not in Westchester County anymore. You came to boarding school in NorCal, where everyone else knows each other already. It would have been easy for you to fly under the radar here, but you landed the captain of the soccer team.

  Maybe you should count your blessings.”

  Ash couldn’t help it—she laughed. “First of all, if you’re including yourself as a ‘blessing,’ then there must not be a God. And second, if you really knew me, or maybe even had half a gorilla’s brain, you’d realize that a girl who leaves her high school in the middle of sophomore year to go to a boarding school three thousand 43

  miles away where she doesn’t know anybody probably wants to fly under the radar.”

  “That so?” Bobby asked, and wandered across the room. He scooped his letter jacket off the back of the armchair and slipped it on in one practiced maneuver.

  “See, word on the street is that you moved here to get away from your crazy sister.”

  This effectively stopped their conversation.

  Ash held her breath, and she felt the room around her tilt and spin. Bobby’s hand paused on the collar he had been attempting to fix when he’d said it. He seemed to be waiting in some combination of baited anticipation and fear for Ashline’s response.

  “Who told you that?” she whispered.

  “It’s called the Internet, Ashline. You’ve been acting shady lately, and I thought to myself, ‘You’re dating the girl. Why not run a little background check?’ Dead girl on the front lawn . . . Outlaw sister on the run . . . All I know,” he said, and moved for the door, “is that, if all that’s true, then maybe I better start worrying whether insanity’s hereditary.”

  Ashline wrapped her hands around her bedspread and tightened them into fists. “Get out of here, Bobby.”

  He whistled and reached for the doorknob. “Whoa.

  Now she gets passionate about something. Here’s a word of advice, Ash. Why don’t you start acting like you’re sixteen, and stop acting like such a bipolar freak?”

  Ash ripped her alarm clock from its socket and hurled 44

  it across the room. It struck the door frame right by his face, the plastic shattering on impact. Even in her unbridled rage she could enjoy the look of terror on his face as he covered his head and shrank back.

  He pulled his hands away from his head and glanced once at the scuff mark in the door frame where the clock radio had shattered, before turning back to Ash.

  “Maniac.”

  With another roar Ash seized hold of the lamp on her nightstand and yanked that out of the socket as well, immersing the room in darkness. Through the black she heard Bobby shout, “Jesus Christ!” and heard the sounds of his hands fumbling for the doorknob. Finally he found it, threw the door open with a crash, and stumbled out into the hallway without looking back. Somewhere at the far end of the girls’ dormitory, the door slammed.

  For a full minute Ash stood by the bed, the lamp still clutched in her hand, and her chest rising and falling in aggravated shallow breaths.

  A familiar figure appeared in the doorway, eclips-ing the hallway light. The visitor’s hand groped the wall until she found the switch for the bedroom’s overhead halogens.

  Jackie Cutter—Ashline’s best friend, who also happened to be the prefect for the floor—stood at the threshold looking stone-faced. On a perfectly normal day Jackie was always squinting, her eyes darting from side to side, as if she were trying to catch sight of her blond feathered 45

  hair. Ash could never be sure whether Jackie’s eyeglasses prescription wasn’t strong enough or whether the girl was just a bit odd. But here, summoned three doors down by Ash’s tantrum, she was squinting so much that her eyes were practically closed. Her gaze traveled from the alarm clock on the floor, with its shattered faceplate, to the scuff on the door frame, and then over to Ash, wielding her reading lamp like a baseball bat and looking like a raccoon caught in the trash cans.

  “Christ, Ash,” she said in her perky alto voice. “I’d have to double-check in my prefect handbook, but I think there’s some sort of bylaw about playing baseball with residence hall furniture.”

  Even in her flustered state, Ash had to laugh. She lowered the lamp. “And I thought I’d broken all the bylaws by now.”

  Jackie squatted and picked up the demolished alarm clock. She flipp
ed it over in her hands. “I know not all of the numbers lit up, and it doesn’t pull in many radio stations, but did it really deserve to die?” She held up the electrical cord. The wires protruded out the end where Ash had yanked it out of the wall—the plug itself was still in the socket.

  “Sorry,” she mumbled. “I’ll pay for it, I promise.”

  “Or we’ll just replace it with one of the forty clocks sitting unused in the supply closet and not say anything about this ever again.” Jackie held the destroyed clock like a basketball and, after eyeing her target, launched 46

  it at the wastebasket. It clattered against the rim and dropped in with a clunk. She threw her hands up in the air victoriously. “Swoosh!”

  Ash collapsed down heavily onto the edge of her bed.

  “I. Hate. Boys.”

  “Bobby Jones?” Jackie sat down next to her.

  “Bobby Jones,” Ash repeated, and buried her face in her hands, half-screaming into them.

  Jackie patted her on the shoulder. “You know what you need?”

  Ash peaked out from between her fingers. “Eight hours of rest before tomorrow’s exam? Bug spray that repels assholes?”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of a cocktail or two. Maybe five.”

  Ash cast a long look at the chemistry textbook sitting on top of her dresser, and then at the clock plug stuck in the wall. The wires sparked. “How soon can Darren be outside with the car?”

  Jackie grinned mischievously. “I took the liberty of texting Darren when I saw Bobby Jones run past my door like a bat outta hell. He should be by any minute now.”

  “You’re a good friend,” Ash said.

  “I know.” Jackie stood up. “And I wouldn’t be a good friend if I didn’t tell you to change. . . . Please put on something besides your academy-issue polo.”

  Ash held the collar of her shirt up to her nose and sniffed. She sighed. “You win.”

  47

  Five minutes later they were standing out on the stone term

  race behind the girls’ residence hall. Like all of the other buildings at Blackwood Academy, the dormitory had a faux log cabin exterior that was actually made from some plastic compound, which supposedly contained traces of recycled milk cartons. A single filthy lightbulb buzzed in its metal cage over the back door, a back door that the architects had intended for use as a loading dock. It got far more use, however, as an escape route for mischievous students.

  Ash shivered in the chill air and wrapped her black pashmina tightly around her dress. On clear nights in Northern California, the temperature plummeted as soon as the sun went down. Now, at the end of April, the summer fogs had already begun to sweep through the surrounding redwood forest, keeping the days around a steady fifty degrees.

  “Aren’t you cold?” Ash asked Jackie.

  Jackie glanced from her tank top to her skimpy jean shorts before looking back at Ash as if she’d asked an offensively ridiculous question. She was from Winnipeg and was accustomed to chilly northern nights.

  Their conversation was interrupted by the low rumble of a motor echoing from the dark port of the underground garage. The entrance was built into the face of a nearby bluff. In an attempt to keep the campus green and eco-friendly in relation to the local national park, 48

  the school had built only a small parking lot beneath the grounds to accommodate faculty cars. Here in Berry Glenn, California, they were 350 miles from San Francisco. Given the campus’s remote location, very few students bothered to bring transportation with them.

  The world could have ended outside the forest in some massive global catastrophe, and the students would never know it until they departed for summer break.

  Darren Puget’s shiny silver pickup crested the hill coming out of the garage, and the instant he hit the access road, he nixed the lights, threw the truck into neutral, and cut the engine, seemingly all in one single motion.

  The car coasted ever so slowly to a stop in front of the two girls. He leaned out the window with a huge grin spread across his face, wearing the reflective aviator sunglasses he never seemed to go without, with zero regard for time of day or weather.

  He pushed the aviators down to the tip of his nose and winked at Ash. “You ladies ready to push?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Ash unwrapped her pashmina, revealing the little dress underneath. “Unless you’re wearing a miniskirt in there, which wouldn’t shock me in the least, you better let me take the wheel.”

  Darren tossed his chin-length hair back with an insulted humph. “You know, I get a call from Jackie saying that one of our good friends is in need of escape, so I drag myself out of bed the night before an exam and put my ass on the line to sneak her off campus for some 49

  debauchery . . . and you have the gall to tell me to push my own truck?”

  Ash crossed her arms and tapped her foot.

  “Don’t give me that look, princess.” Darren wagged a finger at her. “And let’s be honest here. Between the three of us, you are the only varsity athlete, and by a landslide the most muscular. So ditch the heels, stretch those born-to-play-tennis legs of yours, and get behind the damn truck.” When Ash made no initial move to do as he said, he added, “Truck’s not going to push itself.”

  “You’re a real catch. You know that, Darren?” Ash stripped off her high heels and fired them through Darren’s open window; he barely put up his hands in time to block his face. She padded over to the bumper in her bare feet. “First round’s on you.”

  “First round’s on Daddy Puget of Puget World Holdings,” Jackie corrected her, and took up her spot on the left taillight.

  Fortunately, the dirt access road declined steadily from the garage all the way to the edge of the forest, but getting the truck moving was still going to require some serious man power. Ash nodded to Jackie, and with a deep breath she set her feet into the dirt, and they began to push.

  At first the truck rolled forward only at a trickle’s pace along the back side of the girls’ dormitory. Given the distance they had to push the steel beast before they reached the front gate, it seemed like it was going to be 50

  an impossible feat to get the truck off campus. After what felt like an interminable stretch, they approached the edge of the residence hall, and the road curved around to meet the main quad. Inside the cab Darren gradually turned the wheel, steering them around the corner and past the rolling front green of Blackwood Academy.

  The quadrangle was made up of five buildings.

  The girls’ and boys’ dormitories marked the southeast and southwest corners, respectively, with the Mercer Academic Building placed between them like a disapproving chaperone. Mercer was built facing north so that on a sunny day its magnificent bell tower would cast a long shadow across the quad, the cross at its tip serving as the needle to the sundial markers placed around the green. On the far side of the lawn, to the east, was the campus dining hall and fitness facility, while the access road led past the last fixture of the quad—the twenty-bedroom faculty lodge.

  This faculty lodge was the reason that Ash and Jackie were pushing the truck along the dirt road—a truck that, mind you, had a perfectly tuned motor and was so fresh off the assembly line that Ash could practically smell Detroit on it.

  Ash pictured Bobby Jones hog-tied and lying in the middle of the road, his mouth gagged and his face pressed down into the dirt.

  She imagined him squirming as he watched the truck roll forward.

  51

  She thought about how fast the truck would need to be going in order to flatten that utterly handsome yet vile mouth of his.

  And she pushed.

  As she put her foot to the gas pedal in her mind, the truck accelerated from a crawl to a slow walk, and soon to a trot. The faculty lodge was coming up fast on the right-hand side, and she noticed that several of the quad-side bedroom windows were open to let in the cool night air.

  Sure, the truck’s motor wasn’t on, but in the silence of night, the cr
unching of the wheels against the gravel was more than enough to wake at least one professor . . . and that’s all it would take.

  Again Ash pictured Bobby lying in the middle of the gravel path, his eyes wide, wriggling helplessly like a beached whale.

  The truck picked up even more speed.

  Ash glanced over at Jackie and saw that she was having trouble keeping up at this point. “Get in,” Ash instructed her, nodding to the truck bed. Jackie nodded back, grabbed hold of the truck’s loading door, and vaulted up onto the bumper. She lost her balance and toppled into the rubber-lined bed, but her fist shot up over the back gate to indicate that she was okay.

  In need of just a little more fuel to keep the truck rolling, Ash imagined Bobby one last time.

  She visualized the wetness spreading across his crotch as he pissed himself in sheer terror, listened to 52

  the muffled screams leak out through the cloth gag in his mouth.

  But in her imagination the truck swerved right at the last possible moment, and Bobby’s high-pitched shrieking died to relieved, childish sobs.

  After all, Bobby Jones wasn’t even worth a new set of tires.

  In one vengeance-powered leap Ash sprung from the gravel road up over the loading door and landed in a squat in the middle of the truck bed. With their momentum and the slope of the hill leading down to the main entrance, the truck rattled past the faculty lodge and barreled on toward the main gate.

  Darren leaned out the truck window and pumped a victory fist in the air. “Jesus, Ash, have you been mix-ing steroids in your oatmeal? That was some Wonder Woman shit.”

  Ash bit her lip sheepishly. “I don’t know what got into me.”

  Jackie winked at her. “I know who didn’t get into you.”

  Ash extended her foot and playfully kicked Jackie in the knee.

  Back in the direction of the faculty lodge, Ash saw the front light come on, illuminating the previously uninterrupted darkness of the quad. “We’ve got company,” she shouted to Darren.

  He flashed a thumbs-up out the window and shouted,