Crucible of Fire Read online

  Get low. Get low. The smoke won’t be as bad close to the ground. Harvey dropped to the earth and tried to burrow in like some kind of earthworm. He wanted to rip away the bandanna that covered his lower face but he knew that would be a mistake. Breathing in this much smoke could block his lungs, fill them up with particulates that wouldn’t allow the oxygen exchange. That was always a danger.

  He remained still in the grass, heart thudding, wondering if the fire was closing in on him, cutting him off from all escape routes. Trying to calm himself, he struggled to bring his breathing under control. He could smell the scent of fresh grass. He thought maybe that was a good sign. He hoped it was.

  Blinking his eyes, he tried to clear the bleariness from his vision. He rolled over onto his back and gazed up. The treetops blazed and a curtain of fire seared the sky.

  “Harvey! Harvey!”

  Hearing Gary’s voice, Harvey rolled over to his knees and looked around. Finally, he was able to make out the headlamp wandering around in the smoke. “Over here!” He waved his arms, then had a coughing fit from the exertion.

  “Harvey!” The headlamp froze, then came at him. The beam of light flipped and flopped around.

  “Yeah. Keep coming. I’m over here.” Harvey reached around to his back and discovered he still had his water. He’d dropped the chainsaw somewhere, couldn’t even remember what direction he’d come in from. Without a compass and with all the smoke around, he had no idea where he was.

  Scott will have a compass. Scott will probably have a dozen different mental maps of the area that he can just pull up and use to get the hell out of here. In that moment of helplessness and fear, Harvey hated his brother with a passion he’d never before known.

  It was a good thing it was Gary coming over to him, because if it had been Scott, things might not have had a nice ending. Not that they were going to anyway. For all Harvey knew, he and the other man were ringed in by the fire and were waiting to suffocate or burn to death in the next few minutes.

  Harvey pulled out his water jug and drank. Then he threw up most of it because he couldn’t get enough air into his lungs.

  “Hey, man. You okay?” Gary stood over him, looking down. He was way too calm.

  That’s ’cause he’s a newbie. He doesn’t know the true depth of the shitstorm he’s standing in. Gonna find out real soon now, though. That thought almost made Harvey laugh. He probably would have if he didn’t feel sick and could breathe enough to trust himself to laugh.

  “I’m fine. Sucked in too much smoke.”

  “Yeah. I know what you mean.” Gary glanced around and looked uncomfortable, as if he was only then realizing how totally screwed they were. “Where is everybody?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. When the fire came, everybody scattered.”

  “We didn’t have a choice. Anybody who got caught up in that was a dead man.” Gary glanced at Harvey with a haunted look in his weeping eyes. “Nobody got caught up in that, did they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe we should go back and make sure.”

  “Sounds good. You know which way back is?”

  Gary hesitated, then shook his head. “No.” He paused. “Does that mean we’re lost?”

  “Yeah, that’s exactly what it means.” Harvey pushed himself to his feet. “Best advice I can give you is that we head down the incline. That way’s gotta be the bottom. We head that way, we get outta this smoke.”

  “That’s going to be hard.” Gary pointed downhill. “The fire has swept through that area.”

  Harvey studied the lower elevation and saw that Gary was speaking the truth. The fire had skipped over the area where they were and ignited the lower reaches, leaving the void. It wouldn’t take long for the flames to start back this way, though.

  “Okay, then we walk along the edge of the fire and try to get around it.”

  “Sounds risky.”

  “It is. It’s even riskier to stand here with your thumb up your ass.”

  Gary nodded. “Okay, which way?”

  Harvey started to answer, but then he thought about all that bad luck he’d run into at the casino. “You pick. Left or right.”

  Bending down, Gary plucked a few blades of grass. “We’ll walk against the wind. Stands to reason that if the wind is blowing towards us and we’re not walking into flames, it has to be clear that way.”

  It made a twisted kind of sense. But it was also possible that they’d be walking into the teeth of the wildfire. Since he didn’t know which it was, Harvey nodded. “Sounds good.” He watched as Gary released the grass.

  The blades of grass swirled in clockwise circles and dropped almost right where Gary had plucked them.

  “Great,” Harvey said. “That doesn’t help a lot.”

  “They swirled clockwise, though. That means we’re in the northern hemisphere.”

  “What?”

  “Water spins clockwise down a drain when you’re in the northern hemisphere. It’s the Coriolis force, and it doesn’t work on small bodies of water. Hurricanes and tornados do, but not sink drains.”

  “We already know we’re in the northern hemisphere.”

  Gary didn’t have anything to say to that.

  “You’re a science teacher?” Harvey asked.

  “I’m an English teacher.”

  “Fantastic. Maybe you can come up with some great last words we can say.” Harvey started walking to the left, breathing shallowly through the bandanna.

  8

  “I can’t let you go back in there, Miss Lombard. That would be committing suicide.”

  “You can’t stop me.” Angie squared up against the harried fire fighter in front of her, and Matt knew she was going to deck the man if he didn’t step aside. He didn’t try to interfere because he knew she’d turn on him, too.

  A few days after taking the job at Lombard Lumber, he’d gone to a bar with the other men to be sociable. Angie had come in on her own and kept to herself because there was tension between her and her brothers. They hadn’t liked the fact that she’d come home and split their father’s attention one more way.

  One of the regulars in the bar had decided to try his luck with her. She’d been polite but firm, and when the guy had tried to press the issue, Angie had flattened him with a hard right hand, then kicked him when he tried to get back up. Scott and Harvey had to step in when the guy’s friends decided to champion their fallen member. Instead, at the show of solidarity among the lumberjacks, they’d scooped up their friend and retreated.

  Angie had no problem getting physical.

  She stood in the clearing where one of the rescue teams had set up, nose to nose with a grizzled old fire fighter, who was remaining polite with effort.

  “Your father’s position has been overrun by the wildfire, Miss Lombard. Wherever you left them, you can bet they’re not there anymore.” Sweat trickled down the fire fighter’s face, gleaming in the firelight. “Not unless they didn’t have a chance to get clear.”

  Around them, emergency personnel treated fire fighters who’d suffered burns and smoke inhalation from fighting the wildfire. A fire engine sat in the middle of the organized chaos, running out lines in case they had to defend their position against the blaze. Angie and Matt had left the two kids and the dog with EMTs, saying Matt had rescued them but hadn’t been able to save the parents. If the kids started talking about what had happened at the house, Matt knew he was going to be in trouble. But the worst of it still lay out there in the wildfire.

  “If your father’s still alive in there,” the fire fighter said, “it’ll be best if he makes it out on his own. Trust me.”

  “My brothers are in there, too.”

  The fire fighter shook his head doggedly. “I’m sorry. I really am. But there’s nothing we can do.”

  Trembling with frustration, Angie turned away from the man, but she cursed him soundly.

  Matt had already headed back to the Ford pickup on the outskirts of the triage c
enter. He backed the truck into the side of a low hill and left the keys in the ignition in case someone had to move the vehicle later. He kept the key to one of the four-wheelers, then tossed the other one to Angie.

  He clambered up into the bed and checked the gas tanks on the four-wheelers, finding them both full. It didn’t make any difference which one he took. Matt tucked a flare gun and a walkie-talkie he’d picked up from the rescue teams into the pockets on his protective pants, then added a first aid kit and the coil of climbing rope he’d found in the pickup bed to the cargo compartment of the four-wheeler.

  “What are you doing?” Angie demanded.

  “I’m going out there to look for your dad.” More than anything, Matt wanted to find Mr. Dark and try to put an end to the wildfire. The arsonist that the spotters had reported had to be a puppet of Mr. Dark’s.

  “Then I’m going with you.”

  “No.”

  She looked at him fiercely. “Do either of us really have time for this argument?”

  Matt knew they didn’t. He and Angie traded out their hard hats for helmets, strapping them on tight. The full face shield and high-impact-resistant shell would offer more protection than the hard hats. They kept the bandannas wrapped around their lower faces to filter out the smoke and debris.

  When they were ready, gear strapped to the rear cargo decks, Matt lowered the tailgate. He climbed back aboard the unoccupied four-wheeler because Angie was already aboard the other one. He shoved the key into the ignition and nodded at her. Together, they switched the motors on and the four-wheelers roared to shuddering life.

  The sudden blatting of the loud mufflers drew immediate attention even amid the other noises at the triage center. The grizzled fire fighter shouted at Angie, trotted towards her waving his arms, then called to the other fire fighters.

  Angie twisted the throttle and shot out of the pickup bed, dropping a few inches to the hillside, then sped off around the approaching fire fighters. Matt was just behind her, standing up briefly on the foot pegs to absorb the shock of the landing. Then he twisted the throttle in an effort to catch up to Angie.

  They headed out around the camp a moment before entering the forest. The dark haze of smoke waiting inside the tree line swallowed them up like a giant, murky amoeba. Knowing Mr. Dark was out there somewhere and the worst was undoubtedly yet to come, Matt steeled himself and stayed low over the four-wheeler’s handlebars.

  Jimmy was lost, which wasn’t anything new because sometimes he got lost a lot. Sometimes he didn’t even know he was lost until he came out of a brain fog left over from a mellow drunk or back from whatever altered mind state he’d gotten into through some deep dank. Then he’d kind of wake up and find himself wherever he happened to be.

  It was like that now. Everything was surreal, and it was on fire. Squinting against the brightness, he thought he remembered being in the forest fighting fires with the Lombard Lumber crew, but he didn’t see any of them around anymore. He guessed maybe he’d drifted off to sleep and this was some kind of really vibrant dream.

  Except for all the hacking and coughing, the dream was pretty cool. If he was hacking and coughing in real life while he was dreaming, he figured he’d wake up any second now.

  Only he didn’t, so he kept walking and hacking and coughing.

  He didn’t think it was strange at all when he spotted the astronaut appearing out of the smoky haze in front of him. Depending on which chemical had altered Jimmy’s mind, he could always count on some really wild dreams. He wondered where the girls were. In the best dreams, there were always girls without a stitch of clothes on. He’d chase them, but he could never catch them, which was frustrating, but he enjoyed looking at them. It was kind of like his private strip-show marathon.

  The astronaut’s silver suit gleamed, reflecting the yellow and orange flames that sprouted around him. The astronaut pulled an ice chest behind him, one of those things with giant all-terrain wheels an extreme sports enthusiast would love. The ice chest bumped and clinked as the cans rattled around inside it.

  Jimmy headed towards the astronaut. No way could he just walk by something like that. He half expected to never reach the astronaut, kind of like he could never catch those naked girls, but in just a minute, he was standing in front of the silver-suited guy.

  At least, Jimmy assumed it was a guy. For all he knew, it could have been one of those naked girls in an astronaut suit. She’d see him, then jump out of that suit like she was coming out of one of those cakes.

  That would have been cool.

  But that didn’t happen. The astronaut stopped and raised a garden wand, like his mother used on her roses, in his right hand like he meant business. Flames coiled and darted at the end of it like a snake’s tongue.

  Jimmy smiled at the silver astronaut, lifted his right hand in a split-fingered Vulcan greeting, and said, “I come in peace.”

  The astronaut’s head leaned to one side like he was trying to get a better look. Then he let the garden wand drop to his side, still connected to his wrist by a band, and reached up to push the hood back. Then the guy spoke in English, which was kind of a bummer. Jimmy was expecting Klingon or something.

  “Goat-Boy!”

  Jimmy frowned. He hated that name, but ever since he’d started sprouting chin whiskers back in high school and couldn’t get his beard to fill in on the sides, he’d gotten stuck with that stupid nickname. The fact that the guys at Lombard Lumber had glommed on to the name was even worse. It was like he couldn’t lose the name no matter where he went.

  Then Jimmy recognized the guy in the astronaut suit from back in high school. The birthmark and half-closed eye were unforgettable. He smiled. “Gorgon!”

  “I don’t like that name.” Frowning, Freddy reached for his garden wand.

  “I don’t like being called Goat-Boy.”

  After a moment, Freddy shrugged and lightened up. “I get that. What’s your name? Can’t remember.”

  “Jimmy.”

  “Call me Freddy.”

  “Sure.”

  “You want a beer?”

  “In the middle of a wildfire?” Jimmy laughed maniacally. “Hell yeah!”

  Freddy reached into the ice chest, took out a beer, and handed it over.

  “Thanks.” Jimmy cracked the can open.

  “No sweat.” Freddy pulled out another beer for himself. He pulled the tab and took a long draught.

  “What are you doing out here?”

  Freddy grinned. “Burning stuff.” He tapped a badge on his chest. “Park ranger in charge of wildfires. I’m out here getting rid of deadwood. And stupid Ents that crush cars.”

  Jimmy gazed at the encroaching wildfire in awe. “You did this?”

  “Yep.” Freddy picked up the wand and pulled the trigger. A long tongue of fire jetted out and splashed a nearby tree. Instantly, flames started licking up the bark, looking like a blurry monkey hunching on the trunk before it raced up the side. “Whipped this up at the salvage yard. One of the most awesome things I’ve ever made.”

  “Really cool.” Jimmy grinned. “Redneck death ray.” He felt his jacket. “I had some marshmallows somewhere. Brought ’em special when I found out about the wildfire. Figured the guys would get a laugh out of ’em.” He frowned. “But those guys don’t have a really good sense of humor. I tell you, I’ve been in better company.” He swigged his beer. “Never thought I’d say this, but I kinda miss high school.”

  “Not me. High school sucked big green ones.” Freddy spurted fire a couple more times, like it was a nervous twitch or he just couldn’t hold it in. “Thinking maybe I might head over to the high school once I get out of here. Set it on fire and watch it burn. Want to come?”

  Jimmy looked around. “I dunno. I came here with some people I’m supposed to be working with. Those guys with no sense of humor I was telling you about?”

  “You’re out here with somebody?”

  “Yeah. Lombard Lumber. We signed on with the rescue effort for
hazard pay.” Jimmy smiled at the burning forest. “I hope we’re not getting paid for results, because we stink at this.”

  “Where are the other guys?”

  Jimmy shook his head. “Dunno. Fire come up on us outta nowhere, like it was a big cat pouncing on us.”

  Freddy smiled at that and took another drink of beer. “Like a dragon, you mean. A huge, nasty, fire-breathing dragon.”

  “Sure, like a dragon.” The look in Freddy’s eyes was starting to creep Jimmy out a little. “Anyways, we got scattered.”

  Movement to Jimmy’s right drew his attention. He sipped beer again and watched as three smoke-covered men stumbled through the trees and the grayish haze and falling ash. At first Jimmy thought they might have been guys from Lombard Lumber, but he didn’t recognize any of them.

  One of them pointed a Pulaski at Freddy. “Hey! What are you doing out here?”

  Freddy just looked at them and didn’t answer.

  The men came forward cautiously, spreading out like a pack of wolves approaching a kill. “I asked you a question, boy,” the beefy guy growled. “Are you the one been out here starting forest fires?”

  “Yeah, I am.” Freddy lifted the garden wand and hosed the three men down with flames. “But the forest is just the beginning.”

  The men tried to run, turned and headed back the way they’d come, but they didn’t get far before the flames wreathed them and sucked their air away. They flopped to the ground and just burned, flailing in blind helplessness, setting fire to the grass around them.

  “Idiots. Bringing axes to a flamethrower fight. Bunch of losers. They should know to stay out of park ranger business.” Freddy shook his head at them, then took another sip of his beer and switched his attention back to Jimmy. “You could still go with me.”

  “Where?”

  “To burn down the high school.”