Flash Fire (11 page)

The rest of the way through the turn he saw, swirling behind smoke, a white-haired woman in a blue truck enveloped in fire.

Matt pointed the nozzle toward the truck, trying at the same time to move toward her. He couldn’t both handle the dragon of the hose and walk forward. That was a three-man task. He needed to signal his partners, but it turned out not to be necessary. The hydrants ran out of water.

B
EAU’S THOUGHTS WERE RIPPING
out ahead of his actions. I have to be sensible, he told himself, I have to do the right thing.

He could think of nothing either sensible or right.

He hung onto Elisabeth’s hand so hard he was afraid he would snap it off, and have only a hand, and no Elisabeth.

It was such a nightmarish vision that he almost let go of her.

He tried to wet his lips, but his mouth was too dry. They were on the cliff edge. From this spot, they could not go around the house. Only through.

Through fire?

“We have to go through the house, Lizzie,” he said, picking her up.

“It’s on fire!” she cried, fighting him, trying to get back down and run. “We can’t go in.”

He tightened his arms on his sister to imprison her.

A window pane popped. The heat was too much for the glass and it exploded, sending glass splinters like shrapnel. Beau was stunned to see cuts on his bare arms. They just appeared. He saw nothing and felt nothing, but blood ran heavily. “Are you okay, Lizzie?”

Her tears made wet spots on his chest. “Beau, how are we getting out of here?”

He was so aware of her total dependence on him; if he did not make it, she would not make it. If he did not pull this off, she would not pull this off.

His mind was loose. It felt like a pack of dangerous wild animals that had gotten away. It wasn’t doing anything civilized like thinking things through and making plans, it was just screaming
fire-fire-fire
and
get out
—
get out get out.

Bizarrely, his thoughts rushed to Michael, instead of fire or Lizzie or himself.

Stop this. Do something intelligent.

He could not tell if his mind or Michael’s had issued that instruction.

“It’s only smoke, no fire yet,” he said. “We have to go that way. It’s that or jump off the cliff. Take a deep breath and don’t breathe until I tell you to.” Pressing his sister to his chest, he raced into the house.

No flames. At the ceiling, smoke floated like fog.

Beau was a car person. He could not imagine walking, jogging, running, or climbing except in a fitness center. In the outdoors, the real world, you drove. If they had a fire to escape, they also had a vehicle in which to do the escaping.

Either we make it by car, he thought, or we won’t make it.

Not making it was not acceptable. He, Beau Severyn, was not going to burn to death. That was final.

Through the house he stumbled. It had never seemed so pointlessly large. Not breathing was a ridiculous order. Lungs didn’t hold that much air. He made it to the kitchen just fine, though, and there among the white stretch of cabinets and counter, everything seemed completely ordinary. Everything except the ceiling, which was not flaming, but which was blackening, and curling up, and turning into charcoal as he stood beneath it.

No key hung on the hook at the back door, where they stuck tennis rackets, car keys, and messages. Feverishly he patted the counter. Magazines, mail, pocket calculator, pencils, videos, books.

No keys.

Vaguely, from safety lectures on television, he recalled that smoke was more dangerous than flame. He had to get Elisabeth where she’d be breathing good air.

“We’ll jump the car going downhill,” he said briefly, and shoved Elisabeth ahead of him into the garage. He flung her into the passenger seat and reached over her to the remote control clipped to the visor.

The remote didn’t work.

The automatic doors did not move up.

Beau couldn’t believe it.

The doors didn’t open.

If he had a car key, he’d just back the Suburban right through the doors, but he had to get the vehicle on a slope in order to jump it, had to get it rolling, couldn’t do that in the garage.

Elisabeth was like a stick figure on the big front seat. She was looking at him with huge terrified eyes, waiting for him to save her, expecting him to save her.

He had to find those car keys. Praying that he had another few minutes to play with, Beau fumbled for the knob of the connecting door between the garage and kitchen. He had forgotten to adjust the lock.

They were locked out.

Sealed in the garage.

M
ATT WAS HORRIFIED
.

One moment he had water, the next moment he didn’t.

One moment the hose was a living, bucking animal of tremendous strength, and the next moment it was just limp canvas.

He shook it, as if that last drop of water were the one that would put the fire out.

The little truck was still on fire.

The husband, forgetting his cars, figuring the truth out at last (possessions don’t matter a lot if your life is over) was unable to reach his wife. The fire was far, far too hot to thrust his bare arm through the flames to grab a handle, which was actually changing color as it heated.

Dropping the worthless hose, Matt Marsh moved forward into the searing oven of the fire to grab the handle of the teal blue truck.

His huge thick gloves were protection, but not as much as he expected them to be. He felt the heat enough to want to scream and let go, but he didn’t. My fingers are burned, he thought. Please, God, don’t let me lose my fingers. He yanked the door open and reached in for the woman. She was ready and climbed on him like a monkey to a tree. Staggering back, grateful that she was light and slender, Matt looked through filthy goggles to see where to go.

The fire was roaring on all sides, eating everything except what it melted. The tires on the pickup were melting.

Nice, thought Matt Marsh.

The fire had circled them. In the great wrestling bout, it was going for the final round. They were going to roast like meat.

Desperately distributing themselves among trucks, while houses on each side burst into flames of inky black and evil orange, June and his partners had made it into the cabs, hoping to wall the fire off at least a little bit. Everybody knew stories of firefighters who had been burned right through the metal doors.

Matt could not get there.

He had to use the house itself for safety.

Houses usually burn slower than brush or trees. If they could make it inside, maybe they could flatten to the floor, find a little oxygen, and maybe the fireball would burn on by. Then they’d try to get out of the house and make a run to where the fire was finished, before the house did burn down around them.

Of course, that game plan didn’t always work. This fire was so hot that houses were almost combusting spontaneously. If that happened now, Matt would learn what it is to burn alive.

He gambled on the house because there wasn’t another gamble around. He bent, shoved up, and slung the woman onto his shoulder. The husband stuck close without needing to be told and they ran inside the burning building.

M
R. SEVERYN WAS AS
mired in traffic as if there had been a mud slide after all. A line of bright yellow bulldozers was being pulled up the Pacific Coast Highway on flatbed trailers. They would unload to carve up the earth, turn dirt on top of anything flammable, and build instant firebreaks. Nobody was going to go anywhere until that line of trailers got through. And all that time, his children would be alone and in danger.

I don’t know any of my neighbors, he thought, and they don’t know me. I never wanted to. I don’t care about a neighborhood, I care only about my own family, my own house, and my own land.

Who will know that my children are alone? Who will know that somebody has to look out for them? Who will think to go up that drive and be sure that Beau and Elisabeth are out?

He remembered the ugly town of his childhood. How gladly he’d left the empty steel mills and the damp icy climate. But he had left behind the only true neighbors he’d ever had: On that street, somebody would have thought to check on the elderly and remember the young.

He remembered the son for whom he had not been a father or a neighbor. Was this payback? Was this destiny — his loved children in trouble because he had not bothered to love the first one?

Oh, Michael, he thought. Then he jumped out of the car and jogged alongside a trailer, asking the driver where they were headed.

“Command Post on Grass Canyon.”

“Can you give me a ride?”

“No, sir. Sorry. Against the rules.”

The Severyn family had an unusual habit of using cash instead of credit. Mr. Severyn thought this might be a useful time to mention this habit, or at least open his wallet and display it.

The flatbed driver agreed that Mr. Severyn could ride with him after all.

M
ATT WAS RIGHT. THE
exterior of the house was on fire, but the interior was just smoky. Of course, smoke equaled poison and death, but if they lay low there might be enough oxygen. He and the two old people flattened beneath the silver protective blanket.

He kept in communication with June by radio, which was weird. He was going to be able to keep up a running dialogue of his death, unless of course he suffocated as he talked.

“We’re calling in paramedics,” said June. “Hang in there, Matt, you did the right thing.”

Fire was up in the ceiling. The room began raining fire.

“We’re kind of in trouble here,” said Matt.

This was an understatement, and it made the elderly man laugh. Matt liked the laugh; it was a survivor sound, a good sound.

“I think you’re going to be able to leave pretty quick,” said June, which was fine for her to say; it wasn’t raining fire on her back. “This fire is moving at an incredible rate. I’ve never seen anything like this. The wind is taking the whole fire with it. Keep low, keep calm, you can walk out in a few minutes.”

Calm sort of isn’t in the picture if your skin is burning. It was not a three-person blanket.

Behind them, the draperies caught fire. Yellow heat flashed around the room and then, surprisingly, died.

He wondered how quick death was, and if he would know about it, or if it would just flash through him like that, and he would no longer be there — only the charred flesh that had once been Matt Marsh.

“Let’s run to the garage,” said the old man. “It can’t burn, all it can do is get hot enough to melt us.”

“Hey, I’d rather melt any day,” said Matt, and he swung the woman up again and they ran, crouched and terrified, through blistering smoke, and Matt, at least, knew that to breathe this nonair was to die.

I
T WAS SOBERING TO
see how easily panic had taken over. A matter of seconds, and Beau’s thinking had deserted him. He was more shocked to learn that he, Beau Severyn, could panic than he was shocked at the fire.

All he had to do to open the garage door by hand was raise the overhead arm from its connection, and lift upward. Sure enough, the garage door proved rather light and slid easily into its storage slot on the ceiling.

Because of the large, paved, turnaround for the cars, there was no fire in front of him.

“There’s a spare car key in a little metal box under the driver’s seat, Beau,” said Lizzie.

He knew that. He had put it there. “Thanks, Lizzie.” He was very glad she hadn’t seen him lose every molecule of common sense.

He slid behind the wheel, as relaxed and leisurely as if they were headed for school, and she fished out the little box and handed him the key, and he said Do you have your seatbelt on? and she said Yes she did, and he drove out of the garage.

Beau gave his beloved house a last look. It seemed okay except for the places where it was burning. Minor places, places you could get with a hose, and things you could…

…
things you could save.

His hands continued to steer.

His feet braked, his eyes focused, and his concentration didn’t give way.

But his heart gave way. The terrible loneliness that assailed him whenever he thought of Michael came again. Dying without your father’s love was worse than dying of smoke.

Oh, Michael! he thought. I can’t leave you there, as if you don’t matter.

He tried to talk to the brother he had never known, arguing, as if there had ever been talk, let alone arguments; or maybe he was arguing with Dad. Or with disease. Or with death.

Elisabeth, he said to himself, Lizzie is first, she can’t die either. I have to save my sister and then I can go back for my brother.

Go back for my brother.

This seemed brilliant to Beau, a good solid knight-in-shining-armor thought.

He maneuvered down the tight switchbacks. The fire was haphazard, strewn like confetti after a wedding. He had to drive over some fire.

It definitely gave him pause. What if fire somehow got into the gas tank?

Don’t be ridiculous, he said to himself, the underside of the Suburban is not cardboard.

The driveway was very narrow, some space taken up by rows of sandbags, because everybody on Pinch Canyon had thought that mud slides were going to be the problem this year, and he had little room in which to maneuver. Twice he had to drive the very tires through flame — burning treetops thrown into the drive by the wind. What if the tires melted, or the sharp, splintered branches gave him a flat? The idea of changing a tire in the middle of Pinch Canyon right now actually made him laugh.

Around the next switchback, an unidentifiable burning object filled half the driveway. Its flames were higher than the Suburban, so brilliant he had to squint, and he had no idea what it was that was actually burning. In any event, he didn’t want to drive into it.