Flash Fire (15 page)

He didn’t want to die.

He saw himself quite plainly in that fraction of a second: a strong young man standing still, doing nothing, waiting for the fire to take him.

I’m not trying, he thought, and was stunned by this discovery.

But it took oxygen to try anything, and Beau had none left.

F
ROM WAY UP AND
way behind the Suburban came a huge tearing screaming sound. Like an avalanche. Hall pressed the gas down harder, and looked up into the rear view mirror, peering through the grime of the back windshield to see what enemy was chasing them now.

Fire had burned away the underpinnings of the Severyn deck, and some of the house. The house had actually ripped, or burned, in half, and was falling down the steep sheer drop into the canyon rock below.

E
LONY HAD FOUND IN
life that it is best not to look.

Don’t look back, don’t look to the sides, sometimes don’t even look ahead, just go blind.

Elony herself looked mainly down at Danna, who was not coping well with agony. Elony had been in agony a time or two but she hadn’t screamed and cried like this.

Elisabeth was also sobbing, which Elony certainly understood. If her big brother had run back into a burning building, she would have wept also. Elony rather liked Beau, since he so often gave her a ride to the bus stop. She was sorry that he was a fool.

She scooped Elisabeth into her arms. How willingly the little girl came. As if arms were things she dreamed of and Elisabeth was always on the lookout for arms. “Your brother will be all right,” said Elony. “God will take care of him.”

“Really?” whispered Elisabeth.

“All he has to do is ask.” Her English had arrived! Sort of like a bus, coming on time for once. Elony was amazed and proud.

“I’m not sure Beau would ask God for anything,” said Elisabeth nervously.

Really, she was a plain little thing. Elony felt sorry for her. These were the beautiful people. You had to have so much personality to overcome being plain among the beautiful. “Then we will ask, you and I,” said Elony, “and God will still hear.”

Elony was not certain that God paid attention to barbaric languages, so she prayed in Spanish.

P
INE TREES SWAYED SO
much in the updrafts they looked as if they were planning to run away. The fire climbed them in seconds, almost faster than you could count. The cones were a different color fire from the bark and the needles: For a moment each cone was scarlet, like a Christmas tree bulb.

Halstead Press could not get over the magnificence of it — and the extent of it. Where did it end? When would he come out? Were they caught in some reverse tunnel in which everything was light and fire, and nothing was dark, unlit, and safe?

He was not great at steering, nor braking, nor accelerating.

It was clear that these things took practice, and should not be taken up by individuals fleeing fire. The steering wheel was not at the right angle for Hall, and the floor pedals seemed far too large for human feet, as if the car designer had had a Yeti in mind.

When Hall was eight, he’d gotten into drag racing and spent lots of time on a track, but he lost interest before he was ten, to his father’s sorrow, because this was a father/son activity if there ever was one. Actual car driving, in actual normal-sized cars (not that the Suburban was normal — it was like driving a tank) Hall had never done.

The fine smooth roads of California turned out to be full of bumps and dips. Each bump and dip was accompanied by a cry of pain from Danna.

The adrenaline in him made Hall a different person. In spite of his inexperience and fear, he was extremely confident. Confidence filled him, topped him, he was overflowing with certainty that he knew what he was doing and would pull it off. In only a few hundred yards, another minor fire to skirt, another deep canyon drop-off not to go off, and they would emerge onto Grass Canyon Road where
ARMED RESPONSE
would be there to welcome him and set Danna’s leg.

It was at this profound moment that the kittens finally broke out of their cardboard. Within seconds Kumquat, Lemon, and Orange were everywhere; it felt as if there were twenty or thirty kittens, on the dashboard, on his shoulder, under the gas pedal. “Elisabeth!” he yelled. “Get the kittens!”

“How?” asked Elisabeth reasonably.

I’m a stuntman in a movie about vacations for insane people, thought Hall.

Geoffrey was actually exhibiting excitement. He hopped up and down, seat belt long gone, and silence a thing of the past. “Lookit, lookit!”

Hall scooped a kitten out from under the accelerator and then looked. A cactus, the fat-armed spiny type, was filled by heat like an air balloon. Suddenly it deflated, and the cactus sagged down on itself like a dead thing. “I see it, Geoffrey!” Hall honked the horn, in honor of the cactus and Geoffrey’s speech.

B
EAU HAD MADE IT
to the atrium when the house split in half.

It shook the ground like the earthquakes they so often felt. It fell too slowly for reality, its beams hanging on, its bolts not yielding. But gravity was stronger.

The smoke lifted momentarily. All around him the fire was savage and terrible. But on the canyon rim, the fire had burned itself out. The top of the hills were burned and black and dead.

If he wanted to live, Beau had to pass
through
the flames and up to where the flames were no more. Pinch Canyon above the Severyn house was very steep. He couldn’t run up. He could only crawl. Pinch had nothing to hold onto. Its gravel, dried mud, dead weeds, and rocks looked solid, but came off in the hand.

It was so hot now the soles of his sneakers were melting.

Don’t think, just go, he told himself. And if you die, remember Michael is there waiting.

Well, that wasn’t rational. Michael wasn’t anywhere waiting. Michael just plain wasn’t.

He draped the sopping blanket over himself, cuddled the box to his chest as if it were an ally and not a burden, and began.

The noise increased. Beau was beneath the landing patterns of jets or standing at the juncture of freight trains. The noise was immense and encompassing and he could not get away from it, yet he could not see the fire making this immense sound.

The air was literally hung with soot. Would his lungs endure ten seconds or thirty seconds or sixty seconds before they disobeyed him and took the last great sucking breath that would kill him with its heat and its poison?

“I
WONDER WHERE THE
fires are right now,” said Mrs. Press.

“I don’t know,” said Mr. Press, “but it’s nothing to do with us. Danna or Hall would have phoned if there was anything to worry about.”

T
HERE HAD BEEN QUITE
a while, twenty minutes, maybe even half an hour, in which the fire had struggled. Eaten a little here, a little there. That was over. Something — the gas line, probably — had given it the strength of war.

Nature was all: sheets of fire ten or a hundred feet high, the fury of the fire whipping through the narrow slot of Pinch like an angry spouse hurling plates.

Beau held the box in his teeth and crawled up the rock, and it was so hot it burned the skin off his palms but that sort of thing didn’t matter anymore; what mattered was the top, the crest, the hill.

Getting the car and Elisabeth out had been a narcotic: He’d been drugged with joy at finding out he was brave and did the right things. And so he had moved past that, thinking he would be even braver and better and finally superior.

But he wasn’t.

He was dumb and he was trapped.

He clung to the cardboard box, although its contents had already burned once and could not burn again, but would just blend in with the deaths of trees and houses and Beau.

Beau had lots and lots of time for thinking, even though he had very very little time left for living.

The bear went over the mountain,
thought Beau, singing the nursery rhyme in his head, knowing that he was becoming confused; he was sinking.
The bear went over the mountain, to see what he could see. The other side of the mountain, the other side of the mountain…

That can’t be all, thought Beau. There has to be more there than just the other side of the mountain. There has to be safety.

And water.

Please.

S
WANN’S MOTHER WAS ELATED
.

They had some fabulous jewelry. Some great silver. A really incredibly gorgeous thing, they did not know what it was, cut-edged crystal, glittering with diamonds. And even more albums. The Eight-Car family had spent their lives taking pictures of each other.

The photograph albums they threw in the street.

Laughing, they drove back toward their motel.

“Great state,” said Swann’s dad.

“I love California,” agreed Swann’s mom.

The highway patrol officer who pulled them over also thought California was a great state. He thought it was very interesting that people would toss the photographs for which they had just risked their lives. He thought it was real interesting that tourists wearing obscene T-shirts were bedecked in pearls and diamonds. He thought maybe they needed to talk about this.

“It wasn’t me,” said Swann quickly. “It was them.”

I
T WAS ACTUALLY A
very short drive.

Hall had thought he would journey for hours, but it was barely even minutes, because he turned left on Grass, and in a quarter of a mile, hit the great line of fire trucks and firefighters.

It was another world here, because of all the officials. Such a reassuring beautiful world: vivid red and neon yellow and ice white vehicles of safety and rescue. All those people in their yellow fire-resistant outfits. All those adults.

Hall sort of expected a brass band or a television interview, certainly a round of applause.

But through traffic and smoke and confusion and fear, nobody noticed the addition of another vehicle, even when that vehicle was coming from the fire side.

Here the land opened up, and he could see the horizons, the fire visible in the hills. Soaring black and orange in the sky, Halloween colors, the fire seemed a very distant enemy. Hall had learned the hard way that distance was deceiving, and yet immediately he believed in it again.

In this area, a mild fire had already passed through. Beside the Suburban was a row of palm trees like diamond-sided telephone poles, with tiaras of graceful leaves. Every one was black. No leaves remained. The fire had eaten only the skin, lost interest, and passed on.

The beautiful land was desolate and terribly ugly. It was hard to look at anything very long.

In the driveway next to where Hall parked, there must have been a garage, but now there was absolutely nothing but a Sears Craftsman toolbox, no longer red, bent in the middle like a cheap wire clothes hanger, its little drawer knobs melted.

“We made it!” yelled Geoffrey.

His little failure-to-thrive neighbor was thriving. Enjoying himself. Talking and waving.

Maybe he just needed action, thought Hall.

Maybe it was all that sitting at home. This is a guy who needs to be out in the world.

Hall could hardly wait to tell Mr. and Mrs. Aszling about the transformation. He was already full of plans for how to teach the Aszlings to be better parents, not that they had been interested in Hall’s suggestions before. But they would be now, and now that he was a hero, and had rescued the whole neighborhood, he’d have clout and they’d —

But it was not the Aszlings he recognized through the chaos.

It was Mr. Severyn, hopping down off a huge flatbed trailer that carried an immense yellow bulldozer, waving good-bye as casually as if leaving the airport after a routine flight. He wore a suit but not a tie, and looked as if he had a meeting scheduled here in the fireplace of Grass Canyon.

There would be meetings.

But not with Beau.

M
ATT MARSH WAS TURNING
the hospital sheets black from his ash. He wasn’t in pain; they’d medicated him pretty heavily; it was a strange loopy feeling and he didn’t know why he wasn’t asleep. Perhaps he was asleep and couldn’t tell.

I made a real save, he thought. An honest-to-God, lifesaving save.

He wondered what that meant — honest to God. And he decided that he had been honest with God, and God had been honest with him.

“Darling, you must quit now,” said Matt Marsh’s mother, horrified by his wrecked face, kissing his sooty hair. “Surely you see now how dangerous and terrible it is to be a firefighter.”

Matt Marsh loved his mother. He even loved how little she understood.

I was brave enough.

I moved fast enough.

I am good enough.

“Mom,” he said, smiling through the burns, “try to understand. It was great. I’d do it again in a hot second.”

I
’M NOT A HERO,
thought Hall. He deflated like the heat-killed cactus. I let Beau go. I let him go without even a fight.

And now I have to tell his father…Hi, well, at least I got one of them, but the other one? The boy? He was nice while he lasted, but these things happen, Mr. Severyn, you win some, you burn some.

It sickened Hall that even in this, he started and finished flippant.

Halstead Press swallowed, and his tongue was dry and painful on his cracking lips. He looked at Elisabeth, who had seen her father, and was staring at him with a sort of deep apprehension. She didn’t call out either.