Flash Fire (7 page)

“You can’t get there from here,” said the woman who should have been born without a mouth. “The highway is closed.”

The highway was closed? What was she talking about?

“People are being evacuated,” she said, “and the traffic has blocked the highways. You can’t get home.”

You can’t get home.
It had certainly been true for Michael.

Aden Severyn wanted no parallels, no lessons.
“What? Why didn’t you tell me?”
He was shouting, planning the woman’s strangulation.

“You never want to hear anything I have to say,” she said triumphantly.

H
ALL WAS OUT OF
the pool, wandering mindlessly, postponing the homework. The orange basketball expanded.

Below it, five cyclists in neon bright lycra suits appeared on the narrow path that wound around Pinch Mountain. A few years ago there had been no such path, but dirt bikers loved Pinch, and had worn a path into the sides. When there were mud slides the path had to be restarted, but that was just a fun new challenge.

Hall was startled to realize how large the orange basketball was. Now that the cyclists were there for comparison, he saw that it was as big as a car. It was hanging over the bikes like a boulder soon to roll down. He could only suppose they didn’t see it; that the levels of the mountain blocked their view. They stopped pedaling, and looked around, confused. They had goals. Plans. An itinerary, probably. Hall expected that they had backpacks, water bottles, sandwiches. They didn’t see anything, but perhaps they heard something, or felt something.

Was it fire? But there weren’t any flames. It had to be fire, and yet it had none of the traditional fire-type look. A huge coal, maybe? Where could it have come from? There was no bigger fire here. Had somebody started it? Had some arsonist crept up there with a match? But Hall had been out there, and checked the mountain as always, and as always it had been bare.

He stood in his bathing suit dripping on the tiles.

The orange mass widened.

The wind picked up. It was a hotter wind than usual, and because it was laden with grease and ash, he could
see
the wind. Watch the turbulence. The wind tied itself in knots and changed its mind about where to go.

Beyond the wind, the sky was a sunset on the wrong side of the world. The sky turned magenta and gold and lemon and hot hot pink and vermilion.

“Dannie!” he shouted. “Danna, get the camcorder! We’ve got to film this. This is absolutely incredible footage. Dannie, come out here and look at this!”

Over the barren mountainside, above the bikers, came a herd of deer. They leaped over rocks and each other, crossing the path just below the cyclists, and rushing on down a mountainside too steep even for deer. They stumbled and fell on each other, scrambling desperately.

A huge solid black silhouette suddenly filled the sky. It was a smoke mountain. Or the top of an explosion.

Hall was awestruck. He could think of nothing else, look at nothing else. His sister joined him, holding the camera. It was palm-sized, light and easy to use, but she wasn’t using it. She was as hypnotized as her brother.

It was fire, they knew that, but the fire itself wasn’t there yet. This was its teaser. Its advance advertising.

Awesome, thought Halstead Press.

The smoke advanced past the mountain, as if the shadow of the mountain were going first instead of after. The smoke moved over the sphinx head that was Pinch and down the rocky gravelly side that became Pinch Canyon. The smoke was so much more colorful than Hall expected smoke to be: It was like an old bruise — black and gray and olive green. It had sound. It roared, a jet engine inside the mountain, a volcano bursting rock.

Like the deer, the bikers stumbled and fell on each other. Three whirled and pedaled wildly back the way they had come. The other two surged on.

Then, chasing its own smoke, came the fire.

Over the heads of the bicycle riders appeared a huge stretch of fire. It was brighter orange than the fruit. It was embroidered with splotches of crimson and gold, and its smoke was a universe of black before it and after it and in it.

For a few moments the fire was vertical, a sheet billowing on a giant’s clothesline.

Neither Danna nor Hall could make a sound. They were stunned by the size of the sudden fire, the power of it, the absolute utter proof that it was fire, and not a joke.

The fire bent over like a predator and went after the bicycles.

T
HAT IT WAS A
fire storm and not a rainstorm actually caught Beau by surprise. In spite of the dozen raging fires, in spite of the fact that he had been thinking of nothing but fire, he had not in fact expected fire. Not where
he
lived.

Fire stood on top of Pinch Mountain like grizzly bears rearing up to attack.

The fire seemed strangely stationary, as if it had found a good spot on the side of Pinch Mountain and planned to stage a program there. That was good, because obviously Beau had been wasting time wandering back and forth. He needed to be on the decks or the roof, wetting things down, preparing for the actual fight.

He couldn’t do that unless he knew where Elisabeth was. What was the matter with her, choosing a time like this to go into hiding? Why did his sister have to be such a dumpling? “Elisabeth!”

He lifted the deck phone to see if she was talking to somebody on an extension, but the phone was —
the phone was out.

He stared at the receiver. No dial tone, no response, nothing. It was just a plastic rectangle with buttons.

For Beau, whose life was built on wired or wireless communication, a nonworking phone was as frightening as fire. It paralyzed him, to realize he had no phone. The cordless phone, he thought, trying to pull together. Where’s the cellular?

But he had no more idea where he’d set that down than where Elisabeth was. Besides, cellular was often less than useful in a canyon — microwaves didn’t climb up and over the rock.

Beau could hear the fire.

Nobody had said that fire chewed. That you could hear its jaws cracking trees like a tiger’s teeth cracking bones. Nobody had said that when fire split a tree in half, the tree
screamed.

Crackling fire wasn’t the sound of balling paper up in your fist. It sounded more like a freeway full of car accidents — metal and glass smashing.

His heart was pounding in a surprising way. You didn’t think of your heart as a muscle until it pounded this hard, and then you knew it could get cramps and get exhausted just like your calves or thighs from running too hard.

He tried to guess how far away the fire was, in time and miles. It was roughly a half mile to the foot of Pinch Mountain, but up to the crest where the fire was, he couldn’t seem to get his mind working in feet or yards. If I know where Elisabeth is, I’ll be able to think clearly.

He ran to the pantry, an enormous storeroom off the kitchen, and jerked open the empty bottom cabinet in which Elisabeth liked to play house. The cabinet door came off in his hand and it took Beau a moment to realize that he had actually ripped it off. Talk about adrenaline.

But adrenaline didn’t matter. Finding Elisabeth did. He couldn’t stand to have that fire out there, looming on top of Pinch Mountain like a beast with greedy fingers, and not know where his sister was. “Lizzie! Don’t play games with me! Where are you?”

The house was utterly silent.

“Elisabeth! Fire! Pinch Mountain is on fire. You have to come out!” He checked her bedroom and bathroom, checked Mom’s dressing room, where Elisabeth sometimes leafed through Mom’s beautiful clothes, as if she wanted to play dress up and makeup, but didn’t dare. He checked the computer room and the music room.

No Elisabeth.

He raced back to the deck to check the progress of the fire.

He had expected a slow, steady burning march, the way he had seen on television. But this fire was not marching. It had no front line. Instead it was throwing pieces of itself on ahead — embers, firecrackers, detonators. The canyon and the vertical yards and gardens were speckled with little fires. None was dangerous at this moment, but one strong wind and they would coalesce into a single fire, completely enveloping all twenty-one houses. For a moment he was paralyzed. Hideous evil sensation, straight out of nightmare. Stupid mind, stupid legs, stupid lungs.

“Elisabeth!” he bellowed. He felt a terrible anger with his sister for being in the wrong place when everything else was also wrong. He tried to stifle this. If she heard the anger in his voice, she would never come out.

At the circle on the end of Pinch Canyon Road, a homeowner had years ago planted a row of. palms. A single palm tree crown had caught fire. The fire burned merrily at the top of the long thin trunk, like a match-lit brandy dish that a waiter was bringing to the table. It sat on the tray of the tree and burned quite prettily, nice colors, nice size.

All houses on Pinch were on the north side of the road. On the south, a single thread of fire, like an unrolling ribbon, was laying itself out on the narrow verge between pavement and canyon wall.

It could not accomplish much until it reached a wider place in the canyon.

The wider place was across from the Severyn driveway.

D
ANNA WAS CERTAINLY GLAD
that she had made kitten contingency plans. “You keep an eye on the fire, Hall,” she said. “Wet the house with the garden hose. I’ll get the kittens.”

Danna chose the red plastic laundry basket that had fake basketweave through which the kittens could breathe. I’ll cut cardboard to fit the top, she told herself, and tape it down so the kittens can’t climb out. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty,” she called in a high soprano. One kitten came.

She rummaged around miscellaneous kitchen drawers hunting up scissors and tape. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.” The laundry basket was bigger than she had expected and finding a lid was going to be a problem. The only cardboard box she turned up had once held a computer monitor. She’d poke breathing holes in the box and stuff the kittens in. But would seven kittens fit in such a small box? And why was she even bothering with the kittens?

She and Hall were not going to abandon the house, the house was far too important for that. Besides, it was pretty neat that Mom and Dad weren’t here, she and Hall would have to rise to the occasion, and handle it themselves, and save everything.

She got out a can of stinky cat food and opened it noisily. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty. We don’t have all day, you know.”

But Danna thought that they did have all day. On television nobody seemed to be in that big of a rush. The fire was always at the edges of things, and never in the center of things, and it did not occur to Danna that this was because the cameraman did not want to get burned.

Danna had watched the fires on television for many hours over the last nine days, not to mention last year and the year before. The fire-fighting crews — men and women who flew in from various states as well as various towns — were equipped with shovels and a Pulaski — with which they attacked the edges of fires. They were very relaxed about it, as if the fire was nothing but a weed growing around their boots. They acted as if they really expected to kill the fire with a shovel of dirt here and a shovel of dirt there.

On television you saw people sitting on their decks and in their yards, watching the fires that threatened their homes. They might pack their cars just in case, but they stayed with the house, because somebody had to be there in case a wind carried a burning ember onto the roof and it had to be put out.

Danna discovered that six kittens strapped inside a cardboard box could scream as loud as varsity cheerleaders. “Sssshhhh,” she told them. “People will think I’m torturing you.” She carried the box, which bulged erratically as the kittens hurled themselves against their prison, into the front hallway just in case she really did have to take them somewhere. Then she decided to put a six pack of cold Cokes on top of the box just in case.

She assumed she would have as much time as she needed.

She had no sense that the fire was making the schedule, and they would have to stick to the fire’s schedule or die.

B
EAU WAS UP AT
the house, sounding like a madman, shrieking every possible variation on her name:
Elisabeth
—
Lizzie
—
Liz
—
Elisabeth Severyn!
If he didn’t keep quiet, he’d scare the bunnies.

Elisabeth not only had deer in her hidey hole, but she had been joined by real bunnies, sitting at her feet. Little noses working like little engines, little floppy ears twisting and turning as if on strings that Elisabeth herself were pulling.

Elisabeth didn’t answer Beau. Probably Mother or Daddy had phoned with instructions for how they were to spend the remainder of the day. Usefully. Elisabeth didn’t want to spend her time usefully. She didn’t want to improve her mind or her athletic or musical or social skills. She wanted to sit in the quiet green glade with suddenly tame rabbits and deer.

She held out her hand, but her guests didn’t notice. They were panting, their little flanks heaving. “Come see me,” she crooned. “Come let’s be friends.”

W
AY ABOVE THE STACK
of houses, a little bent tree clung to the canyon rim. It burned quietly. It didn’t flame, it didn’t turn orange and yellow, it didn’t scream for attention.

The fire burned through its skinny little rock-squeezed trunk, and it became a five-foot torch. The smoke tornado threw the little tree downhill like a human sacrifice in some terrible ancient religion.

It tumbled against rock and gravel and dust, and came to rest on a ledge just below the Severyn house.