by Cadle, Lou
“We know. We’re going house to house right now. We want everyone to get out.”
“Good.” If Sylvia were taking a nap or not paying attention to the news, at least a knock would come at their door soon. “That’s great. Thanks. But I’d still like to go up, if you’ll let me.” He wondered if he could drive through even if they said no. No: two men, two cars. They’d catch him in no time. He needed permission, or he wasn’t getting through. So he was forcing himself to sound rational and calm. But inside, this whole time, he was screaming in fear for Sylvia. “Please.”
The deputy bit his lip and considered.
James sat still and tried to look like something other than the madman he felt like inside.
“All right. I’ll let you through, but be careful. And don’t tarry. I want you driving back past me headed south again in no more than an hour. I’ll be watching for you. Give me your cell phone number too.”
James did. “Will do. Thanks so much.”
The drive up got harder and harder after that. The people fleeing south were using the passing lane and, where there was none, using his lane to get out. He didn’t blame them, but he cursed them more than once as he had to half pull off onto a very narrow shoulder to avoid head-on collisions. When he made it to a narrow point in the road where the evacuating cars had slowed their pace, he had to force his way against the flow, laying on the horn.
He scraped the right side of his car on a guard rail and didn’t care.
This part of the drive usually took twenty minutes. He’d have been able to do it in the hour the sheriff had given him—get home, grab Sylvia, and get back—in a normal day. Today, it took him the full hour to get to the turnoff to Pinedrops. There was a second roadblock there, and that deputy wasn’t as accommodating.
“Sir, you can’t go in there.”
“My home is in there. My wife.”
“And a bloody big wildfire.”
“It’s in Pinedrops?”
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry. We just got the road cleared from a treefall, and we need to let these people out.”
James looked down the road toward home. A truck was coming his way. It was gray with soot. No—not with soot. More like char. It had been burned along the driver’s side.
The deputy wasn’t lying. The fire was close. For the driver of that truck, it had been far too close.
God. Where was Sylvia?
Chapter 9
Forty-five minutes before James stared at that charred truck, Sylvia had joined a line of cars moving toward the state highway. Bizarrely, there were also cars driving in the other direction, though the loop road was twice as long in that direction. If you wanted to get out quickly, the way she was traveling was the way to go.
A car coming her way—the wrong way—slowed, and a hand waved at her. She slowed as well and came to a stop as the other car did. Its window was open, and a head leaned out. It was Daisey, one of the artists who lived in town, an acquaintance more than a friend. She said, “You can’t get out that way. Turn around.”
“We can’t?”
“There’s fire near the road already, and a tree fell across the loop road. It’s impossible for anybody but motorcyclists. Even four-wheel drive won’t help you. Go this other way like I am.” Daisey drove off.
Maybe she should forget the stuff in the car and grab her bike and get out this way. Maybe she should at least take her bike, in case she needed to get out of the car at some point and flee the fire in case of a blocked road. She could ride trails faster than she could run them. But no, delaying now by going back to the house and loading the bike onto the rack wasn’t the thing to do. From the ugly color of the sky and the smoke cloud darkening overhead, she’d already delayed too long, even though she’d been out of the house within fifteen or twenty minutes of understanding there was a fire.
If the road ahead was already blocked by a fire, she’d already delayed for far too long. She swung the car around, grateful she had a short enough vehicle to make the U-turn without a lot of backing and filling. Her left wheels ran off the road, but there was no ditch, and soon she was on the pavement, and following the cars that had been following Daisey.
Why didn’t the emergency alert ever come to her phone? If the fire was all the way to the loop road, it should have.
Whatever the answer to that question, there was nothing she could do about it now. She needed to focus on survival, moment by moment. The animal voice in her head was still screaming at her to run, but it was crap at directions that involved roads. “I’m running already,” she muttered at it. “Shut up!”
Panic wouldn’t help her now. But it was a constant battle to fight it off. It felt like trying to sit on a wildcat wrapped in a bag. It would not quit fighting to get out.
She made it halfway to the highway in the other direction, the illogical direction starting from their house, when the cars ahead of her were stopped dead in a long line. She waited a minute, then two, and then three minutes that felt like three hours, and finally jumped out of her car, leaving the door open and the car running. She jogged up to Daisey’s car. “What’s happening?” she asked.
“I have no idea.”
“I’ll go up and see.” She jogged up another five cars, and a man emerged from a blue truck. An older man, with a familiar face and grizzled chin, but she’d never met him. “What’s going on?” she asked him.
“I was going to ask you if you knew. Wish people still had CBs,” he said.
Sylvia didn’t even know what that meant. She didn’t stop to ask anyone else in a parked car but just jogged on, trying to get to where the delay was. At one level, she realized it didn’t matter. If there were another tree across the road, she couldn’t personally haul it away. If a car had stalled, she could help push it off the road, but surely there’d be other people doing that by now.
But what she saw when she got close to the holdup—over forty cars up from where she’d left hers—was fire. A finger of fire had crawled up to the road, and then it had jumped across. That must have happened a good fifteen minutes before, because it had taken hold and was burning strongly now. The tips of the flames were blown by the winds, leaning to the southeast.
The cloud of smoke above her was denser here, reddish more than the yellow tinge that had driven her up and out of her chair a half-hour earlier. The sun was almost impossible to find behind it—a dark red blob that didn’t shine through to illuminate things well. It might as well have been eight p.m., it was so dark.
She coughed, and realized the smoke was all around. Above her, it was thicker, but the area beneath the main cloud was filling in with smoke as the grass to either side of the road lit on fire, the fire spreading on both sides of the road now.
To either side of the stopped cars, grass and brush blazed. One nearby house was already on fire, one of those manufactured homes. The porch was ablaze and the wooden steps up to it. Flames were licking at its white sides.
She hoped whoever had been in there was out. Long gone.
She wished she were long gone.
More flames danced across the road as a wind gust hit. A finger of flame leapt from the grass and tried to touch her. She jumped back. She couldn’t just stand here and wait for the fire to get her.
It was hard to see exactly what had happened to stop the traffic minutes before. Someone had stopped, possibly from fear, possibly when the flames had first crossed the road, and now a half-dozen people were yelling at each other around a cluster of six cars. A couple of drivers might have hit each other. She couldn’t be sure.
She wanted to run up and yell too: “Drive through it, or we’re all going to die!” But with at least six people already screaming and not listening, was that going to solve anything? No. She’d go back to her car, give it ten minutes to work itself out, and if it didn’t, she’d take her chances and … what? Hike through the woods? That didn’t seem like a sensible course of action. The flames already right here could overtake her, or flank her.
&n
bsp; She could take her car back home, get her mountain bike, and get past the other blockage. That was an option. But she was loath to leave her car and all her possessions here in Pinedrops, possibly to be burned.
There were only two exits from the loop road, and both exited onto Highway 49. But there were also a few fire roads that ran through the forests. The ones south of here, she had no idea how to get to, except for getting on Highway 49 first. But there was one north of here that started in town and led up to the river.
The river.
That sounded like a potential life-saver. If she had to jump out of her car and run for the water, she might survive there, immersed, as the wildfire passed overhead. Wasn’t that what animals did? She’d have to get to the river first, though, and the smoke had been coming from the northwest, which was the direction the river was in, northwest to northeast of here. She licked her finger and stuck it in the air. The wind was swirling now, but she thought it was mostly coming from the northwest still. So she couldn’t go in that direction. She’d be heading right into the fire. Away was the direction she wanted to go.
She wished James were here. Not only because she wanted him by her side, but because he knew these fire roads better than she did, had hiked more of them. He might know of a way to get out to the southeast. She did not.
James. Where was he? Was he okay? She prayed he was. Was he worried about her?
Hell, she was worried about her.
She jogged the rest of the way back to her car, stopping only to tell the man she’d spoken to in the truck what was going on. Two more people stopped her to ask her. She told Daisey too. By that point, she’d wasted more than her allotted ten minutes. And the line of cars still was not moving.
Again, she debated, standing by her open car door. Maybe if she drove the other direction and got to the downed tree, she could get around it somehow. She wasn’t above driving through someone’s yard or into a ditch, not under these circumstances. She was willing to dent her car up a lot if it was left drivable and could get her out of here. One good thing about the drought was that it left no boggy ground for her tires to sink into. But so many cars had turned around, she doubted there was any way around the tree on the other exit. Surely someone would have tried getting around it were that possible.
Regrets filled her mind. Regrets for not looking up from her work sooner, for leaving her cellphone in the bathroom and not noticing the messages coming in, regret for not having a four-wheel drive vehicle, which would give her a few more options.
Her thoughts had taken on her growing panic, yelling crazy things at her now between the rational thoughts, trying to force her logical mind to quit thinking this through. She took a deep breath and forced herself to be deliberate and keep thinking. Be smart, Sylvia. Whatever she decided, she had to decide now. And she was only going to get one more chance. The smoke was getting thicker. The sun had gone from ochre to umber to now sienna through the smoke cloud, and the world had turned to a strange red twilight.
Flame was visible ahead. And the line of cars still wasn’t moving.
She thought about the fire roads she did know of. One that started in back of the main part of town wound north-northeast. That would take her to the river. She would rather not go north at all, for the fire was northwest, but there weren’t any other choices. A ridge to the east was impassable except on foot, and hiking up that elevation with a wildfire chasing her? No way was that the right choice, though the panicked voice at the back of her head thought it might be.
“Shut up,” she muttered at it.
Sylvia attached her seatbelt and closed the door, and then realized she had no room to make a turn. She had to get out and go to the other drivers on either side of her to beg them to move a few inches. It took another five minutes of wheedling them for her to have just enough space to back and fill and get out of there. Once she had, she gunned the car past another twenty waiting cars piled up behind her and made her way back into the tiny downtown of Pinedrops, where the entrance to the northern fire road was.
She’d assumed she’d have to drive through the barrier that was there on the northern fire road, smashing it and her front bumper, but someone had already done that for her, and it hung, now merely a piece of twisted metal, from its hinges. So she wasn’t the only one with the idea to go this way. That made her feel better. If she was wrong about this being a decent exit, at least she’d have company.
While she drove as fast as she could, it wasn’t nearly as fast as she wanted. The woods had ghostly fingers of smoke drifting through, and that made navigation increasingly difficult. She jounced over a rough spot and involuntarily bit her tongue as the car jumped up and came down, landing hard. As long as the car was still drivable, she didn’t care if she hurt it. Her tongue was bleeding, but that was survivable.
That’s what her life had become in the past half-hour, what her decision making was about now.
The survivable and the not-survivable.
Up ahead past the river was a series of ghost towns, though people lived up there again, and a cult of some sort had taken over one. She was headed east of the cult though. The old wagon road was paved and paralleled the river to its north. It led to Highway 49 to the west, and to the east it eventually petered out. She imagined fleeing the fire to the east, it pursuing her down to where the pavement ended and onto a rough road. But at the end, where it petered out to little more than a track, she wouldn’t know what to do. As far as she knew, there was no exit that way, just a ridge of mountain that blocked her way.
James would know more. Every time she thought of him she felt a terrible pang of longing and regret. Would she never hear his voice again? Never feel his touch? Had he gotten himself caught in the fire coming for her? Or would she die, leaving him grief-stricken?
She knew he’d be filled with regrets because she was, already. She could have been a better partner the past—well, hell, full year, admit it, Syl. She could have engaged with him this morning rather than just waiting for him to wind down and leave. When he left, she could have at least said that she loved him. She could have—ah, damn. So many things.
The road curved to the left. Not the way she wanted to go. She had forgotten about this stretch that went in this direction. But it’d turn back northwest in a little bit, right?
Before it had the chance to, she saw fire. Live, red. Fire, through the woods, not fifty yards away from her.
Sylvia’s foot slipped off the accelerator as she stared at it, mesmerized, watching it dance among the trees.
Chapter 10
A curve of red flame ran through the duff of the forest floor, smoke rising from its edge where it burned at its leading edge. Behind it, the red and yellow fire flamed higher. A ghostly mini-tornado of fire spun up from that, then dissipated, and a new one formed three or four feet away.
The low curve of red along the ground slid closer to her.
She heard the sound of it too, a roar, growing louder, and she realized she’d been hearing it for the past ten minutes without knowing what the sound was. Not fully understanding why she’d do such a thing, she cracked open her door to hear it better, and realized how loud it really was, like the roar of a BART train coming through the tunnel into the station, like a jet taking off a block or two away.
With the door cracked open, she could feel the force of the wind driven ahead of it. A gust rocked her car and the door was wrenched from her grasp. The car began to fill with smoke.
Good God, woman, drive! Get out of here!
The fire had hypnotized her for those few seconds, this mysterious, dangerous, almost beautiful thing, but she snapped out of her shock and lunged for the door handle, coughing. She drove ahead, praying for the curve right in the road to appear, willing it to appear and lead her to the east, away from that fire. The car jounced again, harder than last time. She wasn’t even sure she was staying on the fire road every second as she drove for her life. She simply drove.
She could feel the heat�
�or maybe that was her imagination—as she skirted the leading edge of the flames. The roar grew louder and louder.
And then the road curved just a bit to her right, and she hit a patch where the red curve of the leading edge was farther back from the fire road. Yes. C’mon, road, go the right direction.
Was the sound quieter? Hard to tell. It was still a roar.
Then the road turned to the right almost ninety degrees, and she felt a cold rush of relief. She wasn’t headed into the fire now, but perpendicular to it at worst. She steered the car through the woods, hands clenched tight on the wheel, and wondered if this hadn’t been a stupid decision. Trees were all around her. But, she realized, the trees weren’t burning. Just the understory, the grass and small plants and berry bushes. Her eyes had seen that, but her brain hadn’t registered it until now.
It’s the wind. She realized that must be the reason. The wind was strong enough that while it fed the fire, it also was pushing the fire fast. Dry conditions meant the fuel like grass was ripe to be burned. It burned quickly. The fire kept driving it. So it must be that the fire was moving too fast to set the trees alight. At least not immediately. Maybe back a mile or two, they were burning.
Fire roads were, she knew, a kind of pre-dug firebreak, but this road wouldn’t stop that understory fire at all. Wouldn’t slow it down for as much as five seconds. Driven by the wind as it was, the fire would jump the road.
A mule deer appeared out of the swirling smoke and she slammed on the brakes as it ran not five feet from her front bumper. She wished she had four legs and that kind of sprint speed. She’d follow it.
But no, she was a slow human, so she had to stick with the car, which on an open road could outdistance a deer in seconds. Not on this fire road though. The deer was better off than she was in the woods.
The smoke cleared for a moment, and she saw ahead of her a wall of trees. Somehow, in the smoke, she’d lost the road. If the mule deer hadn’t stopped her, she might have plowed right into them.
