Chris hurried back to Rachelle’s suite. She was still in bed, their son propped in her arms. He explained what he had seen. “Go get your mom,” Rachelle replied. “Make sure she gets out of the house. We’ll be fine. We’ll meet you in Chico.” Chris planted a kiss on her forehead and left.
A few minutes later, a labor and delivery nurse named Tammy Ferguson appeared with three male hospital staffers. They barged into Rachelle’s room, not bothering to knock, lifted Lincoln from Rachelle’s arms, and settled her into a wheelchair. Her intravenous line flapped against the armrest. It happened so fast that Rachelle didn’t understand at first why she was being moved. Her legs were weak from the anesthesia she had received during her C-section. Her entire body hurt. She reached for her cup of ice water, but one of the men snapped at her not to worry about it. A fast-moving wildfire had reached the hospital, they said. Tammy propped Lincoln on a pillow in Rachelle’s lap, preparing to roll her to the emergency bay. The plan was to load Rachelle into an ambulance headed for Enloe Medical Center in Chico.
“Let’s go,” Tammy said. “There’s no time to grab anything else.”
Another nurse pushed Rachelle and Lincoln to the front of the evacuation line, where the queue bottlenecked at the open bay doors. Rachelle looked out across the lot just in time to see the only two ambulances pull out and disappear down Pentz Road. There hadn’t been enough space for her. Staff members parked their cars beneath the overhang, guiding patients into the backseats. Nurses frantically cleared space in their minivans, pitching car seats onto the hospital sidewalk in a jumble. They lifted Rachelle into a white four-door sedan belonging to David, a fifty-eight-year-old biomedical technician. He wore gray scrubs and a black fleece jacket. A white beard stippled his face. The nurse tucked a blanket and three pillows around the premature baby, tossing Rachelle’s IV bag onto the floor mat. Her catheter was still wrapped around her leg. No seatbelt, because of her incision.
“Go with David,” the nurse said, slamming the passenger door.
Each juniper bush was a patch of flame. The oak and birch smoldered. David barely paused to introduce himself, speeding through the concrete lot and turning right on Pentz Road. They passed Rachelle’s house on the left-hand side. Her driveway was empty. Beige trash bins stood at the curb; the red mailbox flag was down. Everything looked impossibly ordinary—and just out of reach. She hoped Chris had gotten his mother out safely.
Just south of Ponderosa Elementary, David turned left onto Bille Road. He knew that their evacuation was going to be problematic. Four main thoroughfares ran south through town, paralleling each other like the spindly legs of a stool. Pentz Road was situated on the easternmost edge, abutting the rim of the Feather River Canyon. Clark and Neal roads were in the middle, and the Skyway ran along Butte Creek Canyon in the west. Only three roads—Bille, Pearson, and Wagstaff—connected them, cutting across from east to west. About 60 to 80 percent of the town’s thoroughfares were access roads that could barely accommodate rush hour traffic on a typical evening. As for the Skyway, studies had shown that its concrete bulb-outs had increased travel times by as much as fifty-four seconds—and that was during normal times. A mass evacuation was sure to make things worse.
At the intersection of Bille and Pentz, a few fire engines were hooked into one of the town’s fifteen hundred fire hydrants. They sprayed water at the baking cars, about as effective as a squirt gun. The crews tried to move traffic forward. They waved David through, but about two hundred feet past the intersection, he and Rachelle hit gridlock. David inched his Nissan forward a few feet at a time, punching the Recirculate button on the air conditioner. He and Rachelle didn’t talk. The autumn sky disappeared, slowly and then all at once. Puffs of orange tie-dyed the horizon, deeper in hue where homes were burning, lighter where flames hadn’t arrived. A toxic mass choked the sunlight, the black smoke suffocating the sky. It was just before 9 a.m., but if Rachelle hadn’t known better, she would have guessed it was midnight. She clutched Lincoln. The top of her cotton gown was folded down, her chest exposed. The baby nursed, occasionally mewling, his face contorted. The glowing taillights of cars marked the road in front of them. Rachelle pressed the window gently with a fingertip, then pulled it back in surprise. It was like touching the door of an oven.
David noticed glowing leaves skittering across the pavement and sticking to other drivers’ engines, threatening to light them on fire. They must be gathering under his Nissan, too, he realized. He got out to clear the leaves, then moved to help other drivers facing the same hazard. Rachelle sat alone in the sedan. She took off her N95 mask, cupping it over Lincoln’s mouth and looping the elastic around his seashell ears. It eclipsed his entire face. She covered her nose with her hospital gown, breathing hot air into the pink cotton. Outside, she saw people abandoning their cars and sprinting by her window.
Her legs were like gelatin. Though the anesthesia and painkillers had started to wear off, Rachelle still felt she had been disconnected from the lower half of her body. After the birth of Vincent, when she’d had her first C-section, she had managed to waddle across the parking lot after being discharged—slowly, but on her own nonetheless. After Aubrey, she had opted for the wheelchair. Days later, when she had begun to walk again, it had been at an excruciatingly slow pace, hunched over with a pillow pressed to her abdomen to stifle the throbbing of her incision. Now, after her third, Rachelle couldn’t fathom the idea of moving. She knew she should be in pain, but fear overwhelmed any other sensation.
She reached for her cellphone, dialing Chris repeatedly. The call wouldn’t go through. The signal dropped. It was a game of chance, like being in a sports stadium or concert arena packed with tens of thousands of fans as they all used their cellphones. Some randomly got connected; others were stymied by the overloaded telecommunications network.
Rachelle’s panic rose. She dialed her father. He lived in Fresno and had no inkling that a wildfire had struck Paradise. Rachelle wanted to say goodbye. She thought about her wild spells—as a teenager and then after her divorce, when she had consumed too much white wine too frequently—and figured this might be her last chance to make amends. She held the phone to her ear. The call connected. “Daddy, I just need to hear your voice,” she said, explaining that fire was all around. She was alone in a stranger’s car and didn’t know what to do. Neither did he. “I’ll start praying,” her father said, mustering his calmest voice. “Take a pillow. Put it up against the window where it is getting hot. Take a deep breath. I love you, baby. I’ll pray for your safety.”
“Dad, the guy came back,” she said.
“Wait—” he said, but the call dropped.
David crawled back inside the sedan, buckling his seatbelt. Traffic had started to move, though barely. For a moment, a gust cleared the haze. Rachelle spotted a familiar white Suburban with an Achieve Charter School honor roll bumper sticker a few vehicles ahead. “Oh my god, that’s my husband,” she said as she leaned forward and pointed out the SUV. “Follow him!” At that moment, the lead car in their lane of traffic caught fire.
Rachelle watched as Chris veered around it and drove into the black puff of smoke. Her children’s school bumper sticker vanished. She wondered about Vincent and Aubrey. She and Mike shared custody, and the children were now with their stepmother. The kids adored their two homes and three stepsiblings—two families, twice the love—but now Rachelle felt panicked. Were they safe?
Rachelle begged David to follow the SUV. But for all David knew, Chris had made it ten feet farther before getting stuck, just like everyone else. Upset, Rachelle pushed back. She knew Chris had escaped. He was invincible. But there were no emergency responders around to tell them whether the wildfire was up ahead or not, whether the road was passable for David and Rachelle—or Chris, for that matter. The closest firefighters were still behind them, at Pentz and Bille. David gripped the steering wheel, staring blindly into the smoke. His chest ached.
He felt like the worst person in the world.
“I can’t do it,” he said finally. “I can’t risk you and your baby going into a black cloud that I can’t see through. What if there’s a choke point?” He explained that he was on medication for a heart arrhythmia. Please, he beseeched Rachelle, calm down. If something were to happen to him, she wouldn’t be able to get out either. They were in this together.
They tried to talk about other things as they waited—his wife, Bonnie, back home on Pinehurst Way in Magalia. He was worried about her. He didn’t mention having children, but he told Rachelle about the infusion machines he repaired at the hospital. He was an engineer or something, she couldn’t really tell. He helped her slow her breathing, and she helped him slow his. They continued waiting. They weren’t sure what they were waiting for. In the meantime, Rachelle texted her father, letting him know that she could see Chris’s car.
David pointed out two bulldozers that were parked near the road, in an open field behind a chain-link fence. If the fire overran him and Rachelle, he said, he would gun the Nissan through the fence and park between the two bulldozers. He thought they could be safe there. Rachelle patted his arm—an oddly intimate thing to do to a stranger, she thought, but these were not normal circumstances. And they made an agreement. If David’s car caught fire, he promised to take Lincoln and run. “Are you sure that’s what you want me to do?” he asked. Rachelle nodded, unable to answer him, because she didn’t want to cry, wasn’t going to cry.
* * *
—
A CALL RANG THROUGH on Chris’s cellphone—another stroke of luck. It was Rachelle’s father. He seemed shaken, his voice quaking as he spoke. He told Chris that Rachelle was a few cars behind him on Bille Road. Chris listened as he navigated the pitch-black tunnel of smoke, feeling his way blind. Suddenly, a sheriff’s deputy sounded a horn behind him, and he hung up before nearly hitting a downed electrical pole. He didn’t know which car Rachelle was in, or he would have tried to backtrack to find her.
After leaving Rachelle and the baby at the hospital that morning, Chris had made the five-minute drive home, through a corridor of houses decorated for the holidays, past scaly-barked ponderosa pines that he had passed thousands of times without truly appreciating them. He had parked his work truck in the driveway, barreled into the house, and woken his mother up. They had stayed up late, chatting until 1 a.m., and she was drained. He told her that she would need to drop him off at the hospital to pick up Rachelle’s car and then head down Clark Road to Oroville. Now he fretted. What to pack? What to preserve when your entire world was at risk of disappearing? Not the family photos or birth certificates or expensive electronics. Not the homemade Christmas tree ornaments or the marriage certificate pinned to the fridge or Rachelle’s wedding dress, meant to be passed down to Aubrey someday. Not the dollhouse the girl had made from cardboard boxes or the blueprints from Chris’s landscaping job. Not anything that made sense. Racked by indecision, Chris stepped outside and pulled his work truck into the garage. The truck’s bed, matted with flammable pine needles, would stand a better chance of survival indoors.
Back in the house, Chris grabbed a newly unboxed car seat, the fabric yet unmarred by dirty fingers and food stains. The power flicked off. He grabbed a flashlight, a diaper bag, and a tub of folded laundry sitting near the dryer. He headed back to his mother’s sedan. Everything around him quivered in the heat. Pine needles bobbed on the wind until they met the flying ash and ignited. Singed oak leaves and a ginger afterglow consumed the front yard. As they backed out of the driveway, the wind lashed his home with embers, and flames leaped onto the neighbor’s place.
His mother pulled in to Feather River hospital. The campus was abandoned. The car seats, tossed out of nurses’ minivans to make room for patients, formed an eerie line on the sidewalk. Near the cardiology wing, a few water tenders, each carrying 3,000 gallons of liquid, idled next to some fire engines from another county. Yellow-clad responders were trying to save the facility. Their division leader directed them indoors. The heavy compressed-air tanks on their backs allowed them to breathe inside the burning building. Some doused tiny spot fires near the Birth Day Place. Others crawled atop the roof and sawed two-foot-wide trenches to let the heat and smoke escape before they could breach the wing. Though the walls were fire-rated, they could withstand only so much for so long. This might be a lost cause, their captain thought. A few minutes before, the wind had launched a sugar pine cone onto his truck with such force that the windshield had splintered.
Chris said goodbye to his mother. She left in her car; he departed in Rachelle’s white Suburban, heading north up Pentz Road and onto Bille Road. It might have made more sense for them to drive together, but they wanted to save their vehicles if they could. Everyone was thinking this way: Paradise was now jam-packed with thousands of cars. This didn’t bode well: According to a 2007 report, a third of the town’s public roadways were in “poor” condition—considered beyond routine repair. “The conditions of roads within the town affect the ability to provide public access for fire, medical and police protection services,” the municipal service review had warned back then. In the coming hours, 179 burning vehicles, many of them stuck on these roadways, would block evacuation routes. The California Highway Patrol would later recover 19,000 more cars, boats, tractors, and recreational vehicles.
Chris had been picturing Rachelle and Lincoln safe, in an ambulance on its way to Chico. When hospital staff had told him that she was “evacuating right now,” he had assumed they meant it. But now her father was telling him something else. He tried to call Rachelle, again and again. Each call dropped. He tried to text her: “What kind of car are you in?” “What color is it?” “How is the baby?” None of the texts went through. He called her again. Nothing. He texted her again. Nothing. Red taillights, white headlights, black skyline. The sunshine had been sucked from the sky.
People were abandoning their cars and—thoughtless in their desperation—taking the keys with them, leaving the vehicles as immovable as boulders on the road. They raced around Chris while he dodged and navigated the obstacles in his wife’s white SUV. He counted the burning cars—there were fifteen—before pulling off near Sawmill Road. He parked on the shoulder and then sat there, the driver’s door cracked. His was the only car that had managed to cut through the gridlock. He fiddled with the radio. The town’s emergency station, 1500 AM, was broadcasting outdated information about the Pentz Road evacuation. The only other clear station on air was a conservative talk show.
Chris knew Rachelle would follow him if she could. And yet nobody appeared. He ran back down the street toward Pentz Road Market & Liquor, leaving the SUV behind with his keys dangling in the ignition in case someone needed to move it. Chris watched more cars catch fire. Was Rachelle in one of them? Was the baby?
Smoke greased his throat, his eyes wet with ash and fear. A man appeared out of the smog, his cheeks dark with charcoal. “Who are you looking for?” he asked.
“My wife,” Chris said. “My baby. He’s six pounds, twelve hours old. I don’t know what’s going on.”
“I saw a blond woman breast-feeding in a car back there,” the man said, gesturing at the roadblock. “They turned around and went back.” Chris had to believe him. Why would this stranger lie? His family had to be alive. Lincoln—the son that he planned to take trout fishing in the Feather River and hiking in the snow-capped Sierra Nevada—had to be alive. Chris ran back through the jumbled maze of eviscerated cars toward the fire, the ground beneath him gummy with tire rubber and marred with tributaries of aluminum from melted engine parts.
OBSERVATION: A FATAL BREATH
In a tunnel beneath Feather River hospital, Ben Mullin wheeled metal cylinders of compressed medical-grade air out of a storage closet. A cardiopulmonary manager, Mullin had devised a backup survival plan after the Humboldt Fire, when he’d been trapped in Paradise by the traffic. He didn’t l
ike the idea of burning to death in his Volkswagen on some winding mountain road.
Mullin, thirty-eight, had been one of the last people to leave the hospital that morning. After the final patients had departed, he and a few others climbed into a colleague’s four-wheel-drive truck. They soon realized, however, that escape on Pentz Road wasn’t an option. Neither was Conifer Street, the residential lane that looped through the Feather Canyon Retirement Community. (The center had been emptied except for eighty-eight-year-old Julian Binstock and his border collie mix, Jack. Binstock’s bungalow had been overlooked in the evacuation.) Mullin and his colleagues tried to find a route to safety even as the concrete rippled with heat. But after encountering flames in every direction, they decided to return to the hospital. Mullin knew a safe place.
Followed by his colleagues, he managed to push open the first set of sliding glass doors outside the emergency room. But the second set was locked and wouldn’t budge, no matter how hard he kicked. He cursed. Then, after noticing a glowing keypad on an exterior door, he ducked outside and tried a combination: 2-4-6-8. It beeped. Access granted. He led the others down the steps to the basement tunnel, which ran beneath the parking lot. At the end of the dark and echoing corridor was the HVAC facility with the boiler and backup generators. Near the middle—where he was—was a housekeeping office and the storage closet with tanks of compressed oxygen and helium. The hallway was about seventy-five yards long and six feet high, meaning that Mullin, at five foot eight, didn’t have to crouch. Bundled electrical wires and pipes ran along the concrete walls, ferrying steam, air, and pure oxygen to patients’ rooms. Though an industrial-looking door opened from the corridor onto the parking lot, most people, aside from housekeeping, didn’t even know the tunnel existed. Mullin was familiar with it only because, as a manager, he monitored gas tank levels for resupply.
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