Simon, of course, was oblivious to Joshua’s visions, oblivious to the presences that were attracted—maybe even attached—to him. Joshua hadn’t figured out yet what exactly his visions were. It had been only a few months since this second sight had interrupted his senior year at high school, and he was still struggling to interpret their meanings, but across the board the people had been blissfully ignorant of the otherworldly activity around them. Even his mother, Greer, who had very accurate visions of her own, did not share his particular ability. She saw colors and images—she called it energy—around people. Joshua saw human shapes. And they usually turned out to represent people whom either he or the subject had known and who had died.
Slightly unnerved and appropriately uncomfortable at addressing a juvenile delinquent with whom he had absolutely no previous connection, Joshua made a feeble attempt to open a conversation. “You think that’s Little Tujunga Canyon over those hills?”
Simon looked equally unnerved to be spoken to, so much so that at first he merely stiffened as though bracing to ward off a blow, but then he shrugged, glanced uneasily up at Joshua, and mumbled, “Don’t know.”
“Yeah,” Joshua pushed on as though he had received an interested reply, “I think it must be, because the Two-ten runs parallel to that ridge behind us, and the canyons connect down toward it.” He nodded knowingly without looking at Simon for a few seconds, then squatted down to be more on the same level with the other boy, pulling a number of prickly hitchhikers off his socks as a pretense. Both the animated dog and the menacing male figure had disappeared. “You live around here?”
That brought a snort of unamused laughter from Simon. “Temporarily,” he said bitterly.
Not knowing what else to do, Joshua ignored the attitude and went on as though having a friendly conversation. “Where do you usually live?”
Joshua thought that the boy would not answer, but then, “Sunland,” came the disinterested reply.
“Oh, so in the general vicinity anyway,” Joshua said, still floundering. What was he doing? What could he do? It seemed apparent to him that this kid had a very negative influence around him, but hell, you didn’t have to be psychic to make that guess, seeing how Simon was wearing a work suit and digging up shrubbery after an hour’s hike uphill on one of the most unpleasant days of the year while his detention officer looked on.
“I live just over that mountain there,” Joshua told Simon, who glanced at the indicated landmark and then busied himself with the cap of his water bottle. A minute crawled past them. “Well,” Joshua straightened up, not having any other bright ideas. “Try to stay cool.”
Simon looked up at him briefly with a mixture of disdain and curiosity and then stared off again into the hazy distance.
“See ya.” Joshua turned away, expecting no response, but he was surprised again.
“What’s your name?” Simon asked flatly, as though he didn’t care one way or the other whether Joshua answered.
“Joshua.”
“I’m Simon.” The younger boy’s eyes met Joshua’s for the briefest moment, but Joshua got the feeling that it had cost him an effort to do even that.
“Nice to meet you, Simon,” Joshua said, and walked away.
Backtracking to the head of the trail he’d come up, he nodded at the fireman as he passed him, calling out, “See you down the hill!” before he increased his stride, aware of the resentful yet apathetic stares on his back as he went. He worked his way back down to the shade of the oaks, then found a log to rest on, and took from his backpack a small leather notebook and a pen.
Opening to a new page, he wrote, Simon, age about sixteen, male over left shoulder. He paused for a moment to think about it; then, smiling, he added, Small mongrel dog, very animated, between the image and the subject. Now came the hard part. He closed his eyes and tried to focus on the images he’d seen, and as he did, he tried to do what his mother had advised him to do, to see what kind of feeling he got from the images.
He started with the little dog. It made him laugh out loud at first, the way the dog had jumped and barked without sound, but there was something else, a sense of protection and warning. The dog was fairly easy to label, very pure in the impression it gave. Joshua wrote it down: Protective.
The next image was much more difficult; Joshua’s instincts were telling him not to go there. The male figure exuded a dangerous murkiness. . . . No, exuded was the wrong word—it was the opposite, a kind of suction, like a tar pit in human form. Even as Joshua focused on it to try to “read” it, he felt it try to draw him in and he pulled away, opening his eyes to cut the connection.
“Wow,” he breathed. “Okay, that’s one scary apparition.” He shook off the jittery feeling it gave him and wrote down his impression in the notebook: Dangerous, malevolent, intent on evil, both toward subject and myself when attention is drawn to me. Then he tried to remember what his mom had said about blocking negativity from “crossing boundaries,” as she put it. It had to do with visualizing light around him. Feeling silly, Joshua closed his eyes again, imagined a white sphere around him like clear shining glass, and then pretended to be looking through it at the figure.
It helped. He was able to observe without taking on the energy. The figure seemed to ooze darkness, like thick smoke from a burning tire, yet at the same time it was magnetic—it had wanted something, and it had been trying to draw something out of Simon.
With a jolt, Joshua realized what it was. The figure wanted Simon, his life, his future.
It wanted his very soul.
Running his hands through his unkempt dark blond hair, Joshua muttered, “I’ve got to help him.”
Even as a frisson of resentment that he would feel obliged passed through Joshua, he wondered how in the hell he was going to help a boy he didn’t even know.
Chapter 3
He poured with sloppy carelessness into the clear plastic water bottle, letting the lethal brown liquid slosh onto the brittle, crispy stalks of last year’s sage and watched it stain the loose earth as it soaked into the dirt. Then, setting the bottle on a bed of the dry stalks, he took out a small magnifying glass and a roll of tape from his sock. It took only a few seconds more to attach the magnifying glass to the side of the bottle and position it so that the sun struck directly through it onto the fuel inside.
He straightened up and looked around, but the ridge behind him hid him from any possible detection, and the steep, rocky slope facing him was inhabited only by hawks and foxes.
A snapping of branches made his head jerk to the side and he turned to see three deer, a doe and two yearlings, watching him from a few yards away down the slope. He made a clicking noise with his mouth and mentally took aim down gun sights.
Another sound was carried to him on the hot gusts of wind from over the ridge. Someone was calling his name.
He looked down quickly to check his creation; then, raising his hands, he shouted at the deer, “Arrg!” They scurried away, graceful even in their terror, all four feet springing them forward off the ground. He laughed at the power he felt. They should fear him. He climbed back up to the lip of the ridge, the loose, desperately dry earth giving way with each step as he climbed.
For a half hour the concentrated rays of the sun through the convex glass beat down on the gasoline in its plastic shell until a small wisp of smoke began to rise, curling toward the open mouth of the bottle, where it was snatched away by wind that fed the phenomenon in the bottle, superheating until finally it combusted, melting a hole in the thin plastic and spilling the burning gasoline onto the dry tinder beneath it. Fanned by the extreme winds, the flames spread quickly, gulping up the underbrush in huge hungry bites, eager to sate a craving after a long, dry famine.
The first serious smoke was dissipated by the searing winds, but as the fire ate its way through the low brush and began to make a meal of some larger scrub oaks, an undeniable belching of blackness began to gather in spite of the season’s best efforts to sweep it away, u
ntil soon an expanding stain on the sky gave evidence of the orgy of destruction below.
Chapter 4
Joshua had driven halfway back down the narrow, deserted road that led from the trailhead when he saw the plume of smoke.
“Oh God, no,” he muttered to himself. He pulled his car over and climbed onto the roof, ignoring the sting of hot metal on his hands. He stood up and tried to get the fire’s bearings. Pulling out his cell phone, he cursed when he saw the hateful words searching for service on the display. It would have taken a miracle to get reception in these deep canyons.
He searched the hills around him for signs of habitation and quickly realized that no one would see the evidence of this brush fire until it crested the ridge. By that time, it would have scorched at least twenty acres and become a formidable foe. He knew that, from this point, it would take him a good fifteen to twenty minutes to get back down to the highway, and he had just passed a small driveway a minute back. It was more of a dirt track, but the presence of a lone mailbox had told him that someone lived there, someone who would probably have a phone, someone who—depending on the whim of the winds—might also be in the direct path of the flames that Joshua could now see jerking angrily below the black smoke.
He jumped to the ground, hitting it with a hard thump that stung his feet even in his heavy hiking boots. Inside the car, he made a U-turn and sped back up the road, turning left into the uneven driveway. He bumped along for a couple hundred feet until a small ranch house came into view. Inside a neatly kept split-rail fence, an old tractor, rusted beyond usefulness, and an old-model Toyota, which had also seen better days, sat baking in the relentless heat.
Honking his horn and praying that someone was home, Joshua jumped from his car and ran to the door. It was opened by an elderly man wearing a torn T-shirt, what looked like old gym shorts, socks, and sandals. From behind him a white-haired woman peered at Joshua through thick and smudgy spectacles.
“Can I help you?” the man asked Joshua in a querulous voice.
“Could I use your phone? It’s an emergency. There’s a fire just over the ridge behind your house.”
Alarm registered instantly on the couple’s faces. “Please, if you could just show me where the phone is.” Joshua stepped toward them as he spoke.
But these people were more resilient than they looked. The woman snapped into action first. “This way. The phone is right over here.” She was already on the move into the small living room. The man stepped out into the yard and squinted up at the rising line of smoke being buffeted by the wind not more than a half mile from his home. “I’m gonna water down the roof, Emily. You shut down the gas,” he called out as he reached just inside the door and grabbed an ancient brimmed hat off a hook.
Emily dialed 911 on the premillennium rotary phone and handed Joshua the receiver before disappearing out a back door. The emergency operator connected him with the national forest fire department, and Joshua gave them as precise details about the location of the flames as he could. Emily appeared again as he was speaking and added some details of her own for him to relate.
As he hung up the phone, Joshua looked up at the woman. “Thank you. Is there anything I can do to help you?” he asked, aware of the possibility that fate might very well take her home today.
“I’m Emily,” she said first, putting out a hand crooked with age. “My husband is Larry. We’re the Caseys.”
“I’m Joshua Sands. I was driving back from a hike up Oak Springs and I saw the smoke.”
“You were hiking today?” Emily asked with a strong vein of suspicion through the words.
Joshua nodded and hoped the fact that he was telling the truth would be enough to convince her that he was. “I hike every day.”
To his relief, Emily smiled, her wrinkled face breaking easily into a wide grin in spite of the fear that persisted in her eyes. “Damn young fool. Larry used to be just like that.” She turned and headed to a wall of books and photos. “If you want to help, you can put some of these in a box. We’ll get them in the car, just in case.”
Within ten minutes they had both their car and Joshua’s loaded to the max, mostly with faded photos of family members, a few books, and what looked like legal papers and records. The smell of smoke grew tangy and strong in the air. As they debated whether or not they could tie a rocking chair made by Emily’s father onto the roof of the tiny Toyota, they heard the first helicopter.
The smoke had begun to mushroom now, and though the wind seemed to be blowing mostly away from the house toward the fire, there were frequent unpredictable blasts back toward them. So far, the flames had not crested the ridge, but judging from the smoke, the area that was burning had mushroomed as well.
The helicopter circled the area once; then swooping like a hawk toward an unsuspecting prey, it shot toward the edge of the fire nearest the house, spraying a load of chemical flame retardant in a long neat row, extinguishing flames and creating a barrier between the fire and Larry and Emily’s home. It was a temporary barrier at best, Joshua realized, as bits of burning ash were blown over the break and threatened to reignite on the near side.
The helicopter sped away, but a second one appeared only moments later, repeating the action of the first with impressive accuracy, and moments after that, the sounds of the arriving ground support could be heard from back down the road.
It was an awe-inspiring display of efficiency. The smaller of the two pale green fire service vehicles pulled up the driveway and, after a hurried conference with Larry, hooked up to the huge tank that held the water from the Caseys’ well. Using the fire hoses and a pump to increase the pressure, they soon had the Caseys’ house and the area around it well soaked. At the same time, five firemen hiked up the hill with pickaxes and shovels and started to dig a firebreak, quickly clearing away the brush and creating a wide swath of brown dirt in the path of the fire.
Joshua wanted so much to help, to do something, but he and the Caseys were ordered to evacuate immediately.
“If the fire breaches the road, you’ll have no exit route down, and this road up is over fifty rough miles until you come to Angeles Crest Highway,” the supervisor told them. He glanced meaningfully at the Caseys’ broken-down old Toyota and then up at Joshua. “And I don’t like those odds,” he said.
“I understand. Yes, sir.” Joshua turned to the older couple, who—now that the cavalry had arrived—seemed to shrink back into fragile frames as they anxiously watched the activity around their home. “Listen, why don’t you come to my house until it’s safe to come back here? I’ll give the fire chief my number and we can wait for news there.” They both turned and looked at him as though they couldn’t fathom the idea. Joshua could see defiance beginning to gather like storm clouds on Larry’s face, but Emily short-circuited whatever refusal he might have been mustering by laying a gentle hand on her husband’s arm and saying, “Of course. Thank you, Joshua. We can call our son from there and then he won’t be so worried.” She turned her eyes meaningfully up to Larry’s as she spoke, and his expression tempered.
He dropped his head in acquiescence and allowed her to hustle him off to their packed car.
As they drove away, bits of gray ash, some still edged with glowing orange trim, fell on the hood of Joshua’s car and lingered precariously until they were blown impatiently away.
Chapter 5
Simon dropped his gear on the foot of his bed and hurried to the showers. He didn’t want to have to wait for a turn; Sunday was visiting day and he was expecting someone.
The water in the open bank of showers ran lukewarm at best, but today Simon didn’t care. He turned the handle to cold and reveled in the few minutes of relief from the domineering heat. His respite was short-lived because he knew he must relinquish the shower quickly or suffer the certain backlash. His first night here, he’d unknowingly sat in someone else’s place at dinner and been woken by a hand over his mouth in the middle of the night. What had followed still caused him pain when i
t flashed unwanted into his mind, but he shut the recall down quickly. He had grown proficient at selective memory.
The rec room was feebly air-conditioned; the merciless heat could barely be disguised by the complaining whines of the outdated window units, and in minutes his white T-shirt was moist with perspiration. Simon spotted his guest and crossed quickly over to where she sat, still and stern.
“Hey, Aunt Rosa.” He nodded, trying to keep the relief and pleasure off his face. He would take a strong ribbing later if he showed anything that could even be mistaken for affection.
“Simon.” She watched him severely but could not keep a small smile from breaking the stern lines of her face. Rosa was a formidable woman, both in size and personality. She was the sister of Simon’s mother, and he always wondered if they hadn’t really been related. His mother, who had taken off when Simon was five, he remembered as having the thinness that comes with debilitating drug abuse and the frightened look of a whipped dog. He supposed there wasn’t much difference between a dog whipped by its master and a wife beaten by her husband. But the memory of his mother was another one that came to Simon only in the last moments before sleep, when his defenses crumbled.
“How you doing? You being good?” Rosa asked Simon in Spanish.
“S’í,” he responded flatly. “How’s Valeria?” Simon hoped that asking about his cousin would derail Rosa from focusing on him. Besides, though he tried to hide it, he really liked his eight-year-old cousin. She was the only person who looked at him with something like trust in her young face.
“She’s good, but don’t you try to distract me. Are you behaving?” Rosa asked unsmilingly.
“Yes, ma’am,” Simon said.
“They feeding you enough?”
“Yes, ma’am. It’s not very good, but there’s a lot of it.” He was relieved to see his aunt have to look away to cover her amusement.
“This isn’t supposed to be a vacation.”
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