Pacific Fire

by Greg Van Eekhout

  The screen door banged, and Fernando came over and joined him at the tree.

  “How can you be okay with your wife doing this?”

  Fernando looked tired, and the smile he gave Sam was one he probably never revealed to his children.

  “Sofía is a good woman. She’s a good wife and a great mother. I love her very much. But if Los Angeles ever decides they need our water for something else, the farm’s done, and so are we. Flying brings in twice as much as farming, and we won’t see our children impoverished and sold off seven times a week as day slaves. We won’t see them digging a rich man’s ditch, or doing unspeakable things for some pornographer.”

  “If you lose your wife, it’ll turn out a bad bet.” It sounded cold, but math was cold, and life was measured on balance sheets. What didn’t show up on the bottom line was the pain of living with those calculations.

  “Did they ever tell you in school that you could be anything you wanted to be?”

  “I didn’t go to school,” Sam said.

  “Well, that’s what I learned. From school, from my parents, from the air. All I had to do was set my mind on a goal, work very hard, and I could be anything at all.”

  “And what did you want to be?”

  “For me it wasn’t a what. It was a where. I wanted to be anywhere outside the Southern realm. Somewhere without the Ministry of Justice Dispensation. Somewhere without cartels. Somewhere without a Hierarch.”

  “Everywhere has a Hierarch,” Sam said. “They may call it something else, and it may not be one man or one woman, but wherever you go, there’s always someone who gets to eat more magic than everyone else, or pile up more money than everyone else.”

  Fernando nodded. “I figured that out. I worked for many of those people, the little Hierarchs. I couldn’t get away from them. But Sofía and I could build this.” He waved his hand at his house and fields. “It’s a tiny fortress. Or an island. We’re not untouchable here. We track our shoes through the kingdom’s dirt all the time. But a flimsy fence is better than none at all.”

  And that’s what Daniel wanted for Sam. Escaping to Tahoe, or Mexico, or to the shaded creases between the Sierra mountains … It would never be more than a flimsy barrier between Sam and some kind of Hierarch. But Daniel considered it worth striving for. And to risk dying for.

  “Come back inside,” Fernando said. “Get a few hours of sleep. We’ll want to be in the air before dawn.”

  * * *

  The stars were still out when Sam and Em helped Sofía push her four-seat prop plane out of a corrugated metal barn. It was an awkward contraption, with a pair of amphibious floats below the wings and three-wheeled landing gear attached to each float.

  “Isn’t this a little big for crop dusting?” Em asked.

  Sofía stroked the fuselage like a cowboy in love with his horse. “She’s more than just a crop duster. This is an AM-Garuda 1015. She belonged to the Ministry of Fire, back when they still operated this far from the capital. I can skim across a lake and fill the floats with water, or use them to store contraband. I’ve even smuggled people in there. Fernando swapped in engine and cockpit armor, put in self-sealing fuel tanks and a bulletproof windshield. He’s a crack mechanic, and I’m a crack pilot, and she’s the best bird in the Mojave. She’ll get you to Catalina.”

  Sam couldn’t help but grin at her pride.

  Fernando came over from the house, where he’d been watching the kids. He handed Sofía a shotgun and box of shells and kissed her passionately enough that Sam felt it proper to look away.

  While Sofía walked around the plane for a preflight inspection, Fernando came up close to Sam.

  “You’re a powerful osteomancer?” he asked.

  Daniel had prepared Sam to answer this question, whether asked by a stranger, a friend, or a cop, whether asked out of idle curiosity or from someone making a business proposal or interrogating him or beating him or begging him for magic to heal a wound. The answer was always supposed to be the same: No.

  He glanced toward the house. The children were standing on the back steps in their pajamas.

  “I’m more of an ingredient than a proper osteomancer.”

  “How powerful?”

  “Very,” Sam said. “A high-value ingredient for any soup.”

  Fernando nodded. “If there’s a problem, if there’s trouble, if you can help my wife but you decide not to, because it’ll compromise your own safety, because it’ll cost you something … if my wife comes to harm and you didn’t do everything you could to help her, osteomancer or not…”

  He didn’t finish the sentence, nor did he need to.

  “I will,” Sam said.

  Fernando gave Sofía a final look, even more intimate than the kiss, and he returned to the house to stand with the children.

  Sam took the front passenger seat while Em buckled herself into the back. When Sofía was done with her preflight routine, she waved toward the house, at Fernando and her children. They all waved back, as though she were just heading off for work. The engine coughed into life and the five-bladed propeller became a blur.

  Sofía taxied onto a strip of flattened dirt between rows of alfalfa, and without ceremony she commenced a rumbling sprint. Sam hadn’t anticipated things would be so loud. Every creak and squeak from the plane no doubt signaled a vital screw coming loose or a spar cracking. He’d seen planes in flight, of course, but he’d never actually been in one. Clearly, the whole enterprise was a hoax.

  Sam didn’t imagine Sofía would run them into the irrigation ditch at the end of the air strip, at least not for the first several seconds of takeoff. Then he began to suspect it was a possibility. And then it became a certainty. Only his unwillingness to humiliate himself in front of Em kept him from emitting a panicked little squeal.

  When the ride smoothed out and Sam looked down to find they were several feet off the ground, he let out a quiet breath of relief. All was forgiven.

  Minutes later, they were in deep sky. The stars twinkled above, and lights from water projects and lonely desert settlements twinkled below.

  Sofía motioned for Sam to put on the bulky headphones dangling in front of him. Em already had her set on.

  “You kids ever fly before?”

  “Yeah,” Em said, without elaborating. No doubt she’d participated in some kind of avian black ops, probably involving parachuting and maybe some wing walking.

  “Not me,” said Sam.

  “Well, make yourself comfortable. Sick bags are under your seats. We’ll be heading south a while, and then a right turn over the San Andreas Abyss. Most pilots hate flying over it, so I don’t expect company. But if you see a moving light out there, anything that looks like it could, might, maybe be a plane, don’t assume I see it, too. Tell me.”

  The Abyss had about the same reputation as the Bermuda Triangle, but Sofía sounded chipper. She liked flying her plane. And once Sam got used to the noises and jolts and vibrations, he was surprised to find he liked it, too. Loved it, actually. If he closed his eyes, he was no longer inside a flying machine with a fuel-combustion engine. It was him flying, not the airplane. He wanted to open his door and step out and spread his arms and race beside the airplane. He wanted to soar up beyond the thin gauze of clouds. The Hierarch had eaten garuda raptor and other flying creatures. Maybe flight was in Sam’s bones.

  A little while later, the plane banked a sharp right turn. Sam looked over the dials arrayed before Sofía and found the compass. They were going west now, toward Los Angeles and Catalina. Since leaving the capital, Daniel had dragged Sam up and down the desert and along winding paths in sequoia forests and through mountain passes. But never into Los Angeles. The weight of their undertaking settled in his gut, and at the same time, he experienced a thrill of liberation.

  “I wish it was daylight so you guys could see,” Sofía said over the intercom. “We’re coming up on the Abyss. It’s beautiful from this high up.”

  Perfect black spread out below, the lights
of human settlement and engineering long behind them. No canals or roads came near here.

  Sam was about to say he was sad over missing the splendor when the windshield shattered. Glass and deafening wind roared through the cockpit and cabin, cutting Sam’s cheeks. Papers whipped through the air—maps and Gabriel Argent’s Catalina intel. There was a harsh beep that must be the stall alarm, and also an unsettling absence of engine noise. The plane flexed under stress with horrific groans and creaks, and the left wing dipped. They were falling.

  Sam hunched in the crash position, icy air rushing through his ears. Bits of bulletproof glass struck his scalp as more pieces cracked loose from the windshield.

  He lifted his head. Blood drizzled down Sofía’s chin. She yanked on the stick with both hands, and her wail of effort penetrated through the rest of the noise, but she couldn’t budge it. She was screaming something, Sam couldn’t hear what. His headphones had come off and jiggled at the end of their coiled cord.

  He was not frightened. He felt remorse for getting Em and Sofía entangled in his problems. He felt bad for never getting to know Valerie in Bombay Beach, and he was sorry Faith the café owner would never get her pickup truck back. He was sorry he’d never see Daniel again.

  Lowering himself back into the crash position, he was struck by an impression, or an essence, of gliding. Even with his arms wrapped around his knees, he felt as if they were spread wide. Membranes broad as yacht sales stretched out, rippling in the wind. The air was cold, but inside, he burned, hot as lava. He saw the plane from outside, contours and edges bright and clear and sharp. The plane plummeted toward a deep earthen scar below.

  He was hallucinating. Stress. Fear. Maybe a concussion. Yet he knew it was none of these things.

  Flames wavered outside, a bright halo streaming past the windows like water, and Sam knew the engine hadn’t caught fire, just as he knew the sense of personal flight and subterranean heat was no illusion. It was osteomancy, and he was doing it.

  There was a sense of slowing, of lifting, right before the plane struck the ground with a tooth-loosening impact and chewed through dirt and rock, fine dust swirling in clouds, pebbles striking the metal skin as if being shot from a machine gun. The landing gear fractured and crumpled and the propeller blades chopped into the earth.

  Then, silence.

  Sam twisted around in his seat. Bits of glass glittered in Em’s hair. Her cheeks and the bridge of her nose were freckled with blood. A deep red line about half an inch long over her left eyebrow streamed blood, soaking her eyelashes and falling in droplets down her face, but she seemed to move fine as she unbuckled her harness. She wrestled with her door and managed to kick it open. After slinging Sofía’s rifle over her shoulder, she tossed out their bags and climbed down bent wing struts and crumpled float tanks to the ground.

  Sofía still gripped the stick with white fingers. Blood streamed from a red splash on her forehead.

  “We crashed,” she said groggily, looking at Sam as if in a state of mild surprise. “Where’s Fernando? Is he okay?”

  “Fernando’s back home. You’re hurt.”

  “I’m fine. Get out. We might be leaking fuel.”

  “Wait for help,” Sam said. He jumped to the ground and came around the front of the plane to meet her on her side. A black object was flattened against the windshield. It looked about the size of a cat, and it had wings.

  “Help Sofía,” he called out to Em.

  The plane had landed on her belly, pitched forward, the nose settled into a ditch dug by the propeller. Sam climbed the engine cowling and crawled up to the windshield. He smelled iron and shit and the scents of pursuit and of hunger and single-minded intent. These were the smells of an osteomantic hound.

  He put his fingers into sticky fur and pried the creature away from the shards of cockpit glass impaling it. Its pinched, apple-doll human face was the dark brown of tobacco spit, of bones soaked in La Brea tar for ten thousand years.

  This was a person. It had once been a man or a woman or a boy or a girl, and whatever kind of life it led—an unpleasant one, probably a horrific one—got canceled out when someone decided it was needed for some monstrous service. Sam set it down gently on the engine cowling.

  He looked around for Argent’s pouch, but the documents were lost, probably blown out of the plane hundreds of feet in the air. All the plans and diagrams of the Catalina facility, gone.

  He climbed down to join Em on the ground, and they half pulled and half carried Sofía away from the wreck.

  “Good enough,” Sofía said, laboring. “Good enough. Let me sit.”

  Em got a pack of gauze from her first-aid kit and put pressure on Sofía’s bleeding forehead.

  “You’re bleeding, too,” Sam observed.

  Em wiped blood off her face with her sleeve and waved him off.

  “If I’m not crying, I’m okay.”

  “Check me for signs of a concussion,” Sofía said. “Is my speech slurred?”

  It wasn’t.

  She continued to give Em directions until Em threatened to set bones that weren’t yet broken if she kept trying to be in charge.

  Sofía relented. “We were in a straight dive. I had no control. How did we end up on our belly?”

  “You must have done something at the last minute,” Sam said. It sounded reasonable.

  “We were on fire.”

  “Maybe the airstream put it out.”

  “No. It didn’t. What happened?”

  “We struck a bat. I found one splattered on the windshield. Maybe another hit the prop.”

  Sofía shook her head, then let out a soft, queasy moan. “That’s impossible. We were at 2,100 feet when we got hit. Bats don’t fly that high.”

  “Trust me,” Sam said. “It was a bat.”

  Em shined her penlight into Sofía’s eyes. “Bats. So what does that mean?”

  Sam looked up at the night sky. “It means someone was looking for me in the air.”

  “I guess it’s lucky I killed it with my beautiful airplane,” Sofía said mournfully.

  * * *

  The San Andreas Abyss was a fissure in the earth where the Pacific and the North American seismic plates met in combat. It snaked northwest from the Salton Sea to the San Gabriel Mountains outside Los Angeles before continuing north, beyond the borders of the Southern Californian realm. The Hierarchs of the Southern and Northern kingdoms both conducted osteomantic experiments on it, trying to control it, to bend it to their will, to use it as a weapon. In doing so, they’d ripped it wider and carved it deeper, and gouged a laceration in the earth almost as deep as the Grand Canyon.

  The place was feared. It was said to be redolent with osteomantic essences.

  Sam and Em and Sofía spent the night shivering and cowering in a nest of boulders. At first light, Em returned to the plane to see if she could bring the radio back to life, but it was too badly damaged by the crash. There was no emergency beacon to summon help, because if Sofía ever crashed during a job, the last thing she’d ever want was to let people know where she was.

  In a different set of circumstances, they might have remained here a day to rest Sofía, who was suffering headaches and nausea and sometimes seemed confused. But Sam didn’t like the way the earth around them rumbled. Grains of sand popped from the ground like droplets in a freshly poured glass of soda pop. Larger rocks cascaded down the canyon walls. Sam had been through earthquakes before, but these tremors felt different.

  “Let’s get moving,” he said. “Maybe we can find somewhere to climb out.”

  They discussed the idea of fashioning a litter from the wreck, but Sofía was adamant that she could walk. Slowly, painfully, they trudged miles west, where eventually the canyon walls would be lower. Strata in the vertical faces twisted like layers in a swirl cake. Only a narrow seam of blue sky was visible between the walls.

  After an hour, they forced Sofía to sit on a rock. She was white as newsprint and shivering.

  Em took Sa
m aside, out of the pilot’s earshot.

  “She’s really not doing well. She needs a doctor.” Em unfolded her map on the shaded ground. “This is just an estimate, but I figure we’re about here.” She touched a spot that put them around forty miles outside Desert Hot Springs. “Not exactly a bustling metropolis,” she said, “but they might have a clinic.”

  Sam puffed out air. “That’d be a long walk even if we were all healthy. And I don’t like the smell of this place.”

  Em refolded the map. “What are you smelling?”

  “I don’t know … something deep. Like, something climbing up through pressure zones. Something that’s not happy to be awake.”

  “Something unhappy is not a smell.”

  “I mean … not a smell smell. An osteomantic impression.”

  Em cocked her head and regarded him clinically. “I didn’t think you had that kind of nose.”

  “I don’t. But, well, that’s what I’m smelling now.”

  He began to walk back to Sofía, but Em put a hand on his arm to stop him.

  “What happened to you during the crash?”

  “Same as you. I was in the plane. We all fell down.”

  “I was watching you, Sam.” She made it sound like an accusation. “There were flames outside.”

  “Yeah. Something caught on fire. So?”

  “There were flames inside, too. Faint, more like a glow. They were coming off you.”

  Sam didn’t quite remember it that way. But he remembered feeling like he was flying, even as the plane dropped. He remembered feeling something in his bones, a heat hotter than fire, but one that didn’t burn.

  “Maybe I did have something to do with the flames,” he admitted. For some reason, he felt sheepish about it, as if she’d caught him naked. “For a few seconds there, it felt like I was doing something. I don’t know what, but like I was powerful and doing something. Never felt that way before.”

  “Daniel’s osteomancy is very deep, isn’t it?”

  The abrupt change of subject left Sam momentarily confused. “Yes,” he said, recovering.

  “He doesn’t just work magic from freshly consumed bone, but also magic deep in his system, from things he ate long ago?”