by Susan Sey
She flung her arms around him and hugged him hard. He hugged her back, dazed and baffled. “Your circles were separate for so long, Eli, and you only let one of them matter, the one that said you weren’t worthy of the work you loved. You were a puzzle and you were broken. You’ve finally put yourself back together. So yeah, I’m proud of you. I’m in awe of you.”
He stared at her, lost for words. A breeze stirred the thick, still air, and pine needles slid against each other with a quiet chuff. And somewhere underneath the sharp green scent of fir and hemlock and aspen, Eli smelled it.
Smoke.
“Oh shit,” Eli said and grabbed Willa by the upper arms, his eyes flying wildly around the serene green forest. Cool, lush, still. Too still.
“What?”
“Do you smell that?”
She tensed in his hands. “Smell what?”
“Smoke.”
She inhaled deeply. “I don’t smell anything.”
Eli dragged a breath into tight lungs. Nothing. “Neither do I. Not anymore.” He snatched the radio off his belt and turned up the trail again. Started off at a near jog. “But I did. And that’s not good.”
Willa fell in behind him as he keyed the radio. “Public Safety? Public Safety, this is Team Alpha in the voluntary evac zone, do you read me?”
The radio gave a belch of static then a crackle that dissolved into words. “…Safety, repeat?”
“Again, Public Safety, this is Team Alpha in the voluntary evac zone. We’re scenting smoke intermittently. Request update on fire movement?”
The path flew along under his feet, blurring into a river of dirt and roots and rocks that barreled him along without any effort on his own part. It had its own gravity, dragging him into its orbit, pulling Willa along behind him.
“…out of the northeast at…to ten miles per hour…time,” a voice said. A woman. A vague image of a redheaded dispatcher came to mind. He’d seen her at IC, hadn’t introduced himself. “…now involves 200 square acres…estimated daily run of—”
The radio squawked violently and the dispatcher cut out. Eli spun the channel knob, searching for a signal.
“—Team Three,” a new voice emerged from the chaos. “We’ve got eyes on…” The voice cut out but dread gripped Eli by the throat.
“Public Safety Team Three?” the dispatcher responded. “You have eyes on the fire?”
“Roger,” a woman — one of the park rangers sweeping the mandatory evac zone — said through a film of static. “We’ve cleared…campsites in this section…ninth is supposed to…vacant.” Even catching every third word or so, Eli could tell she was panting, her voice uneven. She was running, Eli realized, his gut twisting. “…going to check it…be safe but…smell smoke…really dark…We can—” Another sharp blast of interference cut her off.
“Team Three?” Eli could picture the dispatcher sitting up sharply, pressing the earphones tighter to her head. As if that would cut down on the interference. “Team Three, what is your current status?”
“…loud, like a roar all of a sudden then…see flames…still two miles from safe zone…”
Eli’s lungs seized up. “Fuck,” he said with a sinking inevitability. Urgency beat like blood inside him, and suddenly he was running. “It’s going to go over them.”
“What?” Behind him Willa broke into a run as well, her hiking boots thudding into the dry earth like his heart knocking against his ribs. “The fire? It’s going over who?”
“One of the Public Safety teams in the mandatory evac zone. A pair of O’Malley’s rangers.” A stark clarity descended on him, and everything sharpened, slowed. His lungs loosened and his breath cycled smoothly now even as the scent of smoke filtered again through the trees. “They’re two miles from the safe zone.”
“Where’s the safe zone?” Willa demanded.
“We’re in it.”
“I thought we were in a goddamn jungle of ladder fuel?”
“We are.”
“How are we the safe zone, then?”
A cliff shearing away to the Lake Superior shoreline lay beyond the tree line a few hundred yards to their south, and the hotshots were cutting fire line along a basalt ridgeline to their north that rose up out of the woods like a spine running from Canada all the way to the town of Devil’s Kettle. The river was ahead of them by a mile or so, an iffy fence a determined fire could jump in seconds if it wanted to. “There is no safe zone.”
He flipped to channel five — Incident Command — and the radio exploded.
“—goddamn run of at least seven miles, and the wind’s up—”
“—gusting to…miles per hour—”
“—tanker planes en route, drown that motherfucker—”
“—Moving the Barker Mountain Hotshots west to…cutting line on the south bank…River, contain this bitch before—”
He flipped back to the Public Safety Channel, keyed the mic. “Team Bravo, this is Team Alpha, do you read?”
Static gurgled from the radio but then Jax’s voice surfaced. “Got you, Alpha. Go ahead?”
“Fire’s on the move,” he snapped, relief a cool rush in his veins. “Get back to the parking lot and get the hell out. Now.”
“Roger that. Meet you there.”
“No, it’s too close to us. We’ll deploy in the river. Keys are in the truck. Get back to town. We’ll see you there after.”
But the connection had gone to shit again, and when he keyed the mic, he got nothing but static.
“Shit!” He glanced left. He knew the ridgeline was there through the trees to the north, rising up and up, playing havoc with the radio signal. Frustration was a greasy knot in his throat. There was no way he could break into the radio traffic on the IC channel, not with the fire blowing up. Public Safety was out of reach for the moment, too, or until he could get to higher ground. But he’d gotten Jax and Brett off the trail so he hooked the radio to his belt and picked up the pace. He wasn’t sprinting but it wasn’t far off.
“Eli, wait!” Willa’s voice was ragged behind him, her breath coming in snatches. “Where are you going? Shouldn’t we turn around?”
“We can’t.” His brain — still in that state of artificial calm — had been performing calculations in the background since the minute he’d heard that poor park ranger running. It had been efficiently identifying risk factors and escape routes, creating and playing out scenarios, estimating his and Willa’s pace and progress toward the river. “We’re only a mile from the river at this point, maybe less. We turn around now, we’re running through two miles of ticking time bomb back to the parking lot, and no guarantees once we get there that we can outrun the fire to town.”
He felt the weight of her silence as she digested that info, as it rejiggered her reality and not in a good way. Eli was familiar with that unpleasant process. “What do we do?” There wasn’t a hint of panic in her words, and pride flickered inside him. She was breathless, yeah, and more than a little afraid, but she was calm. Alert. Ready to think and survive. And she was looking to him for guidance. Because she trusted him.
Eli was going to reward that trust. He was going to keep her alive. He swallowed a greasy ball of horror at the thought of the baby lawyers on the trail behind them, but Willa was his first priority. Maybe if he got her squared away he could go back for them.
He picked up the pace yet further. “We’ve got to get to the river.”
“But that’s toward the fire!”
“That’s toward a couple million gallons of water.”
“Water that’s freezing cold, wicked fast, and running straight into a bottomless hole?”
Eli blew out a breath. “That’s the stuff.”
“Shit,” Willa said, and picked up the pace. Then suddenly she grabbed his pack and jerked him to a halt. “Oh Jesus,” she moaned. “The baby lawyers.”
“Screw the baby lawyers.” The words were bitter in his mouth but he didn’t regret them. “We have to run now, Willa. Right now.”
“We have to get those idiots off the trail.”
“No, we don’t.”
She didn’t bother answering, just turned and bolted back the way they’d come at a dead sprint. Eli’s blood ran cold at the sight of her putting even another foot of distance between herself and the safety of the river, but his heart swelled with love for her. Because he knew she wasn’t risking her life for the baby lawyers. She was risking it for him. She’d said it herself earlier — if things went south, they’d made their choice. And while Willa could probably live with that, she knew that Eli couldn’t bear the burden of even one more death. She wouldn’t ask him to. It hadn’t even crossed her mind to ask him to, not even with her own life on the line.
Goddamn, he loved this woman. He was going to kill her later, but in this moment, love was all he knew.
CHAPTER 35
WILLA BUSTED AROUND a sharp bend in the trail and nearly took out the female lawyer. Hands fisted, mouth sour, the woman was marching down the trail with more determination than enjoyment. When Willa appeared, she stopped abruptly, then sneered.
“You again,” she said.
“Me again,” Willa agreed, panting.
“What, did you forget something?” She folded her arms, kicked her weight to one hip. “Overlook an insult you wanted to deliver?”
Eli caught up and Willa glanced at him. “I already regret this,” she told him.
“Regret what?” the woman asked acidly.
“Saving your lives.”
The woman rolled her eyes. “Listen, I don’t know what kind of peon power trip you’re on here but if you think you can intimidate us into—”
“Cara, wait.” The other baby lawyer stepped up, put his hand to Cara’s elbow.
She shook him off impatiently, her eyes hot and pinned to Willa. “No, Tim, I won’t wait. We have every right to be on this trail and if you think I’m going to let this woman push us off it with her incredibly and persistently unprofessional behavior—”
“Can you be a professional volunteer?” Willa wondered aloud. “Is that a thing?”
“Do you smell that?” Tim asked.
Cara gave an elaborate sigh. “Smell what?”
“Smoke.” His eyes flicked to Willa’s, then to Eli’s. “That’s smoke, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Eli said grimly. “It is.”
“Wait, smoke?” The woman’s eyes flew to Eli. “How could it be smoke? The fire’s ten miles from here!”
“The wind picked up,” he said. “Best case scenario, the fire’s four miles away. Worst case? Two.”
Willa could smell it now, too, an invisible haze threading through the trees. Between their boots, a patch of sunshine faded from bright lemon to a sickly ash as Willa watched. The woman didn’t seem to notice any of this. She pressed her lips into a line that struck Willa as both skeptical and habitual, and produced her phone.
“Seriously?” Willa stared as the woman flicked competently at the screen with both thumbs. “You think we have time for a fact check? Lady, listen. This is the North Shore, and we’re eight miles from the nearest town. There’s no service, okay? There wasn’t service before and there’s no service now. Plus there’s a goddamn forest fire close enough to smell so will you please put that away and move your ass?”
She continued to tap intently, her eyes never leaving the screen. “If you swear at me one more time—” she began.
Eli reached out, snatched the phone from the woman’s hand, and heaved it into the woods.
“Unbelievable.” Cara stared, outraged, her hands still shaped around the missing phone. “You people are unbelievable. I am so going to have your jobs.”
“You’re welcome to them.” Eli smiled grimly. “But I should warn you, they’re kind of thankless.”
“Plus, they aren’t even jobs,” Willa put in. “We’re volunteers, damn it.”
The woman glared. “What did I say about the swearing?”
Willa turned to the boyfriend. “Is English not her first language?”
He dragged a hand down his face. “It’s not the language, it’s the authority. She has a problem with authority.”
Cara tilted her chin. “I have no problem with authority properly rendered. But this is a blatant overreach and I have no intention of—”
A sudden wind pushed through the trees, and Willa had to brace her boots against the nasty slap. Cara broke off, seeming to notice for the first time that the air had gone an ominous pearly gray. Smoke, Willa realized with a pulse of dismay, was curling through the trees like the thinnest fog, hardly visible except for the way it muted the green.
“Okay,” Eli said, “Time’s up.” He took Cara by the arm and turned her up the trail the way he and Willa had come. “You don’t have to stop talking if it makes you feel better but it’s time to run now.”
Cara dug in her heels and tugged on her elbow. Eli kept it. “What, toward the fire?” She stared. “Hell, no. We’re heading for the parking lot.” She jerked her elbow from Eli’s grip. “Come on, Tim. We’re out of here.”
She marched by him but Tim didn’t fall obediently into line. He stood there, frowning thoughtfully into space. Cara stopped on the trail and threw him an impatient glance. “Tim, come on.”
The forest swayed and shifted around them, dancing with the fitful breeze. Willa became dimly aware of a throb in her bones, some kind of terrible subsonic vibration she’d never experienced before. An instinctive burst of dread filled her, welling up from the part of her brain that didn’t need to name a threat to perceive it. She shifted on her boots, sidling under the itchy urge to run toward the parking lot herself.
“I’m sorry, Cara,” Tim said finally. “But I’m not going to die because you have daddy issues.”
Her mouth fell open. “Daddy issues?”
“The river is this way,” Eli said, jerking his head the way he and Willa had come. He eyed the narrow strip of sickly yellow sky above them, lined in spiky pine crowns. That terrible buzz in Willa’s bones grew until her fillings ached. “I’d suggest we run.”
Tim looked at Cara on the trail behind him. “I’m running,” he said. “Are you coming or not?”
“Fuck you, Tim,” she said, furious tears filling her eyes. But she yanked her pack straps tight and started jogging toward the river. Tim followed.
“Thank you, Jesus,” Eli muttered.
“Amen,” Willa said, and started running.
It happened with breathtaking speed. Later, Willa would have no clear memory of it, just a series of frozen images lodged in her brain like a row of crooked teeth. They ran single file, boots pounding over the hard-packed trail while that buzz in her bones grew and twisted. And then it wasn’t in her bones anymore. It was too huge. It was inside her, outside her, all around her. It was a roar, consuming and ravenous. It was, she realized with a pulse of terror, the sound of the fire. It was ripping and devouring, chewing through centuries of forest, decades of fuel, tearing its way toward them with a gleeful roar that inhabited the very air.
Then suddenly the oxygen disappeared. She felt it go — an eerie rush like the tide going out. Her ears gave a vicious pop and her lungs made a startled lunge into the vacuum where the air used to be. Her heart knocked against her ribs, terrified and starved. Then a dingy twilight dropped over them and they were running blind, sprinting into the dark toward a river they couldn’t see but their lizard brains could somehow sense. That itchy urge to turn around and race for the parking lot was gone, and all Willa knew was a pounding need to race toward the ribbon of salvation twisting and dancing through the forest like a finish line. She couldn’t possibly smell the water — there was no air, nothing to carry the scent — but her brain remembered. Instinct whispered. The scent of wet rocks and lush greens was survival, and it slipped through her fear, wrapped itself around her and pulled. This way, this way, this way.
Then the air returned all at once, a wall of hot smoke that punched her in the face. Her lungs seized on it automatically — o
xygen! — then hacked it immediately back out again. Her eyes stung, her chest ached. She dropped her head into the foul blast of it and kept running, skimming only the thinnest layer into her lungs.
Something bulleted out of the black blanket of the sky as she ran, caught her squarely on the shoulder with a muffled pop. She clapped a hand to the sting and lifted her face to the sky, squinted uncomprehending into the punishing blast of hot wind.
Rocks were falling out of the sky all around her. They were pelting the dirt at her feet and rolling away like marbles. She blinked watering eyes and focused. No, not rocks, she saw finally. Hailstones. The fire was making its own weather, just like Eli had said. An incongruous moment of wonder caught her by surprise and she watched them fall to the trail in dirty gray plops. One crunched under her boot with a strange, hollow delicacy, and a shock of bone-deep revulsion shot through her.
Oh Jesus, oh God, oh hell. These weren’t rocks. This wasn’t hail or rain or even fire. These were birds. Tiny, hollow-boned songbirds were falling, singed and smoking, out of the sky. They littered the ground at her feet, the smallest and first victims of the coming fire. She cried out and Eli said, “Don’t stop. Willa, you can’t stop.”
Ahead of her on the trail, Cara screamed and skidded, then went down hard on her butt. Tim yelped and leapt sideways and Willa said, “Jesus!”
A deer tore out of the forest a foot from Cara’s boots, his antlers ripping at the branches, his large liquid eyes full of panicked urgency. Cara threw her arms over her head and Willa waited helplessly for her to be trampled. But then the buck gathered itself and gravity fell away. The deer sailed over Cara’s head, hit the trail with a thud of hooves and a puff of dust and bounded down the trail toward the parking lot.
