Flash Fire

by Caroline B. Cooney

  It was larger.

  More orange.

  The Health Club

  3:46 P.M.

  BEAU AND ELISABETH’S MOTHER was on the treadmill. Her two best friends were on treadmills on either side of her, Joy listening to a motivational tape and Suze telling how her ex-husband number two was now ending his marriage number three and should Suze begin dating him again?

  This was far more interesting than the problem Wendy Severyn had: her daughter. Thinking about Beau was delightful. Thinking about Elisabeth was depressing.

  You were supposed to accept your children as they were, but when the child was Elisabeth, hiding out in thickets or reading at the back of closets instead of giggling with other little girls…oh, why couldn’t Elisabeth have a real life? Wendy Severyn resolved to invite a new child over every day, one after another, no matter how much her daughter or the guest whined about it. There had to be someone who’d want to be friends with Elisabeth.

  “The fires are spreading,” said Joy suddenly.

  “You’re listening to the radio?” said Wendy. “I thought you had a tape on.”

  “The fires fascinate me. I can’t get enough of them. The power of nature is still here, no matter how we try to put a lid on it. The awesome strength,” said Joy reverently, “of untamed nature.”

  Wendy Severyn hated nature. Nature meant bodies that got old, and Wendy intended to beat nature and keep her body young.

  “Wendy,” said Joy, “it just hit Grass Canyon.”

  Grass Canyon was a very long road. The fire was not necessarily anyplace near Pinch Canyon. Anyway, Aden had said not to worry. Wendy had enough to worry about, what with turning Elisabeth into a child she could be proud of.

  Suze acted as if the fire was already in Pinch Canyon, for heaven’s sake. “Your driveway is awfully narrow, Wendy,” said Suze. “And those switchbacks? You couldn’t even use a regular moving van, remember? I doubt if firetrucks can make the corners either.”

  The treadmill kept moving. You could not stop your pace because the ground beneath you did not stop its pace. So Wendy went on running and running and running. “Beau is a sensible boy,” she said. “I’m sure he’ll know what to do. If only Elisabeth were a sensible girl.”

  “Poor you,” Suze commiserated. Suze’s two daughters were lovely little copies of Suze, which was so unfair. By rights, Elisabeth should have been a copy of Wendy.

  Wendy turned the dial to make the treadmill go faster. If she were really running, she wouldn’t be able to think about anything at all, and wasn’t that what meditation was all about? Emptying your mind?

  Wendy Severyn did not know that even Beau, who loved his mother, believed she had a head-start on an empty mind.

  The Fire

  3:57 P.M.

  FOR FIRES, THERE IS a verb that you use differently.

  Flower.

  A little fire can “flower” like a rose-opening to the sun. It spreads, and its petals cover the ground. It tosses bouquets to the bottom canyon layer of sumac and brush, and that “flowers,” too, and all around, more places “flower” until you are in a garden of wildfire, instead of a garden of wildflowers.

  Some fires not only flower, they throw. They pick up burning logs and toss them ahead. These are fire whirls, giant smoke rings with a down-draft of deadly gases. Their center temperature can actually reach two thousand degrees.

  In the dips and gullies and hills beyond Pinch Mountain, the fire played all its games. Here it slowed, and there it died. Here it leaped a huge space and there it pivoted and went back where it had been.

  The wind blew into the fire’s waiting mouth. The hotter the fire, the more oxygen it ate, the quicker the wind refilled the supply, and the hotter the fire became.

  Behind Pinch Mountain was a narrow crevasse. Not a canyon, really, because it didn’t open onto anything, just a slot in the earth. The fire fell down into it and the crevasse “blew” — a bomb exploding behind Pinch.

  Los Angeles

  3:57 P.M.

  HALL AND DANNA’S MOTHER and father worked in the same studio. The studio was its own world, with deadlines and demands, absolutes and restrictions, hopes and fears. Like a hospital ward, it completely enclosed its people from other worlds. They forgot everything, swamped in the task at hand.

  Oddly, here in a world utterly ruled by television, no television was on.

  Mrs. Press had a watch that did everything but write the scripts for her. Its alarm went off at regular intervals so she could be in touch with the children. Otherwise she’d forget them. It wasn’t a matter of forgetting to call — she literally forgot they existed.

  Sometimes when she was really immersed in a script, the people who lived on the page canceled out the people who lived in her house, and she would actually find herself wondering who Hall was, or who Danna was, and why. She believed that her children did not know this.

  Over and over, Mrs. Press told herself that the kids were fourteen and fifteen now, they were responsible, they were good, they knew the rules…but today she worried. It was unusual for Jill Press to worry. She had brought up these children solidly; they did not wander from the yard and they did not wander from her rules.

  This afternoon, there was a nag at the bottom of her heart, a constant low-level anxiety that she was doing something wrong. But her husband had just called. It was absurd to be calling again.

  Absurd or not, Jill Press took her cellular phone and went to another room to call. (Danna got very cross if her parents talked to her in front of people, although Hall never noticed these things.)

  She wished she could be home, teasing the kids, going horseback riding with them, peeling Hall away from that creepy little Aszling kid.

  She thought of dinner, which once again the four Presses were not going to have together. Danna would have Frosted Flakes followed by several ice cream sandwiches. Hall, so mature in most ways, was a toddler for food: He’d mix Sugar Smacks, BerryBerry Kix, and Cocoa Krispies. Mrs. Press had met families who claimed the children loved sprout sandwiches and tofu casseroles but her children, personally, were into sugar.

  Once out of the conference room, she felt foolish. Fourteen and fifteen was not four and five. She couldn’t have better kids. What was her problem here? Did she think they were going to go out and get hooked on cocaine this afternoon? She was just itchy from too many meetings. It was affecting her like a rash, that and the fires and the Santa Ana winds.

  She went back into the meeting and was relieved that she hadn’t bothered the children only minutes after the last check-in.

  Los Angeles

  3:57 P.M.

  ELISABETH AND BEAU’S FATHER also sat in a meeting. There were seven men and four women at this meeting and he was annoyed at every one of them. Why must they talk so much? In the case of some of these people, why talk at all?

  There were people in this world who should not have been provided with mouths.

  He was sitting between two of them.

  The talk was of the fires, but only what the fires were doing to network advertising income. Fire raged in a dozen places: Glendale and Laguna Beach and Pasadena and Ventura. Nobody knew how any fire had started: lightning, cigarettes, arson, sparks from dragging broken mufflers of passing cars. Now, in the high wind, with the land and the scrub preheated, fire seemed to be starting itself.

  In this group, nobody cared how the fires started. They had bigger things to worry about. Car dealers, for example, didn’t like to advertise during broadcasts of fires that were consuming their customers.

  Mr. Severyn glanced at his watch. This meeting could last until six or even seven. He was not a homebody. Getting home in time for dinner was not something that normally ran through his mind, but these fires were getting on everybody’s nerves. They’d gone on too long and there were too many of them.

  Pinch Canyon was safe. The neighborhood association paid a security guard and if something happened…

  But he felt a queer pounding in his ches
t. A sort of primitive awareness. It was not like Beau to phone him at work. Beau knew that was reserved for emergencies.

  In the complete lack of privacy at this hostile meeting, Aden Severyn allowed himself some very private thoughts. He was angry at himself for the whole nonsense over Michael’s ashes. He did not believe in a life after death, and he certainly did not believe that Michael inhabited those ashes sitting in that cardboard box on the mantel.

  He’d seen Beau’s eyes flicker toward the box every time he went through the room, seen his son flinch just thinking about them.

  He’d seen Elisabeth design a detour for herself so she didn’t have to pass the fireplace. The whole family had moved its activities to the far side of the house, as if they really did intend to bury Michael up there, and would always skirt the graveyard.

  He had to talk to Beau. And for that matter, to Michael himself. It was strange how death had brought Michael into his mind as life never had.

  Mr. Severyn’s chest actually hurt. The possibilities were: heart attack (in the advertising industry, people had heart attacks quite regularly); indigestion (considering what he had had for lunch, this was very possible); and panic.

  Those fires are miles away from the house, he told himself.

  He heard his own thought: not miles away from the children, but miles away from the house.

  A creepy damp wash, like a muggy day, slid up his entire body, enveloping him in what was either a stroke or a warning of one. He said, “I can’t sit here. The fires worry me. I’m going home to be there with the kids.” He liked that sentence.

  “You can’t get there from here,” said the woman who should have been born without a mouth. “The highway is closed.”

  The highway was closed? What was she talking about?

  “People are being evacuated,” she said, “and the traffic has blocked the highways. You can’t get home.”

  You can’t get home. It had certainly been true for Michael.

  Aden Severyn wanted no parallels, no lessons. “What? Why didn’t you tell me?” He was shouting, planning the woman’s strangulation.

  “You never want to hear anything I have to say,” she said triumphantly.

  The Press House

  3:59 P.M.

  HALL WAS OUT OF the pool, wandering mindlessly, postponing the homework. The orange basketball expanded.

  Below it, five cyclists in neon bright lycra suits appeared on the narrow path that wound around Pinch Mountain. A few years ago there had been no such path, but dirt bikers loved Pinch, and had worn a path into the sides. When there were mud slides the path had to be restarted, but that was just a fun new challenge.

  Hall was startled to realize how large the orange basketball was. Now that the cyclists were there for comparison, he saw that it was as big as a car. It was hanging over the bikes like a boulder soon to roll down. He could only suppose they didn’t see it; that the levels of the mountain blocked their view. They stopped pedaling, and looked around, confused. They had goals. Plans. An itinerary, probably. Hall expected that they had backpacks, water bottles, sandwiches. They didn’t see anything, but perhaps they heard something, or felt something.

  Was it fire? But there weren’t any flames. It had to be fire, and yet it had none of the traditional fire-type look. A huge coal, maybe? Where could it have come from? There was no bigger fire here. Had somebody started it? Had some arsonist crept up there with a match? But Hall had been out there, and checked the mountain as always, and as always it had been bare.

  He stood in his bathing suit dripping on the tiles.

  The orange mass widened.

  The wind picked up. It was a hotter wind than usual, and because it was laden with grease and ash, he could see the wind. Watch the turbulence. The wind tied itself in knots and changed its mind about where to go.

  Beyond the wind, the sky was a sunset on the wrong side of the world. The sky turned magenta and gold and lemon and hot hot pink and vermilion.

  “Dannie!” he shouted. “Danna, get the camcorder! We’ve got to film this. This is absolutely incredible footage. Dannie, come out here and look at this!”

  Over the barren mountainside, above the bikers, came a herd of deer. They leaped over rocks and each other, crossing the path just below the cyclists, and rushing on down a mountainside too steep even for deer. They stumbled and fell on each other, scrambling desperately.

  A huge solid black silhouette suddenly filled the sky. It was a smoke mountain. Or the top of an explosion.

  Hall was awestruck. He could think of nothing else, look at nothing else. His sister joined him, holding the camera. It was palm-sized, light and easy to use, but she wasn’t using it. She was as hypnotized as her brother.

  It was fire, they knew that, but the fire itself wasn’t there yet. This was its teaser. Its advance advertising.

  Awesome, thought Halstead Press.

  The smoke advanced past the mountain, as if the shadow of the mountain were going first instead of after. The smoke moved over the sphinx head that was Pinch and down the rocky gravelly side that became Pinch Canyon. The smoke was so much more colorful than Hall expected smoke to be: It was like an old bruise — black and gray and olive green. It had sound. It roared, a jet engine inside the mountain, a volcano bursting rock.

  Like the deer, the bikers stumbled and fell on each other. Three whirled and pedaled wildly back the way they had come. The other two surged on.

  Then, chasing its own smoke, came the fire.

  Over the heads of the bicycle riders appeared a huge stretch of fire. It was brighter orange than the fruit. It was embroidered with splotches of crimson and gold, and its smoke was a universe of black before it and after it and in it.

  For a few moments the fire was vertical, a sheet billowing on a giant’s clothesline.

  Neither Danna nor Hall could make a sound. They were stunned by the size of the sudden fire, the power of it, the absolute utter proof that it was fire, and not a joke.

  The fire bent over like a predator and went after the bicycles.

  RESIDENTS ONLY

  The Severyn House

  4:00 P.M.

  THAT IT WAS A fire storm and not a rainstorm actually caught Beau by surprise. In spite of the dozen raging fires, in spite of the fact that he had been thinking of nothing but fire, he had not in fact expected fire. Not where he lived.

  Fire stood on top of Pinch Mountain like grizzly bears rearing up to attack.

  The fire seemed strangely stationary, as if it had found a good spot on the side of Pinch Mountain and planned to stage a program there. That was good, because obviously Beau had been wasting time wandering back and forth. He needed to be on the decks or the roof, wetting things down, preparing for the actual fight.

  He couldn’t do that unless he knew where Elisabeth was. What was the matter with her, choosing a time like this to go into hiding? Why did his sister have to be such a dumpling? “Elisabeth!”

  He lifted the deck phone to see if she was talking to somebody on an extension, but the phone was — the phone was out.

  He stared at the receiver. No dial tone, no response, nothing. It was just a plastic rectangle with buttons.

  For Beau, whose life was built on wired or wireless communication, a nonworking phone was as frightening as fire. It paralyzed him, to realize he had no phone. The cordless phone, he thought, trying to pull together. Where’s the cellular?

  But he had no more idea where he’d set that down than where Elisabeth was. Besides, cellular was often less than useful in a canyon — microwaves didn’t climb up and over the rock.

  Beau could hear the fire.

  Nobody had said that fire chewed. That you could hear its jaws cracking trees like a tiger’s teeth cracking bones. Nobody had said that when fire split a tree in half, the tree screamed.

  Crackling fire wasn’t the sound of balling paper up in your fist. It sounded more like a freeway full of car accidents — metal and glass smashing.

  His heart wa
s pounding in a surprising way. You didn’t think of your heart as a muscle until it pounded this hard, and then you knew it could get cramps and get exhausted just like your calves or thighs from running too hard.

  He tried to guess how far away the fire was, in time and miles. It was roughly a half mile to the foot of Pinch Mountain, but up to the crest where the fire was, he couldn’t seem to get his mind working in feet or yards. If I know where Elisabeth is, I’ll be able to think clearly.

  He ran to the pantry, an enormous storeroom off the kitchen, and jerked open the empty bottom cabinet in which Elisabeth liked to play house. The cabinet door came off in his hand and it took Beau a moment to realize that he had actually ripped it off. Talk about adrenaline.

  But adrenaline didn’t matter. Finding Elisabeth did. He couldn’t stand to have that fire out there, looming on top of Pinch Mountain like a beast with greedy fingers, and not know where his sister was. “Lizzie! Don’t play games with me! Where are you?”

  The house was utterly silent.

  “Elisabeth! Fire! Pinch Mountain is on fire. You have to come out!” He checked her bedroom and bathroom, checked Mom’s dressing room, where Elisabeth sometimes leafed through Mom’s beautiful clothes, as if she wanted to play dress up and makeup, but didn’t dare. He checked the computer room and the music room.

  No Elisabeth.

  He raced back to the deck to check the progress of the fire.

  He had expected a slow, steady burning march, the way he had seen on television. But this fire was not marching. It had no front line. Instead it was throwing pieces of itself on ahead — embers, firecrackers, detonators. The canyon and the vertical yards and gardens were speckled with little fires. None was dangerous at this moment, but one strong wind and they would coalesce into a single fire, completely enveloping all twenty-one houses. For a moment he was paralyzed. Hideous evil sensation, straight out of nightmare. Stupid mind, stupid legs, stupid lungs.