Flash Fire

by Caroline B. Cooney

  The sky was not a simple place to be right now, what with radio stations moving their helicopters in, and television stations getting their helicopters in, and the sheriff’s department, and even some exceedingly wealthy and stupid homeowners renting helicopters to be flown in since the roads were blocked. Rising waves of heat could toss a plane around like a duckling in a hurricane. A crash landing into a firewall is not cool.

  Tank engine crews and helicopters were after the same thing: Wet it down, keep it back. But it was pointless here. If they kept at it, it was political: just to make the residents feel somebody was trying something. It wasn’t going to make the fire feel anything.

  This fire was above and beyond anything a mere drop of water could accomplish.

  It was like a war, but not modern war. You couldn’t chart the paths of a wildfire the way you could rockets. This was more like fighting Indians of old, never knowing from what thicket the arrows would fly.

  Matt’s goggles were too filthy to see out of, so he’d yanked them down half over his nose and mouth. He stood in a hazy fog of smoke. His partner was spraying mist to cool the air down around them, but it was just making a denser fog.

  Uniforms were lime yellow, bandannas tied over mouths were triangles of red, gloves were white. Their helmets’ lights were diamonds in a cave of smoke. The fire engines were parked face-outwards, so they could flee if it became necessary. Men wrestled with the dragon that was a water-filled hose, three of them fighting the strength of the water in order to use it on the strength of the fire.

  This stretch of Grass featured glitzy residences amid wilderness as scrubby as backdrops for cowboy movies. Million-dollar houses lay below rough hills, dusty brown and full of tinder. Across the street, some moron homeowner actually thought he could drive eight cars out to safety. Listen, leave it this long, you weren’t driving one car out.

  His radio was full of half-decipherable reports coming from all over, ridden with static and interference. “…Pinch Canyon. It just blew.”

  My house! Matt clutched the little radio, as if the tighter he held it, the more he’d know.

  He had grown up on Pinch Canyon.

  He loved California: He loved the calendar year spiked not with holidays but with danger. He loved how southern California said to you — I didn’t ask you to come. I didn’t promise safety. How the land and climate fought back, waiting until you were relaxed and sure of yourself, then flinging in your face the proof that you were merely human.

  In southern California, danger was what building was all about. Logical, rational people wouldn’t dream of building in Pinch Canyon, which was a fire trap waiting for a hot, dry day and lots of wind and a vanity arsonist.

  But, oh — the beauty! The harsh, demanding canyon walls, the azure blue sky, the distant slurred watercolory hills.

  His parents’ house, unlike every other in Pinch Canyon, was down in the bottom, among the oaks and ferns and vines. It was a house meant for pets and children: Matt and his sister and brother had had dogs and lambs and ponies and gerbils, endless supplies of cats, once a llama, and once a Vietnamese pig. His parents could hardly stand it on the weekends if everybody didn’t have a friend sleep over, or two or three.

  There were always relatives from out East, descending on the Marshes to enjoy Matt’s sun and Matt’s horses and Matt’s canyon and Matt’s beaches.

  There was nobody home now during the day. Children and pets were long gone. But the watercolor his sister had done in first grade, the clay palm print Matt had done in kindergarten, these still held their places of honor and would be destroyed.

  His parents would be okay, even if they lost everything. He supposed that memories would be okay, too: Nothing would damage the happy childhood he had had. But how he wanted the house and the oaks to survive!

  Well, somebody else was fighting in Pinch. He was here. Matt swigged water from his belt canteen. The water was hot as coffee. His side pack held a silver blanket to be brought out if he faced death: He was to wrap himself in his own shroud. Then he’d just have to pray that man-made materials really did hold off fire and wouldn’t instead just help cook him.

  Some annoying girl without a brain kept wanting to talk with him. All he could say was, “Get out of here!” but she couldn’t follow that instruction any better than anybody else.

  A silver-and-red tanker plane spread fire retardant chemicals in front of the fire. On the ground, it was gaudy red, so firefighters could see where it had been dumped. “Of course, they can’t spread it here,” said June furiously, “because we have so many jerk homeowners who won’t go, and they can’t spray the stuff on people. If they’d just leave like they were told, we could save their houses!”

  Did the blonde girl realize that “jerk” meant her? No, of course not, jerks were always other people. She smiled at him, as if they were on a date, or something.

  “Morons,” said June.

  The girl kept smiling.

  Los Angeles

  4:07 P.M.

  COURTNEY AZSLING DID NOT worry easily.

  Fire? Earthquake? Thrown from a horse? Struck by a car? Felled by lightning? You could just as easily get hit by a falling asteroid or choke on a french fry. Stable, interesting people did not waste their time worrying.

  Still, Courtney Aszling did wonder briefly if she should check to be sure that Elony and Chiffon had things under control. These fires seemed to be popping up everywhere, like revolutions in third world countries. But telephones were a problem. Elony hated the phone and let the answering machine take all calls, and Chiffon was usually with the baby, and didn’t answer either.

  Chiffon, she thought, shaking her head. Her parents probably meant to call her Siobhan and didn’t know how to spell it, so the kid ended up named for a midwestern pie. Pitiful excuse for a name.

  Courtney Aszling knew, because she was a judgmental woman, that Chiffon was also a pitiful excuse for a person, a truly lousy choice for your only child’s caretaker, but it was hard to find full-time help that spoke English.

  Before Drew and Courtney Aszling knew that being photogenic would be the only good thing about Geoffrey, they bought him a billion clothes. This was the best-dressed child in California, and that was something. But a year had gone by, and he’d outgrown his wardrobe twice, and now had only a fraction of the number of clothes. Who needed a wardrobe when nobody was going to take you anywhere?

  This kid was sullen and unfriendly. He didn’t say hi when his parents came in nor good-bye when they left. If Geoffrey didn’t want to move, he didn’t move. If he didn’t want to eat, he didn’t eat. If he didn’t want to take riding lessons, he didn’t get on the horse.

  There was absolutely not one thing Geoffrey did unless he felt like it. Mostly, he felt like watching TV, wrapped in that repulsive purple velour, and sucking his thumb.

  Courtney Aszling was so sorry she’d gotten sentimental about infants, swept up in this nonsense about biological clocks. She had a clock all right. Geoffrey was a little time bomb.

  She thought gloomily of the next fifteen years. How early did boarding school start, anyway? In England, you could ship them off when they were six. Look at the little princes.

  Now there was an idea. If it was right for the British royal family, it was surely right for her.

  Courtney Aszling felt so cheerful about the boarding school possibility she forgot to check on anybody.

  The Severyn House

  4:08 P.M.

  “OKAY,” SAID BEAU, ORGANIZING himself. “Stay with me, Lizzie, or I’ll get nervous. Now, we’re going to use the swimming pool water to keep the house wet. This’ll be a real adventure, Lizzie.”

  They crossed several rooms and emerged in the reflecting pool area, where green grass and tall cypress did not appear to have noticed a change in temperature.

  “Beau, the deck is burning,” said Elisabeth, pointing.

  It was a tidy little burn. Beau focused the hose, dropped a steady stream of water on the knee-high
flames, and it went out with a hiss of protest.

  Elisabeth clapped. “Aw-right Beau! I get to do the next one.”

  The next one was a single splash of fire eating up the wood chips with which a flower garden was mulched. Beau was puzzled. “I thought those were soaking wet from the irrigation.” He and Elisabeth got as close as they could and worked on the bonfire.

  Beau thought he was facing the source of the fire. He did not stop to think how immense his house was, how it extended on several levels, blocking his view.

  They whipped the bonfire and shook on it.

  Elisabeth was thrilled to be partners with her big brother.

  “I’m so thirsty,” she said. “Firefighting is hot work. Let’s get a Coke.”

  They turned, standing on a curve of the cement walk that wound among the cypresses, to find the house entirely enveloped in smoke.

  The Luu Stable

  4:08 P.M.

  LAST YEAR AFTER THE mud slides, they couldn’t even get to Pinch Canyon, because the Pacific Coast Highway was closed. Mud like hot brown lava had streamed across the road. What fascinated Danna was that it looked alive: It was no longer an inert object. It had plans — places to go, people to see, houses to destroy.

  On the road into Pinch Canyon was a place so horribly eroded that Danna didn’t like looking at it. It had been tortured, as if the hillside had once been alive, and the forces of mud and gravity and fire had ripped its living skin off, and left a scarred, dry, dead husk.

  Somebody had sprayed it with grass seed, that queer greenish blue-gray color of the stickum that was supposed to keep the unsprouted seed from blowing off the dead hill. Danna didn’t see how the poor little seeds were supposed to break through the crust and find good dirt for their roots. It seemed a lot to ask of one little teensy seed you could hardly even see in the palm of your hand.

  Now she looked with approval at the reseeded areas on various parts of Pinch Canyon. They would be firebreaks, and at the pace at which firefighters were coming to rescue them, it looked as if Danna and Hall were going to need every firebreak they could get.

  Where were the firefighters?

  She could hear her father now, asking just what he was paying all these taxes for, anyway.

  Oh, well, they’d be here any second. LA had fabulous fire departments, they were famous. Danna liked being from a place where everything was the best and everybody was famous.

  She ran lightly up to the Luu stable. It was a cute little building, with curlicues carved on the eaves and doors. Egypt and Spice were in the paddock, circling and snorting and jigging anxiously. They wanted to get inside the stable, where they would feel familiar, and the fact that the stable was beginning to burn did not penetrate their little horse brains.

  It did not occur to Danna to be afraid of Egypt or Spice.

  She reached in the open stable door and grabbed the leads hanging there. It sure was a good thing she had gotten up here. The stable was going to bomb out the way that propane tank had, what with the hay and straw.

  She spoke comfortingly to the horses and clipped the leads on their halters. They were not comforted.

  I suppose, she thought resentfully, Hall will put up a fuss and we won’t stay with the house. He’ll make us go to the evacuation point. The local high school. How dumb. We won’t have any fun that way.

  She had not gone to public schools very long. Just first grade. Her room had had kids from Japan, Korea, Argentina, Armenia, Israel, Iraq, the Philippines, and, of course, immigrants from Oregon, Brooklyn, and Massachusetts. Of the twenty-nine children in her class, twelve didn’t speak English at home. That was enough for her parents. Hall and Danna entered private school in only six weeks. Danna was always a little sorry. Even though she had great friends, loved her school, and was loyal to every decision her parents made, she wished she could have learned to talk to the kids from all those neat countries, and find out who was homesick and who was rich and who was smart and who was not.

  In an instant, it became very clear who was smart and who was not.

  The stable went with a blast of noise like the brass section of a symphony. Spice shuddered and plunged his head up and down, but Egypt, crazed with shock and fear, reared. His huge hoof, coming down, hit her in the shin, and she actually heard her bone snap.

  “Oh, great work, Egypt.”

  She didn’t fall only because she’d kept her grip on the leads, hanging onto them like trapeze ropes. She yanked the horses’ heads down and for some reason this satisfied them so they calmed down a little, but she couldn’t move. She couldn’t put her weight on the broken leg. She couldn’t mount either horse. She couldn’t take a single step.

  They stood there — horse, girl, and horse — while a hundred feet away, fire engulfed the stable, and turned the hay bales into ovens.

  ARSON WATCH

  The Aszling House

  4:08 P.M.

  GEOFFREY LAY INSIDE HIS blankie. He loved not being able to see anything. He loved the safe purple privacy. He loved his thumb and the hardness of the floor beneath him.

  Only Elony was there, which was nice. She never tried to change him around. She’d fixed him a cup of milk with the little screw top, like a baby bottle but not really, so he could lie there and still drink. She lay on the floor with him and they were munching popcorn out of the same bowl.

  His blankie was actually her velour, and his parents were always trying to make him give it back, but he knew Elony wouldn’t make him. Elony understood that one possession could form the whole world. She never talked. She didn’t try to assault him with her arms and hands and speech the way other people did.

  Geoffrey wondered if Hall would come.

  Geoffrey didn’t care for speech. But Hall adored speech. If Geoffrey answered Hall just once, Hall laughed and clapped and did somersaults. Geoffrey wanted to somersault, and had even thought about trying it, but mostly Geoffrey never tried anything.

  Even Geoffrey, upon whom little had an impact, sat up when Hall burst into the house screaming. “Fire!” yelled Hall.

  Geoffrey’s velour fell down around his lap, and he gathered it quickly. You never knew when people would try to take something from you.

  “Come on!” screamed Hall. “Where’s that nursemaid? Where’s Chiffon?”

  Elony glared at him for being so loud and not even knocking. “Chiffon take car. Errands,” said Elony.

  “There’s a fire,” said Hall, grabbing at her. “Come on.”

  Elony hated being plucked at, as if she were frozen food. She didn’t want to go with Hall. It was bad enough she’d missed her bus. She didn’t want any other disruptions.

  “Fine,” said Hall. He grabbed Geoffrey, who of course did not cooperate. The little boy rolled over fast, cocooning himself into a fat purple worm. When Hall struggled to lift Geoffrey, he squirmed and made himself heavier. Geoffrey remained mute, while Hall screamed and yelled.

  To Elony, this frantic shoving was unpleasant. She moved between the limp, silent purple child and the hopping frenetic teenager.

  “There’s a fire!” shrieked Hall. “Don’t you understand?”

  Elony shrugged.

  Hall wanted to put a fist through her. What was with these people, shrugging when…

  …when it dawned on him that the shrug didn’t mean Elony was bored. It meant she didn’t know the word fire.

  Hall yanked open the heavy drapes and pointed.

  The view should have been 3-D: closest, the baskets of pink and white fuschia edging the redwood deck; center, green oleanders growing below the deck; distant, Pinch Mountain silhouetted against a reliably blue sky.

  Flowers, decks, and oleanders were the right colors in the right place. Pinch Mountain, however, was orange, and the spacious blue sky was black and white and seething all over with smoke.

  “Fire,” said Hall.

  “Fire,” repeated Elony. It was not a vocabulary word she was likely to forget.

  Los Angeles

  4:
08 P.M.

  ADEN SEVERYN HAD NOT even waited for the valet to bring up his car. His heart pounded so hard he could barely think. Blood slammed around the corners of his body, screeching through his gut like bad brakes. His Mercedes, however, had excellent brakes. He left patches at every turn. If Beau did that, he’d take the kid’s license away.

  On the radio, the mayor said, “If you are a resident of Pinch Canyon, get out now. This is serious. Do not water your roof. Do not stop to find old photographs. Get. Out. Now.”

  Mr. Severyn could not believe what he was hearing. That fire was miles away! he thought. He was furious with the fire for moving so fast. Furious with fire departments for not preventing it better. Furious with himself for not listening to the news coverage — he whose world was news coverage — furious that nobody had told him about the shift in the wind.

  He turned the radio volume way up. Sure enough, the mayor repeated himself. This is serious. Do not water your roof. Do not stop to find old photographs. Get. Out. Now.

  I’m sure the sheriff’s department already cleared Pinch Canyon. The kids’re probably at some evacuation point already.

  He grabbed his phone and called Beau. Nobody answered.

  Was it ringing in a safely empty house? Or was it ringing amidst flames, his two children lying near it, suffocated by smoke?

  He had a sudden whir of memory: an old black-and-white film playing without warning. How the year Elisabeth was two, he used to come home on time, running in the door, scooping her up in his arms, tipping her little body skyward and kissing her little nose as her tiny sneakers scraped the ceiling. He remembered her giggle of joy, her utter happiness that Daddy was home.

  Aden Severyn made remarkable time for several miles by driving homicidally, cutting in and out with inches to spare.

  Traffic slowed.

  Traffic jams had never bothered this man. He was prepared. He had an excellent sound system. He had phone and fax. The soft vanilla leather and flawless, soundless air-conditioning were comforting, and when his foot was on the accelerator and his finger on the radio dial, the car was his kingdom.