Flash Fire

by Caroline B. Cooney

  Chiffon was suddenly very glad she had lied about her name and age when she got the job on Pinch Canyon. Very glad neither Mr. nor Mrs. Aszling had ever asked for a social security number, since they didn’t want to pay their share, because she would be in real trouble if they could find her. But they couldn’t, so there you were.

  Chiffon walked away, slipping through crowds of returning homeowners. She was not hanging around to be accused of abandoning a child so he could burn to death.

  It doesn’t matter, she reminded herself. Elony was there.

  Grass Canyon Road

  4:20 P.M.

  WENDY SEVERYN STARED AT the fire.

  It had finished its job on this stretch of road.

  Where firefighters walked, ash and fire rose up behind them like hot shadows. People had already returned to their destroyed neighborhood, weeping at the solitary standing chimney where once they had had a home, or stunned and rejoicing because the fire had leapfrogged and the zinnia still bloomed and the cat was fine.

  Wendy was on Grass, two miles north of Pinch Canyon Road and as unlikely to get there by car as her husband was from several miles south. Traffic wasn’t traffic; it wasn’t moving. Cars had to move to qualify as traffic.

  Wendy Severyn was in excellent shape. She ran mile after mile on the treadmill at the health club. She could abandon the car and run to Pinch. She was so carbound in her thinking that using feet had not previously crossed her mind. Leaving her car was frightening. It was her world, her safety zone, her climate control, her freedom.

  Since she liked to be prepared for any occasion, however, she had her gym bag in the car. She changed into running shoes (she had paid more for them than she paid the housekeeper in a week), drove up over a sidewalk, abandoned the car alongside some brick building, strapped on her cellular phone, and started running.

  Running up Grass Canyon Road, which climbed slowly and steadily into the hills, was the most exhausting sweaty thing she had ever undertaken in her life. She felt healed, as if she were most of the way into some twelve-step program. Her heart was racing, her lungs gasping, her thighs stabbing with pain, but she was on her way to save her children and that was good.

  In ten minutes, she’d run to where traffic was traffic again, weaving, pressing, honking, cutting ahead, drivers staring madly and blindly at some invisible safe spot.

  Her throat and lungs hurt and no matter how deeply she breathed, she couldn’t get enough air. She wondered if fire could literally burn off the oxygen in the air.

  One of us will find the children, she thought. She wanted it to be her. She had a wonderful vision of herself as heroine: lovely and strong and full of lifesaving abilities. How Beau would admire her.

  “Help me,” said somebody.

  Wendy Severyn did not want to break her rhythm, and did not glance at the speaker.

  “Please! Help me.”

  A hand closed over Wendy Severyn’s arm. She was furious at this trespass of her space. She turned to shake it off and tell the person where to go, but it was some burn victim. Its gender and age were unclear, its clothes singed and torn, its hair and eyebrows burned off. Wendy Severyn gagged.

  “I need medical help,” said the thing.

  She did not want to be the one.

  She looked wildly around for another rescuer. Some official, some person with training, some Good Samaritan type who liked doing this kind of thing.

  But the chaos around her had solidified into a nightmare stream of vehicles and humans coming and going on missions of their own and she felt as if she could hunt for hours and nobody would turn to help.

  It wrapped its fingers around her forearm and the fingers were all ooky and blackened and somehow wet and oozing.

  She was afraid. She didn’t know any first aid. She didn’t want to touch it and she didn’t want it to touch her either.

  I can’t be stopping to help every person who should have gotten out in time! she thought. I have to get home!

  She shook the hand off her arm, with the thought that she was glad Beau had not seen her do that.

  Beau.

  What if Beau were hurt? Would a stranger stop and help Beau? Or would the stranger shake him off and continue on his own errand?

  Wendy Severyn sat down on the edge of the road. She got up again very fast, dusting her bottom, feeling like the idiot of the century. How many people literally sat down on hot coals? She blushed. She was going to display proof of her stupidity until she had a chance to change clothes.

  Assuming she still had a house and a closet.

  “Okay,” she said to the burn victim, “okay,” as if this would make things okay and give her a plan. “I passed fire trucks down below us,” she said, “so, okay, we’ll go back down there and find doctors.”

  “I can’t walk.”

  Wendy Severyn could not carry this person. This was an adult. She began knocking on the hoods of passing cars, crying out, shouting for people to stop and take a passenger.

  Nobody paid any attention. It wasn’t that they turned her down, it was that terror had given them their own agendas, and they couldn’t really focus on Wendy Severyn.

  She had a sudden vision of her own little girl, knocking endlessly on her parents’ lives, but they never saw, and never stopped, and never paid attention.

  Pinch Canyon Road

  4:21 P.M.

  HALL WOULD HAVE TO drive right over fire.

  Branches had been hurled by the tornado of the fire into the street, and were burning in his path.

  What happened to cars driving through fire? What happened to the gas in the tank? What happened to the passengers in the car? Should he have the windows down, in which case fire and burning wind could come through, or up, in which case they would get so hot inside the car they would poach? Should he try running the air-conditioning on an engine so hot he was afraid to place another demand on it?

  “Okay, guys, hang on.” He put the pedal to the metal, relying on speed as his only defense, and drove over flame. Either the undersides of cars were not bothered by fire after all, or the Suburban was a really great car. In any event they hurtled to the mouth of Pinch Canyon, the fire behind them, safety in front of them — and the gate was closed.

  Nobody sat in the little guardhouse.

  Nobody stood waiting to swing the wide gate and give them a little wave.

  Hall had actually expected Alan Davey to stay with his job, had actually expected him to help at this stage. But that was absurd. Of course any halfway sane person would be long gone. Mr. Davey had a tiny little color TV in the guardhouse, and probably had been paying attention, as Danna and Hall had not, to local warnings.

  Part of the guard’s job was to use a special all-house warning system on the phone monitor. The phones are out, Hall remembered. Luckily, the Severyns kept the magnetic gate card under a little strap on the visor, and Hall yanked it down and swiped it through the little slot to open the gate.

  It failed.

  He ran it through again. And a third time.

  The gate did not open.

  Cool, said Hall to himself.

  His sister moaned; Elisabeth whispered, “No, no, no, no, no,” and Elony was praying in Spanish. There seemed no point in consulting with anybody back there.

  High canyon walls gave him very little vision. Smoke made it hard to gauge whether there was a safety zone ahead or not. He wondered where Egypt and Spice were. He felt sick about the horses.

  “Stupid gate,” muttered Hall. He jumped out, casting a desperate look behind him. No flames yet. He raced to open the gate by hand.

  It would not open.

  Hall couldn’t believe it.

  Then he remembered that that was the point of having a gate: to stop people from opening it.

  It must unlock from the guardhouse.

  Slow feet lifted through slow time. Swollen brain and fat fingers struggled to accomplish any task at all.

  I’m panicking, he thought. I cannot panic. Nobody can he
lp but me. This is my job. Period. Do not panic.

  It helped to admit that he was panicking. Sort of like AA, he thought, where it helped to admit you were a drunk.

  Good evening. My name is Halstead Press and I’ve panicked, he said to an invisible meeting, and grinned to himself.

  The guardhouse itself was locked.

  What — did Mr. Davey think somebody would loot the guardhouse? Take his little TV?

  In the pretty little beds of flowers beyond the gate, he saw the unmistakable tracks of horses. They’d figured out how to get around. So Hall certainly ought to be able to, too. He kicked in the door of the guardhouse, unlocked the gate from the inside, opened the gate with another kick — kicks were so satisfying — and leaped back in the Suburban. The size and weight of the vehicle made him realize that the gate was actually just a toy: He could have barreled through like a stunt driver, and the Suburban would have been fine, would have carried the gate on its bumper like a Christmas wreath.

  Everybody — Danna, Elisabeth, Elony, and Geoffrey — sighed with relief when Hall was back and driving.

  He loved that.

  He loved that they needed him, that they were afraid without him, that they had no savior but Hall himself.

  I’m the hero, thought Hall, and he was stunned and proud.

  The Severyn House

  4:21 P.M.

  THE HOUSE STANK EVILLY, every shred of Dacron, Orion, rayon, polyester, and Teflon emitting poisons as they melted or burned. Beau came in through the front door, which was wide open. The wind swooshed through, and Beau so completely misunderstood what wind and fire did together that he was grateful for the breeze. He jogged into the living room, which was intact, in a filthy sort of way: It looked preburned. Gray, but not charred.

  He grabbed the cardboard box with such vigor and relief that he crushed the box and the ashes began to fall out. He yanked his shirt up like an apron to contain the box bottom and grinned. He’d done it. And the driveway wasn’t that bad. He could get back down it and though he couldn’t catch up to the Suburban, he bet he could outrun the fire.

  The house sucked in oxygen like a kid with a straw in the bottom of the milk shake.

  Beau seized the couch blanket, the one that Lizzie liked to wrap up in, claiming the air-conditioning was too cold for sitting still. The water still flowed in the kitchen faucet, so he soaked the blanket — and then fire jumped out of the walls. It licked him and his box.

  He looked down at his arms and fire was resting on them.

  He jerked away, but the fire rested on his pant legs.

  Smoke came, but separately, somehow, like a second enemy.

  Go back out the front door, he told himself, and he lurched toward the big main room. It surprised him that his fine strong reliable legs were not doing very well. He needed great gulps of air, but when he took great gulps there was no oxygen in it, and he felt his head puffing and yet condensing. Felt himself losing brain and thought.

  The smoke closed in: filthy, oily, disgusting smoke, coating his face and his lips and his tongue and his throat and the inside of his lungs.

  Fire rose up in front of him, filling the living room where it was impossible for flames to be, because the floor was tile, it couldn’t burn.

  He whirled like the fire: the two of them in a dance before they met as permanent partners.

  His shoelaces were blackening. He could not tell if they were starting to burn, or if the smoke had coated them.

  His chest hurt in a way unrelated to heart or muscle.

  I’m dying in my lungs, he thought. I’ll die on the inside before I burn on the outside.

  For Michael, it had been the reverse: AIDS had taken him on the outside, destroying his body, but leaving his mind and the ability to feel pain right there. Or so Beau guessed. He was a closet AIDS-reader. He read everything he could find on it, trying to be where his unknown brother had been. And everything he read was so hideous. It was such a vicious disease. Your body rotted without letting your soul go.

  Beau needed to get out of the house.

  Now.

  But he could not discern the outlines of the room.

  Where there should have been a door, there was solid flatness, and where there should have been a wall, there was empty stretching space. He was lost in the smoke of his own house.

  Or his own mind.

  What am I doing here? he thought.

  Had this master plan of foolishness — taking Michael to safety — been percolating in his mind ever since the box arrived on the mantel?

  Or was it lack of oxygen and panic coalescing like a chem lab experiment gone bad?

  This wasn’t Michael, this box. Wherever Michael was, he wasn’t in this box. And Dad — whatever Dad hoped for, keeping that box there — Dad wasn’t going to find it in a box. And Beau — whatever he needed to know about why his father had abandoned his firstborn but was good to his second-born — Beau was only going to learn that by asking his father.

  Michael, thought Beau, I’ve done something really stupid.

  Heat was on all sides. Smoke had hidden the escape routes, if there were any. Lack of oxygen had absorbed his thoughts, and the sneakers he kept trying to lift kept not lifting.

  There had to be a way out.

  Of course, there was no way out of AIDS. In trying to discover his brother, was Beau just following him?

  People would find his body. They would try to figure out what he had been doing, where he had been going. Would they stand there, some official committee, plus his mother and father, shaking their heads and saying, “Kids. They’re so dumb. What did he think would happen?”

  He didn’t want to die stupid.

  He didn’t want to die.

  He saw himself quite plainly in that fraction of a second: a strong young man standing still, doing nothing, waiting for the fire to take him.

  I’m not trying, he thought, and was stunned by this discovery.

  But it took oxygen to try anything, and Beau had none left.

  Pinch Canyon Gate

  4:22 P.M.

  FROM WAY UP AND way behind the Suburban came a huge tearing screaming sound. Like an avalanche. Hall pressed the gas down harder, and looked up into the rear view mirror, peering through the grime of the back windshield to see what enemy was chasing them now.

  Fire had burned away the underpinnings of the Severyn deck, and some of the house. The house had actually ripped, or burned, in half, and was falling down the steep sheer drop into the canyon rock below.

  ARMED RESPONSE

  Pinch Canyon

  4:24 P.M.

  ELONY HAD FOUND IN life that it is best not to look.

  Don’t look back, don’t look to the sides, sometimes don’t even look ahead, just go blind.

  Elony herself looked mainly down at Danna, who was not coping well with agony. Elony had been in agony a time or two but she hadn’t screamed and cried like this.

  Elisabeth was also sobbing, which Elony certainly understood. If her big brother had run back into a burning building, she would have wept also. Elony rather liked Beau, since he so often gave her a ride to the bus stop. She was sorry that he was a fool.

  She scooped Elisabeth into her arms. How willingly the little girl came. As if arms were things she dreamed of and Elisabeth was always on the lookout for arms. “Your brother will be all right,” said Elony. “God will take care of him.”

  “Really?” whispered Elisabeth.

  “All he has to do is ask.” Her English had arrived! Sort of like a bus, coming on time for once. Elony was amazed and proud.

  “I’m not sure Beau would ask God for anything,” said Elisabeth nervously.

  Really, she was a plain little thing. Elony felt sorry for her. These were the beautiful people. You had to have so much personality to overcome being plain among the beautiful. “Then we will ask, you and I,” said Elony, “and God will still hear.”

  Elony was not certain that God paid attention to barbaric languages, s
o she prayed in Spanish.

  Pinch Canyon

  4:24 P.M.

  PINE TREES SWAYED SO much in the updrafts they looked as if they were planning to run away. The fire climbed them in seconds, almost faster than you could count. The cones were a different color fire from the bark and the needles: For a moment each cone was scarlet, like a Christmas tree bulb.

  Halstead Press could not get over the magnificence of it — and the extent of it. Where did it end? When would he come out? Were they caught in some reverse tunnel in which everything was light and fire, and nothing was dark, unlit, and safe?

  He was not great at steering, nor braking, nor accelerating.

  It was clear that these things took practice, and should not be taken up by individuals fleeing fire. The steering wheel was not at the right angle for Hall, and the floor pedals seemed far too large for human feet, as if the car designer had had a Yeti in mind.

  When Hall was eight, he’d gotten into drag racing and spent lots of time on a track, but he lost interest before he was ten, to his father’s sorrow, because this was a father/son activity if there ever was one. Actual car driving, in actual normal-sized cars (not that the Suburban was normal — it was like driving a tank) Hall had never done.

  The fine smooth roads of California turned out to be full of bumps and dips. Each bump and dip was accompanied by a cry of pain from Danna.

  The adrenaline in him made Hall a different person. In spite of his inexperience and fear, he was extremely confident. Confidence filled him, topped him, he was overflowing with certainty that he knew what he was doing and would pull it off. In only a few hundred yards, another minor fire to skirt, another deep canyon drop-off not to go off, and they would emerge onto Grass Canyon Road where ARMED RESPONSE would be there to welcome him and set Danna’s leg.

  It was at this profound moment that the kittens finally broke out of their cardboard. Within seconds Kumquat, Lemon, and Orange were everywhere; it felt as if there were twenty or thirty kittens, on the dashboard, on his shoulder, under the gas pedal. “Elisabeth!” he yelled. “Get the kittens!”