Page 47 of Smoke Season

“In other words, a hot mess ... literally,” Lewis supplied.

“But not, like, made of fire ...” Ryan’s sentence trailed off, doubt adding an upward lilt to his voice that probably hadn’t been heard since puberty.

“’Course not, dumbass,” Deklan said. “This isn’t World of Warcraft.” But he turned to Lewis all the same. “Right?”

He made it a point to keep his own tone even, but everyone could hear the trepidation that crept around the corner of his question.

Sly slapped him on the back. “Hey now, since when has a cloud ever hurt anybody?” he said with obvious false cheer. “It may lead to rain.”

Or more lightning.Mel clamped her mouth shut hard on the word.

“Plus,” Sly continued, “those hotshots are pros. They’ll have things under control.” More baloney he’d promised Doris to set her mind at ease, no doubt, but Mel let it go.

Lewis snagged the water bottle midair to drop it back into Deklan’s hands. “So stop fooling around and get ready to roll out.”

Mel’s own mission would be harder to accomplish. And she was acutely aware that if everything didn’t go exactly right, it could compromise her team. Even cost her her job. She swallowed hard. Even when it was hell, even when she felt pulled impossibly far away from her kids, sheneededthis job. Her whole family did.

But then she thought of True, risking exposure and even arrest out on the river each week, and her resolve strengthened, even if her nerves still churned as she ran her toothbrush under a conservative stream of water from their Gatorade jug mounted on the side of the engine. She dipped her head under the flow next, for only the count of threeseconds before hastily shutting it off and running her hands through her hair, slicking back strands still stiff with dust-caked sweat. And to think she’d just had a shower yesterday morning at the station.

She sat down heavily in the passenger seat of the truck cab, toying with the radio, worrying the thick cord between her fingers. Thinking.Scheming, more like.She slammed one hand down hard on the dash in a sudden burst of frustration, making herself jump at the violent yet satisfying crack.Dammit.Mel hated what she had to do.

There was no way around it, far as she could see: getting away from her team would require a lie. Two lies, she forced herself to amend, one outright to Lewis, her second-in-command out here, when she told him Hernandez had called her away on a side job, and another of omission to whoever Lew told her to take with her, enabling her to disregard Carbon Rural’s buddy system. She’d never thought she’d see the day.

I’m doing this for my family,she reminded herself fiercely as she dug into the MRE stash to count out rations. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Lewis refilling the water jugs. Doing his duty, unaware that his colleague, his comrade in arms, planned to shirk hers. Mel forced herself to think of Annie at her worst: hooked up to machines, disappearing on a rolling gurney down long, shiny hospital corridors, her body impossibly tiny under a thin sheet.I’m doing this to protect the girls and True.Because where would her best friend be if Mel failed to retrieve the ammo box and its contents? She thought of Fallows’s ominous presence at the bar and doubled down on her resolve.

They rolled out on foot, Mel leading her crew over the bridge and up the embankment on the slope adjacent to the lodge. When she looked back, the tired-looking souls trudging after her in a stoic line made for a sorry sight. “Here’s good,” she called out eventually, after the last of the rookies had crossed the dirt access road leading into Wonderland. They’d use this road as a launching point for the containment line that would protect the lodge. From this vantage point on the ridge, Mel gauged the distance to be about 200 yards to the riverbank. Doable, though brutal, even with power tools at their disposal.

She waited for Deklan and Ryan to lift their axes and begin to stab unenthusiastically at the earth before doing what she knew she had to do.

“Be right back,” she told Lewis, who worked his side at the front of the line, feigning a bleep from the radio on her chest that hadn’t made so much as a squawk. She walked exactly five steps, turned her back, unstrapped the walkie like she meant to speak into it, waited another count of five, restrapped it, then walked back. To Lewis, she said, “Gotta move downriver, do a sweep.”

“What? Why?” His confused expression made Mel’s stomach lurch.

“Hernandez is on my ass again. Whataya gonna do.” She couldn’t look Lewis in the eye, so she settled for staring down at his dirt-encrusted boots.

“Take one of the kids, hmm? Deklan, how about?”

“You just want him outa your hair,” Mel accused, trying for a laugh. She managed a wan smile, which Lewis had a hard time returning. And no wonder: Who found things funny forty-eight hours into a fire? Containment was barely at 20 percent. They’d slept on the damned ground. Ain’t nobody happy, least of all the battalion chief and her first assistant. “Sure,” she told him. “I’ll grab him as I leave.”

But she waited for Lewis to disappear along the line, up and over the top of the hill, then strode toward her truck without pausing as she passed Deklan and Ryan. She didn’t need the deadweight. She certainly didn’t need to answer Deklan’s persistent questions. Both boys were bent to their task, finally working without whining, as Mel turned the key in the ignition, feeling her truck roar to life underneath her.

She pointed the nose of the truck west, putting the fire at her back, lurching along the river road from Wonderland toward Temple. Other than river shuttles, hardly anyone drove this route save for the Martins, dropping off guests to fish at the boat ramp, or the few Carbon folkswith fishing cabins out here. Like Fallows’s contacts, whom True had to deal with. But also like Colby Phick, who had water rights out this way, and the Wrights ... good people, if determined to keep to themselves. Mel hoped they’d evacuated by now. She had forgotten how severely this route twisted and turned as it sought out the path of least resistance amid the ridgelines and cliffsides, and she found herself fighting a sense of misplacement, like she was going in the wrong direction. Probably because shewas.Firefighter training, like Sam’s Army training, was harder than one would think to shake off, even to save one’s own skin, and it felt horrible to be drivingawayfrom her crew instead of toward it. Just like being away from her daughters felt horrible, and working with Fallows felt horrible. Yes, every move she made this summer took her one step closer to Annie’s final surgery and health—but simultaneously one step farther from herself.

The smoke lay as dense here on this road as everywhere else, and Mel’s headlights shone through the gray-black trees with an eerie lack of impact, even in daytime. The wind had picked up, too, blowing the boughs of the trees. She swallowed another rush of nerves and uncertainty.You’ve come this far,she told herself firmly. Because she couldn’t forget what else the academy had taught her:You never, ever abandon a mission.And certainly not one this important.

The closer she got to Temple Bar, the heavier the sense of wrongness lay on Mel’s conscience. She was taking this risk for her family, but where would they be if something happened to her out here? Something worse than risking her job? The catch-22s just kept coming.

It didn’t help that the electricity in the air now felt like a living, breathing thing, charging every move she made. She envisioned the usual chaos of the boat launch in daylight, then adjusted the picture in her head. Today, the morning light was nonexistent. The launch would be a ghost town. She didn’t like being alone, which was rich, considering the lengths she had gone to to evade having company on this mission. At least with the boat ramp deserted, no one would bear witness to herplaying hooky from her team. From her carrying out her little errand. At least she was still heading away from the blaze, not toward it.

She made the turn at the dirt junction between the river road and the spur to Temple and was straining forward at the wheel, trying to discern the parking lot through the smoke, when she heard it: the telltalecrack!of wildfire. At first, she thought she had imagined it, she was so jumpy out here on her own. Because this crack was not at a distance, as she’d heard droning on all morning. This deafening roar reverberated off the nearest ridgeline; the Flatiron Fire proper, crashing through forest. Jumping a line.

Impossible! She’d just heard the hotshots, working with the hand crews on the ground, report they had this all in hand not even an hour ago. And yet this sound was unmistakable, even if it was indescribable to anyone who hadn’t heard it, especially to anyone who hadn’t heard it in the field, in the expanse of the wilderness. Hearing it alone, shaking the cab of the truck, was nothing short of terrifying.

The roar felt so close by, the sound and vibrations hit Mel before the smell and sight. When she did see it, the wall of fire looked angrier than ever, and her terror doubled. Her heart hammering so hard in her chest she could feel the pounding in her pulse in her neck and head, she watched as ponderosa trunks broke like twigs; she could glimpse their flaming tops falling to the forest floor somewhere in front of her. Had the fire jumped further west, into the path of the road? She had no way of knowing until she came upon it, swerving this way and that. Had all her deep misgivings about this mission been on point? Was she going to die out here, her truck crashed into a tree trunk or over the riverbank? Would her remains be identified in a burned-out rig, with no one, other than True, to explain why she’d been here, on her own, betraying her team, in the first place? The thought of that very viable reality was almost more than Mel could bear.

On the ridge above her at her two o’clock, the underbrush and madrone trees and sage were ablaze in a blanket of red. Somehow,impossibly, the Flatiron Fire had burned right past the line created by her crew to beat her here.

Skidding to a halt, she cast a desperate glance toward the road in front of her—the path to Temple Bar—and then behind her, where smoke billowed and tree trunks cracked parallel to her under the pressure of two-thousand-degree heat. Mel found herself smack in the middle, in the worst game of pickle ever played. The ammo box lay just before her, not a quarter mile further down the road. And True was counting on her. True, who might be in danger right this minute as well, thanks to Mel, who should never have given her that rapid tag. But closest to this blaze was her crew, her Carbon Ruralfamily. Had they been caught by surprise at Wonderland? Were they scrambling, right this very moment, to fight this new breach?

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