Page 62 of Smoke Season

Claude sort of jumped in his seat, like Sam’s cry had activated him, turning the key aggressively in the ignition. Nothing.

“Claude!” Sam shouted again, becausewhywere they notmoving?

“I know, I know!” He cranked the key again; this time the truck gave a screech of protest, but the engine still refused to roll over. “It’s overheated!” Claude yelled, pointing one thick finger at the heat gauge on the dash. “Grab the hose! We gotta cool it!”

Sam wrenched open the door, only to emit a curse before flinging it shut again on base instinct. Because the second he’d exposed them to the outside air, a new, unprecedented heat had hit them all with full force against the wall of wind. It was as though they’d suddenly tumbled straight into an industrial clothes dryer.

“Dad!” Astor yelled again, and despite her morphined state, Annie began to cry again, a high-pitched, raspy wail. Even with the truck door closed again, the heat in the cab had risen. Surely, it had not been this hot in here three minutes ago. Even one minute ago.

“What-are-we-gonna-do?” Astor cried, eyes huge as she stared forward, watching the fire approach. She gasped a breath, her eyes streaming tears, strands of hair stuck to her sweaty cheeks. “What’s happening?”

Somehow, impossibly, this newly merged fire had beaten them, meeting them at Highline before they could flee. It had gobbled right through Sam’s precious timeline, his carefully laid-out evacuation plan, his and Claude’s cautious efforts. It had caught them flat-footed, sitting in a Ford that simply wouldn’t run.

“I don’t know,” he shouted. Outside, all he saw was black and red and sparks in the air. Inside this metal shell, he felt only increasing heat.

“Are we burning?” Annie mumbled. “Daddy, are we gonna burn up?”

“No!” he yelled, looking swiftly at Claude, which did nothing to reassure him. Claude’s eyes remained forward, his full focus on the fire, his hands now oddly braced on the steering wheel. Sam watched as the glass of the truck windshield steamed with this new, intense heat slowly, like a defroster working in reverse. “No, Annie, no,” he managedmore calmly. They all needed to remain calm. “Claude?” he said. Then, “Claude! We need to move!”

In answer, he turned the key in the ignition again. Not even a sputter answered from the engine.

“Do we go back inside?” Astor yelled.

“Daddy,” Annie cried again.

“Let me think!” Sam shouted. They couldn’t just sit here in the truck.

Claude tried the ignition yet again, cursing at the truck, his stooped shoulders angled toward the steering wheel as if he’d decided that putting his full weight behind the task would urge the old beast into gear. Nothing this time, either. Not even a click. Sam’s stomach dropped out from under him in a sickening lurch.

He must have said something, though he didn’t fully comprehend what, because Claude looked at him directly for the first time in minutes, his face a mask of something Sam had never, in all his years living next door to him on Highline, seen in the old German man: stark fear. “It’ll only get hotter in here,” he said, his voice, always so stalwart and steady, unnervingly shaky. “It’ll catch us in the car.”

“Dad?” Astor cried again. She clutched at his sleeve. “Claude!”

Sam cast an automatic glance back in the direction the mass exodus of evacuees had taken, though the last of the cars had long ago been swallowed in the haze of black, brake lights no longer visible. Every cell in his body told him to follow them, to get out and run if they had to. But then he looked forward again, and he knew instinctively they could not outrun what was coming for them.

Astor followed Sam’s gaze. “The fire’severywherenow!”

She was right. After merging with the new lightning fire, the Flatiron Fire had split somewhere on Buck Peak, one side burning faster than the other through the dry undergrowth of Highline. It now consumed both sides of the road, down Highlineandup, threatening to meet in the middle, like two forks of a river, Claude’s truck and theBishops’ house forming a sort of sandbar between the blazes. No, they wouldn’t escape it on foot any better than in this coffin of a car.

Was this it, then? Were Sam’s mistakes going to cost his children their very lives? Were they all going to perish here, depriving the woman he loved of her family, if Mel was even ... hadn’t already ... Sam couldn’t go there. All he knew: he and his kids were paying far, far too high a price for his wanting to keep his family whole and happy on this hill.

Claude looked once more at the blaze, then seemed to snap back into action, thank God. “Get back in the house!” he decided, suddenly loosening his vise grip on the wheel to hastily unbuckle Annie next to him. The leather steering wheel cover remained indented when he released it, softened in the heat. “All of you! Now! Take a deep breath! Brace yourselves! But get back in the house!”

“Shouldn’t we—Claude, what about your pond?” It was a desperately flung suggestion, the words literally stolen from him in the oppressive heat now that Claude had reopened his door.

“What? No! Look!”

Sam did, only to see flames billowing on all sides of Claude’s property.

The heat smothered them like a blanket, and he heard Annie cry out again, only to have her voice nearly instantly stolen from her by a fit of coughing. Sam, too, suddenly couldn’t breathe—actually couldn’t breathe; for the first time, the density of smoke that wafted in now was enough to choke them all. Taking as shallow of breaths as he could, he thought of that airline regulation, the one where you put your air mask on first, before your kids’, and decided that was both the best and the most useless advice ever. As if he wouldn’t die trying to loosen Astor’s seat belt. As if he wouldn’t drown in this smoke trying to ensure Annie got back through the front door. It was the way he felt about tet spells times one thousand.

Still in the truck, Astor had gone uncharacteristically quiet, her eyes wide as she watched the angry flames out the window get closerand closer, the wind spurring them on. Sam yanked on her hand, his other arm loaded with only what he deemed most essential, with what he always wrote at the top of his priority list: Annie’s cooler and oxygen. Even the medical bag proved secondary right now. Claude had already scooped up Annie and was making an awkward, unsteady sprint toward the front door, her small body wrapped around his midsection like a baby monkey. When Sam put his hand back on the door handle to make a similar exit with Astor, the metal burned his palm; he yelped in surprise at the unexpected, searing pain.

In the driveway, the smoke instantly rendered him blind. Now he understood Claude’s weaving, stumbling gait. He kept his hand tight in Astor’s and made what he hoped was a beeline for the porch steps, pushing through the front door just after Claude.

It felt better in here, just slightly—he could breathe, he could see Annie and Astor breathing, though Annie coughed and sputtered again after being exposed to the air, to a point that had Sam digging blindly through his pockets for her emergency inhaler. He could see Claude struggling to make a sprint for the kitchen.

It was a hazy gray inside, the smoke thicker than in a casino lounge, but Sam could choke out, “Claude! I don’t know if we should stay!” He cast about through the chaos that reigned in his brain for hard facts he might have gleaned through the years: wildfires had an uncanny habit of sweeping right past or over some buildings, even while consuming others. Their mowed field might provide protection, but it just as easily might not. He was certain now that had they stayed in the truck, they’d be dead already. Did the same fate await them here in the house?

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