Page 63 of Smoke Season

Mel’s words rushed in to haunt him.Is this really the hill you want to die on?No, no, no. Never.

But now it was too late. Leaving would be suicide.

But if this housewasto be his last stand, Highline serving as the only sanctuary left to them, running the hoses and soaking the roof jumped in priority. Braving the elements one more time, he flung back open the door, running, near bent double, to the closest outside spigotand cranking it all the way open. Would it be enough to keep the lick of the flames from jumping from the field and neighboring rooftops? He just didn’t know, but he ran to the next one, and then the last, ensuring all hoses were flowing.

Claude yelled something just as Sam ran back inside, though he could hardly hear him over the sound of the wind and, now, more water running in the kitchen sink. Claude bent over the tap, stoppering the drain with the little rubber piece Astor usually dropped behind the counter when she was on dish duty. “Get me towels ... all the towels!”

Sam ran for the guest bathroom, on this floor just off the living room, pulling hand towels off the rack and thrusting them at Astor, who’d followed him, crying. “Give these to Claude,” he ordered, refusing to allow himself to stop and comfort his daughter, refusing himself even one stingy glance at the familiar determination in Astor’s young eyes, fearful that right now he wouldn’t find it.

Claude soaked a towel and wrapped it around Annie, who in her drug-induced disorientation tried to yank it back off, sputtering on the cold, wet terry cloth. He ignored her, which was saying something. Annie had had Claude wrapped around her little finger from the day she’d come home from the hospital, already battle-worn from multiple surgeries.

The next time she flung off the towel, Sam urged the inhaler on her, demanding her to breathe on cue, yelling at her really, as she sobbed, eyes bleary and body limp, depressing the plastic button and blindly hoping the medication made its way into her lungs.

He ran up the stairs to the girls’ bathroom next, yanking Astor’s octopus-print terry robe off its hanger and dousing it in water from the tub. His eyes streamed tears: fear, smoke, adrenaline—somehow it had all become the same thing, one chemically driven, emotional ball of synergy that kept Sam moving forward, kept him soaking towels, gave him the strength to stagger back down the stairs under the dripping weight of them.

All the while, his brain played on a loop:How is this happening?They should have had time. He had his go bags. He had his list. He had his timeline. He’d waited for the evac order. Where had he gone astray? He’d never seen a fire do this. In all his years living in wildfire country, he’d never seen anything move this fast.

The wind rattled the windows now, smoke pouring in from even the best-sealed panes, the ones Sam had actually outsourced to a construction crew. He had no idea what was happening outside, only that it was angry and loud. He hadn’t realized fire could carry such noise, but thundering cracks cut the air amid bursts of hissing steam over a never-ending roar like the sound of hydraulic power coursing over a dam. The emergency broadcast still blared its warning, background noise to intermittentBOOMs of his neighbors’ propane tanks blowing up, the fire consuming houses one by one. If he counted booms, would Sam know when they were next? The morbidity of this thought would have shocked him, had any shock value remained possible. But Sam had gone numb inside. Fighting for his life, fighting for his children’s lives, while knowing they were all at the absolute mercy of the elements, shut something down inside him. It was like Sam was back in Afghanistan, where he’d somehow removed his heart from his body, his soul from his actions, to get through a day of combat. And this was worse. So much worse.

Claude, however, seemed to thrive in battle. He worked with singular purpose, stuffing towels everywhere he could at the cracks, along window ledges and under doorways, while Sam continued wrapping the girls like sopping mummies, ignoring their cries and screams and coughs.

“Take them into the primary bathroom. The one on this floor, that has the bigger soaker tub,” Claude ordered, and Sam obeyed blindly—literally, for the most part—even as his mind spun, and he tried to determine whether they should still make a run for it instead or whether hunkering down was truly the smartest choice now. It always seemed so clear when he watched stories like this on the news. It always seemed soobvious, what people should do. He rubbed at his eyes blindly, attempting to see.Nothing is obvious. Nothing is clear.

In the primary bathroom, he spun in an aimless circle. Wait ... did Claude mean put the girls in the tub in the water? Or in the dry tub? What would Mel do? Again, he wondered wildly: Were he and Claude destined to be lambasted in the news media, those people everyone talked about who’d done the wrong thing, walked through the wrong door, put these children at risk for nothing? If so, it was Sam’s fault. All Sam’s fault.

He ushered the girls unceremoniously into the dry tub, layering wet towels and blankets over them. A compromise. Faintly, over the sound of the fire, he still heard the warning siren blaring, but it no longer came from the kitchen, through the radio. What he heard, Sam realized, came from outside, down Highline, and after a moment of letting it register, he identified it as the siren from one of the smaller fire rigs used by ground crews.Like Mel drives.He’d know it anywhere. How many times had he heard its surprisingly loud wail as he visited the station with the girls? How many times had Dave Lewis, or the new kid, Deklan, let Astor and Annie climb into the cab and push the button, running the lights simultaneously? Annie had delighted in it, clapping her hands at thebleep-bleep-bleep reeeeeercoming from the tinny speakers, and all those burly firefighters had gamely clapped hands over their ears and gone about their chores, happy to let the little Bishop girl with the heart condition have her fun.

He ran to the window, remembering belatedly that, just like before, it would be too smoky to see a thing. Wind rattling everything. Rushing smoke into the bathroom like some valve somewhere had been released, opening up the floodgates of a hell Sam had thought existed only in the movies. He squinted: lights filtered weakly through the haze on the road. The sirens grew louder and louder. The girls sobbed, curled up in the tub with towels over their heads, no longer yanking them off, no longer needing to be told to cooperate. Surely they could barelybreathe through the towels, but they didn’t squirm under the sopping pile, their little sides rising and falling in a sad, weak sort of obedience. Astor’s arms wrapped around Annie’s stomach, Annie’s face smushed into Astor’s armpit. The heat bore down, worsening by the second now, not by the minute.

CHAPTER 29

It felt like both five seconds and five hours had passed when Sam heard the crash of the front door and then, impossibly, miraculously, Mel’s voice cutting through the never-ending noise. “Sam!” she screamed, the sound of her footfalls—heavy in her boots—already on the hardwood. “SAM!”

Relief sluiced through him, thick and hot, feeling every bit as intense as the heat and the smoke.

“Is that ... Mom?” he heard Astor yell, her voice muffled by terry cloth and wind and booms.

“Yes, but stay where you are!”

If he knew Mel, which Sam most certainly did, she would come to them.

“In here!” Sam yelled, torn between running to meet Mel and remaining here with the girls, still huddled in the tub. Her boots thundered down the hall, and the bathroom door he’d wedged closed shook. He leaped toward it, yanking it open against the resistance put up by the soaked towels lining the crack at the bottom of the door.

“Mel!” He collided with her, the solid bulk of her radio unit strapped to her chest momentarily robbing him of what little air was in his lungs. He didn’t care, holding her tight, inhaling the strong scent of smoke and dirt and sweat on her yellow shirt.

Her arms wrapped around him, too, but only briefly, before she lunged toward the girls. True stood behind Mel; Sam only just then registered her presence.

“Mom,” Astor cried, trying to rid herself of the towels to get to her mother.

“No, no,” Mel rasped. “Stay down. Stay there.” Her voice sounded tighter and higher than Sam was used to, the urgency there impossible to miss. It sent a new wave of alarm through him. If Mel and True were here, so was Mel’s crew, right? They’d have engines that could stand the heat. That could carry them down Highline. “Why don’t you want us to go?”

“We can’t transport Annie until we get an EMS rig up here,” Mel said. She tugged Sam back toward the little bathroom window, gesturing for him to look. He did, andholy shit. Where smoke had obscured his view just moments ago, visibility had been oddly restored. It took Sam a second to understand why: direct flames now lit up the street. The wind had driven the Flatiron Fire back up their hill, just as Claude predicted. Had it essentially encircled the house? Yes, it burned right there, ringing around the field and on both sides of Highline, having left the near slope of Buck Peak aflame in its wake. Sam knew in this moment he and Claude had made the right call: had they set out on foot, or even if the truck had cooperated, they would have been caught on the road when the fire made this turn. Trailing so far behind the other evacuees, and without the protection of a fire engine, they would have been consumed whole.

The reality of this was so sobering, he swallowed impulsively, his throat burning. Instinctively, he staggered back toward the girls. Astor and Annie looked like small, poorly costumed ghosts slumped in the tub, adding a macabre twist to what was already a scene of doom.

“Stay here with the girls,” Mel ordered, turning for the door, True, as always, on her heels.

“You stay, too!” Sam shouted back at Mel, grabbing her by the shirt sleeve.

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