Page 11 of Smoke Season

True blinked, trying to make out the shape and scope of the soot that had been falling on her face as she’d slept, but the sky was virtually the same color as the falling soot ... a pale, almost translucent gray. The morning light looked flat and dull, as two-dimensional as themonotoned joke postcard she’d once received from a rafting buddy on vacation in Central America:Costa Rica in the fog.

She scrambled to stand up, steadying herself in the now rocking oar raft as she shook out her sleeping bag, eyes squinting as she surveyed first the mountain, then their camp from the shoreline. Camp looked quiet enough, though a thin sheen of ash covered everything, from the cooler to the foldable kitchen table and chairs to the Wus’ tent, where they continued to sleep.Good.True could use a few minutes to get her bearings.

Because Mel had been right. Flatiron wasn’t even visible in the smoke that now swallowed it whole. In fact, True couldn’t see farther than a hundred yards in that direction—to the east—and her way forward, eyes straining downriver, wasn’t much better.Shit.Maybe Vivianwouldfreak when she saw the apocalyptic world they’d inherited overnight. So far, she had defied stereotypes—a trait True tended to like in a woman—but surely any mother would balk at conditions like this.

She glanced toward the dry bag she knew contained the sat phone, nerves dancing in her gut. Now that she couldn’t even lay eyes on the blaze to assess its strength, should she call Mel back? Or should she forget about Fallows and make an evac plan for the Wus?

Get a grip, Truitt.She’d push for Wonderland, just like Mel had urged, un-ideal as it was. For air-quality comfort, she’d tell the Wu family. To take care of business, she told herself. As long as she still arrived at Temple Bar on Friday, she’d be fine.

A hazy, oddly muted stream of sunlight filtered through Sam’s bedroom window just past 6:00 a.m., accompanied by three sounds, all of which seemed out of place as he stirred under the cotton sheets. The first was Annie coughing in her bed in the apartment living room. The second was the low rumble of trucks—big ones—outside the Eddy, probably on the highway adjacent to the river, and the third was amuted but incessant pounding on the door leading to the stairwell and the Eddy bar.

He sat up quickly, his thoughts immediately on Fallows. Was he back to cause more trouble? But now that he was awake, his priorities reshuffled as he identified the reason for his daughter’s intensified cough. The smell of smoke, not like a house fire—like a campfire—permeated his nostrils, despite the fact that Sam had gone through the building before going to bed last night, sealing all the windows they usually left open on summer nights in the mountains.

The pounding on the door continued, and he felt torn between going to Annie and answering it. He hurried down the hallway, tugging a Carbon Rural softball-team sweatshirt over his head as he walked. Whoever knocked so urgently on the other side of the door would just have to deal with his candy-cane-striped flannel pajama bottoms, gifted by Astor last Christmas.

He opened the door to Kim, a full five hours early for her shift, who rushed inside with a terse “You have your phone on you? I can’t find jack shit on mine.”

Sam trailed after her in his pajamas, scrambling to catch up in his groggy state. Astor, a light sleeper to a fault, emerged from her room, her expression as baffled as Sam’s. Kim popping in wasn’t unusual; her place was just down the street. He did, however, take issue with the early hour. “Find what on your phone, exactly?”

“Carbon Rural updates, county alerts, anything. The Outlaw County emergency app is a joke.” Her eyes were glued to her own screen, one manicured finger flicking upward in search of information.

The smoke. The fire. The reason for Annie’s coughing. “How bad is it?”

Sam moved automatically past her to the window on the landing and got his answer, which had adrenaline chasing any lingering desire for sleep from his head. The smoke was worse outside, far worse ... He nearly choked on it as he craned his neck to the west in an attempt to get an unobstructed view of Flatiron. He covered his mouth with theneck of his sweatshirt to filter the air entering his lungs, but he shouldn’t have bothered: when Sam finally made out the shape and scope of the mountain, he gasped out loud, the involuntary response leaving him sputtering.

The Flatiron Fire raged. No other word could describe what Sam saw to the west. What he had managed to convince himself was a tame show of nature last night now burned huge and hot, covering far more than the finger’s breadth of forest he’d noted before bed.

He closed the window in a hurry; he couldn’t have Annie subjected to this level of smoke. Not that it was much better inside the apartment. As he ushered Kim back in and shut the door behind them, her raspy cough still cut the air. He made a beeline toward the kitchen, where his own phone sat charging. Between Twitter, Facebook, and the county emergency-alert system, surely someone knew something. Or even better, maybe Mel had left him a text. Hearing her voice and confirming her own safety would be a balm to his already tattered nerves, and besides, Kim was right: they needed information, and fast.

“We need to pull back!” Mel yelled to José, spinning on her heel to retrace the path to camp. She didn’t have to tell him twice, and they burst back into the circle of sleeping bags and trucks out of breath, where she gasped out an order to call for backup.

Doug White, with a talent for skeptical derision, looked up from brushing his teeth at the water station with a deliberate lack of haste. “Right now?”

“Affirmative.” Mel ground her jaw, wishing the Red Book call had come in just a few minutes later last night,afterWhite had finished clocking out. But until Hernandez himself showed his face, Mel was the second highest-ranking firefighter here, and she intended to hold her own. White’s misogynism would simply have to wait. “And we need to get on the horn with any neighboring agencies we can. Eagle ValleyFire Protection District, Outlaw County, even BLM, if they can send someone.” They stood on Forest Service land but would take whatever help they could.

He complied, though perhaps not until taking his cue from Lewis, who jumped right on the horn. “I got Parker Pass Station 3 and 7, too,” Lewis announced a minute later, head still bent toward his handheld. “And ODOT is on standby. How bad is it, Mel?”

Though she could no longer see the fire now that she was back in camp, that rolling lava still played behind Mel’s eyes. “Bad. We’re relocating,” she announced to the crew at large, trying hard to keep the edge to her voice firmly planted in urgency, not panic. “Pack up and gear up.”

Most of the young volunteers made short work of it, apart from Deklan, who wanted to know which agency would arrive first—the county—and which would be most effective—probably Eagle Valley.

“It takes a village, isn’t that what you old-timers say?” he noted, while still trying to apply moleskin to his filthy feet, his dirty socks balled up on the ground next to his sleeping bag.

“Just pick your shit up,” Mel ordered in response. She finished stuffing her down sleeping bag into its compression sack with more force than necessary, then called on Deklan to do the same. “Nobody has time to babysit you.”

Deklan’s ears turned the same shade as his fiery red hair at the reprimand, and Mel felt a swell of regret. As battalion chief, it was her duty to make sure the kids took this seriously, but that didn’t mean she had to bark out orders like a drill sergeant. It hardly made her better than White. Besides, stressful situation notwithstanding, Mel was reasonably sure she was actually just projecting her own baggage onto the boy, trying to mother him while her own kids were out of sight and out of reach.

“I’m sorry,” she told them. “Just ... do your best to get loaded up. We need to pull back, stage further down-mountain while we wait for reinforcements.”

Deklan finally complied in earnest, the first hint of fear in his eyes.Good,Mel thought, even while still feeling a bit mean. Fear was his friend. “And get yourselves fed,” she added. She waved a packet of instant oatmeal at the kids, compliments of the Carbon Save Mart. They donated this stuff to the station firefighters by the caseload. “Looks like you’ll get the action you’ve been waiting for sooner rather than later.”

As José rushed to load the Gatorade water dispensers onto the supply rig and Lewis corralled the crew vehicles, Mel stepped away from the fray to check her phone for any messages. One had managed to get through sometime in the night from Sam. Seeing his name on her screen sent a jolt of gladness through her tired body.

“Will it ever stop?” she’d asked True once, in a low moment, when her love for Sam had, at least temporarily, overridden the stubborn resentment that clung like springtime algae to the boulders along the Outlaw’s riverbanks.

True had only looked at her sadly, and Mel had read the answer in her face.Did it matter?Because love simply hadn’t been enough. Finances aside, the stress inflicted by Annie’s diagnosis had proven impossible to parse from the essence of them as a couple.Collateral damage,their therapist had said.Friendly fire,Mel had retorted.

But the text this morning gave her a welcome sense of relief:Girls fine with me at the Eddy.

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