Page 48 of Smoke Season

Thinking of them shifted something vital in her brain, and her training kicked in. She reached for the radio on her hip, just to come up empty. Fuck! She must have forgotten it back at Wonderland Lodge after her mock call.

Never had Mel felt so alone. So untethered. So out of control. Her brain spun through all the bad options at her disposal in a blur. Should she turn back? Push for Temple anyway? She’d already sacrificed so much, putting herself in such danger. This road would not remain passable for long, and she was so close to achieving her mission, she could practically taste it in the ashy air. She shifted the truck back into drive and was just preparing to floor it when the handheld on the dash screeched to life. She’d forgotten it even existed in this old truck.

Relief sluiced through her. “Bishop here!”

Lewis’s voice crackled through the speaker, the poor connection scrambling every other word. “Mel. Thank God. You accounted for?”

“Affirmative. What happened?”

“Heard . . . break . . . as we cut containment . . . rendezvousing with . . . crew 8 at . . .”

Mel gripped the handheld harder, as if she could force the words to emit more clearly. “Lewis! Rendezvousing where?”

“. . . cross river at . . . bridge.”

Mel nodded. Her team wouldn’t have tried to combat this blaze without backup. They’d have recrossed the Outlaw, escaping to the south bank. To safety. Which meant she could still make a run for Temple. She eyed the road in front of her, willing it to stay clear enough to see.

“What’s . . . yo . . . ETA?” Lewis asked.

She glanced automatically at her odometer, which she belatedly realized she’d forgotten to set before departing Wonderland, another standard protocol. “I’m fifteen out, at least,” she told him. “Near the end of the line at Temple.”

“Temple?” Lewis repeated the word like he assumed he’d misheard. “What’s happening out there?”

She squeezed her eyes tight, wishing she could drown out the sound of cracking trees and the roar of the blaze. “I have eyes on her,” she admitted, willing back a fresh wash of fear and nerves. Because she did. The fire wasright there. But the ammo box was also right there, just around the corner.

“Circle back!” Lewis shouted, and that never-ceasing tension between loyalties in Mel ripped further at the seams. To follow orders again would be a relief in this free fall she was in, but how could she let down Annie?

Lewis misread her hesitation. “I got ’em,” he added, his voice still cutting out intermittently. “Did ... count three times. We’re at eighteen ... cluding ... self.”

Eighteen? Mel sat up straighter in her seat. Lewis knew they ran a crew of twenty. Always twenty. “Who’s missing?”

“What? No one!” Lewis’s voice raised as the sound of a siren cut through the speaker on his end. “I’ve counted ... eighteen, minus you and the rook. Deklan.”

Deklan.Mel’s heart seemed to stall in her chest before lurching like a transmission stuck in the wrong gear. God, why hadn’t she thoughtof Deklan sooner? Her stomach lurched next: had she eaten an MRE this morning, she would have lost it.

“Bishop?” Lewis shouted. “Bishop, come in!”

But Mel had dropped the handheld. It dangled from the dash by its cord like a live wire, and she fished it back out of the air numbly. “I’m coming,” she said, though not to Lewis, who had clearly lost connection. Every fiber in her being spoke to Deklan, somewhere out by Wonderland, abandoned by his crew. Neglected by his chief. All thought of making a dash for the ammo box evaporated from her mind like Phos-Chek gel in one-hundred-degree heat. “I’m on my way.”

With a cry of frustration and a slam of her palms on the wheel, she swung a wild U-ey right there on the dirt. She pressed harder on the accelerator, focusing her full attention on keeping the wheels out of the ruts of the road. In the smoke, the lack of landmarks disoriented her. What would she find there when she did arrive at Wonderland? Had the crew’s containment line held well enough to protect the lodge like a storm jetty from a tsunami? Certainly, this demon of a fire was already eating its way through any fishing cabins or storage structures that might be unfortunate enough to stand in the wilderness in between. She visualized Deklan stranded in the parking area, trying to hide his fear behind teenage machismo and a fiery attitude.Please, please let him be there.

She strained to see whatever else she could through the windshield, though she shouldn’t have bothered. Sparks poured down on her from the fire burning above. On the other side of Wonderland Lodge, the trees would be burning, blocking the road where they fell. Mel could still hear the crash of conifers as they surrendered like dominos, some having stood hundreds of years.

She gunned the engine of the truck, trying to outrace the destruction, intent on her goal of reaching the Wonderland parking lot before the fire consumed it. The singular mission put everything else momentarily on hold, clearing her head somewhat even as her heart continuedto pound and she breathed like she was running a race, not driving a vehicle.

Her brain leaped to her personal emergency shelter, stashed in the cargo compartment of the truck, within reach near the dash, ready to deploy at a moment’s notice, and she tightened her jaw. After undergoing hours upon hours of wildland training with that thing—the Shake ’n Bake, they called it—Mel hoped to God she’d never need to use it. She wasn’t going to die like that, cooking from the inside out.

And then suddenly she was there, peeling out on the dirt as her tires skidded along the last turn into Wonderland. Which still stood, she registered with a jolt of relief, whole and untouched. The team’s efforts at cutting a line must have paid off.

But the parking area sat empty. Tire tracks crisscrossed the dirt, evidence that the heavy Carbon Rural rigs had bailed out of the parking lot at sudden speed, but though Mel scanned the area frantically, no rookie, face bright red with indignation, waited ready to give his chief hell. She leaped out of the truck anyway, just to be sure, coughing as she ran blindly through the dense smoke. “Hallo! Deklan!”

Why yell, when there was clearly no one there to hear? Maybe this was just what humans did, Mel figured, when faced with potential tragedy alone in the world. Even a firefighter trained and ready for such incidents needed to bounce disaster off someone else.

“Dek!”

Visibility was gone. Sound was gone. All Mel heard was the incessant roar. All she saw was smoke.Think!She forced herself to draw a ragged breath through her Buff and pause long enough to allow a fragile trail of logic to catch up with her frantic mind. The ridge where she’d last seen her crew cutting the containment line had been abandoned, as best she could tell. But the flames had spread east—she could testify to that thanks to her harrowing drive. It was possible the fire had already consumed what it could below the ridge. Which meant patches of “cold black” might remain, smoldering in its wake.

Seasoned wildland fighters knew to seek out these patches of already burned-out brush in the forest. Little safety zones, the black’s barrenness promised life to the fire crews instead of death. Mel had always found the dichotomy poetic, but now, she just hoped to God Deklan had remembered enough of his training to utilize this resource. If not ... if he had panicked and the unthinkable had happened, it would be her fault. All her fault.

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