Page 65 of Smoke Season

At least three people yelled his name, and he ignored all three, running back to the house and grabbing the hose from a barely standing Claude. “Go. Now!” he told him, shoving the old man in the direction of the EMS rig in his place.

Claude attempted a protest, but his words were lost, stolen from his throat by the cloying smoke. Sputtering and coughing, he pulled Sam into a swift embrace and then launched himself toward the engine. Shoulders hunched, head down, he made his way to the safety of the rig on shaky legs. As Lewis lifted him up, Sam swung around to True.

“You, too!” he shouted, completely ignoring the stunnedWho, me?look she flung his way. He grabbed at her, practically pulling her toward the rig. “Please, True. My girls need you. Because what if ...” He cast a look back over his shoulder toward the blaze, where debris from neighboring roofs flew through the wind, where the flames licked in an angry roar. “Just—please!”

True looked between him and Mel and back again, as if unsure from whom she took orders these days, then came to her own conclusion.

“Hold up!” she yelled toward the rig, jumping into the back just as it began to move, managing a tight maneuver in the drive before pointing its nose toward town.

“They’ll make it,” Mel told Sam, whose hands were now braced on his knees as he coughed in the direction of the dirt. The EMS rig, like the Engine 3, was built to withstand the heat and debris that Claude’s truck simply couldn’t.

“Good,” he managed. “Thank God.”

As Mel redirected her hose toward the fire, part of her wanted to take Sam by the shirt and shake him for giving up his space beside their girls, but the other part had never been more grateful. Having him by her side in this moment felt so right, it made the entire past year feel like a stupid, pointless detour. How had it taken their literal feet to the literal fire for her to see it?

The righteous anger that usually burned hot and bright in her being melted into the marrow of her bones, and the fact that this revelation came as they fought forthishouse, the house that had broken them in the first place, was an irony she would have to unpack later.

If later ever came.

She expected Sam to pick up Claude’s hose and use every remaining second to combat the blaze, but instead, as the Dust Busters piled into the engine, he reached for her hose and dropped it to the ground. “Annie is safe,” he said, tugging her toward their last chance at a ride out of the inferno. “Which means it’s time to go.”

From the back of the Type 3, Sam watched as a Douglas fir, lit up like a torch, toppled onto the roof of his deck with a loud crack, just to join the cedar that had flattened his SUV. For an instant, a shower of sparks impeded his vision, and then he saw the flames begin to lick the roof.

This structure, in its current state, represented every toxic family pattern Sam had been determined to break since he’d left for his first deployment. The sense of purpose that reimagining it for his own family had given Sam a visceral feeling, like every ounce of parental responsibility his old man had lacked had skipped a generation and landed squarely in Sam’s gut. And maybe he’d needed that. Maybe fixing what was broken in this house had been essential, even, but that purpose had been served. His girls were safe. Mel was at his side, pressed in close on the jump seat of the engine.

The only thing left was to let it burn.

Once the thought landed, it burrowed itself directly into Sam’s frontal cortex, igniting into something akin to hope. Was this how ancient peoples had felt, watching the pyres of their ancestors burn in fiery surrender? He remembered something Mel had told him after she’d finished her fire-science training.Ash is the purest of elements.It mixes with the earth and helps create new growth.

It was time to be reborn. He tore his watering eyes away from the house and onto the road ahead of them as the engine eased out of the driveway, not looking back even as he heard the fire find its way from the porch roof to a second-story window in an explosion of glass and heat.

One of the firefighters clapped a hand on his shoulder in sympathy. “Hey, now, this is what insurance is for,” he shouted over the noise of the fire and the engine.

Money for Annie. Money for what mattered.Yes,Sam thought, egging the fire on with a fervent prayer of thanks.Let it burn.

CHAPTER 30

The ride back down Highline was like driving through a hellscape. The Type 3 carried them down the hill at a speed Mel wouldn’t dare; dust flew up in their wake to mingle with the burning ash they now had to clear from the windshield, the wipers flicking across the grimy glass in quick arcs. Even so, visibility was more of a pipe dream than a reality; embers flew up across the glass like sparks flying from a welder’s grinder, showering down on them in a hailstorm of fire. Their driver, a man Mel didn’t know, swore under his breath, swerving to stay on course. If this vehicle didn’t weigh whatever it did, they’d be squirreling out on the road like teenagers on a joyride. Luckily, it drove like a tank, tearing through the dirt, leaving new ruts in its wake.

They swerved often to avoid the worst of the smoldering hot spots where the fire had breached Highline, the flames still licking their way across. Despite the fact that it was not yet nightfall, Mel reached over and flipped the headlights on, and the light from the beams shone orange instead of yellow, bouncing around through the flames on every rut and pothole they hit. It reminded her of a flashlight in the hands of a toddler. Next to her, Sam pressed in close, sitting tall and straight, his eyes on the road.

The fire burned hotly on both sides, a red carpet the truck plowed through like a field of poppies.

“No way Claude’s truck could have made it,” Sam said, an observation echoed from the driver’s seat. Even if it had started properly, evenin four-wheel drive, Claude’s truck tires had been in danger of losing traction or popping altogether in the heat of the burning underbrush and sage, leaving him, Sam, and the girls stranded like sitting ducks.

Mel kept reliving the moment when she’d found her daughters in the bathroom, then witnessed their evacuation, Annie burdened with medical paraphernalia, Astor crying out at the sight of the fire lapping at the house and road. On the EMS rig ahead of them, they must have witnessed the same terrifying scene Mel was subjected to now, and imagining their abject fear left a dull feeling of despair in the pit of her stomach. Thank God they had True.

On the right-hand side of the road, all Sam’s neighbors’ homes burned. It was like a movie; they were on a set, Mel would have told Astor and Annie, tearing along the road past balls of fire and thick billows of smoke, just waiting for a director to yell,Cut!It actually helped to tell herself this as well, because this couldn’t be real. This couldn’t be happening.

On the left, the houses down near the bottom of Highline remained standing. Apart from the red haze in the air, they looked normal. And then Mel nearly laughed out loud at the absurdity of this thought. They’d left “normal” behind hours ago.

They finally reached the base of Highline Road, where hazard tape restricted entry coming from the direction of town. The going was slower here, and their driver made his way more carefully, lights flashing, until finally they were at the entrance to Carbon High, where evacuees still streamed out of the gym doors, piling into the remaining cars and trucks.

“They’ve decided to open up the county fairgrounds,” a woman suited up in Outlaw County Search and Rescue orange told them. A good twenty miles south. Out of the path of disaster.

“My girls?” Mel pressed. “They were just ahead of us.”

The woman nodded toward the gym. “Just waiting on their mama.” She gave Mel a sympathetic smile. “Your friend is with them, and your neighbor, sitting with your youngest.”

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