Page 81 of Sheltering Instinct

He called out, “Tess, lay on the horn.”

Tess pressed the palm of her hand into the middle of the steering column. The noise startled the children, and they turned their heads. Levi was standing in the back, his foot shoved under the seat, his toes curled up to brace himself. He opened his hands and leaned out.

The children instinctively reached for survival.

When Tess lifted her foot from the gas, because of the upward slope, the forward momentum was ever so slightlydecreased. It was enough that he could lock his fists around two tiny wrists and heave upward, flinging the children onto the back seat.

Levi remembered how Tess described her mother lifting her by the wrist and flinging her at Abraham. What came next was destruction.

He quickly scanned the children, their chests heaving from the exertion, tear streaks where bright trails through the soot and smoke that coated their faces.

Levi climbed back over to the front seat. “Switch again, Tess. Get in the back with the kids. Make sure their clothes aren’t smoldering, then get them on the floorboard.”

He stood on the gas pedal as Tess clung to the roll bar and scrambled over the seat.

“Come here, Mojo,” she commanded, and Mojo didn’t hesitate to follow her over the seat.

“Good, Tess, get everyone down as low as possible and pull the wool blankets over you. They’ll smolder, but they won't burn.”

The first blanket she pulled out, she tucked around Levi, pulling it into a loose knot behind his head so it draped over his arms as he drove. Then she pulled her baseball cap from her pack and put it on his head before working on getting everyone situated behind him.

Catapulting forward, Levi tried to find a break in the flames. But the wind had whipped up the blaze. There wasn’t much vegetation, he reasoned, and it was dry tinder, so it should burn and stop. His hope was to get to the rocky hill, climb up into the smoke, and back down the other side, where perhaps they could find fresh air to breathe. That was his plan.

In the back, Tess was asking the children if there were any of their friends who might be out in the brush that they hadn’t seen and might need rescue.

“What did they say, Tess?”

“The school day is over. The other children are from rural homes that are too far away, so they live at the school. These children lived close enough to go home.”

“All right, let’s get them home so their parents won’t be frightened.”

“The big blaze over there,” she pointed past him, “that was their house. When they saw the lightning strike it, they turned to run away but the fire was chasing them,”

“Was their family home?”

A moment later, she said, “No. No one was there.”

Levi ducked his head to avert the embers flying around them in a gust of wind.

When he lifted his gaze again, Tess yelled, “Levi! The fire has us surrounded!”

Chapter Twenty-Six

Tess.

His Iniquus sat-phone in hand, Levi failed to get a call out.

The engulfing cloud cover made connection impossible.

Tess and Levi stood hand in hand on a boulder, watching their vehicle burn. There would be nothing to salvage by way of transportation or cover.

Levi had driven them right through the flame wall. And while their woolen blankets didn’t catch fire, their tires did.

Fleeing into the rocky hills kept them from the path of the blaze, but the soil was dry and dusty here. In the deluge, they could see moving toward them from the north. Tess knew all of this would wash away and them with it.

A mudslide was just another way they could die that day.

Nowhere was safe.

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