Page 1 of Burnin' For You

Chapter 1

If they started running now, they just might make the lake before the fire consumed them.

At least that’s what Reuben Marshall’s gut said when the wind shifted and rustled the seared hairs on the back of his neck, strained and tight from three days of cutting line through a stand of black spruce as thick as night.

After a week, the fire in the Kootenai National Forest had consumed nearly twelve hundred acres. And as of breakfast this morning, his team of smokejumpers, as well as hotshot and wildland firefighter teams from all over Montana and Idaho, had only nicked it down to sixty percent contained.

Now the fire turned from a low crackle to a growl behind him, hungry for the forest on the other side of the twenty-foot line that his crew—Pete, CJ, and Hannah—had scratched out of the forest, widening an already cleared service road. CJ and Hannah were swamping for Reuben as he mowed down trees, clearing brush. Between the two of them, they worked like an entire crew, still determined to prove themselves. Pete worked cleanup, digging the line down to the mineral soil.

Reuben’s eyes watered, his throat charred from eating fire as he angled his saw into the towering spruce—one more tree felled and it would keep the fire from jumping the line or candling from treetop to treetop.

Chips hit his safety glasses, pinged against his yellow Nomex shirt, his canvas pants. His shoulders burned, his arms one constant vibration.

In another hour they’d hook up with the other half of their crew—Jed, Conner, Ned, Riley, and Tucker—dragging a line along the lip of forest road that served as their burnout line. They would light a fire of their own to consume all the fuel between the line and the active fire and drive the blaze to Fountain Lake.

The dragon would lie down and die.

At least that seemed the ambitious but attainable plan that his crew boss, Jed, had outlined this morning over a breakfast of MRE eggs and protein bars. While listening, Reuben had poured three instant coffee packs into one cup of water and tossed the sludge down in one gulp.

Deep in his gut, Reuben had expected trouble when the wind quietly kicked up early this morning, rousing the team tucked in their coyote camp—a pocket of preburned space, their safety zone on the bottom of the canyon near a trickle of river. Already blackened, the zone shouldn’t reignite, but it left ashy debris on Reuben, the soot probably turning his dark-brown hair to gray under his orange hard hat. His entire team resembled extras on theWalking Dead.

He felt like it too—a zombie, barely alive, fatigue a lining under his skin. Ash, sawdust, and the fibers of the forest coated his lips despite his efforts to keep his handkerchief over his mouth.

They’d worked in the furnace all day, the flame lengths twenty to thirty feet behind them, climbing up aspen and white pine, settling down into the crackling loam of the forest, consuming bushes in a flare of heat. But with the bombers overhead dropping slurry, the fire sizzled and roared, dying slowly.

He’d watched them—the Russian biplane AN2, which scooped water from the lake, and the Airtractor AT, dropping red slurry from its white belly. And, way overhead the C-130 circled for another pass, a loaner from the National Guard.

Reuben wondered which one Gilly piloted—a random thought that he shoved away. But not before imagining her, dark auburn hair tied back and cascading out of her baseball cap, aviator glasses over her freckled nose. Petite at just over five feet, the woman haddon’t quitwritten all over her when she climbed into a cockpit.

But it did him no good to let his thoughts anchor upon a woman he could barely manage to speak to. Not that he had any chance with her anyway.

Keep his head down, keep working—wasn’t that what his father had always said?

They all had expected the Fountain Lake fire to fizzle out with their efforts.

Until the wind shifted. Again.

And that’s when the fine hairs of Reuben’s neck stood on end, his gut began to roil.

He finished the cut, released his blade from the trunk of the tree, hollered “Clear!,” then stepped back as the massive tree lurched, crashed into the blazing forest.

The fire roared, a locomotive heading their direction.

It seemed Pete, twenty feet behind, hadn’t yet alerted to the shift. Reuben couldn’t account for why his gut always seemed to clench with a second sense that scented danger. The last time he’d felt it, he’d known in his bones that teammates were going to die.

And they had.

Not again.

Reuben did a quick calculation. They’d completed about twenty-four chain lengths in the last six hours, about a quarter mile from the safety zone. They could run back to their strike camp in the burned-out section—a theoretical safe zone.

However, he’d known forests to reignite, especially loam that had flashed over quickly, hadn’t scorched the land down to the soil. There was plenty of fuel to burn in the so-called safe zone if the fire got serious. Not to mention the air, searing hot in their lungs as it cycloned through the area.

If they turned and ran another hundred yards along the uncleared forest service road, they’d be over halfway to the lake, less than a half mile away.

But they’d be running into unburned forest with nowhere to hunker down if the fire overtook them.

Reuben listened for, but couldn’t hear, the other team’s saws.

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