“Copy that. Just get that debris cleared so you can get out of there.”
“Will do, Chief.”
Clouds of smoke billowed from the trees, casting a dingy haze over the landscape. I could taste it in the air, the acrid bitterness sitting on my tongue. A few inches from my feet, the ground sloped down—precarious, but not too steep to hike—until it dropped off abruptly into the valley below. A dry creek bed meandered across the bottom.
Beyond that, the burn raged, the forest glowing red.
It looked like hell down there.
Levi’s chainsaw roared next to me as he sliced through a trunk that clung to the rocky ground. He kicked the small tree, tipping it downslope so it could fall. The branches scraped across the ground as it slid, stirring up dust.
I adjusted the sixty-pound pack on my back, re-gripped my Pulaski—a tool with an ax on one side and a horizontal adze blade on the other—and attacked the stump that was left.
Chief had once told me that wildland firefighting was long hours of monotonous, backbreaking work punctuated by brief moments of sheer terror. In my experience so far, he was not wrong.
Except for the terror. I’d been right up against the edge of an out-of-control burn last season, and it hadn’t scared me. Got my blood pumping, though.
But mostly, we cleared a lot of debris.
A wildland firefighting crew worked alongside us. They’d been out here for the last few weeks, working to contain the forest fire that had eaten up tens of thousands of acres as it came down from the North Cascades, ripping through the dry mountain forests. Municipal fire departments like ours didn’t always work these kinds of fires. Brush fires, sure. But widespread forest fires weren’t usually our area.
Unless they were really big, or too close to town.
This one was both.
Levi straightened his back and wiped grime and sweat from his forehead with the back of his wrist. “Fuck, it’s hot.”
“No shit.”
Our faces were smeared with soot and dirt, mingling with sweat from the hundred-plus degree heat. The September sun mercilessly baked the mountains, cooking everything like one of Gram’s pies. It had been a hot, dry summer without a drop of rain for the last two months. Even now that it was almost fall, there was still no sign of precipitation.
Without another word of complaint, Levi and I both got back to work. We had a job to do. Bitching about it wasn’t going to make it better.
Besides, I didn’t care that it was hard. That my muscles ached, my hands were raw, the smoky air seared my lungs, and the heat did its best to suck every ounce of energy from my body. I lived for this shit. Needed it.
Gram inexplicably called me Otter—which was the least manly animal name ever—but really, I was a shark. Not because I was a bloodthirsty, vicious predator. I was actually a pretty nice guy. But sharks had to keep moving or they’d die.
That was me. A shark, always moving.
I’d tried to get Gram to change my nickname—I thought I had a damn good argument—but she’d just laughed at me.
But out here, digging a fireline so the burn would run out of combustible material if it decided to chase up the side of the valley, I was moving.
Besides, I hadn’t joined the fire department so I could spend my days rescuing kittens out of trees.
Levi and I dug the stump out of the ground and sent it down the slope. The guys around us dug and sawed and cleared. We had to get down to the mineral soil, where there was nothing left to burn. The top of a cliff wasn’t the ideal place for a fireline—usually a two- to four-foot trench—and right now, the fire wasn’t moving this direction. But there was a house not fifty yards behind us, so we couldn’t take the chance of the burn turning. If it did, it could get ugly fast.
Dirk, the wildland crew captain, walked by. His face was as dirty as mine no doubt was, grime caking into the lines around his eyes. He gave us a nod, his gaze sweeping over the ground, tracking our progress.
He wanted off this ridge as much as we did.
A breath of air brushed past my face, making my nose twitch. I stopped, lowering my Pulaski again. Inhaled deeply. It still smelled like smoke—no more than it had a few minutes ago—but something was different.
I could feel it.
“Fire’s gonna turn,” I said.
Levi glanced back at me. “You think?”
I scanned the forest below us, glowing red with heat, spitting clouds of smoke into the sky. Nothing looked different. Not yet. But I had a feeling.
“Yeah.” I sniffed again. “Smells wrong.”
Levi nodded. “Radio Chief. I’ll go tell Dirk.”
Under any other circumstances, Levi wouldn’t have listened to me. I knew it, he knew it. I was the little brother. The screw-up. The wild one. If we’d been sitting at home, or in a bar, or driving down the road, he’d have blown me off. But when it came to a crisis situation, if danger was involved, my instincts were… well, they were fucking weird is what they were. I was almost always right.
I radioed Chief.
“Go ahead.”
“Chief, just a heads up, I think the fire’s going to turn.”
“Understood.” Chief knew it, too. “Do you think it’s time to move out?”
I glanced back at the house. Wayne and Mary Risley’s house. They’d lived there for thirty years. We couldn’t let it burn. “Not yet. We can finish up here.”
“Okay. Helitack crew will be there soon with a bucket drop.”
A fresh wave of smoke blew over us and the guy next to me coughed again. “Maybe tell them to hurry up with that.”
“I will. Don’t do anything crazy, Gav. That’s an order.”
My mouth hooked in a grin. “Course not, Chief.”
I never did anything crazy. Not by my standards, anyway. Other people seemed to disagree, but as far as I was concerned, the things I did were completely sane.
Going against my instincts—now that would have been crazy.
Levi came back. “Dirk radioed the Incident Commander. Helitack crew should be here soon.”
“Yeah, Chief told me.”
“We should—shit!”
I whipped around to see what he was looking at.
Down the line, a group was working on a snag—a dead tree clinging precariously to the edge. The sawyer had lost his balance and dropped his damn chainsaw. The guy downslope from him shuffled his feet, trying to get out of the way of the deadly blade.
He slipped.
The chainsaw clattered against the rocks, spitting dirt into the air. It missed the guy below, sliding past him. It roared its way down the slope and dropped off the edge.
I was already running. Because the guy on the slope was going to fall.
My feet ate up the ground between me and the sawyer at the top. He stood, dumbstruck, his hands open at his sides.
“Gavin, wait,” Levi called behind me.
The guy on the slope bent at the waist and grabbed at the scrubby ground, his fingers digging for purchase. His feet scraped against the dirt, like something below had reached up and clutched his ankles. A fire demon lashing out with red hot rage, pulling its next victim to his demise.
Fuck that.
Turning sideways, I scrambled down the slope toward him, keeping my feet angled for maximum grip. Rocks tumbled down the hill, jarred loose by my boots. There was almost nothing to grab onto, save some thin roots and a few dry shrubs clinging to the rocky ground, but I’d been rock climbing for years. I’d be fine.