Anna dressed his hands and arms with hope, a couple of nondenominational prayers and five of the rolls of gauze.
"Don't bust open the blisters," she told him.
"Got to let 'em drain," Black Elk said.
"No you don't. Don't do it. Are you going to quit doing it?"
"You betcha."
Anna saw the twinkle in Howard's brown eyes and knew he was pulling her leg. He wouldn't mess with these blisters.
Paula's burns weren't nearly so severe but they covered a good chunk of her small body. Anna recalled the rule of nines from her EMT training. Second-degree burns were considered minor if they covered less than fifteen percent of the body and the face, hands, feet and genital areas weren't affected.
Arms were nine percent of the body, legs eighteen. A little mental arithmetic let Anna know Paula barely retained her minor status. Between ten and twelve percent of her body was burned. Barring any unforeseen incidents Boggins should be all right. Anna was careful to drum that into the girl's head lest her own fear be her undoing.
Jennifer's left palm had a nasty cut where she said she'd fallen on the blade of her pulaski. Anna cleaned it, closed it with butterflies and bandaged it. Unless infection set in, it would heal.
By the time they'd finished it was full dark. Joseph distributed the food. Anna scored a can of beanie-weenies and marveled as she wolfed it down what a wonderful sauce hunger was. Lindstrom made Jennifer eat a can of Polish sausages, then set her to work feeding Howard slimy cold chop suey from a plastic MRE bag. Being of service would probably do Short more good than the nourishment would the big Arapaho.
When they'd finished eating, the firefighters threw their trash into the darkness beyond their enclave. Littering went against the grain for Anna hut, with a touch of childish rebellion, she threw her empty tin toward the smoldering Jackknife.
"I'm going to try and make the ridge," she announced. "See if I can reach Base."
"Wait till it's light," LeFleur said.
The rebellion in her soul wasn't quelled and Anna could feel her metaphorical heels digging in.
"Somebody should go," Hugh said. Everybody ignored him. Pepperdine had dined in solitary splendor out of the sanctity of his yellow pack. Any shred of credibility he might have retained was destroyed in that instant.
"It's not more than a quarter of a mile," Anna said. "Maybe a hundred yards to the heli-spot. There's a road from there."
Silence argued for her. The rest of them craved contact with the outside world as much as she did.
"You're not going alone," the crew boss told her. LeFleur didn't want to leave his crew and nobody else wanted to leave the safety of the creek.
"Stephen will go with me."
"Thanks a heap," Lindstrom said, but he was stirring himself up out of the sand as he spoke.
"Go slow," LeFleur warned. "Test each step before you take it. Those stumps are still burning underground. You wade into one, you'll know it."
With that blessing and a pair of borrowed goggles, Anna and Stephen took two of the headlamps and walked out of the circle of light. At the bank of the creek they stopped. Around them the murmur of the wind and the hiss of sleet on the burn pushed the dark close. Cold crept down the collar of Anna's brush jacket and chilled her wrists between the leather of her gloves and the canvas cuffs.
"This might not turn out to be one of your better ideas," Lindstrom said.
"I'm open to suggestion."
"Let's go snuggle in with our compadres and wait till morning."
"Not that one." Though tired to the bone, with a backache that made her stomach roil and two booted feet that felt like hamburger, Anna was pushed by the need to take some sort of action. There'd been a blowup. A boy was burned to death. A man knifed in the ribs by a means she could not make heads or tails of. To sit, to wait, to try to sleep was beyond her. No rational act left, she'd chosen the least irrational. With luck it would even prove productive.
"Tractability is considered an attractive quality in a woman," Lindstrom said as she sank her pulaski into the bank and pulled herself out of the wash.
After half a dozen steps Anna was beginning to doubt her decision as well. It would be easy to get lost. All they had to navigate by was the slope. Ahead, the teeth of the fire were bared in hollow logs and stumps, glowing coals defying the petty attempts of the sleet to quench them. As winds eddied and shifted the coals brightened hungrily.
More unsettling was the fire that lived high in the burned-out snags. The forest was still there but it had been stripped of skin and muscle. Bare bones, charred a shade darker than the night, rose all around like macabre grave markers. High in many of the snags the fire gnawed at the marrow. An occasional crack or fall let them know that a lingering branch had been chewed off, brought down.
Anna kept climbing, pounding each step with her pulaski as John had told her. Behind her she could hear Lindstrom. He whistled "Ring of Fire" between his teeth.
Visibility improved as they gained altitude and their lamps began to be of more use. The ground flattened out and Anna stopped to catch her breath. So changed was the landscape it took her a minute to realize they'd reached the heli-spot.
"Home free," Lindstrom said as he came up beside her. "Wind's picking up."
A curtain of ash and grit blasted by them and they turned their backs.
"One damn thing after another," Anna groused.
A dirt road had been hacked from spike to the heli-spot and the going was easier. Lindstrom took the lead and she fell in behind him, relieved only to have to step where he stepped.
On the ridge the wind was shrieking. Without the sough of needles and leaves to soften its voice, the whistle was sharp and unkind. Stephen's light picked out the hulk that had been Paula's truck. The tires were burned off the hubs. One of the fenders was gone, blasted away when the gas cans exploded. The cab was gutted and the glass gone. In extremis the vehicle had been rendered black and elemental. It no longer looked out of place.
"Maybe it's still warm," Anna said hopefully. Brush jackets were made of unlined canvas, designed to protect from the scrape of branches and the wind. Now that the exertion of the climb was behind them, Anna was feeling the cold.
Using the truck shell as a windbreak, Anna dragged the radio from under her jacket. On the second try she reached Base. The line was etched by static but still readable. The two EMTs found themselves laughing from sheer relief. They weren't alone.
Gene Burwell, the incident commander, spoke with them and Anna sensed a hushed reverence awaiting her every word. Caught up in surviving, the rest of humanity had slipped her mind. Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, friends were waiting by radios and telephones, the television tuned to CNN, hoping for news. The drama of what they had been through hit her and she was proud even as she mocked herself for feeling heroic. It was with sadness and an unpleasant sense of failure, slipping from her recently acquired pedestal, that she told them of Newt Hamlin, of Leonard Nims.
News of the murder was met with a static-filled silence Anna couldn't break. Burwell had his mike button down and, she imagined, his mouth open.
Three times he made her repeat the information. Anna was shouting now, her face and the radio shielded by the truck's engine block and Lindstrom's body. Rising wind competed for air time. "What do you want us to do?" she asked.
Burwell was quiet so long she began to be afraid they'd lost contact. Finally his voice cracked back: "Can you last out the night?"
"I think so." Anna had told him of injuries sustained and supplies available. It was a rhetorical question. Could rescue have been sent it would already be on its way?
"The National Weather Service thinks this'll break tomorrow. We'll send the helicopters in for you. We've sent a crew up the road but they won't be there anytime soon. If this sleet holds, the fire will be out by then or close to it. One way or another, we'll get to you."
When the conversation was terminated, Anna felt abandoned. Lindstrom took the radio and relayed their information to LeFleur.
From far away, through the howling of the wind, came soft thuds, the sound a giant's footfalls might make in ash and dirt. Anna grabbed Stephen's arm.
"What the hell..."
"John, do you hear that?" Lindstrom barked.
Bile backed up in Anna's throat. The pounding was directionless. It came in intervals of a few seconds to a minute and seemed to be on all sides.
"Put your hard hats on and hunker down somewhere solid," the crew boss said over the radio. "The wind's felling snags. It'll be like a war zone out there till it lets up."
Lindstrom sat down in the ash, leaned back against the engine block and spread his legs. "A little ninety-eight point six?" he offered. Anna squirmed between his knees and he held her close, retaining what body heat they had left.
His hard hat clanked against hers as he leaned his head down. "I sure wish you were fatter. No offense."
"None taken. I sure wish I was home—no offense."
"None taken."
Chapter Nine
TIMMY SPINKS CALLED Stanton a little after nine p.m. Chicago time. Frederick put down a block of cottonwood and the carving knife, muted the television and answered. As Spinks relayed information he'd received of a radio call from the surviving firefighters, the windstorm and the consequent recall of the rescue crew Base had dispatched up the mountain, Stanton saw the same news marching soundlessly across the TV screen.
He didn't take notes while Spinks talked. Names, dates, places, all the details would be remembered. He wasn't born with the talent. Like a waiter in a fine restaurant, over the years he'd trained himself to use his short-term memory. Later he would make lists. The lists served to make tangible his thoughts. Lists could be thumbtacked on maps, moved around, compared, re-matched like puzzle pieces or decorators' samples.
For now Stanton listened, his eyes on the talking head on channel 4, his fingers running absently over his carving. Emerging from the block of wood was a chimpanzee in a cowboy hat and six-guns. Stanton remembered seeing one dressed that way in an old movie. Monkeys in various activities and ensembles cavorted on the windowsill behind the sofa. Stanton had taken up carving in hopes it would do for his hands what the television did for his brain; keep it occupied in harmless pursuits from day's end till bedtime.
The sculptures were good. He knew it without taking much pride in his achievement. Cynicism, carefully weeded out of his daily dealings with mankind, dripped from every knife cut. His monkeys weren't fun, not even a barrel full of them. Slyness, stupidity, greed, envy, arrogance, lust, deceit: seven sometimes deadly but certainly ubiquitous sins marred the simian faces.
Stanton's first carvings had been of people but they had proved unsettling. Too much disappointment was revealed. With monkeys the whimsy somewhat balanced the cruelty.
"What's closest to Lassen Park and the Caribou Wilderness?" he asked when Spinks had finished. "Reno?" Stanton didn't wait for an answer. A map of northern California and Nevada had risen from some recess of his mind. "Book me a flight out of here to Reno."
There was no hesitation before the "yes, sir." Spinks, deliciously damp behind the ears, wouldn't know Stanton wasn't godlike in his powers, that he didn't choose his assignments nor did he prioritize them.
Careful not to scatter wood shavings, Frederick folded up the newspaper laid across his lap. The air ticket he would put on American Express. The days on either sick leave or annual leave. He'd accrued so much of both, come December he'd be on Use or Lose status anyway. The murder was a bit of unexpected luck. Stanton might even wangle official status with pay.
The thought of seeing Anna again gave him a thrill of adolescent proportions. The corpse was a fitting touch. He never saw Anna unless somebody died. If that wasn't the stuff True Love was made of he'd read all those Thomas B. Costain novels for nothing.
Setting his reading glasses down by the half-finished carving, he made squeaky sounds through pursed lips. Danny squeaked back and Stanton located him in the shadows on top of one of the bookcases. "Come, my little bird-brained friend. Time to return to solitary." As he put the budgie back into its cage it crossed his mind that he ought to buy Danny a companion. He could never tell if baby budgerigars were male or female but perhaps it wouldn't matter. Just somebody to pass the time with, twitter to in the dark.
"Maybe when I get back," Frederick promised.
TIMMY GOT HIM on a red-eye out of O'Hare, through Salt Lake City, arriving in Reno at three-forty-eight A.M. Seven hundred and twenty-three dollars. Frederick abandoned American Express at the airport counter and put it on an already overburdened MasterCard. This would have to be paid off one month at a time along with Candice's college tuition.
