Firestorm-pigeon 4 (7 page)

A slap as of a giant hand smashed down on her shoulders and breath gusted from her lungs. She sucked in fire and clamped her jaws closed against it. The shelter pressed down on her back, the saving pocket of air squeezed away. The yellow pack she wore protected her spine but the skin on her shoulders bubbled and Anna bucked. The tent was pushed up off her back and the searing dropped to a tolerable level.
Her nose and eyes were packed with ash and dirt. Through the thick leather gloves the little fingers of both hands, flat on the ground and holding down the shelter, began to throb. They kept the tent down, the devil out, and Anna didn't dare pull them away from the heat.
With liberty and justice for all.
Burrowing blind as a mole, she pushed into the sand and blessed all events social and geological that had formed the creek bed and led her into it before the storm broke. Sand wouldn't burn. A mental image of the creek bed melted, a ribbon of molten glass with their bodies burned into it like flies trapped in amber, flickered through her mind and she started again: I pledge allegiance...
The blessing hadn't extended to Hamlin. The ledge they'd left him on was covered in brush, half a foot deep in leaves and litter. LeFleur: maybe he'd cleared a space for the boy, covered him with a fire shelter. But it was no good. It would only prolong the burning. Newt Hamlin was toast. A ludicrous cartoon version of Wile E. Coyote burned to a crisp sprang up from Anna's subconscious.
And to the republic for which it stands...
The air was too hot to breathe. Anna pressed her lips to the sand, sucking slowly as her grandmother had once taught her to suck tea through a sugar cube. The little fingers of both hands hurt so bad she would have wept but there was no moisture in this convection oven shroud. No sweat, no tears. What was the temperature, she wondered. Five hundred degrees stuck in her mind but she didn't know if she'd read it, heard it or was making it up.
Five hundred degrees. Anna pushed her mind back to the days when she was still a meat eater. Chicken was baked at three-fifty. Roast beef at maybe four hundred. Twenty or thirty minutes for each pound. One hundred and eighteen pounds at five hundred degrees Fahrenheit—two thousand minutes. Numbers scrambled and Anna gave up the exercise. It would be a while before she was fully baked.
One nation...
Pinpricks of light on the right side of her tent swelled, the burning orange pushing through with such intensity they painted her sleeve like the beams from the laser sight on a high-powered rifle. The skin on her little fingers burned. In her mind's eye she saw it curling away, blackened and seared, leaving only the clean white of finger bones.
Noise crested, became solid, clogged the machinery of her ears and mind. Her head filled with the roar till it seemed it must explode. Her lungs were crushed with it, the bones of her body shaking, softening as if the molecules vibrated against each other. Anna hunkered into the sand, thought, like breath and sight and hearing, blasted away.
When Anna had grown accustomed to the idea of death the roaring seemed to lessen. She sensed it not so much with her ears as with her body. An infinitesimal lifting of the weight, a tiny shift in the crush. That something in the eastern sky that, while not yet light, somehow flaws the perfect hue of the night.
The black of the noise was flawed. The firestorm was past the creek. And Anna was still alive.
This is good, she thought. This is good. Elation brought hope up from the depths of her soul and hope brought fear. Anna was sick with it.
Prying open grit-encrusted eyes, she rolled her head to one side. Within the shelter the sparks had moved like stars across the night sky. Orange glared through pinpricks, the small imperfections in the shelter, on her left side now. The fire had jumped the creek bed; it was moving on.
Anna held what fragments of painful breath there were left in her lungs, irrationally terrified that should she move, make even the smallest of sounds, this ravening beast that was fire would turn back, dig her out of her lair and devour her as wild dogs would devour a rabbit.
"Get a grip," she said through cracked lips.
Most assuredly she was alive. Her lungs hurt, she had to go to the bathroom—if she hadn't already—her hands and her shoulders burned, her stomach threatened to empty, but worst was the thirst. Dust stuck in her throat till she couldn't swallow. Lips and tongue were as unyielding as old leather. Her very skin and hair and fingernails felt parched. If she could have immersed herself in water she had little doubt that she would soak it up like a sponge, swell up half again, in size.
"Anybody alive out there?"
Anna thought the words were in her mind, in someone else's voice, and she wondered if this was where the angels came or one's life flashed before one's eyes.
The message was repeated: "Anyone alive?"
It was her radio, impossibly far away on her belt. More than anything in the world, Anna wanted that voice to continue. Inching one gloved hand away from the shelter's edge, she tried to get to the Motorola. Winds jerked the aluminum up and a sandblast of heat and ash choked her. She felt the shelter being peeled back, the fire coming back for her. Abandoning the radio she clawed the tent down again.
"Anyone?"
The voice sounded plaintive now and, to Anna's fevered mind, farther away. Salvation was slipping from her. The rescue plane flying over her raft without seeing it. Rolling to one shoulder she used her weight to pin down the embattled tent. Where she pressed against the shelter wall she burned. Still she held out till she'd wrested the radio from her belt. Facedown in the sand again, she pushed the Motorola up close to her mouth and forced down the mike button with a clumsy gloved finger.
"I'm alive. Is that you, John?"
"Some roller-coaster ride."
Anna wanted to kiss him, cry all over him, marry him, have his children. "Who else has radios?" she asked.
"Howard's got one. Black Elk, are you alive out there?"
Radio silence followed.
"He's alive," Anna said, not because she believed it but because if he was he'd need reminding. "His hands and arms got burned. He probably can't get to his radio."
"Keep the faith," LeFleur said. "I'm on the far side of the wash from spike. It sounds like it's past me. I think that was the worst of it."
"Gee, ya think?" Anna said sarcastically, and the crew boss laughed. A wonderful sound: heaven, honey, nectar. "How long have we been in these things?" she asked.
A second or two ticked by and Anna got scared something had silenced John LeFleur. "Twelve minutes," he replied.
"Bullshit. I was sixteen when I crawled into this fucking thing, now I'm seventy-four."
Again the laugh. Anna had to bite her lips to keep from telling this stranger that she loved him.
"Black Elk," LeFleur was saying, and Anna cradled the radio to her ear for comfort. "Hang in there. This is the worst of it. Don't get out. Nobody get out. It's still hotter than hell out there."
Literally, Anna thought.
"I can still see the fire through my shelter," she said, because she needed to say something.
"We still got fire," LeFleur agreed.
Anna was comforted. She lay hurting in the sand with the radio pressed close to her lips. For the next hour she and LeFleur talked, keeping their courage up, hoping Howard Black Elk still had ears to hear them with. John had seen Joseph Hayhurst and Lawrence Gonzales stumble into the gully. Paula Boggins and Neil Page had been in the wash when LeFleur arrived. He'd shown them how to deploy the shelters Page had had the sense to salvage from the supplies before they'd run from the ridge.
Anna guessed Jennifer Short had made it, she'd been ahead of Anna when she crested the ridge. Stephen Lindstrom, Leonard Nims and Hugh Pepperdine were still unaccounted for. Anna didn't ask about Newt Hamlin.
Every growl and crack of the fire was described and discussed back and forth and slowly, with the flames, the terror passed. In its wake were all the burns, twists, scrapes and bruises that Anna counted herself lucky to be able to feel.
Finally LeFleur said he was going to leave the shelter. Anna was to wait. Science fiction settled over her brain and she laughed at herself, feeling as if she waited in a sealed space capsule while the captain ventured out on an unknown planet. Laughter dried up when images of "B" movie monsters took over her mental landscape and she realized how tired and afraid she was. Close, she suspected, to hysteria. She willed herself away from that edge.
"Come on out."
Briefly, suddenly, Anna didn't want to go. All the safety she'd ever known seemed summed up in the tinfoil shelter. The emotion passed as quickly as it had come and she pushed one hand out from beneath the tent, shoving up the edge. Smoke rolled in but it was no thicker or hotter than that inside. It took all of her strength to push herself to her knees, her house crumpling down over her back.
Then the foil was being lifted away. Again fear pierced deep: the fire was back, ripping at her safety, her flesh. But it was John LeFleur peeling the shelter off of her, helping her to her feet.
"You don't look much the worse for wear. All parts still working?"
"I guess," she croaked, and took the water he offered. LeFleur's face was completely black, like the "darkies" in the old minstrel shows. Mucus and tears had muddied the soot around eyes and nose and a thin trail of blood cut through the black from the tail of his left eyebrow. Through the soot his blue eyes shined bright as opals in whites so bloodshot they showed pink.
"You're the best-looking thing I've ever seen," Anna said from the heart. She shed the yellow pack like a turtle crawling out of its shell and started to pull off her hard hat.
"Leave it," LeFleur said. "The Jackknife's not done with us yet."
Anna rebuckled the chin strap and took her eyes from him for the first time to look around.
Science fiction: it was another planet. Where there had been the green of living trees, the gold of needles, the red of manzanita, the blue of the sky, there was only gray and shades of gray and black. Instead of ponderosa, fir and sugar pine, black skeletal bones poked cruelly toward a sky gray with smoke or cloud. The ground was white, as white as death and bleached bone. Feathers of ash smothered everything, burned so deep and hot the soil itself was dead. Smoke, colorless in a colorless landscape, curled into a sky of the same hue, breathed out like the poisoned breath of a dying planet. Here and there, in a mockery of life, bright beautiful orange-red flames licked at what was left of something once living, cleaning the bones of the carcass.
Anna brought her eyes back down from the ruined hillsides. She had deployed her shelter downstream of a fork in the creek. Above where she and LeFleur stood she could see a boulder the size of a trailer house that had originally divided the creek in two. To the right was a silver-black corner of fabric where someone else had deployed. Whoever was within didn't move.
John laid a hand on Anna's arm. She didn't grab onto it but she wanted to.
"Where is everybody?" she asked.
"Some are downstream, I think," LeFleur said. "And there's a branch over there." He pointed south across a hump of devastated ground oozing smoke and heat. "Not far. Five or six yards. It joins the creek at the boulder. Most are there. I think."
For a moment longer they stood without moving. The only two people on this desolate world.
"Let's go," LeFleur said.
Time to see who had lived and who had died.
Chapter Seven
WIND SWIRLED ASH around their ankles. In places the sand was completely hidden. Flakes of soot eddied down on air currents as wild and changing as Medusa's locks. Cold drafts struck icy reminders of the storm front yet to come. Warm whirlwinds, sudden and smoke-filled, attested to the firestorm just past.
Clouds and smoke pressed close and the visibility in the bottom of the canyon was limited. Anna had yet to shake the feeling that she walked on an alien planet. Plowing through air so mobile and viscous, it wasn't a great leap of imagination to think it had a will—or wills—of its own.
She wanted to hold John's hand and, from the drawn look on his face, she doubted he'd mind. Too bad they were grown-ups. Side by side, shoulders almost touching, they trudged through the sand. Ahead, where the creek split at the boulder, wind curled around the stone in a sudden gust and formed into a shape that was almost human.
"Hold up," John said quietly, and Anna was afraid. The shape continued to shift and settle. Finally it coalesced and she caught a flash of yellow.
"Hey!" she shouted as Stephen emerged from the choking mist. They ran and hugged and pounded backs and laughed like old friends meeting after long years.
"Looking good. Looking good," Stephen said over and over. His eyes were too wide. Whites showed all around the soft hazel pupils. Soot and dirt obscured his skin but for a racoonlike patch over his eyes where his safety goggles had clamped out the worst of the grime. This delicate flesh was stretched tight and the same dirty gray color as the ashes that made up the world.
Shock. Anna reminded herself to be on the lookout for the symptoms in herself and the others. If there were others. Shock would kill as surely as fire but it was a cold death.
Lindstrom grabbed Anna's hand, holding it so tightly the roasted pinky throbbed. It would have taken more than that to persuade her to pull away.
The tinfoil hut by the boulder began to stir and they stumbled over it to drag Howard Black Elk from his aluminum cocoon. Howard was in bad shape. The hasty bandaging job Anna had done on the run down the slope had been scraped away by his struggle to keep his shelter down. Without gloves, his sleeves in rags, the man's hands and arms to above the elbow were badly burned. How much of the charred-looking flesh was third-degree burns and how much dirt, Anna couldn't tell without water, light and a closer examination.
"It don't hurt much," Black Elk said, and Stephen and Anna exchanged glances. When a burn didn't hurt the news was bad. The nerves had been destroyed.
"We'll get you fixed up," Anna said, and was appalled at how halfhearted the promise sounded.
"You're looking good," Stephen repeated. He didn't sound any better than she did.
"Thanks for talking," Black Elk said. "On the radio, I mean. It was better than being alone."
"George and Grade," Anna said. Howard stood there expressionless, his wounded hands held in front of him like paws. The big man swayed on his feet. "Get him down."
Stephen and John helped Howard to sit, out of the wind, his back to the sheltering rock.