Flash Fire (10 page)

Flowers, decks, and oleanders were the right colors in the right place. Pinch Mountain, however, was orange, and the spacious blue sky was black and white and seething all over with smoke.

“Fire,” said Hall.

“Fire,” repeated Elony. It was not a vocabulary word she was likely to forget.

A
DEN SEVERYN HAD NOT
even waited for the valet to bring up his car. His heart pounded so hard he could barely think. Blood slammed around the corners of his body, screeching through his gut like bad brakes. His Mercedes, however, had excellent brakes. He left patches at every turn. If Beau did that, he’d take the kid’s license away.

On the radio, the mayor said, “If you are a resident of Pinch Canyon, get out now. This is serious. Do not water your roof. Do not stop to find old photographs. Get. Out. Now.”

Mr. Severyn could not believe what he was hearing. That fire was miles away! he thought. He was furious with the fire for moving so fast. Furious with fire departments for not preventing it better. Furious with himself for not listening to the news coverage — he whose world was news coverage — furious that nobody had told him about the shift in the wind.

He turned the radio volume way up. Sure enough, the mayor repeated himself.
This is serious. Do not water your roof. Do not stop to find old photographs. Get. Out. Now.

I’m sure the sheriff’s department already cleared Pinch Canyon. The kids’re probably at some evacuation point already.

He grabbed his phone and called Beau. Nobody answered.

Was it ringing in a safely empty house? Or was it ringing amidst flames, his two children lying near it, suffocated by smoke?

He had a sudden whir of memory: an old black-and-white film playing without warning. How the year Elisabeth was two, he used to come home on time, running in the door, scooping her up in his arms, tipping her little body skyward and kissing her little nose as her tiny sneakers scraped the ceiling. He remembered her giggle of joy, her utter happiness that Daddy was home.

Aden Severyn made remarkable time for several miles by driving homicidally, cutting in and out with inches to spare.

Traffic slowed.

Traffic jams had never bothered this man. He was prepared. He had an excellent sound system. He had phone and fax. The soft vanilla leather and flawless, soundless air-conditioning were comforting, and when his foot was on the accelerator and his finger on the radio dial, the car was his kingdom.

He didn’t even mind gridlock. He knew the city well, had his favorite local routes, and could bypass anything. Freeway blocked? So what? He knew five surface routes.

But today he knew nothing: not where the fire was, not where it had been, not where the roads were blocked. It was not acceptable to Aden Severyn to know nothing.

They were going thirty miles an hour, then twenty, then a crawl, and then nothing. Traffic closed, stitching the cars up like sutures on a wound. Mr. Severyn’s car was not his best friend, but a monster, sealing him tightly inside with his favorite music.

C
HIFFON LOVED THE NOISE
. It was like a great rock concert that had taken huge crews all night to set up. Fire kept hitting gas lines and propane tanks, and then tremendous explosions would send flame and shrapnel into the air.

The colors were stunning. Who could go back to a mere Fourth of July fireworks after a display like this? This was the kind of thing you wanted to see every year.

Chiffon was still provoked with the fireman who paid no attention to her, but he was still cute, so she was still working on him. “Get out of here!” the guy kept yelling, half at her and half at everybody else. He was cute when he was mad. “It’s dangerous!”

Nobody even pretended to listen. They were mesmerized by the danger. It was impossible not to stare into the flames and the wreckage. The fire looked right back into Chiffon’s eyes, willing her to stay. Chiffon was so hot she felt cooked. Poached. Done. Ready to serve. But she was in the center of the action now and would not consider backing off.

Fire reached the edge of the lawns.

The road would stop it. Asphalt would win.

Chiffon kind of admired the fire, over there on its side of the pavement. The fire acted like a tennis champ waiting for the first serve. On the far side of the road, the fire swayed and rocked, kept its ankles light and its legs limber.

At the exact moment it chose — with no regard for firefighters nor sightseers — it crossed the road. It ignored humans as the soles of shoes ignore ants. It left its droppings everywhere, like some huge hideous beast.

An ember the size of a doughnut fell into Chiffon’s cupped fingers. She flung her hands up against her face, trying to protect herself, but had not yet dropped the ember, and she branded her own cheek. She screamed, and jerked back, but in the cacophony of the fire nobody heard the scream, and with the running and pivoting and wrestling everybody else was doing, nobody saw. The curtain of fire passed right over her, it felt as if it passed right through her, and yet she didn’t burn, she was just knocked over, as if it had slugged her. What was the matter with the firefighters? They were supposed to keep the fire over there!

The fire, having crossed the road, progressed with an odd efficiency, skipping this house, grabbing that one, taking the top of one tree, leaving the next green and untouched. The burned side of the road was left black and twitching, like a corpse with a single living muscle left. Smoke rose to reveal houses that were already black skeletons, with a single garage, utterly untouched, its hanging baskets of ruby red geraniums still blooming in a friendly down-home way.

The firefighters regrouped, trying to cope with a new battleground.

“My face!” screamed Chiffon. She needed a doctor, an ambulance, immediate attention. “My face! I’m going to be an actress! I can’t have scars on my face!”

Nobody listened.

She grabbed the cute fireman’s arm, but instead of helping, he brushed her away like an insect and went on wrestling with a huge heavy hose.

She grabbed the arm of a woman leading dogs away from the conflagration and the woman snarled, just like her dogs.

People were so cruel. Chiffon couldn’t believe it. There were ambulances someplace. She had to have one. She began running, trying to find an ambulance, she knew they were parked around here somewhere, but the smoke changed its mind and lowered itself back down, a thick stage curtain of smoke, and it was difficult to know where to run. She was no longer sure which way was out, and the faster she ran the deeper the smoke became, and the harder it was to breathe, and the more her burns hurt. She tripped hard over a curb, and fell into a little bonfire. Her bare kneecaps landed in charcoal briquettes, and she was seared, as if she were nothing but a steak on a grill. She managed to roll off, screaming, but nobody heard her, because the fire had gotten into somebody’s gun cabinet, and hit the ammunition, and the neighborhood was literally being shelled, and everybody else was screaming too.

M
R. EIGHT CARS HAD DRIVEN
a romantic ancient battleship gray Rolls-Royce to the edge of his driveway. He couldn’t get it out of the driveway because a firetruck blocked him. He was trying to get the firefighters’ attention so they’d move their truck, but since the firefighters were using that truck to fight the fire on Mr. Eight Cars’ own house, it seemed unlikely that they were going to drive off.

Mrs. Eight Cars had meanwhile packed a cute little teal blue pickup truck with stuff. Wrapped in towels or crammed in cardboard boxes, you couldn’t tell what it was, but given the house it had come from, it had to be worth a lot. On top of it, she was throwing, loose, an enormous collection of photograph albums.

It was so hot, Swann felt like an ironing board, with somebody pressing her on the highest setting. The smoke was very annoying, the way it clouded up everything, so you could hardly see at all, or even breathe very well.

From the teal blue pickup, Mrs. Eight Cars screamed at her husband, telling him to abandon the Rolls and its contents, to get in the truck with her, and they’d drive over the low brick walls and get out of here.

Hysterical people were such a kill. It seemed like the more money and possessions they had, the quicker they reached hysteria.

The contents of a Rolls-Royce, thought Swann, wondering what that might include.

Swann wondered for a moment if she and her parents ought to head back to the rental car. She had a funny uncomfortable feeling. What if fire trucks had blocked
their
car in? “Pop?” she said, but he’d already thought of it, and was backing their car closer to Eight Cars’ to pick Swann up and get out of there.

The fire hopped the road.

“Hop” was perhaps not the word. Hop was a bunny word, a dance word.

This fire crossed the pavement as thick and rich as velvet drapery, embroidered in every flaming color. It was still burning even when there was nothing there but asphalt, which didn’t burn. The fire maybe lay down on the road in order to cross it, Swann couldn’t tell.

The piles and stacks of photograph albums that Mrs. Eight Cars had heaved into her pickup caught fire. Seconds later, she, her truck, and its gas tank were also on fire.

E
LONY SOAKED THE PURPLE
blankie in water and wrapped Geoffrey in it. Geoffrey liked this: a bath without the tub. He was dripping and giggling. Even in this nightmare, Hall loved hearing Geoffrey giggle.

Hall held the wet kid in his wet blanket and he and Elony trotted down the twisted drive past the Luus’ house. Danna would have the horses down at their house by now. Egypt and Spice couldn’t have been half the trouble Elony and Geoffrey’d been.

There was so much noise. Windows breaking? Screams of glass? Tree trunks splitting? Bolts being yanked out of houses as burning decks fell a hundred feet down?

Worse than the noise by far was the heat. Hall doubted if the thermometers on his house even registered this high a temperature. They’d be dead if it got any hotter.

Halstead Press saw his own house start to burn. Fire on both sides of the driveway had eaten the burlap bags full of sand, leaving the sand in bag shape. Now it was joyfully consuming the trees that should not have been there because the Presses should have allowed nothing to grow so near the house.

Because of the air-conditioning, all windows were closed and the fire should have taken a while to establish itself. But no — Danna and Hall had left the doors open. Packaged their house and handed it over.

He could not believe they had been so dumb! Who did they think Nature was? Some enfeebled old bag lady?

In only seconds, the preheated wood burst into flame.

The house was fully involved in barely a minute.

My home! he thought. Hall felt stabbed. The burning of his house smelled awful. He could taste poison gas. His contact lenses rasped cruelly on his corneas.

Danna was not there, so she’d given up her idea of saving the house, which was good, since there was no longer a house to save, and she and the horses must already be down in the road, waiting.

The box of kittens rocked back and forth as they struggled to free themselves. Hall motioned to Elony who grabbed it, and the handy six pack of Cokes on top. They rushed around the final hairpin turn. Below them, Pinch Canyon Road was empty. No Danna. No horses.

She wouldn’t have ridden on ahead, would she? Danna, who wanted to stay with the house? She’d wait for Chiffon and the car and her own brother, wouldn’t she? She couldn’t know yet that there was no Chiffon and no car.

Elony said, “Geoffrey and I, we go.”

“Wait,” he said nervously. Smoke sat down over the shared hillside. Nothing was visible. It might have been an ocean of fog. “Danna!” he yelled, as if anybody could possibly hear anything in this din. “Danna, get down to the road! Hurry up!”

Elony wasted no more time. She set the kitten box down. She took Geoffrey, slinging the wet purple burden over her shoulder, ignoring any noises Geoffrey might be making. She set out for Pinch Canyon Road, or Grass Canyon Road, or the Pacific Coast Highway, or wherever she would have to go to get wherever she was going.

How solid her walk. As if she’d gone through fire in another life, and knew fire. Knew that if you just kept going, you would come out on the other side.

Hall ran back and forth, made stupid by the situation, not knowing whether to run after Elony or up to the Luus. Where was Danna? She should have left a note, or something.

He was swamped by panic.

This was how sons let their parents down; this was how sons did not end up doing great things.

S
WANN AND HER PARENTS
did not even have to discuss it. They simply offloaded the contents of the Rolls into their rental car and drove away. In the chaos of the fire, the fire that weirdly spared this building or vehicle, and completely destroyed the one next to it, Swann’s family was fine.

Mr. Eight Cars saw them.

He knew they were looters.

He knew he would recognize them again if they were caught.

He knew it didn’t matter.

His wife, whom he had adored for forty-four years, was going to burn alive.

M
ATT THOUGHT A CIVIL WAR
battle, with cannon and muskets, must have sounded like this. He was deafened by horns and sirens, helicopter engines, house alarm systems going insane, and the fire itself, chewing, snapping, charring, breaking. Still, his ears registered a shriek of terror. Keeping the hose aimed at the roof, he turned only his head to see the source of the scream. Halfway through the turn, he saw the fire leap the road. Saw his own death.