Summer of Fire (38 page)

The chopper door opened and she saw Garrett Anderson climb out. He headed across the parking lot to a man she recognized as Duncan Rowland, Incident Commander of the North Fork. Clare said to Javier, “I’m going to find out what’s happening.”

She ran to Garrett.

“Hey, gal. This is one bad mutha, “ he shouted with a baleful glare at the North Fork.

Fire swept over the southwest ridge while cinders the size of a man’s hand pelted the parking lot. Rowland, a slender man with narrow features, listened to his Motorola. “This is it,” he told Clare and Garrett, yanking off his ball cap and throwing it down. It tumbled away like a soccer ball.

Press vans were retreating from the perimeter, filming as they drew back to the open space beside the inn. Everyone in sight wore a bandanna or some kind of cloth tied over his or her face.

With a start, Clare realized that there were eight or ten people on the widow’s walk atop the inn, small stick figures at this distance. More press, no doubt, daring danger the way her daughter liked to do. She wished she could warn them off, for if the eighty-five year old wooden building billed as the largest log cabin in the world went up, they were going to be shit out of luck.

The eerie orange light deepened to the reddish-brown of dried blood. Clare had to remind herself that the air itself could not burst into flame. As more burning brands sailed sideways, it was apparent that even the relative haven of the parking lot was not a safe place.

Behind the Hamilton Store and the Snow Lodge, the top of a two hundred foot wall of flame hove into view. Clare stared at the monstrous apparition.

East and west, the North Fork burned there as well, its long tentacles encircling the inn. Where was Steve? He’d gone into the forest and there didn’t seem to be any part of it that wasn’t burning.

And where, oh God, was Devon?

The wind that had been blowing toward the blaze shifted and bore down more directly on the Inn. Clare felt as though she stood in front of an oven, reminding her of the day she and Javier had driven through the tunnel of flame at Grant Village.

Duncan Rowland turned to his car, opened the trunk and drew out a fire shelter.

Clare fingered the pouch on her belt. Surely, that wouldn’t be needed here on the parking lot, but the flame front was throwing up huge fireballs that raged for seconds before they disappeared. If one of them spotted forward . . . She shut her eyes, but she could still see the Hellroaring . . . no, it was the North Fork.

Eyes open, she pulled on her goggles from around her neck and fended off the flying bits of forest. Javier ran up to her and they both realized in the same instant that the crew protecting the Snow Lodge, Hamilton Store, and some storage buildings was woefully inadequate to the task. It was all she could do not to run away, but she hurried across the parking lot with Javier, toward the North Fork.

A cinder driven sideways by the wind caught her in the chest. As she brushed it off, she realized that if she had not been wearing Nomex, her clothing would have caught fire. She ran on toward what looked like the gaping mouth of Hades.

At the edge of the lot, she and Javier joined a pumper crew that was hooking up to a hydrant. “What can we do?” she shouted into the wind.

“Back us up!”

The men dragged the hose toward flaming trees not fifty feet from the nearest building. Clare and Javier made sure the line did not catch on the bumpers of the few cars still on the lot. If the inferno reached them, their gasoline tanks would add fuel.

The heat was worse here. She pulled her bandanna higher over her face and wished she were up front where the water was. The humidity from the spray would be welcome relief to her parched throat.

As fire torched the nearby pines, she realized that they would lose this battle within minutes. From here, the North Fork need only spot across the parking lot and the inn would be in flames.

“We need another line,” Clare told Javier. She ran toward an engine parked at the base of the inn. The roof sprinkler system came on, letting water wash down the sides of the building.

As Clare sprinted past the grounded helicopter, she realized that Deering was the pilot. She hurried on, gasping for breath.

Getting to the engine, she grabbed a firefighter’s arm. “Help us on the perimeter.”

The man’s eyes went wide behind his smudged visor. “Are you kidding? We’re to stay by the inn.”

Clare looked back the way she’d come and realized that the North Fork had reached the storage shed. In the same moment, she saw a ranger running toward the crew she had left. He waved his arms and shouted, pointing away from the shed.

It was clear that the person he was screaming at did not understand, so he balled his fists together and then threw his hands apart in a gesture that conveyed an explosion.

The crew began to run, leaving the perimeter abandoned. She could tell that Javier didn’t see her as he ran for the largest open space to shelter.

“Can I help here?” Clare shouted to the man spraying the inn’s roof.

“I think we’ve done all we can,” he returned.

She ran for the chopper Deering sat in. Pulling herself up into the passenger seat of the Huey, she slammed the door.

Breathing hard, with a stitch in her side, she felt the futility. It was stuffy in the cockpit, but not as crazy as being out in the screaming gale. “Will we be safe here?” she asked.

Deering stared through the windshield. “We’re a ways from anything flammable right now, but if the inn starts to go up, we’ll need to abandon ship.”

“Okay.” Clare turned to study his pale face. “You look sick.”

Deering’s eyes were smoke-reddened. “I really am sick . . . or something. Garrett and I weren’t scheduled to land, but I . . .”

Clare put a hand on his shoulder. He shook as though he were on drugs, like some of the ODs she’d run to the ER in Houston. She’d told Deering there was nothing for them, to go back to his wife, but she hated to see him falling apart like this. “Have you seen Georgia?”

The chopper rocked as a gust struck it. More cinders pelted the windshield.

“I botched it.” He sounded broken.

Clare sat up straighter when she saw Garrett Anderson running toward them. He slid open the rear door and the wind whirled inside. Climbing into the back, he said, “Deering, the way the fire’s moving, I’m sure that it’s cut off those guys we saw counting plants or something.” He raised his index finger and circled it to mimic rotors. “Let’s pick ‘em up.”

Clare swallowed. Steve had gone to do something in the woods with his fellow biologists.

She waited for Deering to start flipping switches.

The chopper rocked again. “Can’t do it, Garrett,” Deering said. “In this wind, we’d crash.”

Devon jumped as an explosion reverberated across the Geyser Basin. Fire raged on three sides of the inn and darkness had fallen in midafternoon.

The North Fork swept steadily toward her perch on the roof of the inn. A building at the edge of the parking lot burned unchecked, after the firefighters who had been spraying it had retreated.

Another rumble rolled across the valley. “What is that?” Devon asked.

“Probably fuel storage tanks,” the tall cameraman with the ponytail replied. He hefted his video unit to his shoulder. “It’s time to get off this firetrap.”

Below, a helicopter sat on the parking lot. Its door opened and a small figure climbed out. Something about the determined walk of the person dressed in fire clothes made her scream, “Mom!”

Clare, if it was she, joined another man and headed away from the hotel. They looked strong and purposeful like all the firefighters, while Devon shook with fear. She must have been crazy to come up here.

A gust hit her like a fist. Her hand opened and the white napkin lifted and blew away.

God, she was falling, her arms windmilling toward that lousy knee-high rail. Heights had made her mindless since she was old enough to peer from the stair landing and scramble back for dear life.

She landed hard on her wrist and elbow. Lying on the rubber roof mat, she fought nausea while pain brought tears to her eyes.

Reaching her trembling good hand to the railing, she pulled herself up. A single dizzying glance over the edge told her if she had been next to the downwind side, she’d have tumbled fifty feet down the steep roof.

Her heart hammered. Looking at the faraway porch where she would have fallen, she suddenly realized that the shingle roof was ablaze.

Devon shrieked and nearly wet her pants. She ran for the stairs behind the ponytailed cameraman. Down one flight and just before she reached the door leading inside the inn, a flying cinder caught her in the chest. Feeling its sting below her collarbone, she raised a hand to slap it away. In the same instant, the singed foulness of burning hair filled her nostrils.

The cameraman, already halfway inside the inn, turned back. His video landed on the decking with a crash. Swiftly, he pulled off his jacket and wrapped her head and shoulders.

The burning heat on her skin sent agonized pulses that threatened to send her to her knees.

Her rescuer dragged her through the portal and inside the dim space beneath the roof. Devon stammered, “Thanks,” and shoved the jacket at him. She ran down the steps toward the tree house. Already a blister was rising on her chest above the curved neck of her tank top.

She had to find her mother. Mom would take her someplace safe. She’d bandage her burn and her wrist that was swelling and hurting more every second.

It seemed to take forever to stumble down flight after flight of stairs. Outside the inn, grit and ash bombarded her.

Raising her arm to ward off the onslaught, she looked for the chopper. An inferno surrounded the inn in every direction, while a clutch of tourists with their backs to the strong wind watched an eruption of Old Faithful. The ridge that formed a green backdrop behind the geyser was fully aflame.

Devon ran to the helicopter. “I’m looking for Clare Chance,” she shouted, as the man in the cockpit swung open the chopper door. “She’s my mom.”

“Yeah,” the slim, dark-haired man in an olive-drab flight suit answered without interest.

“I need to find her,” Devon insisted. “She was just here.”

The pilot removed his sunglasses and she saw that his eyes, surrounded by a sunburst of lines, were red. Of course, everybody’s were because of the smoke, but he looked wracked out. He studied Devon wearily. “I can’t help you.” She saw him take in her burned chest and irregular, singed hair. “You okay?”

“I will be when I find my mother.”

Clare followed Garrett across the parking lot, surprised that she had trouble keeping up.

“Those people you saw,” she said. “I think one of them might be Steve Haywood.” Having the inn in peril was one thing. If the North Fork threatened Steve and his friends . . .

“The guy who was drying out on Washburn?” Garrett grinned despite his speed. “The one I thought was sweet on you?”

A quick flash of last night’s all too brief embrace made Clare return, “He’s off the mountain now.” She got into the spirit of joshing in the face of danger, an old habit of hers and Frank’s. “Did I mention how kind it was of you to tease me about him over the public airwaves?”

“Always happy to oblige.”

As they headed across the complex, Garrett’s continued banter helped keep her mind off his ominous statement that he believed Steve and the others had been cut off.

It was bad enough that she couldn’t find Devon, but there was no reason to believe she’d been caught out on the flat by the North Fork. An inveterate urban kid like her daughter would have been trying to pass for twenty-one in the bar rather than taking a wilderness hike.

Steve and his fellow biologists were another matter. She imagined them out there absorbed in their work, while the fire came on.

Steve surveyed the forty-by-forty foot area they had staked out, partly sheltered by a community of mature lodgepole. The trees exuded chemicals that discouraged the entry of other plant species into its neighborhood.

The balance of the tract had been cleared of forest by the pine bark beetle. A few snags stood, but most had gone down and were in an advanced stage of rot, providing homes for communities of fungi, grubs and termites. Growing lushly around the fallen were crested wheatgrass gone to seed, spreading fronds of bracken fern, and dense patches of red clover. A Monarch flitted around the clusters of late-blooming goldenrod.

Fly away,
Steve told the butterfly. The rooted could only await the inevitable.

“Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty.” Moru finished his count of common Indian paintbrush in precise tones. He looked toward the sound of the approaching fire and broke into a smile. “I believe this one will burn.”

Summer intern Thomas Lee looked at the darkening sky through thick glasses and pressed his lips together. Steve thought Thomas wanted to head out, but didn’t want to be the first to suggest it.

Kelly Engels wiped sweat from her freckled forehead. “Let’s beat feet!” She tightened the cinch on her untidy ponytail, stowed her clipboard in her pack, and waited expectantly.