The Wildfire Season (28 page)

‘We’re going in goddamn circles!’ Mungo is shouting.

We’re going where it wants us to
, Miles says, but not even he can hear.

The fire closes tight all at once. A patch of foxtails embosomed in a dry creek bed lights up in front of them, fizzing like birthday sparklers. Miles urges the three of them back, but the same foxtails they just passed through are already alive with light.

Miles raises his arms to make them watch him. When he has their attention, he points into the seething foxtail.

And runs into it straight.

The girl watches him go. To her, he holds open a velvet curtain. One that has hidden a secret mirror-world from view.

The bear reaches the ridge of the St Cyrs alone. From here, she commands a view over the killing ground and watches it being devoured. The town she knows to be down there cloaked by clouds that have fallen to earth. Nothing moves over the slope but a line of goats inching along the crest, uncertain which descent is the safer of the two.

Closer, her cub’s body lies on the rocks. The scent of his death is already being picked up on the wind. She considers staying if for no other reason than to chase the scavenging eagles off when they come, but she has been moving for so long that her body demands to continue.

She starts down the other side to the south. Though the fire is evident in this valley as well, she can see a route linking corridors of green that will take her to the river. Half a day’s travel,
probably less. Once she reaches the cover of the treeline, she can finally disappear.

But the sow goes no farther this way. Instead, she climbs back to the ridge. Without pausing to read the air, she walks in the same direction she had come with her cub and toward the fire they had raced to stay ahead of.

Her head is empty of intent. Something awaits her here and there is only the need to meet it. A summoning, as it was when she answered the call to mate. Until an hour ago, instinct had governed every action of her life. Now she is guided by grief alone.

Inside the inferno, there is nothing but white noise. A hateful buzzing, like a swarm of yellowjackets spewing from their nest. They clap palms to the sides of their heads but the most persistent still manage to wriggle in, lancing their eardrums.

Snags fall across their course. Twice, a branch holds Alex beneath it, cooking her on the whitened duff. Smoke pukes from the tops of their trunks. Each time, Miles stops to help Alex and Mungo picks the girl up, as much to know where she is as to protect her from falling widowmakers. Miles lifts the branches back with his bare hands and feels the skin there curl away.

You okay?
he asks her.

Alex looks above him, through him. He circles his right ear with an index finger. She shrugs, uncomprehending. If she can’t feel the missing half
of the ear she’d planted on the burning earth, he’s not going to explain it to her.

There is only enough time for Miles to recognize that his next actions will be his last. After that, the wasps will take their time to feed on all of them. If he didn’t know as much about what such an experience would entail, he might welcome, after everything, the rush of surrender.

From somewhere far off, he hears the cacophony of an orchestra running scales in different keys.

Some time—a click of fingers, a night’s sleep—passes. It’s impossible for Miles to guess. He feels nothing but the urge to cough.

Without turning, he learns that Alex and Mungo lie next to him. It’s their touch that tells him. Brushing the sparking wisps off each other’s clothing.

All of them but the girl.

‘Rachel?’

Alex speaks her name with tentative recollection. To Miles, it sounds as though it is something she had been trying to locate for hours that has only now been returned to her. A town they had holidayed in, or an exotic vegetable she had once been served in a restaurant.

She turns to Miles and says it again. A storm builds in the dark crescents under her eyes. Runs fingers around her wrists as though checking to see if she wears a watch. All the while she is
oblivious to the smouldering bald patch at the side of her head. Her long hair now falling over only one of her shoulders to reveal the black plug of her ear.

‘Rachel?’

Miles takes a breath of updrafting carbon and holds it. Inside his head, a violin sings the note that all other sound must be tuned to.

Then, before he can bring his own name to his mind, he lifts himself to his feet and walks back into the swarm.

She tries to follow him. When her arms refuse to rise she pounds her forehead against the soil and uses it for leverage. It gets her on all fours for a second before she collapses on her side, knees up. Her body has betrayed her and she considers ways of leaving it behind altogether. Flight, above all. What she wants is to search for her daughter from the air.

Alex lies curled in the toasted grass and thinks, again, how Rachel had changed everything. This is what they say about children. Before Rachel was born, she had been told to expect the worst. Still young then. Unmoneyed, abandoned.

And what everyone said had turned out to be right: there
had
been changes. They came so hard and without interruption she hadn’t the time to resent them. It was simply her life. Her new, nogoing—back-now life.

There may exist a kind of love that one recovers from, but Alex has never known it. She would go to both of them now if her body allowed her.
Instead, she can only search the flames for their shadows and wait for the new everything to arrive.

He calls out the girl’s name even as he knows she can’t hear it. He can’t hear it himself. And yet, somewhere not too far off, he feels the vibration of Rachel’s voice. A wordless howl, lost in the shifting labyrinth of fire.

He remembers something that, even as it occurs to him, he feels there isn’t the time for. He remembers it anyway. How once, years ago, he’d been picked from the audience to be hypnotized onstage at a nightclub some friends of Alex’s had taken them to. It was supposed to be funny. The hypnotist had made others before him quack like ducks and sob like sissies at nothing at all. When he started on Miles with the
Look deep into my eyes
and counting backwards from a hundred, something about the encroaching deadness had made Miles feel as if he was suffocating. He’d snapped out of it and run back to his seat, waving his hands in the air when the hypnotist shouted at him to come back. It had gotten the biggest laugh of the night.

It is how he feels now. The fire is trying to put him under and he’s not going to let it. There’s something he’s got to do. There’s someone.

A breeze too high for him to feel passes through the upper leaves of an unburned clump of birches. He risks a glance against the heat. It looks to him like an audience clapping a thousand green hands.
Rachel listens to the fire as she runs. It makes a scary music. Jangling and mean. Fingers drawn over piano strings with a toy fire engine holding down the sustain pedal (her preschool teacher hates it when she does this). Music that’s hard to get out of your head once it’s found its way in.

She knows that Miles is here with her, moving but coming no closer. Once or twice, she thinks she’s heard him calling. But that’s not how she knows.

Little Red Riding Hood. She was lost in the woods too. Rachel doesn’t wear the cape that the pictures in the book showed—and which Rachel begged her mother for—but when she glances at the skin on her arms she sees that it has turned the same colour. Aside from these details, Rachel’s and Red’s stories diverge. There is no grandmother’s house. No wolf. Though there is the same anticipation of a bad ending.

The girl bats at the fire that reaches up her legs like dogs jumping for food in her hands. Dogs that bite.

She swipes her hand down her side and it comes away wet.

Maybe it’s raining.

He swings his arms in circles. It’s all Miles can do to search for something when he can’t see anymore.

When he makes contact, he’s not sure his senses have got it right. Was that skin? Or wood? Grabs for it again and finds the girl’s arm. He knows because it’s so small. Its pulse.

When he falls the girl lands on his back, knocking the breath out of him. Wherever he is, it’s cool enough to open his eyes. Rachel’s head rests next to his. All of her hair has burned off, leaving only her pincushioned scalp for him to stroke.

Miles looks about him but can’t find Mungo or Alex. Something drops from his lashes into his eyes, stinging them more than the smoke. When he draws his finger across his lids and inspects what he’s wiped away, he sees that it is blood. Not his, but Rachel’s. The whole of the girl’s right side has been burned. Miles studies her wound like a map, seeking the extent of its borders. As he looks at what shock prevents her from feeling yet, his own scar alights with pain.

‘Miles!’

‘Over here.’

‘How bad is she?’ Mungo asks, looking down at the girl with an expression that answers his own question.

The girl whispers something in Miles’s ear.

‘Don’t talk.’

‘He’s in there.’

‘We’re out of it.’

‘Not us.
Him
,’ she says before blacking out.

‘What’s she saying?’

Alex kneels beside the two of them. The freckles on her cheeks conjoined into a purple birthmark.

‘She’s in trouble,’ Miles tells her.

‘It was only a minute.’

‘It got her.’

Alex pushes his arm away. She is too strong for him to shield her from seeing where the fire had touched the girl.

‘Oh my
God
—’

‘I’ll carry her.’

‘She’s
bleeding.
My baby’s
bleeding
!’

‘That’s why we’ve got to move now.’

Alex’s eyes turn to glass. She’s not here anymore and, for the moment, Miles figures this is better than if she were.

‘You want me to take her?’ Mungo asks, meaning the girl.

‘I’ve got her.’

‘You sure? You don’t look—’

‘I’ve
got
her.’

Miles places Rachel on the grass next to him and lifts what’s left of his undershirt over his head. Using the sleeves as straps, he fits it as best he can around the girl’s wound. Before he’s finished, glistening polka dots have already seeped through the cotton.

‘We have to run,’ Mungo says, not taking his eyes off the fire.

Miles holds the girl against his chest and struggles to his feet. The shakes invade his legs before his first step.

‘Miles?’

‘I heard you.’

‘That’s good. Because this son of a bitch looks like it wants a race.’

The bear eats only to clean the ash from its mouth. When she discovers a thatch of buffalo berries growing next to a creek, she crackles inside and lies down. She picks the last traces of colour off the largest bush in less than ten minutes. The creek is close enough to roll over and drink from. Its water numbs her tongue.

Sleep sings around her like mosquitoes, but she resists its invitation. The work involved in stripping each branch of its fruit keeps her awake. She lingers long enough that, when she’s finished, crimson juice drips off her muzzle.

She crosses the stream and the current pulls out stones embedded between her claws. Climbing up the bank, she lifts her head to see the mountains, the alders, the taffy clouds, all redrawn in sharper lines. Her nose returned to its flaring survey of whatever moves for miles around.

She cracks through a thicket of devil’s club, and its thorns comb dead yellowjackets from her fur.
When the ground opens up again, her feet sink into the cushion of a wide peat meadow. The fire has come closer even since lunch. An inky haze climbs five hundred feet above the larches that border the field. An elk stands with its hindquarters only a few feet from a spot fire, seeking relief from the bog’s blackflies, choosing to be seared instead of bitten for a change. Where the runoff collects in pools, mallards and pintails fidget through the reeds.

As soon as she reaches the shade on the meadow’s opposite side she picks up their scent. Not the same ones she’d met on the rockslide. Not the female hunter, but unmistakably human. A half mile off at the most. She can feel a weight lifting from her great shoulders, lengthening her stride. The hunt focuses her.

A plume of smoke rising from a log ahead signals that she may be cutting too close to the fire. As she passes, she sees that it is only a nearsolid cloud of gnats evicted from a fallen snag. Loud as a buzzsaw. An echo of the fury in her own ears.

She moves with eyes closed. There are always the infinite shadings of brown and green and black to camouflage the truth of where a thing stands. But nothing could ever be confused with the candied odour she follows now. It fills the bellows of her lungs. Its taste so purely imagined that when she swallows, she swallows blood.

The three of them come into view through the birches. Following the same creek he does. Maybe two hundred yards away. He would have seen them earlier if it weren’t for the smoke.

Wade tries to narrow the distance between them by running along the grassy bank, but the ground is too soft for anything more than the foot-sucking march he’s managed for the last halfhour. It forces him into the trees. Here, he moves faster but struggles to keep a line on the creek between the trunks.

When he figures he’s made up enough ground, he cuts back to the right to meet the creek again. Finds that his run in the trees had pulled him off course, so that now he’s gained no more than a hundred feet on them. His chest hurts. He bends on one knee to clear his vision. Figures he might as well try to hit them from here.

The telescope fits his eye socket so snug it steadies the rest of his body. The lens flattens Mungo and the woman against the slope, so that their backs appear, touchable. He pulls the scope over each of them in turn and feels its crosshairs tickle between his own shoulder blades.

It’s only when he gets to Miles that he notices the girl. Resting her head against his neck, looking back. Her eyes blink in short-circuited jolts. But in the brief seconds they stay open she reaches directly into him.

A funny idea introduces itself. He will put the first bullet through the girl’s skull. That way, Miles
will feel her drop from his arms before he turns to recognize what has happened.

Wade can hear the fire now, like a hundred sets of novelty dentures clacking in the grass. He doesn’t turn to see how close it is. Pulls the site away from his eye long enough to slide a cartridge into the chamber. Aims for real this time.

When he finds them again they have progressed only another dozen feet up the slope, but the creek has led them to the left. Soon they will be halfhidden in the birches. Still good targets. But he can’t afford to miss. He picked up five cartridges on the slide. It allows for only one mistake. And he’d really like to get all of them.

He holds the crosshairs square on the girl’s crown. She’s bald where it looks like the fire got her. The darkened skin makes it easier to hold his line.

The trigger is the gun’s only metal that is cool to the touch.

Even as he slips his finger around its curve, a wave of smoke breaks through the trees. Rolls over the creek and whitens like froth against the hillside. Wade knows better than to lower the site. He waits for the smoke to clear. A small adjustment will bring them back.

But the gust that brought the smoke dies, leaving a bank of grey between them. Wade slides to the left and spots them again. Already in the birches. A snatch of swinging arm. A torn pant leg.

He lowers the rifle. Considers swearing, but
none of the most common choices seem right.

He’s more excited than disappointed, anyway. A three-minute jog farther along the creekside and he will be able to tap their shoulders first before separating them from their heads. It will be worth the trouble getting there just to see it with his own eyes.

She is all the way down to the creek’s edge before she realizes they are coming to her. The human scents reach the she-grizzly on the same wind that pulls smoke up and over the St Cyrs. It limits her sight to thirty feet in any direction. Not that this troubles her. She won’t need to see them.

The bear makes her way into a stand of birches. If they keep to the bank, they will pass within three strides of her. She settles into the quack grass and waits.

They make their way along the creek they can’t hear anymore. For a time, the noise it made was a constant shattering of glass. Now the flames’ hisses and cracks stand alone. They look down at the water every few steps to make sure it’s still there.

Miles at the head of the line, the girl in his arms. He doesn’t want to lose Mungo and Alex in the growing smoke, but they will have to move faster if they have any chance of making it to the ridge before the heat steals their air. His compromise is to make them chase him.

The tall grass mixes with willow saplings that
bend against their legs. Off to the side, the bush cuts in close to the creek, so that the space they keep to now is narrowed to the width of a single lane. Up ahead, the creek turns away into thicker stuff. They will have to keep going straight after that without any guidance but the steepening slope.

They are startled by movement next to them. Something heavy enough that they can read its footfall through their boots.

‘Bitchpricks,’ Mungo says, spinning around.

‘Don’t run. Not until we’re sure it sees us.’

Even as Miles speaks there is movement again from the bush. Closer than any of them would have guessed the first time. The dull thud of weight on the same roots the three of them stand on. They wait for the animal’s grunt. But there’s nothing but the stilled green all around them.

If they are to continue on their present upward route, they will have to pass just to the right of the sound’s source. Miles waves them on. But when he steps forward, Alex stays back with Mungo, the two of them paralyzed.

‘I’ve heard about you, big lady,’ Miles is saying, under his breath at first so that only Rachel and whatever waits in the shadowed layers can hear. Slowly, his voice grows louder. Speaking like a fool into the forest as he passes, though the forest quiets to listen nevertheless. ‘Seems you’ve had a bad couple of days. It’s a shame, it really is. But we’ve got nothing to do with any of that. We
don’t have a gun. See? No hunters here. Just fire walkers. Like you.’

A kicked stone off to their left brings their eyes to a new shape standing outlined against the greater darkness behind it. Human but only in that it may have been so once. Its body so humpbacked and soiled it could only be a replica of a living thing, a sewn-together collection of graverobbed limbs. Staring at Miles and coughing dirt past its lips.

‘Hel-
lo
,’ it says.

Wade’s voice, but also not Wade’s. Then Miles notices the rifle. Jostling around but pointed at his chest more than not.

‘You found us,’ Miles says.

‘I tracked you.’

‘Well, you’re out now. You’re okay.’

‘Okay?’

‘You can put it down.’

Wade follows Miles’s eyes and finds the gun held in his own hands. When he looks up again, his face is a mask of stagy innocence. A
You-meanthis—little-thing?
pout.

‘I don’t think I will,’ he says, and firms his cupped grip under the barrel. Holds it steady on Miles.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Wait and see.’

‘Whatever you’re thinking, you don’t have to do it.’

‘No. But I
want
to.’

Wade’s arm snugs around the rifle’s butt. Although his target stands no more than fifteen feet away, he puts his cheek deliberately to the metal. One eye shut, the other peering down the scope into the valleys and ridgelines of Miles’s scars.

Miles takes a step toward him before he remembers he carries Rachel in his arms.

There is a pause that all of them understand the same way. Wade isn’t hesitating, but savouring the moment of being taken seriously.

Miles turns and crouches at the same time, shielding Rachel with his back. It’s only after he’s closed his eyes that Miles sees Wade’s lips trembling into a smile.

There’s a clink. A suck of air.

Something hard hits the top of Miles’s left shoulder and burns through to the other side. As it passes it rings against bone. The same sound that reaches through the windows of his cabin from the softball diamond when the heaviest hitters catch one full with the aluminum bat.

He flies. So does the girl. Sprung from his arms, her limbs powerless to find a way to break her fall.

He is spinning around to push himself up before the girl even begins her rolling disappearance into the long grass. Throws himself at where he thinks Wade was standing a second ago. Arms windmilling.

‘Stop!’

He hears Alex’s shout over the buzzing in his
ears as though from a great distance. At first, he interprets the word as the announcement of a broad concept, something requiring further explanation. Its implications spool out over the surface of his thoughts: Everything is about to stop. Must be stopped. They have been coming to a stop forever.

As he finds his feet under him, she shouts it again. This time, Miles hears its intended simplicity. What she wants him to see is Wade holding the girl by the collar of her shirt. His other hand tapping the end of the barrel against the side of her head.

‘Stop!’

Miles falls to his knees.

‘He hit you,’ Mungo says from somewhere behind him, and Miles looks down at where the bullet took away a piece of his shoulder.

‘How’s that
feel
?’ Wade asks.

‘Like nothing,’ Miles says, and it’s true.

‘No? How about this?’

Rachel is too close to Wade’s legs for him to fire down at her, so he pushes her ahead of him. Returns both hands to aiming at her crawling form. The end of the gun searching the length of her spine.

‘Not her,’ Miles says.

‘You know, I’m not such a great shot. I admit it. But I don’t think I’m going to miss this one here.’

‘Wade—’

‘Everybody got their eyes on the birdie? Good. Now
watch
.’

Miles comes at him in a hopeless run, all waving arms and twisted knees. There is too much ground between them for anything Miles does now to make a difference. Yet the fact that he stays on his feet, tripping forward, forces Wade to swing the bore around at him. He watches Miles loom and blur through the rifle’s telescope as his hand pulls back the bolt.

Miles hits him with his bad shoulder first, but feels only a soft displacement, something come to rest where it shouldn’t be. The contact is barely enough to test Wade’s balance. Yet Miles clings to him, his boots dragged over the stones as Wade tries to step away. The two men hold each other without foot or fist coming free to land a blow, and for a second, the rifle is hugged between them, unwanted. Pointing at the ground. Under their chins.

The barrel tangles between their legs until Wade falls back. When he lands, the earth knocks out a sour breath that Miles, now lying on top of him, tastes against his tongue. When he puts his hands onto Wade’s chest to push himself up, they come away sticky.

Miles gets to his feet and, at first, thinks he has left his right arm behind on the ground. Yet he feels
something
where it used to be—an unsustainable pressure, the filling of a thin-skinned balloon—that isn’t at all right. It reminds him of the rifle.

He bends to pick it up and beats Wade’s
grasping fingers to the stock. Knocks him back with a dunt to the side of his head.

Miles looks back over the widening cleave in his shoulder and sees Mungo lifting Rachel from where she landed. The girl’s eyes batting open, pulling him into focus.

‘Keep going,’ Miles says.

Yet all of them stay where they are for a moment. A calculation based less on whether what they are doing is right than on whether they can do it at all.

‘You have to,’ he says to Mungo alone this time.

With an ache that has nothing to do with his shoulder he watches Mungo start away with the girl in his arms. Her bald head cradled in Mungo’s palm and the rest of her hanging loose, not much bigger than the doll he had discovered in the ash at the edge of town.

Alex follows with her head turned back at Miles. He watches her face shrink, grow vague. It takes less than a minute for the smoke to swallow them all.

Once they’re gone, the weight of the rifle quadruples in Miles’s hands. All around, the skins of the birch trees curl up like pencil shavings.

‘What now, gorgeous?’ Wade says.

Miles looks down at him and sees a distorted version of himself. It’s not a resemblance but a recognition of some fundamental kinship that has been there all along. Wade Fuerst could be his
brother. Or closer than that. A Siamese twin cut free.