Carter heard a shot, glanced in the mirror, and saw the young cop, feet squarely planted, firing his pistol into the air.
And one of the patrol cars that had been blocking the drive started up after him, bumping over the curb with its lights flashing and siren blaring.
Was all of this for nothing? Carter thought. Was Beth in one of the cars that was already snaking its way down the hillside? He kept shooting glances over to his left, looking for her old white Volvo, but he didn’t see it.
Nor did he see, until it was almost too late, the big green SUV that was barreling down the hillside, trying to circumvent the traffic on the drive. The SUV blasted its horn, and Carter blasted the klaxon in reply, its piercing wail reverberating around the hillside with a frightening echo; the SUV, perhaps startled, veered to the side, so close that it grazed Carter’s side mirror. Carter saw a panicked woman on a cell phone in the driver’s seat, a couple of kids in the back, and then he saw her swerve to miss a tree behind him, and he heard the crash.
She’d run right into the front of the police car; the hoods of both cars were crumpled, and there was a cloud of steam escaping from them both. Two cops jumped out to assess the damage, and Carter drove his own car back onto the main drive. While the lane on the other side of the cement median strip had a dozen or so cars still backed up, the lane going up the hill was clear, and Carter took its turns as if he were on the autobahn. The Mercedes purred, like a pent-up animal delighted at last to run free.
But the air, as he ascended, was darker and dirtier all the time. Smoke from the east was drifting over, and it was as if night was falling by the minute. Carter passed only one or two other cars racing down, one of them an open Miata with a bronze statue of a naked nymph on the passenger seat. Far ahead, he saw a red fire captain’s car, and he could hear the speaker on the top telling people to evacuate now. He cut sharply into a side street, then shot back up through a service drive that led toward the top of the development. Via Vista, his own street, connected with it just a block or two up.
Ash was falling like snowflakes on the immaculate houses and parched lawns and empty streets.
Tires screeching, Carter wheeled the limo onto Via Vista, where only one row of houses stood along the crest-line, the dense canyon falling steeply away just behind them. All that could be seen of the massive power towers that rose up above the trees and thick brush were the red signal beacons flashing at their top; the Santa Monica Mountains, perfectly visible on most days, were now just an immense black shadow, far away. Carter raced up the hill, past the tennis courts, past the swimming pool, toward the lighted windows of his own house. Beth was home, he thought, Joey was home! He would gather them all up into the Mercedes, along with Champ—he couldn’t forget Champ!—and get the hell out of there, while there was still time!
The car lurched to a halt in the drive, right next to his Jeep, and he leapt out while the engine was still turning off. He ran across the front lawn—he could hear Champ barking inside—and threw open the door.
“Beth! Where are you?”
But there wasn’t any answer. Champ jumped up onto his pants.
“Down, boy!” He pushed the dog aside and raced up the stairs, shouting, “Beth! Beth!” The dog bounded up after him.
He ducked his head into the nursery—the crib was empty—then into the master bedroom—empty, too.
He stopped to catch his breath, then heard a voice—Beth’s, from downstairs—calling, “Champ! Champ!”
“We’re here!” Carter shouted, then ran back to the top of the stairs.
Beth, at the bottom, was holding a leash; her hair was slapped up under a baseball cap, and she was wearing a Getty sweatshirt and gray sweatpants. She looked shocked to see him.
“Where did you come from?” she blurted out. “I’ve been waiting—”
“No time—let’s go,” he said, leaping down the stairs again, three at a time.
“Joey’s in the car, but your Jeep is blocking the drive! I couldn’t—”
He grabbed her tight, kissed her on the top of her baseball cap, and said, “Follow me.”
The door to the garage was standing open. He ran in and lifted Joey out of his car seat.
“What are you doing?” Beth said. “Just move the Jeep out of the way!”
“Trust me,” he said, running outside now, past his Jeep and toward the limo. If any car could get them out of this maelstrom . . .
He yanked open the rear door and waved Beth and Champ toward it. The dog made a running jump, Beth quickly clambered in, and as soon as she was seated, he handed her the baby. Even Joey, the imperturbable baby, looked concerned; black ashes clung to his blond curls.
Beth didn’t even have time to ask where this car had come from.
Carter threw himself behind the wheel, backed up wildly halfway across the cul-de-sac, then started back down the hill. In the time the car had been out, the soot and ash had piled up on the windshield again, and he hit the fluid and wipers. But the debris was so thick, the wipers could barely move. Carter leaned forward to see ahead, then opened his window instead, and put his head out. It was like a scene from hell.
The sky was filled with clouds of black smoke, lighted from below by the advancing flames. The streetlamps, on light sensors, had all gone on, casting pale golden pools of illumination on the debris collecting around the base of their poles.
Carter fumbled at a few switches again, then found the high beams and turned them on. He had slowed down, looking for the turn back down the hill, when he saw something move, just a few yards in front of the car, and hit the brakes.
At first he couldn’t tell what he was looking at—then he was able to see that it was a kind of animal exodus. In the crosswalk yet! A small herd of deer was skittering across the street, flanked by several coyotes, who were, miraculously, so intent on escape that they weren’t even molesting the deer. A pair of raccoons tumbled over the curb. A skunk followed.
“Why are we stopping?” Beth said, cradling Joey in her arms. Champ barked at the closed window.
“Some deer,” Carter said, before slapping the klaxon control again and sending up a mighty bellow. The deer fled, the coyotes scattered, and Carter started down again.
He hit the klaxon, over and over, to warn away the animals, but then a cloud of smoke and flame suddenly billowed from the eastern hillside, blinding and choking him; he pulled his head into the car, hit the button to close the window, and felt the car lift gently on one side, the undercarriage scraping along cement, before colliding with something he couldn’t see at all, and coming to a full stop.
He tried to reverse, but he could hear the tires spinning.
He jumped out to see what was wrong, and watched as the tops of the palm trees on the other side of the road burst, one after the other, into fiery balls, like puffs of dandelion blowing away in the wind.
The limo had driven right up onto the high curb in front of the pool complex—designed to let parents pull up and easily disgorge a horde of kids—and was perched there, with the left-side tires several inches off the ground. The road below looked dark and impassable . . . and the pool, though it looked like the black lagoon, was right there.
“Get out!” Carter shouted. “Out of the car!”
Beth kicked her door open, got out with Joey in her arms. Champ leapt out, barking frantically at the falling ash and advancing flames.
“The pool!” Carter said. “Get into the pool!”
The klaxon went off again, and Carter clamped his hands to his ears. He leaned into the front seat of the still running car and turned off the ignition, but the klaxon went on for at least ten seconds more, and that blue light on the dash kept flashing.
By the time Carter ran to the pool himself, Beth was already wading into the shallow end, with Joey held tight against her bosom. Champ waited by the lip of the pool, barking a warning.
“Come on!” Carter urged the dog, jumping in himself; the water was so coated with debris that it didn’t splash, but simply sloshed like muck around him. Carter waded toward Beth and Joey, throwing his wet arms around them both. Champ still hesitated, lying by the side of the pool, front paws extended, whimpering.
The klaxon blared again.
“I thought I’d turned that off,” Carter said, trying to catch his breath.
“What?” Beth said, coughing herself and unable to hear him over the siren.
Joey, his head against her shoulder, stared at his father with an ineffable expression of . . . what—sympathy? concern? definitely not fear—in his blue-gray eyes. Carter didn’t have much other experience with babies, but Joey struck him, at all sorts of times, as . . . different. Shouldn’t he be crying now, for instance? Or at the very least, agitated? Even his breathing seemed unobstructed.
The klaxon, blissfully, turned off. But with it gone, Carter could hear the unadulterated whooshing of the Santa Anas, whipped to a frenzy by the encroaching fires, and the crackle and snap of the dessicated foliage on the hillsides across from the pool. It was getting harder and harder to keep his eyes open, and harder to see anything even when he did. Beth’s face looked like it had been coated with that black grease snipers smeared under their eyes; she was blinking at the cinders caught in her lashes.
He put his mouth to her ear, cupped it, and said, “Give me Joey.”
She nodded, and wearily did.
“Now,” Carter said, “you should duck your head under the water, go all the way down, then come up quick. It might clear your eyes.”
She nodded again, took a labored breath, then disappeared under the black surface. When she came back up again, fast, she was shaking her head from side to side, the wet hair flying, and her eyes were tight shut.
“Did it help?” he said.
“Yes . . . yes. But . . .” Her gaze traveled over the pool to the street beyond, where the Mercedes still lay stranded on the curb and a sheet of flame, visible even through the pall of smoke, was cascading down the slope, engulfing a two-story stucco house.
Carter wondered if their own house had already gone up, too.
“Do you think we’re going to die here?” she said, baldly, and Carter vigorously shook his head; despite everything, the thought had genuinely not occurred to him. No matter what came next, no matter what happened, he was going to make sure that no harm came to Beth or his son.
“We’ll be okay,” he shouted over the roar of the wind and the fire. “If the fire comes this way, just go down in the water.” He didn’t actually know if this plan would work, but it sounded good in theory . . . as long as the pool didn’t crack and send the water, with everything in it, flooding down into the canyon.
“Now you clear your eyes,” Beth said, nodding down at the brackish pool. “It does help.”
She reached out her arms to take Joey back, and Carter did lower himself into the water. The deeper he went, the clearer the water felt, and the cooler it had remained; for a few seconds, he lingered there, enjoying the relative silence, the feeling of being clean and unsoiled, the respite from the madness he knew was still swirling above.
But when he came up, wiping his eyes clean, he saw Beth looking out at the hillside with a fixed expression. He looked where she was looking, and then he saw it, too. A hulking black shape, bigger than a rhinoceros but moving as if it were one, lumbering down the hillside. Its scales glistened green, like a salamander’s—the reptile reputedly immune to flames—and it paused, between two ribbons of fire flowing like lava, and waited.