Was I pointing the son of a bitch backward?
he thought, and then he lifted his right hand to his forehead and brought back a palmful of blood and thought,
You are one dumb bastard.
He’d had his eye pressed to the scope. Right up against the metal ring of it, of a scope with high eye relief that allowed the shooter to keep his face away, because guess what, boy, there was some serious kick when you shot a bullet the size of your index finger a thousand yards.
But he’d shot it. And where had it gone?
The QuikClot bandages were dark with blood, and he knew how bad that was, but right then, right there, sitting on top of the world, Montana and Wyoming spreading out for miles in all directions around him, he couldn’t bring himself to care. He just needed to know what his shot had done.
He sat against the rocks where it had all started, where the fall had begun, and he got his breath back as sweat ran salty into his open, gasping mouth, and then he turned and looked down to the place from which he’d come, and he started to laugh.
It was not so far. From up here, it did not look so far. A man with a strong arm would probably believe he could hit it with a baseball, and maybe he wouldn’t be wrong.
But that man wouldn’t have climbed from there to here, bleeding and broken. You didn’t know the distance until you’d done that.
He rolled onto his stomach and found the rifle where it had fallen, and he brought it up again. Put his eye to the scope—same dumb mistake, but he wasn’t shooting this time—and realized he couldn’t focus. He had to pull back and wipe at the blood in his eye; he was awash in it. When he looked again, all he saw was smoke and fire. The forest was burning hot now, the wind carrying the fire up toward him, but it would never reach him, not across all of that stone. Then he moved the scope a touch and he was looking at his wife again.
The first time he’d seen her through the scope, he hadn’t believed it. He’d heard enough stories of the things men thought they saw when death was near, and this one fit, a mirage of his wife, but then the rest of them had taken shape, his wife and Connor Reynolds and Jamie Bennett and another woman, one he didn’t know. The fire lookout, he supposed. All alive. All with Jack Blackwell.
He hadn’t had time to wonder over it, the way they’d all met there, the paths they’d taken. Not when Jack Blackwell started shooting. Ethan had wanted to fire fast then but knew that he couldn’t, because, just as Jack had warned his now-dead brother, a miss at this distance would be costly. This was no AR-15; he wasn’t going to be able to fire a burst of shots and adjust along the way. Shoot once, and shoot true. He’d forced himself to aim and think, trying to remember the basics of shooting at a target that was so far downhill. He’d been taught these things once and all that stood out was something that seemed counterintuitive but was the reality: Whether you were shooting uphill or downhill, the bullets would always pull high. Slightly higher on a downhill shot, for the simple reason that gravity was less of an enemy to the bullet’s path when it was already headed down.
He’d aimed at Jack Blackwell’s waist first and then decided that wasn’t low enough. It was a damned steep slope and the bullet would be climbing above his aiming point, and it would be better to hit him in the hip than not at all. He lowered his aiming point to the knees, moved his finger to the trigger, and let out a long, slow breath. Tried to let everything within him go loose and liquid. A tense shot was a missed shot. His father had taught him that. Tense muscles jerked on the trigger. Jerked triggers produced wild bullets.
Then Jack advanced toward Allison, and Ethan kept those black knees in the center of the crosshairs and let his index finger graze the trigger and pull it home and the world exploded on him.
Now, scope to his eye again, he had the world back, if in a bloody haze, and he could see his wife and the boy and…he could see Jack Blackwell.
Jack Blackwell was down.
Ethan started to laugh, and then he realized it sounded more like sobbing, and he tried to stop but couldn’t.
Got him, got him, got him. Got
them.
But beyond the survivors was a rising scarlet cloud. The fire was pushing hard and fast. They needed to move.
For a few seconds, no one made a sound. Then Jamie Bennett let out a low moan and fell to her knees and stretched her hands out to her brother as if she could put the pieces back together. She dropped her gun when she reached for him and Allison had the slow, stupid thought
Someone should get that,
but she didn’t move. Jace was still sitting on the ground, and though he’d registered that Jack Blackwell was dead, he seemed catatonic. His focus on the woman Jack had shot was total. He was whispering to her, and Allison couldn’t hear the words. The woman had her eyes closed and was breathing through her teeth.
“Who shot him?” Jamie Bennett said. “Who took that shot?”
There was no one in sight. The mountain was empty.
Jack Blackwell was gone, but the fire was not, and the sound of it was louder now, a roar beneath the black smoke that boiled out of the tree-lined ridge below them. The heat was intensifying every minute. Jamie Bennett got to her feet and looked at Allison and then the other woman.
“It wasn’t supposed to go this way,” she said. “This one was supposed to be easy.”
Nobody answered. She began to walk away with a weaving, unsteady stride. She almost went down once, caught a tree, held herself up. Nobody moved or spoke or attempted to stop her. The kill shot from nowhere had stunned them all. Jamie steadied herself and continued walking toward Tango. The horse turned to meet her.
Allison finally moved, crawled over the ground for the two guns that lay there in the blood, got her hand around the pistol, and then looked back at Jamie when Tango let out a whinny. Jamie was trying to mount him. It took her three tries but she got into the saddle, and then she began to kick him. Trying to drive him downhill.
He was already uneasy from the fire; the only reason he was still there at all was Allison, and he did not want to carry another rider. Now he was trying to rid himself of Jamie Bennett; it was as if he understood what Allison had not been able to. Jamie stayed on the horse maybe fifty yards before he succeeded in throwing her. She landed in the rocks and her leg snapped beneath her and when she tried to rise, she let out a cry. The horse hesitated, as if he felt guilty despite himself—Tango was nothing if not a good horse—but then he began to gallop, into the trees and out of sight.
Jamie Bennett tried again to rise, and this time her scream was louder and she went down faster and then she was silent and they couldn’t see her anymore and it was just the three of them left there as Jack Blackwell’s blood poured down the slope and dripped toward the fire.
Allison looked at what remained of his skull and then up into the mountains and said, “Ethan is alive.”
T
here were ghosts
on the mountain now.
Hannah could see her old crew, all of them, but it was better this time, better than it had been. There were no screams and no one was running, and even Brandon was on his feet again—he hadn’t given up, was standing tall and strong.
And watching her.
They all were.
Nick came down close and looked at her patiently and said, “Hannah? Deploy or die.”
He’d screamed it the last time she’d heard the command, but this morning he was calm. They all were. It reassured her. They were the best, after all. Hotshots. If they were not panicking, then she shouldn’t. They were the best.
Nick said it again, his blue eyes earnest, imploring: “Hannah? Hannah?”
He left her then, and the spoken name remained, but the voice was different and the face was different. The boy. Hannah looked at him and thought,
Thank you, God, he made it across the creek. I didn’t think that he would. I didn’t think he had a chance.
“Hannah?”
Wrong boy. Wrong mountain, wrong day. Hannah blinked and looked into a tear-streaked face and said, “Yeah.” It came out as a croak and she wet her lips and tried again and this time it was easier. “Yes, Connor. I’m fine.”
“Tell me what to do,” he said. “I’ve got the first-aid kit, but it’s so bad, and I don’t know what to use, I don’t know what to do, you’ve got to tell me what to—”
“Stop,” Hannah said.
He stopped talking, waited on her. Hannah blinked and breathed and now she saw the woman behind him, and for an instant she was afraid, because the woman held a gun. Her eyes held no harm, though. The woman’s face was wrapped in bandages and she looked down at Hannah and said, “We’ll get it fixed. It’s not going to kill you.”
“Of course not,” Hannah said. She didn’t look where the other two were looking, though, at the places where it felt as if her legs were on fire. That was a trauma basic—let somebody else look. You didn’t need to see it yourself.
So everything was good, then. Everything was fine.
No.
Nick’s voice, maybe. Brandon’s? She couldn’t tell. It was so faint.
Look.
Who was talking? And whoever was talking was wrong, she wasn’t supposed to look, it wasn’t going to help a damn thing. She wished she could hear him better, the voice was too soft and the sound of the fire was a roar now, advancing through the timber, and—
Oh. That was it. Yes, that was it.
“I need to look at the fire,” she said. “Help me.”
“No,” the woman said. “Lie still. Let me see what I can—”
“Let me see the fire.”
They helped her while she turned. The pain turned with her—it wasn’t about to let her sneak away. She got her first glimpse of her wounds without intending to, managed to keep her eyes away from her knee, where the pain was worst and the bleeding heaviest, but she saw her left foot, the beautiful White’s fire boot now with a jagged hole in the black leather, blood bubbling through it. A surge of nausea rose but she looked away and fixed her eyes on the flames, and while the pain didn’t step aside, the sickness did.
The fire was near the edge of the timberline now, and then it was open grass, and then it was them. The route Hannah had wanted to take originally, backtracking into the high rocks, was no longer an option. They’d been delayed long enough to allow the fire to find the drainages, and it was moving through them fast.
If you died in a fire, you died at two speeds, Nick had told Hannah more than once. One was measured with a clock, and the other with a stopwatch. Your death began in the poor decisions you’d made that led you to the place you did not belong, and your death ended in the poor decisions you made trying to escape it. They were on the stopwatch now, and she knew it was running fast.
Time, time is our friend, because for us, there is no end…
“Hannah?”
She was aware then that Connor had been saying her name over and over, and she blinked hard and refocused and said, “I’m fine. I’m just thinking.”
“We go back, right?” Connor said. “Isn’t that what you said we should do? I can carry you. We can carry—”
“We’re not going to get high enough, fast enough.”
“We’ll run,” he said.
“It will run faster.”
The speed of fire increased going uphill, one of the great evil tricks of a forest fire. They were on a slope of about thirty-five, maybe forty degrees. At thirty degrees, the speed of the fire would double. It would also have more of the wind by then, because right now the trees it was burning through were shielding some of the wind. By the time it reached the dry grass, empty of trees and on the upslope, it would turn from a marathon runner into a sprinter, and they’d be trying to cross directly in front of it.
No chance.
Somewhere behind her, just out of sight but so close she could feel his breath on her ear, Nick said, “Hannah? Deploy or die.”
“I had a fire shelter,” Hannah said. She was losing focus, though, losing the place and time, was telling them about another day and another fire, and so she was annoyed when Connor began to open his pack, paying no attention to her. It took her a moment to realize that he was getting out the fire shelter. The one he’d brought down from the tower. The one she’d said she would never get inside.
“That works?” the woman named Allison said. She sounded beyond skeptical. Hannah got that. Everyone who’d ever looked at a fire shelter did.
“It works.”
But not always. It was wrong to tell them lies; you should never lie at the end. Whether the fire shelter worked or not was a matter of heat and speed. If the fire passed over them quickly, the fire shelter might save them. If it lingered, though…then it was the worst kind of end. You’d be better off sitting and waiting like Brandon had.
Hannah pushed herself up on the heels of her hands and then closed her eyes when the pain came on. When she opened them again, her mind was clearer but the pain was sharper.
“Connor?” she said. “Listen to me now. Do what I say. You need to get that shelter up. Can you do that for me?”
He nodded. His hands were shaking, but he nodded.
She told him how to do it, and it took him only two tries, even with the shaking hands. He was good like that, but the fire shelters were also designed to be deployed by shaking hands. It was the only way they were ever put up.
Even as he deployed the shelter, she was doing the math and coming up short. You were supposed to have one shelter per person, and she had three people and one shelter. She’d heard of only one time, ever, when three people had survived in the same shelter. It was the Thirtymile fire. But back in South Canyon, where thirteen lives had been lost, attempts to share shelters had failed tragically.
In Hannah’s mind, that still left an odd man out here in the slopes above Silver Gate.
“That’s going to work?” Allison Serbin said. “You’re serious?”
The flimsy, tube-shaped tent hardly looked inspiring. Particularly not against the awesome backdrop of scarlet terror behind them.
“It works. You’re going to get inside of that,” she said. “And you’re going to stay there.”
She was looking at both of them, and Allison Serbin seemed to understand the problem, because she said, “Jace, listen to her and get in it,” without suggesting anyone join him.
“You go with him,” Hannah said.
“What?”
“It’ll be tight. But it’s worked before.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“You’ll
be fine?
”
Hannah looked away from her. “Please get in,” she said. “You don’t understand how far we’ve come. I can’t lose him here.” Her voice broke on that and she gave up trying for any more words.
Allison stared at her for a moment, and then she said, “Okay. I’m getting in.”
Hannah nodded. There were tears on her face but she didn’t care. “Thank you,” she said. “Connor…I mean Jace…please get in.”
“What about you?”
What about her. She said, “You remember the promise I made to you? I said you were getting home. I promised you that. But what did you promise me?”
“That I wouldn’t make you get in this.”
“Be true to your word,” she said.
“It’s not fair,” he said.
“Didn’t say it was. But we made an agreement. Be true to your word.”
“No. We’ll carry you. I can carry you.”
Hannah looked away from him and over to Allison and said, “Help. Please.”
Allison took his arm and finally the boy listened; he dropped to all fours and crawled inside the shimmering silver fabric that rippled against the wind and the heat. Allison knelt to follow.
“You pull it shut, and you wait,” Hannah told them. “Now, guys, it’s going to be bad.” She was crying freely. “It’s going to be worse than you think, but it will work. You just promise me that you won’t get out too early.”
She was so dizzy that the words were very hard to organize now. She wasn’t sure how many of them she was actually saying.
The fire threw a sparkling spiral onto the edge of the grass no more than a hundred feet from them, some limb or pinecone that exploded out of a tree like an advance scout, and the grass to the east of her, toward the creek, began to burn and then smoldered out. This was how it would begin, with the spot fires, and this was how they did their most devious work, jumping trench lines and gulches and even creeks. She looked at the spot fire as it sputtered out; that one was not quite hot enough, not quite strong enough, but it wouldn’t be long now before one was.
“You did it again,” she whispered. The boy was going to die—after all of this, he was going to die burning. A second chance had walked out of the wilderness and into her arms and she was going to kill this one too. The fire shelter would buy them a bit of time, but not enough. There was too much fuel around it. For them to have a chance in there, the fire would need to pass by fast, a desperate hunter in search of fuel. But she’d set their shelter up in grass that was knee-high and deadly dry. They’d melt inside of the shelter, and they’d go slow.
Words from the dead found her then, more memory than ghost, although it was hard to separate them now. The last thing Nick had said that wasn’t a scream. The final thing he’d wanted—shouted—was for her to deploy her fire shelter. The second-to-last thing, though, the last thing he’d said calmly, was that he wished there were grass around them.
At the bottom of Shepherd Mountain, there had been none. It was all deadfall and jack pines and some fescue clumps, but no open stretches of grass, and he’d wished for some, and Hannah was the only person on the crew who’d understood why in the hell he had desired to be standing amid faster-burning fuel.
You need it to pass by in a hurry.
Up here, it wouldn’t. Up here it would burn slowly and they would die inside that shelter.
They were still not running. What in the hell was the matter with them? Ethan had saved them, damn it, he’d come so far and fought so hard, and he’d won, he’d dropped the son of a bitch, and they wouldn’t even give him the simple gift of running? The fire below was a constant roll of thunder now, he could feel its strength in the stone beneath him, and he thought with great sorrow that it had to be far worse down there, too powerful to imagine, and so killing Jack wasn’t enough to help them, because he couldn’t kill the fire. They had given up, and he could do no more for them now but watch.
He didn’t want to watch. Couldn’t. And so he brought them centered in the scope and he prepared to say good-bye because he refused to see it end like this, but instead of looking away then, he stared, entranced.
They had some sort of a strange silver tent out. It looked like the material on the emergency blankets he handed out to each group, and he realized then what it was: a fire shelter, the sort they dispatched to the crews on the fire line. Where they’d come up with it, he couldn’t imagine—it didn’t seem like it’d be standard issue in a fire tower—but there it was.
While he watched, Hannah and Connor argued, and then he crawled inside, and then his wife followed, joining the boy in the tent, and the other woman sat in her own blood beside a dead man and waited to join him.
You need to take the shot,
Ethan thought.
It will be better for her. Faster.
But he couldn’t do that.
The blood clouded the scope again and washed the woman away from him and that was the last he saw.