“Not so fast,” Kevin cautioned. “We have another half-mile of fire break to clear here to ensure this mother doesn’t swing around and threaten Bakersfield.”
“Lieutenant.” Flash turned off her whirring saw to be heard. Pinning him with a serious expression, she pointed north. “Do you feel that, smell that? Do you hear it?” He looked over his shoulder, and she continued. “The Santa Ana winds—they’ve shifted. The fire wants to climb the slope, but there’s no more fuel. It’s going to come directly toward us next, and it isn’t that far away.”
“Are you sure?” Shane sidled up beside Flash, giving her a worried look. “Lieutenant Garcia, should we back up the four-wheel-drives and head out?”
“We’ve got another half hour at least,” he answered, “but I’ll check with the commander to see what he says. You all keep doing what you’re doing for now.”
With an uneasy glance at the engulfed forest to the north, Flash ripped the pull chord on her chainsaw, established a balanced stance, squeezed the trigger to rev the engine for a second, and returned to cutting her angled line into the next pine’s trunk, adding her raspy grind to the chorus of other saws. Men with axes chopped saplings and stripped branches from felled timber, while Shane resumed scraping leaves and needles from the cleared path.
Intuition gnawed at Flash’s gut as if a whisper on the wind touched her ears, sharing secrets the others couldn’t fathom. She knew fires—understood them inside and out. She could distinguish the innocuous from the malicious, could sense when one gave up and when it forged ahead. It was as if some flames danced for her enjoyment, and others leaped and grabbed at her with scalding fury. Fire was pure energy, not good or bad on its own. Yet, to Flash, some blazes possessed a spirit, and this inferno’s spirit refused to be quenched.
The turpentine scents of sap, fresh sawdust, and smoke mingled in a distinct aromatic soup, free of the acrid, sharp, pungent chemical odors found in structure fires, consuming and spitting out the waste of plastics, insulation, synthetic fabric, and cushion foam. This was the clean smell of a forest ablaze … and it seemed to be growing stronger.
Flash glanced at Kevin.On the radio.They better tell us to move.Repositioning her saw blade, she ground through the opposite angle to complete her wedge. A ruddy little fellow from Texarkana banged the wood chunk with the butt of his axe and cried, “Timber!” Swinging around the precarious trunk, Flash and the red-haired guy easily pushed it in the proper direction. She could barely hear itcrash to the earth. Taking another look across the stream, Flash could swear the flames were closer than when she’d started cutting this tree.
While Red stripped the trunk of branches to make it easier to move, Kevin strode up, tucking his radio into his turnout coat pocket. “Chief says they’re headed down this way along the ridge to make sure it doesn’t jump west, and it’s imperative we finish this portion of the break line before moving out. His reports estimate we’ve got another hour before we’ll need to vacate.”
“Begging your pardon, sir,” Flash rebutted, “but when did he receive that intel? Because this wildfire is getting whipped every which way to Tuesday by the change in the winds.”
He smiled reassuringly at her and slapped a broad, gloved hand on her shoulder. “Relax, Lone Star. This isn’t a house fire. There won’t be any backdrafts out here, no place to get trapped. If we need a quick retreat, we’ll take the service road just south of our debris pile. Besides, we have the ATVs. The chief wouldn’t order us to hold here if it wasn’t safe.”
While Flash trusted Lieutenant Garcia, she didn’t trust the fire to perform as predicted. She realized fires employed strategy and stealth, acting with a survival instinct to match any living creature. Sensing movement, she glanced over at a family of raccoons, bounding from rock to rock, crossing the stream, fleeing the leaping flames. A flock of birds squawked overhead as another powerful gust assaulted them from the north.
“Let’s move it, people!” Kevin shouted as he paced away from Flash, down the row of firefighters.
She watched him and Dillon snap gaffs into a downed trunk and drag it to the debris line. Moving to a bigleaf maple, Flash pulled the trigger and drove her spinning chain blade into its hardwood. While she knew it would have a sweeter smell than pine, her senses were now overwhelmed with the smoke blowing in from up the valley. Teeth clenched, she powered through the cut as fast as she could.
The chief knows what he’s doing,she told herself.Kevin is a lieutenant for a reason. You aren’t accustomed to forest fires.Yet nothing convinced her that her gut was wrong.
I’m coming,sang the fire like the taunt of a nefarious killer. Flash swallowed, yanked out her saw blade, the wedge of wood tumbling to the ground.
Just as the maple hit, throwing up a small cloud of dust from the dry soil, Flash heard a yelp, a female voice.Shane.
Spinning, she scanned her surroundings. “Over here!” Shane yelled as she backed up and pointed. A pop-up crackled in the parched leaves and twigs near where she had been raking. Sometimes it happened—a burning leaf carried on a breeze, an escaped ember, combustion from the nearby heat.
A man with a shovel raced over, flinging dirt onto the stray, fledgling flames, dousing them to a smolder. “I’ve got it,” he answered in an unbothered tone.
“Garcia!” called a voice down the line. “There’s another one over here.”
Bearing less confidence and more concern, Kevin jogged that way, yelling, “Everyone with a shovel, focus on these spot fires. The rest of you keep clearing fuel.”
“Still think we’ve got an hour?” Shane asked as Lieutenant Garcia sprinted past her, but he didn’t answer. Instead, he pulled out his radio.
Flash moved to the next tree and inspected the conflagration across the stream. The surreal scene was much closer now, its thundering growl louder, the billowing clouds of smoke thicker, the air dark and oppressive with heat and a hellish glow. Flames thrust skyward, towering above the trees that crackled and popped like lethal breakfast cereal. She watched one fall, crashing to the ground, igniting a line of sunbaked vegetation as if it had been drenched in accelerant. Next, with a whoosh and a snap, flames soared up the trunk of a neighboring tree like a matchstick, faster than Flash could have imagined possible. The wildfire devoured everything in its path as if it were a racehorse trying to beat all comers to the finish line. Walls of fire surged and swirled, driven by the wind toward the stream. Unable to hear it, she felt her heart pounding in her chest.
They hadn’t finished the fire line, but had, in the past two days, cut a path several miles long. Hopefully, it would be enough.One more tree,Flash thought as she saw everyone around her still performing their jobs, albeit with fearful looks on their faces.
Red ran up to Kevin, who was still on the radio. Although Flash couldn’t hear what they said, she could guess he was urging the lieutenant to get them outnow. Her chainsaw whirred, another piece of fodder for the consuming beast taken away. As it hurtled to the ground with an inaudible, solid thunk, every nerve in Flash’s body warned her to run. There were no victims to save and no chance of putting out the fire. Sure, she didn’t want folks in Bakersfield to lose their houses and shops, but there was plenty of time to evacuate the city if it came to that.
Relief flooded her chest when Kevin waved his bright hard hat in the air, calling for the crew to gather around. All twenty firefighters stopped what they were doing and trotted to him, forming a tight circle so they could hear their instructions.
“The wind has shifted,” he explained, stating the obvious. Hadn’t Flash already pointed that out? “The chief has called in a water drop over there.” Kevin pointed to the pristine strip of forest adjacent to the fire’s edge, between where the smokejumpers had carried out their controlled burn and the stream that was now being threatened. “That should halt it in its tracks. We can hope that between the little river and our cleared fire line, it’ll burn itself out. I told him it was too hot for us to stay here any longer, so let’s clean up, load the trucks, and head out.”
Smiles and nods of agreement abounded, Flash’s included. Chainsaw in hand, she stepped over the debris pile, taking long strides toward the vehicles, when a tremendous boom sounded to her right. Between the volume and intensity of the explosion, she was sure her eardrums would have burst if not for her protective plugs.
Everyone ducked, like soldiers under fire, but Flash quickly spotted the source. “Garcia!” she yelled, pointing to a clump of fully engulfed pines. The flames leaped the creek, tearing across the firebreak, racing to cut off their escape.
Chapter 2
