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.