Chapter Four
Early Saturday morning, Rand drove home from Junction. He had been called in after midnight to tend to a young man who had suffered multiple injuries as a result of wrapping his car around a tree along a curvy road—fractured sternum, broken ribs and collarbone, a fractured arm, and multiple bruises and cuts. Rand had spent hours wiring the man’s bones back together. Weariness set in when he was halfway home, so he did what he always did to try to stay awake: he opened a window to let in fresh air and thought about something other than himself and his fatigue.
He had stayed away from Chris since Thursday night, even though the desire to know what was going on with her gnawed at him, a low-level ache. If she wanted his help, she would ask. To keep pressing himself on her could be seen as harassment. He wanted to be her friend, not someone else she was afraid of.
He thought of the origami hummingbird. Not exactly a threatening item, yet Chris had been physically ill at the sight of it. He had a bad feeling about that moment, but maybe he was putting too much of himself and his own history into it. Maybe the hummingbird had been a kind of sick joke that only had meaning to her, not a real threat.
But could anyone be so upset by a joke that they would throw up?
His phone vibrated, and seconds later the video screen on his dash showed he had an incoming text. He pressed the button to hear the message, and the car’s mechanical female voice recited, “Wildfire on national forest land south end of County Road 3. All search and rescue volunteers needed to evacuate campers in the area.”
Rand increased his speed and headed toward search and rescue headquarters. He parked and joined the crowd of volunteers just inside. He spotted Chris right away, her blue hair standing out in the sea of blondes and brunettes. “Hello,” she said when he approached. No animosity. No particular warmth either.
“What should I do to help?” he asked.
She shoved a lidded plastic bin into his hands. “Put these first aid supplies in the Beast.” She indicated a boxy orange Jeep with oversize tires and a red cross on the back door. “And do whatever Danny or whoever he appoints as incident commander tells you.”
He joined a line of volunteers passing gear to the vehicles, then followed Ryan and Caleb to a Toyota truck. He, Caleb and Carrie Andrews squeezed into the back seat. Ryan drove, and Eldon took the passenger seat. They followed the Beast to the highway, then turned onto a county road that grew progressively narrower and bumpier as they climbed in elevation.
“Check out the smoke,” Eldon said, and pointed at the windshield to a black plume rising in the distance.
“People who don’t live here don’t understand how dangerous these dry conditions are,” Ryan said. “One spark from a campfire or a discarded cigarette can set a blaze that destroys hundreds of thousands of acres.”
Ahead of them, the orange Jeep slowed, then pulled over to the side and stopped. Ryan pulled his truck in behind it and rolled down the window. The headlights of a vehicle moved toward them. Tony stepped out from the driver’s side of the Jeep and flagged down the vehicle. Rand leaned his head out the open back window to hear the conversation. A second car idled behind the first. The driver of the first—a man perhaps in his fifties, his brown hair heavily streaked with white—spoke clearly enough for Rand to hear.
“Are you with the campers who are back here?” Danny asked.
“I don’t know about that,” the man said.
“Were you camped in the national forest?” Danny tried again.
“Yes. We saw the smoke getting heavier and decided to leave.”
“How many are with you?” Danny glanced toward the other vehicle.
“There are six of us here.”
“Only six?” Danny asked.
“More’ll be along soon,” the man said. “They’re packing up camp.”
“How many people?” Danny’s tone signaled that he was quickly losing patience with the man’s casual attitude.
“Maybe a dozen.”
“Men? Women? Children?”
“What business is that of yours?” the driver asked.
“Whoever is back there needs to get out now,” Danny said. “They don’t have time to pack. The winds are pushing the fire this way. We’re here to help with the evacuation.”
“They’re just a few miles back,” the man said. “You won’t have any trouble finding them.” He shifted the car into gear and lurched forward, the other vehicle close on his bumper. As they passed, Rand got a glimpse through tinted glass of two adults in the first vehicle and four in the second. All men, he thought.
Tony climbed back into the Beast, and the caravan of volunteers set out again, driving a little faster now, their sense of urgency heightened by the thickening smoke. “Do we know anything about these campers?” Rand asked after a moment. “Who they are or where they’re from?”
“Danny said he got a call from the sheriff that one of the spotters in a plane flying over the fire saw a group of tents in a clearing and called it in,” Caleb said. “Cell phone coverage is spotty to nonexistent back in here, so they might not have realized the fire had even started.”
“No missing all this smoke,” Eldon said. “Anyone with any sense would know to get out of Dodge by now.”
The Jeep stopped again, this time in the middle of the road. Ryan halted the truck, too, and everyone piled out. Smoke stung Rand’s eyes, and the scent of burning wood hung heavy in the air. “There’s active flames ahead,” Tony said. “We can’t go any further or we risk getting trapped. We need to turn around.”
“What about the other campers?” Carrie asked. “The driver of the car said there were others.”
Danny glanced over his shoulder. Smoke obscured the road ahead, though occasional orange flares illuminated burning trees. “We don’t know who or how many are in there,” he said. “We can’t put our own lives at risk. That doesn’t help anyone.”
Rand wanted to volunteer to go ahead on foot to scout the situation. But then what? He could end up injured or trapped, and the other volunteers might feel obligated to go in after him. But he hated this feeling of helplessness and defeat.
“Hello? Help! Oh, please help!”
They turned toward the sound as a woman stumbled down the road toward them. She was almost bent double beneath what Rand thought at first was a large pack but turned out to be a child wrapped in a sleeping bag, clinging to her back. As they rushed toward her, other figures emerged from the smoke—more women, half a dozen children and a single man, all carrying supplies and bundles of clothing, bedding, and who knew what else.
The lone man brought up the rear of the group. He had a blanket roll on his back and a large wooden box in his arms. “The truck broke down, and we had to walk,” he said, his words cut short by a fit of coughing.
Rand stared at the collection of women and children—some with soot on their faces, holes from sparks burned in their clothing—and thought of the men in the two cars. They had left women and children to walk out of a fire?
He flinched at a crack like a gunshot, then realized it was a tree not thirty yards away, bursting into flame. “We have to get out of here,” Danny said. He took the nearest woman’s arm. “Into the vehicles. Drop whatever you’re carrying and get in. You’ll have to sit on laps, on the floorboards—wherever you can fit.”
Another woman spoke up. “That isn’t necessary.” She seemed a little taller than the others, but maybe it was only that she stood straighter and looked them in the eye when she spoke. “We will carry our possessions and walk out.”
“You can’t walk fast enough to stay ahead of the fire,” Danny said.
“We have divine protection.”
The words snapped Rand’s patience. “Get in the trucks now!” he shouted. He picked up the closest child and shoved them into the back seat of the truck.
Caleb and Ryan reached for other children. Eldon picked up a woman and deposited her in the front passenger seat. Others began relieving the stranded campers of their burdens and leading them to the vehicles. They seemed to come out of their trance then. The man and several of the women and older children crowded into the back of the truck.
“What about our things?” one of the women wailed.
“We don’t have room for them,” Tony said.
She began to cry. Others were already weeping, children screaming.
“Is there anyone else?” Danny asked. He had to raise his voice above the din . “Any stragglers we should wait for?”
“No.” The man shook his head. “No one.”
Rand hoped the man was telling the truth. The flames were near enough he could feel the heat now, smoke so heavy he could no longer make out the road, the roar of the fire so loud they had to shout to be heard. A hot wind swirled around them, sparks stinging bare skin and smoldering on clothing. They didn’t have time to search for anyone who might have been left behind.
Somehow, they managed to turn the vehicles and head back down the road, forced by poor visibility to creep along yet driving as fast as they dared in order to escape the flames. Everyone was coughing now, everyone’s eyes streaming tears.
They slowed to steer around a burning tree that had fallen on the side of the road, and the weight in the back of the truck shifted. The wailing rose in pitch, and Rand looked back to see that the man had jumped from the truck and was running down the road, back in the direction they had come. He had his hand on the door, about to open it, when Caleb gripped his arm. “Let him go. We have to save the rest.”
Rand forced his body to relax and nodded. Even if he had wanted, he couldn’t have exited the vehicle. He was held down by a child on each thigh, a boy and a girl, who were about nine or ten. They sat stiffly and wouldn’t meet his gaze, hands clenched in front of them, eyes downcast. Obviously, they were terrified. Traumatized. Maybe that explained why they weren’t acting like any children he had ever met.
After what felt like the longest ride of his life but was probably only half an hour, they arrived at the staging area on the picnic grounds at the turnoff for the county road. Paramedics, the sheriff and his deputies, and other volunteers surrounded the Beast and the truck, someone taking charge of each of the campers as they emerged. “We found them trying to walk out of the fire,” Danny explained to the sheriff.
Sheriff Travis Walker was a tall man in his midthirties, with dark hair and eyes, a sharply pressed khaki uniform, and a grim expression on his face. “Any idea what a bunch of women and children were doing camping back in there with no transportation?” he asked.
“There was a man with them,” Ryan said. “He bailed out of the truck and ran back in the direction of the camp not long after we set out.”
“There were six other men, in two vehicles,” Tony said. “We passed them on the way out. They told us they had left the others—” he nodded at the women and children “—to pack up the camp and follow.”
The sheriff’s frown deepened. “We’ll question them later, find out what’s going on.”
“I think they might belong to some kind of cult,” Rand said.
Everyone turned to stare at him. “What makes you say that?” Travis asked.
“One of the women told us they weren’t worried about the fire because they were under ‘divine protection.’ That, and the fact that a group of able-bodied men, probably the leaders, left a bunch of women and children to fend for themselves, and the women aren’t questioning—at least not out loud—their right to do so. Blind obedience that goes against all common sense is one hallmark of a cult.”
Thankfully, the sheriff didn’t ask how Rand knew this. “We’ll question them and find out as much as we can,” he said.
“How do you know that? About cults?”
Rand tensed at the familiar voice and turned to look at Chris.
“My sister was in a cult,” he said. “I learned a lot about them when we were trying to persuade her to leave.”
“Did she leave?” Chris stared at him, lips parted, leaning toward him as if something important depended on his answer.
He shook his head. “No. She never did.”
Her expression softened, and she put her hand on his arm. A familiar tightness rose in his throat, but he forced himself not to turn away. He didn’t see pity in Chris’s eyes, but some other emotion, one he couldn’t quite read.
And then she whirled away from him, propelled by a hand on her shoulder. The driver of the car they had met in the burning forest stood with two other men, all crowded around Chris.
Rand moved in behind her, but the men ignored him. All three were middle-aged, from the fortysomething blond Rand had seen on the trail a week ago to the slightly older driver of the car, to a shorter, red-faced man with a round, boyish face but iron gray hair who stood between them. “Hello, Elita,” the driver said.
“My name isn’t Elita,” Chris said. But her voice trembled.
“Your time has come,” the blond said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She tried to turn away, but the blond grabbed her.
Rand took the man’s wrist and squeezed, hard, his thumb digging in between the fine bones in a way that was guaranteed to hurt. The man released her but turned on Rand. “This is no business of yours,” he said.
“Don’t touch her again,” Rand said. He kept his voice low, but anyone would know he meant business. He was dimly aware that a crowd had gathered, among them the sheriff and one of his deputies.
The blond turned back to Chris. “You can’t deny your destiny,” he said. He glanced at those around them and raised his voice so that it carried to everyone. “We will start the wedding preparations today.”