Chapter 3 Linus
Linus pulls over and gets on the radio. He’s in the number two engine, his favourite, which he has just picked up from the repair shop.
She’s been pulling too far to the left on turns and her pump was sluggish.
Number two is old but Linus likes her; she’s quick and generous, not prone to those little exhaustions and stalling like some other engines.
Fire engines can stall, like all engines.
They’re only human. That’s a joke Linus likes to make. But number two is a good one.
‘I think it’s the Winham place,’ the dispatcher says. Everyone knows the Winham place. It used to have another name.
Dispatch tells Linus to come back to the station. It’s the right thing to do. Linus can’t man engine two by himself – can’t use the pumps and hose at the same time.
But Linus doesn’t do that. ‘Send everyone in engines three to six,’ he yells back.
‘I’m responding.’ He swings engine two carefully around across the four lanes, turns her towards that fiery orange corner of the sky, towards the national park.
He knows there isn’t much time but maybe he can help, get people out.
Who lives up there? Apart from him, of course – Leaf Winham.
Linus has been in the fire service three years and never seen a death yet.
He’s been lucky. Today, he wonders, with that turning of the gut that goes with fate, if all that is about to change.
Linus puts on the siren. As he drives he scans the radio.
He’ll be the first there, he’s by far the closest. The Winham place is over by the Never-Summer Wilderness.
All the rangers are on the radio, squawking.
All across the park they watch as that spot on the horizon brightens, an unnatural dawn.
At the entrance gates a police car roars ahead of Linus, clearing traffic to the sides. The police radios take up the call.
Most people call it the Winham place after its famous inhabitant, but its name is Nowhere. It was an apple farm before it was his home. Some say before that it was built on the foundations of a Franciscan monastery. Anyhow there’s always been a house up at Nowhere.
Linus loves Leaf Winham’s movies. His favourite is called Fallen Kingdom, about two airline pilots stranded in the wild after a crash.
They live in a cave together for ten or eleven years, forming a bond no one can break.
When they are finally rescued, they can’t adjust to normal life again.
They can’t handle people, except for one another.
So they leave their wives and strike out together back into the forests, never to be seen again.
Linus thinks about that a lot, about how if the wild gets inside you, you can’t ever get it out.
The radio crackles, a high nervous voice comes across the air. The call finally came in to 911. It’s official, now – code 3-25, meaning Linus will use sirens, because there is a fire. A big one.
Linus speeds up. The roads are steep and narrow but engine number two is good, she tries, she rides the steep incline with a roaring motor. The police car falls behind to clear passage for the other fire engines coming up from Boulder.
The gates of Nowhere come into view. Linus sees ash and burning debris on the wind.
There is no one at the great automated gates to open them.
The guard booth is empty. Linus leaps out with the crowbar.
The ground is strange underfoot. He tries to pry the gates apart.
He realises quickly that it’s no good. He gets back into engine number two and reverses slow and careful to about a hundred feet.
He hopes that will do it. Then he guns the engine until it whines and drives at the gates full speed.
He knows he shouldn’t but he closes his eyes at the moment of impact. He feels the steel reverberate, as if it’s inside his body, part of his bones. The gates part with a crash. Linus and engine number two fly into the grounds of Nowhere.
On either side of the road are split-rail fences.
Horses gallop along their length, screaming.
‘Sorry,’ Linus whispers as he speeds past. The fire will reach them soon enough.
The grass is dry, it will go up like tinder, but there’s no time to stop.
Dark, glistening wide eyes shine in the headlights as he guns the engine. ‘I’m so sorry.’
In his rear-view mirror Linus sees a bay mare jump, clearing the posts with ease.
A heavy dapple grey with a hogged mane follows suit.
His hooves clip the top rail, cracking it.
Now horses crowd round the broken fence, pour out and over, their hide shining in the firelight.
They gallop out through the steel gates, onto the mountain, into the night.
Linus is so glad. ‘Run, horses, run,’ he screams at them in the rear-view mirror, beating the dash with his fist.
The world lightens as he goes; a moment or two later there’s no need for headlights anymore. Shadows stretch long in the orange light. Linus is heading to the centre of it all, the heart of the burning star – Nowhere House.
To the left, through the smoke, something black and spectral is backlit against eerie red.
A terrible metal circle. Even in his panic Linus draws in his breath.
They always said there was a Ferris wheel at Nowhere.
He takes a corner too tight. Engine two crashes into something that looks like a Wendy house, knocking it onto its side, staving in the roof.
A flock of doves bursts from the cote into the black sky.
Some of them are alight. All Linus can see through the dash is burning feathers, like fingerpainting on the air.
Linus chokes on the scent. Some of the birds get high enough so the fire on them goes out and they fall earthward like comets.
One lands on the wind-shield of engine two.
It lies there for a moment, a black skeleton in a ball of fire. Then it is gone. Linus drives.
In the orchard some apple trees have been set alight by the sparks and embers that rain slowly from the sky. The air is full of burning leaves and smoke. Under it is the scent of warm apple pie.
Beyond the orchard the house rears into view, a great timber skeleton against the sky, lit up and beautiful with flame. The first floor is ablaze. For a moment he sees, or thinks he sees, a head silhouetted in the upstairs window. A hand, spread and pleading.
Linus drives engine two even harder, getting ready to unload the ladder.
He leaps out, keeping his eyes on the window above, on the fragile, spider-like silhouette.
It’s the second floor, ok, he can reach that with the ladder on his own.
At least, he thinks so. Smoke billows; he reaches, coughing, to release.
In the distance there is the sound of sirens. Linus feels the collapse of relief. The adults are here. They will take care of things now.
‘Leaf Winham’s up there!’ Linus yells. The officer jumps out of a cruiser. Linus knows Lloyd, he’s a good guy. ‘I saw him, he was waving …’
Officer Lloyd follows Linus’s finger. He looks, expressionless, at the burning casement. Flames lick.
The house is ringed with engines. The fire rages on.
By 4 a.m. the water reserves of the forestry service are exhausted.
Then the pumps and water tanks along the service roads are all used up.
More engines come from Denver. Through the night Nowhere smoulders, flame reviving in unexpected spurts.
The firefighters have been unable to reach the window where Linus saw the man waving. Leaf Winham is probably dead.
Linus’s chief tells him to go home. He’s been on for nearly twelve hours.
‘Please,’ he says. ‘Let me stay.’
Chief Renwick puts a hand on his shoulder and turns Linus about-face towards the patrol cars. His touch is not unkind. ‘Get a ride with one of the patrol cars, they’re changing shifts.’
Linus nods and Chief Renwick turns away. Linus is already forgotten.
Linus doesn’t go towards the patrol cars.
Instead he wanders eastwards, around the smouldering house, through the scalded trees.
He doesn’t know where he’s going. He thinks of that head silhouetted in fire, that desperate waving arm.
He clutches his helmet in both hands. He’s surprised to find that his face is wet, and realises that tears are making their way down his soot-blackened face.
Leaf Winham was Linus’s closest companion while his brother had cancer.
He watched Fallen Kingdom every day. One scene in particular, where the pilots begin to pretend that they are actually half-brothers who grew up together.
They invent a childhood for themselves, talking under the trees, in the cold clear forest air.
Linus cried, hugging his knees in front of the TV, watching those scenes over and during Matthew’s chemo, rewinding and watching, watching and rewinding.
Linus’s brother recovered. Matthew is married now with three loud kids and a harassed expression and far less hair on his head. Linus loves every part of that.
Linus has not been a firefighter long but he has an idea of what it’s like – to burn to death.
Flesh blackening, splitting and crackling.
At school in history class he could never listen to the descriptions of witches being burned.
It’s part of why he chose this job, maybe.
And the idea of Leaf Winham being gone makes Linus afraid.
Maybe the magic can now be reversed, and his brother can be taken from him after all.
If Leaf Winham can die eaten by fire then anyone can die, including Linus and everyone he loves.
He staggers on through the forest, his boots catching on root systems and fallen boughs.
He can’t get in a patrol car and go home.
If he leaves that’s an ending, and if there’s no ending there’s still hope.