Chapter 32
Chapter Thirty-Two
Hunter
I don’t question Porter, I just make for the boulder scramble as fast as I can. I know he’s right. If we can get down and around the shoulder of the hill before the fire reaches that point, we might make it back into the black.
It’s our only chance, because there’s absolutely no way we can outrun a fire moving uphill. Even this is going to be very, very close, and it’s going to depend on moving as fast as we can, in the howling wind and rain, wearing heavy packs.
We’re five feet down the scramble when my foot slips on a wet rock and I go down on one knee, hard. Pain flashes through my leg and I gasp, stars in front of my eyes. Porter stops and turns, just staring at me, waiting.
After a few seconds, I force myself to stand. I put my weight on it, and it hurts like hell, but the leg holds. I bend it, and same thing: painful as hell, still functional. I nod at Porter, and he nods back.
“Careful,” he says.
“Thanks,” I say, and we start moving again, each glancing back at the fire every few moments.
“We might have to deploy,” Porter says, panting for breath, his voice ragged.
He means deploy our fire shelters, the silicon-and-aluminum bags that resist heat.
They’re an absolute last resort, and a bolt of terror shoots through me at the thought: trapped, face-down on the ground, nothing but a thin layer between me and unimaginable heat.
Earlier this year, a dozen men in Arizona died after deploying in the Kaibab fire. They lost sight of it, only to find it below them on a slope, and they were left with no choice.
Kind of like we might be right now. I lower myself, knee a throb of pain, and hope that we get a choice.
This is fucking unfair, I think, even though I know that fair doesn’t matter. It was across the river. There was a one in a thousand chance...
“There’s a gravel fan at the bottom of the scramble that would be the best place to do it,” he goes on. “No flammable materials, up against a rock wall where—”
Mid-sentence, he slips. I hear rocks clatter down the slope and turn just in time to see Porter go over sideways, his heavy pack making him go off-balance.
Just before he hits the ground, I hear a dull crack.
Porter’s leg bends the wrong way.
For a moment, there’s total silence. I stand perfectly still, praying that it’s some kind of optical illusion, that Porter’s ankle is just sprained or something. That he can still get down.
Then he screams, a horrifying, gut-wrenching noise, coming from one of the toughest men I’ve ever met. Porter was in the Army before spending ten years in the hotshots, and I’ve never heard him scream before.
It jolts me back into action, and I cross the jagged granite toward him as fast as I can, careful not to fall myself. Porter’s just lying on his back, his face almost gray, his breathing shallow. He’s dripping with sweat, and I grab the bottom of his pants and pull the leg up.
I have to close my eyes for a moment and collect myself, because no matter how much ugly, gory shit I’ve seen, a bone poking through the skin will always make my stomach turn.
“It’s bad,” Porter whispers, his breathing still fast and shallow.
“Breathe,” I tell him. He keeps panting. “Deep breaths,” I command.
He takes one, long and shaky. His hands are still splayed out to the sides, and I can see them shaking. I can’t even imagine how much this must hurt.
I sling my pack off my back, unzip a pocket, and pull out my field first aid kit, unrolling the gauze. There’s not that much of it, but it’s gonna have to do.
“Casden, don’t,” Porter says, his voice thick and dull. “Go.”
“This is gonna hurt,” I say, and stretch the gauze over his shin.
“Just fucking —”
He screams again, and I grit my teeth together, wrapping his lower leg as tight and fast as I can.
It’s a pretty shitty job, but given the circumstances, I just want to keep him from damaging it more if I can.
He’s panting for breath again, but as I finish wrapping his leg he catches himself and I hear another long, deep breath.
Good.
Something about emergencies always snaps my mind into perfect, crystal clear focus, and I know exactly what I’m going to do, like it’s already been written down for me. I put my gear on my back again, strap it on, and glance at the fire.
It’s coming, fast, The heat and smoke buffeting my face. Sparks and embers float up toward the sky, conveyed on a river of gray-yellow wood smoke.
But the sound. Jesus, the sound. Fires roar and howl as they make their own wind systems, and this one sounds like demons shrieking out of hell.
“I’m gonna need you to stand,” I tell Porter.
“You can’t get both of us down,” he says, his teeth clenched tightly. Sweat is running off his face and onto the rock below his head, and I can see every vein in his forehead standing out.
I kneel on my good knee next to him and offer one hand.
“Casden, go. That’s a direct order,” he says. It’s a last resort and he knows it, saying direct order like it’ll trigger some latent military switch in my brain and I’ll suddenly just leave him there.
Instead, I laugh.
“Fuck orders,” I tell him. “I don’t leave men behind.”
Reluctantly, he takes my hand. I pull him into a sitting position, and then he uses my knee to push himself up on his good leg until we’re both standing. He’s unsteady, but he’s still got his pack.
“This is gonna hurt,” I say, bending at the waist.
“No shit,” he mutters, but he still gasps when I drape him over my shoulders and stand.
Fucking hell, he’s heavy, but there’s so much adrenaline in my system right now that it doesn’t matter. I think I could lift a car if I needed to.
I pick my way down the rock slope slowly, carefully, smoke and rain blowing over us, the fire raging nearby. My eyes sting and my lungs already hurt, but I keep fucking moving.
I remember hauling Clementine up the stairs to the fire lookout. She was a lot lighter.
Hunter, I like your muscles, I think, and in the smoke and the rain and the heat, I smile.
Next to me there’s a crackle, and then Porter’s talking quietly and urgently into his radio. He doesn’t mention that he’s on my back, just that we’ve got no choice but to deploy.
The radio goes quiet.
“Godspeed,” the man’s voice on the other end says.
When we reach the gravel fan at the bottom of the slide, it’s almost unbearably hot, wind whipping against my clothes and face. I put Porter down as gently as I can, and he balances on his good leg and tears into his pack, bringing out the silver tent.
I’m so utterly spent that I’m shaking as I get my pack off.
Porter shouts something but I can’t hear him over the roar and the howl of the fire, the hot wind pushing us both against the rock wall.
I swear I can almost feel my skin brighten and blister in the heat, but I don’t stop. I don’t even look at the fire.
I grab my shelter and shake out the long half-cylinder. Porter does the same, leaning against the rock wall, unsteady on one leg, and I glance at the fire one last time, heat and smoke rolling toward us. An ember lands on the sleeve of my jacket and goes out, singeing it.
Then, suddenly, everything seems very matter-of-fact, like there’s no more point in being afraid because I’ve got only one option left, and this is it.
“Get in,” Porter shouts, and I pull the shelter over myself. I lie face-down on the gravel, my hands and feet anchoring it to the ground as best I can, and I press my face into the rocks, getting as low as I can.
Now the fire is even closer, closer than I’ve ever been to a fire. It sounds like there’s a freight train bearing down on me, and I do the last thing I learned in training.
I turn my radio off, just in case, and now I’m alone in this flimsy tube, holding it down as tightly as I can. Superheated air and smoke rushes through the gaps, no matter how small I try to make them, and the temperature is already sweltering, my skin starting to feel like it’s on fire.
I press my face into the gravel harder and try to breathe, but even the stone below me is hot.
I shift, trying to get a better angle, and I feel the lump in my pocket. Clementine’s rock, from the waterfall. I remember tossing her into the ice-cold water, her stretched out naked on that rock, and I grab the handles on my shelter and I press them down into the earth as hard as I can.