20. Brooks
Brooks
— Crossword Hints
The heavy steel door shudders in its frame as I kick it shut, the sound swallowed by the cavernous quiet of the maintenance bay.
Davis doesn’t look up from the workbench. He’s attacking a brass gate valve with a wire brush, the rhythm aggressive, as if he’s trying to scour the very history off the metal.
He doesn’t stop scrubbing, but he gives me a sidelong glance, a slow, knowing smirk spreading across his face. “How’s the local celebrity doing? I trust you managed to fix whatever crisis she invented this time?”
“It was just a leak,” I say, tossing my jacket onto the lockers. “It’s fixed. Can we move on?”
“Uh-huh. Sure. Funny how you’re always the one who happens to be ‘mobile’ whenever she needs someone to stop by.”
“I was already out,” I snap. “It’s called doing the job, Davis. Where’s the log for the north ridge?”
Davis sets the valve down with a heavy, final thud. “Log’s on your desk. But you’ve got a bigger problem than the road, Brooks. The state forestry supervisor called twice while you were off playing hero.”
I freeze, my hand hovering over the office door handle. “Forestry? The burn permits are frozen until July.”
“It’s not the permits,” Davis says, leaning against the bench, his posture shifting from playful to professional.
“Aerial survey. Thermal imaging picked up three hot spots in the peat bogs behind the old cedar mill. They think the lightning from Tuesday didn’t just pass through—they think it hit the deep mold under the hemlocks and it’s been smoldering subsurface for forty-eight hours. ”
My stomach drops into a hard, cold knot.
Dealing with a peat fire is like fighting a ghost that’s actively trying to boil you from the feet up. You can’t just drop a pumper line into the river and call it a day.
It’s a slow-motion catastrophe, eating through five feet of dry moss and rotted pine needles, traveling along the roots of the trees until the whole forest floor is nothing but a hollow, ticking time bomb waiting to drop anyone standing on it into a bed of coals.
If the wind picks up from the lake tonight like the forecast warned, those three hot spots will clear the ridge and hit the hollow road before the morning shift even clocks in.
“Did they issue a red flag?”
“Not yet,” Davis says. “They’re calling it a localized monitoring event until they can verify the depth.
But the state’s short-handed because of the big burn over in the next county.
They want us to send an officer up to the railway spur with a shovel and a thermal probe to check the perimeter before the wind shifts at midnight. ”
I look down at my boots, noticing the fine, tell-tale crust of white flour still stuck to them from the shop floor sixty minutes ago.
“Get Pumper Two greased,” I say. “And call Fred. Tell him he’s on standby for the town grid. If that peat catches the wind, we’re going to need every gallon of water in the municipal tank just to keep the smoke out of the valley floor.”
“You’re going up alone?” Davis asks, his tone shifting back to the protective edge of a partner.
“The lane’s too narrow for the big rig,” I say. “I’ll take the utility truck and the hand tools. It’s just an inspection.”
I walk into my office and slam the door.
I pull my cell phone out, my thumb hovering over the screen. I have exactly three people on my emergency pick-up list for Sophie: Nana, Davis’s wife, and the school principal.
Nana’s at the doctor’s, Davis’s wife is down with a migraine, and the principal has a district board meeting in twenty minutes.
I’m staring at the contact list, the weight of the mountain and the ticking clock closing in, and for the first time in ten years, I don’t have a clear path out of the woods.
My thumb slides down the screen.
The phone rings three times before the line clicks open, the background noise full of the rattle of old iron pans and the low hum of a dishwasher.
“Ember,” I say.
“Chief,” her voice comes back. “Did you find a code violation in the sourdough crust already? Because I assure you, Marge’s parameters are historically verified.”
“Emmy, listen to me,” I say, turning my back to the office door and leaning my forehead against the cool glass of the window. “I need a favor. A personal one.”
The line goes quiet for a second. “Brooks? What’s wrong? Is it Sophie?”
“Sophie’s fine. She’s at the school extension,” I say. “But the forestry division just called out a subterranean fire up on the north ridge spur. The peat’s smoldering. I have to go up with the tools and map the perimeter before the wind shifts tonight, and I don’t know when I’m getting back down.”
“I’ll get her,” Ember says immediately. “Where do I go?”
“The primary wing at the elementary school. Tell the monitor at the desk that you’re on the authorization card,” I say, my throat feeling dry. “Just… keep her away from the ridge lane if the smoke starts drifting down.”
“Brooks, hey,” she says. “I’ve got her. She’s going to eat three danishes and help me count the goats. Just go do your job.”
“Thank you, city girl,” I mutter, and kill the call before I can say something stupid like be careful.
? ? ?
By seven in the evening, the sun has turned into a long, bloody streak over the western ridge, the light cutting through the pine needles in sharp, red spikes that look like embers themselves.
The utility truck is bouncing over the old log sleepers of the abandoned railway track, the suspension groaning as the oil pan clears the high rocks in the center of the lane.
I’ve got the window down, my left arm resting on the metal sill, my eyes fixed on the gray line of the horizon where the hemlocks turn into black shadows against the sky.
It’s completely quiet up here. No birds, no wind yet, just the steady thrum of the engine and the click of the thermal probe sliding around in the metal box behind my seat.
I pull the truck into a small clearing where the old timber loading platform used to sit. The wood has rotted down into a gray mound of pulp covered in wild blackberry brambles, but the ground is clear enough to park.
I step out into the dirt, my boots sinking into two inches of dry pine needles.
Thirty yards into the tree line, a thick column of pale, blue-gray smoke is rising straight up from the roots of an old, dead white pine.
It doesn’t look like much—just a lazy curl of vapor like someone dropped a cigarette into the moss—but when I walk closer, the bottom of my boots can feel the vibration of the heat through the leather soles.
The ground under the pine is slightly sunken, the moss turned into a fine, gray ash that falls away into black powder when I poke it with the tip of my shovel.
I kneel down, keeping my weight on a solid hemlock root, and slide the long stainless steel needle of the thermal probe down into the gray crust. The digital display on the handle blinks twice, the red numbers rolling up past one hundred, then two hundred, before settling at two hundred and forty degrees.
Four feet down, I think, sighing heavily as I sketch the numbers onto my log sheet. It’s already into the deep peat.
The fire is eating the floor from the inside out. It’s a slow, invisible bastard that doesn’t show its face until the wind gives it enough oxygen to burst through the surface. If that cold front from the lake hits this ridge at midnight, the whole slope will be a chimney by two in the morning.
I spend two hours moving through the brush, mapping the line of the heat.
My shirt is soaked through with sweat by the time I finish the secondary trench, my shoulders aching from digging a two-foot firebreak through the tangled roots of the wild mustard.
I stop to take a drink from my canteen, leaning my back against the rusted fender of the utility truck, my eyes fixed on the small, flickering yellow lights of the town down in the valley floor.
From up here, Suncrest Hollow looks like a toy village—a handful of white dots scattered along the gray ribbon of the river.
I can see the green roof of the municipal building, the silver cylinder of the water tower, and right at the edge of the bend, the single, warm yellow light of the farmhouse shining through the dark cedar lane.
She’s down there right now. With Sophie. Probably teaching her some ridiculous city song, or letting her eat too much sugar while they watch the goats.
The thought gives my chest a strange, tight squeeze that has nothing to do with the physical strain of the shovel work. It’s a heavy, protective ache that feels entirely too loud for the quiet of the mountain.
A sharp, sudden gust of wind hits my face, carrying the cold, wet scent of the lake from the northern gap.
The leaves of the poplars above me let out a loud, papery rattle, turning their pale undersides to the sky as the pressure drops.
The lazy blue smoke from the dead pine jerks to the side, flattening out against the ground before it begins to boil, the gray vapor turning darker, thicker, and smelling instantly of fresh carbon.
The wind has shifted. It’s forty minutes ahead of the forecast.
“Damn it,” I mutter, throwing the canteen into the cab and grabbing the radio mic from the dashboard bracket. “Station One, this is Chief Lawson. Davis, do you copy?”
Nothing comes back but the loud buzz of the dead spot.
I hit the steering wheel with the heel of my hand, the horn letting out a short, frustrated bark into the dark woods.
I can’t wait for the state crew. I can’t even wait for Fred to bring Pumper Two up the mountain.
If the fire clears the railway spur before I get a line down, it’s going straight into the hollow road, and the first house in the path of the draft is Emmy’s place.
I jump into the cab, slam the lever into first, and drive the truck deeper into the old logging trail, toward the upper ridge line where the secondary firebreak is supposed to be.
The wind is screaming through the cab now, tearing at my collar, the sky above the hemlocks turning into a violent, bruised purple.
When I round the final bend near the old cedar mill, the world ceases to be dark.
The surface of the earth has split. The wind has ripped the moss crust right off the peat bogs, and three hundred yards of timber floor are glowing with a dull crimson that looks like a map of veins under skin.
It isn’t a forest fire yet—there are no sixty-foot walls of flame—but the heat hits the windshield of the truck with a sharp, heavy thwack that makes the safety glass groan.
A cluster of old hemlocks at the edge of the clearing suddenly explodes into sound—not a crackle, but a deep, hollow whoof as the gas from their dry roots catches the draft.
The whole cluster goes up at once, an orange tower that throws a cloud of black, burning pine needles straight into the path of the northern gale.
I reach for the gear shift to put the truck into reverse, my boots bracing against the floorboards, but before my fingers can lock around the plastic knob, the ground beneath the front tires gives a sickening shudder.
The old timbers of the abandoned railway platform, hollowed out by thirty years of rot and the heat of the peat beneath them, collapse into the empty space below.
The truck drops violently to the left, the front axle snapping with a sharp, metallic crack that echoes through the trees. The dashboard lights flicker once, twice, and go completely dark as the nose of the vehicle slides three feet down into the smoking gray ash of the collapsing bog.
The heat against the driver’s side door is instant.
I try to force the door open, but the frame is twisted tight against the collapsed timber wall of the loading dock, locking me into the cab as the black smoke from the hemlocks begins to boil over the hood.
I reach for the radio mic on the floorboards, my fingers slick with sweat and grease, my throat closing up as the first thick wave of carbon cuts through the dashboard vents.
“Station One,” I choke out into the plastic casing. “Davis… Fred… if you’re on the frequency…”
The windshield glass lets out a long, splintering ping as the heat from the hemlocks hits the seal.
Outside, the wind roars down from the lake, carrying the burning embers straight over the ridge toward the valley floor, where the single yellow light of Emmy’s kitchen is completely swallowed by the dark.