Chapter 17 Against the Order

Rennick's voice came through the radio like a man talking through a wall. "No," he said. "Adair, I read you and I'm telling you no. The lower road is black, fine, but the slopes above it are still making runs and they're going to keep making runs until the front comes through, and when a slope makes a run it throws embers across the road and starts new fires on the black wherever there's an unburned pocket. You go up there with a team and a wind shift and I've got six more dead instead of twenty-five more trapped. I am not trading six for a maybe." "Nothing about it is a maybe. I walked the black twice today. The road bed is gravel and ash and it does not carry fire. The pockets are small and we can see them. I'll take three people, not six, and no vehicles, and I'll turn around the moment the fire makes a run below us." "Which fire? There are four fires in that valley." "The one that matters is the one above Dunlin Court, and it's going to run when the front turns the wind, and that's in about three hours. Rennick, listen to the arithmetic. If I walk up that road right now I can be back with twenty-five people before the wind turns. If I wait for your dozer I'll be telling the families it got there an hour late." There was a long silence on the radio, and in it Bryn could hear the whole shape of the man, the thirty years of lines he had held and the four false alarms he had called and the fifth one he had finally believed. "If you go, you go as a civilian," he said at last. "I won't have it on the record as a fire organization action. Your team understands that." "They'll understand it. They're not from your organization." "Then God help you," Rennick said, "because I can't." And the radio went quiet. Bryn handed it back to Cassia, and Cassia said, "He's not going to stop you, and he's not going to thank you either. What do you need?" "A radio, a flashlight, four people who can walk, and somebody to tell Dunlin Court we're coming so they don't come out to meet us." Cassia nodded once and went to work. They assembled on the highway shoulder in twenty minutes, and Bryn looked at the small team she had: Emmet Danner, who had lost a dozer and wanted the road back; two forest service firefighters on their off-shift who had volunteered without asking what it paid; and Tova Vickers, who had come out with the convoy, had put a blistered hand in a bandage, and had found Bryn the moment she arrived and simply stood there until Bryn said yes. And then, as she was checking the last of the gear, a fifth person walked up out of the dark in an orange vest that was too big for him, and it was Rennick. "You said I can't," Bryn said. "I said it can't be an organization action." He checked the strap on the belt weather kit he had brought and looked at her with a face that had given up on being square. "I've got a map and a radio and thirty years of knowing how a line fails. You've got a burn. Let's go up the road." They went up the burned Coldbrook Road at midnight, five of them and then six, single file on the black, with the fire working the slopes on both sides. It was the strangest walk Bryn had ever taken. The road was a gray ribbon in the dark, clear and hard, and everything on either side of it was dead and still, the stumps banked red at the base, the ash ankle deep in the ditches, the whole burned valley a landscape made of two colors, black and the red of banked coals. Above them on both sides the unburned timber stood up the slopes, and in that timber the fire moved, orange in the dark, throwing long light down onto the road. Embers came off the runs and landed on the black and glowed and died, because there was nothing there to eat. Twice they passed the skeletons of cars that had tried to drive out and been caught, the metal gray and the glass gone and the tires burned down to wire. Nobody said anything about them. Everybody looked. Rennick walked beside her for a while and read the slopes, and once he stopped and pointed at a fold above them and said, "That'll run in about an hour and throw across us here," and Bryn looked at it and agreed, and they marked the spot on the map and walked faster. "You've been right about the fire since Tuesday," Rennick said, after a while. "I want you to know that I know it. I'm not carrying that around to the review board. I'm saying it here, on the road, so it's said." "You didn't do anything wrong, Hoyt. You held a line you were told to hold." "I held it two hours past when I believed it." He looked at the burning slopes. "There's a difference, and the difference is two hours and a whole valley." Bryn had no answer for that, and she did not try to make one, because the truth was that there was a difference and it had a cost, and the cost was walking up this road right now toward twenty-five people who would have been in the convoy if the word had come a day earlier. They came around the last bend before Dunlin Court, and there, small in the middle of the black, was the community building, a low cinderblock box with a metal roof and a ring of wet ground around it and the hoses still running, and on the roof a woman was standing with a flashlight, holding it up, turning it in a slow circle, the way you signal a ship at sea. ---