Chapter 18 The Safety Zone

The woman on the roof was Sanna, the retired nurse, and she was still turning the flashlight when they came into the ring of wet ground, and when she saw them she stopped and put her hands on her knees and stood there for a moment with her head down, and then she straightened and started giving orders. "Children in the back room, we've kept it cool. Two men with burns, not bad. One woman with a heart condition and she's stable. The water's down to a quarter tank and the hoses are losing pressure. Who are you?" "Bryn Adair. I brought people to walk you out." "Walk us out to where?" "Out the way we came. The road behind me is burned. It's the safest ground in this valley. Two miles down and you're at the highway." Sanna looked at her for a beat, and then at the burned road, and then back at the building and the twenty-five people inside it, and Bryn watched her do exactly what she had done a hundred times in the last week: she weighed the thing she was standing in against the thing she could not see. "Half an hour," Sanna said. "I've got to wake them and get the kids dressed and get the oxygen and the medications. If we're doing this, we're doing it with everything we've got, because I am not leaving anybody in this box." They had nineteen minutes before the fire ran. It came off the south slope exactly when Bryn had known it would, a head of fire that crested the timber above the trailer park and started down toward what remained of the homes, and it threw embers the way a hand throws seed, and some of the embers landed in the wet ring and hissed and died, and some landed beyond it in the dry grass and took hold, and one of them landed on the roof of the community building and Tova was up the ladder with a bucket before Bryn could say the word. "Everybody out the north door!" Bryn shouted, and the door opened and the line started, and it was the same thing she had done at the pass and the same thing she had done in the ditch, forty-four people again but this time twenty-five, and this time mostly children and old ones and one man in a wheelchair who had to be carried. They went up the burned road in a column, and behind them the fire reached the trailer park and took what was left of it, and the cinderblock building stood in the middle of the run with the hoses still hissing and the metal roof glowing dull red, and the line of people walked away from it on the black and did not look back, because Bryn had told them not to look back. The man in the wheelchair was named Arthur Lantry, and he was Mr. Lantry's brother, and getting him up the road took four people, two on the handles and two walking beside to catch the chair if a wheel caught in the ash. Bryn put him third in the line so that the strongest walkers would come to him fresh and the children would come to him after. At the first rise the chair bogged and they lifted it, all four of them, and carried it twenty yards like a litter, and set it down on the hard gravel where it rolled again. Mr. Lantry did not say a word the whole way. When they stopped on the flat to rest he reached out and caught Bryn's sleeve and held it for a second and let go, and that was all the conversation either of them needed to have about it. Behind them the fire chased them for a mile. It was the last run of the whole event, the front finally coming through and turning the wind, and the wind turned it the wrong way for the fire and the right way for them, so that the head that had been coming down the south slope suddenly had the ground wind at its back from the west and lay down, and flattened, and began to creep instead of run, and the smoke stood up over the valley in one last enormous column and then bent over the ridge and was gone. And in the middle of that, with the column bending over them, someone fell. It was Rennick. He was walking the tail with Emmet, checking the line, and a burned snag on the uphill side let go of the ground with a sound like a shot and came down across the road behind the last of the walkers, and Rennick shoved two of them clear and took the end of it across his shoulder and went down on the black. They got him up. His collarbone was broken and his shoulder was bad and he could walk if someone stayed under his arm, and Emmet walked under his arm, and they kept going, because on a fire that has just stopped running there is still no safe place to stop and the highway was the only place that counted. They came off the black onto the highway at three in the morning, and there were the vehicles and the medic and Cassia and Marit, and the medics took Rennick and the two burned men and the woman with the heart condition, and somebody put a blanket around the wheelchair man, and the children stood in the headlights in a daze, and Bryn counted them one more time, twice, because her hands were shaking and she did not trust them to hold the number straight. Twenty-five, out of the burned valley, all of them alive. She sat down on the shoulder of the highway with her back against the guardrail and looked up at the valley, at the fire that had finally stopped making runs, at the smoke standing over eleven miles of burned ground from the ridge to the river, and she did the last arithmetic of the night, which was the only one she could finish: twenty-five here, forty-four at the river, and behind them, in the black, whatever the fire had decided about everyone who had not been counted. ---