Chapter 9 The Whirl in the Meadow

The wind did not come as a gust. It came as a wall, and when it hit the truck it pushed them sideways on the gravel and Judd had to wrench the wheel to hold the road. Bryn looked out her window and saw it happen in the pasture to their left, which was a wide open field of cured grass that ran from the road up to the timberline, and what she saw there was a thing she had read about in every fire behavior class she had ever taken and had never once seen. The fire came out of the timber at the top of the field and stopped behaving like a fire. It gathered itself. That was the only way to describe it. The flame front on the right slowed, and the flame front on the left slowed, and the fire on the slope swung around in a curve, and the two flanks came together in the middle of the meadow and began to rotate. A column of flame lifted off the ground and leaned over, and inside the lean the rotation tightened until the fire was standing on a base of its own spinning wind, drawing straw and dirt and burning brand up into a twisting tower two hundred feet high. "Fire whirl," Bryn said, and heard her own voice come out flat and strange. "Judd, stop the truck. Right here. Stop." He stopped. Delmar Fain, who had seen a great deal in sixty years, looked at the thing in the meadow and said nothing at all. The whirl walked. It crossed the open field with a terrible, deliberate speed, and where it passed it left a track like a machine had gone through, grass burned to the dirt in a narrow spiral, fence posts charred and smoking. It did not care about the road. It did not care about the truck. It came toward them on its own design, a hundred yards, then seventy, and Bryn could see inside it now, see the column of flame at its core leaning and righting itself, see the sparks flying off the top and raining down around it. "Get out," she said. "Now. Everybody out and into the ditch on the far side and down flat. Do not run from it. It moves faster than you do." They went. Bryn went last, and she took the boy by the collar when he hesitated, because hesitation was how people died. The ditch was a shallow thing carved by the county along the road edge, maybe three feet deep, and there was a culvert where a tin horn passed under the road, and she shoved Judd into the shaft of the culvert on the upstream side and put Delmar beside him, and then she got down flat in the ditch herself with her face in the dirt and both arms over her head. The whirl crossed the road ten feet from the truck. It sounded like a hundred trains and a hurricane arguing, and the heat above her back was worse than any heat she had ever felt, a heat with weight, a heat that pressed. Something struck the road and skated off in sparks. A fence post came out of the air and stuck in the ditch bank two feet from her hand and stood there burning like a torch. She could hear the truck's tires hissing, could hear glass and paint making noises glass and paint should never make. She kept her face down and counted, because counting was the only thing that kept her from moving, and she got to fourteen before the roar began to move away. Then the wind came back, colder this time, and the spinning thing was gone up the field on the other side of the road, already smaller, already unraveling into a line of ordinary flame. Bryn got up. Her hands were shaking and her ears were ringing and the air smelled of scorched rubber and hot metal, and she did what she had been trained to do before she checked herself. She did a head count. "Delmar." "Here." The old man was sitting up in the ditch with the boy's arm across his lap. His hat was gone. He looked at her with eyes that had gone very calm. "Not a scratch." "Judd." "I'm okay." Judd's voice was high and far away, but it was his own voice. "I'm okay. What was that?" "Fire whirl." Bryn scanned the field, the road, the sky. "It's what a fire does when the air over it gets twisted. They're rare, and they're short-lived, and they kill people who are standing up. We got lucky." She helped Delmar to his feet and looked at the boy more carefully, and saw then what she had missed in the dark and the roar. Judd's left sleeve was blackened to the elbow, and the skin under it was the color of a ripe plum, and the boy was holding his arm stiff and careful and not saying anything about it at all. "You're burned." "It's not bad." "It's bad enough." She got her pack. "Burns go up fast, and the road ahead is going to be hot. We need the medical kit at the school, and a real person to look at that arm, and we need to get off this road before the next one comes through, because they come in sets." She pulled the radio off her belt, and her thumb found the switch, and the radio was dead. Dead in the way that meant moisture and heat and a long while of hard use, the display dark, the set warm in her hand and getting warmer. She tried the truck's radio next. The dash was cracked and the wiring behind it had that smell, and the radio came on for four seconds of static and then went dark for good. Bryn stood in the road with the two of them and looked up the valley toward the Fain place, now burning, and down the valley toward the school, and then at the smoke that had closed over both directions like a pair of doors. "Change of plan," she said. "The road's out, the radios are out, and that whirl was the first of them. We're not driving to the school. We're walking to the closest thing that won't burn, and then we're going to sit in it until the wind changes, and then we're going to walk out, and we're going to do it before dark." She pointed at the culvert and the ditch and the burned grass, at the meadow the whirl had crossed, which was now black and bare and therefore the safest ground within a mile. "We're going to go stand in the footprint of the fire whirl," Bryn said. "It just did us a favor. It burned the only place we can hide." ---