第11章 A Green Island

The school was there, and it was on fire. They saw it a half mile off, a red glow behind the trees where the glow should not have been, and Bryn made herself keep walking at the same pace because she needed to see it before she decided what to do about it. As they came around the last bend the picture resolved: the fire had come down the slope behind the school and taken the houses on the north side of the street, and it had stopped at the ballfield, which was green and irrigated and had been mowed that week, and on the far side of the ballfield the gym stood with smoke in its rafters and no flame in it that she could see. The fire had gone around the field the way it had gone around the black. There was the school, a green island in a burned sea, and standing in the middle of the island in the dark with a hose and a pump there were people. Junia Kerns was one of them. She was standing at the corner of the gym with a garden hose in her hands and her glasses gone and her gray hair in her face, and when she saw Bryn she did not say hello, she said, "I've got thirty-one in the gym. Kids and old people. The fire came down and stopped at the dirt road and I got everybody inside. What do you need?" "Your count," Bryn said. "And your water." Junia's count was thirty-one. Thirteen more from Bryn made forty-four, plus three dogs, in one building, on one island, with a fire that had shown every intention of coming back. The pump was a portable irrigation pump drawing from a stock tank, and the tank had a couple of hours in it, and the ballfield sprinklers were still turning in the dark, hissing in the ash, keeping the green green. Bryn walked the perimeter with a flashlight and did the one thing she was trained to do on a fire that had stopped: she read it. The fire on the north side was low and settled, creeping through the burned stubble, no flame in the trees. The fire behind the school was higher up the slope and still moving, still making its northeast run, and it was beginning to turn the corner of the ridge that would put it on the south side of the valley, where the other half of the town was. Everything she could see told her the same thing. They had a window, and it was short, and it would close when the wind did what the front was going to make it do. She found a radio in the gym office, a handheld on a charging cradle that still had a bar of charge, and she took it up to the roof of the gym and stood there in the smoke and switched it on, and after a while of hissing she got a voice, thin and broken but recognizable. "Pinegate, this is..." Static. "...Erland. Marit. Bryn, is that you?" "It's me. I've got forty-four people at the school and no road. Give me the forecast." "It's bad." Marit's voice came and went. "The front's going to slide east of us overnight. That's the good news, if there is any. The wind will go around to the south by morning. But before it does, the fire's going to make one more run. Bryn, it's going to run the whole south side of the valley tonight. The town below the creek, the fairgrounds, the road out. Everything east of the creek is going to be inside the fire by dawn." "Forty-four people are east of the creek, Marit." "I know." A long stretch of static. "There's a ridge west of you. Wickers Pass. Is the pass open?" "I don't know. It was snowed in last spring and nobody's cleared it." "Then you need to find out tonight, because by morning the east side of that valley is going to be a fire pit, and the only reason this whole valley hasn't already burned is that it keeps running out of fuel in the right places, and you can't count on running out of luck." The radio gave a long hiss and then nothing. Bryn stood on the gym roof with the dead radio in her hand and looked down at the green island and the forty-four people on it, at the sprinklers turning and the hose running and the children asleep on the gym floor and the old rancher sitting on a bench with his hat in his hands and his grandson asleep against his shoulder with a burned arm. She climbed down and found the group she could trust to keep people calm and told them what she was going to do. "Two people and I go up to Wickers Pass tonight and see if it's passable," Bryn said. "If it is, we walk forty-four people over it before the wind turns. If it isn't, we stay here and we hold this field and we do what Junia's been doing, which is keep it green and keep it quiet." "You're going up a mountain in the dark with a fire on both sides," Junia said. "I'm going up a mountain in the dark to find a way out, because the alternative is to sit in this gym and hope the fire keeps agreeing with us." Bryn pulled on her pack. "Emmet, is there a road to the pass?" "There's a road," Emmet said slowly. "It's an old logging road, and it's been closed for a decade, and it goes up to the pass on the west. I know it because I cut the timber up there. But Bryn, it's not a road anymore. It's a trail with trees growing in it." "Then we'll walk it as a trail." She looked at him. "You know it. Delmar knows the horses and the high country. I know the fire. That's three kinds of knowing, and I want all three of them up there tonight." Delmar Fain stood up, slow, and put his hat on. "I've been sitting on my hands all day feeling useless," he said. "Let's go see about that pass." ---