第16章 The Town Below the Ridge

The three sets of headlights belonged to a forest service engine, a sheriff's utility truck, and a county ambulance that had been staged on the river road all night for exactly this. Bryn stood at the edge of the road with her hands on her knees and watched them arrive, and for a moment she did not trust it, because she had spent twenty hours building a picture of the world in which there was no road and no help and nothing at the end of the walking but more walking. Then the engine pulled up and the doors opened and a medic came out carrying a bag, and she stopped watching and started counting again, because forty-four people had to be handed over correctly. She gave the count to the paramedic, and she gave him Judd first, and the burned arm, and the woman with the oxygen, and the children. Then she found Marit Erland standing next to the sheriff's truck with a laptop under her arm and a phone against her ear, and Marit looked at her and said nothing for a second, and then said, into the phone, "She's here," and hung up. "Rennick?" Bryn said. "Rennick is at the mouth of the valley with what's left of the fire organization." Marit put the phone away. "Bryn, it's bad and I'm going to give it to you straight, because you look like you can take it. The fire came down the south side of the valley overnight and crossed the lower Coldbrook Road about two o'clock. The convoy got out before it, all of it, everybody who was on the road. The fairgrounds are gone. The lower town is gone. And there are people still inside." "Inside where?" "Dunlin Court. The trailer park on the far side of the burned road, mid-valley, maybe twenty-five people who went to ground when the road closed behind them. They're in the community building, which is a cinderblock box with a metal roof, and they've got a couple of hoses and a stock tank, and they're holding on. But the road to them is burned, the creek bridge is burned, and the fire is still working the timber above them. We can't drive a crew in. We can't fly. Rennick has a dozer trying to cut through from the west and it's four hours out at best." Cassia came over with the radio and held it out so Bryn could hear, and the voice on it was a woman's, old and steady and very tired, and behind the voice there was the sound of children. "This is Sanna at Dunlin Court. We've got the water holding and the roof's still on and nobody's hurt. But I want to ask you something and I want an honest answer. That fire above us. Is it coming down here, or is it going to go around?" Bryn took the radio and looked at Marit, and Marit looked at the map and shook her head once, which was the whole answer without any words in it. "This is Bryn Adair. I'm a fire behavior analyst. Sanna, it's coming down. Not in the next hour and not from where the wind is now, but when the front turns the wind it's going to run that south slope and it's going to run it right at you. You can hold one run in that building. You cannot hold two. I'm coming up the burned road on foot to walk you out, and I need you to keep everyone inside and keep the door shut until you hear me at the north side." A pause. Then Sanna's voice again, and under the tired she could hear the beginning of something else. "How long?" "An hour, maybe two." "Then we'll be here," Sanna said. "The children are asleep. I'll let them sleep." Bryn stood in the road with the river running behind her and the smoke of a whole valley standing over her, and she did the one thing she had been doing since the first night, which was to look at the problem as a fire behavior question and not as a disaster. "Can you reach them by radio?" "Voice only, intermittently. Cassia's been talking to them. They've got a woman named Sanna who used to be a nurse keeping everybody calm. They're asking how long." "What did you tell them?" "The truth," Marit said. "At least the first half of it. I didn't have the second half." "The second half is that the fire's going to make one more run before the front turns the wind, and when it does, it's going to come off the south slope right down onto that trailer park, and a cinderblock building with a metal roof in the middle of a fuel bed is a place you can survive exactly one run in and not two." Bryn looked up the valley, at the glow, at the shape of the smoke. "But the road to them is burned. You know what that means." "It means nobody can drive in." "It means I can walk in." Bryn held Marit's eyes. "I spent the last two hours walking forty-four people down the black side of a fire that was moving uphill. The lower Coldbrook Road burned last night. It's black now. It's the safest ground in the valley. You put a small team on it at the highway end, and you can walk right up the middle of that road to Dunlin Court while the fire eats the timber on the slopes above and around, because the road is the one thing that has already burned and won't burn again." Marit stared at her. "You want to walk into a burning valley." "I want to walk up a road that already burned and take twenty-five people out the way I came in. It's not a rescue, it's an escort. Nobody has to be brave. They just have to walk two miles in the dark on the one piece of ground that's already paid for." Marit was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "Rennick won't authorize it." "No," Bryn said. "He won't." She walked to the sheriff's truck, where Cassia Ryland was standing with a radio against her ear and a fixed look on her face, and Bryn waited until she took the radio down and then said, "Give me the radio." ---