第6章 Dark at Noon

The morning came without a morning. The sun rose somewhere behind a lid of smoke and the valley stayed in a brown twilight that deepened by the hour, and by nine o'clock it was darker than dusk, and by ten, people had their porch lights on. It was the column. Overnight the plume had gone from a mountain to a ceiling, spreading east and north and then bending back over the valley like a wave breaking on itself, and the ash began to fall in flakes the size of coins, drifting down through air that smelled of burned pitch and hot metal. Cars moved with their headlights on. A woman stood in the middle of the street looking up with ash in her hair. Somewhere a dog would not stop barking. Bryn stood on the school roof with Marit Erland, who had driven up from the predictive center at dawn with a laptop and a face like a held breath. "The front's accelerating," Marit said. "That's the bad news. It'll be here tonight instead of tomorrow. Northeast, and it's going to come in hard." "And the plume?" "The plume is what's making the front worse. It's hot enough that it's changing the pressure field around it, locally. It's pulling the wind." She closed the laptop and looked at the brown air. "I have never seen a fire do this. I've read about it in the old case studies, and there were a couple in Australia, and one in Canada. A fire that makes its own storm and then changes the weather around it. It's happening here, and it's happening today, and the models we brought are not up to it." The lightning started at eleven. It came down out of the base of the plume into the timber, and every strike was a new fire, and there were dozens of them, scattered across the upper drainages behind and beside Harkwood, in places nobody could reach by road. Bryn counted strikes for ten minutes and then stopped counting, because the count was not useful anymore. She drove the main street twice because the first pass told her nothing she could use. In the false night the town looked like a photograph of itself, headlights and porch lights and shop windows glowing down a street that should have been in daylight. At the grocery the owner had set a case of bottled water on the sidewalk with a hand-lettered sign that said FREE, TAKE ONE. At the feed store two men were loading fifty-pound sacks into a trailer without saying a word to each other. At the church the doors stood open and there was light inside and a woman on the step with a box of candles. Nobody was running. Nobody was shouting. The whole valley had gone quiet and careful, the way a house does when someone inside is very sick. What she could not see was the fire, and that was worse than seeing it. The smoke had closed down to the rooftops and the ash fell and the street lights made soft orange coins of themselves, and the fire was somewhere up there above the town doing whatever it was doing, unseen, unhurried, deciding. She went to the command post. Rennick was there, and Cassia Ryland was there, and the emergency manager had finally arrived, a nervous man in a windbreaker who kept looking at the sky. On the board were pins for six new fires, all of them above the valley, all of them unstaffed. "Coldbrook Road," Bryn said. She tapped the map where the road threaded the valley. "Right now it's open. Tonight the northeast wind comes down this valley and every one of those lightning fires above the road is going to run downhill. If they run, they run into the road, and then we don't have an exit." "We've got a dozer headed up to cut a line along the upper road," Rennick said. "A dozer won't hold a wind-driven fire in that fuel. Hoyt, you know it won't. What a dozer will do is take a day and a half and put a machine and an operator in the wrong place." She turned to the emergency manager. "You want a forecast you can point at. Point at the sky. It's noon and it's dark. The fire has already changed the weather over this valley. That's the forecast." The emergency manager looked at the sky for a while. Then he said, in a voice that had gone thin, "I can recommend a mandatory evacuation of the valley east of the creek. The sheriff's office has standing authority if the IC concurs." All eyes went to Rennick. He looked at the board, and at the pins, and at the six fires above the road that nobody could reach, and something in him gave way, not with a crack but with a settlement, the way a wall settles when you take the last prop out of it. "I concur," Rennick said. Bryn was already moving. "Then we need the alert now, and we need it loud, and we need to tell people which way to go, because a valley with one road and six hundred people on it is not an evacuation, it's a queue." "I'll get the siren and the automated calls," Cassia said. "I'll take the east end," Bryn said. "The Fain place is the last house on the road. If Delmar Fain leaves, the whole north end leaves with him, because he's the one everybody watches." She grabbed her pack. "Tova, you're with the school. Junia's got the roster; she'll need hands." She stopped at the door and looked back at the room, at the grease-pencil board and the flickering radio and the people in it, and she said one more thing, to all of them and to nobody in particular. "When the wind hits tonight, the fire is going to throw embers four miles, maybe more, straight down this valley. Anything standing in that gets lit from above and from the front at the same time. So whatever we do, we do it before dark. After dark, we don't get to do anything. We just get to watch." She went out into the false night, and the ash came down, and she drove east toward the head of the valley where the stubborn man lived, because if she could move him, the odds changed, and if she could not, then the odds for the whole north end of Harkwood went with him. ---