第7章 The Coldbrook Convoy

By two in the afternoon the road was a river of cars, and the river was not moving. Bryn came up the valley from the school and hit the back of the queue a mile short of the Fain place, brake lights red in the brown air, a line of vehicles stretching ahead of her and behind her as far as she could see. Trucks with stock trailers. A flatbed with two bales of hay on it and a family in the cab. An old sedan with a mattress strapped to the roof. Nobody was panicking yet. That was the strange part. They were creeping forward ten feet at a time like a parade, and people had their windows down, and someone had a radio going, and the smoke made every headlight a soft golden cone. The problem was a cottonwood. It had come down across both lanes a quarter mile ahead, a big old tree with a root ball the size of a garage, and it had fallen exactly where the road cut through the steepest ground on the whole valley, so there was no way around it, only through it or back. Bryn got out and walked up the line. She passed a woman giving water to a pair of dogs in the bed of a pickup. She passed two kids playing a game on a phone in the back seat of a hatchback while their mother stared straight ahead and gripped the wheel. She passed Wilma Stane, who taught at the school and kept the clinic cabinet stocked and who had four elderly neighbors in her van and a look on her face that said she had made a decision and would not be talked out of it. "How are you doing this?" Bryn asked her. "One at a time," Wilma said. "Mrs. Caird's got the oxygen and she rides in front. Mr. Lantry is in the back with the dog and he's fine. If you're going to tell me the road's closed I'd rather you tell me now, because I've got about two hours of that oxygen and a long way to go." "The road's closed ahead. A tree's down. We're going to open it." Bryn said it as a promise because that was how you said things to Wilma Stane. "Keep people in their cars. Keep engines running, keep heat off, keep windows up when the ash gets thicker. Don't let anyone walk up the line." She went forward. At the head of the queue the county road crew had gotten there with a chainsaw and a loader, and the crew chief was a laconic man named Emmet Danner who had logged this valley for thirty years and knew every tree in it by name, including the one lying across the road. "Root rot," Emmet said, over the saw. "Look at the butt. It was going to fall on somebody. Fires don't fall trees, trees fall trees." He squinted at the ridge. "Wind's coming though. You can feel it. Been backing and filling all afternoon." "Can you get it open?" "Twenty minutes if the bar holds and nobody stands under it." He nodded at two of his crew. "Cut high, roll the trunk downhill, limb it after. Now." Bryn left them to it and climbed the embankment where she could see over the tops of the stopped cars, and what she saw took the breath out of her. The upper valley was on fire. Not the ridge, not the far crest. The lightning fires from noon had grown, and the northeast wind had arrived on the high ground ahead of schedule, and three separate heads of fire were now moving downhill through the timber above the road, throwing smoke columns of their own, and the columns leaned southwest and drove straight at the stalled traffic like the fingers of a hand. She looked at the distance between the nearest fire and the head of the queue, and she did the arithmetic she had been trained never to do out loud, and she got a number that measured the queue in minutes. She ran back down the embankment. Her radio would not reach the command post from the bottom of the cut, so she climbed onto the hood of the nearest truck and keyed it from up there, and Gerta's voice came back scratched and thin. "Zone Four, Adair. I need you to hear this exactly." Bryn kept her voice level and her eyes on the smoke. "We have wind-driven fire above the Coldbrook Road at roughly two miles from the stalled evacuation. The queue is a mile and a half long. There is no way to turn it around and no way to move it fast. I need everything you can send to hold those heads, and I need everybody in this valley to hear the word 'hold,' because if this queue breaks and people drive into that smoke we are going to lose cars, and I am not going to be able to stop it from up here." "Copy, Adair." A pause. "Rennick's sending the dozer and both crews. He says hold." The tree came down in eighteen minutes. Emmet's crew rolled the trunk into the ditch, and the loader shoved the last of it out of the way, and the queue began to move, slowly, then steadily, and Bryn stood at the edge of the road with her hand raised, waving them through, one after another, the trucks and the sedans and the vans and Wilma Stane's van with four elderly neighbors in it and a tank of oxygen that was probably down to an hour. She watched them go down the valley toward the highway and the low country, and she stayed on the road until the last car passed her, and then she turned and looked back up the valley, at the fire coming down through the timber, at the smoke leaning across the road behind her, and she understood that she had just spent the only road. She got on the radio again. "Zone Four, Adair. The valley below the cut is clear. Repeat, the queue is through. But I want it on the record. Everything east of that cut from here on is behind the fire. That includes the Fain place, the school, and me." Gerta's voice came back, and there was a long pause before it, and when it came it was quiet. "Understood. Do you want a ride out?" Bryn looked down the valley at the last of the taillights disappearing into the smoke, and she thought about a man on a porch with a shotgun and a grandson and two horses, and a school with a roster of three hundred names. "Negative," she said. "I've still got the east end." ---