S. Stirling - Dies The Fire

Maybe being in a mild emergency together gave them more fellow-feeling. Some people were leaving, though and then most of them came back, looking baffled and frustrated.

"Hey, my car won't start!" one said, just as she'd finished her set. "There's a couple of cars stopped in the road, too."

Off in the distance came an enormous whump sound not quite like anything she'd ever heard. Half a second later the ground shook, like a mild compressed earthquake, or standing next to someone when they dropped an anvil. A shiver went through her heart, like the snapping of a thread.

"What the hell was that?" someone shouted.

"Looks like a big fire just started downtown, but there aren't any sirens!"

The hubbub started again, people milling around; then two young men in fleece vests came in. They were helping along an older guy; he had an arm over each shoulder, and his face was streaming with blood.

"Whoa!" she said, jumping down from the dais. "Hey there! Let me through-I know some first aid."

By the time she got there Dennis had the kit out and the two students had the injured man sitting down in one of the use-polished wooden chairs. One of the waitresses brought a bowl of water and a towel, and she used it to mop away the blood.

It looked worse than it was; head wounds always bled badly, and this was a simple pressure-cut over the forehead, heading a ways back up into the scalp. The man was awake enough to wince and try to pull away as she dabbed disinfectant ointment on the cut and did what she could with bandages. Dennis put a candle in her hand; she held it in front of one of the man's eyes, and then the other.

Maybe the left is a little less responsive than the right, she thought.

The man blinked, but he seemed to be at least minimally aware of where he was. "Thanks," he said, his voice slurred. "I was driving fine, and then there was this flash and my car stopped. Well, the engine did, and then I hit a streetlamp-"

"I think this guy needs to get to a hospital," she said. "He might have a concussion, and he probably ought to have a couple of stitches."

Dennis looked sad at the best of times; he was a decade and change older than her, in his late forties, and going bald on top with a ponytail behind. As if to compensate he had a bushy soup-strainer mustache and muttonchops in gray-streaked brown, and big, mournful, russet brown eyes.

He always reminded her of the Walrus in Alice, even more so given his pear-shaped body, big fat-over-muscle arms and shoulders and an impressive gut. Now he turned his great hands palm-up.

"Phone's out," he said. "Shit, Juney, everything's out."

Juniper swallowed. "Hey!" she called. "Has anyone got a working car? A motorbike? Hell, a bike?"

That got her some yeses; it was a safe bet, right on the edge of a university campus. "Then would you get over to the clinic and get someone to come?"

Another student went out, a girl this time. Juniper looked around at a tug on her arm. It was Eilir, her daughter- she'd be fourteen next week, scrawny right now to her mother's slimness. She had the same long, straight-featured face and the same pale freckled skin, but the promise of more height, and hair black as a raven's wing. Her eyes were bright green, wide now as her fingers flew.

Juniper had been using Sign since the doctors in the maternity ward told her Eilir would never hear; by now it was as natural as English.

I saw a plane crash, Mom, Eilir signed. A big plane; a 747, I think. It came down this side of the river – right downtown.

Are you sure? Juniper replied. It's awful dark.

I saw bits of it after it hit, the girl signed. There's a fire, a really big fire.

Dennis Martin knew Sign almost as well as Juniper did-mother and daughter had been through regularly for years, when Juniper could get a gig like this, and for the RenFaire and the Fall Festival. She knew he had a serious thing for her, but he'd never been anything but nice about its not being mutual; he was even polite to her boyfriend-cum-High Priest, Rudy, and he really liked Eilir.

Now their eyes met.

I don't like the sound of this at all, Dennis signed. Let's go look.

Juniper did, with a sinking feeling like the beginnings of nausea. If there was a fire raging in downtown Corvallis, where were the sirens? It wasn't a very big town, no more than fifty thousand or so.

The brick building that held the Hopping Toad was three stories, a restored Victorian like most of the little city's core, built more than a century ago when the town prospered on shipping produce down the Willamette to Portland.

They went up a series of narrow stairs until they were in the attic loft Dennis used for his hobbies, woodworking and tooling leather. Amid the smell of glue and hide and shavings they crowded over to the dormer window; that pointed south, and the other side of Montrose was Oregon State University campus, mostly grass and trees.

The two adults crowded into the narrow window seat; Dennis snatched up a pair of his binoculars that Eilir had left there. After a moment he began to swear; she took the glasses away from him and then began to swear too. There was a fire over towards downtown, a big one, flames towering into the sky higher than any of the intervening buildings. It was extremely visible because there wasn't a streetlight on, and hardly any lit windows, or a moving car.

She could see the distinctive nose of a 747 silhouetted against the flames, pointing skyward as if the plane had hit, broken its back, and then skidded into something that canted the front section into the air. She could even see the AA logo painted on its side.

"Lady Mother-of-All!" Juniper whispered, her finger tracing a pentagram in the air before her.

The fire was getting worse, the light ruddy on her face. She knew she ought to be running out there and trying to help, but the sight paralyzed her. It didn't seem real, but it was; a jumbo jet had plowed right into the center of this little university town in the middle of the Willamette Valley.

"Looks like it came down on the other side of Central Park," he said, holding out a hand for the glasses.

"Sweet Goddess, it looks like it came down around Monroe and Fourth!" she replied, drawing a map in her head. They looked at each other, appalled: that was right in the middle of downtown.

I hope the Squirrel and the Peacock didn't get hit, she found herself thinking, absurdly-both nightspots booked a lot of live music. Then she shook her head angrily.

"There must be hundreds hurt," she said. Hundreds dead, more like, her mind insisted on telling her. She swallowed, and added silently to herself: Horned Lord of Death and Resurrection, guide the dying to the Summerlands.

Merciful Lady, preserver of life, keep the living safe. So mote it be!

Aloud she went on: "And where are the emergency people?"

"Trying to get their ambulances and fire trucks to work," Dennis said; there was a grim tone to his voice she'd seldom heard before. "Check your watch."

Juniper blinked, but did as he asked, pulling it out of her vest pocket where it waited at the end of a polished chain of fine gold links. She was wearing a sort of pseudo-Irish-cum-Highlander costume-billowy-sleeved peasant shirt and lace cravat and fawn-colored waistcoat with a long tartan skirt below and buckled shoes-what she thought of privately as her Gael-girl outfit. The watch was an old one, from her mother's father; she clicked the cover open.

"Working fine," Dennis said, as she tilted it to catch the firelight. "But mine ain't. It's digital."

He turned and switched to Sign. How about yours, Eilir?

It's an electric, she signed. Quartz. It's stopped.

"And stopped at just the same time as that one on the wall over there," he said, signing as he spoke. "Six fifteen."