Rachel Caine - Firestorm

I planned on it.

No Mounties materialized out of the trees to flag us down. Thirty minutes of twisting back road—and no road—later, we emerged from the trees and hit Canadian Highway 2, turning north.

I lost track of our route somewhere around Presque Isle; Emily, on her cell phone, followed back roads in response to directions. We got stopped by a police blockade; whatever Emily said, they let us past. The roads got progressively more challenging on the suspension. I hung on to the panic strap on the passenger side and tried not to think about the residual pain in my healing arm.

I was feeling more than a little nervous, out here in the wilderness, and I wasn't really dressed for firefighting, either. Someday , I promised myself, you'll be able to get back to a normal life. Nice clothes. Bikini on the beach. Shoes that don't have sale tags .

I closed my eyes, but when I did, I didn't see visions of Jimmy Choos or Manolo Blahniks, but David's face, the way he'd been the first time I'd seen him. That sweet, ironic smile. The deep brown eyes, flecked with copper. Angular cheekbones just begging to be stroked.

That smile.

I missed him so much, it felt like a physical pain, brought tears to clog my throat. We hadn't had a chance, had we? So little time to know each other, to find our balance. The world just kept pushing, pushing, pushing. I wanted it to stop . I wanted quiet, and I wanted a place where I could be in his arms, wrapped in silence and peace.

And I wasn't sure that was ever going to happen, especially now that we were two steps from the end of the world.

The SUV hit a particularly axle-rattling bump on the dirt fire road. I opened my eyes and saw a storm cloud looming over the tops of the huge trees.

No, not a storm cloud.

Smoke . Black and thick and pendulous.

A deer bounded out of the underbrush and rushed past us, staying out of our way somehow—it looked wild and terrified. Emily slowed the truck to a crawl. Other wildlife was coming down the road—rabbits, a bear cub, a huge lumbering mama bear behind it hurrying it along. More deer, leaping ahead of the pack.

Emily braked. The fleeing animals ran under the truck, if they were small enough; the larger ones went around. The bear passed close enough to my window that I could smell the hot rank odor of her fur, and hear her heavy chuffing breath.

"We have to go on foot," Emily said. "The other Warden is up ahead."

"Why can't we drive?" Because this was about as close to a big huge bear as I really wanted to get. Emily spared me an irritated glance.

"If I take it farther in, the fire could get around us, the gas in this truck could explode," she said. "I'm assuming you don't want to be in it at the time. Besides, I like my truck."

The exploding part made an impression on me. I unbuckled and scrambled out of the truck, careful of my feet, but it looked like the evacuation had slowed down. A couple of late-breaking gray rabbits broke right at my appearance, and some field mice ran under the truck. No additional bears, thank goodness.

The air felt heavy and hot. There was a steady furnace breeze blowing toward us. It was a tiny little hint of the forces already at work—the fire, which had already been burning for hours, would have created a huge updraft, which would have shoved cooler air in front of it outward in a circle. Cooler air, being heavier, would have been forced out in concentric waves as the temperature increased. It would look like a frozen nuclear explosion, with a hot central column and the rings emanating out.

The breeze was just the forerunner of what was behind it.

Hell.

People think they understand what a forest fire is. They don't. At a certain point, fire becomes semiliquid—plasmatic—and it behaves like liquid, becomes heavy with its own energy, rolls and floods through dry brush, consuming everything in its path. It saps every single ounce of moisture from the air, leaving it dead and dry; its own energy release whips the winds higher, spreading it like a virus. It can jump and encircle an area like an invading army before anyone can see it coming, and then the rising temperature will cook anything caught inside before the flames close in. Most people trapped in fires die of the smoke or superheated air, which cooks their lungs into leather from inside on the first indrawn breath. It's an awful way to die, suffocating, but it's still better than the fire rolling over you and burning out every nerve ending in slow, awful progression.

The only mercy fire shows is that after your nerves burn, you can't feel the rest of it. You can't feel your body being turned to cooked meat and ash. And you're probably—although not certainly—dead before your internal organs burst, and your brain's superheated liquids blow open your skull.

No, the last thing I wanted to do was die of fire. The very last. Even drowning would be better.

And I was starting to wonder why in the hell I'd agreed to this. Pragmatism was starting to get the better of altruism.

As if she sensed it, Emily looked at me over the hood of the SUV, mouth twisted into an unpleasant grin. "You like doing this from a nice, safe distance, don't you?" she asked. "Some nice conference room where you can't feel the cinders on your back."

"If you had any sense, that's how you'd like it, too," I said. "But I'm not letting you do this by yourself."

"That's sweet. You afraid for me?"

"No, but you said it yourself: There are way too many lives depending on this. This is important." I swallowed hard. There was a sound out there in the forest, a roaring that I didn't need to be a Fire Warden to know wasn't right. Not right at all. "Let's just get it done, if we're going to do it. I've got places to be."

"Shoe shopping?" she said archly. My reputation preceded me. "Fine. Watch yourself—I'm not going to have time to keep your ass out of trouble. You see a bear or a mountain lion, freeze, turn profile, and if it charges you, curl into a ball and get under the truck. They probably will ignore you, given the fire, but you don't want to run from them. They do enjoy the exercise."

I gulped. Audibly. She smiled. I wondered if she was just needling me, but then I decided she wasn't. She'd take her responsibilities more or less seriously, out here.

"What I need from you is to hang back here and do what you can to get a decent rain going. Counteract the prevailing winds. Think you can do that?"

I could do that in my sleep. I confined myself to a quick nod, gathered up my hair in one hand and tied it back with a rubber band from my pocket. The way the wind was swirling, that last thing I wanted was to obscure my vision. Too many things could sneak up on me. Fire, for one. Or bears. The bears were worrying me. Badly.

"Take two steps to your left," Emily said.

"Why?" I froze, staring at her. She nodded down at the ground.

There was a timber rattler gliding along the ground right by my foot. I jumped out of the way with a little shriek, hands held high. "Snake! Snake!"

"No shit," she said dryly. "Trust me, she's not paying attention to you. She's got plenty of problems of her own. Not so quick a traveler as the larger critters. She'll have a job of it to try to get out of here in time, poor girl."

I watched the snake wiggle its—her—way down the road. Emily was right; the reptile didn't pay me any attention. Good. On the plus side, now I wasn't nearly so worried about bears. Bears didn't sneak up on your feet like that.

When I looked up again, Emily was striding along the road, straight for the fire. "Hey!" I called after her. She didn't answer. I suppose she really didn't need to answer; I knew what I was tasked to do, she knew what she was doing, and there wasn't a lot left to discuss.