sky remains a cloudless dome. The thunder rolls on. More a tremor in the atmosphere than something they hear, like standing over a pot of water coming to a boil.
A fire whirl. That’s what the kid heard, what they can all hear now. A conflagration creating its own wind. But what terrifies Miles isn’t the vacuum of a fire whirl but the fury that he knows must follow it.
He glances back to see the fire roiling up at them from the bottom of the gulch. At this distance, it looks to him to be a swarm of yellowjackets spewing forth from a rupture in the earth.
It’s happened sooner than he had guessed. A blowup. The most feared event in fighting fires in the bush, but rare enough that most crewman’s careers go by without seeing one. What begins as a series of spot fires sends hot, lighter air up, and the cooler, heavy air sweeps in to take its place, creating a kind of burning tornado. The spot fires that had stood apart a moment before join together. Invisible gases rise into the air hotter than the white heart of a flame. The ground itself is ignited.
‘Drop your tools!’ Miles orders them, only now noticing that the men, including himself, have been slowed by the heavy pulaskis pulling at their shoulders. ‘Let go of whatever you’ve got! Now! Now!’
Most do. But despite his repeated command, a couple of the men refuse to release the grip on their shovels. Whether from an embedded sense of attachment or from shock that has seized their minds on nothing but the crest above them, Miles couldn’t know. The rest of the crew, now sixteen pounds lighter and with the benefit of pumping both of their arms forward, are able to move at a quicker pace than before.
From Miles’s broader perspective as last man back, he calculates that it still won’t be enough. The men farthest ahead have already grown sluggish against the steepening hill face. At best, they’re managing a couple hundred feet per minute. A fast fire will make triple that in forest conditions, and as much as eight hundred feet a minute in long, graded grass like this. Even faster if it’s a blowup.
They’re caught. A textbook firetrap, and he led them into it, allowed himself to be bullied by some shithead over a radio. Miles can do nothing now but will the men on, ordering one leg in front of the other in his head. Go, go, go, go. So long as he pushes them with these unspoken words he tries to believe they cannot fall.
There is no strategy to what they do now, nor could there be. Miles would be unable to find a single tactic in the wildland firefighter’s training manual to help even if he had it in front of him. It is a foot race and nothing more. There is the fire, the crest, the closing yards between them. There is the searing muscles in the men’s thighs, already cramping, reducing their strides to useless penguin hops. There is a window of time about to be shut. A situation that calls only for what Miles’s first foreman used to call FEAR. Fuck Everything And Run.
From his position at the end of the snaking line, Miles watches and, in half-second evaluations, takes note of his various crew members’ progress. Men he would have guessed to be the most nimble end up tripping over their own ankles, one falling chin first against the rock-strewn hillside and sliding helplessly backward. Another runs with his arms straight above his head, as though at gunpoint. None of them call out to each other. None of them scream. But the humanless quiet that results terrifies Miles more than anything else. They are frantic and inarticulate as vermin. In less than a minute the fire has taken their identities from them, their language, their dignity. It kills them before it touches them.
None are as slow as the kid. It’s not his physical conditioning that works against him, as he is stronger than most, light and long-legged. It’s that he can’t help from looking back every five or six strides. No matter how brief his glances, simply turning his shoulders and blinking once against the rolling wall of flame is enough to break whatever speed he had worked up. When the kid’s eyes return to the man ahead of him he has lost another five feet, and he must dig his toes in and start climbing all over again.
Because Miles won’t allow himself to overtake any of the others, the kid slows him down as well.
Don’t look at it! Miles is shouting at him, but the kid doesn’t hear. He says it another three times before he realizes that the words are pronounced only as an idea within him. He works sideways across the hill to the kid’s line of ascent and slams his palms against his shoulder blades. Every time the kid turns, he pushes again. Don’t look at it, Miles says with his eyes, and this time, the kid gets it.
And then Miles looks too. He’s astonished at the fire’s speed. The conditions are perfect for it making a sprint like this—dried stalks of high grass, the accelerant of oak scrub at the bottom of the gulch, a slope for the flames to climb—but he still can’t believe how it defies what he’s ever observed of fire before, the way it turns gravity upside down. Now Miles can see that it’s true what he’s been told a thousand times. Only fires and bears run faster uphill than downhill.
Ahead, Miles can see the first figures making the crest. The fire is so close he can hear it—not its vacuum but its resulting explosion of flames. The whirl opened up and new air rushing in to fill the space in a metallic screech, a subway train grinding the rails as it goes too fast around a bend. The kid covers his ears.
The two of them are the only ones who remain below now, a little over a hundred yards short of where the slope levels and falls away into forest. It is close enough that Miles can see the individual fingers of grass at the top bending against the rush of heat. The fire will have burned the same blades to black wicks before they get halfway to touching them.
It is close, but Miles has noticed how his pace has slowed almost to a standstill, and the final ascent is far steeper than any other section of the hill. The other men have a chance of making it, so long as the fire is delayed on the crest. But even if they had wings it’s too late for Miles and the kid.
Miles lunges forward and grabs the kid’s arm, stopping them both. Without explanation, he slips his hand into his pack and pulls a fusee out. He lip-reads the kid’s voiceless words—Don’t stop! Don’t stop!—but only raises his hand in reply. Miles ignites the fusee with the lighter he takes from his pocket. When it flares to life, he bends to touch its spitting mouth to the straw around them.
An escape fire. A small burning of grass lit before the main fire hits, so that the burned area—the ‘good black’—can be stepped into and, with their heads buried in the ashes, the worst of the fire may pass around them. It is a technique Miles has only read about. He remembers stories of turn-of-the-century natives saving themselves and any pilgrims who would join them, far out on the Great Plains lit up like a prairie inferno. But there is no mention of escape fires in any of the current training materials, and for good reason. Miles knows that more men have burned in the good black than have been saved by it. But they will die if they run on, and die if they stand where they are. Miles decides for himself and for the kid. They will be an experiment.
Miles steps into the circle, the stalks still snapping and sending live sparks up his pant legs, and waves at the kid to join him. Just ten feet away, the kid stays where he is. Staring at Miles in an uncomprehending palsy of disbelief. Why is his foreman starting a fire when there already is one, a huge one, coming right at them?
For a moment, the two men meet each other’s eyes through the smoke spiralling off the grass. The kid’s effort to see the sense in what Miles has done plays visibly over his face. His throat seared shut, leaving all his questions to sit, heavy as marble, in his chest.
The kid is so close that Miles could grab him and try to pull him in. If the kid resisted, both of them would be caught outside the good black as the main fire hit. Still, if he holds on to the kid’s wrist and falls back, it might be enough for them both to tumble down into the smoking ash and breathe. That’s what Miles would tell the kid if he was lying next to where he is now. Breathe and stay low and bury your face in the charred soil where the pockets of oxygen might be and wait—
Behind them, the fire screams.
A shattering, human sound that sends the young firefighter scrambling a few feet higher up the slope. Though his voice doesn’t reach his own ears, Miles can feel his shouts splitting his throat