Page 87 of Smoke and Roses

“Copy, Engine 1.”

Then Weber, a voice I don’t know. “Eden Command, Weber Engine, on scene North Fork, taking the right flank. We’ve got flame lengths six to eight in the cheatgrass. Gonna need that tender.”

“Copy, Weber. Tender’s two minutes out.”

Every voice on the channel is calm. Nobody is screaming. That’s the job. It’s a hell of a thing to listen to when the person you love is on the other end of it.

I take the turn at the end of the ravine where the old ranch road cuts south across the meadow. The smoke is thicker here, rolling over us from the southwest, and the sun is gone, and everything is orange and brown. Visibility’s maybe a hundred yards.

My phone is in my chest pocket, on speaker, under my radio. She’s still on the line. Her breathing comes through, and her boots crunching on burned ground.

“Lindsey,” I say. “Talk to me.”

“I’m here.” Her voice is small and shaking, but she’s there. “I’m at the stone house. I’m standing by the door. Travis, the barn. The fire’s at the barn. The south side.”

“I know. Engine 1 is coming in on the barns from the black side. Nate and Novak. They’re good. They’ll save it.”

“They saved it last time.”

“They’ll save it again.”

There’s a pause. A cough. Then, so quiet I barely hear it over the engine: “I can’t see you.”

“You will. Three minutes. Watch north. Watch for the lights.”

The smoke thins, and there’s the old stone homestead, maybe four hundred yards ahead in the middle of the black meadow. Two stories of gray rock with no roof, and no windows, and no door, just stone walls standing in the ash like they’ve stood since 1880. And beside the doorway, small, in a red sweater, with her sleeve over her mouth, is Lindsey.

She’s waving both arms over her head.

“The lights,” she says on the phone, and her voice breaks. “Travis. I can see your lights.”

Something in my chest unlocks. I don’t have a word for it. I don’t try to find one. I keep my eyes on the ground and my hands on the wheel and drive across the black toward her.

Then the wind shifts. It comes around from the southwest to the south in one big gust that rocks the brush truck on its springs. And the smoke column that’s been laying down to the east swings north, right over the meadow, right over the stone house, thick and brown and hot.

It’s not fire. There’s nothing left on the black to burn. But the smoke from the head of that fire, three hundred yards south, is pouring straight across the meadow at forty miles an hour, full of ash and embers, and it’s coming right at her. Lindsey disappears inside it.

“Shit,” Rob breathes.

“Lindsey!”

On the phone, she’s coughing so hard she’s choking.

“Get down,” I tell her. “Honey. Get low. The air is better low. Put your sweater over your face. I’m almost there.”

I can’t see the house. I can’t see anything. I drive by memory, the way I used to drive by memory at night in Kandahar with no lights, counting meters, feeling the ground through the wheel.

Rob is leaning forward with his face almost on the windshield.

“There,” he says. “Left. Left, Sarge.”

Stone. A gray wall coming out of the smoke. I hit the brakes, and I’m out of the cab before the truck stops rocking.

Chapter Thirty-One

Travis comes out of the smoke like something from a movie.

Yellow shirt, black with soot. Helmet. Goggles. A bandana over his face. He’s big and fast and coming straight at me across the ash.