Page 102 of Into the Fire

“Crew of six, moving west above the fire, all accounted for,” I said. “We’ll call you from the other side.”

I dropped out of second and let Teller and Ramirez pass me so I was riding the middle where I could see both ends of our line. Shep was completely silent.

Teller went down on some loose scree. His feet slid sideways, and he landed under a stack of gray deadfall with the pack holding him there like a turtle on its back. He started swearing.

I stuck my hand in his straps; Hollis arrived from the other side, and between us, we had him up and moving within fifteen seconds. His hands were bleeding through his gloves at the heels. He didn’t mention it, so neither did I.

“Count,” Hollis said behind me. I counted six.

The fire grew louder. It was a low, continuous tearing sound. Nobody looked back anymore. Looking back had stopped producing information.

Through a seam in the smoke, I saw a long, clean lane below us, angling across the slope. It was grass and rock, walkable, twenty feet away. My legs wanted it. My crew was staggering on sidehill rubble, and there was a sidewalk under us.

“Dante. The lane, below—”

“No.” He didn’t even take a full look. “It bellies out into the draw at the far end. Everything down there is going to be burning within ten minutes.”

I took another look. He was right. The lane ran flat and easy, and then sagged. The sag aimed straight into the low country where the runs were headed.

“Stay high,” I called back.

A limb dropped ahead of Dante. He turned us uphill around it, twenty yards of hands-and-feet through rock, and then a fresh column of smoke rose in the timber ahead.

“Higher,” Dante said, and bent us up the slope again, above the new smoke, onto a rib of bare rock that ran toward the head of the fork.

The rib saved us. It was ugly climbing, but it had nothing that could burn. We topped out onto a wide shelf of broken stone with the smoke thinning above it, and I called halt, waving my hand because my voice was mostly gone.

Dante came up beside me. I caught his hand and held it for a second. Then I let go and counted the men out loud—Teller, Ramirez, Shep, Hollis, Dante. All of us bent over our knees, sucking air worth breathing.

We were above it, not out of it. The fork was still burning below us, but there was rock under my crew and some distance behind them. Dante had bought it for us.

I put Ramirez on the fire again, told Teller to check his hands, and had Hollis work the radio to give air attack our position. Dante walked to the edge of the rock and looked back the way we’d come.

While we stood there, a new line of fire showed itself upslope of the front. It wasn’t a spot spawned by the main fire. It sat in green timber with two hundred yards of unburned fuel between it and the nearest flame. It was already a line instead of a single point.

Dante looked below the new line into the brush. I followed his line of sight and found what he’d found. Against a trunk, a hundred yards below the new start, a gray tab with a straight edge was visible. Then another, west of it. Then a third, higher. The third had smoke rising over it.

The markers all laid out a route. The fire appeared along the path they identified.

“Dutch,” Dante said. The words came, and he shouted them the way he’d heard them five years ago.

“Dante! The flagging — it’s the flagging!”

“He was on the line,” Dante said. “He watched it following the markers. Dutch knew he might not make it back, but he wanted someone to have seen what he saw.”

“I see it,” I said.

Below the new start, in the brush, something moved.

It was a shadow moving between trees, there and gone. Mentally, I marked the tree it had gone behind and watched the tree. The shadow slid out the other side, crossed a bare patch, and stopped. It crouched.

A flame lifted out of the brush where the shadow crouched. At first, it was the size of a campfire. Then it was knee-high and started crawling away downhill.

Dante was already sidestepping along the shelf for a better angle, and I went with him. The smoke opened a seam for us.

The figure straightened and looked up the slope, picking what to light next. It was too far to see a face, but I didn’t need it. I’d watched Marty cross the yard for twelve years. I knew his shape—the set of his shoulders.

“Marty,” I said.