Page 8 of Into the Fire

“I’m going to time you carrying that forty-five pounds up a hill.” He turned and called back, “Get some sleep.”

I watched him go. His truck started on the first try, and I returned to the ready room. I didn’t turn on the light. The security light shining through the window did enough.

The coffee pot sat cold on its burner. The faint, stale smell took me back. Five years ago Boone was giving me grief about my handwriting on the manifest. I laughed, and he walked around the table and kissed me.

I grabbed his collar and pulled him close. The table skidded on the concrete. He kissed me again, harder this time, and I backed into the edge of the table. He kissed my neck, just below my ear.

His hands were on my chest, the heat burning through my shirt. He slipped one hand up under it and touched my bare skin. We grinned at each other like idiots, and I whispered in his ear: We’ll figure the rest out when we get home.

We jumped the next morning, Dutch died, and we never figured the rest out.

The lockers stood along the wall, dark shapes in the security light. Forty-one, fourth from the end.

Five years of rookies had gear to stow, and the base never had enough lockers. Somebody should have gotten forty-one three years ago.

Nobody had.

The board was by the door on my way out. Eight names in Boone’s block letters, and below the eighth, an inch of white space where a ninth could go.

Six o’clock. Three miles, forty-five pounds.

I went to bed so I could get up early and start earning that inch.

Chapter three

Boone

The sun shone on the ridge east of the base, leaving us in its shadow. Cold had slid down from the highest ground overnight, enough chill to see my breath.

Dante’s forty-five-pound pack sat by the gate where I’d left it. I’d weighed it last night after dinner, and I weighed it again this morning.

Dante walked across the yard toward me at five fifty-five. He wore the old work boots, the ones with five years of fence lines in the leather. It was smart to skip the new fire boots. They would have chewed his feet apart by mile two. I’d considered telling him, but he’d already taken care of it.

“Out the front gate and up the county road,” I said. “You climb most of it in the first mile. It rolls after that to the turnaround at the cattle guard, then back the way you came. The complete course is three miles and forty-five minutes.”

Dante watched me while I talked, still and intent, not interrupting, and not nodding along before I’d finished. He used to listen to Dutch that way, but I didn’t need to be thinking about that at six in the morning.

He had covered the course in thirty-six minutes in his rookie year. Five years gone, and I still remembered the time to the second.

Dante swung the pack up and settled it, with a pull at the hip belt and a roll of the shoulders.

“Ready?” I asked.

He looked up the road where it climbed into the trees.

“Yep.”

I started the watch, and he walked out through the gate.

I gave him a head start and drove the truck out after him, passing him on the wide spot with two wheels in the weeds. I parked at the one-mile mark with the engine off and the clipboard on my knee.

The first mile tested the body the most. The road climbed hard through the timber. I heard him before I saw him: bootfalls on gravel, steady as a metronome.

He shortened his stride for the grade and kept a steady pace, head level, hands loose on the straps. He knew better than to fight the hill.

He passed the mile mark, and I wrote the split down. Seconds later, I drove on. The road broke out of the trees for a stretch. Across the draw, sunlight worked its way down the far slope. After the timber folded back in close, I parked at mile two and killed the engine. A raven complained somewhere up the road.

Dante came around the bend below me. Sweat had darkened his shirt at the collar and chest, and his hands weren’t loose on the straps anymore. They were clamped there, taking weight, and the pack had crept up off his hips to ride high on his back. Nothing that would show up on a clipboard record.