Page 98 of Until We Come Home

Ollie and I grab backpack pumps and hand tools, I check that my radio’s set to the right channel, and we head up the hill.

The dozer line is a wide swath of raw earth scraped straight to mineral soil, running along the base of the slope above the houses like a fresh scar. On one side sit the backyards of Ridgeview, empty windows and dead porch lights, the residents long evacuated. On the other side, the hill rises into the timber, thick with brush and fir, and above that, maybe half a mile up, the main fire.

We walk it slowly, headlamps cutting thin white beams through the haze. Every hundred yards I pause to look upslope, then down, then behind us, checking the wind. Muscle memory. The noise is constant—a steady roar from the ridge, the wind hissing through the trees, and every few minutes the sharp crack of a tree going up somewhere on the mountain.

We catch our first spot fire a quarter mile in, a patch of grass smoldering just below the line where an ember drifted across. Ollie douses it with his pump while I scrape a ring around it, and in two minutes it’s dead. We find another a little farther on, then another. Small stuff. Exactly why we’re out here.

“This is insane,” Ollie shouts over the noise, staring up at the orange glow on the ridge. “It was raining back in Seattle yesterday, I can’t believe how dry it is out here.”

“Just bad luck with the storm,” I shout back, sweeping my light across the slope. “Hey, keep your eyes on what’s behind us. You need to be checking our back constantly.”

We’re about three-quarters of the way to the water tank when Ollie stops, swinging his headlamp up the hill.

A narrow gravel driveway cuts off the dozer line into a steep draw between two ridges, the kind of tight, brush-choked gully that runs straight uphill like a chimney. At the top, maybe two hundred yards up, sits a little cedar-shingled house with a wraparound porch.

There’s a tire swing hanging from an oak in the yard, and a row of carved pumpkins on the porch steps. Whoever lives there left the porch light on when they evacuated, glowing yellow through the smoke like they’re planning to be back any minute.

Halfway up the draw, right in the middle of all that dry broom, there’s an orange glow. A spot fire. It isn’t big yet, maybe the size of a living room, but it’s creeping uphill toward the back of the house, growing every time the wind catches it.

“Mateo, look,” Ollie says, already moving toward the driveway. “It’s small. We can catch that.”

“Hold up,” I tell him, grabbing the back of his pack.

“It’s right there.” He points up the gully, his voice picking up speed. “We run up, hit it with the pumps, scrape a line around it, and it’s out before it hits the house. Five minutes, tops. We can save it.”

It’s a line I’ve used a hundred times. Hell, I said practically the same thing to Rebecca before that flashover earlier this summer. Five minutes, in and out, I can make the save. All before anyone notices.

Normally I wouldn’t hesitate. I would’ve been halfway up that driveway before Ollie even finished his sentence. It’s exactly the kind of call I used to make without thinking twice, and every time I got away with it, I felt a little more invincible.

But I look at Ollie, so eager, so young, and I don’t want him making my fucking mistakes. I think of Mia, and the promise I made her. Or maybe Barnes’s warnings are finally sinking in, because I take a hard look at the setup.

The spot fire isn’t huge yet, he’s right about that. But it’s sitting in a narrow, steep gully packed with dry broom from top to bottom, and to fight it, we’d have to leave the line and climb up into that fuel with fire burning beneath us.

Fire runs uphill. It races up a draw like that the way flames run up a flue, faster than anyone can climb. If the wind pushes that spot up the gully while we’re above it, or another ember lands below us in all that brush, there’s no way out. No escape route. No safety zone. Just two guys trapped in a chimney, trying to save a house nobody’s in.

I don’t want this kid turning into me.

“No,” I say.

Ollie turns to me, eyes huge behind his goggles. “What?”

“We’re not going up there,” I say. “If we climb up to hit that spot, we’ve got fire below us and nothing but broom between us and the top. If that thing makes a run, or another ember lands behind us, it’ll sweep up that gully faster than we can move. Nobody’s in that house, Ollie. It isn’t worth dying for.”

“But it’s someone’s home,” he protests, looking back up at the porch light. “We can catch it. I know we can.”

“Maybe we could,” I tell him, and I hate every word, but I keep my voice steady. “And maybe we couldn’t, and we don’t get to find out up there. Houses get rebuilt. People don’t. We call it in, Division sends an engine up the driveway from the road, where they’ve got a clear way out, and we stay on the line. That’s the job. That’s what Barnes asked of us.”

He looks up at the house a moment longer, jaw tight, then nods.

I key my radio. “Strike Team 7, Navarro. We’ve got a spot fire in the draw above the dozer line, about three-quarters of the way to the water tank. It’s in heavy broom and moving uphill toward an evacuated structure at the top of the driveway. Requesting an engine come up from the road side to assess. We’re not engaging. No escape route from the line.”

“Copy, Navarro,” Barnes crackles back. “Good call. I’ll relay to Division. Keep moving.”

We keep moving.

We make it another hundred yards before the wind shifts.

I feel it first, a gust hitting from the north instead of the east, hot and sharp. Then a deep roar comes off the ridge, louder than anything I’ve heard all day. I spin around, my headlamp catching a blizzard of embers pouring out of the smoke, swirling down the slope on the wind.