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Chapter 4

Barnacle Ben’s was packed, the raucous crowd making enough noise to be heard out on the streets, above the crashing waves. It was ten degrees cooler at the coast than it was in Elfin Forest, but Lila was ready as she ran from the parking lot to the tavern, huddled with her arms around her body. She hoped no one she’d slept with recently would be there, scouting for her. Nothing was going to interfere with a night out.

Charlie knew she’d be out, and although he tried not to think about it, he kept going back to it. Old ways of thinking said that if he was at work, she should be home, waiting. Trying to sleep while these thoughts filtered through his brain was impossible, so by four, he got up from the cot and sat at his computer. There was nothing like a rousing game of solitaire to put him to sleep.

The telltale warning that an alarm was about to sound was a tinny, live-sounding echo that pulsated over the speaker until the disembodied voice from central dispatch began to speak.

“Attention station #34, engine 5, engine 2, ladder 1, rescue 1, squad 1, squad 4, duty chief C-3, fire chief C-1, fire investigator unit 90, fire mechanic, this is a brush fire in the vicinity of San Pasquel Road and 78. All hands working.”

Out in the bunkhouse, the men started moving.

“Oh crap, that’s by the Safari Park,” Rick Jackson mumbled as they moved to their positions. “I thought I smelled smoke.”

“I did too and I figured I was dreamin’,” someone else said.

The tinny echo again as the voice announcement rang out, “Requesting a water tender.”

“I’ll drive it over,” Charlie said.

In less than five minutes, the engines had left the garages, a procession of vehicles quickly moving through the dense fog. Getting to the scene was always with a sense of emergency, but when there was a structure close by even more so. And the location was in a valley of euclyptus trees west of the zoo Safari Park. Euclyptus were ultra-flammable trees, their seeds and bark full of oil that was known to combust into an explosive inferno.

Heart sinking the closer he got to the already-dense smoke, flames moving quickly in the wind, Charlie made the call to ask the sheriffs to go door-to-door to evacuate the homes that were within proximity to the path of the fire. Within the hour as the first light of dawn just began to peek over the mountains, aerial water drops began, with three water-dropping helicopters and tankers dropping fire retardants, but they were unable to stop the forward movement of the fire.

As it burned closer to the zoo, officials started monitoring the air for smoke that could prove dangerous for animals to breathe. Meanwhile, zoo workers began preparing animals to be moved, just in case, while ground workers helped hose down nearby grassy hillsides that were most vulnerable to wildfire. Where they had irrigation systems in place, those were turned on.

Charlie and a team of firefighters from #34 went inside the park to evaluate and ended up staying to help when the decision was made to move some of the animals out of harm’s way. They had a protocol for rounding them up and relocating them to safety.

As the day unfolded, nearby residents were glued to their televisions, including Lila, who’d called to see if she could help in any way and was told that they’d let her know; right now it was impossible to get to the park because the roads were closed. She’d tried texting Charlie just in case he could answer, but he had his phone shut off. They had not shared their locations on their phones yet, or she’d see that he was in the thick of it after having left the park.

The fire had taken a turn to the northeast, just skimming by the park, but climbing in elevation to the area surrounding it that was covered in highly flammable coastal sage. The goal was to cut a fire break along a two-mile area to the north of the park.

Canyons became like furnaces as wildfires blazed through, heating the rock walls. When the terrain was that rugged, it wasn’t always safe to put ground crews directly on it, relying more on the aerial assault. The steep climb posed more than a danger to the team; large boulders looked stable, but experience taught that the right combination of circumstances were all it took to send one tumbling down in their direction.

It only took a little wind to make the fire grow, making them uncontrollable and unpredictable for firefighters. Winds coming down from the mountains acted like a funnel sweeping through the valley. It was at this point, where he was standing at the juncture of two foothills and the depression that ran down into the valley, that Charlie decided it was no longer safe for his team to progress any farther. The smoke was choking him even with his regulator on. And worse, his air was running low.

“All hands retreat,” he called into his radio. “Answer.”

He understood that one of the hardest things for a firefighter to do was put himself in reverse. In training, they were taught to act aggressively. They always put out the fires they start in fire school. But in real-life situations, it wasn’t always easy to apply the same methods.

One by one the leaders replied, “Leaving now!”

“Did you get that?” Rick Jackson shouted to the team. “Let’s move back down.”

Rick had been the lookout when the Ridge Fire took the lives of Mike Saint and their chief, George McGrew, and he wasn’t going to allow any more guilt or blame to come his way. “Everyone, move!”

For half an hour they scrambled safely over the ridge, a sea of yellow turnout gear making it quickly through the smoke back to the staging area. It took a few minutes for them to realize Charlie hadn’t come back.

“Get on the radio and call him,” someone shouted over the roar of the fire, the aircraft above and the wind.

As he struggled to get through the smoke, the thought that kept going through Charlie’s mind was what would happen to Big Mike if he died, after losing his son just weeks before. When his oxygen ran out, he’d disconnected the hose from his regulator and had it tucked into the coat of his turnout gear so at least the air he breathed would be somewhat filtered. It never occurred to him to issue a Mayday call for himself.

Disoriented from the carbon monoxide, he stumbled over a rock before going facedown. As he smashed his face on a boulder, his mouth quickly filled with blood, and the last thing he thought of before he passed out was of the dental work he’d just paid for, literally gone up in smoke.

Devon had called Lila to see if she was okay. “Can you find out anything for me?” she cried. “They just said on the news that a missing firefighter has been found and is in Palomar in serious condition.”

“I’ll call, but I don’t think I’ll be able to find out anything. We should just go to the hospital.”

“I’ll be right over,” she said, quickly pulling herself together. “Give me five minutes.”

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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