Echoes in the Ashes

Chapter7

Chapter Seven: Fifteen More Minutes

The fifteen minutes felt longer than the six-hour drive that morning.

Derek worked the saw with his jaw locked, counting his own breaths to keep from counting the minutes, watching the glow on the ridge deepen from orange to something closer to red. His radio stayed quiet, which was somehow worse than noise would have been — every silence stretching a little longer than the last, every crackle of static making his whole body tense before it resolved into nothing.

Then, four minutes in, the radio broke its silence with a voice that wasn't Rodriguez's — a paramedic on the south end, tight and clipped. "Still loading the last two residents, wheelchair transfers, going as fast as we can without dropping anybody. Need another ten."

"Copy," Rodriguez answered, and even through the static his voice had an edge to it that hadn't been there an hour ago. "Moss, you copy that? Ten more, not fifteen. I'll take what I can get."

"Copy," Derek said, and looked at the ridge, at the glow that seemed to have crept closer just in the time it took to say the word.

Ten minutes. Wheelchairs. People who couldn't move fast even under the best circumstances, being loaded one at a time into vehicles while a wall of fire decided, on its own schedule, when it was done being patient.

Beside him, Diaz kept glancing north, then catching himself, then glancing again, the saw in his hands slowing every time his eyes drifted.

"It's not supposed to be that close yet," Diaz muttered, more to himself than to anyone. "The briefing said we had until oh-five-hundred before the front reached this ridge."

"Briefings are guesses with good posture," Derek said, not looking up from the line he was cutting. "Fire doesn't read the projections. Keep cutting."

"You've done a lot of these," Diaz said, not quite a question. "Big ones, I mean. Ones like this."

"Enough of them."

"They ever stop being like this? The waiting part?"

Derek thought about lying to him — it would have been the kind of lie that steadied a nervous kid on a bad night, the kind every senior man on every crew told at some point. He decided against it. "No," he said instead. "You just get better at doing the work anyway."

"Copy." Diaz went back to it, but Derek noticed his pace had picked up, the same way his own had, both of them working a little faster than the task strictly required, both of them listening to the same sound behind them with the same growing unease.

At the twelve-minute mark, something about the sound changed — a low, structural groan under the roar, like the fire itself had shifted its weight.

Derek set the saw down. "Hold here. I'm going up to check the north face."

"Derek—"

"Two minutes." He was already moving, boots finding the rocky ground of the ridge without looking, muscle memory carrying him upward through brush that scraped and pulled at his gear.

He crested the ridge and the world went from bad to catastrophic in a single breath.

The fire hadn't just accelerated toward the firebreak from the west. A second front, fed by the same shifting wind, had curled around behind them from the north — quiet, fast, low to the ground where it hadn't been visible from the work site below, and already burning between his crew and the retreat path they'd planned. It moved through the dry grass almost gently, almost beautifully, if you didn't understand exactly what it meant for five people currently standing on the wrong side of it.

His stomach dropped in a way it hadn't since the beam came down in that stairwell. This wasn't a marriage falling apart over a kitchen stove. This was people — his people — with maybe minutes, maybe less, and a mistake here didn't end in a slap or a slammed door. It ended in a body count.

His radio was in his hand before he'd finished processing it. "All units, this is Moss. Fire's behind us on the north face. Repeat, fire is behind the crew. Fall back to Point B, now, do not wait for my signal."

Below him, he heard Diaz's voice crackle back, tight with the particular calm people used when they were too scared to sound scared. "Copy. Falling back. What about you?"

"Coming down behind you. Go."

He didn't wait to hear the confirmation. He was already scanning the terrain below, tracing the fastest line down off the ridge, when something at the edge of his vision made him stop.

Half a mile east, isolated on a spur of the ridge where the fire hadn't fully closed in yet, sat a single vacation house, its windows lit gold against the smoke, completely surrounded by flame on three sides. It should have been empty. Every house on this side of the county should have been empty by now, cleared two days ago when the first evacuation orders went out.

And in the upstairs window, for just a second, he saw movement. A shape. A person.

He froze for exactly one heartbeat, doing the math every experienced firefighter does without wanting to — distance, time, fuel load, wind direction, the odds of getting there and getting back — and didn't like a single number in it.

He keyed the radio anyway.

"Rodriguez, I've got a visual on a residence east of my position, second floor, possible occupant."

"Moss, that's not on the evac manifest, that house was supposed to be empty—"

"I've got eyes on someone. I'm not leaving it unchecked."

"Negative." Rodriguez's voice sharpened. "Withdraw to Point B with your crew. That's an order."

"My crew's already falling back," Derek said. "I'm going to confirm the house."

A pause on the radio, static-filled and furious. Then, grudgingly: "I'll route a truck to your position. If the access road cuts off, you retreat, Moss. That is not negotiable."

"Copy."

Derek was already moving, breaking into a run toward the burning house, the heat rising off the ground in visible waves that bent the air like something out of a dream, his own crew's retreat shouted somewhere behind him and already fading under the roar of the fire. His leg — the one the beam had caught two nights ago in a different kind of fire, the one that had never fully stopped aching since — protested every stride, and he ignored it the way he'd ignored every warning his body had given him for the last two days.

He thought, absurdly, of Erin, of the wristband on his bare wrist that had somehow still mattered to her more than the fact that he'd carried her out of a burning building. He thought that whatever this house held, whoever was up in that window, it mattered more than anything that had happened in that kitchen. It was the first thought all week that had felt uncomplicated.

He was fifty yards out when the second-floor window exploded outward in a spray of glass and heat, the sound sharp enough to cut through even the fire's roar.

A hand shot through the opening — pale, streaked with soot and blood — grasping at nothing, at air, at anything.

Then it was gone, swallowed back behind the flames.