Fishing In Fire, page 11
Liz stepped out of the car into her garage. The fire was very serious. It was on pace to set a terrible new record, perhaps the largest fire the state had ever suffered. She shouldn’t have even come home, wouldn’t have come home if she didn’t need to take care of the kids. Poor Annette. Poor responsible mature Annette. No, it definitely wouldn’t be fair to leave her in charge of helping the younger ones even longer. Janelle had to work tonight and Kyle was busy with football pre-season practice.
She went into the house, emerging into her kitchen. She sighed. This used to be her kitchen. “Oh come on, Annette.” The sink was full of dirty dishes. The dishwasher door was open, with the clean dishes from last night still in it. Someone must have needed a glass or silverware and pulled it from the dishwasher, apparently unable to summon the ambition to empty the rest of the machine. Maybe the culprit had pulled from the dishwasher the knife that was now on the counter, covered in a glob of peanut butter next to no fewer than four cheese-stick wrappers and a half-eaten sandwich.
“That’s it,” she muttered quietly. “You kids are going to face some serious punishment.” She called out. “I’m home!” No answer. She yelled louder. “Hello?”
“Hey, Mom,” Gabe called from the living room.
She stepped over one of Dakota’s Lego creations in the dining room and went to see Gabe. There he was in front of the TV, playing video games. “Have you been playing games all day?” He didn’t answer. “Gabe!”
The kid jumped a little. “What?”
“Have you been playing that thing all day?”
“No,” Gabe said. “I had to pause it once in a while to go to the bathroom.”
“Where’s Dakota? Where’s Annette?” Again no answer. She grabbed the remote control and shut the TV off.
“Mom! No! The game is still going! You can’t just shut off the TV!”
Liz glared at her son. “Don’t even try to turn that TV back on, or I swear, I’ll throw that X-Whatever-It’s-Called straight in the trash. Where’s Dakota?”
Gabe stretched and rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know. Upstairs playing Legos, I think.”
Throwing the video games away would probably be the best thing for him. “Where’s Annie?”
“She left,” Gabe said.
What was this kid talking about? Annette left? That was unlikely.
“Said she was meeting some friends to go fishing.” Gabe shrugged. “I don’t know. She left us sandwiches, though. They weren’t very good. Mine had too much—”
“When did she leave? Went fishing where?”
Gabe yawned. “She left this morning right after you did. Dakota was outside awhile, said the Gator is gone.” He held his hands up. “I said she’d be in a lot of trouble, but—”
“Where did she go!”
Gabe seemed to concentrate hard about that one for a long moment. “What was it? Some pond.”
That didn’t help at all. There were a zillion ponds all around McCall. “Think, Gabe! This is important! Where did she say she was going?”
“A pond!” Gabe burst out. “I don’t know. I was playing my game. Wasn’t really listening.” Then he perked up. “Oh. She said something about paint maybe?”
Liz dropped her purse right in the middle of the living room floor and pressed her hands to her chest. Oh no. Oh Lord God Almighty. Please no. Please let the kid be wrong. “Gabe, now think. Did she say Painted Pond?”
“Yeah!” Gabe smiled brightly. He always had such a cute smile. “That’s it.” He must have noticed her terror. “Why? What’s the big deal? Dad and her been fishing there a bunch of times.”
Tears welled in Liz’s eyes, and she grabbed the back of the sofa as dizziness swept through her. Oh no. My sweet baby. No. Elizabeth Willard had been looking at fire updates on the big wall map in City Hall all day. She knew where Painted Pond was. Way up north, on the other side of what was quickly becoming the worst wildfire in her lifetime. “Get your brother. Bring him down here. Start picking this place up. No more games.”
“But Mom,” Gabe whined.
“Just do it! Right now!” She felt terrible for yelling at her son, even as she did it, but she’d have to worry about that later. Her daughter was in deadly danger. “That’s if she’s still—” She wouldn’t allow herself to finish the sentence. The thought was unspeakable. “I have to make some calls.”
CHAPTER 10
“Come on!” Yumi called to the others. “We have to go faster!” They were scrambling down the other side of the ridge. Some parts of the downslope were very steep, and she’d led the way, sliding down the rock. Mason had talked about how fire, with its heat rising, naturally went uphill very quickly. They had to climb down into the thick woods and abundant fire fuel supply at the base of the valley ahead of them, and then climb all the way up over the top of the next ridge.
She reached a small cliff, a drop of six to eight feet. Quickly, Yumi pocketed her compass, scooted to the edge, and jumped, rolling out on the pine needles below, a rock jabbing into her side as she did so. “It’s not that high. You have to jump. If I can do it, you can.” She wanted to throw up, because she was hungry and terrified, and because the way she sounded reminded her of one of those horrible win-at-all-costs sports coaches she saw in the movies.
Hunter was right behind her. He rubbed his leg, which had been broken and in a cast all winter.
“You can do it, Higgins,” Yumi said. “Trust me.”
It was the trust me that seemed to act like a trigger, a switch. Hunter eased himself to the edge and jumped. Kelton, having watched the other two, quickly followed. Then Annette jumped. The others gathered at the top.
Swann hesitated, perched at the edge. “No princess,” she said quietly as she jumped.
McKenzie shook her head. “No way.” She flipped over on her belly, lowering her legs. Mason directed her to footholds. She climbed down, losing it about halfway, and she was forced to awkwardly jump.
Morgan froze in fear. She looked around for a different way down, but the little cliff ran a long way to either side.
“We don’t have time to wait!” Yumi shouted. “Hurry up!”
Annette put her hand on her arm and whispered. “It’s OK, Yumi. I get the frustration, but we don’t want to freak her out even more.”
Mason, still up there with Morgan, whispered to her. She nodded. “I’m going to help lower her down. You guys kind of grab on to her to help her the rest of the way.”
Yumi bit her lip. Annette was right, and her touch had helped calm her a little. But this wasn’t much of a drop. It was like jumping off equipment back on the elementary school playground.
“Come on, Morgan,” McKenzie said. “This is kind of pathetic. I mean, can you, like, put on a bigger drama show?”
“I’m scared,” Morgan whimpered.
Yumi was scared too. They were all frightened, even McKenzie. And that was what made McKenzie so mean. Do you want to be like McKenzie? Yumi asked herself. Yelling at her own best friend and making the situation worse? No. She did not. “That-a-way, Morgan. You can do it.”
Mason put his wrestling muscles to good use, holding Morgan’s hands and lowering her to the others. Kelton, Hunter, and Swann took easy hold of her and lowered her to the ground. Mason crouched, placed one hand on the rock, and side-vaulted, landing gracefully, bending his legs. He smiled.
Higgins slapped the guy a high five. Kelton patted his shoulder. OK, maybe Mason had made a mistake in letting himself be suckered into this fishing trip with McKenzie and Morgan, but she had to admit Mason was a cool guy.
Annette squeezed Morgan in a one-arm side hug. “Don’t worry. You’re cool. You’re good. We’re right with you.”
“Where do we go from here?” Swann asked.
Yumi hated that question. She took a deep breath, looking up at the smoke rising on the side of the mountain from which they’d come. Hunter held up the map and she checked her compass. She tried to do her best to remember everything her dad had taught her about land navigation. But learning how to understand and use a map and compass was different from figuring out where to go on the ground. The map didn’t take trees, rocks, or other obstacles like that little cliff into account.
And there was one other problem. A possibility so horrible she didn’t want to admit it even to herself, the thought that twisted around inside her and made her want to drop to the ground and curl up in a ball. They all asked her which way to go, but she wasn’t completely sure. She didn’t know with absolute certainty. She was doing her best, but she was still partly guessing. Stumped on a quiz at school? A guess was a good idea. She might get lucky, and if she didn’t, no big deal. But if she was wrong now, with the fire closing in, they were all dead.
That was part of the reason she’d been yelling at everybody to hurry. If they moved faster, they might earn enough time to reroute, to go back and choose a different path, to correct for a bad choice. So she understood why McKenzie was acting extra-mean. But there had to be a way for Yumi to handle this without acting like her.
Maybe she could play the part of the cheerleader. “Follow me,” she said as she trotted off in what she thought was the right direction. “This valley isn’t very deep, so not as much of a climb up to the next ridge. But we need to hurry to get there.”
The only thing almost as strange and uncomfortable as trying to lead the way through the wilderness was the fact that everybody listened to her. When she picked the route, the others followed. When she told them to hurry, she could tell that they tried. Since her mother was Japanese, Yumi had always felt a little “other” in the almost exclusively white town of McCall. Once or twice one idiot or another had asked her where she was from.
“McCall,” she’d say.
“No, but what country?” they’d say.
It was like that. As little kids, nobody had ever said she couldn’t play with them because she was half Japanese. She wasn’t ever in the outcast situation that, until recently, Kelton Fielding had endured, but she’d remained a little bit of an outsider. People like McKenzie or Swann had ideas that everyone else embraced. Now they were following her. Yumi had often thought she would have enjoyed being the one to whom everyone else listened, but now that the responsibility was hers, she hated it.
As they finally reached the dense woods at the base of the valley, Annette caught up with her. “That smoke is really thick at the top of the mountain behind us.” She leaned closer and spoke more quietly. “Yumi, are we going to make it? Is there another way? A faster way?”
“I’m doing the best I can!” Yumi hissed. “You’re the straight-A genius student. If you think you can do better, you lead the way!” Annette seemed to shrink or wilt as soon as Yumi had lashed out at her. Yumi squeezed her itchy smoky eyes closed for a moment. You’re an idiot, Yumi. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“No, I’m sorry,” Annette said. “I really messed things up between us, first when I wrote that stupid school paper article, and then getting us into this mess.”
Yumi put her hand on Annette’s shoulder. “Listen. I’m the one who should apologize. I shouldn’t have snapped at you. And the thing about that article. It’s just that the whole war was, in some way, about people kissing up to either of two super-popular girls. It drove me crazy when it looked like you were kissing up the same way. I thought, let them tear each other apart. What’s it to us?”
“Makes sense, in a way, I guess,” Annette said after a moment.
“Well, no, it doesn’t,” Yumi said. “Swann’s pretty cool. And if we escape this fire situation and I get the chance to get to know McKenzie, I’d probably see she’s OK too.”
“We’ll escape,” Annette said with confidence. “I didn’t mean to suggest you don’t know the way.”
“But I don’t,” Yumi admitted quietly to Annette so the others wouldn’t hear. “I think I’m right, but I’m basically just making my best guess. If I’m wrong—”
“You’re not wrong,” Annette said. “You’re Yumi Higgins, and . . . and you’re my best friend, and you can do anything.”
Yumi didn’t know what to say to that. She was never very good at talking all mushy about feelings. She only smiled and nodded as they continued crunching through the thick dry undergrowth. Then she checked her compass and pointed in the direction she thought they should go. “This is it,” Yumi called out to everyone. The mountain wasn’t one even, steep slope all the way up. There was a kind of shelf, like a massive ramp, that ran diagonally up the side. Again, she could identify the major land feature on the map, but locating it in the woods wasn’t easy. “I’m pretty sure this is the easiest route.” But could they make the next rise before the flames caught up with them?
“You’re pretty sure?” McKenzie asked. Yumi shot her a helpless look. McKenzie held her hands up in surrender. “Or maybe there’s no time to make absolutely sure. I get you.”
“Right now,” Yumi explained, “all we know is we can’t stay here. We have to push one more hard climb, and then . . . and then I think we can follow the course of the stream all the way. Downhill clear to the highway.”
Mason leaned back against the trunk of a large pine. “Do any of you also feel like you’re about to pass out? I know we have to do this, but I don’t know how I can.”
“We’ll have to stop for water and to eat sometime,” Morgan said. “We aren’t machines. We’re going to need to rest and refuel.”
“Right, then,” Annette said. “Let’s hurry up this next climb as fast as we can. If we’re tough, and if we’re lucky, we’ll earn a little rest time at the top.”
Yumi’s legs burned as she pushed off, heaving up the slope. Although the terrain was slightly easier, the climb was not. It didn’t matter how tough someone was. At a certain point, everyone reached their limit. They were nearly out of energy. Whether that was solely the result of being on the run and climbing for hours, or the physical work combined with the terror of the coming fire, Yumi didn’t know. But she was certain the fire was only gaining strength as it moved. She and the rest of them were not.
Filtered through the thick smoke, the sun shined blood-red in the afternoon sky, so heavily filtered they could easily look at it with no pain save for the itchiness of the surrounding smoke in their eyes.
People talked about climbing and reaching the tops of mountains as if it were like climbing up onto the top of a house, where at first you struggle, but then you’re sitting on the shingles, clearly on the roof. A mountain wasn’t like that. There was no line to mark that point at which one was no longer climbing, but had reached the top. There was no single location at which one began to descend down the other side. There were lots of smaller rises and gullies on the massive rounded top of the ridge.
After a long time, and without the energy to talk about it much, they began to realize they weren’t fighting uphill as much anymore.
“It’s getting dark,” Morgan said. “But it’s hours until sunset. From the smoke? How dark is it going to get?”
Nobody answered her. And nobody said anything as, one by one, they took seats on rocks or fallen logs in the diminishing light. Swann and Kelton produced the big cans of pudding and beans. Kelton started opening them. Hunter offered two sleeves of crackers. The group gathered around their stolen meal.
“Chocolate pudding, cold baked beans, and crackers,” McKenzie said. “I’m hungry enough to eat anything.” They dug in with spoons Swann had taken from the cabin, slowly at first, then faster, like hungry animals. McKenzie laughed after a while, a smear of brown pudding and cracker crumbs on her cheek. “This is so sick.”
Hunter stood up after a while. “I noticed a little stream on the way up. I’ll go fill our CamelBaks.”
“You sure that water’s safe to drink?” Morgan asked.
Hunter smiled. “I have a filter pump. It’ll be fine.” He pointed at everyone gathered around the cans. “Anyway, it can’t be much more gross than this.”
“Nobody goes alone, Higgins,” Yumi said. If he got lost or hurt, he’d be in big trouble on his own.
“I’ll go,” Annette said quickly.
What was that about? Yumi met her friend’s eyes as if to ask if she was sure. Annette nodded and was on her feet with Hunter, heading in the direction from which they’d come.
“I can handle this on my own, you know,” Hunter said after they’d reached the water source. Perhaps in early spring the stream might be impressive, but this late in a mostly rainless summer, it was reduced to a low trickle, sprinkling in a little waterfall down the mossy rock. Hunter produced his small handheld pump, one plastic tube in the stream, and the other in his open CamelBak water bladder. It would take many squeezes, but he’d have the thing filled soon enough.
“Sure,” Annette said, scuffing her shoe in the dirt on the secluded rock ledge where they stood. “But it’s like Yumi said.”
Hunter smiled, getting soaked in the stream, still pumping. “So you’re here to protect me?”
“Something like that,” Annette said. Why had she offered to go with him? It would have been so much easier to simply lie there and rest on that flat stone area she’d found. She’d volunteered without thinking. Or had she, on the instinctual level to which they’d all been reduced in this ordeal, simply understood she needed to work things out with Hunter the way she’d fixed things with Yumi? Well, but maybe not in the exact same way.
And suddenly Annette, who worked with words so much, found she had no idea what to say. At first it worried her, embarrassed her, but against the dangerous situation they faced, her silence didn’t seem so awkward. And Hunter smiled kindly.
“I think I wore the totally wrong dress to the dance last night,” she blurted out.
