Fishing In Fire, page 8
“Did you call for help?” Morgan asked feebly. Anyone on her phone as much as Morgan knew they had no signal out here. Yumi and Mason ignored the question.
“Well, you ran all the way here,” McKenzie said. “It’s way back there, right? We have time.”
“No!” Mason shouted. “With this wind, the fire will spread fast. How fast do you think we ran?”
“And not all of that running was in a direction away from the fire,” Yumi said. “Anyway, you think they issue evacuation orders to people who live near a burning because the fire moves slowly and gives everybody plenty of time?”
Morgan pointed to the pond. “Let’s just get in the water. The fire won’t be able to touch us.”
Mason was usually a quiet, mild kind of a guy. When he shouted a curse, it made everybody jump. “Think about it! Fire doesn’t just destroy all the wood, grass, and people in its path. It also consumes oxygen. Even if the fire doesn’t eat all the oxygen and suffocate us, you don’t understand that level of heat. The flames weren’t even near Annette’s Gator, and the seats started burning. Now with these trees all around right up to the water’s edge, imagine that kind of heat searing our faces when we surface to try to breathe.”
“Plus the smoke,” Yumi said. “It would choke us out.”
“Soon nothing will be able to survive here,” Mason said.
McKenzie and Morgan dropped their usual sarcastic know-it-all attitudes. McKenzie clapped her hands, as if she were the queen, deciding for everyone. “OK, let’s get dressed and get out of here.”
“Maybe we should keep wearing our wet clothes,” Morgan said. “Fire doesn’t like water, right? The water in our swimsuits could protect us from sparks. Keep us cool if we’re too close to the heat.”
“Hurry up and change your clothes,” Mason said. “My dad helps fight forest fires. Tells me all about it. Wet clothes around fires this hot are the worst. The water in the fabric won’t protect you. It will boil into steam and burn your flesh.”
The girls went behind a boulder to change. When they returned, Morgan was shaking so bad, Yumi worried she’d collapse.
“Calm down,” McKenzie snapped. “You make it, like, ten times worse freaking out about it.”
Yumi was about to shout at McKenzie, to tell her to try not to be such an evil witch. But that would just start a fight and make things worse.
“It’s bad,” Yumi said. “I won’t lie. But we’re ahead of it. We’ll keep moving. Find the others and get help.”
They hurried to the steep painted-rock slope. “We have a lot of ground to cover,” Yumi said. She tossed her fishing pole and thermos aside. The latter might have been good for hauling drinking water, but she’d have to get by with just her CamelBak, and anyway she needed both hands. “Our stuff will slow us down. Ditch anything you don’t absolutely need.”
McKenzie and Morgan put their fishing poles on the ground. After a moment, they dropped the swimsuits they’d been carrying. Mason sighed and gave up his tackle box. He was about to do the same with his fishing rod, but shook his head.
“Seriously?” Yumi asked.
Mason stood firm. “This is my lucky fishing pole. It’s top-of-the-line. It goes with me.”
“I will buy you a new pole, Mason!” McKenzie snapped. “Drop it, so we can go faster!”
“It’s fine!” Yumi said. “Let’s go!”
The group started the climb, easy at first, but then troubling them with some big boulders. Yumi found her way to the top of one and offered her help to Morgan, who accepted. When she pulled Morgan up, the two of them stood close for a moment. Yumi could feel the girl shaking. She patted Morgan’s shoulder. “We’ll be OK,” Yumi said quietly. “I know the way. We’ll keep moving and be fine.”
After a tough scramble up the first slope, the group paused at the top of the hill, looking back toward McCall. Between them and home, a darker, angrier column of smoke rose from the wilderness.
“It’s getting worse,” Yumi said. She might have sounded calm and confident to the others, but she didn’t feel it. Her legs shook and she wanted to throw up. The quick exchange of a look with Mason told her he felt the same way, and somehow his fear helped her feel less alone.
“Fire can spread fast,” Mason said. “Thick forest? Maybe six miles per hour. More open, grassy land? Maybe fourteen miles per hour.”
Morgan threw a stone over the edge of the rocky slope they’d just climbed. It clicked as it bounced down. “What’s our top running speed? Maybe twenty miles per hour?”
“Not even close to that speed, especially through this terrain,” Mason said.
“I won’t lie to you. We’re in a lot of trouble. We have to move. Fast.” Yumi took a deep breath. She stepped close to Mason and whispered, “Will you bring up the rear? Help out if anyone falls? Keep them moving?” Mason nodded. To the others, Yumi spoke with as much confidence as she could muster. “Now we run. No stopping. Follow me.”
Yumi took off running, risking tripping over a rock or branch when she briefly turned to look back and make sure the others were following. Yumi had participated in McCall’s youth running club before, tackling runs up to three miles. The distance they had to cover to reach Hunter and the others wasn’t as far, but this would still be the longest run of their lives.
CHAPTER 8
“Yumi, how bad is it?” Swann asked.
Yumi was still bent over, hands on her knees, trying to get her breath back after the long run, and coughing. She was drenched in sweat now, dirt smudged across her forehead.
“It’s . . .” Yumi coughed hard, tears in her eyes. “It’s bad. Getting worse.”
Swann tapped at her phone. “No service, so, we need to go for help.”
McKenzie managed to straighten herself up and put a hand on her hip. “Come on, Swann. You’ve known about the fire for about thirty seconds. Don’t act like you’re taking over. You’re not in charge of everything.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, McKenzie. Maybe you would rather hang around and get burned up. It’s not taking over to suggest we don’t die.”
“Stop it!” Annette shouted. “Both of you! Nobody is in charge! That’s so stupid. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is surviving. First we need to know what we’re dealing with. Yumi, tell us what’s up.”
Yumi and Mason explained how’d they’d seen the smoke and tried to head back home, but were blocked by the fire.
“And I’m sorry, Annette, but the Gator is history,” Yumi said. “We watched it burn.”
Annette blew out a breath. “Even if I survive the fire, my parents are going to kill me.”
“Then we have to run,” Hunter said. “No choice, right?”
Morgan waved her hands in front of her chest. “We gotta rest a little bit. Been running forever.”
“What we really need to do is call for help,” Annette said. She took a deep breath, hoping she had the right idea.
“Yeah, that’s great, dummy, except our phones won’t work out here,” McKenzie said.
Yumi scowled. “What is wrong with you?”
McKenzie held up her phone and was about to say something.
“Enough!” Annette shouted, with more confidence than she felt. “We don’t have time to fight. There’s a cabin. It might have an old telephone, like that one with the loud bell that Yumi and Hunter have on the wall at their hunting lodge. Let’s go.” She didn’t wait for the others but ran across the bridge over the river and onto the gravel foot trail beyond. The trail rose at a gentle slope around a little hill. At the top she glanced back, relieved to see the others were following.
A minute later, a red-painted A-frame cabin came into view, a wooden picnic table and a couple of Adirondack chairs out front. Reaching the place, Annette tried the front door. Locked.
“What do we do now?” Morgan asked nervously.
“Do we even have time for this?” McKenzie added. “Maybe we should keep running? Or trying to run.”
“Maybe there’s a key?” Hunter said.
Annette looked for a key, hanging from a nail on the door trim or under a welcome mat. There wasn’t a welcome mat.
Idaho didn’t always get a lot of rain in the summer, but the state always had tons of rocks. Annette picked up a softball-sized stone and bashed in the front window beside the door, jerking her hand back as sharp shards of glass fell.
“You could have warned us,” Yumi said.
“You’re the one who’s gotta pay for that, Annette,” McKenzie said.
Annette used the rock to smash out the few jagged pieces of glass that remained in the frame.
“Or else this whole cabin will be burned down and nobody will care about a window,” Hunter countered.
“If it doesn’t burn, someone will want to know who broke this window, and I will tell—”
“They can bill me, McKenzie!” Swann shouted. “Shut up!”
Yumi and Hunter moved together without speaking, dragging one of the chairs to the wall.
“You’re the coolest, Annette.” Yumi stepped on the chair, then on the window frame, before jumping down into the cabin. A moment later the door was unlocked and swung open. Everybody rushed in, almost as if they thought being in the cabin would somehow shield them from the coming fire.
The ground floor of the cabin was a simple single room. There was an ancient plaid sofa and worn recliner near the front facing a black cast-iron woodstove. The beds, if there were any, must have been upstairs. At the far end of the rectangular room was a kitchen area with a refrigerator, sink, cabinets, and table. There, on the wall beside the fridge, was a big yellow telephone, a holdover relic from the 1900s.
“Bingo,” Annette said, flipping on the lights and rushing to the phone. “We have power. Now let’s just hope this old . . .” She yanked the heavy handset and held it to her ear. Silence. “. . . old piece of junk works. It doesn’t.” Her shoulders slumped. She’d wasted precious time leading them to this stupid cabin. All for a dead phone.
“You didn’t even turn it on.” Morgan flopped down on the sofa, making a dusty cloud. “Is there a button you have to push to make a call? Like an old-time send button?”
McKenzie pointed at the phone. “It has to be that giant claw thing the handle was hanging on. You press that or something.”
Annette moved the claw up and down. Nothing. She looked the phone over carefully. “There’s a loudness dial. Nothing else.”
“Give me that.” Yumi snatched the handset away from her. She held it to her ear for a moment before slamming it back onto its wall mount. “Phone’s dead,” Yumi said decisively. “My grandpa has one of these at the lodge. You pick it up, and it should start making this sort of buzzing noise. This isn’t.”
“Great.” McKenzie threw her hands up, pacing the room, her shoes crunching over broken glass. “Well, this was a pointless waste of time that we don’t have. Thanks a lot, Annette.”
“You don’t like it, you can take off, McKenzie,” Yumi shouted. “Nobody’s stopping you. Nobody wants—”
“Nobody’s splitting up,” Annette said. Visions of funerals for her dead classmates, even for those she didn’t like that much, flashed through her mind. That would not happen. It couldn’t. At least she would do all she could to prevent it. “We’re staying together, and we’ll make it out of this.” She exchanged a doubtful look with Yumi. “We should prepare to be out in the woods for a while.”
“What do you mean?” Morgan asked. “Like camping?”
“No shortage of campfires,” Kelton said quietly.
“Kelton!” McKenzie began in that snotty way she had of tearing everybody down. But she stopped herself, and then laughed. It was like popping the top on a shaken can of soda. Everybody burst out laughing.
“Anybody got any marshmallows?” Swann asked.
“Yeah,” McKenzie added. “And a fire poker that’s, like, two miles long.”
Annette didn’t know much about how to survive a horrible forest fire, but she was trying to be a journalist, a reporter, a writer. So she tried to understand people. And these people all around her needed that break in the tension. They all laughed harder than the jokes merited, and it was good.
“Seriously, though.” McKenzie looked out through the glassless window. “What do we do now?”
“We have to keep moving,” said Hunter.
“First, we rob this cabin of everything we’ll need out there,” Kelton said.
Morgan leaned back on the sofa, her hands over her face. “What? Just steal stuff? It’s bad enough we broke the window.”
“Like I said—” Swann began.
“Yes, we all know you’re rich enough to buy this whole cabin, Swann,” Morgan said. “But it’s wrong. We can’t just steal.”
“There’s real good odds this whole cabin is going to burn to the ground.” Hunter threw open the refrigerator door and checked inside. “If I owned this place, I’d be happy that people used whatever they could before it all burned.”
It was as if everybody silently agreed at the same time. They all snapped to work. Cabinets were thrown open, a team went upstairs.
In the end, they did not find much. A hatchet. A flashlight. Three shotgun shells, useless without a gun. They found a twenty-four-foot length of rope. Upstairs there were blankets and a few towels. These were about to be discarded, but Hunter and Kelton insisted they take them, along with four old wooden tent stakes, each about a foot long.
Hunter rubbed his leg. “In case we end up having to make another splint. We’ll do it right this time.”
“Jackpot!” Kelton said, pulling up a panel on the floor and reaching down into the storage space he found there. He produced two enormous metal cans, the kind Annette had seen once on a survival preparation advertisement online. “Hope everybody’s hungry, because it looks like . . .” He read the cans. “Like beans and . . . chocolate pudding. Five pounds each.” Kelton flipped some buckles on a flat metal tub he found in the storage hatch. He smiled. “Plus”—he held up the prize from the tub—“two sleeves of saltine crackers.”
“Are you kidding?” Swann made a disgusted grunt. McKenzie was about to pounce, but Swann continued, “No lobster? No caviar? What’s the matter with you Idaho people?”
Everybody laughed again.
“Right, Hollywood,” Yumi joked. “I’m sure you’ll leave a negative review for the manager.” To the others she shouted, “If we’re going to be eating a bunch of beans somebody go to the outhouse! Grab all the toilet paper.”
After they’d packed it all up, cramming it into each of the four backpacks they’d brought, Annette’s own, Hunter’s, Kelton’s, and Swann’s, they cranked the handle on the pump until water gushed from the well down a little spout, rust-orange at first, but quickly clearing. Each of them drank and drank. Hunter, Yumi, and Kelton topped off their CamelBak water systems.
While the rest of them drank, Annette spread out the real prize she’d found in the cabin. A paper map of Idaho. Better than a simple road map, this topographical map displayed contour lines to denote elevation and give a better sense of the terrain. It was from the year 1997, but she figured the roads and highways hadn’t changed that much since then. The mountains and other terrain made drastic road changes difficult. It wasn’t like a north-south freeway had been built in the years since the map was made.
They’d found an old radio upstairs, and they brought it down and plugged it in. Kelton turned it on. “Maybe I can find some news.” Static hissed as Kelton turned a dial, trying to tune in a station. “Idaho’s number one country . . .” He cranked the tuning dial more. “. . . for incredible prices on mattresses, before the sale ends on . . . let it be . . . of the serious situation developing north of McCall.” Kelton shouted, “Hey, quiet, everybody! Listen to this!” He turned up the volume. “High winds have grounded firefighting aircraft and are making a bad fire situation worse. Warren Wagon Road is closed to all but emergency traffic, so at this time the only open route north out of McCall is the regular Highway 55–95 corridor or up Lick Creek Road to the east. Again, fire crews are responding to a serious wildfire situation north of the city of McCall, Idaho. Residents are advised that, at this time, no evacuation orders have been issued for city residents.”
“We’ve lost time here,” Hunter said, peering over Annette’s shoulder at the map. He was standing kind of close. Not too close, but pretty close. She could feel his presence, smell the spice of the jerky he’d eaten earlier. Annette squeezed the edges of the map, wishing she could stop thinking about things that didn’t matter right now.
“What do you think?” Annette asked. “Back over the river, and then north? Run from the fire?”
Hunter nodded. “The way the wind’s blowing, the fire will head right this way.”
Yumi tapped the map. “Radio sounds like we’ll never get home by the road. There’s no choice. We hook up with Warren Wagon Road and keep going north, trying to hitch a ride or find some way to call for help. At this point, we just keep moving, no matter what. Good plan?”
“Well, none of this is good,” Hunter said. She turned to face him, annoyed, but found him smiling. “But for now, it’s the best we can do.”
“Great, so let’s stop yapping about it, and go!” Yumi hoisted her drinking pack up on her shoulders and pulled two little straps to tighten the main harness. She had her compass at the ready. “We’re moving out!” she yelled to everyone, circling her hand in the air above her head. “Back over the bridge, then north, as fast as we can move.” Yumi led off in a jog. Annette followed, Hunter running beside her.
“Thanks for the help,” Annette said quietly, wishing she could talk to whomever owned this cabin. “I hope it will be enough.”
