Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [155]
Steve drew Clare back against him. He kissed her and their lips clung with a new intensity she had not imagined possible, something that came from inside both of them. She drew away and studied the clean lines of his face. His eyes met hers and she believed in their unspoken revelation.
“What’s done it for us so suddenly?” she wondered.
Steve nodded toward the approaching conflagration. “I suppose it’s the shadow of the sword.”
There was a battle to fight, but it would not come until sunrise.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
September 10
It’s time,” a man’s deep voice called through Steve’s front door. Clare realized she’d been half-aware of knocking for some time.
When Steve opened the door in his sweat pants Clare recognized Moru Mzima. She thought he took in the situation, but he didn’t look at the rumpled couch or at her until she joined Steve at the door.
“They’ve called the evacuation,” Moru said. The clock on Steve’s bookcase read five-forty.
The wind that blew in the door was cooler than it had been earlier, but still lacked the slightest trace of humidity. Through the open weave of the porch lattice, Clare saw that the North Fork had burned down Bunsen Peak to Golden Gate pass. The only remaining natural break between the fire and the town was the jumbled blocks of rock called the Hoodoos, the remains of an old landslide.
Moru looked at her. “I’m sending Nyeri and the kids to Bozeman now. Do you and your daughter want to ride along?”
“You’d better go,” Steve told Clare.
There wasn’t any doubt that she had to take Devon to safety, but the sight of the crimson fire front had Clare spoiling for a fight. Garrett had convinced her . . . no, she had decided to keep working wildfire.
“I’ll go with them, Mom.” Devon spoke from the hallway. “You stay.”
She turned to find her daughter barefoot and wearing the oversized T-shirt Steve had given her to sleep in. Her hair was mussed, but her blue eyes were clear and steady. “Really, I’ll be okay.” Her certainty said she understood her mother wanted to fight the fire.
Clare looked at the latest advance of the North Fork with growing certainty. After nearly two months of watching the fires’ dark shapes envelop the strategic maps, she wanted to be on the battlefield when the sons-of-bitches were vanquished.
When she and Frank had charged up the apartment house stairs they’d tasted fear, a hot bright edge that could cripple . . . or be forged into a weapon. The challenge was not to live without fear, but to carry on in spite of it.
Fight and fall back!
Clare sweated and struggled as firefighters’ lines were leapt, their backfires swallowed on the long retreat into Mammoth Valley. Her hope that the Hoodoos’ bare rock would stop the North Fork proved vain, as the fire circumvented the slope on the downhill side. By afternoon, she and the others on the line had been pushed below the last highway curve above town. In the hellish half-light, Jupiter Terrace’s glistening surface had taken on the hue of fresh blood.
As the battle was joined, Clare manned a drip torch, side-hilling it below the upper terrace of the hot springs. “This one will do it,” she said grimly. She kept moving ahead of the brisk crackle and heat. Burning sage was supposed to be a sacred Native American purifying rite and she hoped Mammoth would emerge unscathed from this day.
When she reached the road, the entire hillside above her was ablaze with only a three hundred yard gap to the main body of the North Fork. “Burn, baby, burn,” she entreated the backfire. The more thoroughly it consumed the vegetation before the main fire arrived, the more effective the firebreak.
Clare turned away and trotted down the shoulder of the highway. A short way down the hill, she saw Steve in his Park Service truck. He waved and pulled into the parking lot above the stables.