Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [27]
The day wasn’t half over.
After choking back a pair of dry bologna sandwiches, she leaned against a tree trunk and closed her eyes. Against the shifting sparks that decorated the backs of her eyelids, she saw Deering again, smiling at her with teeth that shone white against his skin.
But thinking of last night opened a darker dimension. When she had first seen Steve Haywood, she’d had a distinctly different impression of the park biologist. Going back into the lake after he’d fetched up on shore, he’d seemed a real trouper, not at all like the sodden wretch who had nearly fallen on the floor at the Bear Pit. Shortly after she’d been rude to him, she’d turned from her conversation with Deering to find him gone. Too late, she wished she’d done something to keep him from driving drunk.
Sitting against the tree, she found that even thinking used too much energy. It was just on the borderline between warm and hot, and rest felt so bonelessly wonderful. The sharpness of fresh-cut pine overpowered the undercurrent of smoke while insects droned around her head. Gradually, the voices of the crew muted, then fell silent . . .
She was inside an apartment complex that was burning faster than the Houston Fire Department could put it out. The wood shingle roofs were igniting from flying sparks so that the flames leaped from building to building. Sirens shrilled as more and more alarms were called.
Inside the smoky apartment hallway, Clare and Frank approached a closed door that poured smoke from around the edges. No other firefighters came from the opposite end of the building, leaving them alone to assault this cell of the larger conflagration.
“All for us,” Frank said through the mask on his air pack. She imagined the usual twinkle in his deep brown eyes.
Facing away from the door, Clare raised her leg and brought it back into a mule kick. The panel swung wide, back against the interior wall with a bang.
Light suffused the hall. Heat struck out and pounded. She crouched and turned to face the inferno. She’d been in worse situations, but couldn’t shake a bad feeling. Her rapid breathing hissed in her mask and she told herself she could stay the course.
Frank cracked the valve and sent up a power cone. Steam rose and hot water began to fall like rain, running down her helmet and into the neck of her coat. Over the fire’s roar was an overprint of snaps and pops that didn’t sound right.
She took a hand off the hose. Immediately, over a hundred pounds of pressure threatened to tear it from her remaining hand and Frank’s. Nevertheless, she clutched his arm, with the strength born of premonition. “Don’t go any farther!”
“Son of a bitch! Will you look at that?”
Clare jerked and her heart took off like a greyhound after the mechanical rabbit. She stared through open eyes at the afterimage of the flaming apartment. Gradually, she realized that she sat beneath a tree with the midday sun slanting through the branches, hoping she’d not called attention to herself.
“No shit, man,” someone replied to the request to ‘look at that.’
Clare swiveled toward the unmistakable crackling and saw what had happened. Not a hundred yards back, the North Fork had jumped the line, rendering the morning’s work useless.
CHAPTER SIX
July 27
Randolph Mason.” The Secretary of the Interior greeted Steve Haywood. Mason’s entourage had stopped this afternoon on the road from Norris Geyser Basin to Mammoth Hot Springs.
The Secretary’s handshake was firm, his presence more commanding in person than through the filter of television. He carried his tall frame elegantly, his coal black hair lending a distinguished air to his jeans and chambray shirt.
“Pleased to meet you,” Steve replied, hoping Mason didn’t catch the tremor in his hand. He had slept in his truck last night at Old Faithful, too drunk to drive.
He looked past the Secretary at fire general Garrett Anderson, moving with startling agility down the steps of the TW Services bus. The big man