Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [84]
It seemed to take a long time for help to arrive from the Storm Creek Camp, even though it was only about five miles as the crow flies. After their initial reactions to identifying Billy, most of the soldiers sat silently on the clean sides of shelters spread on the ground. Their shoulders slumped with exhaustion.
Steve sat beside Clare, looking lost in his own thoughts. Periodically, he cleared his throat and spat mucus into the ash. She did the same at intervals, aware of her raw throat.
The dead man lay at a little distance. No one looked in that direction.
Clare did not need her eyes to see a vivid picture of the face death wore today. Before entering the fire department, the only corpses she had seen were the pale products of an undertaker’s art. Masquerading as sleep, death wore pancake makeup.
In the field, it was different. A heart arrested and a woman toppled off the toilet. A middle-aged man died during sex and lay in an awkward sprawl, the sheets soiled with his bowel’s release. Billy Jakes’s humanity was lost along with his skin. The sour cooked smell and stink of singed hair clung cloying in Clare’s nostrils.
About thirty minutes after she’d radioed, headlights approached in the gathering dusk. How fortunate that the burned trees were mostly standing, or the vehicles would not have been able to drive in on the dirt track.
Without waiting for orders from Travis, the soldiers got to their feet and climbed wearily into the back of the Army transport. Travis waited with Clare and Steve while the ambulance attendants made a perfunctory check for a pulse. The senior man shook his head and his assistant brought out the body bag.
When they lifted Billy into it, Clare caught the malevolent flash of blame in Sergeant Travis’s eyes.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
September 4
Good lord, what happened to you?” A powerful-looking woman in a Prescott Arizona Hotshots cap looked at Clare from the next sink. They were alone in the women’s shower trailer at the Storm Creek Camp.
“Setting backfire on the Hellroaring.” Clare’s boots sat side by side on a bench, along with a fresh set of Nomex. She stripped off her stained shirt and trousers and dumped them on the floor. The once-polished stainless mirror gave a blurred suggestion of her blackened face with bloodshot eyes.
Clare suspected that the woman had not asked about her merely because her clothes and skin were filthy, but because of her strained white look beneath the soot. The set of her mouth said she was at the limit of endurance.
“Rose Chee,” her companion offered.
“Clare Chance.” Because Rose had a kind face, she confessed, “Around six it blew up and we went into shelters.”
“Everybody make it?”
Clare swallowed around a hard lump.
Rose waited. From the pocket of her fire trousers, she produced a gold tube, twisted it with an adept hand and applied a coat of crimson lipstick. She pressed her wide lips to even the color.
Clare met her serious dark eyes. “We lost a young infantryman out of Fort Lewis. They were just in and I was training them.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah.”
Pulling a stack of the paper towels offered for drying, Clare headed to a shower stall and pulled the white plastic curtain behind her. She dropped her charcoal-mottled turquoise brassiere and underpants into the trashcan on the rubber mat. As she reached for the taps, the tears came.
With them surged the memory of harsh questioning after Frank’s death. Hadn’t she known they should retreat from beneath the burning overhead? Had she given Frank any signal to back off? Had he, in turn, tried to go back and found her blocking his way? How was it possible that the roof had come down without warning, as she suggested?
She imagined the combined firepower of the National Park Service and the Army descending on her. Did not Sergeant Travis express concern at the safety in the area, long before the actual emergency? Hadn’t she taken it upon herself to delay a judgment call until it was too late?
For God’s sake, the Hellroaring