The Wildfire Season Read online

  A funny idea introduces itself. He will put the first bullet through the girl’s skull. That way, Miles will feel her drop from his arms before he turns to recognize what has happened.

  Wade can hear the fire now, like a hundred sets of novelty dentures clacking in the grass. He doesn’t turn to see how close it is. Pulls the site away from his eye long enough to slide a cartridge into the chamber. Aims for real this time.

  When he finds them again they have progressed only another dozen feet up the slope, but the creek has led them to the left. Soon they will be halfhidden in the birches. Still good targets. But he can’t afford to miss. He picked up five cartridges on the slide. It allows for only one mistake. And he’d really like to get all of them.

  He holds the crosshairs square on the girl’s crown. She’s bald where it looks like the fire got her. The darkened skin makes it easier to hold his line.

  The trigger is the gun’s only metal that is cool to the touch.

  Even as he slips his finger around its curve, a wave of smoke breaks through the trees. Rolls over the creek and whitens like froth against the hillside. Wade knows better than to lower the site. He waits for the smoke to clear. A small adjustment will bring them back.

  But the gust that brought the smoke dies, leaving a bank of grey between them. Wade slides to the left and spots them again. Already in the birches. A snatch of swinging arm. A torn pant leg.

  He lowers the rifle. Considers swearing, but none of the most common choices seem right.

  He’s more excited than disappointed, anyway. A three-minute jog farther along the creekside and he will be able to tap their shoulders first before separating them from their heads. It will be worth the trouble getting there just to see it with his own eyes.

  She is all the way down to the creek’s edge before she realizes they are coming to her. The human scents reach the she-grizzly on the same wind that pulls smoke up and over the St Cyrs. It limits her sight to thirty feet in any direction. Not that this troubles her. She won’t need to see them.

  The bear makes her way into a stand of birches. If they keep to the bank, they will pass within three strides of her. She settles into the quack grass and waits.

  They make their way along the creek they can’t hear anymore. For a time, the noise it made was a constant shattering of glass. Now the flames’ hisses and cracks stand alone. They look down at the water every few steps to make sure it’s still there.

  Miles at the head of the line, the girl in his arms. He doesn’t want to lose Mungo and Alex in the growing smoke, but they will have to move faster if they have any chance of making it to the ridge before the heat steals their air. His compromise is to make them chase him.

  The tall grass mixes with willow saplings that bend against their legs. Off to the side, the bush cuts in close to the creek, so that the space they keep to now is narrowed to the width of a single lane. Up ahead, the creek turns away into thicker stuff. They will have to keep going straight after that without any guidance but the steepening slope.

  They are startled by movement next to them. Something heavy enough that they can read its footfall through their boots.

  ‘Bitchpricks,’ Mungo says, spinning around.

  ‘Don’t run. Not until we’re sure it sees us.’

  Even as Miles speaks there is movement again from the bush. Closer than any of them would have guessed the first time. The dull thud of weight on the same roots the three of them stand on. They wait for the animal’s grunt. But there’s nothing but the stilled green all around them.

  If they are to continue on their present upward route, they will have to pass just to the right of the sound’s source. Miles waves them on. But when he steps forward, Alex stays back with Mungo, the two of them paralyzed.

  ‘I’ve heard about you, big lady,’ Miles is saying, under his breath at first so that only Rachel and whatever waits in the shadowed layers can hear. Slowly, his voice grows louder. Speaking like a fool into the forest as he passes, though the forest quiets to listen nevertheless. ‘Seems you’ve had a bad couple of days. It’s a shame, it really is. But we’ve got nothing to do with any of that. We don’t have a gun. See? No hunters here. Just fire walkers. Like you.’

  A kicked stone off to their left brings their eyes to a new shape standing outlined against the greater darkness behind it. Human but only in that it may have been so once. Its body so humpbacked and soiled it could only be a replica of a living thing, a sewn-together collection of graverobbed limbs. Staring at Miles and coughing dirt past its lips.

  ‘Hel-lo,’ it says.

  Wade’s voice, but also not Wade’s. Then Miles notices the rifle. Jostling around but pointed at his chest more than not.

  ‘You found us,’ Miles says.

  ‘I tracked you.’

  ‘Well, you’re out now. You’re okay.’

  ‘Okay?’

  ‘You can put it down.’

  Wade follows Miles’s eyes and finds the gun held in his own hands. When he looks up again, his face is a mask of stagy innocence. A You-meanthis—little-thing? pout.

  ‘I don’t think I will,’ he says, and firms his cupped grip under the barrel. Holds it steady on Miles.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Wait and see.’

  ‘Whatever you’re thinking, you don’t have to do it.’

  ‘No. But I want to.’

  Wade’s arm snugs around the rifle’s butt. Although his target stands no more than fifteen feet away, he puts his cheek deliberately to the metal. One eye shut, the other peering down the scope into the valleys and ridgelines of Miles’s scars.

  Miles takes a step toward him before he remembers he carries Rachel in his arms.

  There is a pause that all of them understand the same way. Wade isn’t hesitating, but savouring the moment of being taken seriously.

  Miles turns and crouches at the same time, shielding Rachel with his back. It’s only after he’s closed his eyes that Miles sees Wade’s lips trembling into a smile.

  There’s a clink. A suck of air.

  Something hard hits the top of Miles’s left shoulder and burns through to the other side. As it passes it rings against bone. The same sound that reaches through the windows of his cabin from the softball diamond when the heaviest hitters catch one full with the aluminum bat.

  He flies. So does the girl. Sprung from his arms, her limbs powerless to find a way to break her fall.

  He is spinning around to push himself up before the girl even begins her rolling disappearance into the long grass. Throws himself at where he thinks Wade was standing a second ago. Arms windmilling.

  ‘Stop!’

  He hears Alex’s shout over the buzzing in his ears as though from a great distance. At first, he interprets the word as the announcement of a broad concept, something requiring further explanation. Its implications spool out over the surface of his thoughts: Everything is about to stop. Must be stopped. They have been coming to a stop forever.

  As he finds his feet under him, she shouts it again. This time, Miles hears its intended simplicity. What she wants him to see is Wade holding the girl by the collar of her shirt. His other hand tapping the end of the barrel against the side of her head.

  ‘Stop!’

  Miles falls to his knees.

  ‘He hit you,’ Mungo says from somewhere behind him, and Miles looks down at where the bullet took away a piece of his shoulder.

  ‘How’s that feel?’ Wade asks.

  ‘Like nothing,’ Miles says, and it’s true.

  ‘No? How about this?’

  Rachel is too close to Wade’s legs for him to fire down at her, so he pushes her ahead of him. Returns both hands to aiming at her crawling form. The end of the gun searching the length of her spine.

  ‘Not her,’ Miles says.

  ‘You know, I’m not such a great shot. I admit it. But I don’t think I’m going to miss this one here.’

  ‘Wade—’

  ‘Everybody got their ey
es on the birdie? Good. Now watch.’

  Miles comes at him in a hopeless run, all waving arms and twisted knees. There is too much ground between them for anything Miles does now to make a difference. Yet the fact that he stays on his feet, tripping forward, forces Wade to swing the bore around at him. He watches Miles loom and blur through the rifle’s telescope as his hand pulls back the bolt.

  Miles hits him with his bad shoulder first, but feels only a soft displacement, something come to rest where it shouldn’t be. The contact is barely enough to test Wade’s balance. Yet Miles clings to him, his boots dragged over the stones as Wade tries to step away. The two men hold each other without foot or fist coming free to land a blow, and for a second, the rifle is hugged between them, unwanted. Pointing at the ground. Under their chins.

  The barrel tangles between their legs until Wade falls back. When he lands, the earth knocks out a sour breath that Miles, now lying on top of him, tastes against his tongue. When he puts his hands onto Wade’s chest to push himself up, they come away sticky.

  Miles gets to his feet and, at first, thinks he has left his right arm behind on the ground. Yet he feels something where it used to be—an unsustainable pressure, the filling of a thin-skinned balloon—that isn’t at all right. It reminds him of the rifle.

  He bends to pick it up and beats Wade’s grasping fingers to the stock. Knocks him back with a dunt to the side of his head.

  Miles looks back over the widening cleave in his shoulder and sees Mungo lifting Rachel from where she landed. The girl’s eyes batting open, pulling him into focus.

  ‘Keep going,’ Miles says.

  Yet all of them stay where they are for a moment. A calculation based less on whether what they are doing is right than on whether they can do it at all.

  ‘You have to,’ he says to Mungo alone this time.

  With an ache that has nothing to do with his shoulder he watches Mungo start away with the girl in his arms. Her bald head cradled in Mungo’s palm and the rest of her hanging loose, not much bigger than the doll he had discovered in the ash at the edge of town.

  Alex follows with her head turned back at Miles. He watches her face shrink, grow vague. It takes less than a minute for the smoke to swallow them all.

  Once they’re gone, the weight of the rifle quadruples in Miles’s hands. All around, the skins of the birch trees curl up like pencil shavings.

  ‘What now, gorgeous?’ Wade says.

  Miles looks down at him and sees a distorted version of himself. It’s not a resemblance but a recognition of some fundamental kinship that has been there all along. Wade Fuerst could be his brother. Or closer than that. A Siamese twin cut free.

  ‘If I gave you this gun back, what would you do with it?’

  ‘I’d shoot you in the face.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then I’d do the same for your sweetie pies and Tonto up there.’

  ‘And if I kept it and just walked away?’

  ‘I’d get it back.’

  ‘I believe you.’

  ‘You should.’

  Miles watches the first embers skipping over the creek a hundred yards down. He thought the narrow breadth of water might slow it down for a minute or two. Now he can see it would take him longer to jump over than even the slowest pitching flame.

  ‘If we stay here we’re both going to burn,’ Miles says.

  ‘You think I give a fuck?’

  ‘I guess not.’

  ‘That’s right. You know why? I’m already dead. I’m a goddamn zombie. I just keep coming and coming.’

  ‘I can’t let you do that.’

  Miles knocks the end of the Winchester against Wade’s forehead. His eyes cross. Squints the rifle’s black mouth into focus.

  ‘I’m not scared,’ Wade says.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘You would be, though. If this was you.’

  ‘You’re right. I would be,’ Miles says, and slips the bore past the kneeling man’s lips. ‘But I’m not the one who’s already dead.’

  The shot is close but the bear stays where she is. Even through the smoke, human scents are all around her. Some heading higher up. Some staying behind.

  It’s the smell that finally forces her to move. The sharp discharge of powder. Opened skin. Coming from down the creek, she knows. But as she pounds into the cover of trees, she feels it lifting up around her, as though exhaled from the earth itself.

  Miles watches Wade’s face spray out the back of his head. He hears the crack of the rifle only after he sees what it does. Wade leans forward, headless, as though trying to find what he’d lost in the grass at his knees.

  Miles stumbles back to the creek’s edge. When Wade finally collapses onto his side, his body is suddenly too close. It forces Miles to shuffle sideways until he has the room to turn his back on Wade.

  When he looks up the slope he’s glad that he can’t see them. The fire is already circling around on its way up the last of the St Cyrs, but maybe enough time has passed for Mungo, Alex and the girl to have made it beyond its grasp. He feels the force of the rifle’s concussion in his legs. A gelatinous tremor he can’t think his way out of. He realizes he’d dropped the Winchester immediately after firing it.

  He tries at a run and finds it easier than walking. An effort not to put what he’d done behind him but to see if he can catch them before he falls.

  She heard the bullet that hit Miles. A cottony thud like a punched pillow next to her ear. Then Mungo picked her up and she heard the other. But it isn’t the gun that opens the girl’s eyes now. It’s what she knows is going to happen next.

  Rachel can sense it coming closer without seeing it. Like her dreams of falling in dark water, she was born with a knowledge of the bear. The weight of the fat it carries. The pigeon-toed feet. Along with Mr Raven, the sow is a character in a play she has anticipated before ever coming to this place. The farther north her mother took her each summer, the more specific shape the drama took. By the time they arrived in Ross River it was only a matter of waiting for the opening scene. Miles. The burned man. She had seen him in her sleep too. And not the smooth-faced photo her mother had shown her, but after his fire. A sad monster.

  ‘Shush now,’ Mungo soothes the girl.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Alex asks, coming up alongside him.

  ‘She’s just being squirmy.’

  For a second, both of them watch the chase going on behind the girl’s eyelids. It allows them to look at something aside from each other while they catch their breath. To not have to mention the sound of the shot.

  They continue on side by side for another minute before they stop to look back for Miles. And he’s there, hobbling through a patch of beardtongue. When he is close, he stops and looks up the slope.

  At first, Alex thinks he doesn’t meet her eyes because of what he’s done. But it’s something behind her he has settled on.

  Alex turns in time to see the grizzly squeezing out from a tight stand of jackpole pines and onto the trail. She makes a quick guess at how far ahead it is. Fifty feet. Close enough that she can see the sow breathing through her open mouth, the gums smooth and shining as enamel. The bear swivels its head from side to side with surprising fluidity. As it moves, Alex sees that her eyes are brown, and not the unreadable black she had assumed. There is as much life in them as in her own.

  ‘Back up.’

  She hears Miles through what could be tin cans connected with string.

  ‘Get off the trail. Don’t run when you do it. Climb the first tree that can take your weight. Do it now.’

  When Mungo starts, the bear stops swaying its head and stares at him. Takes a step forward. The mouth closes and opens again, closes and opens. Clacking her teeth in warning.

  ‘She’s not going to let me.’

  ‘Don’t look at her. Alex, you too.’

  But Alex can’t stop looking at the bear. There is an expectation that the animal is about to reveal its true opinions of them
. No matter how terrible the performance of her hate—if hate is what has brought her here at all—Alex feels an undeniable privilege at being a witness to it.

  There is this transfixing curiosity, but ultimately what prevents Alex from attempting escape is the immensity of the animal’s need. She watches it breathe, the smoke rattling deep inside it, and knows it is alive for a single reason. They are equal in this respect, if none other. Alex would have quit long ago—searching for Miles, running from the fire, holding back the tickling urge to scream—if it weren’t for a prevailing imperative to hang on to. We survive not for ourselves, but for others. And now she watches the bear and tries to read its justification for coming as far as it has.

  ‘Momma?’

  Alex sees the child clinging to Mungo’s neck. Eyes darker than the bear’s, fighting not to let her mother blur away.

  ‘It’s all right, honey.’

  ‘Momma?’

  ‘Mungo’s got you. You hang on to him tight, okay? I’m going to be right over here,’ Alex says, stepping off the trail as she speaks.

  The animal watches the three of them retreat with an almost detached interest. Although Miles still stands on the trail, it appears not to notice him. Instead, it watches Mungo fight for a grip on the lower branches of a spruce, one hand snapping around above him and the other propped under Rachel. There are a number of boughs sturdy enough to support their weight, but dozens of smaller twigs form a barrier around the trunk, pushing down on Mungo’s head each time he tries to jump up. The bear studies their efforts. Panting, teeth bared.

  ‘Hey there, big lady!’ Miles addresses it, trying to turn its attention away from Mungo and Alex, who is now scraping the bark off the aspen she hugs.

  His voice draws no more than a glance from the bear. It returns its attention to Alex. Miles realizes that, as he was speaking to it, he’d been looking into its eyes. It has prevented him from noticing that the bear is on the move. Dragging its claws over the settled ash.

  ‘Now, Alex.’

  The bear charges as Alex’s feet leave the ground. Its weight pounds the earth so that a low drumroll pushes out through the porous wall of trees. Every time its front paws meet the earth, it whoofs.