“THE POOL!” CAPTAIN Marc Fontaine shouted. He jabbed his gloved index finger toward it, underscoring his point.
His crew understood his meaning, and responded with a minimum of delay. Chris, Jackie, Alonso, Cherie, and Vaughn—the Engine 42 crew—were professionals through and through, and watching them work always swelled his chest a little. Pride was supposed to be one of the deadly sins? He didn’t go along with that. Pride was what got a day’s work done, and when lives and property were on the line, there was not a thing wrong with it.
Cherie and Chris hauled the portable pump from the truck through the pool gate. The pump weighed almost two hundred pounds, and its twin-cylinder, 27-horsepower engine would push out 550 gallons a minute. The others were already laying hose, so it would be in place as soon as the engine cranked up.
The early autumn day had been hot, topping the 112 mark down in the city, Fontaine had heard. All that concrete and steel trapped the heat, radiating it out through the day and into the night and driving the readings up. Even here on Mt. Charleston, temperatures had reached the low nineties. The last rain had been more than a month ago, when summer’s monsoon storms gave up the fight. And it had been a good year for the monsoon, which meant lots of fresh growth that had spent the last several weeks drying out. Optimal conditions for a big blaze, and now they had one. Thick, bitter smoke clogged the air.
There were eight other engines scattered throughout the mountain neighborhoods, and helicopters chattering overhead. Fontaine’s crew would make its stand on a cul-de-sac, surrounded by expensive homes. Those homes didn’t have big backyards, because they were on a ridge, and on three sides the drop-off was sudden, the ground falling away into pine-blanketed canyons. So far the fire was concentrated to the west, and their mission was to keep it there.
Fontaine wanted to light a backfire here, to deprive the main fire of fuel so it wouldn’t run up the canyon, wouldn’t jump to these houses. But between the time he had been assigned the task and when the truck had reached its destination—slowed in its progress by fallen trees and by the vehicles of the few residents who had been slow in obeying the evacuation order—the fire had already started up that flank. A backfire was out of the question now; they needed to focus on defending homes.
As long as it stayed to the west, they could handle it. If it ran around the northern rim and came at them from two sides, or three?
Then it would be time to retreat. And fast.
Trouble with a cul-de-sac was, there was only one way out.
Fontaine had been a wildland firefighter for most of the last two decades. He had seen it all; had seen the changes in the way people thought about fire, the way crews attacked it. He’d survived being trapped for three days in the midst of one of the west’s biggest conflagrations, armed only with his Pulaski tool and pure dumb luck. He had seen more and more houses, even huge overpriced McMansions, raised in places like this: the wildland-urban interface. People built first, and only afterward thought about what they would do in the event of a fire. Most of them, if asked, would have said, “Let the fire department put it out.” Words to that effect, anyway. Some swore they would defend their property with garden hoses.
Standard garden hoses, they would find, only moved about four to seven gallons a minute. And they melted. It didn’t take long for even the most courageous of them to realize they had made a big mistake.
Fontaine had a house on the mountain, too, where he lived with his wife, Marla. But he kept his property clean and safe, surrounded by a hundred feet of defensible space, mostly bare earth and a few scattered, heavily watered plants. He had visited this neighborhood at least a dozen times, trying to persuade the owners of the danger, of the need for reasonable precautions. So many of them didn’t want to spoil the view, they said. They had moved up here to be among the trees. That was fine, Fontaine thought, as long as you made sure those trees didn’t ignite your shake roof.
There was a certain beauty to fire in wild places. Fontaine had watched it from a hillside during the night, in the brief time between when he had knocked off for the day and the few hours he’d slumbered uneasily under a tarp. Darkness consumed the mountain, as usual, but in that darkness were scattered pools of yellow-red flame throwing off silver smoke. From a distance, he could almost view them as Japanese lanterns shining through a dense fog, except he knew what they were doing to the forest and what they threatened to do to those who lived there.
But that was last night. Now, above the racket of the helicopters and the fire’s own crackle and roar, Fontaine heard the rumble of the pump, the shouts of his crew. He allowed himself a smile. The fire was moving up the western slope, but it wasn’t a crown fire. Not yet. It was moving at ground level, and that slowed it down a bit. They had made it here in time.
He was more intimate with fire than with any human being, with the possible exception of Marla. He had lived with it for thirty years, and with Marla for only twenty-four. He had refused to have children with her, because life with fire had taught him that death waited behind every closed door, on the far side of every wall. The only thing predictable about fire was its willfulness, its ability to thwart expectation.
You couldn’t trust fire, and that was a larger life lesson he had taken to heart. He trusted Marla, and not a hell of a lot else.
It was instinct, he supposed, that told him when the prevailing breeze shifted. He couldn’t feel the slight change in its direction, not in his bulky gear, with the fire below generating its own wind. But he knew it, just the same. The change wasn’t dramatic, but it was enough. Vaughn shouted, and Fontaine saw a firebrand wafting past a house: a small section of shrub, flames tonguing the air around it, trailing sparks, brilliant reds and yellows against the smoky gray sky.
It came from the north.
Fontaine ran that way. The fire wasn’t supposed to be there yet. They were supposed to stop it before it got there. That was the plan.
Subject to change.
Fire created its own air currents. A big fire generated powerful ones. This one had blown sparks, firebrands, or both, around the northern point while they had been en route, or while they’d been standing here preparing to attack the west. From the north, it had continued moving east.
Fontaine stood at the point—he was an island, and fire was the sea.
“Get out!” he screamed into the radio. “We’re surrounded! Go! Go!”
His crew reacted at once, wasting not a second, not a breath.
They dropped hoses, scrambled for the truck. Alonso was at the driver’s door when the fire hit, a wave of it, engulfing them. Fontaine could hear his anguished cry, though his earpiece and through the air. He was that close.
He lived just long enough to shed a tear for his crew members. That single tear sizzled, boiled, burned.
Marc Fontaine never felt it.