The McRae Fire grows increasingly ravenous, many times hungrier than any since Dixie.
If the wind pulled it to the east, the blaze might die at the scar of the Moonlight Fire. To the west, the Dixie scar would stop it. But in the space between, its appetite swells.
Feed me, it seems to scream.
At the edge of the fire, a bank of flames slams against a boulder, but its maw stretches wide. The wind pushes it toward dry and rotting timber, and it chews through trees a hundred feet high as if they were matchsticks. The wind pulls it along an open field of grass. Flames sheet across the ground like rushing water.
The fire spans a thousand acres. Completely uncontained.
Many trees, long threatened by drought, don’t produce sap, but inside the ones that do, the sap boils. In spots, the fire nears a lung-blistering three thousand degrees. A fire tornado whirls, sending a column of flames hundreds of feet into the sky. Winds exceed a hundred miles an hour. They uproot trees and scatter bits of bark, starting new spot fires.
One of the spot fires cuts off a section of Highway 89—the highway leading away from Ridgepoint Ranch. Before the residents can be ordered to evacuate, it is already too late.
Near the blaze’s perimeter, timber barons create their own fire breaks. It will be fruitless. Billions in timber will be lost, though firefighters will save the nearby town.
Residents in more remote areas won’t be as lucky. Especially those who choose to stay behind.
One man, realizing he’s trapped, seeks refuge in a spot already burned by this fire. He believes he will be safe there. But the man sinks into an ash pit, and his skin blisters to his knees.
A mile away, a daughter and her elderly mother trying to save their house with a garden hose jump into their pool to avoid quick-moving flames. They huddle together, but falling debris burns them both.
And to the south, a young woman’s eyes sting with smoke.
She claws at the straps on her hands and feet, but two days without food and not enough water has weakened her, and the duct tape might as well be concrete. When she cries, she is too dehydrated to produce tears. When she screams, the tape stifles it, and the fire screams louder.
The fire doesn’t care that it isn’t her choice to stay. It cares only that the structure is made of old wood and that it stands near a forest dense with dying trees.
Like it has for the others, the fire will come for Ellie Byrd too.