Bronx (Western Smokejumpers #1) - Tess Oliver Page 0,3

I let the heavy pack slide off my shoulders. It landed with a thud, kicking up a fair amount of gritty dust. I could still taste the faint remnants of smoke in my charred throat. My shirt was plastered to my back with sweat. The faint breeze blew against my wet skin giving me a moment of relief from the brutal heat.

King trudged over with his pack and let out a loud groan as the heavy load fell off his shoulders. The sound sent several birds skittering from a nearby Manzanita shrub. He plopped down next to me and stretched out his legs. I followed. My legs felt like wet noodles, ready for a rest and ready to be off this damn mountainside. Like every other inch of us, our boots were caked with ashes and dirt.

Mixx pulled out his satellite phone for another text. "Yeah, we've got time, so we might as well rehydrate. I've still got trail mix in my pack if anyone needs some food energy."

King shifted his eyes my direction for a second. "He's like the world's most peppy camp counselor. How does he still have energy? I feel like I've got a pile of bricks connected to each ankle."

"Maybe it's all that trail mix," I muttered.

He elbowed me. "So are you going to the one year memorial?"

I leaned a little away from him, one, to show him I was annoyed and two, because he was beginning to reek like something that got dragged out of a swamp. "Why the hell wouldn't I go?" My tone could not have been interpreted as anything but pissed.

"Jeez, don't get yourself in a twist. It's a perfectly legitimate question. We all know that you and Bulldozer had—had differences. Or maybe you forgot the fist fight that left both of you with black eyes and you with three broken ribs."

"That was—just an off day." I thought about the day when Bulldozer and I came to blows. I hadn't seen it coming and I wasn't entirely sure I'd deserved it. Or maybe I had. He outweighed me by fifty pounds and had been a boxing champion in high school so I was on the losing end. He could be such an asshole. He had been a damn good firefighter and I trusted him as a teammate, but it didn't erase the fact that he was an asshole. "He treated Layla like shit, and it really tore me up. If I had a—"

King smiled. His skin was so dark from the ashes and dirt, his teeth looked neon white. "Ah ha, go ahead, buddy, spit it out."

"Forget it. Just forget it. I'm going to the memorial. Bulldozer, for all his faults, he was one of us. It hasn't been the same without him, and that day on the East Fork fire—fuck, none of us will ever forget it."

King kicked absently at some loose dirt. "Yeah, worst day of our careers."

I was relieved we'd dropped the subject of my contentious relationship with Adam Rafferty, or, Bulldozer, as we'd always called him. The guy could bulldoze through a cluster of burning trees, swinging his Pulsaki like fucking Paul Bunyan.

The topic had conjured up other memories, including one in particular. One I needed to get out of my head. "Hey, do you remember Millie Price? Robbie's mom?"

King chuckled. "Look who's bringing up our childhood. Sure I do. Poor thing was always late bringing Robbie to school. She'd be dragging him along, spitting on her finger and trying to tame down that spike of hair on the back of his head as she hurried him to class. What the heck brought her to mind?"

I shook my head as if it had just been random. Only it wasn't. "You know how those really shitty days stay with you, crystal clear, like the day Bulldozer died? Well, the opposite is true, you know?"

"Not following you but then I'm grumpy and dehydrated according to my crew mates."

I ignored the mix of sarcasm and self-deprecation and continued. "Admittedly, perfect moments are rare, but I can always recall, with detail, no matter how short the duration, whenever everything seemed amazingly right. Millie Price was part of one of those memories. It was one of those extra cold days in Westridge."

King scoffed. "When wasn't it extra cold?"

"Yeah, well this was the day of the fifth grade track meet, and even though the thermometer was dipping down to zero, the teachers decided not to cancel. I had those shitty secondhand running shoes. My