up so I could watch Robby through the smoke. As soon as they got him secured up top, they could throw the rope down to me. Climbing this would be easy. I did shit like this all the time.
Not usually with a raging forest fire at my back, but hey, I loved new experiences.
The fire whispered behind me, the voice promising death. It would burn me to ash, reduce me to nothing. Wipe me from the face of the earth.
It was getting hotter, wasn’t it?
Slowly, I looked back over my shoulder, then radioed Levi.
“Bro, when did you say that helitack crew would get here?”
“They’re less than ten minutes out.”
Well that sucked. Because that was more time than I had to spare.
2
Gavin
“Gavin, get out of there,” Levi said through the radio.
My eyes darted around, looking for an escape route. “No shit, bro. I’m working on it. Anyone else got a rope up there?”
“Maybe. Hold tight.”
Rope wasn’t standard gear for us or for wildland crews. It was a me-thing to carry rope—and a fucking good thing for Robby. But it was taking too long to get him to the top. I didn’t have time to wait down here.
This was a seriously shitty place to be. If I went left or right, along the wall, I’d get cooked before I found an escape route. That meant there was nowhere to go but up.
A nice metaphor. It wasn’t going to get any worse.
I could live with that.
Time to climb.
Finding grips in the rock, I started to scale. I just had to make it to the edge, where it went from sheer cliff to steep hill. Once I got that far, I’d be able to scramble up, more or less on my feet. Or maybe by then Robby would be at the top and they could toss me the rope.
In the meantime, all those rock-climbing hours were sure coming in handy.
“Gavin, check in,” Chief said. “They’re moving everyone off the fireline.”
Wedging my boots into the rock, I made sure I could let go with one hand, then answered. “I’m climbing up. Did they get Robby out yet?”
A gust of wind, hot enough to sear my arm hair, buffeted me.
That wasn’t good.
“He’s fine. But Gav, we’ve got all the makings of a firestorm right where you are.”
I reached up, feeling around for another handhold. Dug my fingers in, pressing them as if I could indent the rock itself to give me just a little more purchase, and pushed upward with my feet.
Inches. I was moving inches.
And I was out of time.
I was going to get cooked against this rock like a virgin sacrifice to an ancient fire-breathing dragon.
Yeah, there was no way I was going out like that.
Reaching for my radio one last time, I called Chief. “Jumping back down. Deploying fire shelter. Come get me when it’s over, Chief.”
I didn’t have time to wait for his reply. For the second time today, I jumped off the side of a cliff.
I rolled into the fall. The last thing I needed to do was break a leg trying to stick the landing. I launched to my feet and ran to where I’d left my pack.
Another blast of hot air hit me and for a second, I thought it might be too late. Voices talked to me over the radio, but I didn’t have time to stop and answer. In about thirty seconds, fire was going to engulf the valley, eating up everything in its path. If we’d done enough at the top, it would stop there. The crew and the houses beyond would be safe.
As for me, that was a little less certain.
I ripped the fire shelter out of my pack and grabbed the handles. Turned my back on the fire and shook it out. The fabric shelter was a bit like a six-foot long silver Twinkie. I guess that made me the cream filling. Probably a bad metaphor, and I didn’t know why I was thinking about junk food right now.
The hot wind made deploying the shelter a huge pain in the ass. But I’d practiced this dozens of times with leaf blowers aimed at me to simulate these conditions.
Time seemed to slow. The twenty seconds it took me to deploy the shelter and take cover felt like minutes. I stepped into the footwell, put my body through the rectangular hole in the shelter’s floor, and covered myself. Then I hit the dirt, face down, with the shelter around me. I pinned it to the relatively