Flames skittered around her car, igniting the woods on the lakeside.
“Back up! Back to the house!”
Ivy seemed to have no problem ordering her around, but Claire wasn’t arguing. She put the car in reverse, then whipped around and gunned the Yaris forward, through the war zone. Flames loomed up and around them, grabbing at the car. The clearing smoked over.
“I think we’re trapped!”
“Just keep driving!”
Claire broke free of the forest, a ball of hades behind her.
Ivy had her hands braced on the roof. “Is there any other way out of here?”
“There’s a trail up by the pasture to Pine Acres—”
“Let’s go.”
She floored it up the dirt trail toward the pasture, the air now swirling with embers.
And that’s when she saw it—a plume of fire over the pasture, growing, a mushroom cloud of flame.
“The pasture’s on fire!” Claire said. “We’re trapped!”
She sent the car into reverse again, turned around on two wheels, back into the forest.
Another tree fell, this one cutting off their access to the house.
Claire tasted the old panic, rising up, choking off her breathing, her thoughts. She couldn’t move.
Except, no. She wasn’t staying put. Not this time. “We have to get out!” she yelled. “C’mon!”
But Ivy wasn’t moving. She shook her head, her eyes wide, suddenly frozen. It was only then that Claire noticed her clutching a tiny, worn stuffed tiger.
“C’mon, Ivy. You can do this.” She grabbed Ivy’s hand. “We have to go—now.”
“Sheesh, Jens, did you call the entire county?”
Darek held a shovel, wore a five-gallon jug of water on his back, stomping out creepers that threatened to jump the fire line and ignite the grasses of the pasture.
Beside him, Jensen had changed into fire-retardant clothing, a pair of sturdy boots, a red helmet, and goggles, a bandanna pulled up over his nose. He was choking off a handful of sparks, his spade grinding them into the dirt. “I called Marnie in dispatch, and yes, she called the county EMS. You said help, right?”
“It’s a regular convention out here.” Three local fire departments had shown up, as well as the Jude County Hotshots, who’d arrived shortly after Jensen hauled off in his four-wheeler. They’d taken the road to Evergreen just ahead of the blaze and tried to reinforce the road between Gibs’s place and the pasture.
Hopefully any fire would stop before it destroyed the Gibson homestead.
Darek didn’t even want to think about the cabins at Evergreen Resort.
Jensen had also returned with three more dozers, compliments of local septic and landscaping contractors. They’d unloaded the machines and tripled their efforts, crawling all the way to Thompson Lake as if they were out for a stroll.
Teams along the line lit the back blaze with their drip torches, chewing up the fuel for the conflagration headed their way.
Now the fire plumed in front of them, burning away at the lush forest, cinders falling like ticker tape from the sky. Air tankers dropped orange slurry, hoping to slow the fire as it advanced. They just had to keep their blaze from rushing back across the swath of dirt until it met the main front of the fire head-on.
While the dozers cut line, Jensen had taken his sprinkler system and rerouted part of it from Pine Acres, dragging hose through the woods until it reached the pasture. He had water shooting full out into the pasture, wetting it down, the pump back at Pine Acres dredging water from the lake.
Overhead, the sky had turned black, ash dripping like snow.
Jensen caught another hot spot, stamping on it. Down the line, Darek saw a crew of Jed’s team sawing down a tree burning midway to the top.
“Dare, look out!”
A snag, one of the dangers of deadfall—dead trees still standing—had lit on fire and now came toppling from the heavens over the fire line, into the green.
Jensen grabbed his arm, yanked him away as the oak crashed, sparks flying. One of the hotshots turned his hose on it while another attacked it with the saw.
“Thanks,” Darek said.
He saw Jensen smile even through the bandanna.
Yeah, this felt good to him, too.
“We should head over to Gibs’s place, see if we can’t get the hoses out, wet the roof down.”
Jensen nodded.
They started off in a jog down the road.
The fire had plumed as they fought the winds. Darek saw it torching trees near the lake and picked up speed. “Uh-oh, it looks like it jumped the line—”
They rounded the edge of the pasture and cut into the forest toward the homestead. He could feel the heat, see embers swirling in the supercharged air. Ahead of him, in the middle of the road, a car burned, flames licking out of the windows, the acrid odor of burning plastic saturating the air.