Read Online Firestorm-pigeon 4 by Nevada Barr - Free Book Online Page B

she asked.

A second or two ticked by and Anna got scared something had silenced John LeFleur. "Twelve minutes," he replied.

"Bullshit. I was sixteen when I crawled into this fucking thing, now I'm seventy-four."

Again the laugh. Anna had to bite her lips to keep from telling this stranger that she loved him.

"Black Elk," LeFleur was saying, and Anna cradled the radio to her ear for comfort. "Hang in there. This is the worst of it. Don't get out. Nobody get out. It's still hotter than hell out there."

Literally, Anna thought.

"I can still see the fire through my shelter," she said, because she needed to say something.

"We still got fire," LeFleur agreed.

Anna was comforted. She lay hurting in the sand with the radio pressed close to her lips. For the next hour she and LeFleur talked, keeping their courage up, hoping Howard Black Elk still had ears to hear them with. John had seen Joseph Hayhurst and Lawrence Gonzales stumble into the gully. Paula Boggins and Neil Page had been in the wash when LeFleur arrived. He'd shown them how to deploy the shelters Page had had the sense to salvage from the supplies before they'd run from the ridge.

Anna guessed Jennifer Short had made it, she'd been ahead of Anna when she crested the ridge. Stephen Lindstrom, Leonard Nims and Hugh Pepperdine were still unaccounted for. Anna didn't ask about Newt Hamlin.

Every growl and crack of the fire was described and discussed back and forth and slowly, with the flames, the terror passed. In its wake were all the burns, twists, scrapes and bruises that Anna counted herself lucky to be able to feel.

Finally LeFleur said he was going to leave the shelter. Anna was to wait. Science fiction settled over her brain and she laughed at herself, feeling as if she waited in a sealed space capsule while the captain ventured out on an unknown planet. Laughter dried up when images of "B" movie monsters took over her mental landscape and she realized how tired and afraid she was. Close, she suspected, to hysteria. She willed herself away from that edge.

"Come on out."

Briefly, suddenly, Anna didn't want to go. All the safety she'd ever known seemed summed up in the tinfoil shelter. The emotion passed as quickly as it had come and she pushed one hand out from beneath the tent, shoving up the edge. Smoke rolled in but it was no thicker or hotter than that inside. It took all of her strength to push herself to her knees, her house crumpling down over her back.

Then the foil was being lifted away. Again fear pierced deep: the fire was back, ripping at her safety, her flesh. But it was John LeFleur peeling the shelter off of her, helping her to her feet.

"You don't look much the worse for wear. All parts still working?"

"I guess," she croaked, and took the water he offered. LeFleur's face was completely black, like the "darkies" in the old minstrel shows. Mucus and tears had muddied the soot around eyes and nose and a thin trail of blood cut through the black from the tail of his left eyebrow. Through the soot his blue eyes shined bright as opals in whites so bloodshot they showed pink.

"You're the best-looking thing I've ever seen," Anna said from the heart. She shed the yellow pack like a turtle crawling out of its shell and started to pull off her hard hat.

"Leave it," LeFleur said. "The Jackknife's not done with us yet."

Anna rebuckled the chin strap and took her eyes from him for the first time to look around.

Science fiction: it was another planet. Where there had been the green of living trees, the gold of needles, the red of manzanita, the blue of the sky, there was only gray and shades of gray and black. Instead of ponderosa, fir and sugar pine, black skeletal bones poked cruelly toward a sky gray with smoke or cloud. The ground was white, as white as death and bleached bone. Feathers of ash smothered everything, burned so deep and hot the soil itself was dead. Smoke, colorless in a colorless landscape, curled into a sky of the same hue,