Read Online Flash Fire by Caroline B. Cooney - Free Book Online

all twenty-one houses. For a moment he was paralyzed. Hideous evil sensation, straight out of nightmare. Stupid mind, stupid legs, stupid lungs.
    “Elisabeth!” he bellowed. He felt a terrible anger with his sister for being in the wrong place when everything else was also wrong. He tried to stifle this. If she heard the anger in his voice, she would never come out.
    At the circle on the end of Pinch Canyon Road, a homeowner had years ago planted a row of. palms. A single palm tree crown had caught fire. The fire burned merrily at the top of the long thin trunk, like a match-lit brandy dish that a waiter was bringing to the table. It sat on the tray of the tree and burned quite prettily, nice colors, nice size.
    All houses on Pinch were on the north side of the road. On the south, a single thread of fire, like an unrolling ribbon, was laying itself out on the narrow verge between pavement and canyon wall.
    It could not accomplish much until it reached a wider place in the canyon.
    The wider place was across from the Severyn driveway.
The Press House
4:01 P.M.
    D ANNA WAS CERTAINLY GLAD that she had made kitten contingency plans. “You keep an eye on the fire, Hall,” she said. “Wet the house with the garden hose. I’ll get the kittens.”
    Danna chose the red plastic laundry basket that had fake basketweave through which the kittens could breathe. I’ll cut cardboard to fit the top, she told herself, and tape it down so the kittens can’t climb out. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty,” she called in a high soprano. One kitten came.
    She rummaged around miscellaneous kitchen drawers hunting up scissors and tape. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.” The laundry basket was bigger than she had expected and finding a lid was going to be a problem. The only cardboard box she turned up had once held a computer monitor. She’d poke breathing holes in the box and stuff the kittens in. But would seven kittens fit in such a small box? And why was she even bothering with the kittens?
    She and Hall were not going to abandon the house, the house was far too important for that. Besides, it was pretty neat that Mom and Dad weren’t here, she and Hall would have to rise to the occasion, and handle it themselves, and save everything.
    She got out a can of stinky cat food and opened it noisily. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty. We don’t have all day, you know.”
    But Danna thought that they did have all day. On television nobody seemed to be in that big of a rush. The fire was always at the edges of things, and never in the center of things, and it did not occur to Danna that this was because the cameraman did not want to get burned.
    Danna had watched the fires on television for many hours over the last nine days, not to mention last year and the year before. The fire-fighting crews — men and women who flew in from various states as well as various towns — were equipped with shovels and a Pulaski — with which they attacked the edges of fires. They were very relaxed about it, as if the fire was nothing but a weed growing around their boots. They acted as if they really expected to kill the fire with a shovel of dirt here and a shovel of dirt there.
    On television you saw people sitting on their decks and in their yards, watching the fires that threatened their homes. They might pack their cars just in case, but they stayed with the house, because somebody had to be there in case a wind carried a burning ember onto the roof and it had to be put out.
    Danna discovered that six kittens strapped inside a cardboard box could scream as loud as varsity cheerleaders. “Sssshhhh,” she told them. “People will think I’m torturing you.” She carried the box, which bulged erratically as the kittens hurled themselves against their prison, into the front hallway just in case she really did have to take them somewhere. Then she decided to put a six pack of cold Cokes on top of the box just in case.
    She assumed she would have as much time as she