‘Hey, Marky Mark.’ Kimble’s grip is so hard on his shoulder he can feel each one of her fingernails. ‘Come on. Help me weatherproof the kit. Put the tent up or whatever. I’m doing everything here.’
‘Be there in a second.’ For a moment he still holds the neck of Linus’s t-shirt bunched in his hands. Then he lets go. ‘Sorry, man,’ he says, the fight they didn’t have still coursing in his blood.
‘You don’t look sorry,’ Linus says. Marc smiles. The adrenaline keeps pounding, he sees it in Linus’s face too. Their bodies shift, tiny adjustments, aligning in readiness.
‘Marc.’ Kimble is still beside him. She fixes him with her blank grey gaze. ‘The tent.’
He starts. ‘Yes.’
Together Marc and Kimble put the gear into canvas and plastic to protect it from moisture and condensation overnight. Kimble reaches for Marc’s hand and for a brief moment squeezes the webbing between his pointer finger and thumb. She doesn’t look at him. This signal meansWhat the fuck are you doing?
Marc seizes her index finger and squeezes it twice in return,which meansWhat the fuck have you gotten us into, Kimble, what the fuck are YOU doing?
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ Kimble sings to herself to the tune of ‘She Loves You’ by the Beatles, moving away from him and thrusting a tent peg into the ground. And that’s as close to an answer as he’ll get, for now.
Loneliness hits Marc, blade-like and cold.It’s just work, he reminds himself. He always feels weird when they’ve been on the road for a while. He loses his centre, forgets his home. Kimble doesn’t. She never loses any piece of herself that Marc can tell.
He wants to call Silvie so badly it’s an ache. But phones don’t work up here.Nothing does, he thinks, hilarious.Minds, lives, phones.
Altitude.
3Linus
Linus is twenty-two, this day in October, when the sun rises in the west at around 6 p.m. He is riding the road back to the station when he sees it, the orange cast behind the mountain, warm against the falling dusk. He knows that light and what it means – a false dawn, made by flame.
Linus pulls over and gets on the radio. He’s in the number two engine, his favourite, which he has just picked up from the repair shop. She’s been pulling too far to the left on turns and her pump was sluggish. Number two is old but Linus likes her; she’s quick and generous, not prone to those little exhaustions and stalling like some other engines. Fire engines can stall, like all engines.They’re only human.That’s a joke Linus likes to make. But number two is a good one.
‘I think it’s the Winham place,’ the dispatcher says. Everyone knows the Winham place. It used to have another name.
Dispatch tells Linus to come back to the station. It’s the right thing to do. Linus can’t man engine two by himself – can’t use the pumps and hose at the same time.
But Linus doesn’t do that. ‘Send everyone in engines three tosix,’ he yells back. ‘I’m responding.’ He swings engine two carefully around across the four lanes, turns her towards that fiery orange corner of the sky, towards the national park. He knows there isn’t much time but maybe he can help, get people out. Who lives up there? Apart from him, of course – Leaf Winham. Linus has been in the fire service three years and never seen a death yet. He’s been lucky. Today, he wonders, with that turning of the gut that goes with fate, if all that is about to change.
Linus puts on the siren. As he drives he scans the radio. He’ll be the first there, he’s by far the closest. The Winham place is over by the Never-Summer Wilderness. All the rangers are on the radio, squawking. All across the park they watch as that spot on the horizon brightens, an unnatural dawn. At the entrance gates a police car roars ahead of Linus, clearing traffic to the sides. The police radios take up the call.
Most people call it the Winham place after its famous inhabitant, but its name is Nowhere. It was an apple farm before it washishome. Some say before that it was built on the foundations of a Franciscan monastery. Anyhow there’s always been a house up at Nowhere.
Linus loves Leaf Winham’s movies. His favourite is calledFallen Kingdom, about two airline pilots stranded in the wild after a crash. They live in a cave together for ten or eleven years, forming a bond no one can break. When they are finally rescued, they can’t adjust to normal life again. They can’t handle people, except for one another. So they leave their wives and strike out together back into the forests, never to be seen again. Linus thinks about that a lot, about how if the wild gets inside you, you can’t ever get it out.
The radio crackles, a high nervous voice comes across the air. The call finally came in to 911. It’s official, now – code 3-25, meaning Linus will use sirens, because there is a fire. A big one.
Linus speeds up. The roads are steep and narrow but engine number two is good, she tries, she rides the steep incline with aroaring motor. The police car falls behind to clear passage for the other fire engines coming up from Boulder.
The gates of Nowhere come into view. Linus sees ash and burning debris on the wind. There is no one at the great automated gates to open them. The guard booth is empty. Linus leaps out with the crowbar. The ground is strange underfoot. He tries to pry the gates apart. He realises quickly that it’s no good. He gets back into engine number two and reverses slow and careful to about a hundred feet. He hopes that will do it. Then he guns the engine until it whines and drives at the gates full speed.
He knows he shouldn’t but he closes his eyes at the moment of impact. He feels the steel reverberate, as if it’s inside his body, part of his bones. The gates part with a crash. Linus and engine number two fly into the grounds of Nowhere.
On either side of the road are split-rail fences. Horses gallop along their length, screaming. ‘Sorry,’ Linus whispers as he speeds past. The fire will reach them soon enough. The grass is dry, it will go up like tinder, but there’s no time to stop. Dark, glistening wide eyes shine in the headlights as he guns the engine. ‘I’m so sorry.’
In his rear-view mirror Linus sees a bay mare jump, clearing the posts with ease. A heavy dapple grey with a hogged mane follows suit. His hooves clip the top rail, cracking it. Now horses crowd round the broken fence, pour out and over, their hide shining in the firelight. They gallop out through the steel gates, onto the mountain, into the night. Linus is so glad. ‘Run, horses, run,’ he screams at them in the rear-view mirror, beating the dash with his fist.
The world lightens as he goes; a moment or two later there’s no need for headlights anymore. Shadows stretch long in the orange light. Linus is heading to the centre of it all, the heart of the burning star – Nowhere House.
To the left, through the smoke, something black and spectral is backlit against eerie red. A terrible metal circle. Even in his panicLinus draws in his breath. They always said there was a Ferris wheel at Nowhere. He takes a corner too tight. Engine two crashes into something that looks like a Wendy house, knocking it onto its side, staving in the roof. A flock of doves bursts from the cote into the black sky. Some of them are alight. All Linus can see through the dash is burning feathers, like fingerpainting on the air. Linus chokes on the scent. Some of the birds get high enough so the fire on them goes out and they fall earthward like comets. One lands on the wind-shield of engine two. It lies there for a moment, a black skeleton in a ball of fire. Then it is gone. Linus drives.
In the orchard some apple trees have been set alight by the sparks and embers that rain slowly from the sky. The air is full of burning leaves and smoke. Under it is the scent of warm apple pie.
Beyond the orchard the house rears into view, a great timber skeleton against the sky, lit up and beautiful with flame. The first floor is ablaze. For a moment he sees, or thinks he sees, a head silhouetted in the upstairs window. A hand, spread and pleading.
