Linus drives engine two even harder, getting ready to unload the ladder. He leaps out, keeping his eyes on the window above, on the fragile, spider-like silhouette. It’s the second floor, ok, he can reach that with the ladder on his own. At least, he thinks so. Smoke billows; he reaches, coughing, to release.
In the distance there is the sound of sirens. Linus feels the collapse of relief. The adults are here. They will take care of things now.
‘Leaf Winham’s up there!’ Linus yells. The officer jumps out of a cruiser. Linus knows Lloyd, he’s a good guy. ‘I saw him, he was waving …’
Officer Lloyd follows Linus’s finger. He looks, expressionless, at the burning casement. Flames lick.
The house is ringed with engines. The fire rages on. By 4 a.m. the water reserves of the forestry service are exhausted. Then the pumps and watertanks along the service roads are all used up. More engines come from Denver. Through the night Nowhere smoulders, flame reviving in unexpected spurts. The firefighters have been unable to reach the window where Linus saw the man waving. Leaf Winham is probably dead.
Linus’s chief tells him to go home. He’s been on for nearly twelve hours.
‘Please,’ he says. ‘Let me stay.’
Chief Renwick puts a hand on his shoulder and turns Linus about-face towards the patrol cars. His touch is not unkind. ‘Get a ride with one of the patrol cars, they’re changing shifts.’
Linus nods and Chief Renwick turns away. Linus is already forgotten.
Linus doesn’t go towards the patrol cars. Instead he wanders eastwards, around the smouldering house, through the scalded trees. He doesn’t know where he’s going. He thinks of that head silhouetted in fire, that desperate waving arm. He clutches his helmet in both hands. He’s surprised to find that his face is wet, and realises that tears are making their way down his soot-blackened face.
Leaf Winham was Linus’s closest companion while his brother had cancer. He watchedFallen Kingdomevery day. One scene in particular, where the pilots begin to pretend that they are actually half-brothers who grew up together. They invent a childhood for themselves, talking under the trees, in the cold clear forest air. Linus cried, hugging his knees in front of the TV, watching those scenes over and during Matthew’s chemo, rewinding and watching, watching and rewinding. Linus’s brother recovered. Matthew is married now with three loud kids and a harassed expression and far less hair on his head. Linus loves every part of that.
Linus has not been a firefighter long but he has an idea of what it’s like – to burn to death. Flesh blackening, splitting and crackling. At school in history class he could never listen to the descriptions of witches being burned. It’s part of why he chose this job, maybe. Andthe idea of Leaf Winham being gone makes Linus afraid. Maybe the magic can now be reversed, and his brother can be taken from him after all. If Leaf Winham can die eaten by fire then anyone can die, including Linus and everyone he loves. He staggers on through the forest, his boots catching on root systems and fallen boughs. He can’t get in a patrol car and go home. If he leaves that’s an ending, and if there’s no ending there’s still hope.
Beside the house is a low, gentle hill topped by a graveyard, marked with small white crosses. Linus had something similar down the bottom of the garden when he was growing up. A pet cemetery. Most houses where kids and pets have lived will. Leaf Winham doesn’t have any kids. Linus recalls what they say about him – that he’s like a child himself. He looks at the white crosses and thinks,this whole place is a graveyard now.
Linus walks. He goes back through the orchard, past the empty paddocks, and out the gate. When he reaches the road he strikes out for higher ground. He needs to stay in constant motion, to feel his legs, to climb the rise. He must be tired, he knows he is, but the chemicals of emergency are still surging in his blood. It’s better to be in the dawn forest, to hear a woodpecker drum its tattoo, to leave the scent of ash and death behind. He doesn’t know how long he walks, and he doesn’t care. He knows these mountains. If he needs a compass point Nowhere is behind him, sending a black cloud of smoke into the pink-blue sky.
‘It will be ok,’ Linus tells himself, aloud. His voice sends a startled wood pigeon flapping for the rafters of the trees. He’s thinking of his brother Matthew, of the pain he was in. It’s almost as if he can hear his brother’s groaning now.
Linus stops. The sound is not in his mind. Someone is groaning nearby. Linus hears the unmistakable note of pain, injury.
‘Call to me,’ he shouts, the first responder instinct kicking in. ‘Keep talking.’
‘He,’ the man says, voice weaving faint through the trees. ‘Me …’
‘Keep talking.’
‘He … No, he …’
Linus follows the voice, treading gentle. The mountain is deceitful. It has pockets and gullies and secrets. You can walk right past someone and if you’re on the wrong side of a stand of brush you’ll never see them. So Linus goes slow and velvet-soft. He listens so close it’s like he’s hooked to the man’s breath.
So he sees the bear trap when many others wouldn’t. It lies a few feet ahead on the deer trail, half hidden by leaf mould, rusty teeth poking through. Linus takes a deep breath. It’s the old kind with a vicious spring mechanism – what they used to call a shin-breaker. Some of the traps left in these remote parts are a hundred years old. The trappers who set them are all dead but the traps wait in the forest anyway, rusting in the sun and the rain. Some still work. They can bite through to the bone. The traps are often laid in groups along animal trails. Those trails haven’t changed too much in a hundred years so hunters still track them and occasionally someone triggers an old shin-breaker whose jaws lurk deep in the mulch. One guy lost a leg last summer.
‘Keep talking,’ Linus calls, breaking a long branch from the nearest tree. The man – he’s pretty sure it’s a man – groans. He’s close. Linus follows the sound, probing and sweeping the path before him carefully with the tree branch.
The man lies propped against an oak trunk, head lolling. His face is milk-pale beneath dark blond hair. His clothes are spattered with blood, it’s hard to say where it’s coming from.
Linus kneels by him. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Adam,’ the man says.
‘Ok, Adam, I’m going to see where you’re hurt, ok?’ Linus lifts the man’s pants cuff, one then the other. Both his legs are whole. Maybe he fell and his hand triggered the trap. But his arms and wrists are unharmed too.
Adam is panting. ‘Have to go. Coming.’
‘Who’s coming?’ He pries Adam’s hand away from his throat. At first he doesn’t understand what he’s seeing. There is a smile there, a bloody mouth in his neck. Someone has slit it. The incision is deliberate but not deep; it’s ragged at one end as though Adam pulled or rolled away as the cut was being made. It has been a very bad day but a cold spike is building in Linus, a certainty that it is about to get a lot worse. A person did that, not a bear trap.
‘Murderer,’ Adam whispers.
