Flash Fire Read Online Free Page A

and relentlessly, and yet it was winning: Winning so brilliantly, he could only admire it. It was like getting beaten by the world champion: There was a certain valor even in defeat.
    He was gleeful about his army’s numbers: 85 engines, 30 bulldozers, 31 water tenders, 8 aerial bombers, 7 helicopters.
    And one huge awesome spectacular lethal fire.
    And that was just Grass Canyon! There were another ten or so fires elsewhere. Matt, like most of the firefighters, was mutual aiding. Each town offered its services and equipment to the neighborhood that needed them most. Matt, however, knew this part of LA well: He’d grown up a few miles south of here, in Pinch Canyon.
    Command knew that Grass would be tough to defend. Where there were houses, of course, people soaked lawns at night with sprinklers, and so the gardens and grass were green and lush and somewhat damp. But above the houses, Grass Canyon rose rather gently to three- and four-hundred-foot heights, covered by shrubby, weedy growth that was thick, sturdy, and very very dry. Previous fires had not touched it. Mud had not slid down it. Grass Canyon was just thousands of acres of tinder.
    Therefore, the critical objective was to hold the fire north of the wide asphalt break of the road itself.
    They did not have a hope of actually putting the approaching fire out. It was mammoth and many sided, driven by maddened wind. The fire was not neat. It zigged, it hopscotched, it doubled back. There were few places actually to set up lines of defense.
    Bulldozer teams were hitting the west, seaward, flank of the fire, to keep it out of the adjoining urban areas.
    The only thing June’s crew could do was try to save houses and lives.
    “Great,” said June sarcastically. She was his captain. The first woman in this fire department, she’d gone through a lot. She was medium in every way: medium high, medium wide, medium looks — but first in guts. “I see four more jerks up on roofs with their garden hoses. What do you bet we get to that hydrant on top of the hill and there’s no water pressure? They’ve sucked it all up.”
    The newest trend — wet roofs. What did they think they were accomplishing? If they’d kept brush away from the house and had a tile roof instead of wood shingle, they’d have a prayer. But all they were now, these roof-wetters, were jerks.
    In fact, this neighborhood looked as if the Homeowners’ Association had said: “Be sure to collect logs, pieces of plywood you might need someday, bales of hay and, of course, full gasoline cans. That way when the fire comes, your house will really explode.”
    “Listen, buddy,” shouted Matt, “you need to get out of here.”
    “My house is my life,” shouted the man right back.
    “Life is life,” said Matt. “Houses are houses.”
    This sounded profound to Matt, but it sounded stupid to the homeowner, who made a rude gesture and went on wetting his house. Matt shrugged. The fire department could do a lot of things, but it could not rope adults like cows at a rodeo and remove them from their own personal rooftops.
    What he really could not understand were the crowds. Tourists from the neighborhood. Tourists from the other side of LA. Disneyland let’s-do-a-fire-instead tourists.
    He would have thought the heat would drive them away. It was ninety degrees by itself, and with the fire approaching it felt like a hundred and ten. Or even a hundred and fifty. But there they stood, bare armed, bare legged, dripping sweat, and the smoke collecting in their sweat so that they turned muddy, and they didn’t care. It was very windy. Combine Santa Ana winds with the fire’s own weather and you had a gale. People just laughed and took pictures of each other with the fire as backdrop. Whoever sold disposable cameras was having a great day.
    It was sort of like a party, with fire gossip instead of divorce gossip. “Laguna Beach has lost over three hundred homes,” said somebody, gloating because she didn’t