Date: 2018-07-08 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Post Apocalyptic; Apocalyptic
Description: A CITY ON FIRE. AN UNPARALLELED CATASTROPHE. UNRIVALED HEROISM. The Alt Apocalypse explores survival under the most extreme circumstances, but with a twist (and no cliff-hangers). This series, which can be read in any order, features the same core characters in each complete story. But every book dunks them into a new, alternate apocalypse; a nuclear holocaust, an earthquake, a flood, a wildfire, a hurricane, a plague, and even zombies. Different heroes will emerge in each novel. Different characters will survive and perish. Your favorite character dies in one book? He or she will be back in t
Publisher: Piton Press LLC

LIT

The Alt Apocalypse Survival Series

Tom Abrahams

A PITON PRESS BOOK

LIT

The Alt Apocalypse Survival Series

© Tom Abrahams 2018. All Rights Reserved

Cover Design by Hristo Kovatliev

Edited by Felicia A. Sullivan

Proofread by Pauline Nolet and Patricia Wilson

Formatted by Stef McDaid at WriteIntoPrint.com

This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events is purely coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

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WORKS BY TOM ABRAHAMS

THE ALT APOCALYPSE SURVIVAL SERIES

ASH

LIT

TORRENT (FALL 2018)

THE TRAVELER POST-APOCALYPTIC/DYSTOPIAN SERIES

HOME

CANYON

WALL

RISING

BATTLE

LEGACY

THE SPACEMAN CHRONICLES POST-APOCALYPTIC THRILLERS

SPACEMAN

DESCENT

RETROGRADE

MATTI HARROLD POLITICAL CONSPIRACIES

SEDITION

INTENTION

JACKSON QUICK ADVENTURES

ALLEGIANCE

ALLEGIANCE BURNED

HIDDEN ALLEGIANCE

Contents

Author’s Note

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

Acknowledgments

For Courtney, Sam, & Luke

The torches who light my path

“It is known that wildfires behave unpredictably—this is fundamental—but it is my experience that humans in the presence of wildfire are also likely to behave in aberrant and unpredictable ways.”

—Michael Leunig

Author’s Note

I once told my editor, “People love reading about the apocalypse.”

She corrected me. “People love reading about surviving the apocalypse.”

She was right.

This series of books, THE ALT APOCALYPSE, is about that premise. It explores survival under the most extreme circumstances. It is, however, a new twist on the post-apocalyptic/dystopian/survival genres.

This series, which can be read in any order, features the same core characters in each complete story. But every book dunks them into a new, alternate apocalypse; a nuclear holocaust, an earthquake, a flood, a wildfire, a hurricane, a plague, and even zombies. Different heroes will emerge in each novel. Different characters will survive and perish. Your favorite character dies in one book? He or she will be back in the next.

The idea is to explore how people with different skills survive, or not, in alternate disasters. I hope you enjoy the fiction that treads close to reality (except the zombies) and choose to ride shotgun with me for what promises to be an exceptional set of adventures.

CHAPTER 1

Friday, October 17, 2025

Angeles National Forest

The first thing Sam McNeil sensed in the space between sleep and consciousness was the acrid odor of smoke. The second was an intense, radiant heat that gave him the sense he was cooking inside his eleven-hundred-dollar sleeping bag.

What time was it?

His eyes popped open; the sting of particulate forced them closed. Tears squeezed down his temples and he coughed.

He blinked open his eyes again, fighting the instinct to shut them, and sat up on his elbows. Their tent was foggy with the smoke seeping in through the partially unzipped flap at the front of the space. Light fought through the opaque flood, giving the smudgy appearance of the sun stuck behind thick gray clouds.

Then he heard it.

The pop and sizzle of fire. It wasn’t the friendly, comforting, hearth-like crackle that beckoned the cold closer to the flames. It was angry. It was chaotic. It was wild.

He coughed again and leaned onto one elbow, rolling onto his side. He placed his hand on his wife’s hip and gripped it.

“Loretta,” he said, shaking her. “Get up.”

She groaned something unintelligible and jerked away from him. Then she tugged on her own bag and pulled it up over her shoulder. Sam cursed her addiction to Ambien and tried again. This time he pulled himself from his bag, unzipping it without difficulty, and got onto his knees. He yanked her onto her back and shook her shoulders. His eyes were watering. The din of the fire was getting louder. The air was hotter, like the new dry sauna at Bay Club Santa Monica, where he and Loretta would work off their mojitos and vegan enchiladas.

“Retta,” he said. “You have to get—”

He coughed, and her eyes fluttered open. At first her face looked like she’d sucked on a lemon. Then she opened her eyes, sensing the urgency burned into Sam’s face, and her brow furrowed.

“What’s happening?” she asked with the breathlessness that accompanies fatigue and disorientation. “What’s wrong?”

Sam coughed. Before he could answer, her nose crinkled, and her eyes widened with recognition. She pulled away from him, sitting up on her elbows. “What’s that smell? Is there a fire?”

Sam pulled the back of his hand to his face, attempting to cover his mouth and nose. He nodded emphatically. He could taste the smoke. He pulled his waffle long-sleeved T-shirt over his nose and mouth.

Loretta scrambled from her bag. Her hands were trembling, her eyes glistening. Sam couldn’t tell if it was from the thickening haze inside the tent or if she was on the verge of crying. She coughed and planted herself on her stomach, staying low to the ground. She crawled closer to the flap at the front of the tent. She was wearing long johns that matched his. Her lavender thong peeked over the top of her waistband. Sam barely noticed. He was preoccupied with surviving.

“It’s easier to breathe down here,” she said.

Sam dropped onto the floor of the tent and elbowed his way the short distance to the flap, joining Loretta. She tucked her face under her armpit, trying to breathe cleaner air; her deep inhales indicated by the rise and fall of her back.

Sweat dripped into his eyes and on his face. He blinked against the salty sting and reached up to peek through the opening in the flap. He pulled back on the nylon fabric, separating more of the zipper’s teeth, and peered outside.

His jaw clenched. His stomach tightened and then lurched. Bile crept up his throat.

The light he’d seen leaking through the gap wasn’t sunlight. It was fire. And it was everywhere. The sun hadn’t risen yet, not that he could tell. A wall of fire twenty feet high was all he could see. The heat was like an open oven, dry and oppressive.

He lowered himself again, the afterimage of the inferno consuming his vision. It took him a couple of tries to swallow. A wave of nausea coursed through his body. His wife’s expectant, frightened eyes searched his for hope.

Her recently trimmed bangs were matted against her forehead. Her face was soaked, and he couldn’t separate the sweat from the tears.

He coughed again and lowered himself to the ground, inching as close to her as he could. He faced her and brushed her bangs from her face. Her skin was hot to the touch.

“The fire is bad,” he said softly. “I’m not sure what to do.”

She pulled his hand from her face and held it tightly with both of hers at her chest, rubbing his thumb with hers. “We can’t stay here,” she said, her chin trembling. “We have to get out somehow.”

Sam was surprised by his wife’s relative calm. He’d expected her to panic. But he was the one suppressing that overwhelming urge to panic. Maybe it was the yoga. Maybe it was the Autumn Mist and Winter Jubilee candles she was always burning in their home. Maybe it was the juice detox.

He should have tried the detox. He had no doubt. As he searched for an answer, a solution to this unsolvable danger, he was thinking about a juice detox and regretting his dismissal of it.

“I need to go out there,” he told her. “I have to see if there’s a way out.

She shook her head and squeezed his hand, her French manicure digging into his skin. “No, you can’t.”

Sam coughed, the scratch of the smoke in his throat. “I’m just going to check. We can’t go out the front…”

He tugged his hand from hers. Loretta reluctantly let go, her nails scratching his skin. She rolled onto her stomach and pushed herself into a low crouch on all fours.

Sam leaned over and kissed her, feeling the heat from her skin. He tasted the salt and lingered for a moment before pulling away. “Don’t follow me outside yet. I’ll only be gone a couple of seconds.”

Loretta nodded. A sheen of sweat coated her face and neck.

Sam maneuvered into a squat and pulled his shirt over his nose and mouth again. He reached up and unzipped the flap, then crawled through the opening. A blast of heat immediately hit him. His ears and forehead were burning. His hands stung, and he tried pulling his sleeves over his fingers. He opened his eyes, barely able to focus against the waves of hot air that crashed over him the way an ocean might during high tide.

The roar of the flames was almost deafening. It was definitely disorienting. Sam’s senses couldn’t process all of it at once; the sight, the sound, and the heat were too much. The moment he exited the tent, he reflexively retreated and backed into its fabric.

He was low to the ground, on all fours. He scanned his surroundings, which he didn’t recognize. When they’d picked the spot the night before, it was a beautiful clearing just off the trail. There were the remnants of an old campfire they’d rebuilt to cook their dinner and a trio of wide stumps they’d used as seats and a table. He didn’t see any of it. The wall of flames was no farther than forty feet from the tent.

Sam hugged the edge of the tent and, with his eyes closed, used the feel of the fabric to work his way around to the back side of the tent, opposite the entry flap. Once he’d reached what he believed was the back corner of the tent, his hand brushing against a metal tent stake, he opened his eyes again. He saw hope.

There was a clear path, at least it appeared that way, leading away from the tent and the small clearing. Beyond a cluster of trees, there was what might be the trail.

Reinvigorated by the possibility of escape, Sam scurried back to the flap, tore it open, and stuck his head inside. Loretta was in the same spot, curled into the fetal position on her side.

“Retta!” he called over the din of the fire. “I found a way out.”

She didn’t react at first. He called her again, and her head jerked, as if freed from a trance. Her eyes were mostly covered by her soaked bangs.

He stole a glance over his shoulder and reached his hand through the opening. He wagged his outstretched hand at her.

“C’mon,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Loretta searched his eyes. She didn’t move.

Sam reached farther into the tent and grabbed her arm forcefully. Her tricep tensed against the pressure. “Let’s go!” he yelled. “Now!”

Still dazed, Loretta acquiesced and followed the pull of his hand. She crawled through the opening, and he positioned her in front of him along the side of the tent. The fire was closer now, perhaps no more than twenty feet.

The soles of Sam’s feet were burning. They hurt as much as the thick pain that covered the back of his neck and the tops of his ears. He motioned toward the path he’d taken to the back of the tent and pushed his wife ahead of him.

They crawled along the edge of the tent, wading through the smoke. From behind, waves of heat washed over them. Sam’s knee came down on a rock, the sharp edge of it protruding through the blanket of toasting leaves and digging into the soft spot underneath his kneecap.

He grunted, his body tensing against the bolt of sharp pain that shot up his leg. He gingerly moved forward to join his wife at the back side of the tent. She was shuffling, her head low to the ground. She stopped ahead of him and coughed. The smoke was thicker on this side of the tent than it had been when he’d made his brief exploratory trip.

The fire had advanced quickly and was only a couple of feet from the front of the tent. Sam pushed himself to his feet. He grabbed his wife under her arm, yanking her forward and up as if trying to launch her into the air, and tugged her with him as he ran now, as fast as he could away from the flames.

They coughed and wheezed, leaving the clearing behind and weaving their way through the cluster of walnut trees toward the trail. The bright glow of the fire lit the trees and cast long shadows onto the trail.

When they reached the trail, Loretta stumbled and fell forward, dragging Sam with her. They tumbled to the dirt and skidded to a stop. Without checking for injuries, Sam got back to his feet. He was facing the cluster of trees that edged the clearing.

There was no longer a clearing.

It was engulfed and indistinguishable from the big cone Douglas fir and Coulter pines it had already devoured. It was moving faster, and if Sam didn’t know better, he’d have thought the fire was chasing them.

The sweat that coated his neck stung his burned skin. The backs of his hands were red, which he noticed when he reached down to help his wife to her feet. The soles of his feet were raw. He yelled over the roar of the approaching flames, despite Loretta being only inches from him, urging her to run.

They did, along a path that didn’t lead them away from danger, as they’d hoped. They couldn’t see where they were going. The farther they ran from the fire that consumed their campsite, the closer they came to another. They had no way of knowing as they ran, stumbled, and coughed their way through the forest, that seemingly all southern California was on fire.

CHAPTER 2

Friday, October 17, 2025

Brentwood, California

“What do you mean you’re not coming home?” Ellen Chang looked at the speaker in the roof above the dash and narrowed her eyes.

Although she couldn’t see her son on the other end of the line, looking at the speaker gave her a misguided sense of control in the conversation.

“I’m staying here for Christmas,” he said, his voice devoid of bass.

She was late to a nail appointment after having a long lunch at the Getty. The buzz from the second glass of Canella Prosecco hadn’t worn off.

“It’s her, isn’t it, Bobby?” she sneered and pressed the accelerator. “She’s making you stay.”

He hesitated then cleared his throat. That was her son’s tell. When she hit the target, he equivocated by clearing his throat. She tapped the brake. Traffic was horrible. She glanced at the clock on the display. She was late. It would cost her a larger tip than usual. Much larger.

“No, Mom,” he finally said. “I’m staying here because I want to stay. I like it here. The food, the weather, the people.”

Ellen laughed, the sarcasm dripping. “The weather?”

She couldn’t imagine a place with better weather than southern California. It was what kept her from wanting to live in the Bay Area near her sister. Well, it was the weather and her husband’s job. That was what afforded the Friday manicures and the two drink lunches at galleries and museums, what paid for the late-model import with a speakerphone in the roof above the dash.

“I’m not coming home until the end of spring term,” Bobby said as if it were fact. “That’s when my year is up.”

Ellen pressed the accelerator, zipped through a yellow light, and the push of cool air from an air vent danced across her fingers. The sweet of the Prosecco had gone sour on her tongue. She ran her tongue along the roof of her mouth.

“I love how you’re telling me how it’s going to be,” she said, changing lanes without using her signal. “I don’t remember you signing the checks for your education. Did you sign a check, Bobby?”

“No.”

She changed lanes again. This time she swerved to avoid a parallel-parked car with its door open. The clock told her the tip was getting bigger. She cursed under her breath.

“What?” asked her son through the speaker.

Ellen checked the rearview mirror. “I wasn’t talking to you.” She glanced at the speaker above the dash. “I’m trying to find a parking space. I’m late for an appointment.”

“We can talk later?” asked her son, his voice full of hope.

“Fine,” she said. “Later.”

Her son sighed. “Okay. I love—”

Ellen thumbed the disconnect on the steering wheel and hung up. She turned off the ignition and shouldered open the door. It chimed, reminding her to grab her key from the center console. She fished it out of the cup holder, grabbing her phone and her purse.

She stepped from the car and onto the street, waiting between the car and the door for a Land Rover to roll past. Its driver glared at her as he drove by, chastising her silently for opening her door into traffic. Ellen rolled her eyes, hung her Balenciaga bag into the crook of her arm, and slid from behind the shield of her door. She slammed it shut, pressed the key to lock the car, and clicked her heels into the salon.

The door chimed, and the aroma of toluene and acetate hit her like a punch to the nose when she stepped into the space. The dozen people in the salon stopped their conversations and measured her as she glided to the glass desk off to one side of a waiting area.

She faked a smile. “I’m so sorry,” she said as sweetly as she was capable of. “I know I’m a couple of minutes late…”

Ellen let the sentence trail off, hoping the birdlike gatekeeper sitting at the desk behind a large digital display would appreciate her apology. She didn’t recognize the woman, who she thought to be Cambodian, no, Vietnamese. Regardless, the gatekeeper appeared unimpressed. The plastic hair clip at the crown of her head held too much hair too tightly and made her face and eyes appear catlike. The woman was both bird and cat.

An odd combination, thought Ellen. She tried a wider smile.

The gatekeeper, whose flat expression gave away nothing, glanced at the display and then back at Ellen. She exhaled an exaggerated sigh. “Tammy,” she called, maintaining the poker face. “Your appointment Chang is here. She’s late. Twenty-two minutes. What do you want me to do?”

Ellen raised an eyebrow. She ran her thumb along the face of her smartphone. Her son’s photograph, without his girlfriend, appeared on the screen. She didn’t notice.

She was surprised by the woman’s English. It was actually good and lacked the staccato of immigrants, who tended to ignore the infinitive when speaking. Her volume matched that of the other, less articulate women in the salon. Her call was more a squawk. Definitely a bird. The woman was a bird.

Ellen stole a look over her shoulder at the salon. Tammy, her regular manicurist, was frowning underneath her thick black glasses, her eyes judging Ellen from above the frames, which hung on the end of her nose, while she worked an emery board on a client’s ring finger. She was chomping on gum. Ellen knew from experience it was licorice-flavored.

She waved at Tammy and started to say hello when the gatekeeper called again. It was shrill.

“Make her wait?” she asked, leading the witness. “I can make her wait.”

Tammy muttered something to the woman attached to the fingers she was decorating. The woman glanced over her shoulder briefly at Ellen.

Ellen’s face flushed. She considered storming out of the salon.

Yes, she was late. She was always late. She’d been warned not to be late. Still, she was one of Tammy’s longest tenured clients. That should count for something.

Tammy waved with one hand, motioning Ellen toward her. In broken English she told Ellen to wait for a few minutes in the empty salon chair at the back of the salon. She’d be with her in a few minutes.

Ellen thanked her and spun around to thank the gatekeeper. The bird woman was typing on a wireless keyboard in front of the display, having already moved on to whatever she had next on her agenda. She didn’t glance up from the screen despite Ellen being certain the woman could feel her glare.

Ellen cleared her throat, pulled back her shoulders, and quickly stepped in time to the back of the salon. She found the empty chair and sank into it, draping one leg across the other.

Several minutes passed and she felt the effects of her lunch, her Prosecco, and the heat of the salon lulling her to sleep. She closed her eyes and relaxed into the soft leather. It was certainly warmer at the back of the salon than it had been by the front door, and the chemical odor was stronger, more acrid.

As she drifted into semiconsciousness, only vaguely aware of the hum and whir of the fans that circulated the caustic air, Ellen thought about her son. She imagined him on the beach playing volleyball with the Spanish heathenness or shopping in the gothic quarter, his fingers laced in the heathenness’s. Then she imagined them marveling at the brightly stained glass inside La Sagrada Familia, the deep-sea blues and the fiery reds growing in intensity as the sun dropped in the sky and hit the glass directly. She could sense the heat of the sun on her face as she stood with them, listening to the soft shuffle of awed tourists and the tentative creak of the pews resisting the weight of those who sat to admire the grand pulpit.

It was warm inside the cathedral. Too warm. There was smoke. Without warning, that red light diffused through stained glass cast a laser beam onto the wooden pews and lit them afire.

The tourists ran screaming. The heat intensified, as did the smell of smoke. Ellen stood frozen, the chaos unfolding around her. Her son was calling to her. He was ushering her, urging her away from the flames that lapped at her feet. He wasn’t calling her Mom, though. He was screaming her first name, and his voice wasn’t his own. It was higher pitched and heavily accented. Somebody else was in the background yelling something about chemicals and fire and calling 9-1-1.

9-1-1 in Spain? That wasn’t right. It was 1-1-2.

It was getting hotter. She couldn’t move. Her son was still calling for her, his voice getting fainter. The crackle of flames sucking up the oxygen inside the cathedral was drowning him out. Why would he leave her? Why would he choose that harlot over her? What kind of son—

Ellen’s eyes popped open. Her body jerked, and her lungs filled with smoke.

Where was she? Sweat stung her eyes, and she winced at the heat at her back, on both sides of her, in front of her. What was this place?

Then she remembered. She was in the salon, waiting for Tammy to finish the client who’d taken her appointment. She was in the leather chair at the back of the room. But now, as she coughed, and tears streaked down her face, she couldn’t be sure where anything was.

It was all consumed in flames and smoke. All of it was burning. This wasn’t a dream. It was real.

Ellen coughed again and sank to the floor. She rolled onto her stomach and tried feeling her way toward the front of the salon with her eyes closed. There was no point in exposing them to the burn in the air since she couldn’t see anything. She crept forward on the tile, her bag still on her arm and flopping along the floor as she inched forward. Ellen groped with open hands in the space in front of her face.

In the distance, voices were calling for her. Glass was shattering, and people were screaming. Beyond the smoke there were people. There was clean air. There was safety.

Ellen’s lungs burned with every successive breath. It wasn’t just the sting of the air, but its heat that gave her the sensation that she was sizzling from the inside out. Her skin was raw, the silk fabric of her blouse and the cotton blend of her skirt stuck to her sweaty body. Each pull of her body was harder than the one before it. She tried calling back, but the smoke was too much. She couldn’t muster more than a squeak.

She imagined those voices outside belonged to the cat-bird gatekeeper at the desk, Tammy, and the other women whose fingers and toes weren’t yet fully mani’d or pedi’d.

None of them had helped her. Not one had awoken her or yanked her from her nap. They’d left her to die. They’d been worried about themselves.

How had the fire even started? Where had it begun? How did it explode into an inferno so quickly?

None of it mattered now. She’d never know the answers to any of those questions. She couldn’t see, she couldn’t breathe, and any attempt at either only injected more pain.

The call of those outside gave way to the wail of sirens. She coughed again and stopped moving. She tucked her head underneath her armpit. The sharp tang of body odor replaced the poisonous smoke for a moment in a welcome, albeit short, moment.

More glass shattered. The creak and moan of something above her rippled across what she imagined was the ceiling.

The sirens were louder. There were men shouting now.

Another creak above her head. Then a boom followed by an instant of sharp pain and immense weight. Too much weight.

Ellen Chang, crushed and burning, drifted back into unconsciousness thinking about her son.

***

Casper “Ritz” Lincoln slammed Rescue 19 into park and hopped from the driver’s seat. The radiant heat hit him as soon as his boots hit the pavement. He was next to one of the two fire engines known as “triples” for their ability to pump water, hold it in a tank, and carry hose.

The chief was already taking command of the attack, directing firefighters to attach a five-inch supply line to the closest hydrant and get the attack lines ready to go. Ritz stepped up to the chief, a veteran named James White. The man’s eyes were focused. The thick white mustache that covered his upper lip bristled with tension.

“Power?” asked Ritz.

“Get after it,” said White. “We’re gonna cut the roof. I need the lights off yesterday.”

Ritz nodded and waved to his partner, another paramedic named Phyllis. She buttoned up her turnout jacket, adjusted the Nomex hood on her head, and followed him with an axe. They headed toward the burning building, which was a long strip center that ran the length of the block. Ritz adjusted his own hood and pulled on his gloves.

They rounded the corner, wading through the thick smoke to the side of the structure. At eye level, on the side of the vaguely white stucco, was the electric meter. The two moved to either side of the large box. Phyllis wedged the axe blade into the narrow space between the back of the meter and the wall and began prying the meter free from the wall using the axe handle’s leverage. Ritz dug his gloved hands in the space on the opposite side of the meter and pulled as hard as he could.

Together they heaved the meter from the building’s external wall. It disconnected, and Ritz yanked it free from the connecting wires. The power to the building was off.

He pinched the button on the radio at his shoulder. “Power’s dead,” he said and locked eyes with Phyllis. “Let’s finish suiting up and get in there.”

As paramedics, their job was multifold. After clearing the power from the building, their next job was search and rescue. He was the first medic on the scene and was the highest rank, so he was in charge. All the other medics who’d arrive would be under his command.

The first alarm had brought with it two engines and his advanced life support rescue ambulance. The second alarm added another engine, another ALS ambulance, and a ladder truck LAFD called a truck company. The call, which Ritz had heard on the radio on the drive to the fire, was for the light force. That light force, the engine, and the ladder weren’t used often. But this fire was already getting out of control. A third alarm sent a fourth engine and a third ambulance.

When Ritz emerged from the side of the building, his eyes widened at how quickly the scene had changed. There were now too many firefighters to count already working the attack lines. The ladder was extending and putting firefighters on the roof to ventilate it.

Ritz tucked his gloves under his arm and grabbed his helmet. He checked his SCBA, which would help him breathe if he had to enter the building, and his locator alarm. Phyllis, who’d done most of this on the ride there, was ready to go.

He affixed his helmet, pulled his gloves back onto his hands, and weaved through the apparatuses to find command. He saw a quick burst of flames shoot skyward from the roof. Thick blooms of black smoke erupted upward and spread outward over the street, blocking out the sun. In the distance, sirens wailed. Beads of sweat were forging paths down his neck and back. The Nomex hood stuck to his face. His helmet bouncing on his head, he moved as quickly as he could toward the cluster of chiefs pointing at the blaze with sharp gestures.

Ritz found James White and interrupted. “How many inside?”

“We think one in the salon,” White said. His bushy eyebrows were furrowed, making them appear like miniature offspring of his mustache. “But the fire is already spreading.”

White pointed toward the roof. Ritz followed his aim and saw wisps of smoke lifting from the adjacent business, a liquor store.

“Common attic,” he said. “No fire break between the two.”

The teams were already putting water on the flames. It wasn’t doing much. Ritz moved closer to the salon. Its front windows were shattered, flames flicking through the black wrought-iron burglar bars barely visible through the smoke.

There was a group of women huddled together to one side. Another paramedic, whose last name was Lardie, was talking to them. Or trying to talk to them. All of them appeared hysterical, and some of them were speaking a language Ritz didn’t understand. Phyllis pushed past Ritz to join the women.

She started speaking in the same foreign, tonal language. Her gloved hands were on one woman’s shoulders, gripping her attention and supporting her weight. Phyllis hugged the woman, drawing her into her body for a moment, and thanked her in English. She glanced over at Ritz and stepped toward him.

“She says there’s only one woman in there,” Phyllis said. “They haven’t heard her calling or crying out. They think she’s dead.”

The smoke was still black. The flames were torch hot, and the firefighters on the roof were having a hard time controlling the spread of the flames despite having ventilated it.

“No go,” he said. “Not worth the risk.”

Phyllis’s eyes narrowed. The corners of her mouth frowned with disapproval. “We’re leaving her in there? I don’t—”

“If she’s still in there, she’s gone,” Ritz said firmly. “I’m not putting our lives at risk for one that’s not salvageable. This fire’s been going ten, fifteen minutes. Structurally, there’s five left until the roof caves. No go.”

“Then what do we do?”

“You and Lardie help the women,” said Ritz. “Check them for burns and smoke inhalation. Remember to be careful for—”

“I know,” she interrupted. “Laryngospasms. I’m not a rookie.”

It was true; she wasn’t. Still, she was a newbie, just three years on the job. Ritz still remembered her first week. They’d sent her to station 37 on Veterans to look for a hose stretcher. She’d been furious when she’d learned it was a prank, part of the hazing that all Los Angeles first responders endured as part of their initiation.

While her sense of humor hadn’t improved, she was a good medic and a solid firefighter who’d earned respect. He shouldn’t have reminded her about the dangers of not checking inside a fire victim’s mouth for signs of smoke inhalation and the trauma it could cause.

“Sorry,” he said. “Just get to work.”

Phyllis motioned to Lardie and, confident the women were in good hands, Ritz moved toward the liquor store. There was an elderly man with slicked-back hair cheaply colored to look brown. His arthritic hands were on his head, the gnarled, swollen fingers gripping at clumps of hair and threatening to pull them out.

Tears streamed down his cheeks, traveling the creases dug deep from cigarettes and stress. Ritz couldn’t be sure if the crying was from shock and sadness or from the increasingly dense fog of gray smoke that was encircling them both.

“Sir,” said Ritz, approaching the man, “I need you to step back. You’re too close to the building.”

The man’s red eyes sat deep inside the leather of his sockets and cheeks. His white, thin line of eyebrows arched beneath the parallel of wrinkles in his forehead.

It was loud where they stood. The roar and crackle of the flames, the whoosh and splash of the water, and the rumble of the engines made it difficult to communicate.

Ritz raised his voice. “Sir,” he said, reaching out to put his hand on the man’s trembling shoulder, “we really should—”

A percussive blast and an intense flash of heat knocked Ritz backward and off his feet. He landed on his side, his helmet slapping against the pavement. Everything went dark for a moment. When he blinked his eyes open, his vision was blurry, and his ears were ringing. The sounds that had been vivid and deafening moments before were muted as if he were lying at the bottom of a pool.

His head was swimming. Where was he exactly? On the ground. Smoke. Heat. He was in his turnout gear. His throat was dry and tasted like a violent cocktail of blood and ash. He blinked again, trying to focus. It was so hard to focus.

Ritz began to lift himself up on his elbows, and a sharp, jabbing pain in his side stopped him short. He rolled onto his opposite side and tried to take stock of the scene. There had to be something that—

All around him was smoldering debris, meteorites of char dotting the asphalt, and people. There were people on the ground. Firefighters lying in awkward, unnatural positions.

There were screams. He could make out screams and calls for help.

Everything was in slow motion as the memory of where he was and what had happened boomeranged back into his mind. Nail salon. It was on fire. So was the liquor store next to it.

The liquor store. A cauldron of flammables. It had exploded in flames.

Ritz tried sucking in a deep breath. He couldn’t. He must have injured a rib, or multiple ribs. He didn’t know what else was damaged. Shards of pain radiated throughout his wounded body. He was better off, though, than the old man with leathery skin and box-color hair.

That man was on his back, his head facing Ritz. He was staring at him with those eyes. They weren’t crying anymore. They weren’t red. They were fixed and distant. They were the eyes of a dead man.

CHAPTER 3

Friday, October 17, 2025

Santa Monica, California

Danny Correa stood on the sidewalk in front of the diner on Pico Boulevard. He was on his break and couldn’t take his eyes off the live video on his phone. He’d gotten the alert when he’d taken off his paper chef’s hat and white apron, fishing the prepaid phone from his pants pocket and tapping the banner on the screen.

He was watching the aerial view of an enormous fire a few miles away in Brentwood. The thick black smoke made it difficult for the helicopter’s camera to show much more than that and the occasional burst of red and orange flames that poked through the pillows of rising smoke.

At the top left corner of the screen was the word LIVE, and at the bottom a graphic banner announced AT LEAST ONE DEAD IN 3-ALARM NAIL SALON FIRE. Those words stayed on the screen for a few seconds before dissolving into a new message EXPLOSION INJURES UNKNOWN NUMBER, FIRE NOT UNDER CONTROL.

Danny tongued a wad of mint gum from his cheek and rolled it between his teeth. He chewed it on one side and then the other. Then his phone rang, and the live feed disappeared, replaced with the contact information stored in his phone. His chest was heavy when he rotated the phone vertically and recognized who was interrupting his break.

He sighed heavily and answered the call. “Yes?” he said with a clipped tone that he hoped conveyed he wasn’t interested in talking and he didn’t have time to do it even if he were interested.

“You got your phone back,” mocked the voice he’d once found musical. “I’ve been trying to call you.”

“Why?” Danny asked. “What do you want?”

“What’s with the attitude?”

Danny held the phone at his ear. He could feel his pulse in his neck, hear it in his ears. There was so much he wanted to say. Instead, he chomped on the gum.

She sighed. “Whatever. You can be mad. I can’t control you. Never could.”

Danny tightened his grip on the phone. His jaw tensed.

“I’m calling because I need a favor.”

A couple walked past him. The man held the door for the woman. The commotion of conversation, dishes, and cutlery grew louder and then dissipated after the door clanged shut. The restaurant closed in an hour. He’d have another hour after that to clean up before he could go home. Well, not home, just a place with a bed, a shower, a toilet, and a close facsimile to a kitchen. Home was a word more than a feeling for Danny. It had been since the woman on the other end of the line had made a one-sided decision to end their marriage.

“Are you there?” she asked.

“My break is nearly over.”

“You’re still at that diner?” she chided. “Rae’s, is it?”

Danny sighed heavily into the phone. He chomped on his gum with his mouth open.

“Derek and I are going to be in LA later in the week. He’s got a meeting with…people.”

“Who else would he be meeting with?” Danny said. Hearing Derek’s name made him want to scream.

The door chimed open behind him. The cashier was standing there with her foot in the door. She motioned back into the restaurant with her head and tapped her wrist with her index finger. Danny nodded his understanding and shooed the cashier back inside. She wasn’t his boss; she wasn’t even full-time. She might not even have been a legal adult. The cashier rolled her eyes and slipped back inside.

“Can you help me or not?” she asked as if he were the imposition.

“No.”

“You don’t even know what I—”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Stop calling me.”

He pulled the phone from his ear and stared at it for a moment. The call timer was still ticking. He could vaguely hear her calling out his name from the tiny speaker at the top of the device. His thumb hovered over the screen before he tapped it and ended the call.

The streaming video reappeared on his screen. The fire looked worse. At least five people, including firefighters, were dead. More were injured. He tapped off the device and stuck it back into his pocket. It was time to get back to work.

Danny yanked open the door and stepped back inside. He walked past the row of orange vinyl booths that lined the front of the place. Large picture windows let bright afternoon light into the diner. It was packed, as it always was. The booths and the swivel chairs at the bar all seated customers as they were served their burgers, corned beef hash with eggs and home fries, and even granola.

Danny couldn’t understand why anyone would go to Rae’s Diner for the granola, except that this was California and the granola was the only thing that didn’t clog arteries.

He wound his way around the bar and took his apron from a hook on the wall, wrapped it at his waist, and popped the paper chef hat on his head. At a smidge under six feet, the hat made him appear taller. His father, who was of Mexican descent, was a good two inches shorter than Danny. His mother, an Irish Catholic from Michigan, was the same height. Danny was glad he favored his mother’s side of the family, even if it was only a bit. Otherwise he’d have spent his life looking up to everyone and getting the distinct sense that everyone looked down on him.

Truth was, Danny knew the issue was his more than it was those who judged him. And it wasn’t his height that had them casting their eyes downward.

He adjusted the hat and grabbed the handle of a fry basket. The timer told him they were done. A waitress wearing the all black uniform trimmed with a white collar and sleeves sidled past him. She put her hands on his hips as she moved. He stole a glance at her as she sauntered toward the opposite end of the bar, and averted his eyes when she winked at him over her shoulder.

He shook the oil from the fry basket and dumped the crispy potatoes into an aluminum bin to salt them. He eyed the waitress again. Her name was Claudia.

She leaned into the counter, pulled a Bic pen from behind her ear, and scratched an order onto her notepad, smiling at the man in front of her. He sipped from a cup of coffee and toasted her as she weaved her way back to the line of cooks working the open kitchen.

“Those fries ready?” she called out to Danny. “I need them yesterday, mijo.”

Danny didn’t speak Spanish, but being called “little boy” was either degrading or endearing. He wasn’t sure which it was coming from Claudia. Even when the cook next to him, a burly black man named Arthur, raised an eyebrow at him between burger flips, he couldn’t decide.

Danny raised a pair of fingers in a V. “Two seconds,” he said softly. “Give me two seconds.”

She handed him a plate with two over-easy eggs and a biscuit sopped in gravy. He scooped an order of fries onto the plate, careful to carve them away from the gravy, and gave it back to Claudia. She thanked him with another wink and walked the order around the counter to an orange booth.

“Who eats fries with breakfast?” he mumbled to Arthur and dipped another basket into the boiling oil. “Eggs beg for hash browns, right?”

Arthur shoveled the sizzling patties on the grill. “I never question a man’s taste in food,” he said. “I know you’ve only been doing this a minute. When you’ve been at it a lifetime like I have, you see predilections for cuisine that boggle the mind. Grilled cheese and bacon dipped in ketchup, coleslaw and yellow mustard on a kosher hot dog.”

Danny smiled weakly. He wasn’t capable of more than that, especially on a day when she had called asking for a favor.

Arthur pointed the spatula at Danny, unintentionally flicking some droplets of grease at his chest. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, pulling forward some memory stored in the back of his mind. Then his eyes widened with horror. “I even saw a man put hot sauce on pancakes,” he said, his jaw slack. “Our pancakes. Can you imagine? It was some of that Sriracha crap everybody likes. Squeezed it like syrup onto pancakes. Damn shame.”

Before Danny could reply, a man bounded in through the door. He was breathless and shaking his head. It was enough of a scene to draw the attention of most of the busy diner.

“The whole city’s on fire!” he said loud enough for everyone to hear. He had a newspaper tucked under his arm. “I mean. The. Whole. City.”

“How’s that?” asked Claudia.

The man stomped past her to the only empty seat at the bar. He untucked the paper and slapped it onto the pale blue counter, exhaling hyperbolically. He waved his hands around as if trying to do a magic trick. “I can’t believe none of you knows what I’m talking about,” he said. “Huge fire in Brentwood. Whole block up in flames, and there’s a couple of wildfires in the hills. The drought’s about to kill us all one way or the other.”

The diner was quiet for a moment; then the crowd returned to their conversations and their club sandwiches. It was as if the man hadn’t said anything at all alarming.

Danny overheard a customer ask Claudia if the place took credit cards. Claudia giggled and pointed to a sign at the register that announced cash only. From beyond the restaurant, he heard what sounded like a large explosion, the plates and dishes rattled, and the lights inside the diner went out.

CHAPTER 4

Friday, October 17, 2025

Santa Monica Pier

Dub Hampton felt the rumble in his legs. At least he thought he did. The arcade was a noisy, crowded place. He wasn’t sure if he’d imagined it until his girlfriend, Keri, touched him on the shoulder.

“Did you feel that?” she asked. “I felt something.”

“Like a wave?” Dub was focused on the wooden ball in his hand. He eyed concentric circles at the end of the ramp in front of him. He stooped, flicked his wrist, and rolled the ball toward the circles. The ball accelerated, launched into the air at the end of the ramp, and rattled into a hole marked 30.

Dub grunted. “Or an earthquake?”

Keri shook her head. “No, like an explosion.”

It was the end of another tough week in the fall quarter. They’d both finished midterms that morning and needed a break. Blowing cash at the pier sounded like fun. They’d Ubered there and had dropped money on the Ferris wheel, bike rentals, and now the arcade.

Dub noticed, despite the chimes, dings, and pops from the other games, much of the crowd was headed outside toward the pier. His girlfriend’s brow was furrowed with concern, her hands planted on her hips.

“We should probably go see what it is,” said Dub, asking as much as deciding what to do.

“Probably,” she said in a way that told him she meant “definitely.”

Keri Monk had a paradoxical way about her that was singular among the women at UCLA. She was both athletic and feminine, strong and slender, kindhearted and strong-willed, easygoing and a relentless advocate for herself. Dub loved all of it. Most of the time.

She started toward the bright light of the open entrance that led out onto the pier. Dub gave chase and caught up with her as they passed a row of old-style pinball machines. A thin, ghost-faced man in loose jeans and a grungy T-shirt was playing The Walking Dead Pro 2014 machine. He hip-checked it and cursed, calling it things Dub had only recently learned by checking Urban Dictionary. The man had been there since they’d arrived an hour earlier. Come to think of it, Dub was sure he’d seen the man there, at the same machine, on previous visits. He wondered if zombies were, in fact, more than science fiction. The strong odor of marijuana hung in the air around the man.

When they emerged from the arcade, the bright light forced Dub to squint. Keri reached for his hand and laced her fingers into his. When his eyes had adjusted, he saw the crowd forming on the pier. Everyone’s eyes were aimed inland toward the myriad of large plumes of black smoke.

“How many are there?” Dub asked.

Keri counted them with her finger. “Seven,” she said. “Are they all fires, I guess?”

Dub scanned the horizon. He counted too. Seven plumes, each distinct and ominous, ballooning skyward. Together, high above the western part of the city, they cast a thick haze darker than the smog to which southern Californians had become accustomed. In the distance, the sounds of sirens whined above the lulls in the crashing surf.

“They look like fires,” he finally said to her. “You said you heard an explosion?”

Keri nodded. “Yeah, it sounded—”

A man in front of them motioned toward one of the smoke pillars. “Big boom,” he said. “Had to be a transformer. Or a substation. Had to be power. Had to be.”

Dub stared at the man for a second until a bright light in his peripheral vision drew his attention back to the distance. A flash of blue-white light strobed like an electrical storm; a fireball shot skyward, followed by a column of black smoke. A moment later a sharp zap and rumbling boom rolled across the air above them.

“That’s another one,” the man said. “Another one.”

The sky was apocalyptic, like something from a big-budget Hollywood film. Dub half expected to see Dwayne Johnson swoop in on a helicopter to save the day.

“What’s going on?” A shallow-sounding voice came from behind Dub. It was accompanied with the strong odor of medicinal pot.

The pinball wizard stood with his hands in his pants pockets. His T-shirt was printed with the words SORRY I’M LATE, I DIDN’T WANT TO COME across the chest.

“The power’s out inside the arcade,” the man said. “Killed my game.”

“It’s a fire,” Keri said. “Or a bunch of them. They’re blowing up the lines.”

The man’s eyes drifted from Keri to the horizon, and his narrow, pale face stretched with disbelief, his glassy, bloodshot eyes widening with surprise. He chuckled nervously. “Whoa,” he said. “That’s crazy.”

“We should get back,” Keri said. “I don’t want to get stuck out here if things keep getting worse.”

Dub took her hand again and led her toward the end of the pier. With his free hand he drew his phone from his pocket. He tapped it and opened the Uber app. His eyes darted between his phone and the crowded path in front of him as they weaved their way toward land. The app wasn’t opening properly. He tapped it again. “I can’t get Uber to work,” he said. “Wanna try your phone?”

They stopped walking, and Keri let go of his hand and unzipped her cross-body purse. She plucked her phone from the bag and thumbed her way to the app.

She tapped the screen several times and then frowned. The concern on her face deepened. “It’s not working on mine either. I don’t have any service.”

Dub glanced up at the horizon again. He counted ten fires now. The blended haze of smoke was darkening and growing thicker. He shook his head and shrugged.

“Maybe there’s too much cell traffic?” he suggested. “Or I guess some towers could be affected by the fires?”

Keri’s broad shoulders sank. “What do we do?” she asked, sounding unusually exasperated. “It’s a long walk, and there are, like, I dunno, a dozen fires between here and campus.”

“We start walking,” Dub said. “No other choice right now. We can catch a cab or Uber on the way. We’re, what, five miles from the Hill?”

She put her phone back into her bag and adjusted the strap across her chest. “Something like that.”

Dub sucked in a deep breath through his nose and held it for a beat before exhaling. He glanced over his shoulder at the arcade. Its beckoning, blinking lights were out. The space inside was dark. He scanned the pier. Nothing was operating except for the Pacific Wheel, the famed Ferris wheel on the pier. It was spinning at normal speed, those in the baskets looking inland toward the fires instead of out at the ocean.

The wheel was the only solar-powered Ferris wheel in the world. At that moment, Dub imagined everyone aboard was thankful for that advancement; otherwise they’d have been stuck.

He took Keri’s hand, ran his thumb across it, smiled at her reassuringly, and led her through the bustling, anxious crowd to the shoreline and the end of the pier.

By the time they’d reached the street, another trio of explosions had shuddered through their bodies. The explosions were closer, the sirens louder, and the panic amongst the people around them more palpable.

Dub was acutely aware his hands were sweating. His mouth was dry. Against Keri’s advice, he hadn’t been hydrating as he should in the dry southern California climate. They were both from humidity-soaked environs, she from New Orleans and he from Houston. She’d done a much better job of acclimating. She drank water all the time and used tubs of lotion on her skin. Sometimes he was the one lucky enough to be applying it.

“You okay?” she asked breathlessly as they crossed the wide street. “You’re pale.”

“I’m okay,” Dub said. “I’ll be okay. Let’s keep moving.”

They kept a good pace, making good time despite the conditions. Dub was certain the air was getting hotter. He was sure that the fires were spreading. Above them, the haze was beginning to block out the sun. It drifted in thick patches overhead and signaled that wherever the fires were burning, firefighters were having trouble putting them out.

He imagined a game of Whac-A-Mole; as soon as they got one fire under control, another would pop up in another part of the city. Dub didn’t say anything to Keri as they trekked silently, deliberately toward home. He wondered if they’d be able to get there. The acid in his gut told him it wouldn’t be a straight shot. It wouldn’t be easy.

“I think it’s getting worse,” Keri said through her shirt. Her flat, muscled abs flexed in the gap between the top of her yoga pants and the bottom of the shirt she’d drawn over her face.

Dub instinctively glanced at her bronze skin. Even in the worst of times, he couldn’t resist admiring her. She squeezed his hand again to refocus his attention.

“The smoke,” she said. “It’s getting worse. So is the traffic.”

She was right. They were moving faster on foot than the cars next to them on the street. It was gridlock. Drivers honked their horns, revved their engines, and cursed at one another through open windows. This was extreme, even by Los Angeles standards.

The air became more acrid the farther they forged ahead. It was laced with smoke and the remnants of whatever the fires had burned to ash. They were getting closer to what he imagined was one of the transformer or substation fires they’d seen popping from the vantage point on the pier. The smoke thickened, obscuring his view to perhaps thirty feet in front of him. Keri’s grip tightened around his hand, and the two of them drew their T-shirts higher above their mouths and noses.

They walked slowly forward. The traffic beside them went from an intermittent crawl to a dead stop. The closest fire to them was more than an isolated power fire. The road was blocked. Through the smoke, the faint strobe of red lights flashed.

Police were trying in vain to turn around traffic. There was nowhere to go. An entire block was in flames.

CHAPTER 5

Friday, October 17, 2025

Westwood, California

The uneasy ping of déjà vu flashed through Barker Mayfield. The sky was hazy with the drift of black and gray smoke. He could smell it, the caustic odor of wood and chemicals burning somewhere in the distance.

He stood at the top of the Janss Steps, his back to Royce Hall, and gazed south and west, toward the coast. Thin columns of smoke dotted the landscape like black geysers.

Somewhere in the corner of his mind, somewhere he couldn’t quite access fully, he was sure he’d seen something like this before. He’d been here before, the sky dark and ominous, carrying destruction on its breeze.

He shook it off when a familiar voice interrupted his thoughts. It was his roommate Michael Turner. The six-foot-tall, socially awkward only child with thinning, curly red hair was rubbing his paunch with his palm. It was a nervous habit.

“That doesn’t look good,” he said. “Are those fires?”

Barker shrugged and leaned into the first step, descending one at a time with short strides. He tucked his thumbs inside his backpack straps. “Looks like it,” he said, forgoing the thirty sarcastic things he might have normally said. “That’s a lot of them.”

Michael kept pace with Barker as they pounded down the eighty-seven steps that once marked the entrance to UCLA. They reached the bottom of the stairs, skipping the sixth one to avoid bad luck, and headed back to the Hill.

“I heard there’s a bunch of forest fires,” said Michael. “My TA was talking about them in discussion. He said they popped up overnight. They’re already out of control.”

Barker nodded. “I saw some video on Twitter. There are two or three of them that are merging. I didn’t see anything about fires in the city.”

“We haven’t had rain in, like, what? Two months? Three?”

“I don’t remember having rain all summer,” said Barker.

Wilson Plaza was no longer the familiar green plots of grass to which Bruins had become accustomed. There were thin ropes, like the kinds that guided the tourists at amusement parks, blocking access to the yellow, dead lawn, and signs warning passersby to stay off the remnant grass.

They passed the plaza and headed to Bruin Walk and the path back to their dorm.

“I can smell it,” Michael said.

Barker knew what Michael meant, but often pretended he didn’t just to make his roommate explain himself. Michael, who was undiagnosed but somewhere on the spectrum, was oblivious.

“The fires,” Michael said. He wiggled his fingers in front of his wrinkled nose. “I can smell the smoke and whatever’s burning. It’s…pungent.”

Barker unconsciously inhaled more deeply than normal. The odor was stronger than it had been atop the steps a few minutes earlier. The haze was darker too.

There’d been fires before. This was California. The environmental cycle was as sure as death, taxes, and some USC douchebag causing trouble at a party off campus. The drought dehydrated everything to the point of tinder, and the fires started. They burned for days or weeks, until his news app told him they were one hundred percent contained. Then it rained, and with nothing to stop it, the water flooded the hillsides enough to loosen the dirt into mudslides.

This was different though. He’d never smelled the smoke. He checked his phone and saw a string of alerts he’d missed. They weren’t encouraging. He read them aloud to Michael. “Angeles National Forest ablaze,” he reported. “It joins four other aggressive wildfires across southern California. Two are closing in on west Los Angeles.”

“That’s us.”

“Yeah,” Barker said in a tone that suggested Michael was stating the obvious. “And there’s a nail salon on fire. Firefighters are trying to stop it from spreading. Power is affected. Forty-five thousand customers are in the dark.”

He noticed others wiping the sting from their nostrils as they passed him in the opposite direction. Some had their eyes squinted toward the sky. It was remarkably quiet for a Friday afternoon. There was no music outside of Ackerman, and nobody was playing soccer on the intramural fields.

Michael thumbed the screen on his phone. “Service is slow,” he said. “I’ve got one bar. Nothing is loading on the browser. I can’t even open the Bruin Alert app.”

Barker closed the news alert and pressed the screen on his phone. “Siri, open Bruin Alert.”

“Okay, King of the World, opening Bruin Alert.”

Michael chuckled. “King of the World?”

“It’s a joke,” Barker said flatly, sarcasm escaping him for the second time. It wasn’t like him.

“I figured. Why would you—”

“I’m unable to open Bruin Alert,” Siri reported. “Please connect to a network for service.”

Barker stopped walking to stare at his screen. A coed behind him bumped into his pack.

“Seriously, dude?” she sneered and shouldered her way past him.

“He’s the King of the World,” Michael called out as the woman passed.

She shot both a glare over her shoulder and kept walking. Michael noticed the Greek letters tattooed on the small of her back above the top of her yoga pants.

“Classy,” he muttered.

“I don’t have service at all now,” said Barker. “All I can see are the alerts I read to you, and they’re thirty minutes old. Now the phone is just cycling, searching for a signal.”

Michael raised a finger. “Hang on.” He tapped his screen several times, swiped, and then held it up to Barker.

Barker stared at it in confusion, not following. “What?” he said, sounding irritated.

Michael wiggled the phone. “Wi-Fi. Log into campus Wi-Fi. It’s working.”

Barker tapped through the screens to adjust his settings and tapped on the Wi-Fi. He didn’t thank Michael for the suggestion.

“Why are you in a bad mood?” asked Michael. “You seem like you’re in a bad mood. Am I reading that right?”

Barker lifted his eyes from his phone and exhaled. He saw the genuine concern in his friend’s face and shrugged. “Yeah. You know that girl I was talking to?”

“Becca?”

“Yeah. I don’t think she’s into me.”

Michael tilted his head to one side. “Why?”

“Long story,” Barker said.

He didn’t want to talk about Becca, but he couldn’t stop thinking about her.

“We have time,” said Michael. “We could go to B Plate, grab some food, and you can tell me about it…her.”

Barker was hungry. “Okay. I’m good with that.”

***

Michael dipped his French fry into a cup of ranch dressing. He always ate the same thing. A cheese quesadilla, French fries with ranch dip, and a Caesar salad.

“Go ahead,” he said, swirling another fry in the dip before shoveling it into his mouth. “Tell me more.”

“Like I said, I took her to Diddy Riese.”

“Your favorite place.”

Barker nodded. “Yeah. I’m in line, and I let her go ahead of me and order first.”

“Like Dub suggested.”

“Yeah,” said Barker, running his fingers through his hair and patting the thinning crown on the top of his head.

Dub, their third roommate, was the expert with women. Well, by comparison. Michael couldn’t get within five feet of a woman without melting into goo. Barker was convinced Michael had never carried on a conversation with a woman that didn’t involve engineering, math, or ordering ranch dressing.

By contrast, Barker had no trouble talking to women. His issue was what he said when he talked. The middle of three children, Barker had learned that sarcasm and hyperbole were the best way to get attention. He’d never learned women didn’t always like one, the other, or both, when getting to know someone. Worse still, he behaved like the runt of the litter at the dinner bowl. He lacked social graces, despite being a proper Southerner from North Carolina, and took care of his needs without thinking about others.

Dub had a successful relationship with a woman and he was dating out of his league. Keri Monk was a catch by everyone’s standards. How Dub had managed to snow her into loving him was beyond anyone who saw them together. It didn’t hurt that he treated her like a queen and typically put her first.

Barker constantly teased Dub, telling him he was whipped and a slave to his woman. Dub blew it off, and instead of shooting back with condescension, he genuinely offered to help Barker learn how to talk to women in a way that led to more than a random hookup.

His first tip was that he should always let the woman go first: walk through a door, take her seat, order her food. Among the many suggestions Dub had given during their time on campus, that first one had stuck.

“So she orders her ice cream sandwich,” said Barker, “and—”

Michael held up a fry. “What did she get?”

“White chocolate and strawberry cheesecake chunk,” said Barker, “but that doesn’t matter.”

“Sure it matters,” said Michael. “Girls who don’t eat aren’t good for you. She eats. That’s good. Full-fat ice cream and two cookies? That’s really good.”

Barker stared at his roommate without expression. He bit the inside of his cheek.

Michael’s eyes widened with expectation. “Go ahead. She ordered her ice cream sandwich…”

“She orders her sandwich, and I tell her I’m going to pay for it. She ignores me and moves to the register to pay. Before I can stop her, or even order my sandwich, she’s handing over a ten and telling the cashier to pay for mine too.”

Michael stopped mid-chew and narrowed his eyes. “What’s the problem?”

“She didn’t let me pay,” said Barker. “If she was into me, she’d have let me pay. She didn’t. She paid for herself.”

Michael wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and placed his hands palms down on the table. He stared at his roommate for a minute.

Barker shrugged defensively. “What?”

“I’m mildly autistic,” said Michael. “I have trouble with social cues; I’m inept with girls. I’m barely functional in large groups. I’ve never been on a date, never hooked up.”

“And? What’s your point, Michael?”

“You’re more of a moron than I am.”

Barker felt the heat in his face and clenched his jaw. He was baring his soul and Michael was making fun of him. He sat back against the chair and folded his arms across his chest.

“Really,” Michael said. “You’re clueless. Even I know she likes you and I’ve never met her. She paid for your food. That’s better than letting you pay for hers. She. Paid. For. You. She wouldn’t do that for a guy she doesn’t like.”

Barker’s muscles relaxed. “You think so?”

“If you don’t believe me, ask Dub. Or ask Keri. She’ll tell you. From everything I’ve read online about dating—”

Barker laughed. “Read online?”

“The internet is a valuable tool,” said Michael. “You can learn about anything there.”

“I know what the internet is, Mike.”

“How would I know?” said Michael. “You’re a moron when it comes to girls.”

“Women,” said Barker. “I’m a moron when it comes to women.”

Michael took a sip of his water, and his phone chirped. Barker’s phone followed with a ding; then a cascade of chimes cascaded through the dining hall.

Barker checked an alert in all capital letters on his screen:

BRUIN ALERT. ALL CLASSES CANCELLED BECAUSE OF FIRE THREAT.

CHAPTER 6

Friday, October 17, 2025

Angeles National Forest

The pain shot through Sam McNeil’s leg from his ankle to his knee. He grabbed at it, squeezing his calf with clawing fingers. He pressed his teeth together, his temples flexed, and he squeezed his eyes shut. None of it helped lessen the bolts of electricity sparking from the top of his foot.

“What can I do?” asked Loretta, her body trembling despite the ambient heat. “What can I do?”

She was kneeling beside him on the edge of the trail. Behind them was a thick root that Sam hadn’t seen as they’d run from the fire. She coughed from the wisps of smoke filtering past them.

Sam groaned. He was on his back, lying on the bed of leaves and dirt that composed the trail. He was drenched in sweat. The bottoms of his feet were burned, his knees bruised, his palms were scratched and bleeding. Sam couldn’t feel any of it. All his focus was on managing the sharp throb in his leg.

He remembered the breathing exercises he and Loretta had learned during birthing classes. He’d tried for so long to forget those lessons, the deep gut ache that accompanied any memory of those five months, two days, three hours, and two minutes.

This pain was more acute, more tangible, and it brought with it the need for any coping mechanism Sam could pull from his mind. He took a long, slow pull of air. He exhaled.

He opened his eyes to the sting of sweat and saw the terror in Loretta’s eyes; she was focused on something behind him.

Sam followed her stare to the approaching flames. They were towering, climbing the tree trunks, and swarming effortlessly to the branches. Foliage combusted and burned, curling into black remnants of leaves and needles.

Loretta coughed again. “Can you move?”

Sam rolled onto his side and tried pushing himself to his feet. His right leg screamed at him when he tried to put any weight on his foot. He balanced on his left and reached for his wife.

She draped an arm over his shoulder, holding it there with as tight a grip as Sam imagined she could muster. She wrapped her other arm around his waist and drew him close to her body.

Singed and barefoot, the two of them ambled away from the flames as fast as they could. They’d made it another three hundred yards along the trail, slowly descending, when the heat from the surrounding fire was too much.

Sam signaled for Loretta to stop. He pulled away from her hold, steadying himself against a tree. He slid down against the trunk, the bark scratching his back. He sank to the thick cradle of roots at the ground, sighed, and motioned to his wife to come close.

Sensing what her husband was about to suggest, Loretta trembled. Her chin quivered. Tears streaked down her face, leaving clean trails in the layer of soot that caked her objectively beautiful face.

Sam spoke loudly, above the noise of the fire. White balls of spit webbed at the corners of his mouth as he told the love of his life to leave him there, to run for her life and escape the fire that would consume them both if she didn’t.

She crouched beside him, her fingers grabbing thick wads of the thin waffled fabric at his chest. She shook her head. She coughed from the deep, uneven breaths she was fighting.

“I can’t go,” he said. “I’m holding you back. Go without me.”

Loretta refused. The fire inched closer.

Sam wiped the sweat from his eyes with one hand and used the other to tightly grip Loretta’s bicep. The flames had jumped from the spent canopy of one tree to the fertile one of the next. Flaming limbs were falling; burning debris drifted and landed on the ground near them.

He took his other hand and pushed her back from his body, locking his eyes with hers. She tried avoiding his stare, but he held it and spoke firmly.

“Go get me help, then,” he said. “I can’t make it if you don’t try to get me help.”

Loretta flinched. Sam knew part of her rational mind had to know he was manipulating her, but he could sense the emotional part took the bait.

She nodded emphatically. Her eyes darted past him toward the path away from the flames.

“Go now,” he said. “Before it’s too late.”

Loretta wiped her nose with the back of her hand and leaned in to kiss him. He tasted the salt and the ash on her lips. He resisted the urge to pull her closer, hold her in his arms one last time, and tell her he loved her.

“I’ll be back,” she said. “I’ll hurry.”

She got to her feet and scurried away from him, half running and half walking. She hesitated, perhaps reconsidering. Then she disappeared beyond a cluster of brush and evaporated in the smoky haze that was beginning to burn Sam’s nose and throat.

He pushed himself up against the tree and braced himself for what was coming. The superheated air warbled and danced in front of him. The fire crept closer.

The heat stung his already raw feet. His ankle throbbed with pain.

This was not how Sam imagined his death. But it made sense when he added it to the film reel of life experiences that flickered through his mind in what he knew to be his final moments.

So much of his life had been the opposite of what he’d pictured it becoming. A poor child with little hope of escaping his bleak surroundings, he’d surprised himself with his intellect and aptitude for numbers. His plan to go to a city college and live at home were undermined by a college recruiter from out of state who saw his potential. The chance to work on Wall Street ended when he chose love over money. Loretta had been the best thing that had ever happened to him. She’d always supported him, lifted him up, been his advocate and his partner.

She’d helped him through the miscarriage that threatened to sink him into a deep depression. Somehow, she’d been the strong one. She’d been the backbone and the glue and every other metaphor he could think of to describe someone quietly heroic.

They’d moved to southern California for a lucrative new job and found a perfect bungalow within walking distance of the beach. They’d decorated it with comfortable furniture, coffee-table books, and pictures of their travels.

They’d joined exclusive, little-known clubs and spent Sundays drinking eight-dollar cups of coffee or eating fifteen-dollar kale salads. There was yoga before work and Sunday nights watching the sun setting on the edge of the Pacific. Life was unexpected and, for the most part, it was good.

Now it was over. The dry heat threatened to suffocate Sam. He took shorter, shallow breaths and then decided that was working against him. Was he really going to try to save his lungs so he could burn to death? He couldn’t imagine a more agonizing death than the one he felt coming in brutal waves that toasted everything around him.

He chuckled to himself as the moments in his life rolled through his mind. He and Loretta had planned for the end, or thought they had. They’d imagined themselves having time to enact their escape from whatever apocalypse came their way. Loretta called it their golden ticket.

He sucked in another hesitant breath, and his chest burned. He wasn’t sure if it was the air itself or the lack of oxygen. His thoughts drifted to the conversation they’d had about the end of times and the need to prepare.

For some reason unknown to Sam, Loretta had become obsessed with dystopian literature. It had begun with Orwell, Huxley, and McCarthy, and had grown to include Hopf, Rudolph, Craven, and some series of books about a cartoonish alpha male named Marcus Battle.

She’d insisted they start preparing for the inevitable. He’d resisted at first but came around. They stocked up on canned goods, water, were planning to go solar so they could escape the grid, and joined various Facebook groups to learn more about the process.

Then they were invited to a secret group that did all the prepping for them. They had, for a hefty price, supplied that golden ticket. It was tucked into a metal lockbox in their master bedroom closet. It was useless now, at least for him.

For a moment, he reconsidered his decision and thought about trying to chase his wife down the path toward possible safety. Sadly, it wasn’t an option now. The flames had jumped past him in the canopy above his head and blocked any possible escape. This was it. This was where it ended. In that instant, Sam made a decision to end his life on his terms, as much as he could negotiate with an all-consuming inferno bearing down on him.

He sucked in a deep breath of hot, toxic air, filling his lungs with acrolein, a gas heavier than air. Sam gagged and reflexively coughed. His eyes teared and he grabbed at his chest. His throat began to swell and spasm as he took a final breath. His chest burned, and his lungs began filling with fluid while his trachea closed.

The pain in his leg, and everywhere else in his body, evaporated into the ether as he lost focus and then consciousness. His final coherent thought was of his wife. He envisioned her in the arms of a rescuer, safe and free from harm.

Sam McNeil was dead before the flames returned his body to the ground, leaving only his blackened bones behind.

CHAPTER 7

Friday, October 17, 2025

Brentwood, California

Ritz was conscious. Each breath brought with it a jab of pain from his ribs, but he could move and was fighting through the discomfort. There was too much to do to think about his own injuries.

Three firefighters and two civilians were dead. They’d died when an explosion from the liquor store launched them from the roof they were trying to ventilate. Punching holes in roofs was frequently a necessary part of fighting a fire. By giving the smoke and flames a place to go, up through the roof and into the air, it could prevent them from spreading horizontally and lessen the ultimate damage. But in that instant when a new source of oxygen met the flames seeking fuel, there was the danger of a quick burst of energy.

Ritz took a last breath of oxygen and yanked the man from his face. He pulled on his mask, his gloves, and set his helmet back on his head. Phyllis was standing in front of him with her hands on her hips.

“You should rest,” she said. “It’s getting worse.”

Ritz shook her off. “That’s why I’m not resting.” He winced as he stood and adjusted his regulator, moving past her toward the thicker gray smoke that obscured the long block of burned and melted buildings stretching a long city block. He carried a pack over one shoulder with first aid gear.

He found White, who was directing the final attack on the strip of businesses. Most of the flames were out. The attack teams were hitting hot spots with their lines, putting out intermittent flares. It was as much a hellscape as anything Ritz had seen in his decade in the department. Sirens wailed in the distance.

While the attacks team worked the lines, other men and women were taking oxygen, dousing themselves with cold water, kneeling in prayer. The bodies of the dead were still on the ground, covered in tarps. Ritz counted six.

“I thought there were five dead,” he said to White, motioning toward the collection of tarps.

Surprised to see Ritz standing next to him, James White shook his head. “Three of ours, and three civilians. There were two women in the nail shop a few feet from each other. One probably never knew the other was there.”

Ritz exhaled slowly. “What can I do?” he asked. “And don’t tell me to go rest. That’s not happening.”

White frowned, the arc of his mustache accentuating his displeasure with Ritz’s obstinance. His radio squawked, and he held it to his ear. He eyed Ritz and held up a finger.

“The fire jumped,” he said after listening. “It’s burning another strip on the opposite block. There might be people trapped. Power is compromised. Substations are popping. You want to help, follow command and get back in there.”

Ritz shrugged the gear higher onto his shoulder and headed off toward the thicker smoke beyond the engines parked in front of him.

He stepped over a supply line, his boots splashing in a puddle of water collecting underneath the line’s connection to a truck. Someone tugged on his arm, and he shifted awkwardly to find Phyllis at his side.

“You’re not waiting for your partner?” she asked, her voice hoarse but loud enough to carry over the rumble of the engines.

“I didn’t think about it,” he said. “I’m working.”

There was a scream ahead of them, piercing the dingy yellow haze that hung at eye level. Ritz checked his locator alarm again and waded through the smoggy air and found himself in front of another strip of adjoined buildings.

A firefighter was holding a woman back from the curb. She was reaching for the building, her body weak at the knees, calling out for a name Ritz couldn’t understand amongst all the other noise. The firefighter seemed to be doing a somewhat good job of calming her. Ritz knew that confusion and panic was contagious at fire scenes. Order within the chaos was paramount to survival.

He pivoted to the left and saw three paramedics prepping to enter one of the businesses. It was a poke restaurant. Ritz waved Phyllis to follow him to the group. As he approached, he searched for overhead power lines.

“We’re with you,” he said to one EMT. “You got someone trapped?”

The lead, a firefighter with a hand line, nodded through his mask. He pointed directions to Ritz, Phyllis, and the other two firefighters. “Power’s off,” he said. “Gas too.”

The group moved toward the entrance to the restaurant. Smoke was pouring through the open front door.

The lead hesitated. “We’ve got two or three in here,” he said. “Intel is that they’re in the kitchen. That’s in the back of the space and to the left. Remember, God gave firefighters ears so they know when to back out. You feel the heat on your ears, back out. Got it?”

The others nodded. Ritz adjusted his respirator and made sure it had a good seal around his face. The adrenaline was amped enough now that he couldn’t feel the pain in his sides. He was focused and ready to deploy. He checked to see Phyllis was on his hip, and he nodded at her.

Together, the team filed into the building. They stayed low, hunched over at the waist. The lead was spraying a path with his handline. But the heat and smoke intensified nonetheless. Everything more than three feet off the floor was enveloped by the smoke.

Ritz knew they had only a few minutes to find the victims. Much longer than that and the toxic fumes would kill them if the flames didn’t. He checked his respirator. It showed twenty-seven minutes. That meant he had seventeen until he’d need a bottle change. He was good to go. They’d be out in the street long before that if they could help it.

Although he’d done this countless times in the last decade, the blackness of a search never got easier. His pulse thumped in his neck and in his ears. He worked to breathe slowly and evenly, but it was tough. He searched in the dark with fifty pounds of gear on his body in an uncomfortable position, focusing on his training.

Their ears straining to listen for coughs or cries, the five firefighters stuck together, moving methodically in a left-hand search. They crept along the perimeter, feeling with their hands and their boots.

“Table!” one firefighter yelled, loud but muffled.

“Chair!” yelled another.

Phyllis shone a flashlight in the space in front of her. It did little but illuminate and reflect the thickening smoke. Ritz had one on the top of his helmet. It was useless.

Three minutes into the sweep, the lead called, “Doors!”

Visibility was slightly better once Ritz pushed through the swinging kitchen door. His mask was fogged, but through the smoke he made out a wide kitchen prep table. Beyond his field of vision someone was coughing. No, two people. The coughs were overlapping.

It was to his right, but the lead was maneuvering to the left. Ritz split from the group.

“Going right,” he called out, and Phyllis stayed with him, as good partners did, until the coughing was next to them. It was next to them, wasn’t it? Maybe it wasn’t. He couldn’t tell now. Ritz spun around in confusion. Had he lost his sense of direction?

“Hello!” Ritz called out. “We’re here. Do you see us?”

He didn’t see the man or woman coughing, but something tugged on his leg. It startled him at first and he jerked away. Then he squatted to the ground and saw a man curled into the fetal position, trying to cover his mouth. His body spasmed when he coughed again. Next to him was another man, an older one, who was unconscious.

“I’ve got two!” called Ritz. “One is unresponsive.”

Phyllis crouched beside him and pointed to the conscious man. “I’ll get him.”

They helped the man to his feet, and Phyllis wrapped her arm around the man’s back. She lifted one of his arms over her shoulder and gripped it with her free, gloved hand.

“I know my way out,” she said and moved toward the swinging kitchen door.

Behind him, Ritz could hear another firefighter approaching. He reached out and grabbed the man’s slight wrists. He was slender. His face was long and gaunt, his jaw slack, and his mouth was open. Still, he wasn’t easy to pick up. Ritz managed to lift the man up around his waist and essentially lift him over his shoulder.

He wrapped his arms tightly around the backs of man’s legs, which hung over the front of his body, and he turned to find his way out. The other firefighter was there.

“I’ll guide,” he said, his voice clear despite the mask.

Ritz nodded and moved forward. The man, despite being lean, was still heavy. Dead weight was exponentially more difficult to carry than someone who was conscious.

Ritz pushed through the swinging kitchen door, standing upright. The smoke was heavier in his face and made the movement more difficult. He banged his knee into the side of a table and nearly lost his balance. The firefighter in front of him steadied him and helped readjust the victim on his shoulder. It was darker in the restaurant now, the smoke heavier. Strobes of orange and red light flickered through the veil. It was hotter too. There was fire above them now, licking at the ceiling like a tidal surge on a beach. They were running out of time.

The two firefighters left in the kitchen called out they’d found someone, a third victim. They were on their way.

Ritz tried keeping his focus on his task, on fighting through the now searing pain in his chest. He hadn’t noticed it before. But now, as he moved closer to the exit and began thinking about the tasks ahead, the pain swelled.

His guide reached back and touched his shoulder, then gripped the thick fabric and tugged before letting go. He was barely close enough for Ritz to see him through the smoke. The heat was on his ears now. There was fire close and to his left. Glass popped and shattered. Ritz could hear his own breathing in his ears, taste the beads of sweat that had dripped from his nose into his mouth.

Although he could barely see the reflective tape on the back of the guide in front of him, he trudged forward, banging into another table. They worked the edge of the room, retracing the path they’d taken to get to the kitchen. The others called their positions as they entered the dining room. They weren’t far behind.

A sudden burst of flames shot toward him from one side, bursting through the curtain of black smoke, startling Ritz. He tightened his grip around the back of the victim’s thighs and steadied himself. His legs were jittery and his lower back ached. A sudden, jabbing pain at his ribs took his breath away, and he seized. He stood still for a moment to catch his breath and exhale into the mask, but he had to keep moving. The man he was carrying was dying.

Another wave of heat blasted him from his left, and tendrils of flames curled out from within the black plumes of smoke that undulated above him. Something bounced off his helmet and to the floor. His vision blurred for an instant from the shock of it, and he glanced up. The ceiling was disintegrating. More chunks rained down on him, hitting his boots and his arms. He swung around, trying to keep his unprotected charge free from the falling debris. The shouts from the two firefighters behind him were louder now. They were moving more quickly than he.

“Get out!” one of them called out. “We’ve got to move!”

Ritz winced and grunted toward the hazy bright light ahead of him. The dark, backlit outline of his guide stood a few feet ahead of him at the entrance. Ritz leaned forward, letting his momentum carry him the rest of the short distance to the exit. He maneuvered past a chair and stumbled free of the building. The two firefighters behind him knocked into him as they emerged from the restaurant. The lead firefighter still had the hand line. He was spraying any threats in front of him, and clouds of steam billowed from the targets. The pressure from a blast of the water hit the back of Ritz’s legs when he cleared the threshold, a final nudge toward safety.

As soon as he was in the smoke-shrouded daylight, two firefighters helped peel the unconscious man from his shoulder. They laid him flat on the ground and immediately began the rhythmic procedures of resuscitation.

The other victim, a woman, appeared worse off. She had burns on her face and hands, and she wasn’t breathing. From the looks of the work a medic was performing, her pulse was absent too.

Ritz bent over at his waist, breathing in what was left of the oxygen in his tank. His gloved hands were on his knees. The tank was heavy on his back. His ears stung. He peeled the mask from his face and stood up. The rumble of the engines and hiss of spraying attack lines were suddenly deafening.

Using the front of an engine to balance himself, he walked away from the scene and into cleaner air. He found a cooler on the side of the truck and pinched the valve to pour Gatorade into an empty plastic cup. His side ached, and his lower back was tightening. He stepped over another five-inch supply line and removed his gloves. His fingers were stiff, and he flexed them, one hand at a time, trying to loosen the joints.

Clear of the smoke, he took a deep breath of air and arched his back. His muscles tightened and stretched. He was exhausted; breathing deeply caused him to hitch. His ribs, if not broken, were definitely bruised.

Ritz raised the cup and gulped until it was empty. The chill of the fruit-punch-flavored drink traveled down his throat, providing relief. He glanced to his left and saw a half dozen others recuperating. They were taking more oxygen, dousing themselves with water. They’d pulled off their jackets to cool their sweat-drenched bodies.

Ritz freed himself of his tank, unbuttoned his jacket, and shrugged it from his shoulders. He sank onto the curb and used the back of his arm to wipe the grime from his face. He closed his eyes and took another breath. A voice interrupted his moment. It was Lardie.

“Hey,” said the tall, prototypical first responder. His face was streaked with char, his helmet loosened at his chin, and his coat was open. He carried an axe in one hand and a cup of Gatorade in the other. The red juice sloshed and spilled over the plastic rim as Lardie strode across the pavement.

Ritz nodded but said nothing. His teeth hurt; his jaw ached; his head pounded. He didn’t want to talk.

Lardie held out the cup. “You okay? Heard you got hurt.”

Ritz shrugged and took the drink, which he downed in a couple of swigs. “Thanks.” His throat hurt when he spoke. His voice sounded alien, scratchy and barely louder than a whisper.

“White said we’re getting a handle on it,” said Lardie. “Turning a corner, I think. We got guys on the far block trying to stop the flames from jumping again.”

Ritz followed Lardie’s eyes and saw the heavy spray of water dousing the corner of another strip. Lardie was still talking, but the sound of rotor blades overhead was drowning him out now.

News helicopters hovered in a flock a thousand feet up. He could only imagine what the local reporters and anchors were saying about the fatalities. Unlike a lot of scenes, he hadn’t noticed any cameras on the ground. He imagined the perimeter was wider than normal.

He thought about telling Lardie he couldn’t hear him, but he was too exhausted to make the effort. He swallowed, tasting the sick combination of artificial flavoring and ash.

Then the radio blared. He could hear that. It was close to him, loud, and the call was urgent. The expression on Lardie’s face changed, and he knew his colleague had heard the call too.

The fire had jumped again.

CHAPTER 8

Friday, October 17, 2025

Santa Monica, California

Danny was the last one out of the restaurant. He held the door for Arthur and let it slam behind him as he stepped back outside. Before he saw the smoke, he saw the crowds of people staring at it.

A granite-colored column of smoke rose into the sky, thickening from the rocketing plume that rose from a power substation two blocks away. The underside of the widening mushroom of smoke glowed a fiery orange that appeared to strobe and shift.

All the surrounding buildings were dark, and the occupants had spilled onto the sidewalks and street to watch the growing inferno that had snapped off the power.

Sirens blared in the distance, and hovering in the sky above the fray, Danny counted six helicopters. It reminded him of the live feed on his phone’s news application. He thumbed his phone to life, tapping open the app.

The app opened, but when he tapped the live video, it wouldn’t play. The signal was flashing between one bar and no service. The restaurant Wi-Fi was down since the power was out. He was about to slip the useless brick back into his pocket when the phone chimed as a text message box appeared on the display. He didn’t recognize the number. He took his eyes from the chaos unfolding around him and unlocked the device.

DANNY. HEY. I NEED TO TALK TO YOU WHEN YOU GET A SEC. COULD YOU PLEASE GIVE ME A CALL? HOW ARE THINGS IN LA? THIS IS MY CELL.

His jaw clenched when he read the end of the message. His blood pressure rose, and his chest tightened.

THANKS, MAN. DEREK.

Derek. Freaking Derek. Wife-stealing, home-wrecking, gazillionaire Derek.

Danny read the message again. It didn’t do anything to quell the nausea roiling in his gut. He read it a third time. Its contents didn’t change.

If he were being truthful to himself, he couldn’t blame Derek entirely for the devolution of his marriage. In some perverse way, he actually felt sorry for the guy. Derek was now responsible for Danny’s ex. He was now the one who had to put up with the overspending and the lies of omission that morphed into bold deception. The overspending wasn’t an issue for Derek, but Danny knew the dishonesty would eventually become an issue. Tigers didn’t change their stripes, even ones with fake boobs and lip injections. Especially ones with fake boobs and lip injections. But it could be that even the lies wouldn’t get to the guy. Danny figured Derek was all about having her on his arm at big fancy NorCal functions and didn’t care about much else.

From what he knew of Derek, the guy was loaded. He was a Stanford or Cal grad, he couldn’t remember which, and had made a bundle of money selling some invention to a big tech firm. Now he spent his money funding other people’s ideas.

At least that was what Google told him Derek did. He didn’t know from his ex. She just up and left one day, leaving Danny in a lurch. He couldn’t afford the rent, the cable, the electricity, or the car payment without her income. And he sure couldn’t afford the debt on the credit cards she’d maxed out.

With the help of Derek’s money, a fancy lawyer with a degree from Cal or Stanford had browbeaten Danny into giving up the modest house they’d shared and taking on the majority of the debt.

To afford a place to live, and the massive debt he’d incurred, he took a second job as a cook at the diner. When he fell asleep at his first job, the one that supplied him with health insurance and a retirement plan, he’d been fired.

Danny had never been one to shirk his responsibilities. In his most self-reflective moments, he might admit that he could have been a more attentive husband to a woman who needed all his attention all the time. But throughout his life, he thought of himself as a stand-up guy who did what he said and said what he did. That was why filing for bankruptcy was the hardest thing he’d ever done.

It had cost him dearly. He’d had trouble finding a new, cheaper apartment. He couldn’t get a cable company to install equipment, and he’d offered to sell his kidney as collateral for having the lights on in his one-bedroom efficiency.

Yet as bleak as his life had become, as difficult as it was to get up in the morning sometimes, he was making it. He still had his car, an old Volkswagen GTI that protested every time he twisted the key in the ignition. He also had Maggie, a mixed Lab who was smarter than his ex. She was more loyal too. She greeted him every evening when he got home as if he were the most important person in the world. It was a little thing, but it was something sunny in the darkness that had shrouded his life since he’d succumbed to the she-devil’s charms and then fallen prey to her evil ways.

He held his thumbs over the keyboard that filled the bottom half of his screen. He considered a half-dozen different responses. He thought about using emojis instead of words. Then he tapped a single letter so in case Derek was awaiting a reply with the text box open, he’d see the little response bubbles populate. He imagined Derek staring at his phone, waiting for the reply that would never come. It was juvenile, but Danny smiled privately and tucked his phone back into his pocket.

The crowds were dispersing. Clumps of people, however, still stood outside the diner. The plumes of smoke dotted the city in front of them like smoldering candles on a cake. Danny tried counting them, but he couldn’t tell where one fire began and another ended.

“I’m clocking out,” said Arthur. He’d appeared at Danny’s side without him noticing. “Ain’t no sense in sticking around with the power out. It’s closing time anyhow.”

Danny glanced over his shoulder at the restaurant and noticed his reflection staring back at him from the glass entrance. It was dark inside the diner.

“Who’s cleaning up?” he asked Arthur.

A broad grin spread across his face. He shook his head. “Brother, I’ve cleaned up at the end of my shift every day for the last ten years.” He nodded at the columns of smoke. “Some of that is near where I stay. I gotta go make sure my stuff isn’t burning up. Somebody else can clean the griddle today.”

He slipped his grease-stained apron over his head, balled it up, and slapped it onto Danny’s chest like a quarterback handing off a football. He slapped Danny on the back and took off in his long, deliberate stride toward the distant smoke. He stuffed his hands into his pockets, crossed the street, and disappeared into the crowd.

Danny gave the smoke a final glance and scanned the crowd. He spun on a heel and walked back into the diner. It was warmer than usual. The air-conditioning, which kept the open grill and oil fryers from turning the place into an oven, wasn’t working. Danny tossed the apron into a tall hamper in the corner. He walked back to his spot by the fryers and took stock of the place. There were abandoned plates of half-eaten food on most of the tables, and the grill was a mess. Thankfully, because the grill was gas, he could keep it hot enough to clean it.

He took a ketchup bottle filled with water and squirted it onto the grill’s surface. It sizzled, the water beaded and steamed, and he grabbed a clean spatula with his other hand.

He scraped the grill’s surface, alternately adding more water, loosening the crusty remnants of the day’s offerings. He worked the char into small piles and then shoveled them into a catch basin at the edge of the grill. He jumped when he heard a woman’s voice.

“You got stuck with it?”

It was Claudia, the waitress, hostess, and part-time cashier. She had three plates stacked like pancakes in one hand and a tray with glasses and flatware perched atop the other. She glided across the floor on the other side of the bar.

Danny shrugged. “I guess so. Arthur needed to check on his place. I don’t know where the other guys went. It’s no big deal. I’ve got nowhere else to be.”

“What about that puppy of yours?”

Danny scraped at a tough piece of crud in the center of the grill. He squirted another dose of water and steam puffed in his face. “Maggie will be okay. She’s crated, so—”

“You put your dog in a crate?” Claudia cut in. “That’s cruel. I could never put my puppy in a box. It’s like prison.” She harrumphed and disappeared into the kitchen. Danny rolled his eyes. She didn’t know what she was talking about.

Claudia could be counted as an expert on whether or not to get the fries, how filling the pancake breakfast was, if the soup du jour was good on any given day, and how to calculate a generous tip in her head. She was smart, sassy, good at every job in the place, but she didn’t know a thing about Maggie and what the dog liked or didn’t like.

What did Claudia know of prison, anyhow? Danny grunted as he dug the hard muck from the grill’s smooth surface. Another squirt of the water loosened the remnants, and he made a wide sweep across the three-foot-wide, rectangular metal hotplate.

The door chimed, and without checking to see who it was, Danny let them know service had stopped for the day.

“Sorry,” he called out, “we’re closed a bit early today. No power.”

“I’m not hungry,” said Arthur, his voice booming through the otherwise empty space.

Danny paused mid-scrape. “You’re back?”

Arthur nodded and pushed his way behind the counter. “I couldn’t let you do all of the work.”

“Claudia’s here,” Danny said.

Arthur laughed. “Then I definitely couldn’t leave you alone. She’ll make you think you killed the Pope by the time it’s all said and done.”

“I heard that,” Claudia called from the kitchen.

Arthur lowered his voice. “I never met a more righteous woman than Claudia, and my mother was the lead singer in the AME church choir. So that’s saying something.”

Danny chuckled and moved over to make room. “Grill’s almost done. How’s your place?”

“Fine,” Arthur said. “I’m a few blocks from the closest fire. But it’s bad out there. It’s like someone took a blowtorch to the city.”

That painted a mental picture for Danny: the image of someone flying low over the southland in a helicopter, hanging free from an open bay door and sweeping a blowtorch across the rooftops, setting everything ablaze. He pictured Derek doing the honors, or even better, his ex. She’d taken a torch to his life, so why not large swaths of Los Angeles?

Claudia appeared from the kitchen and moved over to the men cleaning the area around the grill. She planted her hands on her hips, tapping her sides with her trigger fingers. Danny noticed the slightest crow’s feet fanning out from her eyes towards her temples. He’d never noticed them before. He’d always been too busy. Maybe Claudia was older than he’d thought. Or possibly she’d lived a harder life than he’d imagined.

“Can I get some help with the dishes?” she asked. “It’s a mess back there, the only light is from the red emergency bulbs that connect to the alarm system, and the dishwashers are all gone.”

Danny checked with Arthur, who nodded, before agreeing. “Sure. Give us five. We’ve got to finish this little bit.”

Claudia flashed a smile, deepening the crow’s feet. “Okay. That’ll give me time to clear the rest of these tables.”

She spun around, sliding her hand across the counter, and moved around to the center of the restaurant. As she passed the door, it flung open and a harried woman drenched in sweat stumbled inside. She was breathless, her ice blue eyes wide with fear. Her hair, sapped of color so that it appeared white, was pulled back in a tight bun. Her thin T-shirt clung to her body, not only accentuating the perspiration but also her muscular frame. She looked every bit the athlete.

“Everything’s on fire,” she said. “And it’s coming closer.”

No sooner had she finished her breathy sentence than the door swung open again. This time it was a firefighter, fully clad in turnout gear. His face was red and glistening. His hard expression warned of what they already knew from the woman. “I’m going to need to ask you to evacuate,” said the firefighter. His voice was firm but not overly aggressive.

“Really?” asked Claudia. She was standing at a table, washcloth frozen in mid-swipe. She motioned toward the street with her chin. “The fires are—”

“The winds have accelerated,” said the firefighter. “They’re shifting. We’re losing containment.”

“It’s crazy out there,” said the woman. “People are starting to panic. That’s why I ran in here. Out of the smoke. Away from the people.”

“That’s another reason we’re evacuating,” said the firefighter. “For our safety and for yours. So please—”

“We’ve got work to do,” interrupted Claudia. “We can’t just leave the place.”

Beyond the firefighter and the athletic woman, through the glass entrance, it was hazy now. It hadn’t been twenty minutes earlier when Danny had started cleaning the grill. The controlled swarms of onlookers had devolved into random clusters of directionless lemmings waving their arms and darting from one spot to another. Danny got the sense Claudia didn’t fully appreciate the situation.

The firefighter took a step closer to her. He spoke with his gloved hands in a measured, reasoned tone. His face softened to the expression of a man pleading for compliance. “Ma’am, I’m not asking. I’m telling you that you need to leave.”

Claudia’s expression shifted. Her brow furrowed. She swallowed hard, and her eyes bounced from Danny to Arthur and then to the woman standing next to the firefighter.

“Where do we go?” she asked. “If we can’t stay?”

“Home,” said the firefighter. “As long as home isn’t in this immediate area.”

Claudia laughed sardonically. “Like any of us could afford to live around here.”

“Hey, speak for yourself,” said Arthur. “I live a few blocks up.” He said to the firefighter, “It was safe a few minutes ago.”

“That was a few minutes ago,” said the firefighter. “As I said, things are changing rapidly. I can’t stand here talking about it any longer. We need to go.”

He stepped back toward the door and pushed it open. He stood there holding it as the sounds from the outside filtered in with wisps of smoke. There was yelling, arguing, crying, and suddenly loud wails and the chirp of emergency sirens.

Danny wiped his hands on his apron but kept it tied around his waist as he followed the firefighter’s orders and headed toward the exit. Arthur was a step behind him as they crossed the threshold onto the wide sidewalk in front of the diner. They stepped to the side when Claudia and the woman pushed their way through. The firefighter was the last out.

“I can’t have you standing here,” he said. “You need to vacate the area.”

“Vacate,” Danny mumbled. “I’ve heard that before.”

“Anybody got a car?” asked Claudia. “I take the bus.”

“Danny’s got one,” said Arthur. “A VW, right?”

Danny shook his head. “I didn’t drive. I took the bus too. Trying to save on gas. It’s too expensive right now.”

The woman wiped sweat from both sides of her nose. “I have a car. It’s a couple of blocks from here.”

Danny and his coworkers exchanged glances and shrugged. “Okay,” said Danny. “We accept.”

The woman twisted her lips to one side. Still, she waved them to follow her and started speed walking away from the chaos.

“I’m Gilda,” she said over her shoulder. She was leading them upstream. Despite the apparent evacuation order, everyone other than them appeared to be moving toward the smoke and heat.

“I’m Danny,” he said. Claudia and Arthur introduced themselves. As a group, they weaved their way amongst the thinning crowds.

“Why are you going with us?” Claudia asked Arthur. “Your place is back the other way.”

“If the man is telling me my place isn’t safe, I don’t want to be there. This woman up here,” Arthur said, pointing at Gilda’s back, “if she can get us to a safe place that isn’t going to burn down, I’m all in.”

Danny hurried to catch up with Gilda. There was something about her he recognized. It was her intensity. She was like his ex that way.

“Hey,” he said, “how far is your car?”

“Just around the corner,” she said. “It’s a pickup.”

“A truck?” Danny asked in a tone that must have betrayed his surprise.

“You have a problem with that?”

“No,” Danny said. “Just didn’t have you pegged as—”

“Having a truck?”

Danny demurred. “I guess.”

She was walking faster now, pushing Danny to keep pace. He was sweating now despite the stiffening breeze that came from the ocean one moment and the hills the next. His calves were straining.

“What did you have me pegged for, then?” she asked. “A Prius?”

Danny suppressed a chuckle. It was exactly what he’d imagined her driving.

She shook her head. “Typical,” she murmured and rolled her eyes.

She slowed in front of a silver Dodge truck. It had two doors and a single bench seat. It was easily twenty years old and likely had a couple of hundred thousand miles on it. There were spots where the silver paint had chipped or worn away. Bondo covered some of the rust. The rest of it traced the hinges and wheel wells.

Gilda fished a jangle of keys from her pocket and inserted one of them into the lock on the door. She glanced over her shoulder at Danny, who was watching her manually unlock her vehicle. It must have been obvious he hadn’t seen anyone do that before.

“Don’t even say it,” said Gilda. “This is a work truck. I’m a sort of…botanist. I have a green thumb and I plant things.”

“What’s a sort-of botanist?” asked Arthur. “That kinda like being sorta pregnant?”

“Or sort of sexist?” Gilda shot back.

“Touché,” said Arthur.

“One of you is going to have to get in the bed,” said Gilda. “There’s only room for three of us up here.”

“I’ll do it,” Danny volunteered.

“How far are we going?” asked Claudia. “Where are we going?”

Gilda stood beside the truck, one foot on the side rail and one hand on the door. She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Away from here? I didn’t plan this. We could drive along the coast, try to get to somebody’s house. My house even.”

Claudia tilted her head to one side with suspicion etched on her face. “I don’t know,” she said. “This is too much.”

Arthur stepped closer to Claudia, filling the space between the waitress and the sort-of botanist. He put his sizable hand on Claudia’s shoulder. “What?” he asked.

“She comes into the diner out of nowhere,” said Claudia. “And she’s magically there when the firefighter tells us to leave. Then she happens to have a car—”

“A truck,” corrected Gilda.

“A truck,” Claudia deadpanned. “Whatever. Then she offers to drive us, three strangers, to her house? Doesn’t add up.”

Claudia had a point. Besides, she did know people. One of her many skills was detecting complete and utter crap doled out by the people she served every day.

Gilda stood there silently for a moment, her eyes roving up and down in measurement of the skeptic in front of her. She shook her head.

“Okay, fine,” she said nonchalantly. “Don’t come with me. I didn’t drag you here. I didn’t kidnap you. And I’m not part of some grand conspiracy to get you away from the diner so I can have my team of special operators sneak inside to make grilled cheese sandwiches or whatever greasy crap you make there.”

“Hey now,” said Arthur. “That’s not nice. Don’t talk bad about my cooking.”

“Don’t talk bad about me,” Gilda shot back. “I’m trying to help. You don’t want it, don’t take it. But I’m leaving with or without you.”

Gilda pulled herself up into the cab and closed the driver’s side door. She adjusted her rearview mirror and cranked the engine. It protested for a moment before rumbling into a guttural idle.

“I’m going with her,” Danny said, and climbed into the truck’s bed. It had a spray-on textured liner that was coated in soil and ragged leaves. Twin bags of plant fertilizer were pressed against the back of the cab. He sat atop them, providing a bit of cushion for however long a ride they had ahead of them.

He didn’t see Arthur and Claudia exchange glances, but he did hear the passenger’s side door creak open and slam shut after they’d clambered into the cab next to Gilda. Gilda shifted gears, and the truck lumbered into first as she accelerated away from the fires.

Facing backward, Danny couldn’t see or hear the people on the ground anymore, but the emergency sirens were audible. The smoke, flickering from the flames burning with it, was thicker now and rose higher into the sky. It obscured the mountains to the north and east.

The truck picked up speed, and the wind whipped around him, sending a chill through his body. Then, almost as soon as the truck hit fourth gear and eased into a steady roll, it jerked violently. The wheels screeched against the asphalt. Gilda slammed on the brakes and shifted into neutral, and the truck came to a sudden halt. Danny, who’d somehow managed to keep himself inside the bed without hurting himself, twisted his body to look forward.

They were stopped because the traffic ahead of them was as thick as the smoke behind them. They weren’t going anywhere.

CHAPTER 9

Friday, October 17, 2025

Santa Monica, California

Dub squeezed Keri’s hand and searched for a path to the opposite side of the street. It was hard to hear anything other than the deafening wails of sirens, the loud rumble of engines, and the spray from large hoses that snaked everywhere they tried to go.

In the smoke, they’d somehow gotten confused and stuck in the middle of a literal fire fight. The smoke was thick enough that it was irritating Dub’s eyes and throat. He’d given his T-shirt to Keri and wrapped it around her nose and mouth to keep her from breathing in the noxious fumes, so he was bare-chested. Normally he’d be somewhat self-conscious despite his six-foot-three athletic build. Living in southern California, where it seemed that everybody was constructed by a special-effects team who modeled their creations after the men and women they found on Muscle Beach, had a way of messing with his head. Add to that his own insecurity about Keri’s popularity, and he rarely went without a shirt unless he was in the ocean or on the basketball court and forced to play skins.

In these circumstances that had gotten out of control so quickly, he didn’t give it a second thought. Keri’s health was more important than his ridiculous issues. She’d resisted taking the shirt at first but relented when he’d insisted. She held it tight against her face and winced at the puffs of smoke blowing into her face.

The wind had shifted and intensified. Despite Dub’s inability to discern exactly where they were and which way they were headed, the wind was an aggravating factor. Coming from nowhere, it had brought with it an added tension and palpable danger.

He tugged on her hand, sensing the tension of her arm. He slowed, stepped over a hose, and yelled to warn her to watch her step. A pair of firefighters moved past them, heading toward the flames. Dub walked to where they’d emerged through the smoke, figuring that might lead them farther away from any immediate danger. They’d come from a spot where the smoke was visibly thinner, creating the illusion of a portal of light through which they could escape.

He wondered how they’d ended up in the middle of it all. One moment they’d been contemplating the best route back to campus, and the next they were absorbed into the opaque, choking chaos.

What he did know was that they were in a part of the city that packed houses next to one another like sardines. The lots were long and narrow, and the homes were mere feet from each other. They might as well have shared walls they were so close. Some were older and needed a lot of work but had respectable-sized yards. Others were recent rebuilds that used every bit of the lots they occupied. Regardless, they were likely dominos in an out-of-control fire. One would burn and then catch the next on fire, and the next, and the next.

The tug of Keri’s arm and the squeeze of her hand slowed him down. He’d reached the imaginary portal. Keri stepped up next to him, and they finished their brief run to cleaner air.

They were standing in the middle of the street, to one side of a four-way intersection. Police were behind them, preventing the stalled traffic from turning into the smoke. They were trying to direct drivers to head in the opposite direction, but as the breeze cleared a cloud of smoke from his field of view, Dub saw there wasn’t anywhere for the traffic to go. It was stopped in both directions. It was then he noticed the horns honking and the frustrated would-be drivers shouting from their open windows.

He spun around, trying to figure out exactly where they were, but he couldn’t read the street signs. Keri lowered the T-shirt from her face and handed it back to him. “It might have my snot on it,” she said. “But I’m good now, so if you want it back…”

Dub took the shirt, shook it out, and slipped it over his head. “Thanks,” he said with a wink. “I’m not worried about your snot.”

She blushed, understanding the sexual subtext of his comment. She wiped the sweat from her forehead and rubbed her knuckles in the corners of her eyes. They were red, and she kept blinking against the irritation.

“You’re okay, though?” he asked. His throat burned with the taste of whatever it was that was burning. He tried clearing it. It didn’t help.

“I’m fine,” she said, almost convincingly.

“Really?”

She ran her hands across her cheeks. “My throat hurts a little, and my eyes are burning.”

Dub squeezed his eyes shut, pressing tears from them. “Mine too. But I think we’re okay here.”

Keri searched the intersection. “Where is here? I don’t recognize where we are. I mean, I know we’re probably still in Santa Monica somewhere. But I can’t make out any landmarks.”

They pulled out their phones and tried their GPS apps. None of them worked. They couldn’t get a signal.

“Nothing,” said Dub.

“Me either,” said Keri. She tucked the phone back into her pocket. “This is crazy.”

Dub adjusted his T-shirt, pulling it over the waistband of his jeans, and moved past Keri and into the traffic. The man behind the wheel of a Tesla honked his horn when Dub stood in front of the red electric coupe. Dub ignored him and peered diagonally across the intersection toward a chain-link fence. He walked back to Keri, waving at the irritated Tesla driver with a smile, and then pointed across the traffic toward the fence. “There are tennis courts there,” he said. “I think it’s a park.”

The wind gusted, blowing in their faces and taking with it a layer of the smoke. For the wisp of a moment, Dub could see the street signs.

“Wilshire and Lincoln,” he said.

“Are you sure?” Keri asked, squinting to see the sign before the smoke bloomed again. “This is Wilshire?”

It didn’t resemble the heavily traveled, familiar thoroughfare that stretched from Santa Monica to the 405 and campus before heading east through Beverly Hills. True, it wasn’t as though they were locals who knew these streets like the backs of their hands. He was from Houston, and Keri was from New Orleans. They knew their way around west LA based on the trendy restaurants and shops they frequented. They used Uber, Lyft, and landmarks as easy ways to get around. Drop them into the middle of an intersection without their GPS telling them exactly where they were, and they were lost.

“Hey,” called out one of the police officers directing traffic. “Hey! You two.”

Dub didn’t know the officer was talking to him until he shouted again.

“You,” he said, “with the wrinkled T-shirt. Get out of here. You can’t stand in the middle of the road.”

“Where are we?” Keri asked.

The officer looked at them like they had three eyes and green skin. “Santa Monica. Are you on something?”

He left the intersection, one hand on his service weapon, and strode toward them. Dub and Keri backed up a couple of steps but stood their ground. He eyed both up and down.

“You need to get out of the road,” he repeated. “This isn’t safe.”

Dub raised his hands in surrender. “Okay. We’re just lost, that’s all. We’re trying to find our way back to campus.”

“All this smoke,” Keri said. “We’re turned around.”

The officer frowned. “Still, I can’t have you standing in the street. It’s for your safety and for the first responders working the scene. You need to find a sidewalk and move along.”

Keri eyed the police officer. She exhaled loudly. “Fine, but he can’t tell us—”

“He’s a cop,” said Dub. “He’s not some guy with a walkie-talkie. And he’s right, we do need to get out of here. Let’s move away from the fire. We probably can’t get through to campus this way anyhow.”

“So where do we go?”

“Back toward the coast,” he said. “The ocean can’t catch fire.”

Keri started to answer him, but her voice was drowned out by the deafening rumble of engines. Dub tried to place the source of the noise. It wasn’t coming from the direction of the fires. It couldn’t be coming from the traffic, which was stalled to a stop.

Then Keri pointed overhead, and he saw it. A large helicopter was moving nose down and low overhead. It was red and white with large propellers whirring and thumping against the air.

It zipped past them directly overhead, its wash whirring over them. Without warning, a wash of water dumped from the bottom of the chopper in a cascade larger than anything Dub had ever seen. A spray of steam appeared from the smoke in time for another chopper to emerge from seemingly nowhere. It too dumped hundreds of gallons of water onto the burning buildings.

It appeared the firefighters were beginning to get an upper hand. For the moment.

CHAPTER 10

Friday, October 17, 2025

Westwood, California

“I’ll come get you,” Barker proclaimed when he reached Becca and heard how shaky her voice was. “You can stay with me until this is over.”

“I’m on the other side of campus,” she’d said. “It’s too dangerous.”

Barker was standing at the bottom of the Hill amid the dingy yellow haze that had engulfed the campus. His nostrils stung. He knew the smartest thing to do was to go to his dorm, turn off the air-conditioning, and watch Netflix.

There was a new season on Black Mirror, and he’d downloaded it to his laptop. He’d been wanting to binge but hadn’t found the time. With classes cancelled, now was as good a time as any. Still, he couldn’t leave Becca hanging, and a chivalrous act could go a long way in impressing her. He wasn’t as convinced as Michael that she was as into him as he was interested in her.

Michael was already half up the hill, heading back to the dorm. He’d read the alert and wasn’t taking any chances. Michael was smarter than Barker. Barker was certain of that as he stood in the toxic haze considering a cross-campus trek to Sorority Row.

He’d managed to find the one spot on campus where he could get a cell signal and had called Becca.

“It’s not a problem,” he said. “I don’t want you to be scared. If you’re with me, you won’t be. I’ll…entertain you.”

“Don’t you have a roommate?” she asked.

“Yeah,” said Barker, oblivious to her interpretation of entertainment. “But he’ll keep to himself. I’ll share my headphones, and we can start the new season of Black Mirror.”

“Oh.” Her disappointment filled the bandwidth.

“I’ll be right there,” he said. “It’ll take me ten minutes. Fifteen tops.”

“You know which house?” she asked.

“The one with the prettiest girl on campus,” he said. Then he gritted his teeth, immediately regretting the lame line. When she giggled, he exhaled with relief.

“You’re funny.”

He wasn’t sure how to take it. Was funny good? It didn’t matter. He was trekking across campus to get to her. Any excuse to spend time with her.

“Is that good?” he asked.

No response.

“Is that good?” he repeated. He’d lost service and cursed his phone.

Despite having dated girls in high school and women in college, Barker suffered from an inferiority complex. He was five feet eight on a good day, was losing his hair, and was stocky more than muscular. Plus, he was a sophomore who still hadn’t made up his mind about his major. Most of his friends were south campus majors, meaning they were focused on math, science, or engineering. He was more of a north campus kid, and he couldn’t make up his mind between history, political science, or business economics.

At UCLA, everyone was brilliant. Barker regularly questioned how he’d been accepted. He was the middle child of a long-haul trucker from Washington DC, who wasn’t an athlete or a brainiac.

He typically combatted, or revealed, his insecurity with biting sarcasm. It was lost on his roommate Michael. Dub, on the other hand, could give it right back to him when pushed. So could Keri.

Barker wiped the sting from his eyes, thumbed his nose, and started his walk across campus. Again, he was struck by the eerie quiet, the type of quiet usually reserved for the so-called dead week before quarterly exams.

A couple of kids he vaguely recognized from the dorm shuffled past him with their heavy backpacks clunking as they held their hero blue Bruin shirts above their mouths and noses. They glanced over at him, offering greetings with the slight nods of their heads.

He nodded back. A gust of wind blew past him, and he ran his hand across the spot at his crown where his hair was the thinnest. A chill traveled through his body, and he involuntarily shuddered.

As he walked east along Bruin Walk and back toward the bronze bear statue, the Ashe Health Center, and the Ackerman Student Union, he noticed the swirl of the wind. It was intensifying and steady. It blew into his face at one moment and then breezed across his side from the north the next.

The haze that he’d seen and smelled before eating lunch was thickening, the grungy yellow morphing into more of a slate gray. Puffs of darker smoke blew past him. The air was becoming heavier, more acrid, as he pounded up the steps toward the Court of Sciences. An older man with shocks of white at his temples and thick, black-framed glasses in front of his eyes hurried past him. He carried a black leather satchel at his chest and a deep frown on his face.

Barker recognized him as a psychology professor he’d had his second quarter. Dub, a psych major, had recommended the class. Being somewhat directionless, Barker had taken the advice and earned a B+. He didn’t remember the professor looking so old.

In the distance, he could hear the chirp of emergency vehicles making their way through traffic. After he passed the inverted fountain, drawing closer to the row of sorority houses across from the eastern edge of campus, the sounds from those vehicles grew louder. He stopped at the curb at Hilgard and Westholme, and a pair of bright red fire engines roared past him, an ambulance a couple of lengths behind. All of them had their sirens blaring, their emergency lights swirling and strobing. The spinning lights cast a red glow in the smoke that reflected off the buildings on both sides of Hilgard.

A couple of SUVs trailed the ambulance. Barker followed them with his eyes. They were headed toward Wilshire. At the point where the smoke became too thick for him to see farther, the emergency vehicles had slowed. He couldn’t tell if they were at their destination and the fire was that close now, or if the traffic on Wilshire was so bad the crews were stalled. Either way, it wasn’t good. Things were devolving.

Barker checked his phone again and saw new alerts on his phone. They’d downloaded during the brief time he’d had a signal. He held the phone up to his face to unlock the screen and thumbed through the news updates. Each was more daunting than the previous one. The newest information was at the top.

SANTA MONICA ON FIRE

SEVERAL DEAD IN OUT-OF-CONTROL BRENTWOOD FIRE

EMERGENCY OFFICIALS PREPARE FOR DISASTER

RESIDENTS URGED TO EVACUATE IF TOLD

AUTHORITIES ASKING RESIDENTS TO REMAIN VIGILANT, SHELTER IN PLACE

FIREFIGHTERS OVERWHELMED BY MASSIVE FIRES

SOUTHLAND ABLAZE, WIND WHIPS UP FEARS

An overwhelming sense of dread coursed through Barker’s body. He tried clicking on the links to the updates. None of them worked. Even the campus Wi-Fi didn’t give him access.

He glanced again at the strobing reflections of the emergency lights to his right and then back across the street at the large sorority houses that lined the other side of Hilgard. He swallowed hard, tasting the smoke in the back of his throat, and regretted ignoring the voice in his head that told him not to go find Becca. Barker ignored that voice a lot. He always promised himself he’d listen to it next time, and never did.

He hustled across the wide street. He accidentally took a deep breath once he’d reached the curb and stepped up onto the sidewalk. The pungent air stung, and he coughed, bending over at his waist. He cleared his throat and wiped the sudden sheen of tears from his eyes.

Above him he could hear the whip of helicopter blades. The sirens echoed beyond the veil of smoke. He couldn’t tell how close the flames were. The road descended and curved, merging with Warner and veering north toward an intersection with Sunset. In the distance the orange flicker of flames peeked out behind the tendrils of smoke that ballooned amidst the haze. They were likely farther than they appeared since he couldn’t hear the crackle of the fire.

Fire? There? Why were the trucks headed in the opposite direction? Why weren’t they fighting those flames? Flames that clung to the northwestern edge of campus close to Holmby Hills.

He spun around, surveying his surroundings. He was alone as far as he could tell. Nobody else was out wandering the streets without purpose. He squeezed his eyes shut against the smoke. He took short, shallow breaths and pulled up his shirt over his nose and mouth.

Barker thought about the stupid things he’d done in his young life. There were enough to count on both hands, both feet, and someone else’s hand too. None of them were as reckless as what he was doing right now.

But he was too far into his quest now to abandon it. He was too close to Becca to go back without her at his side. He checked his phone. No signal. If he didn’t show up, he’d lose any chance he might have with her. Being the hormone-driven romantic that he was, Barker tucked his phone into his pocket and marched north toward her sorority house.

When he reached the front porch of the grand Southern facade, he pushed the intercom button and stared into the round camera eye. He coughed twice, holding his balled fist to his mouth.

“Who is it?” came a suspicious voice. “How can I help you?”

“My name is Barker Mayfield,” he said. “I’m here to see Becca.”

There was a pause. Then, “Becca?”

“Yes,” he said, clearing his throat. “Becca.”

“Which Becca?”

“Excuse me?”

“Which Becca? There are four Beccas.”

“Four?”

“Yes,” the suspicious voice sounded irritated now. “There’s Becca Armstrong, Becca Anderson, Becca Ride, and Becky Grissom. There’s also Becca Stephens and Rebecca Cernan.”

Barker had no idea what her last name was. He only knew her as Becca. That wasn’t good. He rubbed the top of his head and stared into the lens.

“She’s the pretty one with—”

“Seriously, dude?” interrupted the voice. “The pretty one?”

“Sorry,” he said, his head down. “I don’t know her last name. She’s got brown hair. It’s cut short.”

“A pixie cut?”

He couldn’t tell if there was a camera in the speaker or not. He coughed and checked back over his shoulder. Now he was the one getting irritated. Did the women inside the house not know what was going on outside?

“I don’t know. Just get all the Beccas in the lobby and let me in, please. It’s getting bad out here.”

There was another pause. “You said your name was Barker?”

“Yes.”

From inside the house he could hear the bounding of feet down a staircase and the heavy plant on the floor. A series of clicks led to the door opening slowly. Becca, his Becca, was peering out at him with her big brown eyes. Her white teeth gleamed. Barker’s face flushed at the sight of her. An involuntary smile spread across his face.

“You made it,” she said and opened the door wide. “C’mon in.”

He stepped into the house and she closed the door behind her.

“You stink,” she said, her face puckering. “You smell like a bonfire.”

“I think he smells like a fart in a hot shower,” said a voice from behind him, the same voice from the intercom.

Becca frowned. “You’re disgusting,” she said to the young woman in faded denim overall shorts and ridiculously deep dimples in her cheeks.

The woman eyed Barker up and down. She pulled her dark hair into a ponytail and held it in place with a purple scrunchie from her wrist. She locked eyes with Becca.

“I’m just kidding,” she said. She paused, leveled her gaze at Barker again, and waved her hand in front of her cherubic face. “A hot shower fart is more intoxicating than whatever it is you’ve got going on, dude.”

Becca put her hand on the back of Barker’s bicep and squeezed gently. “Don’t mind her,” she said. “She’s an ass.”

Barker nodded sheepishly and offered a weak smile in Overall’s direction. “It’s cool,” he said, chuckling nervously. “No worries.”

The woman hooked her thumbs inside the straps of her overalls in an American Gothic sort of way and stepped toward Barker. She smelled like essential oils and wood.

“I’m Gem,” she said.

Barker stepped back, subconsciously separating himself from the space invader. “Gem?”

“It’s short for Gemma. Family name. It’s awful, I know. I don’t need you to tell me.”

“I wasn’t going to—”

Gem stepped forward again. “Yes, you were. Everybody does. It’s whatever. I don’t care. But it gets old.”

Both women seemed oblivious to the encroaching danger. He scratched the top of his head and hooked a thumb over his shoulder at the door.

“Are either of you aware of what’s going on out there?” he asked. “The world is on fire.”

“That explains your funk,” said Gem.

Barker didn’t like her. She was one of those people who immediately behaved too familiar. He pictured her in retail, selling something nobody needed.

Becca’s cheery expression softened. She shot a glance at the door and then focused on Barker. Her stare sent an electrical spark down his spine.

“It’s that bad?”

Barker nodded emphatically. He coughed again and cleared his throat. “There’s a fire up the hill near Holmby Hills. Past the intersection with Sunset. There must be another one near Wilshire, probably toward Westwood. I saw fire trucks headed that way. Traffic on the roads is a mess. Campus is dead though, and—”

Gem waved her hands in front of her face. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, Pony Express, too much information. Slow down. You’re saying there are fires close to campus?”

Barker bristled. “You living inside a rock, Gem? Didn’t you see the Bruin Alert?”

Gem sneered.

“Yes,” Becca answered. “But it didn’t say anything about campus being threatened. It only said classes were cancelled.”

“I can tell you campus is threatened.”

Gem had stepped back but was standing with her arms folded across her chest. Her jaw was tight and her face expressionless save one suspicious eyebrow arched slightly higher than the other. Barker could tell she didn’t like him either. That was fine.

“So what do we do?” Becca asked. “I don’t think we can head back to the Hill, right?”

Barker shook his head. Past Becca, there was a trio of coeds standing at the entry to the foyer. All three were varying degrees of blonde. They wore sweats and T-shirts with their sorority’s lettering on them.

“What’s going on?” one of them called.

“Who’s he?” asked another.

Gem answered them without taking her eyes from Barker. She motioned toward him with her chin. It too was dimpled like her cheeks. “This is Douchebag McDoucherson, and he is the bearer of bad news.”

“The fires?” one of the sorority sisters asked. “Is it about the fires?”

“My name is Barker,” he said to the trio. “And yeah, it’s not good.”

“Why are you here?” asked the tallest of the three blondes. “Are you, like, security or something?”

“He’s visiting me,” Becca said. “We were going out, but—”

“He’s a douche,” Gem cut in.

The trio giggled. Becca shot Gem a nasty glare Barker hadn’t realized she was capable of firing, and she reached over to take his hand, lacing her fingers into his.

Barker’s heart jumped, and his pulse quickened. He smiled at her. She smiled back.

“Don’t mind Gem,” said one of the blonde coeds. “She likes drama.”

“C’mon,” said Becca, “you can come into the parlor and chill until they get the fires under control.”

“We have the news on,” said the tallest blonde. “The fires are on every channel.”

Gem chortled. At what she was laughing, Barker couldn’t be sure. But she stalked her way up past the blondes and around the corner.

Becca put her free hand on Barker’s arm, giving him goose bumps. “Seriously,” she said, “don’t worry about her. She gives every guy a hard time.”

She tugged on his hand, and he followed her toward the blondes, who were padding their way into the parlor. He was glad he’d risked his life to see her.

“Does she have a boyfriend?” he asked.

“That’s kind of the issue,” Becca said in a much lower volume. “She did. They broke up. She’s still not over it.”

“So she takes it out on every guy who walks in the house.”

“Bingo,” she said, squeezing his hand for effect.

They entered a large room decorated in pastels. Barker plopped onto an overstuffed linen sofa next to Becca. She was still holding his hand.

Two of the blondes were on a matching sofa opposite them. The third, the tall one, was sitting in an imitation Eames chair, her fuzzy-slippered feet crossed one over the other on the ottoman. Gem was on the Berber, lying on a large shaggy rug with her head on a big floor cushion. All of them had their attention on a wall-mounted flat-panel television.

“We’re watching this because our Wi-Fi isn’t working,” said the tall blonde. “No Netflix. No Hulu.”

“Turn up the volume,” Gem demanded. “I can’t hear the reporter.”

One of the blondes pointed the remote at the screen and pressed the volume button. The reporter’s voice grew louder, as did the ambient noise in the live report. What they heard and saw on that large flat-panel display sent a wave of nausea coursing through Barker’s body. He imagined it was equally as terrifying to Becca. She squeezed his hand tightly. It wasn’t an affectionate grip. It was one betraying fear.

The reporter was standing amidst waves of smoke, her mouth and nose covered with a surgical mask. She was wearing a bright yellow jacket that appeared part parka and part raincoat. The ball cap atop her head was emblazoned with the television station’s call letters and channel number.

She alternated between looking directly into the camera and over her shoulder to reference the inferno building behind her. The camera moved with her, sometimes drifting from her to focus on the hellscape that served as her backdrop.

“I’m told the fire here is not contained yet,” she said breathlessly. “This one you see on your screen, which they’re calling the Canyon Fire, has merged with the Angeles Forest Fire. The winds are so extreme that on slopes the fire is racing downward at forty miles per hour. It’s burning everything in its path, and firefighters tell me that until the winds diminish, there is no chance of stopping the wall of flames that appears to be growing on all sides.”

The news anchor, a young man with an abundance of product in his hair, appeared on the left half of the screen. He stared into the camera and spoke earnestly, his resonant voice amplifying the seriousness of his question. “What about fire breaks?” he asked. “Having been in similar situations myself, I can recall firefighters lighting smaller fires to contain large out-of-control fires. Have they considered that?”

The reporter on the right side of the screen nodded. “Yes, they have. But it’s too dangerous right now with the winds.”

“What about aerial assaults? I know they’ll use airplanes and even converted Black Hawk military helicopters to dump water or retardant. Any plans for those?”

The reporter adjusted the mask on her face, pinching it at the bridge of her nose. She lifted the microphone closer to her mouth, and a wash of smoke drifted between her and the camera. “Again,” she stressed, “the winds are a problem.”

She looked off camera and nodded. She appeared to be acknowledging someone to her left. Then she pointed at the camera or the photographer. Even with the mask covering half of her face, it was obvious to anyone watching her that she was suddenly frightened. Her posture had stiffened. Her face, what was visible, was ashen.

“Lane,” she said to the anchor, “we’re being told we need to leave. They’re evacuating us from this spot here. It’s too dangerous, I’m told, and we need to move.”

“Gotcha,” said the news anchor. “You get to safety, please. Check back with us when you get to a safer spot.”

The reporter disappeared from the screen, and the news anchor, Lane Turner, was front and center. He occupied a sleek glass desk with a large wall of monitors behind him. On half of the monitors there was a singular looping image of flames. On the other half, over his right shoulder, were the words SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ON FIRE.

“For those of you just joining us,” he said, twiddling a pen in between his fingers, “we’d like to update you on the severity of this fast-developing story. As you likely know, we are under a state of emergency. The mayor of Los Angeles and the governor of California have declared the emergency in order to expedite emergency help. We know that the governor has requested federal aid from the White House. That federal declaration has not come yet, as far as we know.”

Across the bottom of the screen, facts about the emergency were scrolling from right to left. There was too much to absorb, to many locations on fire. Barker saw the blank expressions on the women’s faces. Even Gem was silent and still.

Becca had curled her legs onto the sofa and was leaning into Barker. Fifteen minutes earlier he’d have been relishing the relative intimacy of the moment. Not now though. Not with SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ON FIRE.

“Here is a map of the remarkable scale of this unfolding catastrophe,” said Lane Turner. “You can see much of our viewing area is threatened. The red is what is currently burning. The orange is what is under immediate danger and likely cannot be saved. You’ll see the yellow is the evacuation area. If you are in the yellow, you need to turn off your television and leave. You can listen to us on our free news app as you evacuate to safety. We already have evacuation routes and road closures on that app. Download it now if you haven’t already.”

“Is he really pimping their app?” asked Gem. “Shameless. Freaking shameless.”

“Shhh,” said the tall blonde. “I want to listen. We’re on the edge of the yellow.”

The map filled the display. “If you are not in the evacuation zone,” said Lane, “authorities are asking that you still consider leaving. Make your plans now so that if and when the evacuation zone expands, you’ll be ready to go. Joining me now on the phone is Oscar Robles. He is the public information officer for the LA County Office of Emergency Management. Oscar, thanks for being with us.”

A graphic filled half the screen, displaying Robles’s photograph and his name. The other half of the screen now showed aerial shots of a hillside fire. It didn’t identify where exactly it was.

“Thanks, Lane,” said Robles. “We appreciate the opportunity to talk to your viewers.”

“So, Oscar, what’s your best advice for people who are trying to decide whether or not they should leave their homes or businesses?”

“That’s a difficult question to answer, Lane,” Robles replied. “But I can tell you that you never know if you’ve evacuated too early. You always know if you’ve evacuated too late. To that end, it’s an individual decision, a personal choice about what a resident thinks is best for his or her family.”

“Understood, Oscar,” said Lane, “but are there specific things our viewers should look for? Is there a list of things they can check off and then decide, ‘Yep, I need to bug out’?”

“Certainly,” said Robles. “There are a host of things residents can do to prepare for evacuation. First, they should shut all of their windows and doors but leave them unlocked. Remove anything flammable from the windows, including window shades or curtains. Move furniture to the centers of rooms, and leave lights on in every room. That will make it easier for firefighters to see the house in heavy smoke. Also, shut off the air-conditioning.”

“Should we shut off the air-conditioning?” asked the tall blonde. “Should we ask Zagrecki?”

“Who’s Zagrecki?” Barker asked Becca.

“Our house mom,” she answered.

Gem stood up and adjusted her overalls, tugging on the bottom hem of her shorts. “I’ll go ask her,” she said. “I can’t handle this right now anyway. It’s too much.”

She stepped over the floor pillow and stomped out of the parlor. Barker watched her for a moment and turned his attention back to the television. Oscar Robles was still explaining what potential evacuees should do.

“…what’s called an emergency supply kit. Some people call them bug-out bags or go bags. Regardless of the nomenclature, we recommend that kit include a three-day supply of nonperishable food, three gallons of water per person, any medications you regularly take, a paper map in case GPS fails, credit cards, cash, a first aid kit, a battery-powered radio—”

“That’s all great information,” Lane interrupted. “We do have a link to those necessities on our website and app. But what I asked you was to provide the signs that a family needs to be looking for so that they know when it’s time to evacuate.”

“Again,” said Robles, “that is a personal decision. I can tell you that when we, and our partner agencies, make the decision to order an evacuation, we’ve done so because the time is right. We don’t wait too long. We don’t jump the gun. It’s a thoughtful process.”

Lane Turner’s eyes narrowed. He pointed his pen at the camera. “So are you saying that residents shouldn’t evacuate until you order it?”

Robles exhaled audibly. He rubbed his chin. “No, I’m not saying that. What I am saying is that residents need to pay attention. If they feel as though they need to evacuate, they don’t need to wait for us. They know their home, their neighborhood, the best routes to take when leaving. But I can’t tell them to leave. Too many circumstances go into what is a personal decision, up until the point we order people to leave their homes. It’s emotional, it’s—”

Lane Turner pointed the pen at the lens again. “What if people get trapped?”

“The first thing you want to do is stay calm,” Robles said. “If you are in a car, park it as far away from vegetation as possible.”

The half of the screen showing the anchor dissolved to aerial video of the flames tearing through a collection of hillside homes, torching them, and leaving nothing but char in their wake. A graphic at the top of the screen indicated the image was live. The firefighters had dubbed it the Mount Chapel Fire, named after the trail where it was first spotted.

As the aerial view shifted and widened, it was apparent the fire was spreading. At the top of the screen was an oblong parking lot that sat perched at the end, and beneath, a snaking road that traveled east and west, then looped south and back to the lot. The road resembled a wavy moustache and the lot an open mouth with the upper lip curled like singer Billy Idol’s. In the middle of the lot was a collection of buildings still standing, but immediately threatened by encroaching flames.

South of the lot, and parallel to the end of the road, was a series of small, narrow buildings. Barker thought they might be trailers. Flames were licking at them, beginning to burn them.

Before Oscar Robles could answer Lane Turner’s question about being trapped, the anchor interrupted and apologized. The aerial images stayed on the screen, but Robles’s face was replaced with Turner’s. The anchor was taking notes as he looked off camera, presumably at a monitor on the news set.

“I’m sorry to interrupt you, Oscar, but I’m told what we are watching on the screen next to me is the Mount Chapel Fire. It’s one of sixteen confirmed fires from San Luis Obispo to Cuba Vista. Most, as we’ve reported, are concentrated between the Angeles National Forest and Cleveland National Forest.”

The aerial image widened more, giving a more expansive view of the devastation. Where there weren’t lines or pockets of fire, there was thick smoke drifting upward, obscuring clear views of the ground below.

“What we are seeing here with the Mount Chapel Fire is the impending destruction of an iconic Los Angeles landmark. If the camera could please zoom in again. Give us the previous depth of field.”

Whoever was operating the helicopter-mounted steady cam obliged the anchor’s request and zoomed into the curvy mustache road and the oblong parking lot. Heavy wafts of smoke drifted across the image.

“That building there is the City of Los Angeles Central Communications Facility. You can see the orange tile roofs, and what may be difficult to make out is the destroyed tower at the base of those buildings. It’s also known as the Mount Lee Communications Facility Site. It supports all of the cell and radio traffic for LA Police and Fire.”

The helicopter swung around the side of the parking lot and the buildings again, and the tall red and white tower came into view. The camera zoomed in closer, and it was now clear there were fire crews there working to protect the facility.

Becca nestled closer. The firefighters appeared as though they might be trapped. Then Barker noticed a large red and white helicopter sitting at the edge of the parking lot. He hadn’t noticed it before because of the smoke that drifted into and out of the frame. The chopper appeared to be an emergency escape for the four firefighters dousing the communications center with some sort of red spray.

“That, of course, is critical for our first responders,” said the anchor, “but what I want to draw to your attention and, certainly it’s not as critical as the tower there, but beneath it on the hillside is the Hollywood sign. As you can likely see, it is catching fire live, right here, on the air. It’s difficult to see it from this vantage point, but those large white letters perched magnificently on that hillside are burning.”

Barker narrowed his focus on the television screen. Becca tightened her grip. He reciprocated the grip and rubbed his thumb across the top of hers to reassure her he was staying. But he had to get a closer look, however infinitesimally closer, at the screen on the wall, its sixty inches a portal into the terror unfolding outside and all around them.

The anchor was correct; the Hollywood sign was burning. The helicopter circled around and moved farther away from the burning hillside. As it did, the sign came into view. It was like something on the Warner Brothers lot or from the Universal Studios tour he’d taken as a kid with his mom and dad. The forty-five-foot-tall letters were engulfed, burning from the bottom up. Only the Y hadn’t caught yet, for some odd reason, but it was only a matter of time. Black tendrils of smoke plied their way skyward across the three-hundred-and-fifty-foot length of the lettering.

It had stood there since 1923, originally spelling out Hollywoodland, and had held its spot in the Santa Monica Mountains for more than a century now. It stood watch over Hollywood itself from its home on Mount Lee. It was both famous and infamous. It was the site of Peg Entwistle’s 1932 suicide. The struggling actress, successful in New York, had become disenchanted at her lack of success. She used a workman’s ladder to climb to the top of the H and then jumped to her death. Hollywood legend had it that the day after her suicide, she’d received a letter offering her the lead in a play at the Beverly Hills Playhouse. Now the sign was smoldering and turning to ash like the dreams of so many who’d come to California seeking bright lights.

Barker had no way of knowing the legend of the sign. He just knew it made for a great selfie backdrop. The parlor was silent aside from the drone of the news anchor’s description of the live pictures they could decipher for themselves.

Then Gem returned with a red-haired woman replete with freckles and bearing a commanding presence. She was full-figured, dressed in black pants and a silver silk top. Her large hands were clasped in front of her. But her face was too steely and her gaze too intense to signal prayer.

“All right,” the woman said. “I need all of you to go to your rooms and pack bags. We’re leaving the house.”

“What?” asked the tall blonde. “Now?”

“Yes,” said the woman. She looked at Barker and skipped the pleasantries. “Who are you?”

“Barker Mayfield,” he said. “I’m visiting Becca.”

The woman smirked. “That’s obvious.” Her eyes shifted to Becca and narrowed. “Miss Stephens?”

Becca sat up straight, inched away from Barker, and put her hands in her lap. She whispered to Barker, “That’s Mrs. Zagrecki.”

Barker stood and crossed the room with his hand extended. He smiled and respectfully approached Zagrecki.

The tension in the woman’s face relaxed. Her eyes softened, and she took his hand, her grip as tight as any man’s, and she shook vigorously. “I’m Melinda Zagrecki,” she said. “We don’t typically allow men in our house without occasion.”

Barker let go of her hand. “I didn’t plan on coming in,” he said. “It was only because of what’s going on outside. Please don’t be upset with Becca.”

Zagrecki’s smirk curled into a smile. “She’s not in trouble. Actually, I’m glad you’re here. I’ll need help getting this house ready for us to evacuate. I’ve got a list of things we need to do downstairs. The girls and I will handle upstairs. You can’t go there.”

Barker wiped his hands on his pants, realizing his palms were sweaty. He nodded. “No problem. Happy to help.”

“Good,” she said. “Girls, stay calm. Work together. No panic. We’ll be fine. Just do as I ask of you. I have a plan.”

Zagrecki returned her hands to prayer position in front of her and drew them to her face. She scanned the room and sighed. “All right,” she finally said, “let’s get going. We’ve got a lot of work to do and not much time to do it.”

CHAPTER 11

Friday, October 17, 2025

Angeles National Forest

Loretta was breathless. Her lungs burned, not from smoke but from exhaustion. Her throat was thick with the knot of emotion. Her mouth tasted like charcoal, dry, ashy, full of grit. The bottoms of her raw feet were bleeding. She was dry of tears but congested from having sobbed for most of the last two hours.

The smoke was thin in a clearing where she sat cross-legged amongst the scrub and dirt. She picked a splinter from the pad underneath her big toe and then pinched the injured spot, thumbing away the bloom of blood that leached from the wound.

She found four more, focusing on the nearly invisible slivers buried underneath her skin. She picked and picked, hyper focused on the shards, until she’d pinched or dug them out from her foot. When she was finished, she held the last of the splinters in her palm and stared at it blankly. Finally, she blew it from her hand and blinked into focus the world around her.

In the distance, and in all directions, was the smoke from the wildfires that had chased her to this temporary oasis. She couldn’t stay here long, but from this spot she could see approaching flames with enough distance to make another run for it. She squeezed her eyes shut and lay back onto a patch of weeds that had found their perch in the sandy soil of the forest. Her eyes stung from the combination of smoke, sweat, and tears that had irritated them as she’d worked her way from one trouble spot to the next in search of help.

She hadn’t yet found any. Her husband wasn’t going to be rescued. He’d sacrificed himself for her. She’d let him do it. Selfishly, she had let him give his life in the hope she could save hers.

She imagined the love of her life burning to death, the flames and smoke overwhelming him and consuming him. Her chest tightened, and her stomach lurched. She rolled onto her side and retched. It was nothing but bile, and the taste of it caused her to gag again.

She was at once nauseous and ravenous. And she was thirsty. So thirsty. She tried to think of the last time she’d had anything to drink. The night before? When she’d taken a swig from a hydration-tracking water bottle to wash down her Loestrin pill. She touched her abdomen at her navel and shuddered. Another, deeper wave of profound sadness swelled in her gut.

They’d put off children, thinking they’d have time. Their life was too good, and they were consciously selfish enough to not want children. They’d agreed to establish their careers first, travel, and enjoy each other without the responsibility of another completely dependent life.

That was the plan. Only recently had the pangs of maternal instinct begun to jab at her when she saw strollers, playgrounds, and nursing mothers swaddling their newborns as they sat under umbrellas at street-side cafes, sipping their yerba mate tea.

Now there was no plan. There was no tomorrow. She clawed at her shirt, gripping the fabric in her sore, swollen fingers. The thought sapped her energy, zapped her will. Maybe she should lay back and close her eyes. It was so tempting; the thought of letting the smoke and flames overwhelm her. She could be with her Sam again. He might not have even crossed the gates yet. They could do it together. He could carry her over the threshold like the day they were married. That image sent a shot of warmth into her chest, and for a split second she thought she could feel him next to her, his touch on her body, his scent filling her nose. It was masculine. Clean but with a hint of musk. She could hear his voice.

“Move,” he whispered. “Get up and move.”

Her eyes misted, and she curled into a ball, sobbing, considering the loss of her soul mate. He was the best man she’d ever known: kind, compassionate, smart, loving, funny, and ultimately selfless. A wave of guilt washed over her, supplanting the nausea and the thirst.

She shouldn’t have left him. She should have died in his arms. Their story should have ended on the same page. She cursed herself for having left. It was something for which she would never forgive herself. After what felt like hours but was likely minutes, Loretta calmed herself. She couldn’t let her emotions kill her now. The only thing worse than leaving her husband to die was letting him die in vain. She had to get to safety. She had to find help, wherever it might be.

Loretta wiped her mouth with the back of her sleeve and rolled onto her knees. She pushed herself to her feet, losing her balance for an instant, and steadied herself. She took as deep a breath as her lungs would allow and bent over at her waist. She gripped her knees and inhaled again, drawing snot into her mouth. Then she spit repeatedly onto the ground, trying to cleanse the taste of bile and ash. She really needed water.

She stood up straight, light-headed but aware of her surroundings, and searched the tree line for gaps in the rising columns of smoke. About two hundred yards ahead of her, she could see a clear line of trees. They were green and healthy. They stood tall against the slightest hint of a blue sky. She scanned to the left and the right. The gap in the flames and smoke was the length of a football field. It was a wide enough gap to make a break for it. From her spot in the clearing, she had no way of knowing if the virgin path would lead back up toward danger or descend to safety. It didn’t matter. Not really. It was something.

She sucked a breath into her aching lungs and leaned into her first step, almost falling forward. She planted one stinging foot in front of the other, acutely aware of the pricks of pain from the splinter wounds. It was her focus on the pain that propelled her forward, toward the tree line.

As she reached the first of the pines, leaving the chaparral-pocked clearing behind, wisps of smoke drifted past her, carried on the breeze that whistled through the trees. She was walking uphill now, using the thin trunks of the pines and firs for balance, straining her thighs.

The tension in her muscles told her the climb was steep. She stopped for a moment to catch her breath and listen to her surroundings. Aside from the rustle of the branches swaying above her, it was remarkably silent. Her path was absent the crackle and snap of flames. The scent of smoke was there, although faint. She’d walked farther than she’d thought. There was no clearing behind her, only trees sloping away from her.

It was darker in the forest now. She craned her neck to peek through the canopy above. Hints of bright blue leaked through the dense foliage. Beneath her feet, brown needles and dead leaves crunched as she resumed her slow uphill trek.

She couldn’t remember their elevation but did recall Sam telling her they were camping at the point where the high desert transitioned to more of an alpine terrain. As she breathed in thinner air and felt the dizziness of light-headedness and the beginnings of dehydration, she was clearly nowhere near where she needed to be.

The canopy overhead shook, and then her ears pricked at an unfamiliar sound in the sky. It was a distant whir at first, then a hum. It was getting louder. She stopped again, leaning on the twisted, rough amber trunk of a redwood, and searched the jagged spaces between branches.

The hum became a whipping sound, then then a thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.

A helicopter!

Without thinking about the absurdity of it, she called out in desperation, her voice cracked and barely audible.

“Help,” she tried to rasp. “Please help.”

The noise that squeaked from her mouth was alien to her. It didn’t sound human, let alone like her own voice.

She waved her hands over her head, nearly losing her balance again, and in the small spaces of blue sky, the helicopter flew past her. It looked like the reflection of a jet plane on waves, resembling a mirage.

She wondered first if it was real. It was. It had to be.

Right?

It had to be.

She wondered if getting back to the clearing was smarter than continuing her trek. From the open space, a chopper could see her. It could land or drop a basket and take her to safety. She couldn’t remember how long she’d been walking. Ten minutes? Thirty? Two hours?

She couldn’t be sure of anything. Turning back to the path as of yet untraveled, she wondered if that was the better route. If she found another clearing ahead in the higher elevations, she’d be even more visible. The helicopters would be more likely to see her, wouldn’t they?

She resolved to keep moving in the same direction, to go against convention and find a higher perch from which to seek rescue. She puffed her cheeks and exhaled, feeling the air escape her lungs.

Loretta imagined her husband talking to her, encouraging her. He was with her as she climbed higher and higher, maneuvering her way amongst the trees.

“You can do this,” she could hear him saying to her. “It’s easy. One step and the next. You can do this.”

The knot returned to her throat, aching now. In her mind, she answered him, her voice clear and strong.

“I’m doing this for us,” she said. “For you. I can’t let you die for nothing.”

In her imaginary conversation, the one she knew wasn’t real as she pushed past the prick and sting of pine needles poking at her wounded feet, she could see him listening to her with a knowing smile on his face.

It was the same look he’d given her when she’d insisted on taking dystopian fiction as both warning and primer. He was supportive, if not somewhat suspect. It was the smile of a loving husband indulging his wife’s peccadilloes. They were important to her, so they became important to him.

“I shouldn’t have left you,” she explained to him in her mind. “I shouldn’t have walked away.”

It was a thought she couldn’t escape, a feeling that wouldn’t go away. No matter how much she rationalized it, climbing higher and higher, it wasn’t rational.

Her imaginary Sam told her it was okay. “I would die a thousand times to give you one chance at life,” he said to her. “I’m glad that for once in your life you actually listened to me.”

But Sam wasn’t really here. He wasn’t smiling at her. He was dead.

Loretta pushed forward, past the dryness in her mouth, the ache in her thighs and lower back, the raw burn on the bottoms of her bare feet, until she could see the break of light up ahead. She’d been in the relative dusk of the forest for so long now that the light ahead, beckoning to her through a gap in the trees, was so bright it was blinding.

She worked her way closer to it, keeping her eyes focused on it until the white diffused into blue and then a pine-framed window into what lay beyond the forest. There was a carpet of weeds, rich dirt, outcroppings of rocks and boulders that seemed to have dropped into place from the sheer face of a worn peak.

She emerged from the forest, leaning her shoulder onto the last of the pines, and stepped from the decay of the forest floor onto the soft, weed-infested ground of a new clearing.

She moved closer to the crumbling bluff and surveyed her new surroundings. To her left the clearing wound around the side of the peak, disappearing into the thick line of trees that marked the forest from which she’d just appeared. To her right the clearing spread out in front of her for fifty feet until it stopped. There was a definite edge, an ending to the clearing on that side.

Loretta pegged the sun behind a thin haze of smoke and figured it was after noon now. She’d been moving for too long now for it to be morning still.

She limped toward the edge. She approached warily, not sure where it was weak enough to crumble away from underneath her feet. She stopped at a comfortable spot a couple of steps from the edge, and what lay beyond came into view. Her stomach dropped.

Beneath her, and as far as she could see, was the expanse of the Angeles National Forest. She could see the green of trees, the hints of trails and roads, jagged peaks, and the low glide of quail or magpie swooping above the tops of pines, firs, and redwoods.

What drew her eyes though, what kept her attention, was the smoke. It hung low over the trees and plumed into the sky like nonstop geysers releasing a thousand years’ worth of pressure. Beneath the blanket of smoke, she could make out the endless lines of orange and red that glowed, consuming everything in their paths. Some were razor thin from her vantage point, others thick and hungry. They advanced and merged.

Along the horizon appeared a squadron of large birds. Then she recognized they were helicopters. There were five of them flying in formation, dipping lower above the flames, dunking into the smoke. Then they separated, and two of them dumped streaks of water overtop the burning trees.

The remaining three did the same before the choppers turned, their rotors beating through the black and gray, and they disappeared. Loretta bent over at her waist, resting her hands on her knees before wiping her face with the back of an ashen hand.

She spun when she heard the collective thump of another grouping of choppers. This was much closer and behind her on the other side of the peak. She couldn’t see them at first, but they were loud. They appeared from beyond her line of sight, thundering overhead and toward the fires below.

They were flying close enough for her to read the word FIRE on the underside of the choppers and to see the yellow-suited firefighters sitting inside open bay doors on the choppers’ right sides.

Her muscles tensed, her pulse quickened. She took two quick steps forward, waving her arms wildly and trying to call out for help. Her voice was nonexistent, but even had it been its normal volume, the firefighters wouldn’t have heard her over the roar of the choppers’ engines and the whip of the rotors.

For a split second Loretta thought one of the helmeted firefighters saw her. She thought he or she glanced her way. A tingle of hope charged through her. She stood on her toes, her eyes widening with expectation.

But the chopper banked left with the others and thumped away from her. At a distance the helicopters slowed, and she thought again they’d seen her. They stopped in position and hovered over an area where plumes of smoke were just beginning to puff skyward from the treetops.

Were they coming back for her? Had they seen her in some sort of helicopter rearview mirror or camera? Was she about to be rescued?

No.

Firefighters dropped long ropes from the open bay doors, the lines uncoiling until they disappeared beneath the canopy. One by one, the firefighters descended those ropes and slid toward the danger. She counted five of them in all. They were so close to her, a quarter of a mile, she guessed. It could have been less than that, but given the sudden explosion of smoke between them and her position near the peak, they might as well have been on the moon.

The lines, once taut from the firefighters’ weight, were slack now. Other first responders in bright yellow jackets and pants edged toward the open door and pulled up the lines. It was strangely beautiful watching them work in synchronicity, like a well-rehearsed dance. The ends of the ropes returned to the chopper’s sizable cabins, and the doors slid shut.

The choppers hovered for a moment. One of the five then rose and banked to the right. The others, one at a time, followed, and they glided back around the end of the peak. None of them were close enough, apparently, to notice Loretta jumping up and down and waving her hands as if doing jumping jacks. They disappeared, and she listened to the diminishing thwack of their rotors leaving her alone in the wilderness.

She collapsed to the ground, catching herself awkwardly on her wrist. It tweaked from her weight and she winced. She grabbed at her wrist and flexed her fingers, rolling her hand around in circles, testing the injury.

It was okay. Not even sprained. When she died in the smoke and flames, she’d have two good wrists. That was the bizarre consolation she reasoned in her zapped mind. She ran her tongue along the roof of her mouth, aware again of her thirst. At the corners of her mouth, gummy white yarns of dried spit had formed. Dehydration might take her before the smoke or the flames.

“A girl can hope,” she whispered.

CHAPTER 12

Friday, October 17, 2025

Brentwood, California

Ritz was stuck in a loop. Or better yet, he was on a treadmill from which he couldn’t escape. He was George Jetson stuck in an endless revolution, calling for Jane, but getting no help.

As soon as he and countless other firefighters attacked one city block, rescued people, and worked to douse the flames, another block caught fire. Like a book of matches, one after another after another sizzling to life, Brentwood was systematically burning.

This part of the city was in an area typically free from the ravages of wildfire. Even if the Getty Museum, planted high above the edge of the enclave and overlooking the western part of the city like a sprawling keep, was threatened, Brentwood proper and the neighborhood that populated the rolling landscape west of the 405 and north of Wilshire would escape. The worst they could expect was poor air quality and drifts of ash settling in drifts on the roofs of their mid-century modern homes or on the hoods of their fuel-conscious, high-end cars and SUVs.

Now every home in this idyllic part of west Los Angeles was threatened. Because of the heavy tree canopy and the proximity of the homes to one another, the fire danger was ridiculously high.

Ritz wanted nothing more than to be sitting on the ratty lime green sofa in front of the television inside station 19. It was on Sunset, nestled amongst expensive homes with sparkling pools and mature trees. The station itself was a single-story pale brick with a flat roof. If it didn’t have a marking of a fire station or thirty-foot flagpole out front, it might look like one of the few remaining houses that hadn’t been substantially remodeled. There was a single beautiful tree out front in the manicured yard, wrapped in a wooden bench.

Most days, during their shifts, they’d train. They might run on a couple of wrecks, a few medical emergencies. Rarely did they roll on a fire. When they weren’t on a call, they’d chill. They’d make hearty, gut-filling, nap-inducing meals in their kitchen. Cornbread and gravy, chili with sirloin, chicken, and dumplings. They had men and women who were better cooks than first responders, and they were damn good first responders. Every once in a while, a newly converted vegan would take the controls in the kitchen. That was a sad day for everyone.

The firehouse was the one totally un-California place in west Los Angeles. It was where Ritz was most comfortable. It was where he wished he was right now, watching Wendy Williams or Judge Judy and expecting dinner from the thick aromas of cooking meat filling the house.

Instead, he was banging on the door of a house on South Saltair Avenue. He pounded his fist against the metal frame of the glass door. It rattled, vibrating his heavy knock.

No answer. He shook his head so that Lardie and Phyllis could see him. He backed away from the door, axe in hand, and went back to the street. When he reached the sidewalk, he could see the smoke was closer now. At the street’s intersection with San Vicente, a pair of commercial buildings was in flames. One was a six-story bank building and the other the low, wide home of a real estate development company.

There was a twin attack with teams trying to curb the flames from their positions on San Vicente. Helicopters equipped with three-hundred-gallon water tanks had begun dumping their contents onto the widespread fires as fast as they could. It wasn’t enough.

Command had ordered evacuations of several square blocks. Lardie, Phyllis, and Ritz were one of three teams going door-to-door asking people to leave their homes. Given that it was the middle of the day, most of the houses were empty. The ones that weren’t empty were, for the most part, occupied by the help. Maids and nannies answered the doors with wide eyes and obeyed without question, almost too eager to bolt, to leave the danger zone in favor of their own safety and a day off.

Ritz reached the curb, his heels rubbing raw against his boots. He wasn’t meant to wear his gear for this long, to be block-walking in it. Despite that, he pressed ahead. Lardie took one house, Phyllis the next, and Ritz moved three houses down the street.

He stepped up the walk toward the house, noticing the large jacaranda trees on either side of the stamped concrete walk. There was ivy growing up the front of the stucco two-story McMansion and the glossy front door adorned with hammered iron hardware. Above the door was the black globe of a surveillance camera. There was another camera on the doorbell. He pressed it. There was no sound. He peeked inside the house through the wide sidelights that framed the door. It was dark inside the house. The power was out.

He knocked on the door, politely at first, and then harder when there wasn’t an immediate response.

Ritz stood there, his hands on his hips, inhaling the faint odor of smoke that clung to the dry fall air. He was surprised he could still smell it. He’d been in it for so long he’d have thought he wouldn’t be able to register it anymore. But he could, and it was the constant reminder of the catastrophe unfolding around them. With every breath he could taste it in his throat.

The third knock elicited a response. A regal woman with short brown hair, dressed in a flowing red silk kimono, floated to the front door. She unlocked a series of bolts and swung the door inward, peeking around its substantially thick edge.

Ritz took a step back, careful not to trip in his heavy boots.

“Yes?” she asked. “May I help you?” The question was polite but was laced with the confusion plastered onto the woman’s face. She was in her late sixties. Her skin had softened. The wrinkles around her eyes and mouth were faint underneath a thin layer of makeup.

Ritz smiled. “Yes. I’m with the Los Angeles Fire Department.”

She leaned against the door. “Apparently you are,” she said sweetly. “Is this about the fires at the strip mall? I saw some of your colleagues died. I’m so sorry.”

A sting of sadness jolted Ritz. It surprised him and unsettled him. “You heard about that?”

The woman motioned toward the inside of her home with her head and opened the door a crack wider. “Yes, it’s on the television. Well, it was. We’ve lost power.”

“Of course,” said Ritz, “the news.”

A third person joined the conversation from inside the house. “Is everything okay, Barb?”

The door widened, and a kind-looking man with broad shoulders set against a thin frame appeared next to the woman. He glanced at Ritz and then back at Barb.

“I don’t know,” she said. “The firefighter here was about to tell me, I think.”

Ritz silently cursed himself for not having handled this more quickly. They didn’t have time for conversations and condolences. “We’re evacuating,” he said, cutting to the chase. “I need you to gather some belongings. A duffel bag with some clothes and a couple of bottles of water. You’ve got five minutes.”

The woman’s soft expression hardened.

The man next to her visibly tensed. He folded his arms across his chest. His face soured. “Five minutes?”

Ritz glanced back over his shoulder at the flashing red lights reflecting in the thickening smoke at the end of the street. It was still running dark. The fire wasn’t out yet. “Four minutes and fifty-five seconds.”

The woman shook her head. Her mouth was open for several seconds before she spoke. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Is our house in danger? Are we in danger?”

“Yes,” Ritz replied. “I know this is hard to hear, but I need you to pack up and get out.”

“Do we have a choice?” asked the man. “Can we stay?”

Ritz’s shoulders sagged. He’d hoped to avoid this. “I can’t forcibly remove you, but ignoring a mandatory evacuation is a criminal offense in California.”

The man chuckled nervously, his eyes dancing between Barb and Ritz. “Criminal?”

“Yes,” said Ritz. “You can go to jail for up to six months.”

“Hal,” said Barb, “I think we should go.”

He unfolded his arms and put one of them around Barb’s waist. “Where do we go?” he asked. “How far do we have to go?”

“I can’t tell you that,” said Ritz. “My job right now is getting you out of immediate danger. I can tell you that the intersection with San Vicente is closed. That’s the closest fire.”

Hal let go of his wife and stepped across the threshold. He moved a couple of steps past Ritz toward the strobing haze. The color drained from his face.

“Please,” Ritz said. “You’ve got less than four minutes.”

Hal nodded and stepped back to the door. “Okay,” he said, his voice suddenly hollow sounding. “We’ll go.”

“I’m going to wait here until I see you go,” said Ritz. “Do you have a car?”

Barb nodded. “Yes, two.”

“Take one,” said Ritz. “Stay together. Traffic is a nightmare.”

Barb thanked him, and the couple drifted deeper into the house. They left the door open, promising to be back before the three minute and forty-five second deadline passed.

Ritz walked halfway back to the street. He could see Phyllis having a similar conversation with a young couple next door. They were in workout clothes, sweaty, and apparently not thrilled with the idea of evacuating. Phyllis was talking with her hands, the stress in her face obvious even from this distance.

Two doors down, Lardie was having more success. A silver BMW SUV was pulling out of the driveway, backing onto the street. Lardie was waving goodbye to whoever was behind the vehicle’s dark-tinted windows and was already making his way to Phyllis for backup.

By the time he’d reached them, Barb and Hal were back at the front door. Hal was holding a large canvas duffel bag. A black computer bag was strapped across his body and hung at his hip. Barb carried matching aluminum tumblers, her purse slung over her shoulder.

“We’re ready,” she announced.

“Any pets?” asked Ritz.

“No,” said Hal. “Just us. What now?”

“Get in your car and head out. Try to pay attention to emergency alerts. If your phones are working, check your news apps. It’ll be obvious when you can come back.”

“When will that be?” asked Barb. “Any idea?”

Ritz frowned. “No, I’m sorry. We’re doing the best we can.”

She curled her shoulders forward and looked away from him, closing the door.

Ritz spun on his boot heel and moved toward the street. Phyllis and Lardie had convinced the couple to evacuate. They were leaving on foot, stalking the pavement away from San Vicente toward Kearsarge.

They grumbled to each other, making aggressive gestures at the air in front of them. But they were leaving. That was something.

It was never easy asking people to leave their homes. Never. But those who were used to the threats were more compliant. It was as if they waited at their front doors, go bags in hand, waiting for the orders. In a place like Brentwood, where they weren’t accustomed to the idea of leaving their homes to the whims of wind and fire, the resistance was as real as the smoke in the air.

Phyllis met Ritz at the curb in front of Barb and Hal’s house. Lardie was already on his way across the street to a large Spanish-style home with ornate fencing.

“That was fun,” she said. “They told me they knew better than we did about where the fire was going.”

“What did you say?” asked Ritz.

“I told them to go fight it, then,” she said. “I offered them my gear. Took off my helmet and tried to hand it to the wife.”

Ritz smiled. It was a genuine smile.

“Lardie told them we’d have PD arrest them if they didn’t go,” she added. “That did the trick.”

“They bought it?”

“Yep.” Phyllis pointed at the couple walking together, moving farther away from the immediate threat. Then her eyes widened; she glanced over Ritz’s shoulder and grabbed his arm. “Heads up.”

A blue Prius hummed quietly from Barb and Hal’s driveway. Hal was in the driver’s seat. Barb was wearing large bug-eye sunglasses.

Ritz waved at them. Hal waved back. Barb lifted a tissue to one eye and dabbed. The car eased into the street and whirred to the right, following the athletic couple away from San Vicente.

“C’mon,” said Ritz, “we’ve got a dozen more to go.”

Phyllis patted Ritz on the back. “You’d rather be running into buildings, wouldn’t you?” she asked as they started across the street to the homes adjacent to the Spanish mission, whose gates were retracting for Lardie to enter.

“On a normal day, without a doubt,” he admitted. “But right now, with the way my ribs feel, the way the city is burning, I wish I were watching TMZ on the couch while Lardie cooked up his pork enchiladas.”

“With cilantro lime rice?”

“Yeah. And that chipotle-flavored salsa. That’s where I really want to be.”

They reached the opposite curb and stepped up simultaneously. As they split to go to their respective houses, he called back to her, “Does that make me a bad firefighter?”

She smiled warmly. “It makes you human, Ritz.”

CHAPTER 13

Friday, October 17, 2025

Santa Monica, California

Danny held his phone up above his head and against the smoke-filled sky. He couldn’t get a signal. The phone was useless. That meant he wasn’t getting updates from his news apps. He was riding blind, or he would have been had Gilda’s truck moved more than a foot in the last twenty minutes. They were stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic as bad as any he’d ever seen. He scooted forward in the truck bed and stood.

He brushed soil from his pants and the backs of his arms and held up his phone again. Even the added height didn’t make a difference. He glanced around at the drivers and passengers in the other cars around them. Most of them were doing some variance of the same thing, checking their phones for a connection.

The passenger-side door to Gilda’s truck opened, and Arthur hopped onto the pavement. He squeezed between the side of the truck and the Volvo station wagon in the next lane and leaned on the side of the bed, folding his arms on the liner and rapping it with his knuckles.

“Not exactly a quick escape, is it?” he said.

“Nope,” said Danny. He squatted down onto his heels in front of Arthur. “Not at all.”

“I’m not sure how safe it is for us to be sitting here,” Arthur said. “You see what’s happening?”

Danny followed Arthur’s eyes and spun around. His jaw dropped. “Whaa…?”

He’d been so focused on searching for a cell signal, he hadn’t noticed the deteriorating conditions they’d left behind. The sky, much darker east of them, appeared post-apocalyptic.

The underside of the black smoke throbbed red from the flames that occasionally reached above the manmade horizon. Helicopters moved swiftly, their noses tilted downward, racing in and out of the chaos. If he strained his ears and focused on the frequency, he swore he could hear a chorus of sirens.

“It’s bad,” said Arthur. “It’s a good thing we left the diner when we did. We might be running for our lives if we didn’t.”

“As opposed to being sitting ducks?” Danny asked absently, his focus on the burgeoning disaster behind them, farther from shore. It didn’t seem real.

A sensation of familiarity washed over him. He’d seen this before, in a dream or in that not-quite-lucid moment between sleep and consciousness.

He swallowed against a surprising knot in his throat, and a vision of water flashed in his mind’s eye. So much water. Rising faster than it could drain.

Arthur was talking to Danny, suggesting alternative modes of transportation: bicycles, their feet. Danny was still lost in his thoughts and images that whirred through his mind like he was looking through an old red View-Master, pulling the orange plunger to spin the photographic disc from one three-dimensional image to the next. It was a vintage toy his mother had once purchased for him at a thrift shop. He’d loved the concept then. He didn’t love it now.

The apocalypse in his mind shifted from water, back to fire, then to drifts of gray ash, and men in orange biohazard suits blocking his path. He saw a man shot at an ATM and people crowding his corpse to steal his withdrawal. There was blackness. A deep, unsettling darkness that consumed everything. He felt weightless, then nauseated, feverish, and cold. All of it happened within two blinks of his eyes, and then the images were gone.

As soon as the slideshow had begun and his emotion had welled, they subsided. The helicopters spun in the distance, and the smoke bloomed higher into the afternoon sky. Flames poked through the thickest of the plumes.

“Are you listening to me?” asked Arthur. “Danny? You okay?”

“I’m fine,” he said. Then he shook his head. “No, I’m not fine. I mean, nothing’s wrong.”

Arthur’s expression compressed with worry.

“I don’t know what I mean,” Danny said. “And I don’t know where we should go.”

He gestured at the traffic with a resigned look on his face. The passenger door opened again. Claudia came into view with the attitude of a woman stiffed of a tip. She slammed the heavy truck door shut with both hands.

“You left me in there with Gilda the Good Witch?” she asked Arthur and slugged him in the shoulder.

The big cook grabbed his arm and faked outrage. “Ouch. What was that for?”

“I can only handle silence for so long,” she said. “I tried making conversation. She’s all business. Too serious. I don’t know about her.”

“And you’re sure you’re not the problem?” asked Arthur. He recoiled as he said it, anticipating another punch.

Claudia narrowed her eyes and mocked Arthur in a whiny voice. “You’re sure you’re not the problem?”

“Mature,” said Arthur. “Very mature.”

Danny sensed, not for the first time, a spark between Arthur and Claudia. There was always the hint of flirtation, but Danny chalked it up to their years they’d worked together in the diner. Both had been there a decade, Danny couldn’t remember exactly how long. Squatting in the back of the truck, so close to both while they bantered, he wondered if it was more than flirtation.

Had Arthur come back to the diner because Claudia was there?

It was inconsequential, really, compared to the grander scale of things facing them. But it was a momentary and welcome distraction from the challenges he was sure lay ahead and beyond the frozen river of traffic.

The truck shuddered and went quiet. It lurched and stopped. Gilda’s door opened, and she stepped out onto the street. She walked along the side of the truck, putting Danny in the middle between her and his coworkers.

“What’s the plan?” she asked.

“No plan,” Danny said. “That’s the problem. We don’t know what to do or where we’d be heading if the traffic was moving.”

Gilda sighed, her gaze dreamy. She pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed. “I was heading toward the beach,” she said, her white blonde hair struggling to stay put in a sudden stiff breeze. “That’s going to take forever. I don’t want to be stuck in this if the fire keeps coming this way.”

The smoke was pouring into the sky. It was obsidian. The fires were out of control.

“We could leave the truck and start walking,” said Arthur. “We could easily put ten miles between us and this truck in a few hours. How far is your place?”

“My place is in the opposite direction,” she said, motioning to the left with her head. “I was headed somewhere else, somewhere safer.”

Claudia slapped her hand on the truck and pointed at Gilda. “I knew it,” she said, the thickness of her faint accent intensifying. “You’ve got something working. You’re not who you say you are.”

Gilda rolled her eyes and grunted. She threw her hands up in the air and then set them on her narrow hips. “What are you talking about? What grand scheme am I working?”

“You said before you were taking us to your house,” said Claudia, suspicion dripping from her sneer. “Now you take us in the opposite direction to some supposed ‘safe place’.” Claudia made air quotes with her hands.

Danny cringed. His ex used air quotes.

“Sheesh,” said Gilda. “Don’t go with me, then. Seriously. Leave. Be on your own.”

Gilda waved her hands, shooing Claudia off into the traffic. She glanced at Arthur and then Danny. “Both of you can go too. I seriously was trying to be a good person. Clearly no good deed goes unpunished.”

Danny shifted his weight and leaned toward Gilda. “I’m not leaving,” he said. “I don’t have anywhere to go. Might as well stick with you.”

Three sets of eyes turned to Arthur. He took a step back, clearly uncomfortable being the center of attention. He shrugged and stammered unintelligibly. Danny watched Claudia watch Arthur. She was expectant, biting her lower lip. She searched him for an answer.

Admittedly not the best judge of women, Danny was now certain Claudia liked Arthur, loved him even. She wore the face of a jealous woman asking her man to choose. Her issue with Gilda had everything to do with Arthur and nothing to do with Gilda.

“I’ll do whatever Claudia wants to do,” he said finally. As he spoke the words, he exhaled. Claudia exhaled too. She’d been holding her breath.

“Well, Claudia,” said Gilda, “what’s your verdict? You in or you out? Either way I’m good with it. But if you stay, you gotta stop with the conspiracy crap. There is no conspiracy.”

Claudia reached out and linked her arm with Arthur’s. She lifted her chin and cleared her throat. She blinked several times.

“We’ll stay,” she said. “How far to this safe place?”

Gilda didn’t answer at first.

“How far?” Claudia repeated.

Gilda smirked. “With traffic or without?”

That was a dig. Danny bit the inside of his cheek to suppress his laughter. As much as he liked and respected Claudia, he thought she’d been unfair to Gilda. The woman hadn’t done anything other than help them. There was no sign of anything nefarious, yet Claudia had treated her as if she were taking them to slaughter.

Danny knew, as did Arthur and Claudia or anyone who lived in Los Angeles for more than an audition or two, that the distance between two points was always measured by those two options: with traffic and without traffic. The latter was only useful between the hours of two and four in the morning. Other than that, the only reasonable way to measure how long it might take to get to a destination was with traffic.

“With,” said Claudia flatly.

“It’s a bit north on the PCH,” Gilda answered. “Right on the coast in Pacific Palisades.”

The four of them exchanged glances, but none of them said anything. Danny eyed the logjam of cars, trucks, and SUVs ahead of them on the road. Both directions were stopped, and there was no sign, even in the distance, that anyone would be going anywhere for a while.

“I say we walk,” Danny suggested.

“What do we do with the truck?” asked Arthur. “She can’t leave it right here in the middle of the road.”

Danny checked over his shoulder to one side and then the other. He pointed to a grassy spot between a traffic signal post and a utility box off the side of the road.

“How about right there?” he said. “We’re out of the right-of-way. Nobody’s going to try to tow it, not until this is over. We could be back here by then.”

Gilda scratched her temple and used both hands to tighten the knot of hair atop her head. She surveyed the snarled right-of-way in both directions. She sighed and slapped the sidewall of the truck bed, startling Danny.

“Okay,” she said. “I like it.”

She walked around the front of the truck to check how much room she had to maneuver; then she motioned for Danny to hop out of the truck, and asked him to help guide her.

He hopped up onto the curb. Arthur and Claudia stepped around the back of the truck and joined him. Danny could feel the stares of other drivers as he shouted directions to Gilda. She had her window down, arm hanging out of the truck.

It took several attempts, with absolutely no help from the drivers in the cars in front of and behind her, but she managed to hop the curb and park the truck between the two prescribed points. Danny moved over to the driver’s side in time to see Gilda grabbing something from the glove box.

“Is that a gun?” he whispered.

Gilda slapped the glove box shut and gripped the holstered handgun in her right palm. She locked the box with a key and motioned with her head for Danny to step back so she could roll up the window. She didn’t answer him until she’d stepped from the truck, locked it, and tucked the handgun in the small of her back underneath her shirt, which she bloused at the waist.

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s a gun.”

Danny didn’t know if Arthur and Claudia, who’d been engaged with each other, had noticed the weapon.

“Is that legal?” he asked quietly.

Gilda shoved her keys into her pocket. “Yes, it’s my gun, and I have a CCW.”

Danny’s brow furrowed with confusion.

“Concealed carry permit,” she said. “I have a permit that lets me have the weapon with me in public. I’m not breaking any laws.”

“Why do you have a gun?” he asked. “I thought guns were for…”

“For what?” Gilda said sharply.

Danny shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. “I’ve never known anyone who owns one.”

Gilda eyed him up and down. “Figures.”

That put Danny on the defensive. “Figures how?”

“Nothing,” she said with a now familiar smirk. “Forget about it. Let’s go.”

She walked ahead, forging her way past him and his coworkers. Danny could make out the vague shape of the holstered gun against her shirt fabric.

Gilda walked quickly, marching to a beat that wasn’t easy to match. Arthur was particularly heavy-footed and breathing heavily as they wove their way past people and vehicles.

Danny tried to match his own breathing to the rhythm of his cadence: inhale, step, step, step, exhale, step, step, step, inhale. Each breath brought with it the scent of acrid smoke. He tried to think of words other than acrid or stinging or foul to describe what he smelled.

Pungent, he thought.

That was the best he could do. Despite his intelligence, he’d never been a wordsmith. His ex, who’d been a copywriter for a small advertising firm, had always corrected his grammar or his speech. She’d even send him text replies with the corrected versions of words he’d misspelled. She’d highlight them with asterisks.

Inhale, step, step, step, exhale, step, step, step, inhale.

Bitter, he considered.

Danny was more of a math and science guy. He’d never been a great communicator, which was one of the many problems with his marriage. He’d never enjoyed reading or writing, with the exception of comic books or graphic novels, and most of them had some science-fiction element that intrigued him.

He especially enjoyed comics about mutants or zombies. The more obscure the story, the better. He’d collected all the issues of a series called The Deadwardians and another called The Revival. He had been forced to sell them to pay off some of the debt he and his ex had accrued. It had killed him, so to speak, to part with them, but he’d had no choice.

Inhale, step, step, step, exhale, step, step, step, inhale.

Sharp. That was another good one.

His ex considered his love of comics, and sci-fi in general, to be immature. She’d never understood it, he later learned. It was funny, in a sad way, that she’d left him for a guy who employed the tools of sci-fi to create new, innovative, real technology.

He’d wondered if the irony was lost on her. Then he’d wondered if he truly understood the use of the word irony.

Gilda was moving adeptly through the obstacles ahead of them, apparently unconcerned as to whether or not Danny and his coworkers were keeping pace. Clearly, it was up to them if they wanted to follow her there.

Danny swallowed hard against a deep breath and then puffed his cheeks to exhale. He’d unconsciously slowed a bit, drifting behind the others, when he heard a radio through the open window of a late model sedan. The driver had his eyes closed and had his seat back at a forty-five-degree angle. His mouth was open, and Danny was pretty sure the guy was asleep.

He stopped at the open window and listened to what was clearly a news report, with live information about the litany of fires that were still devouring southern California. The driver didn’t seem to notice or care.

The reporter was a man whose voice was vaguely familiar. It was deep and carried with it an air of importance. He spoke as one who knew everything about everything.

“…told that resources are stretched thin across the Southland,” the man said, his voice booming through sparks of static in the transmission. “Not only are the wildfires spreading and converging to make fighting them incredibly difficult and dangerous, but the west LA fires are out of control as well.”

The driver shifted in his seat, and Danny backed away for a second.

“We know it started at a nail salon,” said the news reporter. “It quickly spread. There were electrical surges that caused issues at power substations. Failsafe systems failed at two of the substations, sparking ancillary fires. That has crippled the power grid through much of west Los Angeles. Cellular signals are sporadic, and traffic is snarled.”

In the background of the transmission, Danny could hear sirens and people yelling. The reporter paused and cleared his throat.

“The lack of easy communication and the impassability of major thoroughfares has made it incredibly challenging for first responders to get to the scenes of these newer fires. Command tells me they cannot get their crews to where they need to be.”

A woman’s voice cut in during the reporter’s pause. She spoke clearly and slowly, but Danny heard the alarm in her voice.

“And, Bob,” she said, “we understand the primary communication tower for both LA Fire and Police was caught in the middle of the flames. The Mount Chapel Fire compromised that critical facility.”

The ambient noise of sirens accompanied the reporter’s response. He cleared his throat again and coughed.

“Yes, that’s correct, Donna. We know that the City of Los Angeles Central Communications Facility is down, and there’s no fixing it. That’s a major blow to the emergency response. It looks like, as one veteran firefighter told me, this is going to get worse before it gets better.”

Danny stepped back from the car. He’d heard enough, and he was falling far behind his traveling partners. He could barely see their heads bobbing up and down as they maneuvered through the cars up ahead. He sucked in a deep breath and leaned into a jog. He needed to catch up before he lost sight of them.

Acidic, he thought. Acidic is a good word.

***

Danny pulled even with Gilda by the time they hit the Pacific Coast Highway. She was on the sidewalk now, heading toward Topanga State Park and, beyond that, Malibu. He was sweating and thirsty. His mouth was dry, and there was a sting of thick pain with every thump of his pulse at his temples.

“Pacific Palisades?” he huffed, working to keep pace with the indefatigable Gilda.

“Yep,” she said.

The sweat on her back was creating a vague trace of the gun in her waistband. He wondered if anyone else could see it. She pumped her arms, her stride long and powerful.

“Is it a house?” he asked.

“Not really,” she said, punching each word between measured breaths. “Not anymore.”

“Care to explain?”

Gilda slowed, perhaps sensing that Danny was struggling. She checked behind them. Claudia and Arthur were fifteen yards back but still following. She locked eyes with Danny in a way that made him both excited and uncomfortable.

“What?” he asked, snapping the intensity of the moment.

“You ask a lot of questions,” she said. “It’s cute.”

Danny’s pulse skipped a quickened beat. He didn’t respond, though he hadn’t realized he’d asked many questions at all.

She blinked, perhaps sensing his discomfort, and turned her attention to the sidewalk ahead. “We’re headed to a place that not many people know about. Even if everything around us burns, we’ll be safe.”

“Why do you have a gun?”

“Self-defense,” she said. “Protection. Times like this when the infrastructure is challenged.”

Danny didn’t respond.

“Why?” she asked. “Don’t you think you might need protection someday? Maybe today?”

“I can protect myself,” he said self-consciously.

Gilda chortled. “Really?”

Just when he was beginning to think she might be attractive, she ruined it with something as condescending as emasculation. Danny pulled his shoulders back. She had no idea what he could do when pushed to his limits. Truth be told, neither did he.

“Martial arts,” he said.

“Really? What type?”

He wasn’t sure if the question was an effort to show interest or to challenge whether he was telling the truth. Danny knew he shouldn’t care whether she believed him or not, but he did. He always cared what people thought of him.

“Shotokan,” he said. “I was a green belt.”

“So you didn’t get that far.”

“Not formally,” he said. “I wasn’t much for kata, that was the issue. But I was naturally gifted at kumite. I could sense the opponent’s movements before he executed them.”

“What’s kata and kumite?”

“Kata is like a series of memorized movements,” he explained. “It’s part dance, part meditation. Done well, it’s beautiful.”

“And kumite?”

“That’s fighting.”

“Huh,” she said. “Didn’t take you for a fighter.”

Danny started to say something defensive, something obnoxious, something he couldn’t take back. He stopped himself. There was no point. Besides, she was right. He hadn’t fought anyone since he was a kid, so who knew if his pubescent skills would translate to adulthood, if the rust would brush off easily or serve to paralyze him when the moment struck.

He stared off to his left. Ahead of them, and east of the highway, were tree- and rock-lined bluffs that held enviable perches overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Behind them, the first wisps of smoke were beginning to filter skyward. At first Danny couldn’t tell if the smoke was a mirage, the drifting remnants of fire farther inland, or if it was evidence of something much closer.

He tapped Gilda on her shoulder with the back of his hand. She glanced at him with a furrowed brow, which relaxed once she saw where he was pointing. She stopped moving for the first time and stared intently at the bluff closest to them.

At that moment, a burst of flame bloomed above a cluster of trees that peeked above the closest bluff. A mushroom of smoke formed above the flames.

A gust of wind caught the plume and carried it toward them, toward the ocean, before it swirled and headed southeast. The smoke danced in the sky like a kite caught on competing drafts of wind.

“That’s not good,” she said.

“What’s not good?” asked Arthur. He and Claudia had caught up to them. Both were winded and breathing with their mouths open, hands on their hips.

Danny pointed again toward the bluff. “That.”

The smoke was pouring over the top of the cliffside now, a black waterfall of burning hillside. Drifts of ash floated in the sky above the smoke. Behind both, an orange glow intensified.

“What does that mean?” asked Claudia. “It doesn’t look that close, does it?”

“It means they can’t handle what’s happening,” said Gilda. “It’s getting worse. We need to hurry.”

The short, piercing sound of a siren whooped ahead of them. Danny took several steps forward and stood on his tiptoes to see beyond the traffic in front of them.

A trio of police cruisers was blocking the road. Uniformed officers were standing in front of the cars, wildly gesticulating. From his vantage point, Danny couldn’t tell how the police had managed to maneuver their way to that spot on the highway. But they were there, and they were clearly preventing traffic from going any farther.

Without waiting for the others and responding to some sudden masculine need to prove himself, he moved quickly toward what was apparently a newly installed blockade. He picked up his pace until he was jogging. As he approached the police and one of them eyed him suspiciously and placed his hand atop the holster at his hip, he slowed again and raised his hands above his head.

There was already a cluster of people standing around the cops, questioning them, pointing north past the blockade and to wherever it was they were headed. Danny sidestepped open driver side doors and approached the officer coping with the fewest number of angry travelers. Although the officer was doing his best to remain calm, the sweat on his brow and the tension that framed his stance told Danny his patience was wearing thin.

The officer was young, in his mid-twenties. His hair was trimmed close to his head, and his broad shoulders carried a confidence born from wearing a badge. Like the other officers, his hand was resting on the top of his black patent leather holster. The other hand was on a rectangular compartment Danny guessed held a Taser.

At the officer’s chest, which was bulky because of the Kevlar that strained against the fabric of his shirt, was a body camera. On his shoulder was a keyable microphone connected to a portable radio on his belt.

He took one volley from a frustrated would-be driver and then another. Slowly, he took a step back and raised one hand, asking for calm.

“I understand,” he said with a soft but firm voice. “You’re frustrated. We’re frustrated. We don’t want to be stopping you here or turning you around. But you cannot go any farther. Not right now. We need to clear the area for firefighters and other emergency personnel.”

When one of the drivers tried to protest, the officer stopped him. His voice remained measured despite the obvious stress forming in his expression, in the way he carried himself.

“We are trying to keep you safe,” he said. “We’re trying to manage a—”

The man who the officer had interrupted pointed his finger at the officer’s face. He snarled as he spoke. The back of his shirt was sweat-soaked. Blood vessels stretched against his neck. The man was clearly at his wits’ end.

“You’re trapping us here,” he said. “There’s fire getting close. Traffic is stopped. What do you want us to do? Where do you want us to go?”

The officer eyed the man’s jabbing finger but exercised what Danny thought was heroic restraint. He couldn’t imagine the cop enjoyed doing his job in this environment.

“The beach,” said the officer. “Go to the beach. Leave your vehicles. Wait it out.”

Danny spied the sand and slivers of ocean between the closely built houses that filled the narrow space between the southbound lanes of the PCH and the beach itself.

It made sense. The sand wasn’t going to catch fire even if the flames jumped the highway and burned the endless row of homes with a front-row view of the Pacific. It probably was as safe as any place Gilda was taking them. Without listening to the ongoing argument between the police and angry drivers, Danny backed away and headed toward his traveling partners.

He met them in front of a rusting Ford Bronco. The driver was reading a book. The passenger was asleep, her mouth agape.

“They want us to head to the beach,” said Danny. “They’re not letting anyone drive past the blockade.”

Everybody’s attention shifted from Danny to the shoreline. “We’re not driving,” said Claudia. “We’re walking. Can’t we walk past them?”

“From the beach,” said Gilda. “They’re not going to stop us from moving north on the beach. That’s probably a good idea anyhow. We avoid all of the traffic, and it keeps us farther away from the flames and smoke.”

“It’ll take us longer to walk,” said Arthur. “Moving on sand isn’t easy. I’m already exhausted.”

“It’ll be easier than dealing with all of this traffic,” said Gilda. “We can stay along the tideline, where the sand is wet and compact. That’ll make it a little easier.”

They all agreed to move to the beach. Danny noticed waves of people ahead of them heading the same way. They were leaving their cars and trucks abandoned on the frozen PCH and heading for safer ground.

Danny could taste smoke in the air. He glanced over his shoulder and saw flames reaching higher than before, snapping at the sky and devouring trees. A lone house built into the hillside was surrounded. One side of it was beginning to smolder. A man with a garden hose was trying to fend off the inevitable. No firefighters were anywhere in sight.

Danny felt a tug to go charging the cliff and help the man. It was a fool’s errand. He could neither climb the face of the bluff nor stall the advance of the flames. He couldn’t watch either. He yelled ahead to Gilda, told her he’d catch up; then he spun around and bolted back to the officers. He waved his hands above his head and stopped cold once he’d reached them.

He interrupted a woman complaining about how her predicament was more important than others around her. The officer held up his hand to stop the woman from talking and stepped toward Danny.

“What’s up?” said the officer. “I can’t understand you. You need to calm down.”

Danny realized he was talking too fast, was out of breath, and everything he was trying to say was totally unintelligible. He inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly, and pointed back at the bluff and the man with the water hose.

“That man,” he said. “Is going. To die. He needs. Help.”

The officer pivoted to search the cliffside. He tilted his head to the side, pinching the button on the side of his microphone.

He called for help and gave an approximate location. There was banter back and forth on the radio using codes and language Danny didn’t fully register. His attention was on the man with the hose.

It was like he was battling a dragon with a spoon. He’d parry and advance, only to retreat and regroup. Each attack was weaker, more tentative than the one before it. He didn’t have much time. The flames were closing fast from all directions. His roof was coated in a thin layer of smoke. Red bits of ash that looked like the tail end of an Independence Day sparkler rained down on the house. The man now had his shirt pulled up over his nose and mouth. His movements were more erratic.

Danny jerked when a strong hand touched his shoulder. He blinked from the mesmerizing scene of the lone man atop the bluff and turned to the officer.

“They’ve got a chopper headed there,” he said. “It’s close.”

Danny nodded blankly, searching the smoke-filled sky for any hint of a helicopter. He listened for the whir and thump of the rotors. Nothing.

All he could hear was the distant wail of sirens, the loud wash of the ocean as high tide approached and waves crashed ashore, and the low rumble of cars whose drivers hadn’t yet killed their engines.

The man atop the hill was backed into a corner now. He’d dropped the hose and was searching for a way out. The roof of his home was engulfed, flames racing across it with incredible speed. The man was at the edge of the bluff, his back against a glass wall cemented into a retaining wall that anchored his property to the side of the bluff.

He started waving his arms frantically, pacing aimlessly. He gripped the top edge of the glass wall and peeked over the edge. Although he was too far away for Danny to see the man’s expression, he could imagine the sheer panic drawn on his face. He was a man facing his own mortality.

Gripping the glass, the man checked over his shoulder, his shirt falling from his face, and climbed over the wall onto the narrow, rocky precipice on the other side. One leg at a time, he carefully but hurriedly moved from one side of the barrier to the other. His back was to the wall. He was gripping it with his hands and edging along its base in a nervous shuffle. He leaned out, looking for purchase below or measuring the fall, then pulled himself back against the glass.

A knot thickened in Danny’s throat. He sensed those around him paying attention to the lone, desperate figure trapped between two untenable choices: die by fire or by jumping off the cliff.

The woman who’d been complaining about her personal plight was quiet aside from the squeak she emitted from behind her hands. They were pressed to her face in horror.

Danny wondered if she, like him and everyone else standing at the blockade, knew she was about to see a man die. It seemed inevitable. He, for one, couldn’t watch it. He closed his eyes, the wind swirling around him, and offered a silent prayer for the anonymous man on the cliff. His pulse was racing. He’d seen the man too late. He’d taken too long to reach the officer. The man was going to die a brutal death, and it was going to happen in front of an audience.

But then, as he said amen, he heard the faintest hint of blades slicing through the air. It grew louder until Danny opened his eyes and saw a helicopter zooming toward the cliff.

The chopper slowed and leveled itself fifty feet above the man. It rose and then dropped again. It was obvious the violent gusts of wind were playing havoc with the pilot’s ability to keep the helicopter in a steady hover.

Behind the man, the flames were inching closer. His house was fully engulfed in large, hungry flames. Smoke filled the sky across the hillside property.

The chopper dropped again into position. It wobbled but stayed put. A door opened, and someone in a helmet heaved a basket over the side of the helicopter’s frame.

The person disappeared into the rear bay of the chopper, and slowly the basket descended. It swung wildly and spun around, reminding Danny of an unwinding yo-yo.

The chopper managed to hold its position until the basket was spinning slowly in front of the man. He craned his neck to see up toward the chopper. The smoke drifted in thick patches that made it difficult to see from Danny’s vantage point.

The man reached out with one hand while still gripping the glass wall and pulled the basket toward him. He tugged on it. The chopper gave him more slack. The basket, now waist high, was still.

A collective gasp leaked from those surrounding Danny when the man let go of the glass wall and fell forward, gripping the side of the basket with both hands.

He pulled the basket toward his body and tried scrambling into its shallow frame. But as he swung one leg into it, the chopper drifted in a sudden gust of wind, and the man was pulled free of the ground, half of his body dangling from the basket. He struggled to maintain his grip as the chopper swung away from the cliff. The man was kicking his free leg, trying to lift it into the basket. He couldn’t do it. Then his other leg, which had been inside the edge of the basket, slipped free. He was holding on, several hundred feet in the air, with only his two hands. His legs swung, and his body twisted as the basket twirled at the end of the cable. The chopper quickly moved out over the highway and hovered for a moment before descending.

The man was hanging freely. He was ghost white, his mouth was open, the muscles in his arms stretched and strained.

As the helicopter carefully moved west across all the lanes of the PCH, the crowds of drivers and passengers stuck at their vehicles were enraptured. Everybody’s eyes were on the man dangling from the edge of the tipped basket.

The chopper dropped quickly and then stopped, hovering with the man only a few feet off the ground. They’d maneuvered to the edge of the beach, and the man let go.

When he dropped to the ground, landing on his feet before falling forward onto his hands and knees, the crowd erupted in cheers. The man waved to the chopper. Then he collapsed onto the sand.

A wave of relief washed over Danny, and the officer next to him brushed past in a rush to meet the rescued man. He darted amongst the cars until he reached the man, dropping to his knees to check on him. A small crowd gathered around them. Danny gripped his trembling knees and resisted the urge to vomit.

“You did good,” said Gilda, appearing from nowhere. “You saved that man’s life.”

He looked up, still bent at his waist, and saw her warm smile greeting him. He stood up, and she moved into him, wrapping her arms around him. She squeezed and said into his ear, “That was incredible. If you hadn’t seen him and said something, he’d be dead.”

Danny melted into her embrace and put his arms around the small of her back above the gun. It was life affirming. It wasn’t so much that it was Gilda hugging him. He was undecided about how he felt about her—there were mixed emotions and a confusing attraction there—it was the sensation of anyone holding him, of a physical connection.

However brief or platonic that connection might be, it grounded him. It reminded him he was human.

“I didn’t save him,” he said softly. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Yeah, you did,” said Arthur, walking toward them, hand in hand with Claudia. “If it weren’t for you telling that cop what’s what, that idiot would have died up there.”

Danny pulled away from Gilda. He was defensive of the anonymous man who’d nearly died trying to protect his home. “He’s not an idiot,” he said. “He made a mistake.”

Arthur shrugged. “A stupid mistake. No way I’d risk my life for a house. Even if it was super-luxe like that one was.”

The spot where the house had stood was black char now. Burned framework made brief appearances from behind the still-thick veil of black smoke that spread wider along the bluff’s face.

“Let’s go,” said Gilda. “We need to hit the beach. It’s going to get crowded here in a bit.”

More people had abandoned their cars in favor of the sand and surf. Danny sucked in a smoky breath and coughed.

“Let’s go,” he said. “Wherever it is we’re headed.”

CHAPTER 14

Friday, October 17, 2025

Santa Monica, California

“Are we lost again?” Keri asked.

Dub checked his cell phone. He had no signal and the battery was low. He wasn’t sure where they were, despite the street signs. He didn’t want to admit it. Saying it aloud made it real.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “We’re still in Santa Monica.”

“So we’re lost.”

They were standing on a residential street, only a hint of smoke in the air. The street was empty aside from the two of them. Dub spun in a circle and surveyed their surroundings.

“We’re safe. That’s the important thing. No cops telling us where we can or can’t be. No fire. No smoke.”

Keri sniffed, drawing in a deep breath. “There’s smoke. I can smell it.”

“You know what I mean.”

Keri smirked. “I know what you mean.” She paused and added, “We’re lost.”

Dub stepped into her and put his arms around her. She wrapped hers around him. They kissed briefly. Nothing passionate, just an affirmation of their love for one another.

“So what do we do?” she asked. Her breath smelled like the cherry-flavored Icee she’d slurped at the arcade. “It’s like we’re in the eye of the storm. If we move in any direction, we dive right back into a mess.”

Dub brushed hair from her eyes. “I agree. We might be better off staying here for a while. Waiting it out.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Waiting it out? I’ve gotta pee. I’m not doing it in the street. The only thing that’s keeping me from wetting myself is moving around. The longer we stay here, not moving, the more my eyes float.”

The hint of her New Orleans twang seeped through. She’d worked hard to dampen the drawl since arriving on campus. Every once in a while, Dub could hear it. It was adorable.

“We could walk in circles,” he said. “Up one side of the block and then back. This is a pretty long street. We could keep moving without going anywhere.”

She appeared to consider it, wrinkling her nose and eyeing the canopy of trees that darkened the street. The block had the appearance of being trapped in an eternal dusk.

“Or we could knock on a door,” she said. “Some nice person might let me use the bathroom.”

“Pick one.”

She pointed at a moderately sized home directly in front of them. Aside from the towering tree at the curb, the front yard was xeriscaped. Instead of grass, there was a series of concrete pads, wispy light green tufts of grass filling the narrow spaces between the pads. Closer to the front door lining the long bed that ran along the front of the low-slung single-story house were various cacti and succulents. The house was gray washed concrete topped with a Spanish tile roof. The windows were large frameless panes that bordered both sides of wide glass double doors.

The couple walked across the yard, stepping on the concrete squares, and reached an eight-by-eight stoop in front of the door. Next to the door was a camera-adorned doorbell. While Keri stood rocking on her feet, Dub pressed the bell.

A man’s voice answered almost at once. “May I help you?”

“Yes, sir,” Keri said. “We’re college students from UCLA. We were at the pier when the fires started. We’re having trouble getting back to campus. And I need to use a restroom.”

There was a pause.

“Please?” Keri added. “May I use your toilet? It’s embarrassing to ask, but—”

“Of course,” he said. “Hang on a moment, please.”

Keri smiled widely at Dub and gave him a thumbs-up. Her rocking had become more of a dance. Dub suppressed a grin.

A figure appeared behind the glass doors. There was a series of clicks and the door swung open. A tall, slender, African-American man stood in an untucked Cal T-shirt underneath an unbuttoned long-sleeved linen polo shirt rolled at the cuff, cargo shorts, and brown leather sandals. He extended his hand to Keri and then Dub.

“I’m Victor,” he said, “and you are?”

“Keri.”

“Dub.”

“Dub?” Victor repeated. “That’s your name?”

The man was soft-spoken, his voice velvety and reassuring. His smile was broad, his face kind and seasoned with wisdom. His question came across as genuine and without sarcasm.

“It’s short for W,” Dub explained. “William is my first name. My dad was William, so they called me Dub for short.”

Victor’s smile broadened. “Nice. I like it.” Then his expression shifted. He stepped to the side and motioned past himself into the house. “I’m so sorry, you need the bathroom. It’s to the right and down the hall, second door on the left.”

Keri thanked him and scooted into the house. She disappeared around the corner, walking faster than Dub had ever seen her move. Victor invited Dub into the foyer and left the front door open.

“You have a beautiful home,” said Dub.

“Thank you,” said Victor.

The home was immaculate, with the distinct flair of a place inhabited by a man alone. The woods were heavy, the fabrics dark, and the dining room, or what might have passed for one, directly across from where Dub stood might have been an electronics repair shop.

On a large cherry table sat boxes overflowing with various parts, tangles of wire and cables, and circuit boards. On one end there were large various-sized batteries plugged into power strips that snaked from outlets with the help of orange and red extension cords. Their chargers blinked green and red and occasionally beeped.

On the other end was a bank of radios. Some appeared to be handheld, like walkie-talkies. Others were tabletop sets with separate microphones that plugged into the boxed transceivers.

Victor must have noticed Dub eyeing the unique setup. He chuckled.

“That’s my control center,” he said. “I have a thing for amateur radio, electronics in general, really.”

“Amateur radio?”

“Ham radio,” Victor said. “You’ve heard of that?”

Dub nodded. He took a tentative step toward the room as a radio crackled.

Victor stayed by the door. “We do emergency broadcasting too. We’re useful when cell towers or phone lines go down.”

“That’s cool,” said Dub. He wasn’t sure what else to say.

“What’s cool?” asked Keri. She appeared from the hallway and stepped into the foyer, stopping next to Dub.

Victor smiled. “Dub and I were discussing my mess of a control room here. I was just explaining—”

He was interrupted by an urgent-sounding transmission from the largest of the boxes at the far end of the table. It was a woman’s voice. She sounded frantic.

“—emergency. Break emergency.”

Victor ran from the door, leaving it open, to the end of the table. He pulled back the armchair and stood in front of the console. Deep lines creased the sides of his mouth.

“Autopatch fail,” the woman said. “I need someone to call 9-1-1. Repeat. Emergency.”

Victor grabbed a mechanical pencil from the table, fumbled with it for a moment, and then readied himself to take notes, his hand poised above a yellow legal pad.

Keri took Dub’s hand, sliding her fingers between his. Neither of them moved toward the door. Now wasn’t the time.

The woman called out an address. She explained her house was on fire. There were two other homes ablaze. She’d gotten out of her home, but there was an elderly couple in the house next to hers. They were trapped. They needed help.

Victor looked up from the notepad. “That’s four blocks from here,” he said. He reached for a traditional landline phone perched on the edge of the table. He dialed 9-1-1. It was busy. He tried again with the same result.

“I’ve gotta go,” he said. “They need help.”

Without waiting for Dub or Keri to react, Victor ripped the paper from the pad, pushed past them, and ran through the open front door. He was halfway across the concrete squares when Dub let go of Keri’s hand.

“We should go too.”

“What?” she asked, appearing dumbfounded.

“He can’t do it alone.”

Keri steeled her glare. She clenched her jaw and nodded. “You’re right. Let’s go.”

The two of them bolted from the house, pulling the door shut behind them, and chased Victor into the street. They caught up with him and ran alongside him. Victor glided, almost floated, as he ran. He was incredibly light on his feet and he was fast. Dub struggled to keep pace. Keri, who ran every day, moved gracefully. Within two minutes they rounded two corners and found themselves in front of three burning homes. A fourth and fifth, one on either side of those on fire, were in danger.

There was a crowd on the street. As many as a dozen people stood watching the houses burn. It didn’t appear any of them were doing anything other than staring slack-jawed or recording the flames on their cell phones.

The houses were burning in various degrees. The one in the center was fully involved, with flames on its first and second floors. To the right, another two-story house was burning on the second floor only. Smoke poured from its eaves, billowing in black plumes.

To the left was a single story, its roof on fire. It was unclear how far the flames had spread.

Keri and Dub followed Victor to a tear-streaked woman holding a large radio in her hand. She was alternately speaking into it and holding it to her ear.

“Which one?” Victor asked her.

The woman’s eyes opened wide, appearing incredibly white against the soot covering much of her face. At first, she didn’t seem to understand the question.

“I heard your transmission,” Victor said. “People are trapped. Which house?”

The woman’s chin quivered. Her trembling hand extended the radio toward the single story.

“It’s filled with smoke,” she said. “I tried. I couldn’t breathe.”

“Two people?”

“I think so,” she said. “Stanley and Sonya. Both use walkers. Their bedroom is in the back. I tried the front—”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Victor. “You coming, Dub?”

Dub looked at Keri, mouthed, “I love you,” then followed Victor toward the house.

Keri started to follow. Dub held up his hand. “Stay here. Keep her calm. Talk to the firefighters when they get here.”

Keri took another step and stopped. She opened her mouth to say something. Dub ran after Victor.

The closer they got to the house, the thicker the smoke became. Behind them, people were yelling at them, telling them to stop, that they were being idiots. That they were going to die. Dub ignored it. Victor did too. They rounded the corner of the house, racing toward the backyard.

Victor ran through the smoke, crashing into a wrought-iron gate. Dub heard the clang, and Victor tripped backward into him. He caught him, steadying his new acquaintance, and they fumbled the latch open. Dub swung open the gate and held it for Victor. Both coughed. Dub tried to squeeze out the sting of the particulate. Victor moved past him. He couldn’t see much more than four or five feet in any direction. His throat burned, and he pushed his shirt up above his nose and mouth. It didn’t provide much relief.

“I found the bedroom,” said Victor. “This way, Dub.”

Dub followed Victor’s voice to the rear of the home. There was a window that stretched from underneath the eaves of the roof to Dub’s waist. Victor was pushing on the pane from its base. It wasn’t budging.

“How do you know this is the bedroom?” asked Dub. He was against the house now, where the smoke wasn’t as oppressive.

“I don’t, really,” said Victor. “I can see a bed through the smoke. The glass isn’t hot. This is as good a place as any to get inside.”

“Is this a good idea?” asked Dub.

Glass shattered inside the home somewhere. Wood cracked and popped.

“It’s a horrible idea,” said Victor.

Dub hesitated, thinking about Keri, about how much life he had ahead of him, about the bystanders yelling at him. Then, against his better judgment and the little voice in his head telling him to run, he ignored all his misgivings.

“Okay. Let’s do this.”

Victor took off his linen shirt and wrapped it around his arm. He told Dub to back away and shield his eyes for a second.

Dub pinched the fabric at his nose to keep his shirt in place. He heard a crash as Victor jabbed his elbow through the window and then cleared away the shards. He reached up inside the broken pane, unlocking the window lock, shoved it upward, and told Dub he was going first.

“I need you right behind me,” he said. “I can’t do this alone.”

“I’m ready to go,” Dub assured him, and Victor heaved himself up onto the window ledge and over into the smoke-filled darkness. Dub followed and was immediately struck by the suffocating heat and the disorientation from the smoky blackness.

Only the dim light from the open window provided any sort of visibility. Low to the hardwood floor, the smoke wasn’t as bad. Ahead of him he could see the soles of Victor’s leather sandals. Victor was calling out for the homeowners.

“Stanley!” he yelled. “Sonya! Are you here? Where are you?”

Victor coughed and stopped advancing along the floor. They were at the foot of the bed, Dub guessed. He reached out, touching the edge of a cheap comforter that draped to the floor. It was thinly stitched polyester, the same kind he’d had on his bunk during freshman year. It was the kind of thing that came in a bag with sheets and pillowcases to match.

Coughing, Victor called through the fabric of his shirt, “Stanley! Sonya! Can you hear us?”

Victor inched forward, and Dub followed at his feet. They hadn’t heard any sounds from the homeowners. From beyond the walls of the room, more glass shattered. A loud crash told Dub that either a wall or ceiling had collapsed.

“We don’t have long, Victor. If they’re not in this room, we’ve gotta get out.”

Victor didn’t acknowledge him. He scooted forward at a quickened pace, the soles of his sandals becoming more difficult to see as the smoke thickened closer to the floor.

As they moved closer to the wall that separated the room from the rest of the house, the ambient heat grew more intense. They passed the bedroom door, which was closed, and in the gap between its bottom edge and the floor, an orange glow flickered from beyond despite a feeble attempt at plugging the gap with balled athletic socks.

Victor repeated his call, and his cough, leading Dub closer to another doorway that was open. They crossed the threshold onto a tile floor. This was a bathroom, the faint outline of the toilet to one side and the white laminate cabinet to the other. It was a narrow space, like a galley, but the smoke was thinner in here, and the air was moderately cooler. The tiles were cold on Dub’s palms. He inched through the narrow space behind Victor, and from the back of the bathroom came the faintest echo of a raspy whisper.

“Help.”

At first, he thought it was Victor. He grabbed his sandal and tugged. Victor turned around, wide eyed.

“You okay?” asked Dub, suppressing another cough. His mouth was dry and scratchy, his nostrils stung, and his eyes burned.

“It’s not me,” he said and then louder, “Hello? Hello? Stanley? Sonya?”

“Help.”

It was coming from inside the bathroom. The men crawled quickly toward a bathtub in the back of the space. Victor pulled back the curtain, yanking hard enough that the rod lost its suction on the wall and crashed down on top of them.

Dub helped yank it free and toss it aside, revealing two figures huddled together in the tub, which was half filled with water. One of them weakly called out for help and reached a hand toward Dub.

Dub grabbed the hand, its skin wrinkled and soft, like a woman’s hand, a decorative ring on one of her fingers.

“Sonya?” he asked. “Squeeze my hand if you can hear me.”

She squeezed.

“Squeeze again if Stanley is with you.”

Another squeeze. Weaker.

“Okay,” he said, still holding her hand, “I’m Dub. Victor is with me, and we’re going to get you out of the house.”

Victor shifted his weight and moved next to Dub. He reached across the porcelain lip of the tub and spoke calmly. “Hi Sonya,” he said. Everything is going to be okay. Dub and I are here for you. Is Stanley awake? Can he hear me?”

She shifted her weight, tugging on him for leverage. She sat forward, her body in the corner of the tub, wedged between the tiled wall and the faucet.

“No,” she said. She coughed and cleared her throat. “He fell. He hit his head.”

“We can’t get both at once,” said Victor. “He’s unconscious. It’ll take both of us. We have to take one at a time.”

“Agreed,” said Dub.

“Okay,” said Victor, turning to Sonya, “we’re going to get you first. I’m going to wait with Stanley and Dub—”

“No,” said Dub. “You take her. I’ll climb in the tub and wait with Stanley for you to come back.”

“You sure?”

“Yes,” said Dub. He guided Sonya’s hand to Victor. The two of them helped lift her from the tub while at the same time making sure Stanley didn’t slip under the water.

Essentially Dub took Sonya’s place, leaning against the wall with Stanley’s body against his. He coughed and told Victor, “Hurry.”

Victor managed to drape Sonya’s slight figure over his shoulder and disappeared into the smoke and out of the bathroom. Dub had never felt so alone in his life. Stanley’s lungs expanded and contracted against his chest; with the water seeping into his socks and down the back of his waistband, he regretted his decision.

What had he been thinking? Why had he gone on what was increasingly a plain suicide mission? Why had he told Victor to take Sonya?

It was getting warmer in the bathroom. There was more smoke, he was certain. The crack and roar of the flames on the other side of the wall were louder.

He imagined how angry Keri would be when Victor appeared without him. She’d lose it. She’d have every right to. All these selfless acts he’d undertaken in these last minutes were, in truth, selfish. He hadn’t thought of her or of his family back home in Houston. He’d neglected to think of all the future clients he’d never be able to counsel to help live healthy lives. He was going to die in a bathtub with an unconscious old man he’d never met lying on top of him.

He thought of all the interviews he’d seen on television with people who’d done heroic things. None of them considered themselves heroes. All of them claimed they’d done what anyone else would do when put in the same circumstances. He’d long questioned whether that was true. Would anyone dive into a roiling ocean to save a drowning man? Would anyone pull over to the side of the road to rescue someone trapped in an automobile accident? Would anyone thwart a would-be robbery by attacking an armed thug? Would anybody run into a burning building to save someone trapped inside?

Clearly, as he’d run up on the burning houses on this street, not everybody would do those things. He pictured the faces of the men and women standing in the street doing nothing, taking videos and pictures with their cell phones, calling after him as he ran around the side of the house and into the smoke, chastising his choice to act.

For a split second he thought about leaving Stanley in the tub. Nobody would blame him except Sonya. Getting the man out of the house was going to be impossible. The idea that Victor would even make it back to the bathroom was improbable.

Stanley let out an audible sigh and then a groan. Unsure what to do and worried the elderly man might freak out if he came to completely, Dub whispered into the man’s ear.

“Shhhh,” he cautioned. “It’s okay. I’m here with you, Stanley.”

The man groaned again and then coughed, wheezing on his exhale. His body shivered, sending a ripple through the water. Dub continued to speak softly to him, trying to keep him calm should he awake as much as he was trying to keep his own wits about him.

Minutes passed and then, finally, from outside the bathroom, Dub heard a thump that made him believe Victor was coming back for him. There was coughing coming from the bedroom. Somebody was there.

“We’re still here!” he called out. “We’re still in the tub!”

Another round of coughing and then a figure manifested next to the tub. It was Victor. He was on his knees. They were going to survive.

“C’mon,” he said, his voice weak, “we gotta go.”

He leaned over the tub and helped Dub lift Stanley from the water. They each took one arm and draped it over their respective shoulders. Climbing to their feet, they moved through the narrow galley in the bathroom, bumping into the walls, tripping over themselves until they found themselves in the bedroom.

Dub was at once hit with a flash of dry heat, as if he’d opened a hot oven with his face too close to the coils. To his right, and only feet from him, flames ate through the door. They climbed the walls, defying gravity, spreading outward like molten ivy.

Sizzling air filled his nose and then his lungs when he inhaled. His throat was tighter with every step. Each movement now hurt. The air in his lungs burned.

Stanley’s weight was heavier with every difficult step. It was a short distance from the bathroom to the rear window. Shouldn’t they be there? Where were they? Was that the window ahead of them?

Another blast of heat burned the side of his face, and he instinctively moved left, away from the source. That forced Victor into the foot of the bed. They lost their balance and tumbled forward in the dim gray light. Dub landed awkwardly, twisting his ankle and knee when Stanley landed on top of him.

“You okay?” Victor yelled above the din of the fire. “Can you get up?”

“Yes,” Dub said.

Or he thought he said it. He tried to say it. He wanted to say it. Nothing came out. And he wasn’t okay.

He couldn’t breathe. Suddenly he realized he hadn’t taken a breath in several seconds. His pulse was throbbing against his chest and neck. He tried sucking in a breath but couldn’t. His throat was closed. It was swollen and damaged from the superheated air of the fire.

His vision blurred, and he opened his mouth like a fish out of water. Nothing came in or out. So much smoke. Too much heat.

Panic flooded his body, and he struggled, flailing, to free himself from underneath Stanley’s body. He couldn’t. Even as Victor managed to pull the again unconscious man from atop his legs, Dub was powerless to help himself. As the lack of oxygen made his head tingle and his extremities twitch, there was a familiar touch on his body. It was feminine. It was strong. It was Keri.

***

She couldn’t stand it any longer, not when the smoke pouring through the one-story house turned from gray to black, not when Victor had come out without Dub and then gone back for him. Keri had to act.

While residents worked to comfort Sonya and pull her free of the smoke, Keri ran towards the house. She followed the same path Victor had taken twice, diving into the opaque haze that shrouded everything more than two feet in front of her. She felt her way past the open gate and into the backyard. She fought past the sting in her eyes to find the open window at the back of the house. Victor wasn’t anywhere. He must have already climbed inside.

Twenty feet to her left, the back of the house was on fire. It was a wall of flames shooting straight up into the air and threatening the large jacaranda tree whose canopy arched over the roof.

The window in front of her was chest high. Keri wiped the moisture from her eyes and pressed her palms flat against the sill, pulling herself up and onto the open ledge. She squinted into the darkness, trying to make out shapes or forms. All she could see were the spreading stalks of flames along the wall.

She held herself there for a moment, debating whether or not she should drop into the burning house, when she heard a noise straight ahead of her. Through the smoke she could make out the vague outline of three figures. As soon as she made them out, they collapsed in front of her.

She scrambled through the window, almost falling onto her face inside the house. She caught herself, jamming her right shoulder into the hardwood floors with a grunt. She steadied herself and rolled onto her knees.

There were voices. Or a single voice. It was Victor. He was asking Dub questions. Dub wasn’t answering. Where was he? Where did he go?

Then she found him on the floor in front of her. The right side of his face was red and blistered. It was obvious even in the dim, smoky light that filtered into the room from the window. His right eye was swollen, the collar of his shirt was stuck to his neck. None of that frightened her as much, though, as the look in his open eye and the static gape of his mouth.

His tongue was waggling in and out. His left eye rolled back into his head. He wasn’t breathing. Dub was dying.

With strength she didn’t know she had, and a gargantuan surge of adrenaline she’d never felt before, Keri lifted him from the floor and dragged his limp, heavy body to the window. She yelled at Victor to help her. He crawled toward her, and they heaved Dub half through the window. Keri quickly climbed around him and dropped to the ground outside. The rush of hormones still raging through her, she pulled Dub from the window, dragging him far from the house, and laid him on his back near the fence line with the neighboring home directly behind the one she’d just escaped.

Her own throat now swollen with emotion, she tried giving him air, performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It wasn’t doing any good. It was like blowing air into a thin soda straw. Virtually nothing was getting into his lungs. There was so much resistance. She paused, hovering over his wounded body. Her hands trembled, her pulse raced. She could feel the heat emanating from his wounded face without touching it. She was afraid to touch the swelling blisters. She’d carefully tilted back his head and lifted his jaw. There was thick black soot around his mouth and underneath his nostrils, and the odor coming from the burned flesh and singed hair made her gag. He was missing his right eyebrow. If she didn’t know it was Dub, she was certain she wouldn’t have recognized him.

She ripped open his shirt, the collar tearing away burned layers of skin. Bile stung the back of her throat. She tried to keep calm. She placed her head to his chest and listened for a heartbeat. It was weak, but it was there. Incredibly, it was there.

She tried mouth-to-mouth again. It was useless. Dub’s body seized and then tensed. Keri backed away, the scope of what was happening beginning to paralyze her. Dub blurred behind the tears spilling down her cheeks. He was dying, and she couldn’t help him.

The world slowed around her. The sounds of the fire, the smells of the smoke and of Dub’s burns dissolved into a mindless haze. None of this seemed real.

She’d woken up that morning to an emoji-laced text from Dub inviting her to join him for breakfast before catching an Uber to Santa Monica. It had been a perfect day. The Uber was on time, the driver didn’t try to engage them, and the weather was beautiful when they’d arrived at the pier.

They’d walked around in the healthy breeze. She’d relished the feel of his strong hand holding hers, the clean, briny scent of the air. He’d looked so good today, his blond hair stylishly unkempt and his bright blue eyes intensely fixed on hers whenever she spoke to him.

She’d confided in him that she was rethinking her major. She wasn’t so sure biology was the right path for her. South campus majors were typically more challenging than north campus. They were the science and math kids. Although she enjoyed both, she was competing with human calculators who were blessed with photographic memories. In the courses where the grades were curved based on class performance, she had not fared well.

Keri had envied Dub’s certainty, his confidence. He got to UCLA knowing he’d be a psychology major, and he’d dived in head first. He was in clubs, he participated in studies, he relished every major-related class. Granted, his need to explore other people’s minds and issues was the direct result of his own upbringing, his own issues.

She’d hesitated before telling him, fearful that he wouldn’t understand her indecision. He’d stood across from her, leaning against the pier railing. He didn’t try to fix anything or tell her she was rash. He listened. He was better at that than anyone she’d ever met. Her sisters certainly never listened. Her parents tried but were too consumed with the daily noise of life to hear her above the cacophony of distractions and responsibilities. Dub understood her. He truly, fully got her.

And they shared so much in common. They both loved binge-watching the latest Netflix series or spending time wandering the art-clad halls of museums and exhibit halls. He loved sushi as much as she did; she enjoyed onion rings as much as him. Hers were always doused in ketchup; he liked his dry. She loved watching him play basketball. He was graceful and powerful all at once. She relished those moments when she’d watch him play, and after he’d stroke a three or block a shot, he’d search for her as he ran up the court and lock eyes with her. It was as though they were the only ones in the gym. Her heart fluttered thinking about it.

Much of her life she’d wondered what form her Prince Charming would take. She’d found him in Dub.

Sure, he could be an ass like any guy. He had his selfish moments where he’d demand a horror flick over a rom-com or poke instead of pizza. Ultimately, though, he was kindhearted, sensitive, and brave. Those wonderful attributes that made Dub who he was were what made her fall in love with him. It was those same things that led to him lying burned and nearly dead on the ground in front of her.

She’d resolved to try resuscitating him once more when someone grabbed her shoulder. A firefighter was staring down at her. He was saying something she didn’t comprehend. A second firefighter helped her to her feet and moved her back from Dub. Then the two of them went to work on him, trying to save him.

In shock, Keri stumbled backward a couple of steps and dropped to her knees again. She grabbed fistfuls of thick green grass and tugged the clumps free of the ground, ripping them at the roots. She surveyed the scene unfolding around her, the world still in slow motion, and saw Victor standing in the middle of the yard, his hands on his knees. Two more firefighters were huddled over an elderly man who was on his back.

Behind them the house burned. Flames now reached through the open window at the back of the house. They consumed the exterior, having broken through a sliding glass door that now contained no glass at all. The roof was virtually invisible behind the monstrous curtain of smoke that rose higher and higher.

Keri inhaled deeply. It was a ragged, phlegm-laced breath; it was too deep. Smoke filled her nostrils and mouth, and she coughed it out.

Snot drained from her nose, and drool stuck to her chin. She coughed again. Her eyes burned from the smoke and the tears that wouldn’t stop. Her pulse pounded in her chest. Her head throbbed. She was cold. The world was distant, as if she were observing everything from above. Behind her she heard the firefighters using a word she didn’t understand fully despite her major: escharotomy. What was that? It didn’t sound good.

She searched her mind. The suffix otomy meant “to cut into.” What were they cutting into?

She saw them. There was no cutting. They were working to intubate Dub, to open his airway. They were failing. She could see it in their faces. Dub’s legs were pale, almost translucent. And they were still. So still. It was the last thing Keri consciously processed before the world went black.

CHAPTER 15

Friday, October 17, 2025

Westwood, California

“We’re trapped,” said Barker. “We can’t go this way. We can’t head back to the house. We need to split the difference and head across campus.”

He stood in the middle of the street across from an elementary school five blocks from campus. His shoulders were already sore from carrying Becca’s pack on his shoulders. All the sorority sisters had brought large backpacks filled with clothing, makeup, toiletries, and other “essentials.” They also carried water bottles of various sizes, and most of them held a useless brick of a cell phone in one hand. They all wore surgical masks over their faces.

Barker had volunteered to be Becca’s pack mule. His neck and lower back were cursing him for it now. One thing Westwood was not—flat, and they’d traversed the hills along the eastern edge of campus, venturing back into Holmby and the steep neighborhoods that abutted the Wilshire corridor.

He was the lead mouse in a maze, and none of the paths led to the cheese. Zagrecki, the house mother, was actually the one in the lead. She was making the decisions about where and how to evacuate. She carried a special pack that contained first aid supplies, an air horn, flares, and additional masks.

“I’m not sure heading through the heart of campus is going to help us,” she said. “That’s as dangerous as any of the other routes we’ve tried.”

There were forty coeds, most of them sophomores, awaiting instructions. Make that thirty-nine.

Gem lowered her mask, cupping it at her chin, and directed her thoughts at Zagrecki. “Believe it or not, I agree with Sparky here. We should try to make it to the Hill.”

“It’s Barker,” he said flatly.

Zagrecki shrugged her pack higher on her shoulders and eyed Gem and then Barker. “When you crossed campus before,” she said, “what was it like, Barker? Any trouble spots?”

“It was a couple of hours ago, easy,” he replied. “Things have changed since then. It was pretty smoky, no flames that I could see. Nothing on campus was burning at the time. I couldn’t say what it’s like now.”

The house mother sighed and scanned the horizon. There was smoke everywhere. It was impossible for her to know where the hotspots were. The only way to see the active fires through the veil of smoke that blocked out the sun and cast a gray pall over everything was to be too close to the flames. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, Barker noticing for the first time she was wearing orthopedic shoes, and then pointed toward campus.

“Let’s head that way.” She backed up and waved her arms to motion the coeds into a tight grouping around her.

Barker remained as close to Becca as possible. They’d been walking side by side the entirety of their aimless trek, occasionally holding hands. She stood next to him now, her hip touching his while Zagrecki awaited the group’s semicircle formation.

“You okay?” he asked her quietly.

“Yeah. My legs are tired, but I’m good. Thanks for carrying my pack.”

He smiled. She smiled back. Their moment ended when Zagrecki whistled and the sisters hushed. A swirling breeze chilled the air and pushed Zagrecki’s hair across her face. She fingered it aside.

“Okay,” the house mother said loudly. She’d cupped her hands at her face and pulled off her mask. “We keep hitting dead ends. The fires and the winds are too unpredictable. I don’t want us to wander into a situation we can’t handle. We have to cross back over Hilgard to get there. I want us staying close together. No dawdling. I can’t stress that enough, girls.”

“Where exactly are we going?” asked Gem. “What’s the end game here?”

Zagrecki frowned. “The end game is keeping all of you safe.”

Gem’s eyebrows arched with suspicion. “So where are we going?”

“On to campus,” Zagrecki answered. “That’s the first thing. We’ll assess the situation when we cross Hilgard and see what’s what.”

The house mother pulled her phone from her back pocket and held it up to the sky, essentially mimicking what every sorority sister had been doing since they’d left the house. She squinted at the display and ran her thumb across the screen. She pouted and returned the phone to her pocket.

Barker stole a glance at the elementary school, eyeing the campus through the ubiquitous haze and the trumpet vine that draped the chain-link fence surrounding the perimeter at Warner and Loring Avenues. There were no cars, no buses, no children. The outdoor basketball court, marked in yellow and blue, was empty, as were the hopscotch courts beyond it.

He followed Zagrecki southwest along Loring. It was a short block with gated homes and typically manicured southern California vegetation. Drifts of thicker smoke occasionally wafted past the group.

They wound their way back to Hilgard, north of the sorority house, and found themselves only a couple of blocks from an active fire. Water rushed down the street, pooling in the gutters and flowing like angry streams from the snaking links of yellow and brown hoses that crisscrossed the pavement.

Three engines and two rescue units blocked the street. As many as a dozen firefighters were attacking a tall, thick cluster of trees adjacent to the UCLA Faculty Center on the edge of campus. Across the street, on the same side of Hilgard as Sorority Row, another group of firefighters were spraying a red liquid onto the roof of the campus Hillel and St. Alban’s Episcopal Church. It looked like they were coating the buildings in bright, oxygenated blood.

The group slowed, stuck at the spot where the hoses intersected, and a firefighter who identified herself as a crew chief told Zagrecki they couldn’t pass. She was drenched in sweat, her eyes red, deep lines ran across her forehead, and her face was covered in soot.

“I can’t let you pass,” she said firmly. “We’ve got too much going on here. Where are you headed?”

“Campus,” said Zagrecki. “We need to get to somewhere safe.”

The crew chief, whose jacket stitching read CAPT. EAKER, looked back at the fire burning precariously close to the faculty building. She shook her head. “I don’t know what to tell you,” she said. “There’s no good way to get anywhere from here.”

Barker winced at the odor of boiled cabbage. He pinched the mask at his nose, and the pungent waft of air passed. He checked the faces of those around him. Nobody had a sour face. Nobody seemed to smell it. Perhaps it was his imagination.

“How’s campus?” he asked. “Is it safe?”

“For the most part,” Captain Eaker replied. “I think there’s a shelter at the Wooden Center. If you can get there.”

If. That was the operative word right now.

The firefighters who’d been spraying retardant on Hillel were now on the other side of the street, assisting at the faculty building. All the first responders were engaged with the fire threatening the edge of UCLA’s campus.

“Can we get there if we take Hilgard to Wilshire?” asked Zagrecki. “Then Wilshire to Westwood and straight into campus?”

“I don’t know,” Eaker replied. “We don’t have communications right now. Cell phones are down; radios aren’t working. We’re flying blind. We’re hitting spots as we—”

A percussive blast of heat exploded behind Captain Eaker, launching her from her feet and into the forty-two people standing in front of her. All of them hit the ground, falling hard onto the street and on top of one another.

Barker landed on his side, dazed and bleeding. His head throbbed and pulsed. His shoulder ached, and a sharp pain radiated from his hip. For several seconds he had no clue where he was or what had happened. A high-pitched tone rang in his ears and drowned out whatever other sounds might have given him clues. His vision was fuzzy. He could see shifting blurs, vague shapes moving slowly on the ground near him. Drops of rain hit his skin.

Blinking his vision into focus, Barker saw Becca next to him. She was on her back, her face bloodied and her right arm bent at an awkward angle. She blinked wildly. Her surgical mask was torn and dangled from one ear. She was saying something to him. He couldn’t hear her.

He reached out for her and found her thigh, placing his hand on the fabric of her leggings. Then her hand was on his. It was trembling.

He was deaf to everything but the tone. Barker let go of Becca and sat up. The pain in his hip jabbed at him, and he froze for a moment until the radiating jolt passed. Then he exhaled slowly and surveyed the carnage in front of him.

His mind struggled to understand it.

Bodies lay strewn across the road. Some of them weren’t whole. There was blood and matter everywhere. Some of the bodies were smoldering. None of them were recognizable as men or women. All of them wore the uniform, or what remained of it. Some of them were moving. A couple had risen to their feet and appeared as dazed as Barker felt. They stumbled, unsteady on their feet.

Two of the three engines were on their sides. Water sprayed uncontrolled up into the air. That was the source of the water falling from the sky. It wasn’t rain.

Where the faculty building had stood was the skeletal frame of the structure. Spot fires burned, and various shades of smoke rose from the burned hull of the property, dissolving into the yellow-brown haze above it.

Beyond the building, no more than thirty yards from it, was a jet of fire that shot a hundred feet directly into the sky. It reminded Barker of something from a science-fiction movie, a stargate or the fiery plume off the back of a rocket engine.

The flame was perpetual, and it was only now that Barker sensed the heat from the stream of fire. Again, he smelled cabbage, or maybe it was onions.

His senses were coming back, everything but his hearing. That was still obscured by a thick ringing in his ears, a high-pitched tone that made him want to scream. It aggravated the pulsating throb in his head.

From his sitting position, Barker used his fists to push himself to his feet. He wobbled, and the world around him tilted. His vision blurred for a moment as his legs nearly gave out from under him. His hip didn’t feel right. He touched it, and a deep pain shot down the back of his leg. He grimaced and grabbed his leg, cursing loudly. The muffled word was only audible in his head. He turned gingerly and reached down to help Becca.

Only then did he realize the backpack was gone. It wasn’t hanging from his shoulders. He didn’t see it anywhere as his hands gripped Becca’s and heaved her onto her feet.

She stood and fell into him. He tripped backwards and steadied himself and held her. She wrapped her arms around his back and buried her face in his neck.

He put one bleeding hand on the back of her head and held her until she pulled away. Tear tracks marked both cheeks. Although she was talking, he couldn’t hear her.

She pointed to her ears and shook her head. She couldn’t hear him either. He thumbed away the bloody smear above her left eye, revealing some superficial abrasions. She glanced over his shoulder, and her face stretched with shock. Barker gathered she was seeing the column of fire for the first time.

He stepped back from her and stood with her shoulder to shoulder. The fire, which the wind was now bending toward the cluster of trees firefighters had been working to protect, projected a warbling effect on the air.

They stood there watching the gas-fed fire, sparked by the rupture of a high-pressure distribution natural gas line. It was a newer extension to an existing line that ran along Gayley a few blocks west. That connected to a main transmission line, which was buried underneath the right-of-way along the 405.

What neither of them could know was that the extension had been improperly fitted. There had been a neglected microscopic leak for months. The leak had grown in recent weeks, and all it took was the wrong combination of circumstances for the line to explode.

Captain Eaker appeared in Barker’s peripheral vision. Her face was swollen and bloodied. Her shoulder-length tangle of brown hair, which had been tucked under her helmet, looked like she’d stuck her finger in an electrical socket. She was cradling her right wrist in her left hand. A couple of her fingers looked dislocated or broken. She loped forward toward Barker and said something. The tone in his ears was lessening. As Eaker talked, he saw she was missing teeth. He tried counting the gaps as she spoke. There were three missing, and another flapped loosely.

Sensing there was something wrong, she ran her tongue along the front of her mouth, and tears welled. She appeared to swallow hard and drew her good hand to the loose tooth. She wiggled it, and her chin quivered. Then Captain Eaker found the gaps where teeth should exist.

She looked at the ground and spun in a circle, searching for her teeth. She backtracked, winding a path back to where she’d picked herself up from the street. Once there, she dropped to her knees and felt around the concrete with her hands. Suddenly she stopped and gripped something. She held it up and pulled in a ragged breath, her chest filling with dank, smoky air, and tucked the tooth into her breast pocket.

Becca tugged on Barker’s arm, and he pivoted to see Melinda Zagrecki helping Gem to her feet. Both women were battered but in one piece, and that was saying something given what lay in the road between him and where the faculty building used to stand.

Other sorority sisters gradually came to their senses and got themselves to their feet. Barker sensed the heat from the fire column behind him. He stepped forward, noticeably limping, to help some of Becca’s sisters who hadn’t yet managed to find their balance.

None of them could hear one another clearly. There was a lot of pointing, hugging, and crying. Most of the women had minor injuries. A couple of them were nursing sprains or possibly fractures.

Zagrecki managed to gather them together and, understanding that none of them could hear her, she pulled a marker and sticky notepad from her first aid bag and wrote notes, which the group passed around.

The first asked if everyone was okay to walk. One of the three blondes Barker had seen when first entering the sorority house raised her hand when the note reached her. She was balancing herself on one leg and using another woman’s shoulder to lean on for support. Everyone else was mobile.

The next note instructed everyone but the blonde to go find their packs if they were missing. Pick them up, shoulder them, and meet back in the group, Zagrecki ordered. For the blonde, she suggested she sit in place until it was time to leave.

While the women were gathering their bags, Zagrecki slowly moved to Captain Eaker. When she reached her, she put her arm around the firefighter’s shoulder, embracing her before scribbling a note. There were four other firefighters who appeared to have survived the blast.

Two of them were able-bodied enough to check on the dead, making certain there was nothing they could do for them. One was trying a handheld radio. He kept switching channels, pressing the talk button, talking with his mouth pressed to the speaker, then holding the unit at his ear. He tried this several times and then tossed the radio to the ground. Either it wasn’t working, or he couldn’t hear anything. They weren’t getting any help here.

The other two firefighters were as dazed as Eaker, perhaps concussed or in shock. Both men, in their late twenties or early thirties, ambled around in oblong circles. They looked to Barker like mindless zombies wandering in search of stimulation.

Barker couldn’t read the notes. Whatever they were, they elicited a vigorous nod from Captain Eaker. Slowly finding her way through her fog, Eaker found her way to the two coherent firefighters and communicated something to them that had the trio moving toward the gathering of backpack-wearing coeds.

Only when they approached did Barker realize that one of the firefighters he thought was a man was in fact a slim woman with a buzz cut. She was relatively unscathed aside from road rash on one side of her face. She stood behind Eaker, facing the coeds and their house mother.

Zagrecki tried talking first and pointed to her ears. The women all shook their heads. Barker’s hearing was still too muffled to understand as well. He thought of Charlie Brown’s teacher in the Peanuts cartoons. That was how Zagrecki sounded to him.

She took out the pad again and began scribbling furiously on Post-it notes. One at a time she handed them to Eaker, who passed them amongst the firefighters before they made their way through the sisters and then to Barker.

We’re going to Wooden, read the first note. Barker crumpled it up and stuffed it in his pocket.

Firefighters are coming with, read the second.

The five surviving firefighters were all looking worse for wear. Eaker had ripped part of her uniform shirt and had made a sling for her arm. Her face was sour with pain.

The other four had distant looks in their swollen, reddened eyes. None of them, even the strong-looking woman with the buzz cut, appeared fully engaged.

They’d just lost their friends in a gas explosion. They’d been fighting battles they couldn’t win. And now, breathing waves of heat were being sent in their direction; a gas leak was burning like an unstoppable geyser of flames. There was no telling when SoCalGas would be able to shut it off.

As much as shock and bewilderment, Barker saw defeat in the firefighters’ faces. Through no fault of their own, they’d failed to do their job. Communities were burning, people were dead and dying, and there was virtually nothing they could do to stop it.

It made sense that they would leave this mess behind and lead the group to a safe shelter where they could assist however many people needed first aid. They could regroup, perhaps form some sort of command there.

Zagrecki was more than a house mother, she was a leader. A third note made the rounds.

We will make it. Put on your big-girl panties and let’s go.

CHAPTER 16

Friday, October 17, 2025

Angeles National Forest

Loretta was beginning to lose hope. Despite it being little more than a smudge in the sky, the sun was getting ready to set. It was late afternoon. It might be three o’clock. It could be five.

She wasn’t in immediate danger of smoke or flames and could see both in all directions at lower elevations in the forest and beyond. Her head throbbed, and her muscles were so weak that standing was difficult. She was no doubt dehydrated, she was hungry, she was nauseated, and she was exhausted.

Every time she slipped into an uneasy sleep, she reminded herself to stay awake. She couldn’t afford to miss her chance to connect with firefighters or low-altitude helicopters whose pilots or crew might see her. She couldn’t miss the chance at a rescue.

Although countless choppers had flown overhead, none of them had noticed her increasingly feeble attempts to flag their attention. Now she sat with her aching back against the rocky face of the cliff at the edge of a small clearing where she’d spent several hours waiting for help.

The chaotic events of the morning seemed distant. Already it was difficult for her to remember the sound of his voice. She hoped that was a function of the stress and shock of her predicament and not an accelerated coping mechanism.

Yet as long ago as her decision to leave him felt in some respects, the ache of it was fresh in her gut. She replayed it again and again in her mind, imagining what would have happened had she made a different choice. Being alone with her thoughts atop the peak was worse than the threat of dying alone from thirst or fire or some frightened wild animal that wandered from the forest below.

Loretta was drifting off to sleep, her chin dropping to her chest before she jerked it back when she heard the familiar thump of a helicopter overhead and behind the peak. At first, she incorporated the noise into her daydream, playing out a drama in which the pilot had seen her and lowered the aircraft close enough for her to climb aboard. As the whip of the rotors grew louder, her eyes fluttered open and reality reemerged.

She pushed herself from the wall of rock and dirt, wincing at the strain in her back, and groggily rose to her feet, stepping away from the cliff and out of its shadow. The helicopter whirred past her without hesitating. Its steady speed carried it off over the dense canopy of trees toward columns of smoke that were closer now than they’d been only an hour earlier.

She swallowed against the sharp dryness of her throat. Dirt and ash coated her tongue and the roof of her mouth. She tried gathering saliva in her cheeks, enough to dampen the taste. She couldn’t muster even a spit’s worth.

She stood upright again, her head immediately throbbing from the sudden movement. Each heartbeat sent a wire of stabbing pain into her forehead and neck. She inhaled slowly through her nostrils and held the breath there for a moment before exhaling through her mouth. Her heart rate slowed, and the pulsating ache in her head lessened.

She opened her eyes in time to see a condor wing its way past her. It flapped its magnificent wings for several beats until it held them wide and glided on the warm currents of air the collective fires must have provided. The bird soared higher and then swooped away from her, just as so many choppers had done before it.

Her attention drifted from the bird to a large passenger jet that was flying too low. From a distance, she at first thought it was in trouble. As it drew closer, she could see its markings. It was orange on the underbelly and tail and white along the sides and top.

It was moving fast, at what Loretta imagined was normal cruising speed for a jet that size. It zoomed past her, the trailing roar of the engines deafening as the DC-10 dropped twelve thousand gallons of retardant in a matter of seconds. The liquid dropped from its belly, spreading out into a wide path nearly a mile long and a football field wide.

When the jet disappeared into the distant smoke, another airplane came into view with a loud, rumbling hum that sounded very different from the high-pitched whoosh of the jet. Loretta could see the twin propellers mounted in front of the wings. The aircraft was smaller than the DC-10 and was painted mostly white save the orange stripes on its wings and on the rear of the fuselage. On the tail, the number 29 was painted in large orange letters. It looked to Loretta like a converted military aircraft, and it was old.

The plane rumbled past the spot where the jet had emptied its tanks and then unleashed a trail of red dust or liquid. She couldn’t tell which, although she did recognize it as flame retardant.

The turboprop wasn’t out of sight before another smaller plane zoomed into view. When it zipped through a curtain of smoke, she discovered it was a large helicopter. On its side, it was labeled S-70 Firehawk. The chopper was red, white, and blue, and cruised evenly until it banked hard to its right, aiming for the same general area as the two aircraft before it, unloading a large spray of water onto the now-smoldering vegetation below.

The Firehawk, a Sikorsky helicopter called a Black Hawk in the military, was a four-bladed, twin engine, light transport chopper. It could travel at speeds approaching two hundred miles per hour, and outfitted to fight fires, it could carry a thousand-gallon tank under its belly.

Loretta didn’t know any of that. What she did know was that the chopper had finished its run and was headed straight toward the peak on which she stood.

The whip of its blades grew louder, and its side profile disappeared as the craft motored directly at her. The opaque light of the sun was behind the aircraft and backlit its approach in a way that appeared cinematic to Loretta. She closed her eyes for a brief second and then reopened them, assuring herself she wasn’t imagining her potential salvation.

She wasn’t. It was getting closer, the thump, thump, thump of the rotors musical as the chopper slowed, lowered its altitude, and hovered fifty yards from her off the edge of the peak.

The wash from its blades was powerful and cold. It beat her relentlessly while she struggled to maintain her balance against its force. The pilot was staring straight at her through reflective eye protection. He was close enough Loretta thought she could make out the stubble that peppered his strong jawline.

He touched the helmet-mounted microphone and adjusted it closer to his mouth, then looked at his instrument panel, speaking to someone. He stared again at Loretta and waved at her.

A knot swelled in her throat and her knees weakened. Her neck aching, she tried to suppress the sudden tide of emotion that threatened to wreck her. Barefoot, in pajamas, and alone, the tears came despite her best efforts. Loretta lifted her trembling arms as high as she could and waved back.

The pilot gave her a thumbs-up and then held up his index finger. He followed that by raising his palm and then holding up his index finger again.

Was he telling her to wait? Loretta wasn’t sure. She didn’t care. He could see her. People knew she was trapped. They would rescue her soon enough.

She nodded theatrically so she could be sure he’d see it and returned the thumbs-up. Not able to hold herself up any longer, a sobbing Loretta dropped to the ground and crossed her legs. She sat there, her chest heaving, trying to contain herself, to lessen the overwhelming mixture of relief and sadness, grief, and elation.

The chopper hovered there for a minute more and then, without any warning from the pilot, banked to the left and gathered speed. Within seconds, it had disappeared beyond the edge of the peak.

Loretta’s eyes were glued to the sky now, awaiting whoever it was that would return to rescue her. Various aircraft zoomed past her, fighting the flames from above. The noise was constant now. She was so transfixed by the air traffic she didn’t notice the group of men and women who appeared to manifest from the smoky tree line yards below her.

There were four of them, clad in fire-resistant pants and shirts. They wore helmets and eye protection that masked their gender. Their heavy gloves and leather boots appeared cumbersome. Still, they moved with ease up the embankment toward Loretta.

They wore backpacks, and some carried axes, others chainsaws. They had radios on loose-fitting belts that also carried water bottles that dangled on large carabiners.

They were filthy and smelled of smoke and ash, but when Loretta finally spotted them, they appeared angelic. They were the most beautiful people she’d ever seen.

A woman knelt in front of her while a beast of a man keyed his radio and spoke in some coded language Loretta didn’t understand. The woman plucked her water bottle from her waist and handed it to Loretta.

“Drink this slowly,” she said. “You’re dehydrated. I can tell by your coloring. If you swig this too fast, you’ll puke. Tiny sips, okay?”

Loretta nodded and greedily took the bottle. She squeezed as she drew it to her mouth and sucked in a mouthful of water. The woman put her hand on Loretta’s leg and squeezed.

“Too fast,” she warned. “Small sips.”

Loretta swallowed what she’d stored in her cheeks. She relished the feel of the water in her mouth, on her tongue, in her throat. She took another, smaller sip and handed back the bottle. She wiped her mouth with her pajama sleeve and gasped some air into her lungs.

“My name is Sheri,” she said. “I’m with Cal Fire. My teammates here are from BLM and USFS.”

Loretta eyed the others with confusion.

“Bureau of Land Management,” said the man with the radio in his hand.

“US Forest Service,” said another man, slighter in appearance than the beast but no less imposing. The fourth member of the team smiled and waved.

Sheri squeezed Loretta’s leg again and locked eyes with her. “We’re awaiting a chopper for evac. I need to check your vitals, okay? We need to make sure you’re all good.”

Loretta nodded, blinking back tears.

Sheri shrugged off her pack and slung it onto the ground next to her. She fished through the pack, and Loretta noticed a royal blue package labeled Fire Shelter, a Ziploc bag full of Chapstick tubes, a jar of Vaseline, a can of Solarcaine spray, and some additional clothing.

From beneath all of that, Sheri pulled out a metal box. The words Medical/First Aid were neatly printed in black marker. She unlatched it and began checking Loretta’s pulse, her pupils, her oxygen saturation, and the bottoms of her burned feet. While she did this, the beast kept busy on the radio, and one of the Forest Service firefighters asked her questions.

“How long have you been here?”

“I can’t be sure,” Loretta replied. “Several hours, I think. I tried to flag down choppers much of the day, and nobody saw me until now.”

“Was anyone with you?” was the second question, immediately followed by, “Where were you when you evacuated?”

Loretta hitched before answering. She couldn’t find the words at first. Then once they came, they wouldn’t stop. She told them about the plans for a long weekend off the grid. She and Sam wanted to detach from their wired world and explore nature. They wanted to reconnect. It was a lengthy soliloquy that was irrelevant to the situation. Nobody interrupted her.

“We were camping,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “My husband, Sam, and me. Sam McNeil was his name. Mine is Loretta King. I didn’t take his name. I should have taken his name.”

She paused and stared off into the smoky distance. She tasted salt.

“Was his name?” asked the firefighter after a few seconds of silence. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere down there. We woke up, and there was fire all around our tent. We were at a campsite. I couldn’t tell you which one. We were the only ones there.”

She sniffed and wiped away the snot from the end of her nose. Her detached gaze was still vaguely focused on the dense woods below and the columns of smoke that pierced through the canopies. When she spoke, it was as if she were reliving what had happened. Her phrasing became clipped and fragmented as her mind dipped deeper into what she’d experienced.

“We found a way out,” she said. “It was a path. It was rocky, lots of stumps and roots. Sam tripped. He hurt himself. Bad. It was bad. Our feet were already burned. Blisters. Splinters. He tripped and then he couldn’t walk.”

Sheri stopped her examination and pulled back. She and the others listened intently to Loretta’s story.

“The fire was moving so fast. I’d heard before how wildfires could race like that. I’d never imagined though. It was so fast. Too fast.”

Sheri offered Loretta another sip of water. Loretta absently took the bottle and sipped from it. Water streamed from her mouth and dribbled down her chin.

“It got bad,” she said, exhaling a ragged breath. “Sam couldn’t keep going. I told him we could make it. I thought we could make it. He wouldn’t go. Sam said to leave him. He wanted me to get help.”

Loretta handed the bottle back to Sheri. She wiped her face with the back of her hand.

“I told him I wouldn’t leave, but he insisted. He wanted me to live. He said to get help, that he would wait for me. He knew I’d never make it back. I knew…”

Loretta tried to swallow again. The knot that had sat there, thick and uncomfortable in her throat, was too big now. It pulsed. It ached. She tried breathing. It came in short bursts of air between involuntary spasms in her chest.

Sheri wrapped her arms around Loretta. She didn’t speak, didn’t try to calm her. She just held her. Loretta sobbed. When she finally calmed herself and pulled away from Sheri, she thanked her.

“I left him there,” she said. “I know he’s dead. I knew he wouldn’t make it when I left him. We both knew that, though neither of us said it. He didn’t say it because he was brave. I didn’t say it because I was a coward.”

The beast firefighter stepped away. He was on the radio. He glanced back at Loretta and then continued the transmission.

Loretta was on the verge of hyperventilating. “I should have stayed,” she said between gasps. She buried her head in her hands. “I should have stayed.”

Sheri dug into her bag and pulled out a couple of prescription bottles until she found the right one. She opened the bottle and shook a white pill into her other hand. After replacing the bottles in her bag, Sheri held the pill between her thumb and index finger and showed it to Loretta.

“This is lorazepam,” she said. “It’s a one-milligram dose. I want you to take it.”

Still breathing at a noticeably quickened rate, Loretta blinked and focused on Sheri. She eyed the pill and exhaled. She was trying to calm herself. She couldn’t.

“Lorazepam?”

Sheri handed her the pill with one hand and the bottle of water with the other. “It’ll take the edge off. It’s an anti-anxiety medication. You need this right now. It will help us help you.”

Loretta shook her head. “I don’t think I need a drug. I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

From behind the peak, a helicopter appeared above her. The wind whipped, and the rotors thumped. It dropped altitude directly above Loretta and the firefighters. A side door slid open and a rope ladder unfurled, swaying until it was a couple of feet from the ground.

The crew member was on a radio, apparently communicating with the beast, who had moved around the group and was now holding the ladder steady.

Sheri moved uncomfortably close to Loretta and said loudly at her ear, “If you’re getting on that helicopter, I need you to take this pill. It’s not going to hurt you. It will make the ride easier to tolerate. I can’t let you on that chopper unless you’re calm.”

Loretta craned her neck back, sending a sharp pain through her shoulders, and measured the climb to the helicopter. The wind was kicking up the dry dirt, dusting it into her eyes and nose.

She pictured Sam. She imagined him coaxing her onto the chopper, leading her to safety.

“Okay,” she said. She took the pill and swallowed it with a last swig of water.

Sheri hugged Loretta again. “Kevin is going to help you up the ladder and onto the chopper. The crew up there will strap you into a seat. They’ll take care of your feet and get you to a hospital, where they’ll make sure everything else is copacetic. Okay?”

“You’re not coming with me?”

Sheri shook her head, motioning toward the trees below them. “We’ve got more work to do. We came up here to check on you. Now it’s back to the real work.”

Sheri winked and helped Loretta to her feet, and they moved the few steps to the ladder. The beast, whose name was apparently Kevin, took Loretta’s elbow and guided her up the first couple of rungs.

“I need you to move one rung at a time,” he said into her ear above the loud din of the chopper and its wash, “one foot at a time. No skipping rungs. Slide one hand and then the other. Don’t ever let go of the ropes. When you get to the top, you’re going to grab onto the guy up there. His name is Rick. He’s going to hold your hands and then pull you up. He’s connected to a harness. You let him do his thing.”

He stepped back from her, and Loretta nodded her understanding.

“I’m right behind you,” he said. “I won’t let you fall. Cool? Now go.”

Loretta lifted one foot and then the other. The soles of her feet were raw, and she grimaced. She slid one hand up the rope and then the other on the opposite side. Step. Step. Slide. Slide.

He was right behind her, as he said he’d be. She moved rhythmically, and he mimicked her progress up the ladder. When she reached the top, a helmeted crew member reached out with both hands. His arms were crossed, so he took her left with his and her right with his. When he had both gripped securely, he uncrossed his arms and leaned back, spinning her and pulling her into the chopper bed on her backside. She was sitting upright.

When he had her in the chopper, Rick took a yellow harness and pulled her into it. Then he gave her the thumbs-up. At the edge of the chopper, Kevin the Beast was already descending the ladder toward the peak.

Rick led Loretta to a canvas seat. She sank into it while Rick connected her harness, buckling her in. He immediately lifted her feet, one at a time, and examined them.

She took a moment to appraise her surroundings. The helicopter bay was barebones. There were two pilots up front, neither of whom had acknowledged her yet. They were flipping switches and working the collective to maintain their position until Kevin had reached the ground.

When Rick began cleaning her feet, sparking a hot, sharp pain across her soles, a fourth crew member pulled up the ladder. He sat diagonally across from Loretta in one of the three empty canvas seats. His back was to the pilot on the right side of the cockpit.

Without warning, Loretta’s stomach lurched when the chopper quickly elevated. The crew member sitting across from her pointed to his ears and then to a spot near her head. She glanced to her right and saw a pair of pale green headsets. She reached up, unhooking them, untangled the coiled connection, and placed them over her ears. She could hear the electronically modulated voices of the pilots. The man across from her smiled and gave her a thumbs-up.

“…with Incident Management Team 3,” said the pilot on the left side of the cockpit. “Jumpers are clear. Returning to location. Vic is secure. Over.”

Loretta listened to the conversation, picking out bits and pieces she could understand. Rick plucked a splinter from the side of her big toe. She grimaced.

The chopper banked and accelerated. Far below she could see the team of firefighters, led by Sheri, descending into the smoky and dense forest. Beyond them, a column of smoke rose high above the tops of the trees. Another column was fifty yards to the right.

The smoke became denser and darker the farther the chopper flew. Occasional orange strobes flickered beneath the veil. Above the trees, the swarms of planes and choppers resembled flocks of disorganized birds, zipping back and forth.

“You got lucky,” a voice said in her headphones, drawing her attention back inside the helicopter. It was the man diagonally across from her. He was holding the coiled cable at his side, pressing a button as he spoke.

“I did,” she said without pushing her own button.

“Push the button if you want to talk,” he said. “Try to keep it to a minimum though. We can’t interrupt key communication for the pilots.”

She found the button and pushed it. “Thank you.”

The anxiety was leaking from her body. Her heart rate was slowing, and her breathing had normalized. The field surgery on her feet wasn’t as painful as it should have been.

“Seriously,” said the man. He adjusted the microphone at his face and then tightened a strap on his shoulder. “A couple of hours more and you’d have been toast.”

Rick snapped his head around and pushed his button. “Really?”

The man’s face flushed. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I—”

Loretta shook her head. “It’s okay,” she said after pressing her button. “I know what you meant.”

Her voice was still a wisp of itself, her throat like sandpaper. She rested her head against the stretched canvas behind her. At her feet, Rick was working on an IV. He’d been pressing on the blood vessels at the crook of her elbow until he’d found a viable vein, then wrapped an elastic strap around her bicep and checked it again.

Apparently satisfied, he ripped open a square package and pulled out an alcohol-doused swab. He rubbed clean a spot on her arm, warned her to prepare for some uncomfortable pressure, and inserted a peripheral venous catheter, a PVC.

Rick pressed his comm button and spoke into his headset mic. “I’m going to hook up some fluids now, okay? It’s going to be cold going in and might make you shiver a little bit.”

Loretta nodded. He attached a bag of clear liquid to a hook above her head, carefully threading the line along her side, and after checking to make sure there was no air in the line, attached it to the PVC.

“This is dextrose and water,” he said. “It’ll help you feel a lot better by the time we land.”

She tapped her wrist, asking him the length of the flight.

“About a half hour.”

“Thank you.” Loretta relished the cool rush of the fluid into her body. The sensation spread with every pulse, and she indeed was suddenly colder than she’d been a few minutes earlier.

She drifted off to sleep, exhausted and drained from her escape, focusing on the thump of the rotors overhead. It helped take her mind, for a few precious moments, from the foul stench of the burning wildfires below and its odor that clung to her clothes, hair, and skin.

She was unconscious by the time the chopper had beaten its path beyond the borders of the forest and had found cleaner air along the coastline. It was windier here, but the rumble and jerk of the chopper didn’t awaken her. Her body jostled, the IV doing its job, while Rick kept an eye on her heart rate and oxygen levels.

In the front seats, one pilot pointed out the windshield at the front of the cockpit and motioned to the horizon. He spoke, and his microphone activated automatically from the vibration at his neck.

“Are those storm clouds out there?” he asked. “Fifteen miles or so?”

The pilot in the right seat responded, “Could be. It’s hard to tell with all of the smoke. Can’t be sure.”

“It would be a miracle if they were,” said the first pilot. “A real miracle.”

“You’re not kidding. Otherwise half of the state is going to burn.”

Loretta slept and thankfully didn’t dream. It would have been a nightmare every bit as bad as the one she’d survived, and her husband had not.

CHAPTER 17

Friday, October 17, 2025

Brentwood, California

Squealing tires and a loud, crunching bang startled Ritz. He was sitting on a curb with Phyllis and Lardie, drinking the last of his juice box, when the noise made all three of them jump to their feet.

They’d been sitting for less than two minutes, hydrating after having neglected themselves for much of the day. Lardie had been on the verge of passing out. Phyllis had a throbbing headache. Ritz was increasingly sore, his bruised ribs yanking at him every time he moved awkwardly or too quickly. All three had ignored the advice they’d given everyone else throughout the day until they couldn’t ignore their bodies any longer. The familiar sounds of a violent automobile crash ended their brief respite and had them on their feet, heading toward the nearest intersection.

Responding to automobile collisions wasn’t uncommon. In fact, most of their calls during a given shift were medical calls, followed by multi-vehicle accidents, or MVAs. Despite the apocalyptic outbreak now burning, fires weren’t as common an occurrence as they’d been ten, twenty, or thirty years earlier. Better fire codes, advances in technology, and overall awareness had reduced fires significantly for urban and rural departments in California and across the country. Some government watchdogs thought there were too many firefighters and that their pensions were bankrupting cities all over the country. The exception was wildfires. They were increasing in frequency and in intensity. City fire departments typically didn’t respond to those unless they got too close. So, to keep busy, they rolled on every emergency call possible.

What made this one different was that Ritz, Phyllis, and Lardie were rolling up to the wreck on foot. They had only the gear on their backs. No jaws of life or any other hydraulic rescue tools, no crow bars, no rescue units, defibrillators, or advanced life support. They were on their own.

They reached the intersection of South Westgate and Sunset, three blocks from the closest burning fire, and directly stepped into a tableau of horrors. Ritz’s heart raced, and the adrenaline kicked into high gear. His body tensed, his mind focusing on the sobering task ahead. He was floored that they’d been resting so close to chaos, however briefly, and took an instant to process all of it.

The fire was burning uncontrolled and devouring a Catholic school to their left. There were people with water hoses trying to hold it back. They weren’t.

Straight ahead of them, and essentially in all directions, traffic was gridlocked. People weren’t waiting patiently in their cars. They were running up and down the street. Some were engaged in physical altercations, shoving and pushing each other in what Ritz imagined was fright and frustration. Others were carrying children on their hips, hustling away from the growing fire toward safety.

Safety.

Ritz had come to understand through the course of the day that safety was relative. Right now, in Brentwood, in Santa Monica, in Westwood, in the Hills, there was no true safe haven. And those were only the spots about which Ritz was aware. His intelligence was hours old. For all he knew, virtually everything from the valley to the ocean was on fire.

People yelled and screamed, babies cried, and there was no sense that anybody knew what to do. Phyllis put her hands atop her helmet and puffed her cheeks.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said.

“It’s like some disaster movie,” Lardie remarked.

Ritz soaked it in, still searching for the collision. He scanned the craziness until he spotted it a block away to their right. Two cars were entangled, both crumpled against the side of a traffic signal pole, which now leaned precariously toward the street. What was worse than the wreck itself was the trail of bodies that led his eyes to the resting, smoking heaps that passed for the two cars.

He now understood that those running in either direction weren’t only escaping the fire. Some had witnessed the accident, and others were moving to help the wounded. Ritz tried to count the bodies and reached seven before Lardie interrupted him.

“We need to get to work,” he said. “This is too much.”

The three of them took off running as fast as they could in their heavy turnout gear, their boots slapping against the concrete and asphalt. Their breathing loud and rhythmic, they reached the first of the wounded on the ground.

“I got him,” Ritz said, kneeling. “You take the next ones.”

Phyllis moved to a woman only five feet away. Lardie took the child next to her.

The man lying in front of Ritz was breathing. He was conscious, somehow, though it was clear his legs were broken. There was a compound fracture at his right tibia. The bone was through the skin. His left ankle looked like it was hanging freely from his leg.

The man was in shock, no doubt. He was pale, drenched in sweat, and cold. He kept mumbling, his hands at his sides twitching and trembling.

“Can you hear me, sir?” Ritz said softly. “My name is Ritz. I’m a firefighter and a paramedic. I’m going to take care of you.”

The man stopped blinking and rolled his head slowly toward Ritz. His lips had a bluish tint to them, and his pupils were dilated.

“Ritz?” the man asked. “Like the cracker?”

The question caught Ritz off guard. “Y-y-yeah. Can you tell me your name?”

“Bill. I think my legs are broken. I can’t get up.”

“You’re going to be okay,” said Ritz. “Don’t try to get up. You do have some injuries to your legs. I’m going to help you.”

Bill’s eyes fluttered. “He came out of nowhere.”

Ritz started unbuttoning Bill’s shirt to check for any other obvious signs of injury. He found dark purple bruising at his right shoulder. He took Bill’s clammy right hand and squeezed.

“Can you feel that?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Bill.

“Good. I’m going to give you some water and something for your pain. Then I’m going to elevate your legs. It might hurt. Okay?”

“I understand,” Bill whispered.

Ritz removed a small pack from his back and fished out four green and brown tubes with purple caps. He stuffed three into his breast pocket, removed the cap from the fourth, and held the tube above Bill’s thigh.

“Are you allergic to opiates?”

Bill shook his head.

“Any allergies?”

“Uh…Bactrim. I get a rash.”

“Okay,” said Ritz. “Good to know.”

He slammed the tube into Bill’s left thigh, and Bill let out a grunt before whimpering.

“Sorry,” said Ritz. “It’s going to help though. It’s morphine. It should kick in pretty soon.”

Because of the shock, the morphine might not work as well. It could take some time. But Ritz didn’t have any other options at the moment.

He took off his jacket and laid it across Bill’s chest. Then he took his pack, zipped it up, and slowly, methodically, pushed it underneath Bill’s legs. He held the broken ankle as still as possible while he maneuvered the pack inch by inch.

Bill gritted his teeth and managed not to cry out in pain. Ritz took his pulse. He leaned over and listened to his chest. His lungs sounded clear. That was a bonus.

“All right, Bill, I’m going to check on some others. I’ll be back.”

Bill reached up groggily around the coat covering his body and loosely grabbed at Ritz’s forearm. Ritz paused and placed his hand atop Bill’s. The man’s fingers were cold, his nail beds the color of his lips.

“Thank you,” he said. The words slurred into one another. Ritz hoped that was the morphine doing its job. “Come back. Please.”

“Of course,” Ritz said. “Wish I could do more.”

He adjusted the coat atop Bill and got to his feet. The smoke from the church school fire was drifting toward him. Unlike earlier in the day, there were no sirens blaring, no distant sounds of emergency crews rushing toward the flames. There weren’t enough of them, communications were down, and the roads were blocked.

Blackest at the school’s entrance off Sunset, the smoke rolled in aggressive, boiling clouds out and up. He could smell it now, the familiar odor of burning things. It was something about which he’d long dreamt. The stench of fire and what it consumed was like the smell of death. Once you experienced it, you always recognized it at once for what it was.

It went everywhere Ritz went. Even a good shower or occasional bath couldn’t rid him of it. He wondered if it wasn’t really there when he was clean, but that the olfactory memory of it created the illusion of the smell.

It would never leave him.

Not after a day like this.

Not after the city burned one block at a time without end.

Ritz gave Bill a final glance, convinced he’d done everything he could for now, and moved with purpose toward the next of the seven people on the ground. Past the path of bodies and toward the two still-smoldering wrecked cars, there were civilians, bystanders, who were helping there, trying to figure out a way into the crumpled mess of one of the cars. Nobody was at the other one. It was the worse of the two, having taken the brunt of the traffic pole and the other car.

Ritz wanted to help, but he couldn’t walk past the four wounded people between him and the wreck. He sucked in a deep breath, tasting the smoke now. There was just too much to do, too many people to aid.

He told himself to eat the elephant one bite at a time, assist one person at a time and not to take the scene in as a whole task. It was too overwhelming.

His adrenaline spiking again, he reached the next body. He knelt to confirm what he could see from a few feet away. The man, in his fifties or sixties, was dead.

His eyes were open and fixed with a distant, cloudy gaze. His jaw was agape.

He seemed unhurt save one gruesome wound. His legs and arms were intact. He lay on the ground as if he were there in protest, conscious and aware of what he was doing. The growing pool of dark red blood that spread from the back of his head told the truth.

Ritz listened for breathing and felt for a pulse. He found neither. He fingered the man’s eyes closed and gently lifted his jaw to close his mouth.

When Ritz stood to check the next victim, a young, frantic woman approached. He’d seen her working on the car moments ago. Although she was breathing heavily in short, quick gulps of air that made it challenging to understand her, she appeared uninjured and lucid. She blocked Ritz’s path.

“He got impatient,” the woman said. “Started yelling at people to get out of the way. He said he couldn’t sit anymore.”

Ritz put a hand on the woman’s shoulder. She flinched. “Who? Who couldn’t sit anymore?”

“The driver,” she said, cursing, and pointing at the car nobody was helping. “That piece of—”

“Okay,” said Ritz. “I got it. He was in traffic and then pulled out, trying to move around people?”

“He didn’t try to move around anyone. When the cars in front of him wouldn’t move, because they couldn’t, he put the car in reverse and slammed it into the car behind him. Then he accelerated up onto the curb. He started mowing people down like they weren’t even there.”

“Then he crashed?”

“Then another driver, who was near the intersection, slammed into him to stop him,” she said. “That guy’s a hero. But he’s hurt. He didn’t have his seatbelt on. Can you help?”

There were two more on the ground between him and the cars. He pointed at them. “I need to check on these two people first,” he said. “Then I’ll be there. How bad are the injuries?”

The woman shook her head. “His head is bleeding. He was unconscious. He’s awake now.”

“And the other driver?”

“Dead.”

“Are you sure?”

“His head is sticking out of the windshield and he’s…he’s dead.”

“All right. Keep him calm. Talk to him. Don’t move him yet.”

The woman stood there for a moment, frozen. Her eyes searched Ritz’s, darting around like she was trying to figure out if he was going to change his mind. Then she nodded.

“Okay,” she said. “Hurry.”

The woman ran back to the car, past the two wounded people on the sidewalk. It didn’t surprise him. Normal people tended to get tunnel vision in times of extreme stress.

Ritz moved to the next victim, frustrated by how long it was taking to help people. He checked over his shoulder and saw the fire burning as it had moments earlier. The people with the hoses had stopped. The fire was going to burn itself out. Eventually.

When Ritz reached the victim, a young woman in yoga pants and a sports bra, Phyllis ran up to him. She offered to help the woman, who was unconscious. She appeared to have a head injury and a broken arm. Without discussing it, he accepted her help and saw Lardie attend the final hit-and-run victim, another middle-aged man. He was sitting up and complaining of numbness in his legs.

Ritz walked more quickly toward the car and pushed his way past the small crowd of would-be medics. The woman who’d summoned him was standing closest to the driver, who was awake and disoriented. An arcing indention ran across his forehead. Above and below the line was swelling and bruising. His eyes were bruised too, and his mouth was bleeding.

The woman was about to give him water when Ritz stopped her, and she pulled the bottle back from the injured driver.

“No water,” he said. “Could do more harm than good. He hit the steering wheel. That much is obvious. We don’t know what other internal injuries he might have.”

Ritz wedged himself into the cramped opening between the damaged door and the car’s frame. He took the man’s wrist and checked his pulse. While he counted in his head, he glanced through the passenger window and spotted the other driver. It didn’t take a professional to know that other driver, the one who’d panicked and caused so much harm, was dead. It was gruesome, and despite his experience with gruesome, Ritz finished the count.

“Sir, can you hear me?” he asked.

The man nodded, drool leaking from the corner of his mouth. He tried licking it clean.

“Can you speak?” asked Ritz. “Can you tell me your name?”

The man mumbled out a series of garbled phrases punctuated by long pauses. His eye movement was jittery and not at all fluid.

“Okay,” said Ritz. “Just respond to me by squeezing my hand.”

Ritz took the man’s left hand and held it loose in his, making sure the man’s fingers were on the outside of the grip. He wiggled more into the tight gap and tried to face the driver directly.

“Squeeze once for yes, twice for no. Understand?”

The man squeezed once.

“Can you see?”

Two squeezes.

“Is it black or just blurry?”

The man didn’t respond. Ritz cursed himself for not asking a yes or no question.

“Is it black?”

Two squeezes.

“Blurry.”

One squeeze.

“Is there a ringing in your ears?”

One squeeze.

“Can you—”

The man lurched forward, convulsed, and vomited in his lap. Ritz never let go of his hand. People behind him were gagging at the sight and the instant odor of bile and whatever the man had last ingested.

“It’s okay,” Ritz said. “It’s okay.”

It wasn’t okay. At the very least the man had a concussion. What really concerned him was the lack of swelling around the injury. There was a small amount, though it was hard to discern where the puffy bruising around the edges of the arced compression in the man’s forehead was actually swelling or just appeared to be because of the indention.

Ritz checked his pupils again. Not good. One was dilated much larger than the other. Then he noticed that what he’d thought was drool at the corner of the man’s mouth wasn’t saliva. It was clear fluid draining from his nostrils that had pooled at the corners of his mouth. It was also now leaking from his ear too. His head injury was more than a concussion. It was traumatic and life-threatening.

“Can you hear me?”

The man squeezed, a much weaker grip. Ritz turned to the gathered crowd behind him. “Does anybody know this man’s name? Does anyone know who he is?”

Nobody did. This man was going to die as a stranger to everyone around him, and there was virtually nothing Ritz could do to stop it from happening.

Worse was the multiple survivors lying in the trail of carnage stuck on the ground in pain with virtually no hope of getting any real emergent care. Ritz considered his options, and the other injured victims, then remembered the injectors in his pocket. How could he have forgotten them? He fished one into his fist with his free hand, plucked off the cap with his teeth, held the injector above the man’s thigh for a moment, and then plunged it into the muscle without warning. It wouldn’t have mattered if he’d told the patient what he was doing. Ritz was pretty certain the man wouldn’t have understood exactly what he was doing anyway. His hope was that the morphine might manage the increased cranial pressure in the victim’s head. Morphine or fentanyl were commonly used in treating head trauma. There was some controversy surrounding its use, however, and Ritz had prescribed the relatively new policy of not using the opioids as analgesics in head-trauma cases.

As much as research had shown that morphine could reduce the cranial pressure, others had determined its use lowered blood pressure in a way that actually increased the pressure and worsened the eventual outcome.

Yet there was no good outcome here. This man, whoever he was and whatever life he’d led, didn’t exist in the same way anymore. The only thing Ritz could hope to do was ease some of the pain the man must be experiencing, give him comfort on some level.

The man’s grip, already slight, weakened further. There was no pressure from the man’s fingers anymore. His eyes slowly blinked; his mouth open and closed. The morphine was taking hold. He held the man’s hand, ignoring the rise in shouting behind him, and noticed a strobing red light reflect on the victim’s face and torso. The light was filling the cabin of the car.

Ritz glanced over his shoulder through the cracked windshield and saw a parade of rescue units—four ambulances and a supervisor’s SUV—moving toward Sunset.

The yelling and shouting he’d heard was actually a swell of cheering and applauding. Ritz was confused by it at first. There was essentially no communication. How had they found them?

He let go of the man’s hand, rested it on his chest, and moved clear of the crowd gathered behind him, heading toward the lead vehicle, the SUV. He didn’t recognize the crew.

“What’s going on here?” asked the driver when Ritz neared. He was older than Ritz, his brown hair accented with gray at the temples, his tanned face weathered.

“MVA,” said Ritz. “Some moron tried going around the gridlock, hit several people. We’ve got fractures, internal injuries. Seven patients total. Six on the ground and one still in a car. He’s stuck in the vehicle. Severe head trauma. Probably won’t make it.”

“What about the others?”

“Survivable,” said Ritz. “If you can get them help, it’d be a lot better.”

The driver instructed the firefighter in the passenger seat to grab some gear, tell the others the situation, and start helping people.

“How did you—”

“We’ve been traveling through neighborhood streets,” he said. “Some are gridlocked; some of them aren’t that packed. It took us four hours to go a half mile. We’ve been jumping curbs, doing whatever we have to do.”

“No,” said Ritz, “how did you know to come here? Are your radios working?”

The driver laughed. “No. No external comms at all. Our handhelds are dead for the most part. We’re winging it, man.”

“Where are you headed?”

“A fire a couple of miles east. There are multiple injuries,” he said. “There’s a fire here, and nobody’s fighting it.”

“Nobody can get here,” Ritz said. “Command likely doesn’t even know it’s burning.”

“They know,” said the supervisor. “No doubt. They’ve got satellites telling them everything. My guess is they can’t get any assets here, especially with the primary radio system not operational.”

A group of well-equipped firefighters raced past them with stretchers and medic bags.

Ritz tapped one on the arm and pointed toward Phyllis and Lardie. “They can guide you to the most critically injured first.” He turned back to the supervisor. “So what do we do to help these people?”

“We’re gonna turn around,” said the supervisor. “I’m going to try to get all these units back to Reagan or the VA, whichever hospital I can reach. Cedars Sinai is too far. There’s too much fire between here and there. Not even sure I can get back to Westwood.”

“The injured will still be better off with you than on the street,” said Ritz. “It’s incredible luck that you wandered here.”

“I guess,” said the supervisor. “We’re on hour fifteen. You?”

“I don’t even know,” said Ritz. “It’s all a blur.”

“What are you going to do now?” asked the supervisor. “I mean, once we head out. You and your team wanna ride?”

“No. I’m good here.”

The supervisor leaned out of his window, eyeing Ritz up and down. “You don’t look so hot. Your coloring is lousy. I’m guessing you’re dehydrated. You could get checked out too if we find a way to an ER.”

Ritz declined again. “No, I’ll be fine. We’ll be fine. My job’s to help people, not be sitting in an ER getting attention others need more than I do.”

Two of the firefighters rolled a gurney past them toward the back of the nearest ambulance. The man with two broken legs was aboard. Ritz shouted after them that he’d administered morphine.

“You’re a good man,” said the supervisor. He held out his hand. “I’m John Mubarak. Station 92 over off Pico. You?”

“Ritz. Station 19.”

“Like the cracker?”

“Like the hotel.”

Mubarak laughed and scratched the stubble on his chin. “We’ll get through this,” he said. “One way or the other.”

Ritz offered the best smile he could muster. There was smoke in all directions. He agreed they’d get through it one way or the other, though there were so many possibilities that lay within those two options he couldn’t know which one would find them.

“I’m going to touch base with each of your guys before you head out,” said Ritz. “Make sure they know what we’ve done before they start the real work.”

Another gurney passed the SUV, and Mubarak reached down to the floorboard of the passenger’s seat, pulling out a pair of bottled waters. “Sounds good,” he said, handing them to Ritz. “Be careful out there, Ritz like the hotel. And always remember one thing…”

“Thanks.” Ritz took the waters then asked, “What am I supposed to remember?”

“Play the lottery before every shift starts and after it ends,” he said. “’Cause every shift you survive is another chance to hit it big.”

Ritz toasted Mubarak with one of the bottles. “Good advice. Thanks again for getting these vics. They need your help.”

“It’s not like we can get to that other fire anyhow,” he said. “That call was four hours ago, before the comms died.”

Ritz nodded and walked back through the crowd toward Phyllis. She was at the car with the head-trauma victim. When he reached her, she was closing his eyes with her fingers. She shook her head.

He paused, gripping the bottles of water more tightly, feeling the condensation in his palms. His body quivered, and he was suddenly paralyzed, stuck in that spot on the side of the road. Chaos still looking for order all around him, he focused on the man behind the wheel, the man whose name he didn’t know but whose life he’d tried to save.

Ritz had seen so many horrible things in his years as a firefighter. He’d witnessed the worst of people and the best of them, the cowards and the heroes, the evil and the benevolent. As a first responder, he had a uniquely clear window into the soul of man and what he could do when pushed to the extremes.

He’d seen countless deaths while saving as many if not more lives, but this one was tough. Maybe it was because it was the most recent. Or perhaps it was because of what the death represented on this unreal day.

The man behind the wheel had seen someone hurting others, had chosen to take action at great risk to himself, and sacrificed his own life in the process. Ritz’s weight sank into his feet. He wanted to move. He wanted to run. He wanted to be on that sofa in station 19 doing nothing.

More than anything though, he wanted to help people. In this untenable, disintegrating environment, it was becoming increasingly difficult to find ways to do that.

Phyllis pushed back from the car and walked the short distance back to him. She must have seen the abject confusion on his face, because she reached out and wrapped her arms around him, drawing him close.

“You did everything you could, Ritz. You’re a hero. You’ve proven it time and again.”

He didn’t feel like one, despite the growing sensation in his gut that somehow all of this was a test, part of a grander scheme by a deity neither good nor bad but all-powerful. His mind told him he was doing good.

When Phyllis let go of him, he thanked her. He returned the compliments as Lardie approached, his hands and shirt bloodied from his work.

“Your gear is over there,” said Lardie. “Your jacket and your bag. They’re still on the ground. You want me to get ’em? You don’t look so good.”

Ritz shook his head. “I’ll get them, thanks.”

“Where to next?” asked Lardie.

“Wherever we’re needed,” said Ritz. “I bet we could toss a rock and find someone who needs help.”

Lardie said something to Phyllis as Ritz walked away. He wasn’t close enough to the exchange, nor did he care about its content. He was focused on getting his belongings, weaving amongst the obstacles in his way until he reached them.

He bent over, his ribs reminding him how injured he was, and picked up his jacket. He put it on, careful not to stretch too much as he eased his arm inside the heavy, fire-resistant fabric. He slung the bag over his shoulder and sucked in a breath, exhaled, and surveyed the scene around him once more.

He’d started walking back toward Phyllis and Lardie when he felt something on his face. It was cold, and it was wet. He reached up, his fingertips finding the droplet clinging to his cheek, and wiped away the drop of moisture. Another drop hit him on the face. Ritz eyed what he thought might be storm clouds on the horizon and grinned.

CHAPTER 18

Friday, October 17, 2025

Santa Monica, California

Danny was agitated. He wanted to crawl out of his skin and run screaming into the roiling ocean, diving headfirst into the breaking waves, never resurfacing.

Another shoulder bumped against him. Someone’s blowing hair brushed against his face. Kicked sand sprayed across his legs.

The beach was swarming with so many people it was difficult to move. Danny did not like crowds. Every brush or spray or bump was more painful than the last.

They hadn’t expected the crowds on the beach. They’d thought it would be an easier path toward whatever safe haven it was that Gilda had them looking for. That wasn’t the case.

Even in the shallows of the tide at the water’s edge, there were masses of people walking in both directions. Many of them carried their shoes in their hands. Parents held children on their shoulders or on their hips as they trudged in both directions along the water’s edge.

It was the safest place to be with flames and smoke so close. There was no way, regardless of how out of control a fire might become, that it would burn its way across the wide, pale stretch of beach and into the Pacific.

The congestion was all along that stretch of beach. From the edges of the properties that lined PCH to the ocean, people moved and stood still.

“Something wrong?” asked Gilda. She was walking next to Danny and behind Arthur and Claudia.

Danny shook his head. “No, why?”

“Your fists are clenched at your sides,” said Gilda. “And you look like you’re about to bite through your teeth.”

Danny checked his hands. He hadn’t even realized how tense he was. He relaxed his fists and flexed his fingers. Then he let his jaw slack and exhaled a breath he realized he’d been holding.

“You’re wound pretty tight,” said Gilda.

Danny hadn’t ever thought of himself as intense. He was the opposite, really. He suffered from a lack of assertiveness. He was the strong, quiet type. He didn’t want to betray his discomfort to Gilda; he didn’t know her well enough. Even if he had, he probably wouldn’t have opened up.

“I guess,” he said. “Hard not to be on a day like this.”

“That’s an understatement,” she said with a laugh. “You know, we spend a lot of time thinking about the what-ifs in life. Rarely do they ever happen.”

Danny’s calves ached. Every step in the dry sand was a workout for his already sore legs. His heels dug in and he’d have to push harder to take the next step.

“I’ve always been a glass-half-empty sort of person with a twist,” said Gilda. “You know?”

He didn’t. She kept talking without waiting for his response.

“I see the glass as half empty,” she explained. “I know I’ve got some water left, some time, to prepare for the glass to be bone dry. Know what I mean? I spend all my time thinking about that glass being empty and what I need to do before I run out of the half of a glass I have left. So I never really enjoy the water still in the glass. I’m too consumed with making sure I’ve got a way to replenish it when it’s gone.”

She took long strides, unfazed by the crowds around them or the arduousness of the trek in shifting sand.

“That’s a lot of thinking about a glass of water,” said Danny. “I mean, a lot of thinking. And you say I’m tightly wound?”

She chuckled again. Her face was flushed, and she bit her lower lip, seeming to consider both what he’d said and her response.

A large man in a tank top with a sunburn on his neck trudged past them, bumping into Danny. He apologized and kept moving. Danny’s body tensed and relaxed.

Ahead of them, Arthur led Claudia through the crowds. They held hands, as they’d been doing much of the afternoon, and when they weren’t walking side by side, he was leading her through the openings that appeared and evaporated between the hordes blocking their paths.

Gilda conceded. “Mainly I just like to think of myself as prepared. If I’m ready for whatever happens, it’s worth all of the stress leading up to it.”

“Whatever happens,” said Danny, repeating her. “What exactly does that mean?”

She shrugged. “Anything really. You ever heard of SHTF or TEOTWAWKI?”

“I’ve heard of FUBAR,” said Danny. “Is it anything like that?”

A stiff wind blew in from the ocean, and a chill raced through Danny’s body. He shivered and glanced in the direction of the wind. On the horizon clouds were gathering. Some of them appeared as dark as the columns of smoke that rose above western Los Angeles. He’d begun to think of those columns as a game of Whac-A-Mole. No sooner had one of them dissipated than two more appeared. Perhaps the clouds were a much-needed mallet that might clobber all the moles at once.

Danny chastised himself in his head for the lame metaphor. Then he blamed Gilda. Her glass-of-water soliloquy had him thinking poetically. Poorly so.

“More or less,” she said. “The first one has to do with stuff hitting the fan.”

He was surprised she didn’t use what he now knew was the real S in that acronym. Gilda struck him as the kind of gal who’d have no problem with profanity. He didn’t mind that.

“And the second?” he asked. “It sounds Native American.”

She sidestepped a pair of children tugging at their mother’s legs and laughed. “It does, but no. It means The End Of The World As We Know It. TEOTWAWKI.”

“Never heard of it. That’s a thing?”

“Yeah, it’s a thing. It’s an industry. A subculture.”

“Doomsdayers?” he asked. “Really? I never knew.”

Gilda bristled, and her tone shifted. It was colder, like the wind, sending a chill down Danny’s neck and along the length of his spine.

“We’re not doomsdayers,” she said. “We don’t go around preaching the end is nigh or any crap like that. You make it sound crazy.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“We’re prepared, that’s what we are. We plan for what will happen eventually. It could be a nuclear attack, a flood, a plague, financial meltdown, or even widespread fires. It doesn’t matter. Whatever it is, something apocalyptic is going to happen, and we are ready for it when others are not.”

Danny stole glances over both of his shoulders, seeing the teeming unwashed masses of people walking toward their homes or somewhere else. None of them looked like they were prepared. They were stuck. They were victims of the fires. They probably hadn’t thought of glasses of water or SHTF or TEOTWAWKI or FUBAR. Yet they were in the same position, walking the same beach as the woman who made those considerations a part of her everyday life. He thought whether or not he should say something. She must have read his mind, because she went on.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she began and referenced her traveling partners with a pointed, wagging finger. “I’m here with you and them, and you didn’t do anything to prepare. None of these people in this…this…this human tide did anything to be ready. Right?”

He shrugged.

“I figured,” she said. “Don’t think about what’s happening right now in the short term. Think long term. What do you do two or three days from now when the fires are still burning? Where do you go for food or water? How do you protect yourself when people start getting more desperate?”

She motioned to the sea of bodies around them, shuffling and walking, bumping, and brushing. Danny followed her gestures, noticing the blank looks on people’s faces.

“These people are thinking about getting home. They’re worried about their houses burning or their cars getting towed. They might be thinking about how to get their kids from daycare or what mess awaits them from a pet left inside the house for too long.”

Danny thought about Maggie. He’d left her with plenty of food and water. She’d be okay for a couple of days, even if she soiled her crate. It wasn’t ideal, and he was pretty sure she was miserable and confused as to why he hadn’t come home. She was fine for now.

Gilda continued, a hint of condescension in her voice now. “They don’t have a clue about what’s next, in the days and weeks still to come. I do. Although I might not be any better off than any of you in the effort to get safely to a waypoint, once I’m there, I’m golden for the foreseeable future. I’m set because I thought about the half-empty glass. I’m prepared. I have sustainable supplies of food, water, and energy. Do you?”

He didn’t. He had a few cans of dollar-store soup in his otherwise empty pantry, and half of a six-pack of twelve-ounce water bottles in the refrigerator along with some ketchup and a box of leftover pizza delivery breadsticks.

On the thrift-store milk crate that served as a bedside table to his mattress perched atop plywood and cinderblocks, he had a hand-crank flashlight and an external phone charger. Those would be good in an emergency. Danny did have two large bags of dog food for Maggie. He was more prepared for his dog than he was for himself. He didn’t say any of this to Gilda.

“Probably not,” he chose to say.

A victorious grin spread across her face, accentuating her high, angular cheekbones. “Probably not?” she said. “Or just…not?”

“What’s your point here?” he asked. “You mock me for being uptight and then lecture me about how I’m not uptight enough.”

Gilda shook her head, the smile stuck in place. “I’m not lecturing you. And I’m not telling you to be uptight. I’m telling you who I am, why it’s good we met. There’s a distinct difference, Danny, between being uptight and being prepared.”

He looked at her suspiciously. He wasn’t sure there was such a distinction. Then her expression softened, and she opened her mouth to speak but didn’t.

“What?” Danny asked.

“I don’t know,” Gilda said in a reflective tone Danny hadn’t heard her employ before. “It’s just that I’ve always thought of the apocalypse as some global meltdown, you know?”

Danny wasn’t sure if the question was rhetorical until she kept talking without awaiting his answer. It was just as well. As she’d so kindly pointed out to him, he’d never given the apocalypse any thought.

“I’ve always thought I’d be preparing for some big nuclear war or a viral plague,” she said, staring off into the distance. “But now, with these fires, it’s clear to me that the apocalypse is like losing a job.”

“How so?” asked Danny.

“Harry Truman once said that a recession is when your neighbor loses his job,” she answered. “A depression is when you lose yours.”

“So what’s the comparison to the end of the world, then?”

“An apocalypse is what happens to you,” she said. “It’s when it’s the end of your world. Think about it. When we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was an apocalyptic event for the eighty thousand people who died and the countless others who survived. That was the end of their world. But for us, it wasn’t. Our clocks kept ticking. Our air was still breathable.”

Danny considered it wasn’t a mistake she’d quoted Harry Truman since he’d been the only world leader in history to drop a nuclear bomb. He understood her point though. He offered a comparison of his own.

“All politics is local,” he said.

“Exactly. These fires, though confined to southern California and not part of some grander destructive force, are catastrophic for those who they affect.”

Not part of some grander destructive force.

Danny mulled over those words. He wasn’t convinced. Who set the fires? How did they start? Why did the city burn at the same time the wildfires took hold? He shook the thoughts from his head. They were the byproduct of his ex and Derek, beliefs that the world was secretly conspiring against him.

They were marching steadily now, having picked up speed the farther north they walked. The sand was as challenging as it had been since they first stepped onto it, but the crowds were thinning. Beyond the Palisades was Topanga Beach, Pepperdine University, and eventually Malibu before the shoreline hooked into Point Dume. Beyond that, they’d be on their way to Ventura and then Santa Barbara, although that was a hundred miles up the coast.

“How far are we going?” he asked her. “Where’s your prepper palace?”

Gilda’s smile morphed into a smirk. She motioned up the beach with her chin. He followed the direction. More sand, more houses, more ocean, and off to the right on the other side of the highway, more smoke.

The wind had picked up. Instead of gusts, it was now a steady chilling breeze off the water. Danny’s skin was covered with goose pimples.

“Prepper, huh?” said Gilda. “Not a big fan of that term. Sort of pejorative, I think. Interesting that you used it, given that you said you’d never heard of TEOTWAWKI.”

He shrugged. “You keep using the word prepared. It reminded me of hearing the term prepper on the news. Lane Turner talked about it. You know Lane Turner?”

“The douchebag on the billboards?” she asked. “The one with the hair and the dimple?”

“Yeah, I watch his news channel. I have the app on my phone. Anyhow, you reminded me that there’s a group called California Preppers. They get ready for…doomsday.”

“I’ve heard of them. Still don’t like the name. I’m into preparedness, not prepping.”

It sounded like semantics to Danny. While he understood the concept behind being ready for a disaster no matter what it might be, he didn’t fully understand how people could spend their lives worried about something that might never happen. Even in the midst of this disaster, he questioned it. Nonetheless, he was thankful that he was walking on the beach with someone who embraced it.

“So, you didn’t answer me,” he said. “Where are we going? What’s going to save us?”

Gilda stopped, focusing her attention on a large Italianate structure perched on a bluff overlooking the ocean. She stared at it longingly for a moment. The Getty Villa, of all things, was their escape plan.

However, before she said anything, a spray of water descended upon them. The spray quickly became a shower. From seemingly nowhere, the rain had come. It was heavy, the cold drops pelting them and the sand and the ocean. It was cold, adding to the chill blowing in with a front, a low-pressure system that could be their salvation.

Gilda opened her mouth wide and stuck out her tongue, relishing the cold rain like a child. Danny noticed Claudia and Arthur with their hands raised toward the heavens, also soaking in the sudden downpour.

The rain drenched Danny’s head, and the water ran down his face, into his eyes. He blinked past the sheen of water, the blur of it all.

Cheers erupted up and down the beach. In the distance, car horns beeped and honked. People shouted. The line of rain advanced farther ashore, crossing the highway and toward the first columns of now graying smoke.

There’d been no forecast for rain. Nobody on the news that week had mentioned storms or clouds or any chance for a downpour. Yet there it was, a magnificent cavalry in liquid form riding to the rescue. Gilda took his hand. She held it tight.

“That,” she said, looking at the leading edge of the storm. “That is what’s going to save us.”

CHAPTER 19

Friday, October 17, 2025

West Los Angeles

Keri was in the back of the ambulance, a mask on her face, oxygen streaming into her nose and mouth. Her body was cold, her mind numb.

The rhythmic thump of wiper blades on the windshield of the ambulance didn’t register. Nothing registered except for the tightness in her chest, the lingering smell of smoke in her nostrils, and the image of her dead boyfriend’s lifeless legs.

Was the ambulance actually moving? Keri couldn’t remember exactly how she’d gotten into the back of it. She’d blacked out, and someone had helped her. It might have been the paramedic in the back of the ambulance with her and the woman named Sonya. She was sitting against the wall, also wearing an oxygen mask. The condensation bloomed and evaporated on the inside of Sonya’s mask when the woman took breaths in and out.

Sonya noticed Keri’s eyes open and pulled down her mask. She smiled, tears in her eyes. She reached over to touched Keri’s hand. “Thank you,” she said. “It’s not enough. I know it’s not enough.”

The soreness in Keri’s throat thickened. She swallowed past it, tasting the remnant bile.

“Your husband was so brave,” Sonya said, her voice peppered with the gravel of someone who’d inhaled too much smoke. “He stayed with my Stanley. He saved his life.”

Keri didn’t know what to say. She didn’t feel like correcting the woman by telling her Dub wasn’t her husband, or that his actions had prevented him from ever proposing to her. Tears blurred her vision, and she blinked them down her cheeks.

“When this is over,” Sonya said, “I want to thank you properly. I know I can’t really. Nothing can…”

Sonya trailed off, perhaps because Keri was now sobbing, her body shuddering uncontrollably. The monitor keeping track of her heart rate was beeping—pulsing faster.

The paramedic who sat across from Sonya on the opposite side of the ambulance inched closer to Keri. He took her other hand and said calmly, “Keri, I need you to look at me and breathe when I breathe.”

Keri focused on his kind face. He sucked in a slow, long pull of air through his nose, his chest expanding. Then he held it, slowly letting go through his mouth.

“Do that,” he said. He eyed Sonya, Sonya’s hand, and Sonya again.

The woman took the hint, pulling away from Keri. She sat quietly on the bench, drawing her shoulders inward and her head down. Her chin quivered.

Keri mimicked the paramedic’s instructions, taking several long, slow breaths. The beeping slowed. She calmed down.

“Good,” said the paramedic. “You’re doing fine. We’re going to get you to a hospital and get you checked out. You took in a little too much smoke; then you passed out. We need to make sure—”

Keri pulled the mask from her face. “I just want to go back to campus. I don’t need to go to the hospital. I want to go back to campus and go to my room. I want to sleep.”

“I don’t think we can take you to campus,” said the paramedic. “We’re having trouble with communications, and we’ve heard that UCLA is on lockdown.”

Keri didn’t want to hear that. She wanted to be on her bunk, under the covers, in the dark, grieving until she fell asleep. She craved solitude and sleep.

The windshield wipers thunked back and forth. Then it registered. It was raining.

Keri strained against the nylon strap at her waist. The front windshield was a filthy mix of water and wet ash that the wipers merely moved around from one edge of the glass to the other, leaving gray smears.

Still, beyond the opaque sheen, the rain was falling in sheets outside. It was a heavy downpour that beat on the roof of the ambulance.

“It’s raining,” she finally found herself saying aloud, repeating what she’d said to herself several times since noticing the beat of the wipers. “It’s actually raining.”

“Yeah,” said the paramedic behind the wheel. “This is big. It could help us get a handle on things.”

He was still dressed in his firefighter turnout gear. As he shifted in his seat, his clothing released a strong whiff of smoke.

“Could it put out the fires?” asked Sonya. “Is it enough?”

“It could,” said the driver. “I mean, not actually put out the flames, but the humidity goes up. That slows a fire’s growth, which helps us contain the flames better.”

The medic in the back spoke up. “If this kind of rain keeps up, it could put out some smaller structure fires. Not the wildfires though.”

The ambulance, which had been stopped, was moving slowly now, a few feet at a time. Stop and go.

“Fires can actually create rain,” said the driver. “I mean, not actually create it. The fires stop the clouds from losing their moisture, so that moisture builds up more than it might have otherwise. That can cause rain. Kind of.”

Keri wasn’t paying attention to the driver. She wasn’t interested in the science of fires, she was trying to listen to the noises coming from outside the ambulance. Above the thwack of the raindrops on the roof and the thump of the wipers, people were cheering. There was a chorus of car horns. People were celebrating.

Keri laid her head back on the gurney and closed her eyes. She could see Dub. Instead of his dying moments, though, he was smiling at her. He touched her face and pressed his lips to hers. His heart beat against her bare chest.

He’d loved rain. It was something he said he missed, living in southern California. It almost never rained here. However, in his native Houston, it was a daily summer occurrence. He’d told her that, despite the well-documented flooding in his hometown, he always relished a lazy weekend afternoon listening to the rain hitting the pavement outside his house. He’d loved the smell of the grass after the rain had finished and the oil-formed rainbows that marked the pothole-riddled asphalt on city streets.

He’d loved her. More than anything, he’d promised her. He’d loved her, and she’d loved him.

She opened her eyes. The back door to the ambulance was open. Sonya was gone. The paramedic was sitting at her side.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“You fell asleep,” he said. “We’re on campus.”

“How long was I out?”

“A while.”

It was dusky outside. She couldn’t be sure if that was from the smoke or the time of day.

“Why are we on campus?” she asked. “I thought—”

“We made it to Reagan,” he said. “It was tough, took some maneuvering. I’d like it if you went inside and got checked out.”

“I don’t have to?” she asked, leaning up on her elbows.

He unbuckled the strap at her waist and began working on removing the IV from the back of her hand. He covered the injection point with a cotton pad and white medical tape.

“You should,” he said. “I can’t make you, especially because the ER is packed. Like, ridiculously overcrowded. You’d be there a long time and, frankly, despite having some minor smoke inhalation, I think you’re okay to go.”

Keri reached out to the paramedic for help sitting up straight. He took her hands, pulling her forward. She scooted to the foot of the gurney and stood, somewhat hunched over, until she gingerly stepped from the back of the ambulance out into the rain. It hit her instantly, drenching her by the time she’d taken her first full step outside the ambulance.

“Thank you,” she said to the paramedic.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said. “I wish we could have—”

Keri wiped her hair from her face and held up her hand to stop him. “It’s okay.”

It wasn’t okay. It wasn’t going to be okay. She didn’t want condolences. She tried to smile and rounded the corner, leaving the ambulance behind.

She wound her way around the hospital’s exterior, soaked through, until she found a recognizable spot at the corner of Westwood and Charles E Young Drive. There were no people on the sidewalks, but the streets were still packed with cars. The traffic moved almost imperceptibly.

Shivering, Keri took one waterlogged step after another, the water sloshing inside her shoes. She plucked at the fabric of her shirt to pull it free of her skin. It didn’t help. The faintest hint of smoke lingered in the air. Fires had burned or were still burning nearby along with something unfamiliar. It was like cooked cabbage or boiling onions.

A uniformed officer was standing outside the campus police station, holding an umbrella over his head. As Keri approached, he stepped toward her.

“Miss,” he said, “are you a student?”

She nodded and stopped in front of him.

“I can’t have you walking around out here,” he said. “Despite the rain, it’s still dangerous.”

Keri was shivering. Her teeth chattered as she spoke. “Can I go to my dorm? I’m in De Neve.”

“No,” said the officer. “We’ve evacuated the Hill. We’ve got a shelter set up in the Wooden Center. I can take you there.”

She shook her head. “That’s okay. I’ll go there. I’m fine.”

The officer offered her his umbrella. She politely declined and kept walking. She passed the guard gate at the main entrance to the school and looked over her shoulder at the officer. She waved at him and took another step.

She was back on campus.

She was home.

CHAPTER 20

Friday, October 17, 2025

Westwood, California

The volleyball gym inside the John Wooden Center was like a rave without the music, the strobing lights, or the ecstasy-laced, oversized bottles of water. It was shoulder-to-shoulder crowded, hot, and altogether uncomfortable.

There were students sprawled out on the gym floor and on the wooden bleachers lining the walls. The overhead fluorescent lights were working thanks to emergency generators providing power to critical parts of campus. They appeared overly bright to Barker as he entered the absurdly cramped space. If only the volleyball teams could always draw this size crowd.

Overhead, amongst the shining lights, were retractable basketball goals that were stowed away shy of the ceiling’s rafters. On the wall next to the scoreboard was a large television monitor. During matches, it displayed live action and instant replays. Today it was showing the news.

When they entered the gym, there was a pair of uniformed campus police officers standing guard at a metal detector and accompanying folding table. There was also a Los Angeles firefighter standing there wearing blue latex gloves. His expression soured when he saw the dozens of walking wounded entering the space. It softened as quickly when he spotted that some of the group were fellow firefighters.

“I need you to empty your pockets, open your bags, and put them on the table,” said one the officers with the exasperation of someone who had already repeated it a thousand times. “One at a time, you’ll walk through the detector. I need to know ahead of time if you have any weapons—guns, knives, tasers, pepper spray, whatever.”

Barker’s hearing had returned for the most part, though there was still an annoying, headache-inducing ring in his ears. It was a high-pitched tone, steady and constant. From his conversations with others on their way to the Wooden Center, he discerned that most everybody else was regaining their hearing and also suffering from the ringing.

“Do we need to empty our bags?” asked Gem. She was standing right behind Barker and Becca. She ran her hands through her hair, straining the rainwater onto the floor. The sudden downpour had soaked all of them.

The officer shook his head. “No, but we do need to check them. This is going to take a bit, so please be patient.” He raised his hands to get the group’s attention. “If you need medical assistance, please alert firefighter Anthony Reed. He will make sure you get help in the most expedient way possible.”

Reed raised his hand and waved to the sorority awaiting entry. Leading the other firefighters, Captain Eaker approached him and stood close, speaking in a voice low enough that others couldn’t hear.

Reed’s expression shifted from concern to horror, likely from Eaker telling him what had happened at the faculty building. He put his hand on her shoulder, replying with something Barker imagined was consoling and reassuring. Then he held his hands up, his fingers spread.

“If you need help,” he said loudly, “hang here after you go through security. We’ll be back in less than ten. Is there anyone who needs urgent care?”

Nobody was in dire need of help, so Reed motioned to the other firefighters and led them into the crowd, disappearing into the masses.

Eventually all the sorority sisters, the house mother Melinda Zagrecki, and Barker made their way through the metal detector and into the gym. Barker hung Becca’s backpack onto his sore shoulder, standing there for a moment, soaking in the bizarre environment. It was loud, funky, and there was an air of surreality to the place. The students didn’t seem all that concerned. Except for the small group huddled around the television on the far wall of the gym, it appeared to Barker the rest of the population was merely waiting out a drill of some kind. People were laughing, joking, playing cards, trying to connect on their phones.

They must not have seen what he’d seen. They hadn’t seen things burn and people die. They hadn’t inhaled thick smoke and coughed it out or been knocked senseless from an explosion. There was such a disconnect inside this place from what was happening on the outside.

“Should we go look at the news?” he asked Becca. “There’s nowhere to sit, and I kinda want to know what’s going on.”

She touched the cut on her head and nodded. “We’ve got some time before the medics come back.”

Barker took her hand and led her, snaking through the crowds of students who acted oblivious to the dangers surrounding them. Their laughter and joviality were a sharp contrast to the sounds of sirens and traffic outside.

They reached the crowd at the television and weaseled their way into a position where they could see and hear the news. There were closed captions running along the bottom of the screen, which helped, though they blocked the scroll of additional information that ran from right to left.

The new anchor was Lane Turner, the same reporter they’d watched in the sorority house hours earlier. He was sitting at the high-tech desk in the studio in front of a large wall-sized complex of flat-panel monitors. On the monitors was a wide aerial shot of the Hollywood Hills. It was dark outside now except for the parallel streaks of fire that gouged into the hillsides, glowing and throbbing shades of orange and yellow.

“…twenty-seven deaths and at least one hundred twenty-seven structures damaged or destroyed,” said Turner, reading from an iPad on the set. “As we reported online and on our news app, those numbers are preliminary, and authorities caution they will likely go much higher.”

The small group staring at the television was silent and attentive. None of the noise behind them distracted them from what the newsman was saying on screen.

“The good news here is that the unexpected development of storms has given firefighters significant hope that they’ll have these fires under control much sooner than initially anticipated,” Turner said directly into the camera. “Let’s go now to reporter Dan Visoiu, who is in Santa Monica with the latest there on the urban fires.”

The screen split and revealed the reporter full screen. Visoiu was standing on the edge of the beach, the rain pelting him in his station-issued rain jacket. He wore a matching baseball cap and held the microphone close to his mouth. A plastic baggie was wrapped around the wireless transmitter at the base of the mic, held tight with a rubber band.

“Here’s the latest from Santa Monica, Lane,” said the reporter. “The rain, which started an hour ago, is steady, and as you can likely see, pretty heavy. We’re drenched here, which is a good thing. The rains have doused some of the smaller fires that popped up along the strip centers and in one power substation. There is still a lot of work to do.”

The reporter disappeared from the screen, replaced with video of firefighters battling the flames at what was likely a gas station, though it was hard to tell for sure through the smoke and the condensation on the camera lens. The reporter kept talking as the video cut to different shots of various burning scenes. Some looked far worse than others. There were people with towels over their heads getting oxygen treatments and others who appeared injured and burned. There were more pictures of fires burning out of control with no firefighters in sight.

“…proving to be a major problem. In addition to a lack of consistent or even adequate communication, emergency personnel can’t get to a lot of these scenes because of traffic. So much of it is at a standstill. I will say that while the gridlock appears to have loosened slightly in the past thirty minutes, it’s not great.”

“Dan,” said Lane Turner from the set, “let me interrupt you for a moment. I want to ask you how firefighters know where to go if there is little to no communication?”

“They’re getting lucky in some cases,” Visoiu said, water dripping from the brim of his hat and spraying his face. “I’ve spoken with several first responders, both police and fire, and they tell me that they are driving around proactively in search of fires or other emergencies. As they find them, they stop and do their jobs. It’s incredible and heroic work. Lane?”

“Thank you, Dan Visoiu, for that live update from Santa Monica,” said the anchor. “Now for more on the rain and what it means for these fires overnight, let’s head over to the weather center.”

A hand touched Barker’s shoulder. His roommate Michael was standing there alone. His face was drawn, and he had dark circles under his eyes.

Barker grinned and stepped to him, wrapping his arms around him in a big hug. He patted Michael on the back.

“You’re okay,” he said. “I’m glad. I mean, I figured you were fine. It’s good to know you’re here.”

Michael awkwardly returned the hug and then stepped back, dipping his hands into his pockets. Barker noticed then the circles under his eyes were swelling. Michael had been crying.

“What?” Barker asked. “What happened?”

Barker’s pulse accelerated, and a nervous twinge spiked in his chest. He searched Michael’s face for an explanation.

“It’s Dub,” he said.

“What about him?”

“He…”

“He what?” Barker snapped. Becca’s hand touched his. He ignored it. “What about him, Michael?”

Before Michael could answer, Barker saw Keri walking toward him. She was soaked, her clothing sticking to her, outlining her physique. Her mascara was smudged under her eyes in wide black semicircles. She looked nauseated.

Barker glanced back at Michael and then at Keri again. His chest was heavy. His legs were suddenly noodles. He braced himself, tightening his hold on Becca’s hand, using it for support.

He searched the crowd for any sign of Dub, for any hint that his roommate and friend was there and okay. He couldn’t imagine college without him. Dub wasn’t there. And the closer Keri got to Barker, the clearer that devastating fact became.

“He’s gone,” Keri said. There were hints of soot at her nostrils and the corners of her mouth. “Dub’s gone.”

“I don’t understand,” said Barker. “You guys went to the pier. I just saw it in a live report on television. The pier is there; it didn’t burn. I don’t understand.”

Michael put his arm around Keri. She explained as coherently as she could what had happened, how Dub had given his life in exchange for another.

Barker’s despair gave way to anger. He wanted to scream. The gym, which was crowded to him before, became suffocating. The warmth was now oppressive heat, the noise of indistinct chatter deafening.

This was not the way a story should end.

In Barker’s mind, it should have been a long, awful day that years from now at a reunion in some high-end Westwood eatery he and his roommates and their spouses talked about with bravado. It was supposed to be a tourist destination along memory lane. Nobody was supposed to die, especially not his roommate and friend Dub Hampton.

This was no Hollywood ending. Then again, how could it be when the Hollywood sign had gone up in smoke?

This wasn’t the place to grieve, however. He couldn’t break down amid hundreds, or thousands, of his fellow students. He wouldn’t be that vulnerable in front of a woman he was still courting. Instead, he steeled himself. He moved closer to Keri and Michael, let go of Becca’s hand, and wrapped them in a group hug. It took everything in him to maintain his composure.

He kissed Keri on the cheek, rubbed Michael’s head, and thumped his belly with the back of his hand. He tried smiling.

“We’ll be okay,” he said. “Dub wouldn’t want us wallowing.”

Keri chuckled through her tears. “Very true.”

“I’m sorry,” Barker said. “Becca, these are my friends Keri and Michael. Michael and I are roommates. Guys, this is Becca.”

They said hello to one another. Becca expressed her condolences.

“What now?” asked Michael.

“As soon as they let us go, I’m headed back to De Neve,” Keri said. “I’ve got to call Dub’s parents. Then I’m showering and going to sleep.”

“Do you want me to go with you?” asked Michael.

“No, thanks,” she said tearily. “I appreciate the offer though.”

“I need to see the medic,” said Becca. “I’m going to head back to the front of the gym. I’ll be back.”

“You want me to go?”

“No. Stay here with your friends. That’s more important right now.”

Before he could protest, she kissed him on the cheek and moved swiftly toward the metal detector. A couple of the firefighters, including Anthony Reed, were back.

After she walked away, Michael said, “She seems nice.”

“Yeah.” Barker nodded. “She does.”

“You look like you got hurt,” said Keri. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” said Barker. “I mean, I’m not fine. But I’m okay. I just…”

“Just what?” Michael prompted.

“I just wish we could do this day over, that somehow it would turn out differently.”

The rapt crowd was still transfixed by the breaking news on the large television screen, the developing stories playing out across the Southland. On the screen was video of a woman draped in a heavy blanket. Firefighters were escorting her from a helicopter into a large nondescript building at what a graphic on the screen proclaimed was the Angeles National Forest. The woman was barefoot and wearing only thin waffle-fabric pajamas. She was covered in soot and ash.

Medics helped her onto a gurney and then wheeled her into an awaiting ambulance. As the video played, Lane Turner explained who the woman was, how she’d lost her husband in the flames and was rescued atop a peak that hadn’t yet caught fire.

“Hers is one of countless stories of survival,” said Lane Turner, “of perseverance, and of loss. This is a day Los Angeles will long remember. It’s a day our world caught on fire.”

CLICK HERE FOR THE NEXT BEGINNING TO THE END

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HE THOUGHT HE WAS PREPARED.

HE THOUGHT HIS FAMILY WAS SAFE.

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Five years after a pneumonic plague killed two-thirds of the world’s population, army veteran Marcus Battle is isolated. He’s alone with his guns, his food, and the graves of his wife and child.

Unaware of the chaos that’s befallen everything outside of his central Texas ranch land, Marcus lives a Spartan life. If anyone steps onto his property he shoots first and never ask questions.

But when a woman in distress, chased by marauders, seeks asylum, Marcus has a decision to make.

Does he throw her to the wolves to protect himself or does he help her and leave the shelter and protection of home?

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No communication. Limited power. An unbreakable will to survive.

A violent blast of solar magnetic radiation plunges much of Earth into darkness. From the decaying orbit of the powerless ISS to a devolving Southeast Texas neighborhood and a secret doomsday bunker buried deep underneath the Colorado Rockies, The SpaceMan Chronicles tells the story of a stranded astronaut, his family and friends on the ground, and a shadowy conspiracy to rebuild the world in the shape of a new society.

It’s written with the help of former astronauts, NASA team members, and well-respected astrophysicists that give the trilogy a unique sense of detail and desperation.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to my wife and kids. You always have my back. I couldn’t do this with out you. You’re a constant source of motivation. I love you.

To my fearless editorial team, who wades through the mess and tangle of words until they make sense of it all. Felicia Sullivan, editor, Pauline Nolet and Patricia Wilson, proofreaders, and Stef McDaid at Write Into Print, formatting, are all wonderful at their jobs and such blessings to my work. Hristo Kovatliev is also so critical to drawing readers into each story with his magnificent covers. He is so talented.

For this book, I’d like to give a critical shout out to a group of first responders (or those with extensive knowledge in that arena) who help make this story more realistic. Your help was invaluable. These are their names. They rock…

James White, Matt Lardie, Casey Ward, Nick Meacher, CJ Bartholomew, Melonie Taitano, Joe Mahoney, Johnny Wilt, Robert Launt, Linz Cheyanne, Christopher Beall, Jackie Williams, Butch Tillson, Tony Allen, John Cooney, Hannah Hans Carpenter, and Sheri at the Bureau of Land Management. All of you offered help and/or provided it. Thank you. If, by any chance, I’ve left anyone out, send me an email and I’ll name a character after you in my next book. :-)

Thanks also to my mom and dad, siblings Penny and Steven, and my mother-in-law Linda. All of you are the best marketing team money doesn’t buy.

Most of all, thanks to you the reader for your continued support of my work. Without you, these stories would only be voices in my head. That would be bad.

Table of Contents

Author’s Note

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

Acknowledgments