THE FIRES WITHIN
The Summer of '88By MARY S. RYZUKiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2010 Ryzuk
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4502-8536-0Chapter One
1988 -
Yellowstone National Park. Early August. Still no rain ...
Alerts went out as far north as Cooke City, Montana.
Helicopters roared low across roads jammed with firefighting equipment, stranded tourists, sightseers, and locals trying to get home.
The wind had shifted.
That meant the danger, which for months had been "off somewhere" in the distance, was coming closer. Now, "off somewhere" was only a few miles away with smoke thick, black, dangerous and as mean as a disturbed rattlesnake. The winds were violently spewing leaping tongues of flames in every direction. The swirls of fire were creating their own super-hot blasts of winds which urged them to huge spouts of flames leaping from treetop to treetop looking, for all the world, like bursts from a huge flame thrower manned by some unseen giant.
With the normal temperatures soaring in the desert-dry August afternoon and the firefighting equipment losing the hard-fought war of attrition against the steadily increasing demands for their services, the combination was creating a desperate situation. It was already the worst fire season on record in the great Yellowstone National Park south of where the helicopters now searched for the trapped men, and everyone knew as they raced against the encroaching flames that the situation was just about out of control.
No one talked much about the body that the firefighters had accidentally uncovered while trenching in one of their many attempts to stop the spreading flames. The men were too tired and too busy with their own firefighting tasks to pay much attention. Since there had never been talk of a missing person in the general area for as long as anyone could remember, the discovery excited little attention other than the routine business of turning the remains over to the now besieged authorities for investigation and identification, if possible. Identification would be difficult since it wasn't actually a body. Rather it was the skeleton of an apparently murdered woman hastily buried in a shallow grave some time ago. All that could be told from the badly decomposed remains was that the victim was a small-framed woman who had been shot through the head before being hidden deep in the woods under thick scoops of black earth. A single spent bullet was found beneath the skull. The firefighters who discovered "Ginny Doe," as they dubbed her, and the investigators who followed, couldn't tell for certain how long Ginny Doe had been slowly decomposing in her obscure grave. Probably four or five years. If the fire had not been heading in that particular direction, who knows how long she would have remained undiscovered.
Another five years? Forever? A crime well done.
When Jane heard about "Ginny Doe," for some inexplicable reason she found herself fantasizing the girl's murder over and over again. All the lurid imaginings were to become a bitter recurring dream.
Who was the murdered woman? And why was Jane so preoccupied with the long ago murder of a total stranger? She hadn't the slightest notion.
Jane Marcheson was one of the locals trying to get home after putting in an uncomfortable day working at the library in Velusia. Only seventeen miles west of Cooke City, the library was in the direct path of the fires.
Jane was one of the many volunteers who, for most of the past week, had been helping to pack all the volumes in the Velusia library to be moved to a safer storage area until the danger was over. Maybe the building would fall to the fires, but at least the books, the essence of any library, could be saved. Tim Lunde's mother, Gloria, had been the librarian ever since Jane could remember. When Gloria told her she needed help, Jane readily volunteered. It was a backbreaking task. But Jane was 23, tall for a girl, thin and physically quite strong. Living alone with her mother, Valerie, and hiking frequently through the woods, it was amazing how much power those extended hikes had given to growing young limbs. Even so, Jane's arms were not as strong as her legs and the books seemed to get heavier with each passing hour. The smoky haze lingering over the area where the library was located didn't help. Some of the volunteers had been wheezing and coughing all day.
Now the job was finally finished, her throat parched, her thick honey-colored hair crushed under a tight, sooty bandana, her hazel eyes tearing to a lucent green.
"Thanks, Janie," Gloria Lunde said with her gravely voice and her expansive smile. "You've been a big help."
"I'll think about you when I'm soaking out the aches in a hot tub tonight," Jane laughed, thinking again that Gloria Lunde, whom she had known all her life, was the only one she knew who still called her Janie.
Gloria thrust out her thickening middle with a groan and rubbed the small of her own sore back with both hands. "I know what you mean."
Jane said her goodbyes quickly and jumped into the blue Ford Station wagon illegally parked in a spot reserved for the handicapped. No one seemed to mind the liberty during these hectic emergency days. Not too many handicapped still around anyway.
Knowing the back roads well, Jane managed to skirt the main roads where the luckless tourists and sightseers were hampering the steady flow of what, in these parts, was usually sparse traffic.
Ten firefighters had been trapped in a sudden hotspot in the "Eagle Bar Fire" section. All avenues of escape had been cut off by the encircling walls of flames. Anyone close to the scene, aware that the ten endangered men had to be plucked out by helicopter, realized how out of control the situation was becoming.
"C'mon, c'mon," shouted Bugger, a Vietnam vet pilot who seemed to be holding the roaring chopper in suspension by the strength of his wrists alone. In his forties, retrained as a 'copter pilot specializing in circumstances where rappelling was essential, he was tough, seasoned and accustomed to hazardous situations. The ache in his teeth, clenched behind a tightlipped grimace separating the long straggly ends of his graying mustache, attested to the effort.
Hot sparks were scattering like huge, voracious fireflies igniting drought-dried limbs even before they touched.
"C'mon!"
Dangling by the horse-collar above the swirls of acrid smoke during the hastily rigged emergency rescue, the harshly seasoned firefighters knew they were being lifted out of the jaws of Hell. And none too soon. The last few to be pulled up were always the most anxious. Every moment counted and every moment they had to await their turn seemed a lifetime.
"Help him get aboard," Bugger shouted hoarsely to Beethead, his 'Nam buddy who had retrained with him for Forest Service. Not being able to separate at the end of the war, they had remained almost symbiotically attached to one another and, without discussion, paralleled their lives. "Hurry it the hell up!"
"It'll take as long as it takes," Beethead said easily, but he was working with quick, steady, nerveless precision while Bugger breathed his tension in and out with grunts and groans.
The ferocious sound of the fire was almost worse than the parching heat and the blankets of soot and ash spreading over miles of acres yet unscorched.
As the helicopter rescue scene played itself out over and over, the dangling bodies swayed in the hot wind for what seemed like interminable moments of helpless vulnerability until the gaping opening of the chopper's belly was reached.
Finally.
"Thanks, guys ..."
Safety. Coughing. Grim relief.
"C'mon, c'mon. Get aboard!" Bugger ordered brusquely, pushing aside the 'thanks.' "You think this is the only fuckin' hotspot around?"
"Months," Jane murmured aloud to herself inside the blue Ford tightly sealed against the smoke. "That's how long its been going on," she thought.
Seven separate fires raging through 375,000 acres of Yellowstone Park alone. Here, the danger was just as ominously real. Storm Creek Fire, their fire, was just west of Cooke City and slowly heading East in their direction. It consisted of 100,000 acres of 200 foot high flames.
Storm Creek Fire, Jane thought a bit derisively. Like the names given to hurricanes, each of the fires had such a pretty name. "Fan Fire," "North Fork Fire," "Lovely Fire," "Clover Mist Fire," "Cub Fire," "Mink Creek Fire," "Falls Fire," "Madison Fire."
Nothing in the names spoke of the death and destruction in their wakes.
She hated the fires. Hated that there had been no rain since well before Memorial Day and that Yellowstone was parched. The ubiquitous lodge pole pines contained less moisture than dead wood. It was as though they had been baked in a monstrous kiln. With lightening strikes, dead wood, fuel littering the forest floor jumped easily into flames. Jane resented that her world was burning up around her, resented being forced to deal with it when there were so many emotional priorities to consider.
But it was all anyone could think of since the strikes of lightning set off the first blaze in the drought plagued Park some time in late June. The decision to let it burn created the first controversy.
"Let 'em burn!" was one of the conservationist policies Jane hated.
"Fires rejuvenate the forest," was another.
To Jane, all she could think of was that forest fires burned and killed, not only trees, underbrush and flowers, but wildlife as well. Hundreds of Elks alone would perish by the time the fires were extinguished. And what of the homes in the path of a 200 foot wall of fire, she thought. Fires were freakishly erratic. One never knew whose home would get licked up out of existence. Maybe even her own.
She coughed in one quick rasp of discomfort as she drove closer to one of the fire stations where she was hoping to find Gloria Lunde's son, Tim. No reason other than to ask him outright if he thought she and her mother would have to evacuate, she told herself. If anybody would know, Tim would tell her straight. No matter what had or, more to the point, had stopped happening between them, Tim was always honest with her. At times brutally so.
Jane jerked the Ford to a stop at the huge fire camp that supported the fighters on the Eastern wall of the fires. If she could find him amidst all the activity, which gave every impression of confusion but, in actuality, was professional, methodical and well organized, this was where Gloria told her he would be.
Fire Crew Units of Rangers were sprawled in groups between open cargo trailers with heavy support equipment. Unit chiefs were briskly communicating intently with each other.
It took a full ten minutes before she finally spotted the familiar six-foot-two lanky figure of Tim Lunde in his Forest Service uniform, as usual looking accidentally elegant. He was standing with a group of Rangers dominated by the huge bulk of Big Ben Sharkson, the Incident Commander of the Forest Service.
"Tim," she thought with a subtle ache somewhere deep inside of her rejected desires. He had made such a decisive point of avoiding her. She hadn't seen him in months, not since the first lightening strike alerted the Rangers to the onset of the burn season. She tried to blame their separation on the work now consuming every Ranger in Yellowstone and its surrounding area, but Jane knew, down deep, that was not the reason he was avoiding her.
They had known each other practically all their lives. In another time and place, nothing and no one, could have wedged between them. It had always been there from the first time they had seen each other on the school playground when she was eight and he was eleven. They had stopped in their play, their movements suddenly immobilized, staring at each other across the sliding pond for a long moment, she, intrigued by the boy's sudden intensity, he, by the brilliance of green eyes he had never seen before and the honey colored hair that looked to the boy like a tossed salad. Slowly he came around to her and took the hand she extended to him. They found themselves laughing aloud as they began to run, nowhere in particular, just running, instinctively, as though being together abruptly canceled out the rest of the world. From their beginning moments together on the playground, they were inseparable. Few could enter their private world, not even her mother, Valerie, or his mother, Gloria. Never understanding the source of their attraction to each other themselves, they simply accepted it.
The moment Tim spotted her, an ache began to develop somewhere deep inside him. He hesitated before he waved to her with a slow smile. This was not the time for personal problems right now, he thought. He knew he couldn't avoid her here. The crisis burning around them was reason enough to necessitate putting personal matters on hold anyway, he told himself, denying to himself the familiar keen surge of pleasure he felt at seeing her again. Now that he had finally been able to put her in the proper perspective in his life, he could be friendly again, he thought, as long as he kept the relationship tightly bound within the parameters of friendship. With their volatile history, that was the only safe place. He couldn't let himself get drawn in again. There were still too many raw aches.
Tired as he was from long hours on the fire line, he didn't know if he could deal with it right now. He wished she would drive away, not wait for him to come over to her car. But he knew she was not going to leave.
Looking away, trying to concentrate on the words of John Elmer, a friend with whom he had gone to Forestry School, Tim found himself remembering how tall she was for a girl, five-seven or so. At the age of twelve, she was even taller than he. It took a few years for him to catch up and finally pass her in height. It had been an important contest to the boy. He had always been drawn to her brightness and her brashness. Mostly, he had been drawn to her wild imagination. But Jane's agenda had always been quietly, but tenaciously, full of unsolved mysteries from her past.
Her mother's past, anyway. The bitterly divisive vision of her mother, Valerie, instantly flashed across his mind.
Now that he had finally untangled himself, he stubbornly ignored the void the disentanglement had left in his private world. It was too late anyway. It didn't matter anymore. He had just become engaged to Allison.
Tim turned to John who was still attempting to get his attention. Tim tried to listen but his racing thoughts were drowning out the sound of John's voice. From the corner of his eye he saw that she had not moved the Ford. He knew she was expecting him to cross over to her. Well why not. What was there to be afraid of! He was a Ranger and she was a citizen in potential peril he argued with himself foolishly. Even without looking at her directly, he knew she was staring at him patiently with those green eyes!
"F'Christ sake," John Elmer exploded impatiently, knowing that Tim had not heard a word he had said. "Go talk to her! You haven't been listening anyway!."
Tim sighed an apology. "Look, I'll talk to you later, okay?" he said to John.
"Yeah, yeah, sure," John scoffed over his shoulder, as he walked away. Everyone knew about Tim and Jane.
Tim turned to her.
"Hi!" he finally called out to her.
"What's the latest?" she called back to him, her question forcing him across the road to her. He could no longer deny that she had no intention of leaving until they spoke.
"Terrible," he called back bounding across the filthy black road to the side of her car. Newly paved at the beginning of the tourist season, the road had been a beautiful clear grey-white only a short time ago. Now every boot that touched it was grotesquely engraved on its surface like huge smudged fingerprints. Tim leaned against the side of Jane's car smelling like the inside of a well-used fireplace. Close up, his uniform was smudged and wrinkled as though he had been sleeping in it at a camp near one of the fire sources and his white-yellow hair, usually sparkling like a TV commercial, was darkly matted with gray soot. She could tell that he was tired and harried.
"It's going like wildfire," he said grimly, determined to keep the conversation impersonal, and then he suddenly grinned in that warm way he had that always sculpted his face back to boyhood, "Pardon the pun," he quipped.
She heard Big Ben Sharkson barking orders in the middle of the group. His booming voice was impossible to miss. "God-damned fuckin' greenhorns ..." they heard. She could sense the tension in his voice.
"How are the guys?" she asked.
"Holding up, holding on, hanging in. At least they're not caving in, even under Big Ben," he laughed softly.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE FIRES WITHINby MARY S. RYZUK Copyright © 2010 by Ryzuk. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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