Rise of the Phoenix novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Quill

I stopped the truck.

Garth looked at me like I had lost my mind.

"We can't outrun them," I said. "The van's slow, and they're right behind it. If I run, they catch the nine instead."

"Emmi."

"I'm not asking."

I turned the pickup sideways across the road, and I got out into a cold that hit my lungs.

I'd spent six seasons on a hotshot crew, and the first thing they teach you is that fire follows fuel.

Fuel here was the black wall of pines on my left, which I did not want to touch.

It was also the road, which I did.

The road was packed snow over gravel, and snow does not burn.

It melts.

I knelt, put both palms flat on the white, and called the coal up out of my chest.

It came, glad, fast, and hungry.

I pulled it down my arms and pushed it into the ground in a line forty feet wide.

The snow went to water and the water to steam.

Then I made myself hold it.

I kept the heat low and flat, a sheet of it across the road.

I held it back from the trees as if I were digging a fire line with my own hands.

The pines stayed dark.

My crew boss would have cried.

The first truck came around the bend at forty miles an hour and hit forty feet of slick, steaming black ice.

It spun a full circle and slid backwards into the second one.

The third braked too late.

Metal crunched, glass blew out, and a hunter in the third truck rolled out into the snow and lay there, cursing.

"Nice," Garth said from behind me.

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