Firestorm-pigeon 4 by Nevada Barr Read Free Book Online

revelation, of sharing the divine. "Whoa," she said, and heard the bubbling laughter of her voice mixing with the roar of Armageddon.

A scream brought her back and the fire of the holy spirit turned to fear that coursed through her with such violence she felt her bowels loosen. The scream had been ripped from Hamlin when Len Nims dropped his end of the litter. Anna could see him barging up the hill through the manzanita. She grabbed up the foot of the fallen stretcher. Hamlin's weight pulled a cry from her, the movement an answering groan from Newt.

"Deploy?" Lindstrom was shouting.

"Not a good place." LeFleur. "Too much brush. Run. Go for the ridge. Run."

Lindstrom held the head of the stretcher, Anna the foot. Both stared stupidly at Newt Hamlin, his only safety between their hands.

"We can do it," Lindstrom screamed.

The hell we can, Anna thought, but she held on to the litter. Newt said nothing. His brown eyes stared into her face, then Lindstrom's, and Anna knew she was witnessing an act of courage. Not bravado—he couldn't loose his jaws to tell them to go—but the courage to keep them closed against the words that would beg them not to leave him.

"We can do it," Anna said.

"Get the fuck out of here," LeFleur shouted. The roaring pushed his words like foam on the tide. "Go." The crew boss brought the handle of the pulaski he carried down hard across the bones of Stephen's wrists. The litter fell. Anna couldn't hold on and her end dropped as well.

"Go. Go." LeFleur was striking at them with the handle, herding them like goats. Jennifer started up the hill, slowly at first, then beginning to run. "Go, God damn it!"

Anna started to climb, Stephen with her, pounding up the slope. Fear took over. John, Newt, everything behind was blotted out but for the fire. She wanted to turn back, to look at it, but an odd memory from Sunday school of Lot's wife turning to a pillar of salt stopped her.

Loping on all fours like a creature half animal, half human, she scrambled over downed logs crumbling with rot, plowed through brush. Ahead of her, in that narrow scrap of world between eyes and hands that still existed, the ground turned red. She thought of "Mars," a short story her sister had written about the red planet. Close on that thought came another: how strange it was that while she was running for her life, she was thinking of Mars.

And she was running for her life. The idea snapped sharply through the sinews of her body and she became aware of the stretch of the muscles in her legs, the hardness of the ground, the slipping as her boots tore at the duff, the strain in the big muscles of her thighs and that slight softening that heralded fatigue. She wondered how long she could keep going.

A scrap of trivia surfaced. Fire, unlike anything else known to man, defied gravity. It traveled faster uphill than down. The length of a football field in a minute, that stuck in her mind. How long was a football field? A hundred yards? Fifty? Third grade. Johnstonville Elementary. She'd won a blue ribbon for running the fifty-yard dash in ten seconds flat. She was older now. Stronger. Older. Maybe only the young would make it.

A thicket of manzanita filled her vision and Anna plunged in. No time to find another way. Breath was cutting deep, each pull of air tearing a hole in her side. Branches scraped her face, plucked hanks of hair from under her hard hat. Nothing registered, not pain, not impediment. Anna felt as if she could claw her way through a mountain of stone.

Then her feet went from under her and she was down, her jaw cracking against a stone or a root. Her head swam with it, her mouth was full. She spit and blood, colorless against the flame-drenched earth, spilled out. She wondered if she'd bitten her tongue off.

"Up, goddam you, up."

LeFleur. He pulled at the back of her pack and Anna came to her knees. "Go. Go." Anna ran again. The thickets were close to the ridge. Close. If she could make the ridge,