Fire on Headless Mountain by Iain Lawrence

Author:Iain Lawrence [Lawrence, Iain]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Holiday House
Published: 2022-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

24

The Bucket

A line of flames crawled along the ragged edge of Headless Mountain. Thick smoke streaked across the sky, stretched into streamers by winds a mile high. Virgil thought of his brother walking over the mountain and into a burning forest, and he blamed himself for not seeing the signs of fire: the heat, the lightning, the colors in the sky. His mom would have known what they meant; he was sure of that.

Kaitlyn was standing up, leaning on the branch that she used for a crutch. “Are you sure you can fix the van?” she asked. “’Cause if you can’t, we should leave right now.”

“Where would we go?” asked Virgil.

“I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “Down to Little Lost Lake, I guess.”

“That’s twenty-six miles.”

“Not if we cut through the forest.”

“It’s still a long way,” said Virgil. “You can’t walk that far.”

“I can if I have to. If you help me.”

Virgil tried to imagine the two of them staggering twenty miles through the forest. He glanced toward the fire and wondered if they could even keep ahead of it. No matter what they did, it was coming toward them quickly. At first, fixing Rusty was just something he wanted to do. Now it was something he had to do.

“I’ll get the van going,” he promised. “I know I can do it.”

“But how long will it take?”

“An hour,” said Virgil.

He went back to work under the van, twisting the hoses, prying with his makeshift tools. The deerflies crawled on his arms and his ankles, and the day grew hotter than ever.

His hour went by, plus a little bit more. When he finally levered the last hose off the plastic and twisted the fitting free, the smoke was thickening all around. He came out from under the van to find Kaitlyn asleep, twitching like a dog in a dream. Her arms and legs, as brown as chestnuts, were scored with white lines where her fingernails had scratched at the bug bites. Her ankle looked so big and purple that Virgil didn’t believe she could walk more than a mile or two.

He didn’t wake her. He went into the van and rummaged through the glove compartment, pulling out maps and gas receipts, every bit of paper he could find. He fed it all into the fire and heated his knife till the blade was glowing red. Then he pressed the tip against the fitting, trying to weld the crack.

It might have been that he was in too much of a hurry. Maybe his hand was shaking. Maybe the knife was too hot. Whatever the reason, Virgil ended up with a hole so big that he could stick his finger inside it. He’d made things worse instead of better.

Again he felt like shouting. He could have flung himself down and thrown a little tantrum as though he was four years old. But he just squeezed his eyes shut, balled his hands into fists, and waited until the feeling passed. Then, with a sigh, he went back to the van to look for something to plug the hole.

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