Fire by Cadle Lou

Author:Cadle, Lou [Cadle, Lou]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Natural Disaster
Publisher: Cadle-Sparks Books
Published: 2020-12-06T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

It took James two hours from the time he left the Yuba City Walmart to arrive near the point of the fire’s ignition. He passed some cars with official county seals on their doors parked along a wide spot in the road. Investigating the cause of the fire? Or looking for bodies, maybe. No one was on the road to stop him from driving on, so he scooted past them without incident.

Around him, the blackened landscape told some of the story. The treetops over about thirty feet were spared. Anything under that had been burned, except for strange spots here and there where the fire had seemed to go around a section of brush, random plants being spared. He drove through five hundred yards of untouched chaparral. Wild gooseberries and poison oak predominated lower down, with scrub oak and gray pine growing over them. He drove into another burned area, and the gooseberries and poison oak were gone, and another few hundred yards later on, only the few largest scrub oaks were left alive. The smaller ones were blackened skeletons.

It was as if the fire had tidied up the place, taking out all the thicker, messier, low stuff, and leaving only the tall trees in an eerie landscape of blackened forest floor, the smell of smoke, and the sense of death. He forced his mind away from thoughts of people as almost a part of the forest understory, too short to be out of the flames, and so vulnerable in the same way.

Though some smoke was rising here and there in the distant woods, the unpaved road was clear. He made it to Highway 49. To his surprise, there was no roadblock anywhere up here. There were also no cars. It was just possible there was a roadblock north of him, and he’d avoided it by slipping through the one-lane dirt roads. He turned right, toward his home, and through a landscape of devastation on either side of the highway. There’d been a couple of houses visible from the road a week ago. No more. He couldn’t even tell where they’d been, except for one melted metal mailbox drooping in a short turn-out.

The fire had eaten up those houses. You’d have to know exactly where to look to see the charred remains.

He’d never been in a war zone, but he’d heard the comparison before. He doubted any war waged was this effective at destruction. A nuclear war, maybe, at the center, where the fireball burned. There was almost nothing left standing that people had put here. Metal road signs were still there, but unreadable. That was about all that was left.

He turned onto the northern loop road to Pinedrops and pulled up at once. Several cars were blocking the road, and every one of them had burned. Strange sculptures of melted black plastic and aluminum flowed from them, reminding him of the kind of thing one of Pinedrops’s artists did. Abstracts from industrial materials.

It was a stunning sight. Parts of cars had actually melted.

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