Road to the Fire's Heart by M. L. Buchman

Author:M. L. Buchman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Buchman Bookworks, Inc.
Published: 2016-02-11T16:00:00+00:00

6

Jess couldn’t get a feel for Jill Conway-Jones. He remembered down at the wrecked engine that she’d been funny. But up here on the line, she was mostly quiet. When she spoke, it was to ask him about hotshotting.

They switched over to grubbing a twenty-foot line, which was just as exciting as it sounded. It was working the dirt with a Pulaski until there was nothing living in a swath that was hopefully wide enough to stop a fire from crossing—not even organic duff was allowed to remain. The cut trees would force the fire down to the ground, the removal of the branches and underbrush would rob it of fuels to slow it further, and the grubbed line would hopefully stop it cold.

But for everything she didn’t say, she more than made up for by doing. She’d tirelessly leaned into branches that must have weighed more than she did. And, once she got the proper Pulaski technique, she kept up with him right down the line.

The more he did manage to get from her, the more he cursed the luck of Trent the engine driver, whether he was Conway or Jones. A woman like her didn’t come along even every year, never mind every day.

He did finally poke around enough to rediscover her funny side.

“Supergirl is trying to be superhotshot,” Jess had forgotten his early nickname for her until they’d worked through the whole night and a dirty, smoking dawn was approaching.

“No, she’s actually trying not to be superlame.”

“She’d can’t be,” Jess insisted in between slices with the Pulaski—he had to chop out a stubborn root. “That job description has already been taken by me. Only one allowed per team.”

“Fine. You want the title, it’s yours,” the smile he could hear in her voice through the exhaustion just made him like her all the more. “I’ll get myself a t-shirt to prove it. It’ll have the red and yellow S on it and then in tiny letters, I’ll have it say, ‘…and, yes, he is with me’.”

Almost too exhausted to breathe, she still gave him the energy to laugh.

When sunrise finally did happen, they’d sat on a cut log to rest through a breakfast break of energy bars, an orange, and a canteen of water with electrolyte powder.

“Yum! You hotshots really know how to live the high life.”

Jess grimaced, “Just wait until the fire gets here. This has all been prep.”

As if in answer to her question, the first air tanker of the morning raced by low overhead, dumping a long line of red retardant on the line of trees beyond the firebreak. Wouldn’t do to have some errant spark, of which there would be plenty to hunt down and kill during the height of the battle, ignite the fire beyond the fire line.

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