Heroes of the Frontier by Dave Eggers

Author:Dave Eggers
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-07-25T16:00:00+00:00

XII.

JOSIE STARTLED AWAKE. It was still dark. The kids were asleep, and the night was quiet, but she knew everything was wrong. She sat up on one elbow, listening, and for minutes heard nothing. Then a thunderous rapping of knuckles on the Chateau door. The kids leaped up, Paul hitting his head on the ceiling. Josie dropped to the floor to answer the door. She heard movement outside. A car started. A voice in the distance yelled “Frank!”

Josie opened the door and saw Kyle, in a robe. “Gotta move,” he said. “Evacuation. We’re moving out in the next five minutes.”

“Wait. What?” she said, and looked down the road, and saw, far beyond, through the trees, the red, blue and white flashes of a pair of police cars. Kyle ran back to their truck, and Angie appeared, poking her head in the Chateau door.

“Frank,” she said. “Wake up.” As Frank climbed down, she explained a change in the winds had sent a wildfire south and it had accelerated far quicker than anyone had anticipated, that it could arrive within the hour. “We’re going north,” Angie said, leaving with Frank wrapped around her. “Follow us.”

Josie closed the door and inside found Paul and Ana standing just behind her, eyes wide. “Get buckled,” she said.

She didn’t have her keys. She leapt from the Chateau and ran after them. “Wait!” she yelled. Kyle and Angie’s taillights cast Josie in red.

“You have my keys!” she screamed.

“Sorry,” Kyle said. “We would have noticed eventually, though. We wouldn’t have left you here to burn.”

He handed the keys to her. “Better hurry.”

She ran back to the Chateau.

“Did they have our keys?” Paul asked.

“Yes,” Josie said.

“Why?” Ana asked.

“No idea,” Josie said. She followed them down the hill and toward the highway. Ahead of her she saw nothing strange—just a dozen or so red taillights blinking, beginning the process of leaving the area. The archery field was apparently not far from a small town, which was being cleared out by police. The silhouettes of a few people raced past but otherwise the scene was orderly. Josie followed the column of vehicles fleeing, but in the melee she lost Kyle and Angie.

Where the dirt road met the highway, most of the cars were going left, but she saw a man waving madly. She wanted to follow the other cars but this man—now she saw he was in a yellow uniform—was waving her the other way so passionately that she obeyed, going alone. After a few hundred yards she stopped and looked in her rearview mirror, trying to decide if she’d done the right thing. But the mass of lights was vague. One car seemed to be turning around to follow her. She decided that the other vehicles had been misdirected before, and were now all being sent her way, the right way. She would be the leader, and, she assumed, the farthest from the fire.

She drove on. For a mile or so there were no signs, but then she saw one, in the sudden headlights a startled green and silver, telling her the highway was three miles ahead.

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