River of Ash, fiction by Tom Barlow
Maddy slid Ethan's hand off her thigh, painfully aware that Jacob, to whom she had granted groping rights until they broke up while he was in jail over the winter, was watching and had not yet come to terms with the new arrangement. And he had a temper. Not as much as back in high school, where students considered him the most likely to go Columbine, but earlier in the week, at their band's gig at a dive bar in nearby Anderson, California, Jacob had sucker punched an asshole who was making fun of her attempt to channel Courtney Love.
Maddy wasn't feeling amorous now anyway, in the aftermath of the last line of cocaine they could afford. After the Slipknot playlist ended, she was about to suggest they abandon Jacob's room in his parent's basement to beg a pity joint from their dealer when she became aware of a loudspeaker approaching down the street. Even from inside they could hear the announcement–a mandatory evacuation. Immediate. No exceptions.
"The Olancho Fire," Ethan said. He was the one who habitually checked the news on his Twitter feed. He had been tracking the progress of the forest fire for them, which had been burning unchecked for three days in the mountains east of their hometown of Plata Grande. "But it was twenty miles away yesterday," he said. "It must really be moving."
"The people who run this town are afraid of their own shadows," Jacob said. "Remember the boil alert last year, when it turned out it was the bottled water that was tainted?"
They followed him out onto the patio. To the west, the sky was still ocean blue, but to the east smoke columns were visible two ridgelines, five miles, away, and there was the unmistakable smell of burning brush. Circling to the front of the house, they found neighbors who must have received the announcement on their phones earlier already jamming their pickups with what passed for valuables in their impoverished neighborhood. Jacob snickered as he pointed out one down the street trying to drive an ATV onto a truck bed using his front door for a ramp.
At that moment Maddy's phone rang–her mother May Ellen calling from work at the DMV in Anderson. She put the call on speaker so the other two could listen in.
"You hear the evacuation order?" her mother said.
"Duh. It's hard to ignore."
"I made a list of stuff I want you to pack into the Toyota before you drive out."
Maddy tapped her phone a few times with her fingernail. "You're breaking up. I think the cell phone tower must be on fire." She upended the phone to break the connection before her mother could respond.
"Why'd you do that?" Ethan said.
"She's worried for no reason. The fire marshal was on TV last night. He said there's a wide fire road running across the next ridge. They'll stop the fire there. And the Santa Anas are supposed to die off tonight."
"If you say so," Ethan said, although his face suggested he was still in doubt. She wasn't surprised he refused to challenge her opinion; he was by nature someone who avoided conflict at all costs. Jacob, on the other hand, sought it out.
"Let's take a walk," Jacob said.
"I'm not wearing my hiking leg," Ethan said.
Ethan had lost part of his leg in a car accident the year before, and Maddy was still a bit spooked by the stump and the blade he wore while hiking or jogging. Since they began hooking up, he'd taken to wearing his more lifelike prothesis in her presence.
"Just up to Money Street," Jacob said. "You can hobble that far, right? I want to check something out."
The three of them made their way through the stand of woods separating the original small cluster of ramshackle split levels, built on the fly and now falling into disrepair, from the new Plata Grande, a development of the nouveau wealthy that they nicknamed Moneytown.
"What are here for?" Maddy said, as they emerged from the woods onto a cul-de-sac of mini-mansions. Each household was frantically packing the family SUV with as much personal treasure as it could hold. "To watch the morons panic?"
Jacob nodded toward the end of the street, where behind an ornate iron fence sat a mansion to put the rest to shame. "The Heritage."
They'd often ridiculed the pretension behind the naming of that mansion, even though The Heritage was probably worth a hundred times that of either of their parents' cheap tract houses. It sprawled on a five acre plot, with an infinity pool the size of basketball court and a private grassy landing strip on the only flat terrain in these foothills.
The three of them had attended high school with the daughter of the owner, Samantha Hendricks, a snobbish overachiever who had squealed to the principal about the affair Maddy was having with her Spanish teacher in her junior year. It had cost the man his job, and to Maddy's dismay the teacher blamed her, not Samantha, and refused to have anything more to do with her.
There was a great deal of activity in that household too. A prop plane idled on the runway while the servants packed a 38-foot motor home, a BMW SUV, and a pickup truck with the Empire furniture and Dutch Golden Age art the owner, David Hendricks, collected. Hendricks had hosted a Christmas open house for the neighbors when he first moved in, so they were all familiar with the museum-like contents of the place.
"The whole town will be vacant in an hour," Jacob said. "I bet there's a shitload of valuable stuff Hendricks will have to leave behind. Remember his book collection? He told my mom it was worth half a million bucks. And he was bragging about his wine cellar. Might be we could get a few cases worth a hundred grand on the dark web."
Ethan looked surprised at what Jacob was thinking, but Maddy wasn't; she knew Jacob and his uncle had pulled off more home invasions than the one Jacob had spent three months in jail for. He wasn't so much a thief, he claimed, as someone who was driven crazy by the boredom of life in the suburbs. She didn't quite buy this explanation, as she'd seen some troubling darkness in the music he was attracted to and the books he read, one reason she broke up with him.
"Don't tell me you want to loot their house?" she said.
"The cops will be too busy to respond to a break-in when the whole town is freaking out. We could grab enough shit to pay for us to move to Seattle." Seattle had become the consensus destination, where they dreamt of joining whatever was left of the grunge music movement and finding an audience, like Nirvana and Pearl Jam had in the old days. And given the poverty of their parents and the lack of good jobs in the area, they had little hope of gathering enough money to make it happen any time soon.
"But what about the fire?" Ethan said. He was nibbling his lower lip, a habit that Maddy was trying to break him of.
"You heard what Maddy said. It's a long way from here yet, may never arrive. We have plenty of time. We wait until dickhead and his family leave, grab what we can, drive out in my dad's van. You," he pointed to Maddy, "go home and pack whatever you need to leave this town forever. We can stop by Ethan's on the way out." Ethan now lived in Anderson, twenty miles west, on the escape route.
Perhaps it was irritation in the aftermath of the coke, or her own dissatisfaction with her lameass job at Burger King in Anderson, but his idea of leaving Plata Grande behind appealed to her. Her father, who had died in Afghanistan, had been a thrill seeker, a climber, a wingsuit flyer. It was only in moments of danger that she still could summon some attachment to him.
She hit her house, a couple of blocks away, to pack, filling part of the backpack her father had used for mountaineering with her precious musical instruments: the assortment of harmonicas and her flute, wrapping each in a t-shirt to keep it from damage. She also brought along her electric bass and her practice amp. She returned to Jacob's house to find he and Ethan had already loaded both of his guitars and his amps, the size of small refrigerators, in the van. She added her baggage to his.
Jacob's parents were both in Sun Valley visiting his grandparents, so, to kill some time while the town finished evacuating, they picked the lock on the liquor cabinet and helped themselves to the cherry vodka. Ethan annoyed her every five minutes by bringing up a new reason they should pass on the burglary.
"Oh, for Christ's sake," Jacob finally said, "would you man up for a change? I never knew you were such a pussy."
The friction between the childhood friends was getting tiresome. Since Maddy had broken up with Jacob, there were times at band practice when she had to play the peacekeeper when he reamed Ethan for setting the wrong tempo or burying his vocals with cymbals. Ethan always capitulated, as he did now, by crossing his arms and pouting.
***
They re-emerged from the house at 4:00 p.m., Jacob carrying a backpack holding a crowbar and the 9mm Glock knockoff his father kept bedside for protection against burglars. The entire sky was now covered in a haze and ash fell around them like down feathers. The wind had picked up, and Maddy could have sworn the air was ten degrees hotter. The absence of another soul on the street made her uneasy.
There was no sign of activity at The Heritage either, all the vehicles gone. They each tied one of the railroad bandanas Jacob had brought from his dad's dresser around their nose and mouth before Jacob scrambled over the wrought iron gate to open it from the inside. As he passed the camera mounted on one of the gate posts, he gave it the finger.
Maddy's stomach was clenching as they walked up the cement drive, maybe from nerves, maybe from the aftermath of the coke. A persistent rumble in the distance masked the sound of their footsteps.
Jacob led them up to the covered entry loggia and the nine-foot cherrywood door. As expected, the door was locked, but the brass hardware proved no match for the crowbar.
Maddy was surprised by the empty walls and floors in the grand foyer, which had held the best of the painting collection, furniture, and an antique oriental rug. Surely the vehicles couldn't have transported everything of value in the mansion. Jacob met her eyes and shrugged. He beckoned them deeper into the house with the pistol he'd taken from the backpack. The center gallery, the great room, the ballroom, the den, had all been stripped. The library was still full of books on twelve-foot-high shelves, but the glass cabinet that had held the collectable volumes was empty.
"Damn," Jacob said. "How did they have the time to haul away all the good shit?"
"Maybe there's something in the basement," Ethan said. "That's where his wine cellar is."
However, as they reached the bottom of the staircase to the basement and turned the corner, they came face to face with the owner, David Hendricks. He stood in the doorway of a panic room concealed behind hickory paneling, holding a shotgun trained on them.
"You fucking punks," he said. "People are losing their homes and all you can think of is how you can profit from it. Good thing I decided to ride the fire out. I ought to shoot you as looters. The cops would back me up, no doubt about that." His bold words were undercut by the trembling of the shotgun.
Maddy was paralyzed by the barrel of the gun pointing at her, and didn't react immediately as Jacob calmly reached around her and fired the pistol twice into Hendrick's chest. The owner fell back, triggering the shotgun into the ceiling on his way to the floor. Several pellets struck her in the upper arm.
"That'll teach you to run your mouth," Jacob said to the fallen owner. They watched as Hendricks stopped breathing.
"Jesus," Ethan said, "You murdered him in cold blood." He was white as the ash outside.
"Bullshit," Jacob said, "He had a gun on me. Self-defense. There you are acting like a pussy again."
"It's not self-defense when we broke into his home first," Maddy said, furious. She held her hand to her wound, which was on fire and seeping blood. "You idiot. We'll all get life for this."
"Then let's make it worth our while." He stepped around the bodies and the heavy steel door into the panic room.
The room was surprisingly large, fifteen feet square. Next to the door was a video panel divided into twelve screens, each showing the feed from a different security camera, all hooked up to a laptop computer. Jacob removed the hard drive and stuck it in his backpack.
The room was crowded with paintings, rugs, furniture, cases of wine, with bottled air lining the far wall under an exhaust fan. A ladder at the far end led to a hatch in the ceiling which Maddy presumed exited somewhere in the back yard. On a table next to the door rested several jewelry boxes and a wooden crate the size of a small cooler, with steel handles on either end.
Jacob opened one of the jewelry boxes, pulled out a long pearl necklace and draped it over Maddy's head. Its beauty failed to take her mind off her arm, though, which was still bleeding and throbbing. She used her bandana to wrap the wound.
"Let's get out of here," Ethan said, stubbornly remaining outside the room. "I bet he called the cops the moment you climbed over the fence."
"I told you, they aren't coming back." As Jacob spoke, he opened the wooden chest. "Holy shit. Look at this."
Maddy peeked over his shoulder. The box was half full of gold coins, each in a plastic sleeve. "How much?"
Jacob lifted the box, with some difficulty. "Jesus. Maybe fifty pounds. What's that worth, you suppose?"
They both looked to Ethan, the math wizard. "Fifty pounds? An ounce of gold is selling for maybe $1,500, so you're looking at the best part of…a million bucks."
"And it's untraceable," Jacob said. "Excellent. This is all we need. NOW we get the hell out of here." He closed the chest, latched it, and took it in hand. Although he would never admit it, Maddy knew that with his thin frame such weight would be a struggle for him. Since Ethan couldn't help while wearing his cosmetic leg, she took one of the handles and helped him carry it up the stairs and out the front door. At Jacob's direction, Ethan followed with the jewelry boxes.
***
They hadn't been inside for more than fifteen minutes, but in that interval, hell had come to Plata Grande.
"I told you so," Ethan said, pointing to the houses and the high school on the hillside at the eastern edge of town, now on fire. The wind had picked up to a ferocious pitch and flames were leaping from one tall western pine to the next. The air was so thick they could barely breath and the fire roared so loudly they had to shout to be understood. They quickly worked their way down the driveway, Ethan struggling to keep up.
It took them ten minutes through the woods to reach Jacob's house, hauling their loot, and the temperature rose another few degrees in that short time. They placed the gold and the jewelry in the back of the van and pulled out, heading for California State Highway 604, the only way out of Plata Grande to the west. By the time they reached the outskirts of town, a wall of flame was visible to their left, only 100 yards from the highway.
"As fast as you can," Ethan, in the back seat, said, pounding on Jacob's headrest.
"No shit," Jacob said.
They made it almost a mile on the highway before encountering disaster. The road ahead was entirely blocked by a four car pileup, now abandoned, doors hanging open. Beyond that, the fire had jumped the highway and was burning on both sides. Maddy turned around only to find that the road leading back to Plata Grande was now also enveloped in flames.
Jacob sat dumbfounded, and it was up to Maddy to slap him on the head. "We've got to move! Do something."
"The river," Ethan said, opening the back door and pointing down the steep, forested slope to their right. "The bike trail is on the other side of the river. We could cross the river, follow it downstream. The fire might not jump the river for a while."
"Better than staying here and burning," Jacob said. He exited the van, opened the tailgate, and handed the jewelry boxes to Ethan. He nodded to Maddy to grab the other handle of the gold chest, while she donned her backpack.
Jacob began to descend sideways down the steep bank toward the river, weaving through the gray pines, all dry as tinder. Maddy stumbled along behind him, holding the other handle of the gold chest with both hands.
They were only 100 yards from the Quicksilver River, but Maddy was soon forced to free her gunshot arm, which now throbbed, as she descended, in order to grab tree after tree to check her fall. Jacob glared at her every time she jerked the box back.
Ethan trailed behind, jewelry boxes under his arm, making his way with great deliberation. As they finally were about to reach the river, though, he stepped with his bad leg into a gopher hole hidden by leaves, lost his balance and fell, hard, onto a boulder. His prosthesis was left jutting out of the hole.
Maddy and Jacob set the chest down and climbed back up the hill until they reached Ethan. He had landed faceup. His eyes were open, he was breathing, to her relief, but did not respond to her as she gently slapped his cheeks.
Jacob pulled her hand away and shook him hard. No reaction. "We don't have time for this," he said. "We've got to move." As though to punctuate his words, a stand of cottonwood back by the road behind them burst into flames.
"We can't just leave him," Maddy said, shaking Ethan again, to no avail.
"What do you expect us to do? Carry him out with us? He weighs 150 pounds or more."
"You just want to keep your gold, damn you. He's your friend. Doesn't that mean anything?"
"You mean, my friend who stole my girlfriend? You expect too much."
"Get out of my way." With that, she grabbed Ethan and began dragging him toward the river, now only ten yards away. The slope and desiccated soil made it easy.
"What are you going to do? Drag him all the way?" Jacob said, carrying the jewelry boxes.
"We can leave him in the river if he doesn't come to," she said. "Maybe he can escape the flames that way."
With Jacob's help, she dragged Ethan the rest of the way to the river, ten yards wide and hip deep at this point. Halfway across was a gravel bar, and they were able to pull, then float, an unconscious Ethan onto it. They left him there in a couple of inches of water, arms crossed over
his chest. Maddy placed the pearl necklace around his neck for good luck.
***
Jacob returned to the south bank and laboriously carried the gold chest across the river while Maddy quickly went through the jewelry boxes, putting the most valuable looking rings, necklaces and earrings into her backpack. She then crossed the river and took one of the chest handles. They began to shuffle side by side downstream on the packed gravel bike trail. The air was so thick with smoke now she couldn't help but cough, and she could hear the snapping of the fire, like gunshots, coming down the ridge on the other side of the river. Flames were even closer to the river ahead, the air so hot she was bathed in sweat. Blood from her wound had soaked the side of her shirt.
She placed her hope on the terrain ahead. They were close to Vicuña Falls, where the Quicksilver dropped an abrupt thirty feet in a waterfall. At that point the bike trail descended the steep hill in a set of switchbacks. She hoped that the fire would be checked by the sheer wall of the slope adjacent to the falls.
As they approached it, though, her good arm, exhausted, finally gave way. She dropped the chest and leaned over, trying to catch her breath in the smoke. Jacob grabbed her by the hair, pulled her face up, and said, "You want to live or not? We don't have time to rest." He pointed across the river, where licks of flame were advancing.
"We've got to leave the gold," she said. "I can't carry it anymore."
"Bullshit," he said, lifting the chest and setting off down the trail by himself on bowed legs. He only made it twenty yards, though, Maddy stumbling in his wake, before he set it down again. "Too heavy," he said. "I got an idea." He opened the chest, grabbed a handful of coins to fill his pocket, then closed it again.
As she watched, he waded into the river with the chest. Near the center, dividing the flow, was a wide, flat boulder. The water was waistdeep there. Jacob dropped the chest into the water on the upstream side of the boulder, then quickly piled several river rocks, each atop the last, to create a small cairn on top of the boulder to identify the site. As he returned to the bank he said, "We can come back and get that later."
"At the moment, I don't care about anything except surviving," Maddy said, continuing down the trail.
The waterfall emerged from the dense smoke none too soon. To her dismay, though, the fire had now enveloped the bike trail on the hillside below. There was no way to progress except to stay in the river channel, follow it over the cliff.
"We've got to jump," she said to Jacob as they looked ahead. The frothy bottom of the waterfall was faint in the smoke.
"That's crazy," Jacob said. "Who knows what's down there?"
"Now who's the pussy? My dad used to bring us swimming here. He'd jump off the ledge. The pool down there is plenty deep." Infuriated at the way Jacob had treated Ethan, she felt no guilt in lying to him. Let him try it first, show her if it was possible.
"You sure?"
"Absolutely."
"Then you go first."
"Hey, this was your idea. And you're the brave one, right? You better leave those gold coins behind, by the way, or they'll take you straight to the bottom."
"I do this, you owe me." He dumped his pockets and waded out into the river to the midpoint, the water now up to his chest as the river narrowed into a funnel. As he minced forward toward the precipice, the current suddenly took his legs out from under him and he slid over the edge on his back.
Maddy took a couple of steps forward to watch him fall. His arms were windmilling frantically as he flew, then disappeared into froth. A moment later, he floated clear, back bent unnaturally and his head a mass of blood. He disappeared downstream into the smoke.
Behind her, she heard a roar and turned to discover the fire had jumped the river and was now attacking her from all directions. The air was scorching hot, and to elude it, she waded into the river until it was knee deep. She tore open her backpack, dug through it for her flute, and pulled off its mouthpiece.
She tossed the backpack to the shore, sat down in the river, and rolled over on her side. Using the flute mouthpiece as a breathing tube, she rested her head on the river bottom until she was entirely submerged in six inches of water.
Even that deep, she could see the flickering fire now consuming trees overhanging the river, and the surface of the water was beginning to steam. The air coming through the flute was thick with smoke, and it was all she could do to suppress coughs. But she was only there a minute, a minute spent trying to convince herself that she could do this, that she might maybe perhaps live through this nightmare, when something floating by snagged her flute and ripped it from her slippery hand.
She emerged, gasping, just in time to see Ethan, floating midstream, toss the mouthpiece onto the flaming shore as he frantically clawed for purchase on the rocks he passed. In only a moment, he reached the funnel leading to the waterfall and dropped off the edge.
Before she could even cry out in despair, though, an overhanging tree, afire, split and came crashing down on her, pinning her to the bottom of the Quicksilver.
The searing pain only lasted a couple of minutes, until the water did its work.
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