Like Wildfire

The riots were three blocks over and the power was cutting in and out, so she packed her camping gear and drove hard and fast out of the valley, leaving the smog and concrete behind.

She drove until she found a high ridge in the forest and sat watching the sunset with a bourbon in her hand as the power grid flickered on the other side of the valley. That night she lay beneath the tent canvas and marveled at the silence, broken only by the soft and melodious call of a nightingale and the trickle of a stream when the wind blew a certain way. She expected the whine of sirens and the staccato of gunfire but they never came. She slept deeply, forgetting the curfews and militias for the first time in months.

She had drunk too much and when she stumbled from the tent in the depths of night she saw a light glowing someplace distant. She took her bearings and realised it came from the city, but even through eyes heavy with sleep she could tell that the light was wrong, too big and too bright. She stood listening. The nightingale was gone and in its place she could hear the crackle of fire. Her eyes adjusted to the twilight and she saw a great smear of wildfire across the horizon, reaching from the city and deep into the forest, tracing the same route she had driven hours earlier.

She grabbed armfuls of clothing and bedding from the tent and crammed them into her car. Except for the bourbon and two packs of ramen she hadn't bothered to unpack the cooler of food and drinks in the trunk. She left the tent and her battered old camping chair to keep their lonely vigil on the ridge and got into her car.

The road was darker than it should have been and her headlights struggled to penetrate more than a few feet in front of the car. She drove slowly, peering over the wheel, and it took her a couple of minutes to realise that thick black smoke from the fire was settling into the holloways and smothering the road.

When she rounded a bend the smoke cleared and she sped into higher gear, beginning to panic. She followed the tight curves of the road through a hairpin and a moment later the darkness evaporated and the forest burned around her. Coruscating embers drifted over the car in eddying waves. The world seemed inverted, the dark shadows and nooks of the forest turned shades of brilliant white, the wet, messy tangle of ivy and scrub scoured clean to leave rows of regimented tree trunks glowing perfect white in the impossible night. It was beautiful and otherworldly, so beautiful that she wanted to stop the car, to walk through the carnival light show and feel the brilliant warmth upon her skin. She had been living in the dark, and suddenly the shutters had been torn down to reveal an incandescent sun, burning with impossible fierceness and heat. How could she go back after this? she thought. How could she live in darkness again?

And then a tyre burst from the heat and the car swerved from the road, kicking up a thick bank of white ash and coating the windscreen. There was an impact, hard and sharp, lifting the nearside briefly from the ground and taking all forward momentum from the car. It listed to a stop, the engine sputtered and choked, and the only sound that remained was the spit and crackle of the burning forest.

She sat, watching the cascade of burning pine needles, falling like snow.

The air in the car heated up faster than she would have believed. The steering wheel became too hot to hold—or at least she noticed the wheel's heat for the first time. The view from the car looked like stained glass, a tableau of streaked white ash on the windscreen alternated with the deep reds and burnt oranges of the aureoled pines, glowing like stoic heroes in some grim fresco of martyrdom.

She was reluctant to move, tired and warm. It was the thud of a falling bough on the roof that chased her from the car. She opened the door, stooped under the buckled roof and set off at a run.

The hot air smothered her entirely. Every inch of exposed skin felt sunburned. Each breath rasped in her lungs, hot and sharp. Her eyes stung and watered so much that she was forced to close them. She picked a course between the burning trees and stumbled blindly forward, step over step, crashing through charred stumps that crumbled into powder, until she splashed into water and fell forward onto all fours. She plunged her face under the surface to wash the ash away. She coughed up a mouthful of water and scraped the wet ash from her face as best she could, before swimming away from the bank and into the still depths of the lake.

She floated, treading water.

The fire encircled the lake. She knew it could advance no further in her direction.

She swam ragged backstroke until she felt the lakebed rising to meet her. She pulled herself onto the bank of a small wooded spit in the center of the lake and used the light from the fire to find a depression in the roots of an older cedar. She tucked herself into a ball and slept.

She woke several times in the night, frigid with cold. Each time she looked at the wildfire across the water and listened for the sounds of burning and fell asleep again, the cold held distant a while longer.

By morning the fire had passed on. Across the water the world was ash. Amongst the desiccated trees she could see deformed steel beams and charred brickwork fireplaces and mourned for the small hamlet that had hugged the water's edge all these years. She had no way to cross the river and no way to get home, save for swimming across the lake and hiking through the ruins. So she swam, casting herself off from the island and into waters entirely unchanged by the conflagration.

She walked until sunset, coming at last to another ridge, overlooking the city from its Eastern side. The fire had passed through here, too, and it had scoured the land just as thoroughly. A soft blanket of ash now softened the city's hard angles and muted its garish colors. The city lights no longer flickered and lay dark, drawing the eye to the purple hues of twilight. She listened. The crackling roar of the fire had abated, but so too had the sirens and the gunfire.

She picked her way down the scree and into the reborn city, leaving footprints in the white ash as she walked.