Flash Fire Read online

And they didn’t come back. Beau was not coming back. Danna hoped it had not hurt for Beau. If a broken leg hurt like this, what had burning up hurt like?

  The act of not screaming took up the energy she had left, and it felt as if her rescuers were sliding somebody else onto the stretcher; lifting somebody else into the back of the helicopter. Her head felt detached, as if her vertebrae had come undone. She was bobbling around like a Barbie doll whose owner hadn’t stuck the head on all the way.

  Danna wanted to call good-bye to her brother, congratulate him, thank him, be proud of him, but rescue was like fire: When it came, it came so fast. You could only hold on; you couldn’t do anything yourself.

  “It’s okay, sweetie,” said the fireman again, “we’re just giving you some medication,” but this time he was somebody else; a helicopter pilot, a different uniform.

  “It’s okay, sweetie,” they said and the door slammed and the copter lifted up with a sickening swerve and a ferocious noise.

  It’s okay for me, thought Danna. It’s okay for Elisabeth and Hall and Geoffrey and Elony. But is it okay for Beau? Are you okay in death?

  Oh, Beau! Why did you do that? Did you sort of want that to happen, or did you completely not want it to happen? Did you try to change your mind and couldn’t?

  Grass Canyon Road

  4:30 P.M.

  “IT’S OKAY?” SAID GEOFFREY nervously, staring way up at Mr. Severyn’s face.

  Mr. Severyn tried to imagine any world at all now, let alone one which he could call okay.

  The inferno was more distant. It was again traveling with the wind, but the other direction. Fire trucks were shifting their war positions. In only a few minutes, they could probably actually walk back into Pinch Canyon, and see what was left.

  What a quick world fire was.

  Mr. Severyn picked Geoffrey up, remembering Michael at four, Beau at four, Elisabeth at four. “It’s okay.” His throat was thick with hope. Beau was too good, too smart, too beautiful, too much his son to be dead.

  The Studio

  4:35 P.M.

  “WELL, THAT’S A WRAP!” said Jill Press with delight. “We’ll be home for dinner after all. What do you think the kids would like? I’m in the mood for some of that wonderful goat cheese ravioli we had the other day.”

  “Danna doesn’t like it. We could bring them pizza.”

  They walked slowly out to their cars, sorry they had not driven together, because they were in the mood to keep talking. Jill Press got in her car while her husband continued to discuss the dinner issue through the car window. She’d left her radio on. “Fires continue in Greater Los Angeles,” said the news.

  “I’m sick of these dumb fires!” She punched the radio button and turned it off. “There!” she said, grinning at her husband. “So much for fire.”

  Grass Canyon Road

  4:55 P.M.

  ELONY WAS PLEASED WITH how well everybody was behaving. It was good that you couldn’t classify everybody in the same category as Chiffon or Mr. or Mrs. Aszling. That would reduce your faith in people.

  “Ice cream truck!” cried Elony, pointing. Only in America. The ice cream trucks, the taco trucks, the hot dog and soda trucks — you never had to wait long. She smiled at Mr. Severyn. “You pay,” she explained.

  He nodded. “I pay.” And somehow they were all standing around having toasted almond and orange Creamsicle and chocolate cherry dip.

  Elony felt desperately sorry for the man. It was a new experience, to be better off than Californians were. She had already buried her family, and her history too. Someday the father would smile again, and someday the mother would laugh. Someday Elisabeth would forget and someday the sky would be blue and clean again. Without Beau.

  Nature never needed anybody. It went on by itself, following its own rules.

  Elony was thinking in English. She felt almost reverent, that her mind had pulled it off.

  “Daddy, I think we should adopt Geoffrey,” said Elisabeth. “Elony would come, too, and we’d all live happily ever after.” She had bought vanilla ice cream in a cup for the kittens to lick.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Aszling love Geoffrey,” said Mr. Severyn, which wasn’t true, and they all knew it wasn’t true, but which he felt compelled to say anyhow. They looked at him and he flushed and occupied himself licking his ice cream.

  “But Elony could live with us,” he said. Companionship for his daughter, a safe easy babysitter.

  He glanced at Elony and was shocked to see such relief on her face, the relief of a child who is about to be taken care of after all; and he saw now that Elony was a child, not just help, and that she, like Elisabeth, needed shelter and love. We’d all live happily ever after. What else did anybody ever want?

  He had no idea where he had been in his life, nor where he was going, but he knew at least that the fire had given instruction and he’d better pay attention.

  He could see part of Pinch Mountain. The barren slope twitched as if it possessed nerve endings. A little branch full of pine sap exploded and gusts of wind made ash devils.

  He could see officials approaching, and knew that they were coming to him. He could read in their bodies the dread with which they walked forward.

  When they said quietly and carefully that they had found Beau, he knew they did not mean Beau alive.

  Happily ever after, he thought. Both my sons! It can’t be, I can’t take it, I cannot go on without them.

  He was vaguely aware of his screaming, sobbing wife, vaguely aware that tranquilizers were decided upon for her, and then an ambulance.

  After a long time, he saw that he still had a daughter, and he tried to think of something to say. The only thing he could come up with was, “I love you, honey.”

  When he saw how badly she had needed to hear that, he wondered how much Michael or Beau might have liked to hear it, but it was too late for them.

  Grass Canyon Road

  4:55 P.M.

  HALL WANTED HIS PARENTS so bad he could hardly manage not to scream, the way Mrs. Severyn had screamed. If he had lost one of his family…

  He imagined them in their cars, engulfed by hundred-foot flames. He imagined them in their cars, breathing in a solid wall of black smoke. Turning to charred, dead, stinking flesh.

  The once beautiful California hills encircled him like a black soiled wreath. The land twitched, erupting here and there with flame or a burst of smoke or a sizzle of sparks. Dead houses and corpses of cars were just litter.

  His own house was gone. His entire neighborhood was gone. Beau, short for beautiful, was dead. Fire was stronger than people, even the beautiful people.

  And what if fire had been stronger than Hall’s mother and father? Hall didn’t exactly pray. He built a wall out of a single word, a wall of brick repeats: no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

  Exhaustion hit Hall. He did not see how he could stand up any longer, or form another syllable, or lift another eyelid.

  They had taken Danna so suddenly, so completely. Just whisked her away, as if she were their sister instead of his. He knew he could trust them, but to have her flown off into the ashy sky without him — it left him with nothing. Nobody.

  They had said Hall could go with her, but Hall could not go; he had to take care of the neighborhood. Mr. Severyn was managing for a minute, but that would end. In a minute, Mr. Severyn would understand what had happened to his son. He would look at the remains of hills and houses and know that was also the remains of Beau.

  If only I’d fought with Beau, Hall wept in his heart. If only I’d knocked him down. Forced him back into the car. If only I could do it differently.

  He rubbed tears with his fists, like a grubby little kindergartner.

  So terrible, to find out that the best you could do might not be much.

  He watched Elisabeth, savoring any crumb of affection her father gave her. She was as damaged as Geoffrey, her landscape as bleak as if she, too, had grown up unloved in a silent orphanage.

  And then, unmarred
by smoke or fire, his mother’s car nosed its way through the press of rescue vehicles and tourists and television crews and neighbors. Then his father’s car, right behind her. Hall’s parents vaulted out from behind their steering wheels, eyes wide with horror, heads swiveling for clues, hearts falling with fear.

  He knew exactly what brick wall against fate the single word was building in their hearts and mouths: no, no, no, no, no, no! Not Hall. Not Danna. Please, take our house, take land, take anything we’ve ever owned, but spare our children.

  There was nothing on earth more wonderful than parents who loved you. Hall had them. Danna had them.

  “Mom,” he croaked, trying to walk toward them, but he was sapped of all strength. They would have to come to him. “Dad.”

  They saw him. They ran.

  “We’re all right,” he said. “We made it.”

  A Biography of Caroline B. Cooney

  Caroline B. Cooney is the author of ninety books for teen readers, including the bestselling thriller The Face on the Milk Carton. Her books have won awards and nominations for more than one hundred state reading prizes. They are also on recommended-reading lists from the American Library Association, the New York Public Library, and more. Cooney is best known for her distinctive suspense novels and romances.

  Born in 1947, in Geneva, New York, Cooney grew up in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where she was a library page at the Perrot Memorial Library and became a church organist before she could drive. Music and books have remained staples in her life.

  Cooney has attended lots of colleges, picking up classes wherever she lives. Several years ago, she went to college to relearn her high school Latin and begin ancient Greek, and went to a total of four universities for those subjects alone!

  Her sixth-grade teacher was a huge influence. Mr. Albert taught short story writing, and after his class, Cooney never stopped writing short stories. By the time she was twenty-five, she had written eight novels and countless short stories, none of which were ever published. Her ninth book, Safe as the Grave, a mystery for middle readers, became her first published book in 1979. Her real success began when her agent, Marilyn Marlow, introduced her to editors Ann Reit and Beverly Horowitz.

  Cooney’s books often depict realistic family issues, even in the midst of dramatic adventures and plot twists. Her fondness for her characters comes through in her prose: “I love writing and do not know why it is considered such a difficult, agonizing profession. I love all of it, thinking up the plots, getting to know the kids in the story, their parents, backyards, pizza toppings.” Her fast-paced, plot-driven works explore themes of good and evil, love and hatred, right and wrong, and moral ambiguity.

  Among her earliest published work is the Fog, Snow, and Fire trilogy (1989–1992), a series of young adult psychological thrillers set in a boarding school run by an evil, manipulative headmaster. In 1990, Cooney published the award-winning The Face on the Milk Carton, about a girl named Janie who recognizes herself as the missing child on the back of a milk carton. The series continued in Whatever Happened to Janie? (1993), The Voice on the Radio (1996), and What Janie Found (2000). The first two books in the Janie series were adapted for television in 1995. A fifth book, Janie Face to Face, will be released in 2013.

  Cooney has three children and four grandchildren. She lives in South Carolina, and is currently researching a book about the children on the Mayflower.

  The house in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where Cooney grew up. She recalls: “In the 1950s, we walked home from school, changed into our play clothes, and went outside to get our required fresh air. We played yard games, like Spud, Ghost, Cops and Robbers, and Hide and Seek. We ranged far afield and no parent supervised us or even asked where we were going. We led our own lives, whether we were exploring the woods behind our houses, wading in the creek at low tide, or roller skating in somebody’s cellar, going around and around the furnace!”

  Cooney at age three.

  Cooney, age ten, reading in bed—one of her favorite activities then and now.

  Ten-year-old Cooney won a local library’s summer reading contest in 1957 by compiling book reviews. In her collection, she wrote reviews of Lois Lenski’s Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jemison and Jean Craighead George’s Vison, the Mink. “What a treat when I met Jean George at a convention,” she recalls.

  Cooney’s report card from sixth grade in 1959. “Mr. Albert and I are still friends over fifty years later,” she says.

  Cooney in middle school: “I went through some lumpy stages!”

  In 1964, Cooney received the Flora Mai Holly Memorial Award for Excellence in the Study of American Literature from the National League of American Pen Women. “I always meant to write to them, and tell them that I kept going!” Cooney says. “I love the phrase ‘pen woman.’ I’m proud to be one.”

  Cooney at age nineteen, just after graduating from high school. (Photo courtesy of Warren Kay Vantine Studio of Boston.)

  Cooney with Ann Reit, her book editor at Scholastic. Many of the books Cooney wrote with Reit were by assignment. “Ann decided what books she wanted (for example, ‘entry-level horror, no bloodshed, three-book series,’ which became Fog, Snow, and Fire) and I wrote them. I loved writing by assignment; it was such a challenge and delight to create a book when I had never given the subject a single thought.”

  Cooney with her late agent Marilyn Marlow, who worked with her on all of the titles that are now available as ebooks from Open Road.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1990 by Caroline B. Cooney

  cover design by Kathleen Lynch

  978-1-4532-6419-5

  This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media

  180 Varick Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

  EBOOKS BY CAROLINE B. COONEY

  FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

  Available wherever ebooks are sold

  FIND OUT MORE AT WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM

  follow us: @openroadmedia and Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia

  Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases

  Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.

  FOLLOW US:

  @openroadmedia and

  Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia

  SIGN UP NOW at

  www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters