Free Firestorm-pigeon 4 by Nevada Barr Page A

alone."

"George and Grade," Anna said. Howard stood there expressionless, his wounded hands held in front of him like paws. The big man swayed on his feet. "Get him down."

Stephen and John helped Howard to sit, out of the wind, his back to the sheltering rock.

"Where are you going?" he asked as the three of them straightened from settling him. Terror was clear in his face and voice.

"Not far," Anna promised.

"John's got to round up the rest of his flock," Stephen said.

Black Elk didn't look reassured. LeFleur knelt beside the injured man, reached down and turned the firefighter's radio on. "There's some down the creek. Watch. Call me if you see anybody. Don't let them wander by, Howard. Don't let them get lost."

The crew boss made it sound as if he was addressing Horatio on the bridge or the little boy with his finger in the dike.

Black Elk pulled himself together. Anna could see it happening: fear and pain pushed aside by strength and purpose.

"Split up?" Lindstrom asked LeFleur.

"No. You and Anna stay together. You've only got the one radio between you. You go on up the creek. I'll go back down where we were."

He pointed toward the arm of the creek meandering off south of the boulder roughly parallel to the section of creek where he'd met up with Anna. "We'll check there last. And nobody goes far. Anybody you find, you send back here. Howard will field them in, keep them together." LeFleur looked at his watch. To read the face, he had to scrape off the soot.

"Takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin'," Lindstrom said. Anna silently voted him the man she'd most like to survive a wildfire with.

"Don't walk more than twenty minutes. Whoever didn't make the creek before that... didn't make the creek," LeFleur finished.

"Got a light?" Anna asked as she and Stephen started up the creek bed.

"Don't tell me you want to smoke?"

"Headlamp," Anna said. "Mine's in my yellow pack."

Lindstrom stopped obediently and Anna dug the battery-powered light out of his backpack for him.

September had brought shorter days. Smoke and cloud robbed the last light of its strength. Though it was only a little after four it would soon be dark. Anna had ambivalent feelings about that. Darkness had been her cloak of invisibility, her protector more than once. When she was a little girl she'd been afraid. Her mother once asked her of what, and Anna answered, "Of the things that jump out at people." Her mother had looked complacent. "I always figured I was the thing jumping out," she'd said. Since that time Anna and the dark had become old friends.

"This'll be a night full of ghosts," she said aloud.

 
"Anna, cut that out."
     
     
"Right."
     
     
Sneezing and hacking pulled them forward at a faster pace. Jennifer Short staggered out of the murk coughing as if her lungs would spew out onto the sand. "If I got an orifice that's not running, I don't know where it is. I swear I didn't think a person had this much snot in their head. Disgusting. Anybody got a clean hankie?"
     
     
"Blow your nose on your fingers," Stephen suggested.
     
     
"My, aren't we down-home?" Jennifer drawled. "Shoot. Gotta do something. Don't tell Momma." She cleared her sinuses.
     
     
In the strange half-light Anna noted the red of blood through the soot-impregnated glove.
     
     
"I'm an EMT, can I help?" she asked, parroting the accepted introduction of emergency medical personnel coming onto an accident scene. Stephen laughed, they all laughed way out of proportion to the feeble pleasantry.
     
     
"It's nothin'," Jennifer said. "You can patch it up when we find a spot to perch."
     
     
"Anybody back where you were deployed?" Anna asked.
     
     
"Lawrence and Hugh. I didn't walk back down. I came toward your voices. They deployed when I did. How close, I'm not sure. I haven't been paying many social calls just recently."
     
     
Drawn by the sounds of the living, two more zombies stumbled out of the smoke. Veiled in gray, soot blackening their faces, they were