Free The Wildfire Season by Andrew Pyper Page A

at town boundaries. It’s impossible to believe that this place— these ragged power lines, this gravel street—is any different. She doesn’t know what she expected of it, if she expected anything. All this time and she had never considered the place she would find Miles standing in, only Miles himself. What’s more unsettling is that now she’s standing in it with him.
    It took less than an hour’s walk through this weedy, broken-hearted nowhere to forget most of what she expected he would have become. All she’s certain of is that he’s in worse shape than even her most malicious scenarios. It’s what allowed his talk of postcards and the sight of his big-eared dog to make a momentary dent. But even as she feels a brush of pity come and go, what remains is her desire to spray kerosene over the half of him the fire missed, toss a match his way, and watch. Not only for the pain it would cause, but to leave a tattoo that would forever mark his cowardice, his uncorrectable failure to the world. She has thought about this for longer and in greater detail than she would ever admit.
    Alex is strangely glad to find that she still hateshim. As much now that she’s found him as she had the evening she’d come home to their empty apartment and looked for the note he hadn’t bothered to leave. She’s grateful that the sight of him has done nothing to alter her fundamental judgments. Her planned retributions.
    What she hadn’t seen coming is how much he frightens her. One of the things she hadn’t told him about her past four summers was that a couple of the people she’d shown his photo to had recognized him, or at least had a story to tell. A mechanic in Dease Lake said the scars made him sound like a guy ‘way far up,’ one that had nearly killed a man for looking at him and asking if Halloween had come early this year. A hardware store clerk in Telegraph Creek claimed to have heard about someone with burns down one side of his face ‘like a line of shade’ who hunted solo, living on grizzly meat and firing his shotgun at anyone who came within a half mile of his camp. Alex didn’t believe these stories, nor did she dismiss them. She simply added them to the composite portrait she was assembling in her mind. One that took hideous shape as she added a murderous grin, jellied eyes, blood-soaked teeth.
    The first summer had been something of an accident. A weekend drive out of the city after the end of term. She spent her first night in a creepy motel near the marina in Parry Sound, and found herself enjoying the creepiness, the foolish thrill of being a young mother on the lam. In the morning, insteadof heading back, she turned north, then west. At lunch, she bought a half-dozen identical postcards showing a row of oiled men’s torsos frying on a beach and sent them to the people who might be wondering where she’d gotten to. ‘I’m taking our show on the road,’ she wrote. ‘We’ll be gone for as long as the credit card and Pampers hold out. Please don’t worry.’ She signed each of them ‘Love, Alex and Rachel (a.k.a. Thelma and Louise).’
    She bought a tent and sleeping bag in Dryden, a camp stove in Medicine Hat, matching toques for her and Rachel in Jasper. Even as far as Fort St John she still wasn’t looking for Miles in any concerted way. And yet, more and more, Alex found herself glancing through the windows of roadhouses, waiting for heads to turn her way in convenience store lineups, judging each town she passed through on its merits as a hiding place.
    The next year, once school was out, Alex had plans to spoil herself for a change, a splurging on cheap good-for-you treats. She would catch up on the prize-winning novels she’d seen praised in the paper for their ‘affirming’ and ‘meditative’ qualities, start jogging again, plant tomatoes in her building’s communal garden. To steal a few hours of freedom during the week, she enrolled Rachel in a daycare downtown. The girl’s