The sky has darkened, not only with the coming night: a sullen layer of purple-gray cloud has rolled in from somewhere, on no wind that Cal can feel. It’s been so long since he’s seen cloud that it looks alien, bringing the sky unnaturally close. The fields have a strange, unfocused luminosity, as if the remaining light is generated from within the air itself.
Johnny stops again, leaning heavily on the spade, his head falling back. “Hooper,” he says. Cal can hear his breath deep in his chest. “You’re a man of sense. D’you wanta be mixed up in a bad business like this?”
“I’m not mixed up in anything,” Cal says. “I’m not even here.”
“None of us are,” Sonny says. “I’m having a few cans in front of the telly, myself.”
“I’m playing cards with these two,” Mart says, indicating P.J. and Cal. “I’m winning, as per usual.”
“Hooper,” Johnny says again, more urgently. His eyes are wild. “You wouldn’t let them leave Theresa without her daddy.”
“You’re no kinda father to her,” Cal says. “And you’ll be no loss.” He catches Mart’s small grim smile of approval, across the deepening hole.
He still can’t tell whether they’re just here to run Johnny out of town, or whether the men intend more than that. Johnny, who knows them better than Cal does, believes they mean more.
Cal could try to talk them out of it. He might even succeed; these aren’t hardened killers. He doesn’t know whether, if it comes to it, he’ll try. His personal code doesn’t allow for letting a man be beaten to death, even a little shitweasel like Johnny Reddy, but he’s gone beyond his code. All he cares about is making sure Trey has what she needs, whether that’s an absent father or a dead one.
“Lads,” Johnny says. The stink of sweat and fear comes off him. “Lads, listen to me. Whatever it is ye want, I’ll do it. Just tell me. Sonny, man, I got you outa hot water before…”
Cal’s phone beeps. It’s Lena.
I have Sheila and the children. Trey is at her house. Get her.
Johnny is still talking. As Cal lifts his head from the phone, he smells a faint trace of smoke on the air.
The turn towards the mountain seems to take him forever. High on its dark shoulder is a small, ragged splash of orange. A pillar of smoke rises, glowing, against the sky.
The other men follow his turn. “That’s my place,” Johnny says blankly. The spade drops from his hand. “That’s my house.”
“Call the fire department,” Cal says to Mart. Then he runs, brambles clawing at his legs, for his car.
He’s halfway there when he hears the thudding and panting of someone behind him. “I’m coming with you,” Johnny says, in between raw gasps.
Cal doesn’t answer and doesn’t slow for him. When he reaches the car, Johnny is still at his shoulder. While he’s fumbling his key at the ignition with fingers that feel thick and numbed, Johnny wrenches open the passenger door and throws himself inside.
Trey pulls herself up by the wall, hissing through her teeth to manage the pain, and braces her way along it to the nearest tree. The crackle and flutter of the flames is growing, mixed with strange popping and creaking sounds; when Trey looks over her shoulder, she sees a patch of the spruce grove is made of fire, every needle perfect and blazing against the dusk.
The tree is brittle from the drought, but all the same it takes her four tries to hang her weight from a branch hard enough that it snaps off. The recoil jolts her ankle and for a second she’s light-headed with pain, but she leans over the wall and takes long breaths till her vision comes back.
It’s clear to her that she might be going to die, but she doesn’t have time to have any feelings about that. She pads the end of the branch with her hoodie and tucks it under her armpit. Then she starts down the path, step and hop, as fast as she can go.
Birds are shooting up from the spruces and the gorse on every side, calling hard and high for danger. The air smells of smoke, and the heat is churning it: small things whirl and eddy in front of Trey’s face, flakes of ash, scraps of flame. The path is steeper than she ever realized before. If she speeds up, she’ll go sprawling. She can’t afford either to lose her crutch, or to get hurt worse than she is.
She keeps her pace steady, and her eyes on the ground for rocks. Behind her, the mutter of the fire is building towards a roar. She doesn’t look back.
“God almighty,” Johnny says, with an exaggerated puff of air, “I’m glad to be outa that.”
Cal, flooring it and dodging potholes, barely hears him. The one thing on their side is the windless air. The fire will spread fast enough all by itself, in this bone-dry country, but with no breeze to twist it, it’ll lick uphill. Trey will be heading down.
Johnny leans closer. “They weren’t going to kill me or anything mental like that, now. You get that, don’t you? Me and the lads, we’ve known each other all our lives. They’d never hurt me; they’re not fuckin’ psycho. They just wanted to give me a bit of a fright, like, just to—”
Cal swings the car hard left, up the mountain road. He says, “Shut your fucking mouth or I’ll kill you myself.” What he means is If anything’s happened to the kid I’ll kill you myself. He’s not clear on how exactly this is Johnny’s doing, but he has no doubt that it is.
Up the road in front of them, too close, is the fire. It backlights the trees with a ruthless, pulsing orange. Cal is wishing for Trey with such ferocity that every time they round a bend he truly expects to see her in the headlights, loping down the path, but there’s no sign of any human creature. He drives one-handed to check his phone: nothing from Lena.
At the fork where Rushborough was dumped, Cal hits the brakes. He doesn’t dare take the car any farther; they’ll need it safe to get them out of here, if they come back. He grabs his water bottle and the raggedy towel he keeps for wiping down his windows, soaks the towel, and tears it in two. “Here,” he says, tossing half at Johnny. “You’re coming with me. It might take two to get her out. Give me any hassle and I’ll throw your ass in there.” He jerks his chin uphill, at the fire.
“Fuck you,” Johnny says. “You were only a lift. I’d be here with or without you.” He jumps out of the car and starts up the path towards his house, wrapping the towel round his head, without waiting for Cal to catch up.
Cal has never been near a fire before. His old job brought him to the aftermath of a few, soggy black ash and sour reek, sulky threads of smoke curling here and there, but that was no kind of preparation for this. It sounds like a tornado, a vast relentless roar sliced through by crashes, squeals, groans, sounds that gain added terror from their incomprehensibility. Above the treetops, smoke boils in great rolls against the sky.
Johnny can only be a few paces ahead, but the dusk is coming down hard, the air is hazy, and the fluttering glow confuses everything. “Johnny!” Cal yells. He’s afraid Johnny won’t hear him, but after a moment there’s an answering shout. He heads for it, makes out a shape, and grabs Johnny’s arm. “Stay close,” he yells in Johnny’s ear.
They hurry up the path with their elbows clumsily locked together, heads bent, like they’re fighting through a blizzard. The heat charges at them like a solid thing trying to wrestle them back. Every instinct in Cal’s body is clawing at him to obey; he has to force his muscles to keep moving forward.
He knows Trey could already be long gone, by some hidden back trail, or else trapped behind the flames where he’ll never reach her. The air is blurred with smoke and whirling with blazing scraps riding the currents. A hare hurls itself across the path, practically under their feet, without a glance their way.
The crackling roar has grown to something almost too furious to hear. Up ahead, the path disappears into a billowing wall of smoke. They come to a standstill, without meaning to, in the face of its immensity.
The Reddy place is behind that, and everything behind that is gone. Cal twists the wet rag tighter around his head and takes a deep breath. He feels Johnny do the same.
For a splintering second, the thing hobbling out of the smoke looks like no living human. Blackened, lopsided, juddering, it’s one of the mountain’s hidden dead, woken and animated by the flames. Cal’s hair rises. Beside him, a sound comes out of Johnny.
Then Cal blinks and sees Trey, smoke-blotched and limping, one arm spasming from the pressure of her makeshift crutch. Before his mind even figures out whether she’s dead or alive, he’s running for her.
Trey’s senses have split apart. She sees Cal’s eyes and for some reason her dad’s, she hears their voices saying words, she feels arms across her back and under her thighs, but none of those things connect. Smoke floats between them, keeping them separate. She’s nowhere, moving too fast.
“Keep her foot up,” Cal says. There’s a hard bump as her arse hits the ground.
It jolts things back into focus. She’s sitting on the dirt, with her back up against the tire of Cal’s car. Her dad, bent over with his hands on his thighs, is panting. Thin streams of smoke drift, unhurried, down the path and between the trees. Below them, twilight covers the road and the heather; uphill, the mountain is blazing.
“Kid,” Cal says, close to her face. His head is covered in something red and white; the parts of his face that show are smudged and sweaty. “Kid, listen to me. Can you breathe OK? Anything hurt?”
Trey’s ankle hurts like fuck, but that feels irrelevant. “Nah,” she says. “I can breathe.”
“OK,” Cal says. He stands up, pulling the towel off his head, and winces as he rolls one shoulder. “Let’s get you in the car.”
“Not me, man,” Johnny says, lifting his hands, still breathing hard. “I’m not chancing my arm going back. I was lucky to get outa there alive.”
“Whatever,” Cal says. “Trey. In the car. Now.”
“Hang on,” Johnny says. He kneels down in the dirt in front of Trey. “Theresa. We’ve only a minute. Listen to me.” He takes her by the arms and gives her an urgent little shake, to make her look into his eyes. In the flickering muddle of dusk and firelight his face is ancient and shifting, unfamiliar. “I know you think I just came back to squeeze a bitta cash outa this place, but that’s not true. I wanted to come anyway. I always wanted to. Only I wanted to come in a limousine spilling over with presents for all of ye, fire a cannon fulla sweeties outa the window, diamonds for your mammy. Show ’em all. This isn’t the way I meant to come home. I don’t know how it all went like this.”
Trey, glancing over his shoulder at the smoke, says nothing. She can’t fathom why he’s telling her this, when it makes no difference to anything. It strikes her that he just wants to talk—not because he’s upset, but because that’s how he operates. Without someone to listen and praise or commiserate, he barely exists. If he doesn’t tell her, it won’t be real.
“Yeah,” Cal says. “Let’s go.”
Johnny ignores him and talks faster. “Didja ever have them dreams where you’re falling off something high, or down a hole? One minute you’re grand, the next you’re gone? My whole life, I’ve felt like I was in one of them dreams. Like I’m slipping all the time, digging my nails in but I just keep sliding, and there was never a moment when I could see how to stop.”
Cal says, “We need to move.”
Johnny takes a breath. “I never had a chance,” he says. “That’s all I’m telling you. If this fella’s giving you a chance, take it.”
He lifts his head, scanning the mountainside. The fire is spreading, but it’s mostly spreading upwards. Along the sides, there are still wide stretches of blackness; ways out.
“Here’s what happened,” he says. “Myself and Hooper, we split up when we got here: he took the path, and I cut up through the woods towards the back of the house, in case you were coming that way. When Hooper found you, it was no good him calling me, in all this noise, and the fire was too close for him to go after me. And that’s the last anyone saw of me. Have you got that?”
Trey nods. Her dad’s skill with stories is, finally, doing something worthwhile. This one is simple enough, and close enough to the truth, that it’ll hold while he slips through every noose and away. And, at last, it lets him be a hero.
Johnny is still intent on her, his fingers tight on her arms, like he wants something more from her. There’s not one grain of anything that she’s willing to give him. “I get it,” she says, and pulls her arms out of his hands.
“Here,” Cal says. He takes out his wallet and hands Johnny a fold of notes.
Johnny, straightening up, looks at them and laughs. He’s got his breath back. With his head raised and the firelight catching in his eyes, he looks younger again, and mischievous. “Well, God almighty,” he says, “this fella thinks of everything. I’d say the two of ye will do great together.”
He takes out his phone and tosses it in among the trees, a long hard throw towards the flames. “Tell your mammy I’m sorry,” he says. “I’ll send ye a postcard someday, from wherever I land.”
He turns and starts running, light as a boy, up the other fork that leads towards Malachy Dwyer’s and over to the far side of the mountain. In seconds he’s disappeared, into the dusk and the trees and the thin drifts of smoke.
Somewhere far away, under the wordless roar of the fire, Trey hears a rising whine: sirens. “Let’s go,” Cal says.
The smoke is thickening. Cal pulls Trey up by her armpits and practically throws her into the car.
“What the almighty fuck were you thinking,” he says, slamming his door. He feels like he might hit her if he’s not careful. “You could’ve died.”
“I didn’t,” Trey points out.
“Jesus Christ,” Cal says. “Put your seat belt on.”
He spins the car, gravel crunching, to face down the mountain. The slow drifts of smoke make the road appear to move under the headlights, shifting and heaving like water. Cal wants to floor it, but he can’t afford to hit one of the many potholes and get stuck up here. He keeps it slow and steady, and tries to ignore the fluttering roar swelling behind him. Somewhere there’s a crash, immense enough that he feels the car shake, as a tree comes down.
The siren is rising, straight ahead of them and coming fast. “Fuck—” Cal says, through his teeth. The road is too narrow for passing, there’s nowhere to pull off; the only thing he can do is reverse, straight back into the fire.
“Turn right,” Trey says, leaning forward. “Now. Go.”
With no idea what he’s doing, Cal spins the wheel hard, sees the headlights skid across tree trunks and feels the tires bump over something, and finds himself on a path: narrow and overgrown enough that he’s passed it for two years without ever suspecting its existence, but real. Behind them, on the road, the siren wails by and fades.