Page 13 of The Heat is On
Watchout rule number seventeen—when terrain and fuels make escape to safety zones difficult…
She toggled her walkie, dropped her pack. “Tucker, get out of there!”
He was scrambling to his hands and knees, then up. Limping…
His knee. She’d seen him wrench it a couple times skiing, an old injury from his snowboard cross days. Now, it crippled him, sending him to his knees.
“Tucker’s in trouble!” she screamed and couldn’t take her eyes off him as he fought to climb out of the flames.
Oh God, please, please—
A man burst out of the smoke at the top of the ridge and scrambled down toward Tucker. He grabbed him around the waist and struggled up the hill with him. They disappeared over the ridge into the rocky, safe area.
The fire engulfed the hill seconds later. It swept over the ridge and down into the meadow to meet the burn.
For a second, Skye couldn’t move.
Please be okay. Please be okay—
“Tucker?” She listened for anything, but only got static over the line. “Tucker!”
That was justit.
She took off down the slope, her feet landing hard on the granite, not caring that one wrong step could send her flying.
She should have warned him of the upsurge in the fire before he went over the ridge. He could have burned to death right before her eyes!
She hit the ground and sprinted down the fire line, past Romeo, Seth, Hanes, and Eric, over to the anchor point. Heard one of her teammates calling her name. But she didn’t stop until she reached the rocky anchor point where the other line connected.
Turning, she ran along the southern line, black on one side, green forest meadow on the other. And all along the line, men in orange shirts, yellow hard hats, wearing the green Nomex pants of a fire crew. They used their shovels to put out spot fires that spiked over the line.
Riley had also run down to the end of the line, as if looking for Tucker. And that’s when she realized—one of the new crew had saved Tucker. A hero, running through the fire to drag her boss to safety.
Sweat trickled down her face and she leaned over, breathing hard.
One of the firefighters turned, his back to her.
She stared at the imprint on his shirt. CCCF.
And she hadn’t a clue what it meant. But she recognized the block-style lettering.
No. What—?
No.
Please let her be wrong. Because by the looks of it, the heroes who had shown up to fight with them were none other than…prisoners.
Three
Rio had nearly been burned alive.
And to think, he’d actually been contemplating a change of profession. Because although the very marrow of his bones ached from hours of digging—evidence of how prison had stripped him of girth and muscle despite his in-cell push-ups—the breadth of Alaskan sky, the scent of the pine, the grandeur of the Denali range sluiced a freshness into his soul that Rio hadn’t experienced for a long, long time.
As if God had suddenly looked down and realized Rio needed to escape.
He’d tried not to let the smoke prick tears into his eyes, but yeah, he’d turned into a soggy-eyed mess as he fought to dig out the line in the soil.
Never mind that the boss—Tucker, who’d met them off the chopper—barked orders like he might be a prison guard. Rio could easily be back in juvie hall, listening to the guards remind him of the mindless rules that governed his pitiful life.