Page 55 of Some Like It Hot
Good thing they made bush pilots fearless. Or perhaps just as crazy as he was.
Tucker caught up to him. “Have you lost your mind? You can’t jump that fire!”
“I can and I will.” Riley was breathing hard, but he stopped to pull on his suit. Tucker zipped him up while he threw on his helmet.
“This is stupid and crazy, and Jed is going to kill me, sodon’t die.” Tucker slapped the top of Riley’s helmet, then grabbed the grids. “Watch the wind—it’s going to carry you west into the fire. You’re on a ram, so that just might keep you alive. You want to go down as close as you can to the shore as possible. Otherwise the chute and all your gear could drag you down.”
“Keep trying Larke. Make her get to that lake.”
Tucker nodded, then picked up the chute and shoved it on Riley’s back. Turned him to click him in and check his straps.
“So help me, if you die—”
Riley turned and ran for the plane.
* * *
And to thinkshe’d accused Riley of being reckless.
Larke tried to cut his panicked plea from her brain as she held her hose, attached to the pump in her yard. The water came from the lake, and she had turned it full force as she sprayed her house, but the wind caught the deluge and tore it from its target. She was drenched, filthy from the ash blowing through the yard, and her eyes teared, blinding her.
Smoke billowed, turning blacker as the fire roared closer. She couldn’t make it out but felt it, the sparks lighting her world to red, the breath heating her neck.
She couldn’t sort out exactly what had propelled her to jump in her truck and race down the hill toward the house. Instinct, panic. Or maybe just the sense that she had to dosomething.
She couldn’t lose everything, not again.
Not when she was just starting to put herself back together.
It was just a house, yes. But it had been her safe place.
Her safe meadow when she ran from the valley of death.
Get to the lake!
The last words she heard Riley say, nearly a scream as his emotions streaked through her. Then she’d coughed, dropped the phone, and the call died.
She hadn’t been able to find it again in the smoky haze that collapsed over her property.
She didn’t know what else to do but to keep trying to spray the house. To save—
Fire flickered on the roof, a tongue of flame that rippled up the cedar shakes and caught on the ridgepole.
No!
She aimed her hose, but the spray wouldn’t reach that far. More cinders blew onto the dry slats, and she wept, as much from the grit in her eyes as the destruction of her home.
Smoke clogged her throat, and she bent over, her body racked with coughing. Fell to her knees.
Get to the lake!
She dropped the hose, kept her head down.
Two hundred yards away.
Except, she wasn’t sure what direction in the blackened fog.
She followed the hose line, scrambling toward the pump, and found it jutting out of the ground on a cement slab.