Rushing In (Bailey Brothers #4) - Claire Kingsley Page 0,3

sloped down—precarious, but not too steep to hike—until it dropped off abruptly into the valley below. A dry creek bed meandered across the bottom.

Beyond that, the burn raged, the forest glowing red.

It looked like hell down there.

Levi’s chainsaw roared next to me as he sliced through a trunk that clung to the rocky ground. He kicked the small tree, tipping it downslope so it could fall. The branches scraped across the ground as it slid, stirring up dust.

I adjusted the sixty-pound pack on my back, re-gripped my Pulaski—a tool with an ax on one side and a horizontal adze blade on the other—and attacked the stump that was left.

Chief had once told me that wildland firefighting was long hours of monotonous, backbreaking work punctuated by brief moments of sheer terror. In my experience so far, he was not wrong.

Except for the terror. I’d been right up against the edge of an out-of-control burn last season, and it hadn’t scared me. Got my blood pumping, though.

But mostly, we cleared a lot of debris.

A wildland firefighting crew worked alongside us. They’d been out here for the last few weeks, working to contain the forest fire that had eaten up tens of thousands of acres as it came down from the North Cascades, ripping through the dry mountain forests. Municipal fire departments like ours didn’t always work these kinds of fires. Brush fires, sure. But widespread forest fires weren’t usually our area.

Unless they were really big, or too close to town.

This one was both.

Levi straightened his back and wiped grime and sweat from his forehead with the back of his wrist. “Fuck, it’s hot.”

“No shit.”

Our faces were smeared with soot and dirt, mingling with sweat from the hundred-plus degree heat. The September sun mercilessly baked the mountains, cooking everything like one of Gram’s pies. It had been a hot, dry summer without a drop of rain for the last two months. Even now that it was almost fall, there was still no sign of precipitation.

Without another word of complaint, Levi and I both got back to work. We had a job to do. Bitching about it wasn’t going to make it better.

Besides, I didn’t care that it was hard. That my muscles ached, my hands were raw, the smoky air seared my lungs, and the heat did its best to suck every ounce of energy from my body. I lived for this shit. Needed it.

Gram inexplicably called me Otter—which was the least manly animal name ever—but really, I was a shark. Not because I was a bloodthirsty, vicious predator. I was actually a pretty nice guy. But sharks had to keep moving or they’d die.

That was me. A shark, always moving.

I’d tried to get Gram to change my nickname—I thought I had a damn good argument—but she’d just laughed at me.

But out here, digging a fireline so the burn would run out of combustible material if it decided to chase up the side of the valley, I was moving.

Besides, I hadn’t joined the fire department so I could spend my days rescuing kittens out of trees.

Levi and I dug the stump out of the ground and sent it down the slope. The guys around us dug and sawed and cleared. We had to get down to the mineral soil, where there was nothing left to burn. The top of a cliff wasn’t the ideal place for a fireline—usually a two- to four-foot trench—and right now, the fire wasn’t moving this direction. But there was a house not fifty yards behind us, so we couldn’t take the chance of the burn turning. If it did, it could get ugly fast.

Dirk, the wildland crew captain, walked by. His face was as dirty as mine no doubt was, grime caking into the lines around his eyes. He gave us a nod, his gaze sweeping over the ground, tracking our progress.

He wanted off this ridge as much as we did.

A breath of air brushed past my face, making my nose twitch. I stopped, lowering my Pulaski again. Inhaled deeply. It still smelled like smoke—no more than it had a few minutes ago—but something was different.

I could feel it.

“Fire’s gonna turn,” I said.

Levi glanced back at me. “You think?”

I scanned the forest below us, glowing red with heat, spitting clouds of smoke into the sky. Nothing looked different. Not yet. But I had a feeling.

“Yeah.” I sniffed again. “Smells wrong.”

Levi nodded. “Radio Chief. I’ll go tell Dirk.”

Under any other circumstances, Levi wouldn’t have listened to me. I knew