Wildfire - Honey Palomino Page 0,3

were dashed.

After he’d given up the promotion he was up for after being harassed by the other cops, he was never the same. We moved away and he took a boring desk job that eventually broke his spirit, leaving only an empty shell of a man.

Seeing him broken like that changed me.

I vowed my life would be full of adventure and I jumped feet first into a lifestyle that kept my juices flowing. Adrenaline became my drug of choice and fear became my adversary, and by the time I was in my teens, I was hooked on danger.

Maybe I would have found that as a cop, but as I became more educated and saw all the atrocities in the world that were perpetuated by the police, I knew that life wasn’t for me.

I wasn’t into the kind of adrenaline that hurt other people.

Oppression was not in my fabric.

I just wanted to see how far I could push my body, how far into the ocean of danger I could swim.

Fighting fires seemed like a natural choice and it paid the bills.

Unfortunately, I’ve been ousted from three different fire departments at this point and my chances of getting hired in a different city become slimmer each time.

Just as well, I thought, as I gulped down another beer.

I was bored anyway. Sometimes, there was action, sure, but it was far and few in between. And hoping for fires seemed a little sick, I know. But the wait time between jobs could be excruciating.

I needed something different.

Something with loads of danger, but constant danger. Something that could really keep my interest peaked.

Unfortunately, I had a truck and house payment that needed attention and I couldn’t find too many jobs within my skill set that would provide the income I needed.

I turned on the television and flipped through the channels. I found just the inspiration I needed when I landed on the news.

“The wildfires in Southern Oregon are out of control,” the newscaster said. “Governor Brown has been reassigning wildland firefighters from other regions of the state to assist.”

I smirked and grabbed my phone.

This was the answer I needed all along.

Chapter 3

Jesse

Snagging a spot on the hotshot crew was a minor miracle.

I had to call in a couple of favors, and even I was surprised it worked.

My reputation precedes me, though, and as soon as I showed up, I felt all the crews’ eyes on me. Luckily, I already knew a few of the guys, including my good friend Frenchie. While Frenchie wasn’t as much of an adrenaline junkie as I was, I’d somehow convinced him to join me. So with a couple of stupid jokes and hefty pats on the back, I was able to integrate myself without too much trouble.

There were small pockets of resistance, though.

Starting with our crew leader, Max, who hadn’t cracked a smile the entire day. He’d looked me up and down when I arrived, sizing me up, no doubt. People in leadership roles seemed to instinctively not trust me — whether it was from rumors about my previous troubles, or they sensed I was a threat to their own insecurities, who knows, but it always seemed to take a little longer for them to warm up to me.

I was used to it by now.

This wasn’t my first rodeo in the mountains, though. For kicks, Frenchie and I had joined up with another hotshot crew for a couple of summers after college. The work only lasted for a season, and then you were shit out of luck till the weather warmed up again, which is why I always seemed to turn back to regular firefighter work.

Now that I’d burned that bridge, I was determined to squeeze every shift I could out of this year’s fire season and hope like hell I made enough to sustain my unruly ass until next year.

“It feels good to be back, doesn’t it?” I asked Frenchie. He stood at my side as we looked over the camp before heading into our tent.

We spent the day meeting the other crews and gathering our gear. There were ten other crews of twenty guys each working the Mt. Shasta fire, so our camp was teaming with people streaming in and out of tents and organizing the camp that we’d all be rotating through. It was a ton of work but it would be our home for the next several weeks as we battled the raging flames working their way through the valley and up the sides of the