They let themselves drift, for now. Tugged northward. On their left rose a continuous muffled roar as of storm and turbines punctuated by the pitched whine and pops of pressure cookers as they explode. Nothing to see, still, but a thickening haze. Jack thought it was eerie—the chorus of harsh instruments that should never commingle—and every now and then rose a thin scream exactly like someone being squeezed to death. Squeezed and sizzled to a last tortured hiss and then maybe the crack of a spirit being loosed to the heavens. It was terrible. The wind had backed west-northwest and it brought the bedlam along with rolling smoke that stung their eyes and made them cough. The water was swift and flat for now, at least there was that. Without talking the two picked up their paddles and began pulling the boat forward.
In the last couple of miles the river had widened, it was maybe a hundred and fifty yards across, and almost instinctually they hugged the right bank, away from the fire. Their hands were stiff with cold. Motionless tall trees on either side, still dense with darkness, except over the left treetops now fluttered a glow not bright but bright enough to erase the lowest tiers of stars. Jack held up his hand and Wynn rested. They listened. The jet roar was no longer muffled but rose and fell as if buffeted. Almost as if breathing.
Their throats burned. Jack almost had to yell. “It should lay down at night, but it’s not. That’s weird. It’s plenty cold.”
They drifted. Jack said, “If anything, the wind is stiffer.”
They waited. Both knew he wasn’t done, and both sensed he himself wasn’t sure what he wanted to say. That was almost scarier than the sense of a mega-giant beast thumping closer beyond the wall of trees. Wynn thought of Jurassic Park. He said, “What rough beast…?”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“It happens,” Jack called. “A fire disobeys every rule. Anyway, it’s close. No sparks yet or flying shit, there’s that.” Pause. Then: “The river isn’t wide enough.”
He’d said it. With a fire this big, the river wouldn’t act as a firebreak. Nobody had to ask what he meant.
“You can hear it. It’s just big as shit, the biggest fucking forest fire on earth. Right now that’s a fact.” He shook his head, trying to clear it maybe of the truth. “So it’s coming across and the heat makes these crazy swirling gusts and it’ll make its own weather. Little cyclones and windstorms. That’s maybe the gusts we’re feeling now. The head of it. The smoke will get thicker and that’s gas and it’ll roll across the river and if it ignites…well.”
“We’re toast.”
“It’s a flashover. But.”
“But what?”
“I dunno.” Jack had to make himself breathe steadily. He coughed. “I dunno. You know how sometimes a fire runs over some neighborhood and half a block of houses’ll burn and then there’ll be two that stand untouched, and then another block burned down to cinders?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s uneven. It’s not predictable. That’s all I’m saying.”
Wynn lifted his voice. “You’re saying we better be those two houses.”
* * *
The smoke did thicken. They hugged the right bank, the main current just along the eddy lines close to shore, and the smoke rolled, so dense the black mirror of the river ahead was clouded as in fog, and then the wind picked up and the smoke was peppered with flying sparks. Sparks first, then shreds like leaves but embered and glowing, then torn rags of bark laced with fire. Wynn thought of strips of burning skin. They flew across in the smoke and they spread and folded and tumbled as they blew and the boat plowed through them. Over the trees—they could still see the wall of trees through smoke like fog—the glow was a fierce and general radiance that pulsed with a redder breathing. It was loud. Whatever turbines roared were just beyond the trees and now they were cut by a sudden whoosh and pop, and then the terrible hissing squeal that Jack knew was a tree’s sap, its lifeblood boiling and pressurized and squeezed through the very pores of the wood.
The sparks and flying tatters were hitting their backs and shoulders now. Wynn dumped the blueberries out of the pot and yelled at Maia to pull up her hood, she did, and he dipped the pan and doused her with water and then himself and he yelled and tossed the pot to Jack.
They needed to get to the bank. It was low along here, it was the shadow of a wall, a cut bank running to three or four feet above the water, running down to water’s edge and rising again like a moldering stone fence. The fire was coming fast and they needed to get against the dirt down low maybe in the water and get their heads in moss or roots, he didn’t know what. As he thought that, he heard another rush beneath the fire: the current was picking up. Holy fuck. The current was gathering speed, and the rush he was hearing had a wholly different key, something whiter, ancient, a violent register but now of water—it too was growing in strength, they were being sucked into the V’d current of another rapid. Jack peered into and through the smoke and flying debris—there were small sticks flying, burning sticks, that couldn’t be good, some not that small—and he could barely see and feel that they were ramping into a rapid and it was a left-hand bend. Fuckin’ A, at least that. A left-turning bend would pull the current to the outside of the turn, to the right bank, away from the blaze. At least that. Jack yelled, “Rapid!”
They grabbed paddles and stroked into the first breaking waves.