Set Me Alight (5 page)

“This land here is National Forest. In the grand scheme of things it’s not that vital to save, and the fire shouldn't be able to get past the river towards Helena. There's crop land south of here, though, and we don't want the fire spreading down there.”

“We could all just start fasting and forget this whole firefighting business.”

“Pete, there's a water tank up there, on the other side of the river. We haven't checked that one yet so pray to God it still works.”

The water tank was damn close to the fire. We made our way there, across the river, and with every step it got just a little hotter. We didn't have any firefighting apparel on. The forestry department sold it all to the mining companies years ago when they were strapped for cash. Fifteen minutes prior I was soaking wet. Then I was bone dry. I didn't even have time to feel the sweat leave my pores before it was gone. The area we raced over was brown and brittle, waiting to go up in a swirling inferno at a moment's notice. When we finally got to the tank, it was too hot to touch with bare hands. It was too hot to even be standing there. If Paul didn’t have a damn quick plan, we were going to spontaneously combust.

“Shit, Pete, even if this tank was operational it doesn't look like there's any water left.”

“What the hell do we do now then!?”

Paul just stared out into wilderness, I'm assuming to try and hatch some sort of plan. It’s not like we had much to work with. The best I could come up with was to jump inside the tank, face our end inside a makeshift brazen bull, with no elaborate sound system to dampen our tortured screams, and no maniacal tyrant to take pleasure in our demise.

“Do you see where the river bulges out over there?”

“Yes, why?”

“That's created by a dam a little bit upstream. The farmers use it to control flooding from the Missouri to irrigate their crops. If memory serves me right, there are sections of it made from wood. We need to hurry back to the bike.”

Again we began to run. I was hoping at this point we would just stay at the river and let the damn forest burn. Maybe the farmers could have fought the fire off themselves? I don't eat much then anyway, what did I care if there was just a little bit less to eat the next coming season? Unable to find the courage to even make snide remarks, I just followed Paul in complete silence. Well, silent save for the harsh panting all the running in smoky air caused me to do. I picked a hell of a time to quit smoking.

“What are we doing back at the bike, Paul?”

“In the saddle bags there should be a few hatchets. Grab two. We need to break the dam up. We can only hope the water will flood over into the path of the fire, stopping its spread.”

I raced across the river, found the hatchets, and high tailed it towards Paul. He already began heading towards the dam. When I got there he looked like he was checking it for weak points.

“The dam is already in rough shape. Back when we had infrastructure reports, it always made it to the top of the 'likely to fail' list. If we hack away at it here and here, it should burst, and with enough luck most of the water will head towards the fire.”

As Paul put it, we just started hacking away at the thing. What concerned me most at the time was not slicing part of my body open while wailing at the dam's wall. The hatchet was blunt, and my erratic swings had a tendency to bounce off back toward me. Only after a bit did it dawn on me that if this thing broke in a sudden burst, we were going to be swept away by the rushing water. If we didn't drown, or have our necks broken tumbling through the rushing water, I imagined we’d be spit up near the fire to be burned alive. With all those great ways to die, I wasn’t sure which one to pray for at that point.

Even though we were right next to the river I felt my back heating up. It felt like I was laying bareback on asphalt on a hot summer day. In a few more minutes, my hair was likely to burst into flame. If I didn't have the motivation to cut through this thing before, I did then. I can’t stand the smell of burnt hair.

All of a sudden, this loud cracking noise started up. Paul just yelled “Run!” and I followed. We scrambled up the bank past the dam, and with what sounded like a canon firing, the water burst through. The dam only broke on the eastern side at first, causing most of the water to head toward the side of the river where the fire was. Soon the whole thing gave way. We just sat there watching, gasping for breath, as the water rushed over the ground. The goal wasn't to have the water rush directly into the fire and put it out, but to have it dampen everything in its path to the point that the fire could no longer spread. It took some time, but we saw the fire reach the area we had just flooded. It didn't move past, and with time everything would turn to nothing more than a smoking ember. Nothing I would want to frolic through, but at least it was no longer a rolling hell blaze.

Paul turned to me and gave me just the slightest hint of a smile. Having been propped up on my elbows to take in the view, I collapsed and just started to laugh. The old man's plan had worked, and somehow I managed not to completely fuck it up for him. I can't think of a more improbable scenario.

“Congratulations, Paul, it looks like you saved the day.”

“Wait until we hear back from the farmers downstream who depended on that dam before we start saying that.”

Chapter 4

The rest of the summer wasn't as eventful as that first fire. There hadn’t been any fires to occupy our time. It was dry, dry as all hell. I don't think it had rained a single day that summer. I don't even remember it raining much in the spring either. Paul kept saying a big one was bound to come, but it hadn't happened yet, and I continued to dread each day as the summer went on.

Paul had been passing the time pouring through his brother's documents on the mining companies. Every moment of spare time he had he would be leafing through the files his brother left him. It seemed like he had made the same amount of notes on the documents as there were documents themselves. There were just piles and piles of paper everywhere he went, whether it was in our little shack of a house or in the office, or whatever place we decided to eat lunch at, there was always a nice stack of papers to keep him company. He seemed to enjoy the company of his papers far more than my company, as for the most part our interactions had just been me grumbling at Paul as he completely ignored me and turned to another sheet of paper. He said he didn't want to tell me too much about what he found out. He thought he was onto something big, or that his brother was onto something big, but he just didn't have enough pieces to pull it all together.

“It's something to do with the water here, kid, that's all I'm willing to tell you right now. The mining companies are messing around with our water.”

“What exactly do you mean, Paul? What the hell could the mining companies want to do with the drinking water here?”

“I've told you before. I won't tell you until I have everything pieced together and figured out. This is too big to start blabbing about without solid evidence. I don't want to implicate you right now. I can't.”

“Implicate me? What the hell are you talking about? Do you think the cops are going to arrest you or something?”

“Arrest me? That's the best outcome I could hope for at this point. There's a genuine chance someone is going to want to see me dead over this.”

“Stop being such a God damned drama queen, Paul. Whatever it is you're reading, it’s making you a paranoid little shithead, just like you said your brother became. Every time we're out in public you're convinced someone is following us. Paul, I've been there with you, no one is following us. No one has the time or attention span to follow around two boring schmucks like us. What would someone even find out from following you anyway? That you wake up, go to work, and then head back home every single day? I guess they'd know about times like today where you go out to get a burger for lunch with me. That's some damning evidence for a conspiracy they have right there.”

“I'm serious, kid. They know what kind of information my brother left me. Well, they don't know exactly what he left me, but they know I'm looking through it, and they want to know what I know.”

“Who the hell is 'they', Paul?”

“I don't know, God dammit!”

“Exactly, Paul, you're just scared of your own shadow while being chased around by some boogeymen.”

“I don't know who they are exactly. I just know they're tied up with the mining companies. They got my brother, and they're out to get me. Especially once they figure out what I have”

“If that's the case, what's stopping them from breaking into our house while we're at work and looking through your brother's stuff? We don't even have a lock on our door, Paul. You'd think some big, bad shadow organization would have the capabilities to do something as easy as that.”

“I'm sure they have snooped around our place, but my brother left everything in bits and pieces of a puzzle. You can't just read through it and figure out what he had, you have to know how he thought to interpret it. If I handed everything over to you, you wouldn't be able to make a lick of sense of it, trust me. I'm the only person who can make any use of the crap he left behind. I was his last hope for his discovery to be brought out before the world.”

“I swear, Paul, when I met you, I thought you were the only sane man I ever knew. Now, you're just as crazy as everyone else in this God forsaken world.”

“Say what you will, kid, but I know I'm on to something with all this. There are certain clues I’ve found I can’t deny, and others agree.”

“Others? What others?”

“Oh, well, I – I’ve been spending some time at the library, using their computer. Did you ever go ‘online’, before the crisis?”

“Yes, I’ve been ‘online’, as you say. Who knows how my formative years would have went without internet porn. I may have been a contributing member of society.”

“Well, I’ve been going to these forums. Talking with other people who think like me.”

“So you don’t want to talk with me about this stuff, but are perfectly willing to with strangers on the internet?”

“It’s easier to ignore the potential backlash against them. It isn’t for you. They’ve helped me though. They’ve helped me with my research, and what we need to do if anything happens to me.”

“Whatever. You can pass the time however you like. Just try to avoid getting yourself involved in some sort of embarrassing scam, alright?”

Most of our days seemed to pass by with conversations like that. Nothing of any importance was revealed by Paul, and I was too lazy to engage to the point of offering any sort of assistance in helping him decipher God-knows-what his brother left behind for him. Honestly, I just didn't care. Whatever his brother found out – if anything – it either killed him from the stress of 'discovering' it, or someone who didn't want that secret to get out got to him. That wasn't my bag, man. I'm an honest man. I keep my head down and mutter complaints under my breath. I wasn't put on this Earth to start shit, just to take shit. It's all I ever want to amount to. Paul can have all the fun he wants on his adventure to save the world from whatever these big bad conglomerates were doing, but I wasn’t going to be taking any part of it. Sure, I was being a coward, but at least I was a coward who wasn't giving themselves an ulcer worrying over something they couldn't control. I had the common sense to drink if I wanted a God damned ulcer.

As the summer progressed I had been spending more and more of my time 'working', or just sitting around in the office. As the days went on we did less of the fire prevention work, and instead were just waiting for something to happen. There wasn't a whole lot to do around the office, but there was enough to keep you occupied. Jim, Tim, Slim and I worked on repainting the inside of the place. Patti's mother was sick, so I'd often fill in for her and do whatever admin work was needed around the office. Not a whole lot to do for that though. Not like there were a lot of meetings to schedule or calls to take. It seemed like her main task was just making sure our paychecks were sent and for the right amount. God bless her.

All of a sudden the radio started blasting. “Fire at 47,35,52 North by 112,02,40 West. Repeat, fire at 47,35,52 North by 112,02,40 West. Fire outside the MineCo waste facility.”

“Shit! Paul, are you hearing this?”

“Yes, get the boys ready, Pete. Fortunate for us this is accessible by road. We can take the Forestry car.”

Jim, Tim, and Slim weren't hard to find. It wasn’t exactly a big office, and there wasn't anything they had to do right then. We all hopped in the car. Paul drove. He slammed on the accelerator and we were blasting our way to the waste facility.

“What exactly do we do for a fire at a waste facility, Paul? It's not like we're bringing any equipment with us, and what if this is some sort of crazy chemical fire?”

“They should have everything we need to fight the fire there, Pete. We just get called in for assistance. In theory, we should be better trained to fight this than what they have on staff.”

“That's a good one.”

“If this is a chemical fire, it’s going to be different than anything else you boys have faced or trained for. We better hope that they'll have all the safety gear and fire suppressants we need. Just water isn't going to do anything here, especially if it’s some kind of metal burning.”

The four of us just kind of sat there nodding at Paul in silence, not having a clue what would be an appropriate response to anything Paul was saying. There really wasn't much room for us to add our own input. It's not like we knew jack shit about fighting fires in reality. We had all helped dump some water a time or two, but nothing serious. I hoped that it would turn out to be a small, easily manageable fire, but nothing in my life had turned out to be easy.

The waste facility was a giant, sprawling labyrinth of garbage. I had no idea what constituted any of the endless number of piles of waste, but I could only assume none of it would be good in a fire. Thankfully for us the place was open to the air, so the threat of breathing in whatever toxic fumes were being spewed out by the fire was somewhat lessened. Mother Nature may not have been so appreciative of that fact, though.

Paul went to one of their facility managers and said, “What's the situation here? Do you know what's burning and how it started?”

“No to both, but we're fairly certain that you don't want to be breathing in any of that smoke. We've got some sort of gas masks over there, and some sort of powder we're supposed to use for fires.”

“Ok, we got this. Pete, Jim, Tim, Slim, put on the masks. I'll ready the powder. We don't have much to work with here, so we're going to be sending this stuff through what amounts to a leaf blower into the fire. There's going to be nothing in the air you want to breathe or get in your eyes.”

“What about on our skin?”

“That's not going to be good for you either, Pete, but it doesn't look like they have real firefighting suits here. Make sure everything's covered, and hope for the best.”

“I don't like the sound of this one bit, Paul,” Slim said.

“Neither do I, boys, but we got to make do with what we have.”

Paul wasn't kidding. We were putting the powder in some sort of hopper strapped to our backs that was attached to what looked like a leaf blower. It reminded me of those high-end water guns the cool kids in the neighborhood had when I was younger.

“We need to stick together and move through this. Everyone form a line, standing about ten feet apart, and we'll start sweeping through this. Follow my lead.”

“Roger that, Paul.”

I don't know what was going through Paul's mind, and it didn't seem like there was going to be much thought coming from the rest of us, either. We were spraying this powder wherever we saw fire. It was surprisingly effective at putting everything out. The fires seemed weirdly individual and spread out a bit. It wasn't just one large continuous fire like I was anticipating. It made it easier to move through and suppress.

“Boys, over there! There's some scaffolding that's going up and it looks like there are workers on it too!”

We all raced over to put out the flames. Workers who weren't too high up stared leaping off. Some of them didn't make the prettiest looking landings. If the area wasn't already flooded with the sound of fire and our chemical spraying machines, I'd be hearing the snapping sound of their ankles giving way beneath them. Some of them were too high up to jump, and the fire had already spread up there.

“Pete, Slim, come with me up this thing. We can't spray the powder up that high. Tim and Jim, keep the surrounding area under control until we're done.”

Slim and I began following Paul up the series of ladders and walkways. This was one hell of an elaborate scaffolding setup they had. I guess they needed a way to dump the waste on the top of this pile, which seemed to be a few stories high, and it must have been cheaper to pay some schmuck to haul it up on his back than to use a crane.

The whole time we were climbing, some of the wooden boards were giving way above us, sending flaming shards of wood and embers into our faces. We had to get above the fires to be much good at fighting them, which meant we were climbing through a fire before we could put it out. As we were heading up, the workers were scrambling down. It seemed like a never ending stream of them. Between the workers running around like scared ants, the fire, the smoke, and our powder, I couldn't see jack shit. I had no awareness of my surroundings. The only thing guiding me was Paul's voice, hardly audible with this gas mask surrounding my head and his mask muffling his shouts.

We were on the level second to the top, and all of a sudden the boards right above us burst, and a worker fell through. He landed between Paul and Slim and myself.

“Pete! Quick! Grab him from the fire!”

I rushed in, grabbed the guy by his shirt, and starting hauling him out of there. Running completely on adrenaline I had no sense of the fire and embers that were burning away at my clothes.

“Slim! Clear them off and I'll take care of the fire.”

Slim started patting us down to try and put out whatever burning crap was on the worker and myself. I looked over and saw Paul spraying down the flames. It looked like he had almost got it all put out, and then suddenly, I could see the fire work its way up his stream toward him. I screamed out “Paul, NO!”

In the blink of an eye there was a small explosion and Slim and I were knocked back. When I looked up I could see the whole area were Paul was looked like inside of a kiln. Just hot, red, burning death. I got on my feet and ran toward it.

“Paul!”

I felt Slim grab me by the arm. “Are you crazy, Pete!? What the hell are you doing running into there?”