Suck It Up and Die (39 page)

She wasn’t sure when the connection went dead. She threw the phone on the seat and kicked the accelerator.

In the Dredful apartment, Penny sat at Portia’s desk, waiting for a huge file to download from the iDisk onto a flash drive. “C’mon.” The computer
boinged
, she snatched the flash drive and dashed from the room.

Zoë ran out of Penny’s downstairs office with a sheet of paper as Penny started down the spiral staircase. “Got it!”
Zoë shouted. “Fastest bird in level flight is a spine-tailed swift, with a max speed of one hundred and six mph.”

Penny leaped into the kitchen and yanked a box of Band-Aids out of a drawer. “So, do it.”

Zoë held up the paper and focused on the picture of a bird that looked like a bullet with wings. “God, I hope I’m a natural.” A moment later, Zoë disappeared; the piece of paper fluttered to the floor along with Zoë’s collapsing pajamas. A spine-tailed swift popped from her pajama top and landed on the kitchen island.

Penny jumped with joy. “You’re a natural!”

The bird lowered its head and Penny carefully attached the flash drive to the bird’s back with a four-pronged Band-Aid. She threw open the kitchen window and the bird shot into the darkness with a shrill
tweet!

Penny shouted after it. “It’s Sixteen Hundred Pennsylvania Avenue. You can’t miss it!”

The bristlecone pines stood with the motionless silence of graveyard sentries. The stillness was broken as a flock of birds swooped down, unfurled into human forms, and tumbled on the dusty ground near the largest tree, the Matriarch. Some stayed on all fours, while others stood as they all gasped for air after their sprint to sanctuary. Their sacred ground was off-limits, to Lifers, anyway.

Catching his breath, Morning looked back at the dark horizon below the star-choked sky. No ominous glow signaled the turning of Leaguer Mountain into a fire-spewing oven. And there was no black plume of nuclear waste poisoning the air.
Maybe
, he thought,
our diversion has given a few hundred Leaguers the chance to escape
.

The recuperating Leaguers heard what sounded like distant thunder. They watched the thunder’s source take shape. The Chinook looked like a great armored bee with two wrecking balls dangling underneath it.

DeThanatos, having learned all he needed to know about flying an aerial eighteen-wheeler, had shape-shifted back into his own skin, while the pilot still sat rigidly in his seat. He had been relieved of his duties, and his senses.

The Leaguers watched the Chinook bear down on the Mother Forest. “What happened to sanctuary?” one of them shouted over the growing roar of the chopper.

The Chinook flew straight at them, dropping low. The bambi buckets clipped the top of trees. In the moment before the helicopter thundered overhead, Morning saw who was at the controls. He ducked as the tree-trimming buckets and the double rotor wash whipped the air with sticks and needles. While the chopper rose up and banked, Morning shared his discovery. “It’s DeThanatos.”

The stunned group watched the Chinook bank in a giant circle with the Matriarch and the cluster of Leaguers in the center. The buckets began releasing a steady stream of liquid. The air filled with the smell of gas.

“He wouldn’t,” one of them rasped.

Inside the cockpit, DeThanatos worked the stick with one hand as his other pointed at the pilot’s pack of cigarettes and the lighter on the center instrument bed. He snapped his fingers and the lighter sprouted a flame. The lighter slid toward the cigarette pack and lit the box. His hand flicked to the side window; the glass shattered. Then he thralled the burning pack out the broken window.

Under the chopper, the tiny ball of fire shot down in the rotor wash and landed in the top of a bristlecone pine. The treetop burst into a crown of flames.

The horrified Leaguers watched as the flames jumped around the circle of gas-soaked pines. Each tree ignited
with a percussive
whop
until the twin arcs of racing fire collided, sealing the Leaguers in a ring of fire.

The Chinook hovered outside the fiery circle. In the cockpit, DeThanatos smiled at his handiwork. “Add another shape-shift to your repertoire, bad boy. Vampyromaniac.” He shilled his joke with a raucous laugh.

On the ground, Morning yelled over the rumble of the Chinook and the fire’s growing roar. “If everybody’s got the strength for another CD, we can fly above the—”

A wild sight cut him off. Above the flames, in the plumes of smoke and sparks, eerie phantoms rose like a picket fence of northern lights. As the ribbons of color flickered and danced, they gathered into bodies and heads shrouded in ghostly light.

“What are those?” someone asked.

“Dunno.” Morning gaped up at the faces in the veils of light. “Whatever they are, they don’t look happy.”

A Leaguer announced, “That’s it, I’m outta here!”

As the young man snapped into a crow and took flight, Morning yelled, “Don’t!”

The crow rose sharply, flying toward the barrier of light wavering above the burning trees. The moment the bird hit the light it burst into flames. The Leaguers watched in wide-eyed terror as the burning crow fell into the inferno.

Morning flashed back on Prowler’s demonstration of the burning pine bough and the three parts of wild fire: gas, heat, and
spirit
. He realized they were staring at and surrounded by more than the crimson terror of a wild fire. They were beholding the spirits of the most ancient vampires, risen from their wooden graves.

Inside the cockpit’s flickering glass, DeThanatos chuckled. “What do you know? They’re on my side.”

On the ground, the girl next to Morning blurted, “What’s up there?”

“The spirits of the Old Ones,” he replied. “And they don’t like being disturbed.”

“What are we gonna do?”

Morning kicked the ground. Under the dust was nothing but rock. “We can’t go up, and even a mole with diamond teeth couldn’t tunnel through what’s under us.”

As the Leaguers murmured toward panic, Morning stared at the wall of flames. Tree by tree, it was pushing closer. The red dragon was stalking, and there was only one way out. Before Morning could even come up with a bad idea of how to bust a hole in a wall of fire, he heard a siren’s distant wail.

Hovering above the forest, DeThanatos spotted the flashing red lights of the fire engine racing toward the scene. “Oh, dear,” he said with mocking disdain, “is that a fire truck or a wagon full of marshmallows?”

The truck lurched to a stop as close to the flames as possible. Probies jumped off, buckling up gear and cinching their SCBAs. Prowler dropped out of the cab, taking in the towering conflagration and the luminescent spirits wavering above them. He had never seen anything like it.

Armando and Sully joined him. “Jeez,” Armando said to Prowler, “you weren’t kiddin’ about the red dragon.”

“Yeah,” Sully added, pointing above the flames, “but you didn’t tell us the red dragon ran in packs.”

“Didn’t wanna spoil all the surprises,” Prowler said, masking his concern with a game face.

“You think Morning’s in there?” Armando asked.

“There’s only way to find out: open a door.” Prowler
started shouting orders to pull hose and stretch a line. He eyed the Chinook hovering at a safe distance and wondered whose side it was on.

As the probies laid out a long stretch of hose, a Jeep raced up and fishtailed to a stop. Portia jumped out. She rushed over to Prowler and threw an arm at the fire. “Morning and a dozen Leaguers are trapped in there!”

“You know that for sure?”

She pointed at the hovering Chinook. “Why else would DeThanatos wanna burn down the Mother Forest?”

“That’s who’s up there?”

“Yeah.” She turned to the spirit lights dancing above the flames. “But what the hell’s up
there
?”

“Not sure,” Prowler answered, “but I got a bad feeling they’re not a bunch of looky-loos here to rubberneck.”

Armando’s voice came over Prowler’s walkie-talkie. “We’re ready to put the wet stuff on the hot stuff.”

Prowler keyed the walkie-talkie. “Then cut me a door.”

The probies shot a geyser of water into the fire.

DeThanatos watched the arc of water hit the massive fire and evaporate in clouds of steam. He laughed. “A dog lifting his leg on a house fire could do better!”

Seeing the futility of the effort, Portia nodded at Prowler’s walkie-talkie. “You got another one of those?”

“Yeah, in the rig.”

Portia grabbed the walkie-talkie from Prowler, ran as close to the wall of fire as possible, wound up, and hurled the walkie-talkie.

On the other side, the walkie-talkie flew through the flames and tumbled to the ground near the Leaguers. Morning jogged over, scooped it up, and keyed it. “Who’s out there?”

Portia’s voice crackled over. “It’s me, Morning.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Trying to get us back to the Williams Bird Bridge.”

A rueful smile teased Morning’s mouth as he took in the impenetrable barrier of flames and wavering spirits. “You got my note.”

“Yeah. I’m here with Captain Prowler and your crew. Got any ideas of how we can get you outta there?”

“Lemme talk to Prowler.”

Portia handed the walkie-talkie she had retrieved from the truck to Prowler. Morning told the fireman about something he had read in a book on fighting forest fires. Sometimes a wall of fire can be breached using fire against fire. First, a jetty of dry, combustible wood gets built out from the wall of fire, but out of reach of the fire. When the fire is allowed to jump to the jetty, the tinderbox bonfire can be so explosive it creates a backdraft, sucks the oxygen away from a section of the main fire, and momentarily blows a hole in the wall of flames. If it’s timed right, someone can escape through this blowout. When he was done, Morning asked, “What do you think?”

Prowler grinned. “Now you’re thinking like a fire knight. We’re on it.”

DeThanatos watched curiously as Prowler, the crew, and Portia collected wood and began building a jetty at almost a ninety-degree angle from the fire. A couple of probies hosed down the end of the jetty closest to the fire to keep the main fire from jumping too soon and igniting it.

A spine-tailed swift raced through the dim light over Washington, D.C. The shadow-consciousness Zoë retained
in the swift’s bird brain was more than enough. The trip had been the fastest, most vivid flying dream she’d ever had. But it was no dream, it was a dream come true!

She spotted the White House, the lights burning in the Oval Office, and dived toward them. She was so jacked up she realized too late what so many birds realize too late:
Is that a window?
She banged into it with a
thud
, bounced off, and crashed in the bushes.

The president, lying on the rug in front of his paper-strewn desk, was doing a stretch to loosen his back after another stressful day being the most powerful man in the world. He heard the sound and started to sit up, but his back twinged, sending him back to the carpet. “Ow!”

At the window, which was slightly raised to let in the warm autumn breeze, the swift darted into the Oval Office. Fortunately, the bird was so small it had flown between the motion-sensor laser beams the Secret Service had “barred” the window with as a last line of defense against anyone busting in on the president from the outside.

The swift landed on the paper-cluttered desk as Zoë wondered where she should look for the president next if he wasn’t in the Oval Office.

Before she produced an answer, the president’s head popped up in front of the desk. The swift shrieked into flight; “Ahh!” jumped out of the president, and he was thrown back to the floor by a back spasm.

The swift darted around the room before Zoë’s shadow-consciousness took back the avian controls and landed on the floor behind the desk. She could hear the president moaning on the other side of the desk as he tried to raise himself off the floor with his now seized-up back. Zoë knew it was only a matter of seconds before the
president yelled for the Secret Service, or the White House animal-control officer, or whoever rids the Oval Office of unwanted birds. She had to act swiftly. Or, in this case, de-swiftly.