Lit Page 15

  Barker stole a glance at the elementary school, eyeing the campus through the ubiquitous haze and the trumpet vine that draped the chain-link fence surrounding the perimeter at Warner and Loring Avenues. There were no cars, no buses, no children. The outdoor basketball court, marked in yellow and blue, was empty, as were the hopscotch courts beyond it.

  He followed Zagrecki southwest along Loring. It was a short block with gated homes and typically manicured southern California vegetation. Drifts of thicker smoke occasionally wafted past the group.

  They wound their way back to Hilgard, north of the sorority house, and found themselves only a couple of blocks from an active fire. Water rushed down the street, pooling in the gutters and flowing like angry streams from the snaking links of yellow and brown hoses that crisscrossed the pavement.

  Three engines and two rescue units blocked the street. As many as a dozen firefighters were attacking a tall, thick cluster of trees adjacent to the UCLA Faculty Center on the edge of campus. Across the street, on the same side of Hilgard as Sorority Row, another group of firefighters were spraying a red liquid onto the roof of the campus Hillel and St. Alban’s Episcopal Church. It looked like they were coating the buildings in bright, oxygenated blood.

  The group slowed, stuck at the spot where the hoses intersected, and a firefighter who identified herself as a crew chief told Zagrecki they couldn’t pass. She was drenched in sweat, her eyes red, deep lines ran across her forehead, and her face was covered in soot.

  “I can’t let you pass,” she said firmly. “We’ve got too much going on here. Where are you headed?”

  “Campus,” said Zagrecki. “We need to get to somewhere safe.”

  The crew chief, whose jacket stitching read CAPT. EAKER, looked back at the fire burning precariously close to the faculty building. She shook her head. “I don’t know what to tell you,” she said. “There’s no good way to get anywhere from here.”

  Barker winced at the odor of boiled cabbage. He pinched the mask at his nose, and the pungent waft of air passed. He checked the faces of those around him. Nobody had a sour face. Nobody seemed to smell it. Perhaps it was his imagination.

  “How’s campus?” he asked. “Is it safe?”

  “For the most part,” Captain Eaker replied. “I think there’s a shelter at the Wooden Center. If you can get there.”

  If. That was the operative word right now.

  The firefighters who’d been spraying retardant on Hillel were now on the other side of the street, assisting at the faculty building. All the first responders were engaged with the fire threatening the edge of UCLA’s campus.

  “Can we get there if we take Hilgard to Wilshire?” asked Zagrecki. “Then Wilshire to Westwood and straight into campus?”

  “I don’t know,” Eaker replied. “We don’t have communications right now. Cell phones are down; radios aren’t working. We’re flying blind. We’re hitting spots as we—”

  A percussive blast of heat exploded behind Captain Eaker, launching her from her feet and into the forty-two people standing in front of her. All of them hit the ground, falling hard onto the street and on top of one another.

  Barker landed on his side, dazed and bleeding. His head throbbed and pulsed. His shoulder ached, and a sharp pain radiated from his hip. For several seconds he had no clue where he was or what had happened. A high-pitched tone rang in his ears and drowned out whatever other sounds might have given him clues. His vision was fuzzy. He could see shifting blurs, vague shapes moving slowly on the ground near him. Drops of rain hit his skin.

  Blinking his vision into focus, Barker saw Becca next to him. She was on her back, her face bloodied and her right arm bent at an awkward angle. She blinked wildly. Her surgical mask was torn and dangled from one ear. She was saying something to him. He couldn’t hear her.

  He reached out for her and found her thigh, placing his hand on the fabric of her leggings. Then her hand was on his. It was trembling.

  He was deaf to everything but the tone. Barker let go of Becca and sat up. The pain in his hip jabbed at him, and he froze for a moment until the radiating jolt passed. Then he exhaled slowly and surveyed the carnage in front of him.

  His mind struggled to understand it.

  Bodies lay strewn across the road. Some of them weren’t whole. There was blood and matter everywhere. Some of the bodies were smoldering. None of them were recognizable as men or women. All of them wore the uniform, or what remained of it. Some of them were moving. A couple had risen to their feet and appeared as dazed as Barker felt. They stumbled, unsteady on their feet.

  Two of the three engines were on their sides. Water sprayed uncontrolled up into the air. That was the source of the water falling from the sky. It wasn’t rain.

  Where the faculty building had stood was the skeletal frame of the structure. Spot fires burned, and various shades of smoke rose from the burned hull of the property, dissolving into the yellow-brown haze above it.

  Beyond the building, no more than thirty yards from it, was a jet of fire that shot a hundred feet directly into the sky. It reminded Barker of something from a science-fiction movie, a stargate or the fiery plume off the back of a rocket engine.

  The flame was perpetual, and it was only now that Barker sensed the heat from the stream of fire. Again, he smelled cabbage, or maybe it was onions.

  His senses were coming back, everything but his hearing. That was still obscured by a thick ringing in his ears, a high-pitched tone that made him want to scream. It aggravated the pulsating throb in his head.

  From his sitting position, Barker used his fists to push himself to his feet. He wobbled, and the world around him tilted. His vision blurred for a moment as his legs nearly gave out from under him. His hip didn’t feel right. He touched it, and a deep pain shot down the back of his leg. He grimaced and grabbed his leg, cursing loudly. The muffled word was only audible in his head. He turned gingerly and reached down to help Becca.

  Only then did he realize the backpack was gone. It wasn’t hanging from his shoulders. He didn’t see it anywhere as his hands gripped Becca’s and heaved her onto her feet.

  She stood and fell into him. He tripped backwards and steadied himself and held her. She wrapped her arms around his back and buried her face in his neck.

  He put one bleeding hand on the back of her head and held her until she pulled away. Tear tracks marked both cheeks. Although she was talking, he couldn’t hear her.

  She pointed to her ears and shook her head. She couldn’t hear him either. He thumbed away the bloody smear above her left eye, revealing some superficial abrasions. She glanced over his shoulder, and her face stretched with shock. Barker gathered she was seeing the column of fire for the first time.

  He stepped back from her and stood with her shoulder to shoulder. The fire, which the wind was now bending toward the cluster of trees firefighters had been working to protect, projected a warbling effect on the air.

  They stood there watching the gas-fed fire, sparked by the rupture of a high-pressure distribution natural gas line. It was a newer extension to an existing line that ran along Gayley a few blocks west. That connected to a main transmission line, which was buried underneath the right-of-way along the 405.

  What neither of them could know was that the extension had been improperly fitted. There had been a neglected microscopic leak for months. The leak had grown in recent weeks, and all it took was the wrong combination of circumstances for the line to explode.

  Captain Eaker appeared in Barker’s peripheral vision. Her face was swollen and bloodied. Her shoulder-length tangle of brown hair, which had been tucked under her helmet, looked like she’d stuck her finger in an electrical socket. She was cradling her right wrist in her left hand. A couple of her fingers looked dislocated or broken. She loped forward toward Barker and said something. The tone in his ears was lessening. As Eaker talked, he saw she was missing teeth. He tried counting the gaps as she spoke. There were three missing, and another flapped lo
osely.

  Sensing there was something wrong, she ran her tongue along the front of her mouth, and tears welled. She appeared to swallow hard and drew her good hand to the loose tooth. She wiggled it, and her chin quivered. Then Captain Eaker found the gaps where teeth should exist.

  She looked at the ground and spun in a circle, searching for her teeth. She backtracked, winding a path back to where she’d picked herself up from the street. Once there, she dropped to her knees and felt around the concrete with her hands. Suddenly she stopped and gripped something. She held it up and pulled in a ragged breath, her chest filling with dank, smoky air, and tucked the tooth into her breast pocket.

  Becca tugged on Barker’s arm, and he pivoted to see Melinda Zagrecki helping Gem to her feet. Both women were battered but in one piece, and that was saying something given what lay in the road between him and where the faculty building used to stand.

  Other sorority sisters gradually came to their senses and got themselves to their feet. Barker sensed the heat from the fire column behind him. He stepped forward, noticeably limping, to help some of Becca’s sisters who hadn’t yet managed to find their balance.

  None of them could hear one another clearly. There was a lot of pointing, hugging, and crying. Most of the women had minor injuries. A couple of them were nursing sprains or possibly fractures.

  Zagrecki managed to gather them together and, understanding that none of them could hear her, she pulled a marker and sticky notepad from her first aid bag and wrote notes, which the group passed around.

  The first asked if everyone was okay to walk. One of the three blondes Barker had seen when first entering the sorority house raised her hand when the note reached her. She was balancing herself on one leg and using another woman’s shoulder to lean on for support. Everyone else was mobile.

  The next note instructed everyone but the blonde to go find their packs if they were missing. Pick them up, shoulder them, and meet back in the group, Zagrecki ordered. For the blonde, she suggested she sit in place until it was time to leave.

  While the women were gathering their bags, Zagrecki slowly moved to Captain Eaker. When she reached her, she put her arm around the firefighter’s shoulder, embracing her before scribbling a note. There were four other firefighters who appeared to have survived the blast.

  Two of them were able-bodied enough to check on the dead, making certain there was nothing they could do for them. One was trying a handheld radio. He kept switching channels, pressing the talk button, talking with his mouth pressed to the speaker, then holding the unit at his ear. He tried this several times and then tossed the radio to the ground. Either it wasn’t working, or he couldn’t hear anything. They weren’t getting any help here.

  The other two firefighters were as dazed as Eaker, perhaps concussed or in shock. Both men, in their late twenties or early thirties, ambled around in oblong circles. They looked to Barker like mindless zombies wandering in search of stimulation.

  Barker couldn’t read the notes. Whatever they were, they elicited a vigorous nod from Captain Eaker. Slowly finding her way through her fog, Eaker found her way to the two coherent firefighters and communicated something to them that had the trio moving toward the gathering of backpack-wearing coeds.

  Only when they approached did Barker realize that one of the firefighters he thought was a man was in fact a slim woman with a buzz cut. She was relatively unscathed aside from road rash on one side of her face. She stood behind Eaker, facing the coeds and their house mother.

  Zagrecki tried talking first and pointed to her ears. The women all shook their heads. Barker’s hearing was still too muffled to understand as well. He thought of Charlie Brown’s teacher in the Peanuts cartoons. That was how Zagrecki sounded to him.

  She took out the pad again and began scribbling furiously on Post-it notes. One at a time she handed them to Eaker, who passed them amongst the firefighters before they made their way through the sisters and then to Barker.

  We’re going to Wooden, read the first note. Barker crumpled it up and stuffed it in his pocket.

  Firefighters are coming with, read the second.

  The five surviving firefighters were all looking worse for wear. Eaker had ripped part of her uniform shirt and had made a sling for her arm. Her face was sour with pain.

  The other four had distant looks in their swollen, reddened eyes. None of them, even the strong-looking woman with the buzz cut, appeared fully engaged.

  They’d just lost their friends in a gas explosion. They’d been fighting battles they couldn’t win. And now, breathing waves of heat were being sent in their direction; a gas leak was burning like an unstoppable geyser of flames. There was no telling when SoCalGas would be able to shut it off.

  As much as shock and bewilderment, Barker saw defeat in the firefighters’ faces. Through no fault of their own, they’d failed to do their job. Communities were burning, people were dead and dying, and there was virtually nothing they could do to stop it.

  It made sense that they would leave this mess behind and lead the group to a safe shelter where they could assist however many people needed first aid. They could regroup, perhaps form some sort of command there.

  Zagrecki was more than a house mother, she was a leader. A third note made the rounds.

  We will make it. Put on your big-girl panties and let’s go.

  CHAPTER 16

  Friday, October 17, 2025

  Angeles National Forest

  Loretta was beginning to lose hope. Despite it being little more than a smudge in the sky, the sun was getting ready to set. It was late afternoon. It might be three o’clock. It could be five.

  She wasn’t in immediate danger of smoke or flames and could see both in all directions at lower elevations in the forest and beyond. Her head throbbed, and her muscles were so weak that standing was difficult. She was no doubt dehydrated, she was hungry, she was nauseated, and she was exhausted.

  Every time she slipped into an uneasy sleep, she reminded herself to stay awake. She couldn’t afford to miss her chance to connect with firefighters or low-altitude helicopters whose pilots or crew might see her. She couldn’t miss the chance at a rescue.

  Although countless choppers had flown overhead, none of them had noticed her increasingly feeble attempts to flag their attention. Now she sat with her aching back against the rocky face of the cliff at the edge of a small clearing where she’d spent several hours waiting for help.

  The chaotic events of the morning seemed distant. Already it was difficult for her to remember the sound of his voice. She hoped that was a function of the stress and shock of her predicament and not an accelerated coping mechanism.

  Yet as long ago as her decision to leave him felt in some respects, the ache of it was fresh in her gut. She replayed it again and again in her mind, imagining what would have happened had she made a different choice. Being alone with her thoughts atop the peak was worse than the threat of dying alone from thirst or fire or some frightened wild animal that wandered from the forest below.

  Loretta was drifting off to sleep, her chin dropping to her chest before she jerked it back when she heard the familiar thump of a helicopter overhead and behind the peak. At first, she incorporated the noise into her daydream, playing out a drama in which the pilot had seen her and lowered the aircraft close enough for her to climb aboard. As the whip of the rotors grew louder, her eyes fluttered open and reality reemerged.

  She pushed herself from the wall of rock and dirt, wincing at the strain in her back, and groggily rose to her feet, stepping away from the cliff and out of its shadow. The helicopter whirred past her without hesitating. Its steady speed carried it off over the dense canopy of trees toward columns of smoke that were closer now than they’d been only an hour earlier.

  She swallowed against the sharp dryness of her throat. Dirt and ash coated her tongue and the roof of her mouth. She tried gathering saliva in her cheeks, enough to dampen the taste. She couldn’t muster even a spit’s wo
rth.

  She stood upright again, her head immediately throbbing from the sudden movement. Each heartbeat sent a wire of stabbing pain into her forehead and neck. She inhaled slowly through her nostrils and held the breath there for a moment before exhaling through her mouth. Her heart rate slowed, and the pulsating ache in her head lessened.

  She opened her eyes in time to see a condor wing its way past her. It flapped its magnificent wings for several beats until it held them wide and glided on the warm currents of air the collective fires must have provided. The bird soared higher and then swooped away from her, just as so many choppers had done before it.

  Her attention drifted from the bird to a large passenger jet that was flying too low. From a distance, she at first thought it was in trouble. As it drew closer, she could see its markings. It was orange on the underbelly and tail and white along the sides and top.

  It was moving fast, at what Loretta imagined was normal cruising speed for a jet that size. It zoomed past her, the trailing roar of the engines deafening as the DC-10 dropped twelve thousand gallons of retardant in a matter of seconds. The liquid dropped from its belly, spreading out into a wide path nearly a mile long and a football field wide.

  When the jet disappeared into the distant smoke, another airplane came into view with a loud, rumbling hum that sounded very different from the high-pitched whoosh of the jet. Loretta could see the twin propellers mounted in front of the wings. The aircraft was smaller than the DC-10 and was painted mostly white save the orange stripes on its wings and on the rear of the fuselage. On the tail, the number 29 was painted in large orange letters. It looked to Loretta like a converted military aircraft, and it was old.

  The plane rumbled past the spot where the jet had emptied its tanks and then unleashed a trail of red dust or liquid. She couldn’t tell which, although she did recognize it as flame retardant.