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  “Okay, fine,” she said nonchalantly. “Don’t come with me. I didn’t drag you here. I didn’t kidnap you. And I’m not part of some grand conspiracy to get you away from the diner so I can have my team of special operators sneak inside to make grilled cheese sandwiches or whatever greasy crap you make there.”

  “Hey now,” said Arthur. “That’s not nice. Don’t talk bad about my cooking.”

  “Don’t talk bad about me,” Gilda shot back. “I’m trying to help. You don’t want it, don’t take it. But I’m leaving with or without you.”

  Gilda pulled herself up into the cab and closed the driver’s side door. She adjusted her rearview mirror and cranked the engine. It protested for a moment before rumbling into a guttural idle.

  “I’m going with her,” Danny said, and climbed into the truck’s bed. It had a spray-on textured liner that was coated in soil and ragged leaves. Twin bags of plant fertilizer were pressed against the back of the cab. He sat atop them, providing a bit of cushion for however long a ride they had ahead of them.

  He didn’t see Arthur and Claudia exchange glances, but he did hear the passenger’s side door creak open and slam shut after they’d clambered into the cab next to Gilda. Gilda shifted gears, and the truck lumbered into first as she accelerated away from the fires.

  Facing backward, Danny couldn’t see or hear the people on the ground anymore, but the emergency sirens were audible. The smoke, flickering from the flames burning with it, was thicker now and rose higher into the sky. It obscured the mountains to the north and east.

  The truck picked up speed, and the wind whipped around him, sending a chill through his body. Then, almost as soon as the truck hit fourth gear and eased into a steady roll, it jerked violently. The wheels screeched against the asphalt. Gilda slammed on the brakes and shifted into neutral, and the truck came to a sudden halt. Danny, who’d somehow managed to keep himself inside the bed without hurting himself, twisted his body to look forward.

  They were stopped because the traffic ahead of them was as thick as the smoke behind them. They weren’t going anywhere.

  CHAPTER 9

  Friday, October 17, 2025

  Santa Monica, California

  Dub squeezed Keri’s hand and searched for a path to the opposite side of the street. It was hard to hear anything other than the deafening wails of sirens, the loud rumble of engines, and the spray from large hoses that snaked everywhere they tried to go.

  In the smoke, they’d somehow gotten confused and stuck in the middle of a literal fire fight. The smoke was thick enough that it was irritating Dub’s eyes and throat. He’d given his T-shirt to Keri and wrapped it around her nose and mouth to keep her from breathing in the noxious fumes, so he was bare-chested. Normally he’d be somewhat self-conscious despite his six-foot-three athletic build. Living in southern California, where it seemed that everybody was constructed by a special-effects team who modeled their creations after the men and women they found on Muscle Beach, had a way of messing with his head. Add to that his own insecurity about Keri’s popularity, and he rarely went without a shirt unless he was in the ocean or on the basketball court and forced to play skins.

  In these circumstances that had gotten out of control so quickly, he didn’t give it a second thought. Keri’s health was more important than his ridiculous issues. She’d resisted taking the shirt at first but relented when he’d insisted. She held it tight against her face and winced at the puffs of smoke blowing into her face.

  The wind had shifted and intensified. Despite Dub’s inability to discern exactly where they were and which way they were headed, the wind was an aggravating factor. Coming from nowhere, it had brought with it an added tension and palpable danger.

  He tugged on her hand, sensing the tension of her arm. He slowed, stepped over a hose, and yelled to warn her to watch her step. A pair of firefighters moved past them, heading toward the flames. Dub walked to where they’d emerged through the smoke, figuring that might lead them farther away from any immediate danger. They’d come from a spot where the smoke was visibly thinner, creating the illusion of a portal of light through which they could escape.

  He wondered how they’d ended up in the middle of it all. One moment they’d been contemplating the best route back to campus, and the next they were absorbed into the opaque, choking chaos.

  What he did know was that they were in a part of the city that packed houses next to one another like sardines. The lots were long and narrow, and the homes were mere feet from each other. They might as well have shared walls they were so close. Some were older and needed a lot of work but had respectable-sized yards. Others were recent rebuilds that used every bit of the lots they occupied. Regardless, they were likely dominos in an out-of-control fire. One would burn and then catch the next on fire, and the next, and the next.

  The tug of Keri’s arm and the squeeze of her hand slowed him down. He’d reached the imaginary portal. Keri stepped up next to him, and they finished their brief run to cleaner air.

  They were standing in the middle of the street, to one side of a four-way intersection. Police were behind them, preventing the stalled traffic from turning into the smoke. They were trying to direct drivers to head in the opposite direction, but as the breeze cleared a cloud of smoke from his field of view, Dub saw there wasn’t anywhere for the traffic to go. It was stopped in both directions. It was then he noticed the horns honking and the frustrated would-be drivers shouting from their open windows.

  He spun around, trying to figure out exactly where they were, but he couldn’t read the street signs. Keri lowered the T-shirt from her face and handed it back to him. “It might have my snot on it,” she said. “But I’m good now, so if you want it back…”

  Dub took the shirt, shook it out, and slipped it over his head. “Thanks,” he said with a wink. “I’m not worried about your snot.”

  She blushed, understanding the sexual subtext of his comment. She wiped the sweat from her forehead and rubbed her knuckles in the corners of her eyes. They were red, and she kept blinking against the irritation.

  “You’re okay, though?” he asked. His throat burned with the taste of whatever it was that was burning. He tried clearing it. It didn’t help.

  “I’m fine,” she said, almost convincingly.

  “Really?”

  She ran her hands across her cheeks. “My throat hurts a little, and my eyes are burning.”

  Dub squeezed his eyes shut, pressing tears from them. “Mine too. But I think we’re okay here.”

  Keri searched the intersection. “Where is here? I don’t recognize where we are. I mean, I know we’re probably still in Santa Monica somewhere. But I can’t make out any landmarks.”

  They pulled out their phones and tried their GPS apps. None of them worked. They couldn’t get a signal.

  “Nothing,” said Dub.

  “Me either,” said Keri. She tucked the phone back into her pocket. “This is crazy.”

  Dub adjusted his T-shirt, pulling it over the waistband of his jeans, and moved past Keri and into the traffic. The man behind the wheel of a Tesla honked his horn when Dub stood in front of the red electric coupe. Dub ignored him and peered diagonally across the intersection toward a chain-link fence. He walked back to Keri, waving at the irritated Tesla driver with a smile, and then pointed across the traffic toward the fence. “There are tennis courts there,” he said. “I think it’s a park.”

  The wind gusted, blowing in their faces and taking with it a layer of the smoke. For the wisp of a moment, Dub could see the street signs.

  “Wilshire and Lincoln,” he said.

  “Are you sure?” Keri asked, squinting to see the sign before the smoke bloomed again. “This is Wilshire?”

  It didn’t resemble the heavily traveled, familiar thoroughfare that stretched from Santa Monica to the 405 and campus before heading east through Beverly Hills. True, it wasn’t as though they were locals who knew these streets like the backs of their hands. He wa
s from Houston, and Keri was from New Orleans. They knew their way around west LA based on the trendy restaurants and shops they frequented. They used Uber, Lyft, and landmarks as easy ways to get around. Drop them into the middle of an intersection without their GPS telling them exactly where they were, and they were lost.

  “Hey,” called out one of the police officers directing traffic. “Hey! You two.”

  Dub didn’t know the officer was talking to him until he shouted again.

  “You,” he said, “with the wrinkled T-shirt. Get out of here. You can’t stand in the middle of the road.”

  “Where are we?” Keri asked.

  The officer looked at them like they had three eyes and green skin. “Santa Monica. Are you on something?”

  He left the intersection, one hand on his service weapon, and strode toward them. Dub and Keri backed up a couple of steps but stood their ground. He eyed both up and down.

  “You need to get out of the road,” he repeated. “This isn’t safe.”

  Dub raised his hands in surrender. “Okay. We’re just lost, that’s all. We’re trying to find our way back to campus.”

  “All this smoke,” Keri said. “We’re turned around.”

  The officer frowned. “Still, I can’t have you standing in the street. It’s for your safety and for the first responders working the scene. You need to find a sidewalk and move along.”

  Keri eyed the police officer. She exhaled loudly. “Fine, but he can’t tell us—”

  “He’s a cop,” said Dub. “He’s not some guy with a walkie-talkie. And he’s right, we do need to get out of here. Let’s move away from the fire. We probably can’t get through to campus this way anyhow.”

  “So where do we go?”

  “Back toward the coast,” he said. “The ocean can’t catch fire.”

  Keri started to answer him, but her voice was drowned out by the deafening rumble of engines. Dub tried to place the source of the noise. It wasn’t coming from the direction of the fires. It couldn’t be coming from the traffic, which was stalled to a stop.

  Then Keri pointed overhead, and he saw it. A large helicopter was moving nose down and low overhead. It was red and white with large propellers whirring and thumping against the air.

  It zipped past them directly overhead, its wash whirring over them. Without warning, a wash of water dumped from the bottom of the chopper in a cascade larger than anything Dub had ever seen. A spray of steam appeared from the smoke in time for another chopper to emerge from seemingly nowhere. It too dumped hundreds of gallons of water onto the burning buildings.

  It appeared the firefighters were beginning to get an upper hand. For the moment.

  CHAPTER 10

  Friday, October 17, 2025

  Westwood, California

  “I’ll come get you,” Barker proclaimed when he reached Becca and heard how shaky her voice was. “You can stay with me until this is over.”

  “I’m on the other side of campus,” she’d said. “It’s too dangerous.”

  Barker was standing at the bottom of the Hill amid the dingy yellow haze that had engulfed the campus. His nostrils stung. He knew the smartest thing to do was to go to his dorm, turn off the air-conditioning, and watch Netflix.

  There was a new season on Black Mirror, and he’d downloaded it to his laptop. He’d been wanting to binge but hadn’t found the time. With classes cancelled, now was as good a time as any. Still, he couldn’t leave Becca hanging, and a chivalrous act could go a long way in impressing her. He wasn’t as convinced as Michael that she was as into him as he was interested in her.

  Michael was already half up the hill, heading back to the dorm. He’d read the alert and wasn’t taking any chances. Michael was smarter than Barker. Barker was certain of that as he stood in the toxic haze considering a cross-campus trek to Sorority Row.

  He’d managed to find the one spot on campus where he could get a cell signal and had called Becca.

  “It’s not a problem,” he said. “I don’t want you to be scared. If you’re with me, you won’t be. I’ll…entertain you.”

  “Don’t you have a roommate?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” said Barker, oblivious to her interpretation of entertainment. “But he’ll keep to himself. I’ll share my headphones, and we can start the new season of Black Mirror.”

  “Oh.” Her disappointment filled the bandwidth.

  “I’ll be right there,” he said. “It’ll take me ten minutes. Fifteen tops.”

  “You know which house?” she asked.

  “The one with the prettiest girl on campus,” he said. Then he gritted his teeth, immediately regretting the lame line. When she giggled, he exhaled with relief.

  “You’re funny.”

  He wasn’t sure how to take it. Was funny good? It didn’t matter. He was trekking across campus to get to her. Any excuse to spend time with her.

  “Is that good?” he asked.

  No response.

  “Is that good?” he repeated. He’d lost service and cursed his phone.

  Despite having dated girls in high school and women in college, Barker suffered from an inferiority complex. He was five feet eight on a good day, was losing his hair, and was stocky more than muscular. Plus, he was a sophomore who still hadn’t made up his mind about his major. Most of his friends were south campus majors, meaning they were focused on math, science, or engineering. He was more of a north campus kid, and he couldn’t make up his mind between history, political science, or business economics.

  At UCLA, everyone was brilliant. Barker regularly questioned how he’d been accepted. He was the middle child of a long-haul trucker from Washington DC, who wasn’t an athlete or a brainiac.

  He typically combatted, or revealed, his insecurity with biting sarcasm. It was lost on his roommate Michael. Dub, on the other hand, could give it right back to him when pushed. So could Keri.

  Barker wiped the sting from his eyes, thumbed his nose, and started his walk across campus. Again, he was struck by the eerie quiet, the type of quiet usually reserved for the so-called dead week before quarterly exams.

  A couple of kids he vaguely recognized from the dorm shuffled past him with their heavy backpacks clunking as they held their hero blue Bruin shirts above their mouths and noses. They glanced over at him, offering greetings with the slight nods of their heads.

  He nodded back. A gust of wind blew past him, and he ran his hand across the spot at his crown where his hair was the thinnest. A chill traveled through his body, and he involuntarily shuddered.

  As he walked east along Bruin Walk and back toward the bronze bear statue, the Ashe Health Center, and the Ackerman Student Union, he noticed the swirl of the wind. It was intensifying and steady. It blew into his face at one moment and then breezed across his side from the north the next.

  The haze that he’d seen and smelled before eating lunch was thickening, the grungy yellow morphing into more of a slate gray. Puffs of darker smoke blew past him. The air was becoming heavier, more acrid, as he pounded up the steps toward the Court of Sciences. An older man with shocks of white at his temples and thick, black-framed glasses in front of his eyes hurried past him. He carried a black leather satchel at his chest and a deep frown on his face.

  Barker recognized him as a psychology professor he’d had his second quarter. Dub, a psych major, had recommended the class. Being somewhat directionless, Barker had taken the advice and earned a B+. He didn’t remember the professor looking so old.

  In the distance, he could hear the chirp of emergency vehicles making their way through traffic. After he passed the inverted fountain, drawing closer to the row of sorority houses across from the eastern edge of campus, the sounds from those vehicles grew louder. He stopped at the curb at Hilgard and Westholme, and a pair of bright red fire engines roared past him, an ambulance a couple of lengths behind. All of them had their sirens blaring, their emergency lights swirling and strobing. The spinning lights cast a red glow in the smoke that r
eflected off the buildings on both sides of Hilgard.

  A couple of SUVs trailed the ambulance. Barker followed them with his eyes. They were headed toward Wilshire. At the point where the smoke became too thick for him to see farther, the emergency vehicles had slowed. He couldn’t tell if they were at their destination and the fire was that close now, or if the traffic on Wilshire was so bad the crews were stalled. Either way, it wasn’t good. Things were devolving.

  Barker checked his phone again and saw new alerts on his phone. They’d downloaded during the brief time he’d had a signal. He held the phone up to his face to unlock the screen and thumbed through the news updates. Each was more daunting than the previous one. The newest information was at the top.

  SANTA MONICA ON FIRE

  SEVERAL DEAD IN OUT-OF-CONTROL BRENTWOOD FIRE

  EMERGENCY OFFICIALS PREPARE FOR DISASTER

  RESIDENTS URGED TO EVACUATE IF TOLD

  AUTHORITIES ASKING RESIDENTS TO REMAIN VIGILANT, SHELTER IN PLACE

  FIREFIGHTERS OVERWHELMED BY MASSIVE FIRES

  SOUTHLAND ABLAZE, WIND WHIPS UP FEARS

  An overwhelming sense of dread coursed through Barker’s body. He tried clicking on the links to the updates. None of them worked. Even the campus Wi-Fi didn’t give him access.

  He glanced again at the strobing reflections of the emergency lights to his right and then back across the street at the large sorority houses that lined the other side of Hilgard. He swallowed hard, tasting the smoke in the back of his throat, and regretted ignoring the voice in his head that told him not to go find Becca. Barker ignored that voice a lot. He always promised himself he’d listen to it next time, and never did.

  He hustled across the wide street. He accidentally took a deep breath once he’d reached the curb and stepped up onto the sidewalk. The pungent air stung, and he coughed, bending over at his waist. He cleared his throat and wiped the sudden sheen of tears from his eyes.

  Above him he could hear the whip of helicopter blades. The sirens echoed beyond the veil of smoke. He couldn’t tell how close the flames were. The road descended and curved, merging with Warner and veering north toward an intersection with Sunset. In the distance the orange flicker of flames peeked out behind the tendrils of smoke that ballooned amidst the haze. They were likely farther than they appeared since he couldn’t hear the crackle of the fire.