It was gaining on them.
Another curve.
The trees on both sides of the road went up in flames.
Keep going. Keep going. Faster!
A flaming branch fell onto the rocky shoulder of the road, sending up a shower of embers. Conrad drove straight through it without slowing.
Another curve.
Spot fires flared up ahead of them, heat radiating through his vehicle. There was nothing he could do but drive.
“Keep going,” he said aloud this time.
All of Conrad’s near-death experiences had come in the Himalayas in ice and snow. How ironic it would be if he ended up being barbequed right here, just outside his hometown.
Kenzie.
He couldn’t do that to her.
He glanced in his rearview mirror, saw Megs riding his bumper, embers dancing off her truck, nothing visible behind her but flame.
The road sloped sharply downhill now, and the fire seemed to fall back. Conrad remembered Hawke telling him something about fire burning uphill faster than downhill.
“Woohoo!”
The smoke began to clear, and ahead he saw it—the highway.
Ahearn slowed but didn’t stop at the stop sign, fish-tailing as he turned right and heading toward Scarlet at sixty miles an hour, Conrad and Megs following.
They didn’t stop till they got back to The Cave.
It was only after he’d turned off his engine that the full force of what had just happened hit him, uncertainty gnawing at him. “Shit!”
Had everyone gotten away, or had they just abandoned friends to die?
Chapter 12
Gabe reachedfor the last hold as he neared the entrance to the cave. He’d done some hairy free soloing in his life, but he’d never had to free solo to save lives. Every person here was depending on him for their survival. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t wearing a climbing prosthetic or that he was on-sighting what was a solid 5.12—no practicing while roped in, no time to examine the route, no beta from someone who’d climbed it already.
Don’t think about it.
He hauled himself upward, caught the lip of the cave, pulled himself over the edge. He got to his feet, glanced inside the dark space, relief rushing through him.
The cave was big enough to hold all of them.
He shouted down to Belcourt. “We’re good!”
He fixed a pulley in the rock with a rusty piton, set up a kind of assisted belay, and lowered the rope to Belcourt, who already had everyone in climbing harnesses. “Hurry!”
The fire had already engulfed the camp buildings and was now burning through the grass and brush toward them.
Gabe hauled little Dean and the lightest of the camp counselors up, the two of them harnessed together, Dean in tears despite the counselor’s attempts to reassure him.
“We’re going to burn to death down here if you don’t hurry!” another counselor shouted.
That wasn’t going to help.