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CHAPTER 1

A storm of wind-tossed embers burst through the smoke, crossed the Pacific Coast Highway, caught the dry grasses along the ocean side of the road. A stand of eucalyptus trees exploded into flame. Suddenly visibility was zero.

Matt Lowell forced himself not to jam his foot on the gas. Without the weight of the two horses, the empty trailer was already rocking dangerously. The wind slamming against it had to be gusting at eighty miles an hour.

At Trancas Canyon Road, the traffic lights were out, the Mobil station and the market both dark. On the other side of the intersection, the whirling blue and red light bars across the top of sheriff's black and whites became visible through the murk. A police barricade stretched across the highway, blocking all lanes, north and south.

A deputy sheriff waved Matt down, his sharp arm movements directing him left into the Trancas Market parking lot. Matt recognized Bobby Eckhart. They'd been at preschool together, gone through Webster Elementary and Cub Scouts, surfed the coast from Rincon to Baja. Raised some hell.

Matt pulled over to the median and lowered the window. The acrid stink of disaster caught in his throat -- chaparral burning on the hillsides, houses, furniture, lives going up in flames.

"Bobby," he shouted. "I've got to get through."

The deputy looked to see who was shouting, then jogged over to the pickup. "Hey, Matt." Eckhart looked like hell, eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot, his usually immaculate tan uniform charred on one sleeve, and streaked with ash. "The PCH is closed, but we're getting a convoy out over Kanan Dume while it's still open. We can sure use your trailer. Take it over to the creek area, and start loading some of those animals."

Matt shot a glance at the parking lot. Another uniformed deputy was trying to bring some order into the chaos of vehicles loaded with a crazy assortment of household goods; anxious adults riding herd on kids holding onto family pets: dogs, cats, bird and hamster cages. A makeshift corral held a small flock of black sheep, a couple of potbellied pigs, some goats. Horse trailers, rocking under the nervous movements of their occupants, lined the edge of the parched creek. In October when the Santa Ana's roar straight out of the desert, water is a distant memory of spring.

"My horses are down in Ramirez. I've got to get them out."

"Margie Little brought a couple of trailers out of there an hour ago. They're over at the shelter in Agoura."

"Did you see my two?"

Eckhart shook his head. "But you can't get down there, Matt, not now. It's been evacuated, everyone's out." His words ended in a fit of coughing.

Matt put his head out of the window, peered into the blanket of smoke shrouding the highway. "Where the hell are the fire crews?"

"They're spread pretty thin but more are coming. This brute skipped the PCH at noon today, in some places it's burned clear down to the ocean, and now some crazy bastard is setting fires along Mulholland in the backcountry."

Matt's gut clenched. His house was on the beach, and Barney was locked inside. "What about Malibu Road?"

"Blocked at both ends, but it was evacuated earlier today. Escondido, Latigo Shores, everything. Last I heard it was still okay, but the wind's getting worse."

"Bobby, I've got to get through. Barney's locked in the house."

"Oh, Jesus." Eckhart looked stricken, he had known the yellow Lab since he was a pup. "Matt, I'm sorry, but the official word is no traffic on the PCH from here to Topanga, only law enforcement and fire crews. But you slip by, I sure can't follow with lights and sirens." He thumped the top of the cab with a clenched fist, and started back toward the parking lot. Matt let in the clutch.

The emptiness was eerie. No traffic along Zuma Beach. No surfers crossing, their boards balanced overhead. Twice birds literally fell out of the sky --whether from exhaustion or burns it was impossible to know -- and hit the road in front of him.

At Ramirez, he pulled into the turn and jumped out of the pickup in front of the tunnel built under the highway to lead back into the canyon. The intricate metal gates barring entry to the tunnel were closed, and he ran to the keypad that would open them, cursing the day they had been installed. A movie star had dazzled the residents when it had come to a vote at the homeowner's association. Then she got married, sold her collection of stuff, donated her property to Nature Conservancy and moved to Point Dume. Only the goddamn gates remained.

Matt entered the code. Nothing happened. Cursing, he banged out the number again. The gates jerked, held. He tried again, jamming a finger at the numbers, slamming a foot against the gate as it jerked. A burst of black smoke billowed from the darkness and he ran back to the pickup.

Matt thought quickly. Maybe Margie got the horses out, maybe she didn't. If she didn't, she'd open the corral, let them take their chances. A lot of people had had to do that in the 1978 fire, it had moved so fast. Either way, there was nothing he could do about it now. But Barney was at home, locked inside. If he dumped the trailer, he could jam through with the pickup, and be there in ten minutes.

The metal hitch was too hot to touch. Quickly, he reached inside the trailer, grabbed the leather gloves he used for hauling hay. He sent an anxious glance up into the eucalyptus trees. For a long choking moment, he wrestled with the hitch. Then fire swept through the oleanders, jumped to a pair of cedars, ran up the trunks of the eucalyptus. The tossing crowns exploded into flame. A shower of sparks hit the trailer, found the shreds of hay on the floor inside, ignited. Within seconds trailer and pickup were engulfed.

"I'm not going to make it." Matt heard his own voice, maybe in his head, maybe he was yelling. "God, I'm not going to make it."

He raced down the road to the Cove restaurant and the beach. Half a mile seemed suddenly impossible. Melting asphalt grabbed at his feet, fifty-foot eucalyptus trees were going up like oil-soaked torches, burning leaves tossed in the wind like missiles spreading fire wherever they touched. Beyond the trees on his right, the Sunset Pines trailer park was a sea of flames, metal screamed as heat buckled the double-wides, the force of the wind lifting blazing roofs, sending them spinning like giant fiery kites.

At the edge of the water the restaurant was still untouched, the old wooden pier still standing. Not a soul was around. The Cove had been abandoned.

Matt smashed a window in the kitchen door, thrust a hand through to the lock and let himself in. Normally booming with activity at this hour, the interior was utterly still, empty. He grabbed some bottled water from a refrigerator, left by the side door directly onto the beach. The sky was darker, an ominous dirty orange reflecting the fire and the low, late afternoon sun. It had to be close to sunset, but it was hard to tell.

Ash and smoke eddied in the wind, lifting the sand into a murky, eye-stinging soup. The edge of the bluff was in flames, the multimillion-dollar houses fronting the ocean probably already engulfed. Fire ate at the cascading purple ice plant, smoldering clumps dropped into the water lapping at the base of the cliff. The swells on the sea were a dark hammered bronze, the tops of the waves blown apart by the offshore wind.

Without slowing his pace, Matt struggled out of his jacket, stooping to drag it through the water. Debris tumbled in the surf, the bodies of singed birds, fish floating belly up in the unnaturally warmed water. He covered his head with the wet jacket, kept as far as he could from the base of the cliff and the brush failing in great blazing arcs blown by the wind.

The sea dragged at every step. He prayed he wouldn't stumble into a hole -- he'd surfed this coast all his life, and with a booming tide like this racing in, he knew the rip could tear a grown man's legs from under him, drag him out to sea.

The beach widened, the bluff on his left was lower now, breaking down into sandstone gullies and he was able to get his bearing. The stairs to what used to be the Edwards place were charred and rocking with every gusts, but still standing. He could hear his breath laboring, and his lungs felt seared. Even this close to the water, the Santa Ana winds drew every scrap of moisture out of the air. In the oven-hot wind howling under a dirty sky, he felt as if he could be the last man left alive on a devastated earth.

He took a swig of the bottled water, warm now from the heat. Ahead, a large seabird, a dead pelican probably, tangled in a fisherman's discarded line -- it happened all the time -- lay close to the edge of the surf. Matt fixed his eyes on it as a measure of his progress along the beach. As he got closer, he realized it wasn't a pelican. Maybe a doll with a scrap of copper-colored fabric wrapped around it. He glanced down as he passed, took several more strides. Uncertain, he turned back.

An advancing wave broke around his ankles and tugged at the small pale form. It moved, then responding to the pull of the water, started to roll. Matt reached down instinctively to stop its slide to the sea. Suddenly he found the smoke-filled air even more difficult to draw into his lungs and in spite of the heat, the blood pumping through his veins felt icy. He picked up the tiny form, held it against his body, and put his fingers against its throat.

He felt the thready flutter of a pulse.

CHAPTER 2

Matt stripped away the wet silky covering, struggled out of his polo shirt and wrapped the newborn infant, a girl, in the soft cotton. Her eyes were closed, her hands curled into tiny fists. Downy strands of gold hair feathered damply against her head.

He scanned the beach but the blowing sand and smoke and falling ash cut visibility down to a few yards. Rabbits and a couple of raccoons huddled against the low bluff close to a flock of gulls. He could see nothing that could possibly be a human form.

Who would leave a baby like this?

He held the almost weightless bundle against his chest with some idea of warming her with his own body heat, put on his wet jacket to protect them both against falling debris, and started back along the beach toward the stairs up to the Edwards house. If they were still standing, maybe there would be firefighters trying to save it.

He scanned the beach as he ran. Trash thrown up by a polluted ocean was caught in the giant kelp above the high tide mark -- nylon fishing line, plastic holders for six packs, bits of Styrofoam coolers. No sign of the mother, no patch of blood, nothing to show that a woman had just given birth. He stumbled across a beam of charred wood and saw the beach was littered with planks.

The stairs. Since he had passed them only minutes ago, the ferocious wind had blown the damaged stairs apart.

He swept his eyes across the low bluff, looking for another way up, handholds, anything, but even if he could find a way, the top of the cliff was blazing. He hesitated -- the empty restaurant was closer than his own place, he could go back. But he'd lived in Malibu all his life, seen flames leap two hundred feet in seconds, consume a house in minutes. And the tide was roaring in. He had to get home.

Flooded with relief, Matt jogged across the dry sand, toward his own beach stairs. The small gray clapboard house was intact. The large houses on either side were dark, not surprising. His neighbors used them only on weekends, and that rarely.

For the last hour he'd been running nonstop, across soft sand, in and out of the ocean, holding the baby close as he clambered over the bare rocky reefs that would normally be covered by resting seals as the tide receded. On a night like this, though, they'd stay out at sea.

The sky was a cauldron, the fire dangerously close. He could feel blasts of heat from the thirty-foot flames now whirling south on the ridge above the Pacific Coast Highway as it followed the curve of the coastline toward the enormous expanse of lawn fronting Pepperdine University. That lawn still pissed a lot of people off, they were still arguing about the amount of water used to keep it green, the contaminated runoff draining into the Santa Monica Bay, but in a wildfire it could be a godsend, a break where fire crews could make a stand.

If the wind turned west again as it easily could, a maelstrom like this created its own wind patterns, flames would be across the highway in minutes, take the houses above his on the land side of Malibu Road, jump to the beach side and bum clear down to the water. From what he'd seen, so far the flames had reached Oceanside houses in a staggered pattern, driven by the changing wind. His place was vulnerable, clapboard with an old shake roof, it would go in seconds.

He pushed open the door into his smoky kitchen, staggering as eighty pounds of terrified dog hurled himself at his legs.

"It's okay, Barns. It's okay, boy." Matt held off the Lab with one hand and picked up the phone. No dial tone. The line was dead. He shook it in frustration. Of course it was dead -- the phone lines were down. This wasn't the first fire he'd been through in his thirty-six years, he should have remembered that. At least he had his mobile.

The baby close against his chest, he searched his jacket. Then again. Patted the pockets in his pants. The phone was gone. He'd dropped it somewhere on the beach.

He laid the child down on the soft couch in the living room, touched her pale cheek. She was cool. Colder than she had been when he picked her up. Matt felt for the pulse in the baby's throat, as he'd done on the beach. He couldn't find it. He flexed his fingers, felt on the other side. No pulse. Maybe he was doing it wrong. He rubbed his fingers on the couch to sensitize them, tried again. Nothing. Heart hammering, he knelt, held the tiny nose, blew gently into the infant's mouth. Once, twice. Again. But he knew it was useless. There was no breath, no heartbeat. The baby was dead. Sometime in the last hour, as they made their way down the beach, she had died in his arms. He had not even known when life left her. Surely, he should have felt something.

He sat back on his heels. She was so delicate, so fragile, she made barely a dent in the cushion. Long lashes fanned her cheeks. He didn't even know what color her eyes were. What sort of woman would abandon her defenseless newborn on an empty beach?

Minutes passed. Barney pushed his nose at Matt's hand, then started to howl as if he knew, a mournful sound that gave a voice to the tangle of feeling swelling in Matt's chest.

Matt put a hand on Barney's head, and took a long, deep painful breath. The smoke inside the house was thicker now, the heat increasing. Barney nudged at him insistently. Matt knew he had to get some water on the roof, and soon. He looked at her one last time, then covered her face with his shirt and got to his feet.

"Come on, boy." He snapped on Barney's leash in case they had to make a run for it, took the Lab with him into his bedroom. Black particles of ash hung in the air and coated every surface; shadows danced madly in the dirty amber glow that was the only light, but it was enough for him to see what he needed to see. He stripped, got into dry jeans and shirt, socks and heavy boots, then retrieved a black carry-on bag from the closet and looked around for the things that were important enough to save.

He picked up the photograph by his bed, an eight-by-ten of Ginn and himself, Barney at their feet, taken last summer, and put it into the bag. The only other things of value were a framed picture of his mother and an album of old photographs of them together when he was a kid. His memory of her had dimmed over the years, only the pictures kept it alive. He took a second to wrap them in a T-shirt before putting them in the bag, threw in a handful of underwear, socks, some jeans on top. He took some of his books from the shelves in the living room, his laptop. He already had Barney ready to run. That was it. Except for the house itself, there was nothing else here he cared about.

Copyright © 2003 Shirley Palmer