Hell Is Empty

12

It was a ragged forest decimated by the bark beetles-a standing forest of the dead. They say that if you’re quiet and you listen, you can hear them chewing.

They’re only about an eighth of an inch long, like a grain of rice, which is appropriate since they’re indigenous to China, Mongolia, and Korea. Word is they hitched a ride over on truck pallets, crates, or some such-and so far they’ve eaten more than 1.5 million prime acres of our woodlands. The forest service figures that in a few years the bark beetles will have killed every mature lodgepole pine in Wyoming; by then the epidemic will be under control, because there won’t be anything for the little monsters to eat.

The other thing that will kill them is an extended cold snap of subzero temperatures that lasts more than ten days. Now, I figured that this winter alone we’d already accomplished that many times over, but evidently some of the little buggers were frostproof.

The effects of beetle-kill on water flows, watersheds, timber production, wildlife habitat, recreation sites, transmission lines, and scenic views is already horrific, but the thing that’s got everybody really nervous is that, if given half a chance, there will be a forest fire unlike anything ever seen-Smokey Bear’s worst nightmare, a wildfire that would run from New Mexico to Colorado, through Wyoming, all the way into Montana.

When I saw those standing lifeless brown streaks of dead trees running through my forests, I always thought that I could hear the chewing, too.

But maybe that was just in my mind.

The northern tip of Lake Marion was fed by a healthy amount of water that also filled a couple of kidney-shaped ponds that had no names. The snow was deep in the gullies, but the wind had polished the banks, making the footing pretty good; with recent developments, footing was foremost of my priorities, so I took the shortcut that would help me gain ground on the party ahead. I could still see the ridge trail they followed-it wasn’t as if I was going to cut them off, but I’d be gaining ground.

When I got a little higher, I turned and looked for Virgil in the valley below, but there was still no one there. What I could see was where we’d diverged from the path and started across the northern part of the lake from the peninsula. The odd thing was that there appeared to be only one set of tracks in the portions I could make out.

It was possible that the giant had been careful to walk in my prints, just to make sure the ice would hold him, but it seemed odd.

I shook my head, immediately regretted it, and slipped a hand up under my hat. The blood was congealing in my hair, and it was hard to make out the damage by fingers alone. The lump on the front of my head still hurt, but it was nothing in comparison to my newest wound. The pack straps were biting into my shoulders, and the muscles in my thighs were really starting to ache. Running for exercise is one thing, but carrying a pack at altitude on broken ground through snowdrifts on snowshoes is something altogether different.

I looked back up the rise. I could cut left and find the trail, but that would be where Shade would be expecting me, so I decided to take the more direct, if exhausting, route. I knew once I got to the glacial moraine at Mistymoon Lake there would be alpine meadows that trailed to either side, one leading toward Florence Lake, Solitude Trail, and the Hunter Corrals, which would be the only way out, and the other leading toward the dizzying heights of Cloud Peak and no exit.

The weight of the snow had felled a number of the trees leading up the slope; where the bark had sloughed away, I could see the crazy-quilt patterns that the beetle larvae had made in pursuit of the soft cambium underneath.

I was studying just such a log when I got to the second of the two pools and stepped onto the ice. When I put my full weight on the surface, there was a discernible crack, and the water rushed underneath complete with multicolored bubbles crowding against the underside; I eased back on my rear boot.

The larger of the ponds had been rock solid, but this, being the shallower of the two, didn’t have the capacity to maintain a thickness. I decided to follow the right bank in an attempt to stay with the creek and give myself a little relief from climbing over logs.

The storm had let up, but the wisps of fog and intermittent snow were still driven by the wind, and visibility was still negligible. It felt like I was pushing up from under the clouds through half-shadows and hazy-looking stands of eaten-alive trees. I was starting to think that Mistymoon Lake had come by its name honestly when I got that sensation that I was being watched again.

I froze and felt it full force when I thought I saw something beside a stand of the dead trees up and to my left. Someone was there-a small, slim someone.

I scrambled to get my. 45 out of my holster since it was the easiest weapon to get to, snapped off the safety, and held it ready as the vapor between us grew stiffer. I could’ve sworn that directly where I was pointing, someone laughed like a child.

The front sight of the. 45 wavered a little with the exertion of holding my arm steady. I took a deep breath but kept the pistol pointed at the spot ahead. When the elongated streams of mist cleared a little, I glanced to my left and then my right, but there was nothing. The rows of monochromatic lifeless trees stretched away like bars on a universal and reminded me of something from my past, something important-the Old Cheyenne.

I lowered the Colt and reassessed. If I was getting to the point where people were appearing and disappearing in front of me, then perhaps I needed to holster my weapon and wait for some backup.

I thought there was some movement to my right, and I snapped the sights of the. 45 on it and waited, but once again there was nothing. My heartbeat reminded me of the bubbles struggling against the underside of the ice, and I just stood there, finally lowering the semiautomatic pistol and laughing.

A second later, I heard a giggle to my right.

This time I didn’t even raise the Colt-but I did laugh again.

He mimicked me in triplicate, and I leaned my head against a tree. You fool-you’re aiming at your own shadow and attempting to shoot your echo.

I punched the safety, holstered my sidearm quickly, and tried to remember if I’d laughed first before hearing the echo-but I must have.

Must have.

I took a deep breath and looked around at the bursts of fog surging past the trees like the flow of a river. The effect pulled me forward, and I left a hand on the tree to steady myself. Maybe it was the altitude, maybe it was the exhaustion, or maybe it was cracking my head open on the ice, but I had to get a quick grip on things.

I met up with the creek feeding the small pond and started climbing the hill again. There was a large log lying over the area where the water spilled in under the ice, and I could gain some more yardage by stepping up and crossing over. I placed a hand on it and could feel its structural integrity.

It was massive, still sturdy, and unlikely to move. Scrambling onto the rooted end, using some of the larger limbs as a handrail, I stepped onto the log and started across. I kicked the snow off as I went, clearing a path so that I could see the wood and make sure I didn’t slip.

It was a balancing act, and I felt like Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood, but where was my Little John, let alone the rest of the Merry Men? I turned and looked at the drifting currents of fog erasing Lake Marion; no Virgil, nobody.

As I stood there, I noticed that the mist had turned from white to gray to black, which only reinforced the two-color landscape, and it took a while for me to realize that something was not specifically right about this.

Black fog.

Then there was the smell.

I tasted the tang of smoke in those glands at the front of my throat, and when I took another breath, I choked and my eyes underneath the goggles began to tear.

I swung around and almost lost my balance, especially when a cabinet-size sheath of bark fell off onto the ice. I caught myself, careful not to let the weight of the pack and the rifle pull me over the side, but what I saw on the ridge above me almost dumped me anyway.

It was a wall of fire with an inverted layer of smoke below and flames at a height of over two hundred feet above, arching down the hill with the forty-mile-an-hour gale-force winds.

The tops of the dead-standing trees were on fire, and I could see the ones along the ridge and the ones that surrounded it on both sides lean forward and start to collapse down the hill toward me.

It was a ground fire that had crowned, every firefighter’s worst-case scenario, the one that the old hands used to say you’d fight by finding an ash pile, curling into a fetal position, and praying for hard rain.

I’d worked as a smoke jumper in Greybull in my youth with the advantage of being big for my age-ten feet tall and bulletproof. The largest fires I’d fought were a few class Ds in the sixties and then helping with the evacuation during the Yellowstone fires in the late eighties, but none of them had looked anything like this, and I’d never been anywhere near this close to any of them.

It was as if the immediate world was like some giant coliseum suddenly on fire.

I looked to my left. It was a good hundred yards to clearance-a death trap, with fallen trees and dry brush between here and there. I yanked my head to the right, but the forest was denser in that direction and I couldn’t even see how far it was before I would be able to get into a clearing. Straight ahead was sure burning death, so the only avenue of escape was back down the hillside.

Some wildfires have been clocked at over six miles an hour, able to bridge gaps and jump rivers and fire blocks; this one, with the advantage of fuel in the dead treetops and plenty of oxygen from the ferocious wind, seemed alive and was leapfrogging, transforming from a crown fire to a whirl. The vortex of flame, preceded by the poisonous gases, superheated air, and reflected heat, would be on me in less than two minutes-well before that, it would cook my lungs.

I looked down the hill.

Never make it.

I looked back up the hill. The black fog had changed direction, pulling the oxygen from the arching wind that continued to blast its way down the valley, the fire using the ridge as a jumping-off point, not even backing up for a run at it. Lodgepole pines were exploding with the heat, and a crisscross of timber fell down the incline. The darkness lifted long enough to reveal massive logs exploding as the resin inside them reached boiling levels, branches, pine cones, and needles swirling in armies of winged fire devils.

The tower of flames reached out from the top of the forest with a sound like a freight train, and the vacuum pulled at my chest, trying to topple me from the log where I stood as live ash struck at me from the dead trees. I stood in a spot where flammable material, oxygen, and a temperature above the point of ignition would spontaneously combust and essentially detonate.

I twisted my hat down tight on my head; in the next few seconds, I could die, still erect in a state of astonishment, or I could tuck in my arms and legs and… I clutched the binoculars to my chest and stepped off the log.

The expedition pack on my back absorbed the majority of the shock just as I’d hoped it would. I’d thought of leaving the rifle on the bank, but it would’ve been nothing but a smoking husk of charred wood and burnt metal if I ever got back to it, so it went into the drink with me as well.

I’d felt water this frigid just over a year ago when I fell through the ice in Clear Creek Reservoir, but I didn’t remember the chest-seizing cold that struck me like a ball bat and forced the air from my lungs; all I could think was that I was going to need that air in a matter of moments.

I felt the pack hit bottom and estimated that the pond must’ve been only about four feet deep, hopefully enough to insulate me from the coming hell above. I stood and fully inhaled.

The steam vapor rising from the expanse of ice made the entire pond look as if it were being whipped away up the hill and lifted into the pitch-colored sky. The noise was deafening, and as I looked back at the log that I had been crossing, I could see the smoke beginning to pour off the thing.

I unsnapped the pack, shifted it around and over me, and heaved myself backward into a cleft of rocks where the water spilled into the pond, any sort of shelter being an advantage.

Generally, except for the very heart of the inferno, there would be a stratum of oxygen up to about fifteen inches from the ground. I didn’t know how the water would affect this pocket, but my hopes were that the vapor would provide added insulation without parboiling my lungs.

I forced a massive amount of air into my chest, hoped there was enough there to suffice, and plunged into the water again.

The fire’s heart struck it like a cannonball, and I could feel my ears deaden with the brunt of the blow. Tiny explosions of blue, white, orange, and finally red covered the surface, and it was only when I noticed the temperature of the water rising that I realized it was attempting to boil.

I was sure I was in the belly of the beast now. Those fire devils were circling above, hunting for me, hoping to turn me into a hairless, bloated, purpled, and slick-skinned corpse-a collection of blackened bones wearing nothing but a charred leather service belt with all my extra ammunition exploded.

As I buried my face into the pack and slunk deeper into the crevasse, I thought about the phones in my pockets and all the calls I should have made to all the women in my life. I thought about Cady, about her wedding and what she was going to look like standing in the golden grasses of the Little Big Horn country in July. I thought about my wife, how long she’d been gone, and how she wouldn’t forgive me for not being there to represent us at our daughter’s wedding. I thought about Ruby, who would want to know exactly where I’d died. I thought about Vic, who would likely pound her fists on the chest of my corpse for being such a dumb ass.

I couldn’t die-I had too many women who would kill me.

The log I had been standing on exploded like a pipe bomb, the resin inside finally reaching the temperature of napalm, the dead husk no longer able to contain its fury. The force of the eruption hit the pond like a depth charge, the pressure making it feel as if my mouth, nose, ears, and eyes were being pressed back in my head. I stifled the scream that would kill me; instead, I crammed my face against the backpack and just lay there, crushing it against me.

The panic from lack of oxygen was yanking at my chest, trying to get me to the surface, but I held on with my face pressed against the Cordura fabric for what felt like another eight hours but was likely twenty seconds. I felt the involuntary heave of my diaphragm and knew that I had to get to the surface before the next one.

I disengaged from the pack and turned my head; the roar of the freight train was distant now, but I wasn’t sure if it was because my eardrums were partially, if not totally, shot, or if the fire was receding. My eyes were still working, however, and I could see that red had subsided to amber.

I figured I had about five seconds before I pulled in two solid lungs of pond water. I carefully listed to the side and raised my face slowly to the surface, barely allowing my nose and lips to break the tension where air and water met.

As horrifying as it was, it was magnificent. About a foot and a half above me, the air was burning like some gargantuan convection oven, jets of undulating flame coating the air and water vapor steaming from the surface of the pond. I was actually fortunate in that the water’s temperature had started at just above freezing, which was keeping me from being boiled alive.

I coughed uncontrollably and inhaled. The air was superheated, just as I’d expected, but it was air and breathable. I could feel my face beginning to burn, especially my eyes, so I closed them, hurriedly filled my lungs, and sank back into the warm and insulating water.

I lay there, thinking that if I could just hold on for another couple of minutes, the majority of the fire’s front would’ve passed and I could reemerge relatively unscathed-well, as long as a flaming tree didn’t fall on me.

I wasn’t taking anything for granted.

The reflections on the water continued to change from red to orange, finally fading to yellow. My air was running out again, and I was pretty sure that that last gulp had held a lot less oxygen. It seemed by the color refracted that the fire had receded to the banks. I really didn’t have much choice and carefully raised my head again.

The ceiling of flame was gone. There was a thick layer of ash on the surface of the pond, which I wiped away with the back of one of my gloves, and sleeper fires were still burning along the banks of the pond.

I rose up to my full height, the ash water rolling off me as I stood, leaving me cloaked with a grayish-black soot.

It was like hell on earth.

There was not a tree standing in the gulch leading toward the ridge, only blackened husks in the forest where I had stood only five minutes ago. The flat plains of scree and boulders steamed from the heat, and the pond had dropped about a foot since I’d entered it, the exploded tree trunk sunk into the black water from both ends.

I could hear nothing, not because there was no sound, but because I was stone deaf from the compression of the exploding log. I stretched my jaw again and felt a popping in my ears and a ringing, muted like an alarm clock under a pillow, with a dull thrum as accompaniment. I could feel the air going in and out of my lungs, but I could swear that there was no sound.

I turned my head and looked down the mountain where the fire had burned itself into the draw at the shore of Lake Marion. The valley was protected from the wind, and there was a larger snow load on the trees there that had smothered the flames so only a red and orange edge showed fire.

With my hand still holding the strap of both the pack and the rifle, I pivoted to my left and looked up the hill. There was some movement to my right, and I watched as a charred elk stumbled forward down the incline toward the edge of the pond, his blind eyes dead in the sockets but his nose drawing him to water.

I stood silently as the elk came closer, hobbling on hooves that had burned away. He bumped into a scorched tree, momentarily catching one of the points of his antlers, then yanked free and continued more carefully.

His body was telling him that he needed to drink; his body was telling him that if he could only go a little further it was possible that he might make it. His body, of course, was lying.

I wondered how many lies my body was telling me-maybe my hearing was gone for a reason. Perhaps my body didn’t wish to be the one to break the news to itself about things I shouldn’t hear.

Hairless and black, he lowered his blistered nose to the soot-covered surface. The great rack on his head bobbed as his lips pulled in the water with a shudder from his midriff. I was amazed that he could stand, let alone drink.

I stood there with him until his legs collapsed and, with a shiver and one brief exhale, he died. I waded out to him and placed a hand on his magnificent antlers as I paused and returned my eyes to the ridge, the dead silence crowding in on me and hardening like my clothes.

The animal’s horn still looked alive with the glow of the many fights the majestic old beast had won. Every rutting season he would’ve taken on all comers: younger elk, bears, cougars, wolves, and the human hunters that would’ve followed him to the very heights of the Bighorn range.

He had survived them all, only to end like this.

I could feel the air around me cooling, and the water that had protected me was solidifying underneath, in, and on top of my clothes; it was like I was wearing one of Dante’s lead cloaks. The ridge was naked, with just a stubble field of nubbin trees and scalded earth. The only thing I’d ever seen that approached it was a war zone, but somehow, in so many ways, this was worse.

I thought about all the recently lost lives, of all the current destruction, and could feel a stirring deep in a place where my ears wouldn’t have heard it harden even if they’d still worked. The ringing continued, bells of warning along with the continuing tattoo of distant drums, but the one sound that rustled over the others was the sound of the blackened, leathery wings of wrathful vengeance folding themselves around me.