Burn | Page 9

after tomorrow, but here I am

on my way to Little Bend for a week. I have a new grandson."
"That's nice," Spur said absently. There was one other passenger in the compartment. He
was a very fat, moist man looking at a comic book about gosdogs playing baseball;
whenever he turned a page, he took a snuffling breath.
"I see by your uniform that you're one of our firefighters," said the gandy. "Do you know
my nephew Frank Kaspar? I think he is with the Third Engineers."
Spur explained that there were over eleven thousand volunteers in the Corps of
Firefighters and that if her nephew was an engineer he was most probably a regular with
the Home Guard. Spur couldn't keep track of all the brigades and platoons in the
volunteer Corps, much less in the professional Guard. He said that he was just a lowly
smokechaser in Gold Squad, Ninth Regiment. His squad worked with the Eighth
Engineers, who supplied transportation and field construction support. He told her that
these fine men and women were the very models of spiritual simplicity and civic
rectitude, no doubt like her nephew. Spur was hoping that this was what she wanted to
hear and that she would leave him alone. But then she asked if the rumors of pukpuk
collaborators infiltrating the Corps were true and started nattering about how she couldn't
understand how a citizen of the Transcendent State could betray the Covenant by helping
terrorists. All the pukpuks wanted was to torch Chairman Winter's forests, wasn't that
awful? Spur realized that he would have to play to her sympathy. He coughed and said he
had been wounded in a burn and was just out of hospital and then coughed again.
"If you don't mind," he said, crinkling his brow as if he were fighting pain, "I'm feeling a
little woozy. I'm just going to shut my eyes again and try to rest."
Although he didn't sleep, neither was he fully awake. But the nightmare did not return.
Instead he drifted through clouds of dreamy remembrance and unfocussed regret. So he
didn't notice that the train was slowing down until the hiss of the air brakes startled him
to full alertness.
He glanced at his watch. They were still an hour out of Heart's Wall, where Spur would
change for the local to Littleton.
"Are we stopping?" Spur asked.
"Wheelwright fireground." The fat man pulled a limp handkerchief out of his shirt pocket
and dabbed at his hairline. "Five minutes of mandatory respect."
Now Spur noticed that the underbrush had been cleared along the track and that there
were scorch marks on most of the trees. Spur had studied the Wheelwright in training.
The forest north of the village of Wheelwright had been one of the first to be attacked by
the torches. It was estimated that there must have been at least twenty of them, given the
scope of the damage. The Wheelwright burn was also the first in which a firefighter died,
although the torches never targeted citizens, only trees. The fires they started were always
well away from villages and towns; that's why they were so hard to fight. But the
Wheelwright had been whipped by strong winds until it cut the trunk line between

Concord and Heart's Wall for almost two weeks. The Cooperative had begun recruiting
for the Corps shortly after.
As the squealing brakes slowed the train to a crawl, the view out of Spur's window
changed radically. Here the forest had yet to revive from the ravages of fire. Blackened
skeletons of trees pointed at the sky and the charred floor of the forest baked under the
sun. The sun seemed cruelly bright without the canopy of leaves to provide shade. In
every direction, all Spur could see was the nightmarish devastation he had seen all too
often. No plant grew, no bird sang. There were no ants or needlebugs or wild gosdogs.
Then he noticed something odd: the bitter burnt-coffee scent of fresh fireground. And he
could taste the ash, like shredded paper on his tongue. That made no sense; the
Wheelwright was over three years old.
When the train finally stopped, Spur was facing one of the many monuments built along
the tracks to honor fallen firefighters. A grouping of three huge statues set on a pad of
stone cast their bronze gazes on him. Two of the firefighters were standing; one leaned
heavily on the other. A third had dropped to one knee, from exhaustion perhaps. All still
carried their gear, but the kneeling figure was about to shed her splash pack and one of
the standing figures was using his jacksmith as a crutch. Although the sculptor had
chosen to depict them in the hour of their doom, their implacable