The sky
is burnin'
I believe my soul's on fire
July, 2007.
Doc frames it as a question.
It's what he does when the idea he's had is both stupid and dangerous. Maybe it's how they teach you to talk in doctor school, or lawyer school, but Lightning has a feeling it goes deeper than that.
Doc is teaching at the edge of a sport that defines itself by exceeding its edges. Racing is, more than finish lines or pole positions, the breach between tire and asphalt when you don't have the downforce–when that bump sneaks up on you; it's the keening shriek of air better measured in cc's than inches when you're loose on a turn and skim a wall. It's teaching your hunger for the edge without dooming your student to your old mistakes.
But here's the thing. Question or not, it's what Doc Hudson would do. It's what the Fabulous Hudson Hornet would do. Lightning's never once answered 'no.'
–
November, 2016.
There's a storm up in the mountains–lightning, the works. The race is on, though–if there's anything to be said about Los Angeles, it's that it can stop a storm dead in its tracks. Traffic, grid-locked; smog, rising; inversion layer, paralytic.
"They're worried about wildfires," says Danny, whose name Lightning only knows because Danny qualified a tenth of a second ahead of him, and because he replaced Bobby. Danny's talking to Chase, who replaced Brick, because Danny still has anyone to talk to, because Danny was never friends with Brick Yardley or anyone else who's gone now.
Chase doesn't even know what a wildfire properly is. That's how young these guys are.
But Los Angeles is always worried about wildfires.
Lightning just needs to focus on Storm.
–
It's always dusk under a wildfire. Orange and hazy, Cadillac range obliterated by smoke, it feels like they're on the moon. Except it's hot. Real hot. Radiator Springs shutters, all of its residents having retreated indoors; and caught up in the sepia of wildfire, it looks the way Lightning imagines it would have, if it had been allowed to disappear.
Red's already burnt a ring of brush all around town, doused the roads and all the tractor tracks he could find. They'll probably be all right, though with fires this size it's hard to tell. It's all scrub brush out here, so they can't fuel the truly large blazes like they get up north, but if there's something this desert has in spades, it's wind. You get wind and fire on a plain together, and boy, they can dance.
Red waits, wordlessly anxious, and hopes for the best.
According to Sheriff, Red thinks the fire is far enough away, at least for now. Doesn't feel that way, though. If Lightning closed his eyes, he'd believe it were right in front of him. It's gotta be 140 degrees. It's been 140 degrees for days. It feels like it's been the last lap of a summer 500, track so slick it's almost liquid, for a full-on week.
Doc asks, "Hey, Rookie, you wanna try something?"
And so, with Red in tow, they head to Willy's Butte.
–
Los Angeles at night is a race you need to lead in order to win. Problem is, it's hard enough to hold P6 against these guys, much less overtake. Lightning stays out of the pits as long as he can to build as many hundredths of seconds as he can between him and the car behind him, snatches a few off Danny's lead on him, and prays there aren't any early yellows.
In the distance, there is thunder.
–
A couple slow laps around the Butte, and it's hot and unpleasant, but nothing awful. Lightning wasn't made for low speeds, so they always feel a little coarse. But it doesn't get better. The air's flabby, just doesn't have the density, doesn't have the oxygen, and Lightning's engine can't find its power. It's hard to breathe.
When the wind blows in, so does the ash. It coats the track like snow and it coats Doc like a fine white dust and Lightning can't see much of anything at all, just dirt and ash and the occasional snatch of the plummeting cliffside he knows is out there. He tries to find what speed he can. He feels lightheaded.
You know, when I was a rookie on the force, Sheriff told him once. He says, Any time I bulls-eyed, I couldn't ever actually see the target. When my vision went pure white I'd pull the trigger and that'd be my perfect shot. It was always the ones I couldn't ever see.
Not gonna lie, Sherif. As a private citizen living in your town, that's a little scary to me, Lightning replies.
They weren't Hail Marys, boy, Sheriff huffs. That was instinct. Experience taking over. You just don't know it 'til you feel it a coupla times.
"Watch your temperature," Doc shouts over Lightning's engine. "What you're feeling–usually you only ever get that at the tail-end of an actual race. Everyone knows you got talent, rookie, but that's only gonna get you so far when you're up against a field who's got 300, 500 races on you."
It's hard to train race circumstances as fleeting as this one–those last five minutes where the pressure's on and one poor experimental decision can cost you. But under that wildfire, it's those last five minutes forever. They train until Lightning's engine is spent and there's so much dirt and ash clogging his air filter he can't speak without hacking. He feels like he's run a thousand races.
–
Los Angeles at night. You lead, you win.
Lightning screams out of pit road just ahead of Storm. It took 450 laps to make this play. Now he just needs to hold on.
It's honestly breathtaking how quick Storm shuts that door.
–
Sally's pretty irate at Doc when she finds out about their wildfire training, which is probably where that doctor-lawyer school thing comes in. She's irate even after Lightning coughs his way through some staccato, single-syllable version of "No, I wanted to, it's fine, I feel fine, this was actually really helpful."
"Does Spare the Air Day mean nothing to you?" she asks Doc tersely.
In truth, the phrase means less than nothing to Lightning, because he lied, he does not feel fine, and his vision's going white and he suspects it has less to do with instinct and experience than it does with oxygen deprivation, and instead of heading to the shop with Doc he groggily wanders to his cone and refuses to be roused because he'd rather be miserable and asleep at home than miserable and awake in the clinic. That can wait 'til morning. End of discussion.
It's a mistake, and the most miserable night of his life because he cannot sleep because his body keeps jostling him awake to remind him that he cannot breathe, but maybe that's a learning experience, too. Sally says I told you so.
But whatever Sally's chagrin at their bold rejection of safe common sense, he'd never felt endangered. Besides, Doc was there. Red had been there. They'd only been training the edge, not derailing from it.
They talk about this on the radio a lot, as Lightning grows his career. How good he is at finishing, at clawing to first in the last laps of a race, out of the broiling pan straight into the cool shadow of that checkered flag.
And when the Cup introduces restrictor plate races, he's skilled at that, too. He adapts well to their breathless feeling, the way they steal power that you know you have–should have. Lightning owes a lot to that wildfire.
When asked about his training, Lightning simply replies, "Doc," even though Doc's been gone for four years and the last time ash rained down on Radiator Springs was even longer ago. His answer will always be Doc.
–
Lightning remembers almost nothing from the second that back tire goes out. He thinks remembers scrambling to keep hold of the track, but being at the mercy of the elements more than anything else. Correction: His elements. This is not a dust storm, it is not a tornado. It's not even the fire, raging in the mountains under lightning far above. This is the force of himself, and at 200 miles an hour, it plows him head-first into the wall.
They say he went airborne. They say he rolled–eight times, maybe more. Straight down the track, like a cue ball. Would've been gentler in the apron. It's a miracle he didn't injure anyone else.
He doesn't remember any of that, though he swears he can remember the pain.
His nurse swears he doesn't. "Trust me, honey. What you're feeling is the pain you're in right now," she says. She sounds like she might've already had this conversation with him a couple dozen times.
He might've had an out-of-body experience. He could see what was left of himself, splayed out on the track.
"They showed it on the screens," says Sally, who's there sometimes and not, which is confusing, especially when she tells him, "No, it's Friday," except it's Saturday, because it's race night, because the ambulance was only a moment ago, and normalcy was just one tire longer ago than that.
"Yeah, they showed that on the screens," she says, in response to whatever it was he just said. "Until they cut the visual, because they thought that maybe you–"
"It's Tuesday," says Sally. "You should get some sleep."
–
The ER is filled with ashy, fire-damaged cars who've just lost their homes to the blaze that razed the hills–the blaze which was, as it turns out, not so far away after all. The news is filled with the lightning storm that started it all, and doomed them. It's filled with news of Lightning, burning too. It's a testament to how this city works that they still spare him a private room.
The number of displaced cars climbs. The fire goes uncontained. There are two confirmed deaths.
–
Lightning dreams racing more than he dreams anything else. No surprises there. He dreams the dreams where you're supposed to run your heart out, but you can't. You can't make your wheels turn faster, can't get your engine to pump air through its cylinders, can't get the life inside you spin the way you know it needs to. That's how it always happens, in dreams.
But when he wakes, alone, in the hospital, he doesn't see the difference. He smells like smoke.
"They shouldn't let you watch that," says Sally, during visiting hours the next morning. It's a Wednesday. She shuts the news off mid-cycle. (The cycle goes McQueen, wildfire, McQueen wildfire, McQueen, community interest story about cats, McQueen, wildfire…)
When Lightning reminds her that he is extremely concussed and probably won't remember it anyway, she doesn't think it's funny. She says, "I don't care. You don't need to see that."
Whether he remembers it for five minutes or five years, he doesn't need to see that. And when you watch yourself fly through the air, the screen has a way of making five seconds into five minutes, five minutes into eternity. (Remember that wildfire? With Doc watching? Five hundred last-five-minutes. A lifetime of experience.)
When Sally is gone, the TV springs to life again. It asks, "Will this be McQueen's last?"
They frame it like a question. They don't mean it like one.
–
Lightning wants to bounce back. That's sort of his style. But it doesn't come naturally this time, so maybe it's not. And there are so many maybes clogging his mind they can't possibly be helping the concussion. Which is making him feel like garbage, by the way.
Maybe they were right, putting Doc out to pasture after '54. Maybe Rusty and Dusty are wrong, for not following suit; they're not exactly business moguls. They're constantly giving away free maintenance, free bottles of bumper oil. Heaven knows how they kept on top of all those sponsor deals. But who knows? Maybe Lightning doesn't have sponsors anymore. Harv has not exactly been in contact. Maybe it was wrong to end Doc's career, but not his. He's not the Fabulous Hudson Hornet, after all; he's just Lightning McQueen. And maybe experience is nothing against what a Next-Gen's got under the hood, white-hot or not.
Maybe it'd be a mistake to come back, because it was already a mistake to have stayed.
"Well, does it feel like you made a mistake?" Sally asks, having withstood this particular litany of maybes multiple times already. It's the first time she hasn't let him get away with his self-pity, so either he's looking better or she's finally annoyed.
"It feels like I'm in pain," Lightning mutters, distracted. He's trying to figure out if she's annoyed. Present circumstances make it hard to think in anything but worst-case scenarios.
"I know you are, Stickers. But that's not what I asked," says Sally, gently. She kisses him. Not annoyed, then.
Maybe.
–
It wasn't a mistake. He ran that race because he deserved to be there. And he ran it hard, because there's no other way to race. You leave your rubber on the road and your smoke in the air and if you have to eat your own glass, then you do it. If you gotta hold yourself together with tape, you do it. And if you hit a wall and you don't remember anything, anything but this moment right now, then you get right back out there and you keep running. Even under wildfire. Just because it feels like hell doesn't mean you're wrong.
–
They're rebuilding in the LA hills, now that the fire's choked itself out. The faces of the displaced Angelenos on TV are masks of grim determination. It's not a resilience story, or community interest story (that one is about harbor seals this time); it's a 'the fire took everything' story.
"Our home is gone," one of the cars points out. "And it feels like trash; and it ain't gonna stop feeling like that. But man, I don't gotta take it lying down! Of course we're gonna rebuild. And of course it's gonna be on that same hill! It's my hill! I know I can't say this on TV but–eff that fire, you know what I mean?"
–
Lightning knows what he means.
–
Four months later, that car is back up on his blackened hill, living large in a mail-order double wide with an ostentatiously lavish fountain sitting in his front yard. It's pearl white against black char, peppered with the green of the tender new growth that made it back with the winter rains. The fountain cost four times as much as his house and he doesn't regret a single dang thing.
It has a setting where you can make water shoot up into the air like fireworks, which he uses often. So he does that, and goes back inside. He flips his TV to the Daytona 500.
He looks for the 95.