Ablaze
They were searching for a five-year old girl who'd gone missing from a campground in Northern California.
She'd been gone for thirty-six hours.
They'd been going non-stop since their call-in at hour two.
He'd pulled in the cadaver dogs four hours ago.
He'd be damned if they left without finding her, though.
She was somewhere in the park, he could feel it in his bones, and he was going to bring her home.
Which is why he was now somewhere in the middle of Klamath National Forest, running on bad coffee and six hours of three-day-old sleep, poking at piles of fallen autumn leaves with a stick.
And if his team had been anyone else, they would've probably called it quits by now, at least for the day. They needed to sleep and eat, and he knew that, knew that they would be fully within their rights to demand an eight-hour break before starting up again.
At this point, the chances that it would make a difference in the end result were slim.
But his team wasn't anyone else, and they were the best for a reason.
They were no more likely to leave right now than he was.
And as he glanced to his left, and then to his right, and saw the five most incredible people poking at their own leaf piles with their own sticks, he felt a surge of gratitude and pride.
He really didn't know what he'd do without them.
The smoke had come up out of nowhere.
One minute the sky was a sparkling cerulean, and the next, a swirling mass of grey.
And before they could do more than wonder at the sudden shift, they saw the massive wall of orange that was headed straight for them.
The head ranger pushed them towards the east, said that flames always raced down this hillside on the western face.
He'd failed to take into account the wind, blowing at their backs as they fled the flames.
And then suddenly, the orange wall that had been behind them was all around them instead, stretching on for miles in every direction and closing in on them on all sides.
He always did think he'd go down in a blaze of glory.
Admittedly, a literal forest fire hadn't been what he'd pictured.
But then, life had a funny way of throwing curveballs.
And as he looked around at his team, and saw the same resignation plastered on their faces, it hit him that they wouldn't be getting out of this one.
So while the rangers raced frantically to try to save them all from the hungry flames, he walked over to where his agents were standing and shook each of their hands, told them how honored he was to have been able to work with them all of these years, and sat next to them on the ground to await their fate.
And though he was staring death in the face, it was the most peaceful he'd felt in quite a long time.
Later, when the last hot fingers had been doused and the decimation had been catalogued, they would determine that a carelessly tossed cigarette nine miles to the north had started the blaze in the dry brush covering the ground. In looking for the ignition source, firefighters would stumble upon the charred remains of a five-year-old little girl, missing for thirty-nine hours.
They would find, too, the remains of the search party that had been trying to find her, among them six Federal Agents, their badges grasped tightly in their hands, the shiny metal of the shields melted from the heat.
Now, though, as the smoke swirled thicker around him, he would breathe deeply and think of Jack.