fic: All Fires Have To Burn Alive, 3/3
Later, Brendon realizes that he actually heard the explosion when it happened. He'd been at the dog groomer's, and the faint concussion had made everyone in the lobby pause, then carry on. Closer to the port it was apparently loud enough to damage people's hearing. There are pictures of longshoremen and railroad workers being tended to by paramedics. The news is suddenly split between the forest fire story and the accident: a navy gunship hit a tanker, which was refueling on its way down to Panama. On TV, executives and admirals stand around looking grim while masses of people trek down to the closest beaches to wait for the oil slick to hit shore so they can take pictures of dying birds. Or soap them off. Or maybe just watch the water go black in the bloody light of the forest fire smoke.
The anchorwoman says that six people burned or drowned on those boats.
Spencer goes. On the second day of news coverage, when it turns out the ship isn't so much leaking as gutted entirely. Whatever it had in it is already in the water. He calls around and finds a group who'll give him a pair of rubber overalls and a bucket of soapy water and a biologist to tell him how not to break a bird's neck. They tell him the response has been overwhelming. Which is the same thing they say on TV.
Brendon stays on the couch. When Spencer goes, he raises an eyebrow. Ian is gone, he caught a plane back up to Seattle. Shane is with Regan at her parents' house, using pool water to douse the lawn and keep it wet. But Brendon can't go anywhere because he can't tear himself away from the forest fire coverage.
They're evacuating Topanga.
The burn line came southeast from Thousand Oaks, straight through the state parks. People in Malibu are already gone, and some of their mansions, too. The news shows women whose faces don't crease with worry waving luggage into SUVs. Topanga is next, they say. At least Malibu's on the water. Topanga's right in the middle of the fucking woods.
Brendon takes out his phone to text Ryan. He doesn't know what to say. Are you watching the news? Ryan never watches the fucking news. He thumbs through his contacts, then drops the phone on the table. Ryan will take care of himself.
An hour later, the anchorwoman says that residents are not to head north on the 27, as it is blocked off by the authorities, who are hoping it will act as a fire break. The screen shows firefighters in masks aiming hoses at burning trees.
Brendon calls Ryan.
He calls him every five minutes for an hour. He's surprised when he looks down and sees the number of outgoing calls on his screen. The sun has set, but the light in the house hasn't changed.
When the number starts going straight to voicemail, Brendon gets his car keys.
--
The line of traffic coming down from Topanga is a steady stream of headlights. There's no traffic going in Brendon's direction, but no one stops him, either. He drives at a brisk crawl, past garages open to show dioramas of families shoving coolers and duffel bags and pillows and teenagers and banker's boxes into their cars. There are cops parked in groups, wearing reflective vests and waving people along.
No one is running. Nothing is on fire. The radio is playing Jimmy Eat World.
Brendon pulls into Ryan's empty driveway, crawls along the thirty feet to his house. The sky should be black above the arbutus trees, but it's orange. Brendon gets out of his car and the air is dryer up here, shallower somehow, and thick with the taste of woodsmoke. He notices how much vegetation there is. Ryan must have a couple dozen trees in his yard alone. The whole yard is a tinderbox, no matter how much rock façade there is.
Walking up the wide steps to the front door, Brendon prays to god he has already left. There's no light in the windows. It's possible. He knocks loudly, and for a long time. He switches hands when his knuckles get sore.
No one comes to the door. Ryan's phone is still going to voicemail.
Brendon hesitates. He shuffles backwards, eyeing the dark windows. Then he goes around to the back where the rough flagstone shifts in terraced layers down to a murky unlit pool, and there is a smudged view of the city over the cliff beyond. Brendon enters the house through one of the sets of glass doors.
Okay, so what he does, actually, is smash a glass panel with a potted cactus and duck through like a looter. Ryan has always been meticulous about locking up his shit. And he never believed in keeping easily accessible spare keys. So it's his own fault. Brendon will apologize later.
Inside, he steps over the glass shards and looks around. The kitchen is pristine, a microwave blinks 12:00 at him, the counters are clear. Brendon looks down into the living room, where a guitar propped against the couch is the only thing that doesn't belong in a design magazine. And even then, it's a 1950s Strat, so probably it wouldn't be out of place, either. The grubby orange light coming down from the sky touches everything; narrow shadows from the windows lie like tiger stripes across the floors, the furniture, up the bare walls.
The house is entirely silent.
Brendon goes across the living room, up the stairs. He's been in this house before. He helped Ryan move in. But it's been a long time, and the stone staircase that climbs over the fireplace is uneven and unfamiliar
The hall upstairs is all closed doors, except for the last one. It's a dark frame, and Brendon is suddenly afraid that he'll find Ryan sleeping, and totally freak him out and not be able to explain what the hell he's doing here. So he lobs his voice down the hall like a tennis ball, "Ryan?" Soft and hesitant. Maybe too creepy. He calls again, louder: "Ryan?"
He reaches the open door and peers into the room, where the awful orange light is coming in around the curtains, through a door that's open to the deck. The light and the smoke smell are a creeping fog, lying over the ruins of the bed and the small-scale catastrophe of personal detritus. Scarves, shoes, books, dishes, takeout containers. It's all extremely familiar, and it makes Brendon wonder how Ryan managed to keep his tornado of a personal space confined to this one room, leaving the rest of the house untouched.
Brendon makes his way through the debris field, out onto the deck, where a hot wind ruffles his hair, but doesn't do much about the nervous sweat he's broken into.
Ryan is sitting in a plastic chair with his sunglasses pushed up into his hair, a glass of something beside him on the railing, a ukulele on his lap like a cat.
He turns to look at Brendon. He says, "You have got to be fucking kidding me."
"You didn't answer your phone," Brendon's voice is maybe a little high, a little plaintive.
Ryan stares. "For obvious reasons."
"No, not obvious. You're supposed to be evacuating."
One of Ryan's eyebrows goes up at supposed to. He's never liked supposed to.
The view from the deck is even better than the view from downstairs. The arbutus trees don't reach up to block out the ocean to the southeast. Even with the air clogged up like it is, Brendon can see the water, or the absence of it. Just a wide blackness. Everything else is painted in apocalypse colors, but the ocean is invisible, removed from all this.
Ryan is looking in that direction, too. "Where the fuck do they want me to evacuate to? It's not like tract housing is less flammable than trees."
Brendon rolls his eyes. "Just stay at our place tonight. Don't be an ass."
Ryan doesn't respond.
"Or don't. Check into a hotel. I don't care where you go, just get out of here."
Ryan turns away from the railing and walks to the other side of the deck. He turns a corner and Brendon is forced to follow, unwilling to let him out of his sight, now that he has him. A part of Brendon is thinking he could knock Ryan out somehow. One of those potted cactuses. Would that count as assault?
Brendon follows Ryan around the corner and sees the wildfire.
Objectively, Brendon knows that it must be distant, still - he can't see it really, not individual bursts of flame or anything. But the light it casts is huge, spread over the hills, coloring the topography in layers of red. Roofs move like ships through currents of smoke and light, houses playing hide and seek in the undertow. The heat touches Brendon's face like the sun.
Ryan is standing at the railing, ukulele still in hand, looking out past the tops of his neighbors' houses. "Six miles, at least. That's the elementary school right there. I don't think it can even get here, really. How can it jump the highway? And they have firebreaks."
"You think they didn't have firebreaks in Malibu?" Brendon says.
Ryan shrugs. He sips his drink.
"Have you been listening to the news? They've been pretty clear about the fact that it's not safe to be here." Brendon starts to walk away, thinking he'll turn on the TV and make Ryan watch it.
But Ryan doesn’t move to follow and Brendon only makes it three steps before he comes back.
"God, you want to burn up with your stupid house?"
"It's not my house." Ryan corrects him, voice mild. "I stopped paying the mortgage three months ago. I guess it takes them a while to process foreclosures, these days. There's a backlog."
His ice clinks in his glass. He looks like he's standing at a dinner party watching waves hit the beach, talking about his investment portfolio.
Brendon wants to shake him. He thinks maybe he could just tip him over the railing, break his leg, put him in the car and they could drive back to his place quick.
"So, great," Brendon says. "It's the bank's problem. Grab your guitar and let's go."
Ryan's eyes don't leave the elementary school. "I'm not going anywhere with you. You broke my fucking window."
Brendon's breath catches in a laugh and he says, "I'll pay for it, Ryan. Jesus."
"Fuck you," Ryan says, and sips more of his drink.
Brendon stands there, hands slightly spread and ready at his sides in case Ryan pitches his glass at him, or makes a suicidal break for the ledge, or something. Anything. Brendon is prepared for anything but this total apathy. Brendon can't even tell if Ryan sees the fire, or if maybe he's just staring past it, blind to anything but his own thoughts. He used to do that: out the bus window, into the audience, right into Brendon's eyes. He'd blink if you called him on it. He'd get pissy and deny it.
"It's burning alive," Ryan says. He sounds like he feels sorry for it. "Sooner or later, it's going to burn itself to death."
Brendon says, "Not before it gets here."
Ryan shrugs. "Doubtful."
"You should call the fire department. I don't think they know that."
Ryan ignores him.
Brendon presses his mouth tight, tries to look out at the neighborhood, count the blocks and make some kind of rational scientific hypothesis about how far away the burn line is. But Topanga is not organized in anything so boring as a grid, and he doesn't know the landmarks.
He says, "So what's the plan, then?"
Ryan has turned, is walking away, heading back inside. "What plan?"
"Any plan," Brendon's voice rises, half because Ryan's walked away and half because a thread of real panic has reached past his defenses and touched his lizard brain.
He hurries after Ryan, blind in the darkness of the bedroom, and immediately stumbles over him where he's stopped at the foot of the bed.
Ryan's hands steady him at waist and shoulder. Brendon does his best to pull himself off, regain his autonomous balance.
"Woah," Ryan says. His hands stay where they are, warm and firm. After a moment, he sighs.
Brendon stays locked in place. No words, no movement. His lizard brain, emboldened, is pushing hard to get closer. More hands under sweaty tshirts, more flushed skin, more gin and tonic lips, more sounds like sighs out of Ryan's throat.
Ryan's thumb circles at Brendon's hipbone. His face is tipped forward, close, and Brendon wants to lean forward and breathe in the smell off his collarbone. He wants to put his nose to the warm pulse under Ryan's jawline and kiss the familiar skin there.
But Ryan's hand drops down Brendon's arm. And then his other hand falls away, too.
Ryan turns and goes downstairs.
It takes Brendon a long while to follow. In fact, he doesn't right away. He calls 911.
"Nine-nature of your-" says the voice on the other end.
"Hi," he says. "Look, my friend lives in Topanga and he won't evacuate? Could you send someone to get him?"
"-sir, I can't-repeat yourself?"
Brendon turns into the corner of the bedroom, trying to speak clearly and lower his voice simultaneously. "I said, I need you to come get my friend. He won't leave his house."
The operator's voice is unintelligible. There's a lot of static.
"Hello?" Brendon says, plugging one ear with his finger. "Can you hear me?"
More static. "-going to have to speak-" says the operator.
"Listen," Brendon says, "I can't understand you. Can you just send someone?" He gives Ryan's address. Repeats it. The phone gurgles back at him. He hangs up.
When he tries to call again, he gets a weird shrieking machine noise instead of ringing, and no one answers at all.
"Fuck," Brendon says. He looks over his shoulder, then, to see if Ryan maybe came back and caught him calling for backup. But the doorway's empty.
He could call Spencer. Brendon thinks it, and then stops himself. Spencer is saving pelicans. Spencer doesn't know Brendon's even been talking to Ryan, much less seeing him. And getting Spencer up here triples the chance that someone Brendon cares about is going to burn to death tonight.
He thinks about calling Jon, too. Definitely no risk of him showing up in the next six hours. Maybe he could talk Ryan down. Probably he speaks Ryan's language better than Brendon ever did. Probably they have a safeword, a word that means 'stop drinking now or you'll puke in the van' or 'if you say another fucking thing I will put your fucking head through the windshield' or 'that's enough' or 'calm down' or 'shut up, just shut up right now, shut up.'
No goddamn way is he calling Jon.
Brendon puts his phone back in his pocket and goes downstairs.
Ryan is standing in the kitchen, running a rag in circles over the shining countertop. The glass from the broken window pane has been swept up and placed in a tidy plastic bag on the flagstone outside. Brendon keeps his distance, watching, until Ryan glances over and says, "I was keeping it clean in case someone from the bank showed up. Or a realtor or something."
"Oh," Brendon says. Part of him wonders where the hell Ryan's friends are. That girl Z, for one. Where is she? Why hasn't she done anything about Ryan's sudden dip into neuroticism? But Brendon suspects asking won't make Ryan any happier with him. So he says, conversational: "So do you think it's cut off the roads, yet?"
"Maybe." Ryan shrugs. "Probably not to the south. I bet you could still make it back to Santa Monica."
"We could," Brendon corrects him.
"Or we could go over the cliff," Ryan says. "Worst case scenario, there's a little path down that the deer use."
Brendon seizes on that, Ryan's first acknowledgment that he's actually given some thought to getting out of here. "Really?" Brendon says. "Can I see it?"
The smallest, most repressed hint of a smile bends a corner of Ryan's mouth. "Fine," he says, and the flatness of his tone sounds like overcompensation.
Ryan leads the way through the faux-mountain range that makes up his back yard. Several levels of uneven terrace, a treacherous pool deck that seems designed to trip you into the pool, which is more like a small lake, and then a winding goat path through overgrown scrub brush to the fence, which is less a fence and more a guardrail. The cliff drops off immediately after. The rail reaches maybe to mid-thigh.
"I hope you don't invite children over," Brendon says, keeping his distance. "Or drunks."
"No one's fallen off yet. It's over there." Ryan scuffles down closer to the edge, points maybe ten feet down into the darkness.
Brendon can't see a thing. "Oh yeah," he says. "Worst case scenario, we throw ourselves off the cliff."
Ryan stands, staring out at the city for a minute, then starts the hike back up to the house. "God, you're melodramatic," he says, passing Brendon by.
Worst case scenario, Brendon thinks, they could hide in the pool. They could sway in the water with their hands on each other, with their mouths tipped up for scorched air. Their clothes could come off and float away, their wet skin could slide around, sinking and slipping, before the air turns to carbon and the water boils.
In six long strides, he catches up to Ryan by the pool. He grabs his arm, and Ryan looks back, annoyed and also not. Surprised, and also resigned.
"You want to start this, again?" he asks, as he lets Brendon pull closer.
"Start what?" Brendon asks. And then, "It wasn't over."
Ryan shrugs, and turns his face away as Brendon presses in.
Firm, Brendon tilts Ryan's gaze back to him. He stares him down. "It wasn't over," he repeats.
Ryan snorts. "Of course not. You dumped me, but it wasn't actually over. I should've figured that out on my own, I guess."
Brendon kisses him, then. To prove the point. To shut him up. To fucking show him how much is still between them. Wrong or right. Whether they burn here or sit and drink Ryan's expensive gin until the fire's turned itself to ashes.
Ryan breaks away. Takes a step back, one hand up, guarded. "You know what, Brendon?"
He doesn't finish. He doesn't know, either. It's obvious that neither of them know anything.
Brendon frowns at him. "You want to stay here, I will stay here with you. That's what I'm telling you."
Ryan shakes his head. He's twisted sideways, like maybe he can make Brendon's attention glance off him, deflect into the bushes and rocks.
Brendon plants both feet and waits.
When Ryan gets his voice together, it is thin and strained. He says, "Fuck you. You were right the first time. It's over."
And then he climbs up to the house, and doesn't go in. He goes around, the corner, down the path to the front.
When Brendon reaches the driveway himself, Ryan is buckled into the passenger seat of the car, waiting for him, ukulele in his lap.
--
Brendon is wound tight with anxiety through the drive back down the canyon road. The street lamps are out, there are no other cars on the road, not even emergency vehicles. Smoke drifts across his headlights, undulating in a grainy fog. He can't see more than thirty feet. When he flicks on his brights for a second, it looks like nothing but a solid wall in front of them. He flicks them back off in a hurry.
They proceed at a crawl. Every time Brendon tops thirty miles an hour, the smoke thickens up and he panics because he can't see anything but the reflective tape on the guard rail, and he slows back down.
Fifteen. Fifteen is fine. It's not like there's flame looming in his rearview.
And then they turn a corner and the road ahead is pebbled and rippling. In his headlights, it's like it's broken up into thousands of individual jumping pieces.
He slams on the brakes as Ryan goes, "Jesus Christ, those are toads."
Thousands of them, hopping around and over each other, their rough backs dull in the half-light. They seem to be streaming across the road, but their movements are so randomized that it's hard to tell.
And then, ten feet in front of the car, a doe bounds across the pavement. Right after her, three more. One after another, they keep coming. A stag with a pair of half-formed antlers. All of them holding their white tails aloft like flags of surrender.
"You think it's the fire?" Brendon asks.
Ryan opens his mouth, but he never does answer Brendon's question: the car is juddering. Brendon is already staring at the spectacle in front of them, so he sees the road ripple like a wave. The toads move in unison, like they've been bounced off a blanket, rejected, momentarily by gravity. The deer vanish into the trees.
"Oh my god," Brendon hears himself say. He steps on the gas and plows ahead, and Ryan beside him is going, "Landslide, landslide, landslide."
"What?" Brendon says. He can't see much of the road ahead, but his rearview mirrors aren't showing any falling rocks, either.
"This road is really prone to landslides. There are signs." Ryan says. "Can you drive faster?"
It feels like they've blown a tire. The car thumps along, but the faster they go the less they feel the earthquake. As they clear the canyon, the car eases up.
They head south along the freeway, and the highway is crawling with activity. There are hordes of people on the beach, staring out at the ocean, their cars parked haphazardly on the shoulder. Emergency vehicles blaring their sirens don't move any faster than anyone else. Rocks have spilled out in several different places along the northbound lane where the retaining wall has cracked open.
It took Brendon ten minutes to get to Ryan's house. It takes forty-five minutes to get back. And when they pull into the driveway Spencer is standing there. His hair is stuck to his face, his skin has dark sticky smudges on it, his jeans are wet to his knees.
As Brendon gets out of the car, Spencer says, "Where the hell did you go? We have to-"
And then Ryan gets out of the car, and Spencer stares at him for, and then takes three long steps and wraps his arms around Ryan's skinny shoulders.
Brendon watches, and sees Ryan's hands come up to clutch at Spencer's back. Their faces buried in each other.
When Spencer pulls away he has to take a breath before his voice works. He looks at Brendon. One hand is still clinging to Ryan's shirt, like he's worried its occupant might wander off while he's not looking. "We are leaving. Right now." And he gestures, and when Brendon turns to look, it turns out that the ocean to the south is no longer black. It is as red as the forest.
"The spill caught fire," Spencer says. The black smudges on his nose and throat are oil, Brendon notices. But the wash of black on his hands is mucky ash.
Spencer's collected all the food in the house into the back of his truck. There are duffel bags, too, filled with who knows what. Spare underwear and cell phone chargers, knowing Spencer. While Ryan and Spencer load the dogs, Brendon runs downstairs to look at his instruments. He thinks stupidly about his insurance plan, staring at his cello. Then he grabs his acoustic, because it's always been Ryan's favorite.
The radio says the 15 is backed up for miles. Everyone is leaving. Everyone south of the 405, everyone east of Culver City is being told to vacate their homes. Not just the spill is on fire, but the port. And everything around the port, and it's spreading.
At the wheel, Spencer does not take his eyes off the road for a second. He sees brake lights ahead and he swerves off onto side streets. They don't go near the freeway. All Spencer says is, "Pete and Ashlee are in Indio. They found a place where people can stay."
Brendon nods. He doesn't want to go to Indio. He'd rather go home to Vegas. But right now, he can't even imagine getting to San Fernando.
Spencer takes the scenic route, through the canyon parks, past the reservoir. The roads are dark and empty. Once, they crest a hill and see the freeway in the distance: a bright red ribbon of brake lights. Then they're back into the dark. Spencer doesn't take them near traffic again: they stay on residential streets, winding park roads. The farther north they get the more the streets clear. Houses have TVs flickering in living rooms. Up in the passenger seat, Ryan is consulting a paper map fished out of the glove box, outlining options in a murmur to Spencer. The GPS is dead on the dashboard.
The radio says the evacuation area is being extended to West Hollywood and Santa Ana.
Spencer turns left onto a two-lane road without streetlights. Brendon can't read the blue highway number that flashes by in the headlights, but Ryan nods in approval, and lets out a breath.
They drive through the dark for a long time. No more LA houses, no more suburbs. Just trees. When the radio signal gets weak and fuzzy, Ryan changes it to another station. It's something small town and local, and the announcer is breathy and nervous. There are no ads, no music. LA is being evacuated, the announcer reports. And the Coast Guard has been called in to help with the flooding in Miami and Jacksonville. Mud slides in the northwest have blocked off highway access to Seattle. The three-day blizzard in Chicago has knocked out power to the area and a state of emergency has been declared by the mayor, who has asked the president to send in troops to get the power lines back up.
The announcer keeps reporting, her voice unsteady. There are death tolls to read.
They drive in silence. Brendon pulls a dog into his lap and strokes her ears, puts his nose at the base of her skull.
Spencer pulls into a gas station in Lone Pine as dawn breaks. It's the only lit building in town. Brendon leashes the dogs and lets them waterfall out the back door to sniff around and pee on things.
Ryan stands with his shoulders hunched against the early morning chill, hands in his pockets while Spencer pumps the gas.
"If we head north," Spencer says suddenly, "We could hit the I-80, drive in shifts, be there in two days."
"Be where?" Brendon asks.
"Chicago," Ryan answers, glancing up through his eyebrows.
Brendon pauses, then nods.
Spencer replaces the gas nozzle and pushes the button for his receipt, which he folds precisely and places in his wallet.
As they pull back out onto the road, Ryan messes with the radio. He flickers past dozens of voices all speaking in the same scared or stumbling or dully professional tones, and he finds a station that's still playing music. It's playing Avril Lavigne, it's playing late-nineties pop. They hit the eastbound ramp onto the I-80, and it's playing something familiar. A tick-tock of plucked cello notes, and then Brendon's voice fills the car.
For a moment, they all listen in silence. But when the beat drops, Spencer's fingers tap against the steering wheel. By the second verse, Ryan is singing the lyrics he wrote a lifetime ago. Brendon harmonizes.
Ahead, the highway is empty and the morning sky opens up into air so clear and blue that probably, two thousand miles down the road, Jon can hear them coming.