Carbon Run Read online

  CARBON RUN

  CARBON RUN

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  A novel

  J.G. Follansbee

  ©2017 J.G. Follansbee / Fyddeye Media

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 0984905448

  Print ISBN-13: 9780984905447

  Ebook ISBN-13: 978-0-9849054-5-4

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017912177

  Fyddeye, Seattle, WA

  Seattle, Wash., USA

  Cover art by Christian Bentulan

  http://coversbychristian.com/

  Edited by John Paine

  http://www.johnpaine.com/

  Proofread by Edith Follansbee

  For Grandma Thelma

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PREVIEW CHAPTER 1 OF CITY OF ICE AND DREAMS

  ALSO IN THE TALES FROM A WARMING PLANET SERIES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER 1

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  SOME POOR DEVIL DOWN-VALLEY’S GOING to have a carbon ticket in their com if they don’t douse that fire now. Anne Penn dismissed the thought before turning back to the male Klamath magpie. Pushing hair the color of fresh-sawn pine from her oval face, she was so intent on the bird she was observing from her blind that she didn’t notice the disappearance of the sun as charcoal clouds skulked east. The bird grasped the carcass of a dead tree with its needle-like talons, the yellow band on its left leg visible. He belted out a screep-screep-screep. Anne hoped a female answered. If it didn’t, the sub-species was doomed to extinction, another victim of the Warming.

  Anne, what do you want for supper? The com message from Anne’s father blinked in her visual field.

  She clicked her tongue impatiently. Wait a minute, Dad. He always managed to break her focus at the wrong time. Something’s happening.

  Can’t wait long, my dear.

  Another rumble rolled down the valley toward their ranch a half-mile away. Anne crouched in the wildlife refuge where she had watched a colony of the magpies since her fourteenth summer. For five years she had worked as a volunteer observer, following the instructions of government scientists. That first summer, the ornithologist called her “swiftie,” a comment on her keen, if immature mind, which bounced from subject to subject, turning on a dime like the swifts he studied. Last summer, one of the young biologists, a cute, bookish boy, claimed her elegant, streamlined shape compared well with the swift’s. The awkward compliment made her laugh. She thought the word “lanky” was enough of a description. Her mind was more disciplined now.

  The male bird called again, and Anne heard a whoosh overhead as a drab female Klamath magpie swooped onto the nub of a broken branch. The male called again, showing his blood-red throat patch. The lady bird lingered. The male spread his wings in an invitation. They tussled.

  Anne was elated at the mating. This population of Klamath magpies, the last known on earth, just might make it through another year. She yawned, tired from the long day, and she grew hungry in anticipation of her father’s basic, delicious cooking.

  Coming home, Dad.

  I broke out a jar of my pasta sauce. Pasta’s boiling on the hot plate.

  Bill Penn made gallons of Anne’s favorite Italian sauce from the tomatoes they didn’t sell at the farmer’s market, but the smell of smoke drowned out her anticipation. Two fixed-wing aircraft roared overhead up the valley. Anne called up the Brier Valley news chan, and she found live images of a forest fire 10 kilometers upwind under attack by the tankers. The images broke up in her minds-eye display.

  Anne, I’ve got a problem. Her father’s message broke into her minds-eye. “Anne, are you there?” He never uses that voice unless something’s wrong. “Anne, answer me.”

  “Switch to voice,” Anne commanded the com stud in her ear. “I’m here, Dad. What’s wrong?”

  “Call 9-1-1. I’ve got a fire in the kitchen. The extinguisher is exhausted.” His voice was calm, if clipped.

  “Did you say ‘fire?’”

  “I’m rigging up a hose. I need you here.”

  He spoke in his sailor’s voice, the one he used to give orders, the one that gave others confidence. “What about Maxie? Where is she?”

  “I don’t know where the dog is. Get down here now, please.”

  She scrambled across an old stream bed and ducked under a fence. Despite his even tone, she heard impatience, and it magnified her anxiety. Her house was a hundred yards away, and a thin plume of black smoke rose from behind it. She’d lived there all her life. Everything she owned was there. The woodcut. Please God, no.

  Anne remembered her father’s order and directed her attention to her com. “Emergency numbers. Call 9-1-1.”

  “McCall County emergency services. Can we help you?”

  I can handle this. “My house is on fire. It’s in the kitchen.” A tremble in her voice betrayed her fear.

  The emergency dispatcher confirmed Anne’s coordinates sent to the dispatcher when Anne made the 9-1-1 call. “The Penn ranch, William Penn?”

  “Yes, that’s right. Hurry, please.”

  “Fire units on their way, ma’am.”

  Anne ran to the far side of the house. Her father was spraying water from a garden hose into the kitchen though an open window. An electric pump labored, drawing water from an aluminum horse trough, but the stream was weak. That will never put out the fire. Sparks curled up over the eave and landed on the roof. Anne felt useless as the water hissed off the shingles. If I can save the woodcut, I don’t care if the whole place goes up. She approached the kitchen steps, putting her hand up to block the heat.

  “Stay away from the kitchen,” Anne’s father bellowed. “Damn this piece-of-shit pump. I’m going to start the gasoline pump.”

  The thought of rescuing her father’s precious gift vanished. “No, Dad. You can’t do that. The cops—”

  “To hell with them. I’ll do what I have to do.” Bill Penn headed toward the shed where they hid the obsolete engine. His intricate tattoos shone through his water-soaked t-shirt. In the shade of the outbuilding, Maxie whined. The ranch’s old basset hound was frightened, but unhurt.

  “No, Dad, you can’t risk it. What if the cops show up? You know what the judge said.”

  “Screw the judge. This is all I have.” He pointed at the burning house. “It’s all we have.”

  Fear for her gift returned, even as flames licked the walls of her home and threatened everything else she owned. Her father found the woodcut in an antique shop in Port Simpson a year after they stopped hearing from her mother. It was a page in a book of poems published in the 1820s. Frayed, yellowed, but preserved under glass, the print showed a vigorous English sailor and a girl child of four or five reaching out to embrace each other. To Anne’s eye, the sailor looked exactly like
her father: pleasant face, strong arms, rough around the edges. The gift marked the moment her anger toward her mother began to fade. For 15 years, the artwork hung in the kitchen, above the table where father and daughter ate their meals. More than two hundred years ago, an artist had captured their love and respect for each other. The thought of losing the image tore at Anne.

  Bill knocked down the tongues of flame, but two sprang up in their places. Convection currents carried embers over the roof and out of sight. Soot stung Anne’s eyes like tiny insects until it obscured the minds-eye display for her com. Messages came in from her loop as friends picked up her emo-sigs of distress but the smoke made her eyes tear up, and when she wiped the tears away, her hand distorted the shape of her eye and the display went fuzzy. Dirty sweat trickled down her neck along a gold chain with almost microscopic links that held a thumbnail-sized crucifix next to her skin. Her control over her fear slipped as it mixed with the stink of burning insulation and decayed tar paper. She heard her father’s voice, but couldn’t see him.

  “Anne, where are you?” her father screamed through the surging blackness. “Call 9-1-1 again. The fire’s spreading.”

  Anne updated the dispatcher, but it would take ten more minutes for the trucks to arrive because the Penn place was so far up the valley. Her rising terror emerged as frustration when he repeated his plan to use the gas pump. She grabbed the dribbling hose. “You’re always breaking the rules. Is that why the fire started?”

  The accusation brought her father up short. “What are you talking about? I need your help, not a lecture. Help me with this pump.”

  “I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m scared.” She rushed to the back of the building, guilt and thoughts of rescuing the woodcut and a few belongings driving her. A window shattered from the intense heat, discouraging her. She called out to her father again but he didn’t answer. She wished he would get one of the new augmenters. Adding him to her c-tribe would give her a better sense of what he was thinking and feeling, even when there wasn’t an emergency.

  “Dad, I’m in the back.”

  Most people over thirty didn’t get the concept of c-tribes, anyway. Like her dad, they were still using old-fashioned slow jack-in’s. They might as well be using cell phones.

  Her father came out to the back porch and Anne pointed to the sky. “There’s smoke coming from the roof, Daddy.”

  “Get some water on it.” Fear pitched his voice high as he handed her the garden hose. For the first time in her life, she saw raw horror in his face. It was the opposite of what Anne knew. There was the time Maxie confronted a rattlesnake when she was a puppy. The snake coiled to strike, and Bill crushed its head with a shovel. He was always calm in a crisis, but this one was getting away from him, and it frightened Anne.

  He coughed as he held a cloth over his mouth. “I’m going to move the truck. We can’t lose it.”

  The decision bolstered Anne’s confidence. If I could just get inside the house for 30 seconds. Mentally, she listed holo-pics of dead ancestors, trophies and ribbons from school, her prom dress, the signed t-shirt from the Hindu Mistress concert, the only time she’d ever seen a live music performance by a pop band. Bill had taken her.

  A bark from Maxie brought Anne back to her job: get water on the roof. Mist from the nozzle soaked her denim overalls. Water dripped on the rockery by the front porch and boiled away. On the roof, flames danced among the shingles.

  Anne heard the whine from the old truck’s electric motor pitch up and the churrr churrr of the gears as her father tried to find reverse. They couldn’t afford to take it to the repair shop. Despite their poverty, he had bought her the minds-eye for Christmas after she had begged for months. Everyone in Brier Valley owned one. Everyone she knew, at least.

  Helpless as she and her father waited for the firefighters, Anne’s thoughts flashed to that birthday. She went with her best friends to the mall in Medford and the com company booth with the gift certificate in hand. She was not one to buy gaudy electronics, and she picked out a head appliance styled like an ordinary silver stud, if larger than average. She had it installed at the top of her left ear, which was the fashion at Brier High. She had to settle for one without the imager, because of the cost, so she wouldn’t be able to share stills and vids. It would take her months to save for the imager add-on. The sales tech tuned the appliance to the wave frequencies of her occipital lobe and limbic system. She squealed with delight as she looped herself into her friends’ tribes and created her own tribe.

  Her digital memories were safe with the com company, but when a corner of the porch collapsed, she despaired for her other memories, the ones she could hold in her hand. They’re all gone. Pieces of her life were slipping through her fingers. Bill managed to get the truck moving, even as the fire’s heat blistered the paint off the hood. A gust of wind lifted an ember and it floated like a feather in a breeze. The wind carried it to the woodland next to the ranch. As if she had second sight, Anne saw the future.

  “Oh, god. The refuge.”

  The wisp of fire landed in tinder-dry brush and flared. Her fear turned to panic, but not for her home. Her matted hair flying, Anne ran past the lurching truck carrying a tin bucket. Bill yelled as she flew by. The house no longer mattered. She dipped the bucket into the half-empty horse trough and splashed the water onto the blackening grass. It wasn’t enough. Within seconds, the offspring of the house fire raged into the pines. The fire jumped from tree to tree like a mad demon. Anne made another call to 9-1-1. “Where are you? Are you coming? Please hurry!”

  As if in answer to a prayer, a fixed-wing aircraft arrived first. Anne heard the drone before she saw it. It’s about time. Several of the big tankers were always somewhere over the Cascade Mountains twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week during the dry season. Their pilots waited for orders at workstations in the western states fire suppression center. Anne had taken a tour of it for her junior year environmental defense class. The tour guide said most of the pilots were veterans of the Three Degrees North War.

  Anne ducked by instinct as the initial sorties dive-bombed the forest around the refuge at tree-level. It was now a war against destruction. She prayed for every strike. Experienced pilots were as precise as raptors. They could hit a single tree with their water payloads, leaving the tree’s neighbors dry as a bone. She leapt for joy at each hit. She messaged her c-tribe in jubilation and the Hurrahs and Yays came back within seconds. Thousands of gallons of fire retardant and water carpeted the blaze, but the flames defied the aircraft like rioters. More sorties attacked the fiery stragglers. Messages in her minds-eye warned her to stay clear, but she thought she saw the magpie nest with the newly mated pair, unharmed. Stay in the nest. You’ll be fine.

  The sun glinted off the silver wings as the planes banked to avoid the mountains. As soon as they turned, the fire flared again, marching in patches up the hill, heading straight for the refuge and the birds. Anne was running up to the blackened, still burning forest when her father texted her.

  Anne, where are you? I can’t fight this by myself.

  She hesitated, torn between the birds she had come to love like a family and her father, the only family she had. More tankers roared overhead. I’m coming.

  When Anne returned to her father’s side, gray ash covered his face like a shroud, highlighting the shock in his blue-green eyes. The entire house was engulfed in a roaring cacophony of fire. A helicopter slinging a full bucket of water hovered into position over the house. A thousand-gallon deluge dropped onto the house’s remains.

  All the flames at the house died, leaving charred wood, twisted aluminum from the window frames, and a concrete set of steps that led nowhere. White steam rose from the debris. A puff of brown smoke escaped from the stove pipe. The wood stove was one of the few pieces of the house left over from the original building, which her father said was built a century ago, long before the development restrictions of the 2020s made the appliance illegal. The stove kept Anne and her father warm
in the high-country nights. Its blackened carapace chilled her.

  “Oh, god. Oh, god.” Bill clasped his hands on his head, as if protecting it from the devastation. Anne had never seen him in a state of shock. Was this how he looked when Molly left us? They walked into the corpse of the house. Heat rose from the ashes. Grit choked the air. She searched for the woodcut, but found nothing, not even the glass case. The only fragment she recognized was the cooked blob of her pistol marksmanship trophy. Bill lifted a metal picture frame, which still held a seared, soaked image of Anne’s dark-haired, fair-skinned mother. He dropped the photo among the scorched fragments of two lives—mementos of his sailing days, melted plastic toys—and he keened as if his heart had been torn out.

  Anne wished the photo had burned. It had the opposite meaning of the woodcut. The photo sat on the shelf for her father’s sake, not Anne’s, a reminder for her of abandonment, not love. All she remembered of her mother was her anger, which flared into rage in dreams or the occasional argument with Bill. Her father sometimes fell into dark moods and glared at the photo. Why he kept it was a mystery to Anne as a child, though as she grew into a young woman and noticed the young men around her, something about her father’s need for the photo became clearer. He was lonely, and some of his memories of Molly were happy ones.

  Daughter wrapped her arms around her father, guiding him like a child, pulling him away from the carnage, ignoring the sweat and caked dust on his body, her own tears mixing with the dirt and water that saturated his shirt and jeans. Her c-tribe posted dozens of messages trying to soothe her and tell her she wasn’t alone and that the community would help. She heeded nothing aside from her father’s grief, her own disbelief at the destruction of her life, and the cadaver of her home. It was the end of her world.

  The world around Anne kept going. Two fire trucks, one a red pumper from the local fire district, and the second a fire-suppression unit from the state Department of Forestry, roared up the pitted dirt road that wound through the Penn place’s forested ravine. The pumper peeled off across a field to the front of the ruined house. A firefighter, his face streaked with sweat, dragged over a hose to soak the coals. He impressed Anne with his fearlessness.