Fire Season
The Pacific Coast is the natural habitat of the Thunderbird, who roosts atop the tallest, darkest clouds and leaps down with thunderous cry and blinding flash. When it lands to feed, it consumes everything in its path, leaving behind only ash and cinder.
For generations before European countries invaded, colonized, and polluted North America, the Pacific Coast was managed by indiginous tribes who lived in harmony with the Thunderbird, feeding it and enjoying the bounties of its rain. Under their stewardship, the fire season was a natural and controlled part of the seasons
As the world decayed and the trees dried and died, all that remained was shrubland and grassland. These smaller plans grow during the monsoon season and are torched during the fire season, often resulting in wildfires across the Pacific Coast which spread particularly unabated across the Exclusion Zones.
It is one such fire which marks the beginning of Malcolm's adventure.
A Fire Approaches
Mallie locked eyes with the sunset and dared it to look away first. Bloodshot and unblinking, she scowled at the horizon’s challenge: an incomprehensible hue — red, green, both, and yet neither. The sun faltered, sinking into the bruised haze of the horizon. It was spent. Mallie had only just awakened.
Behind her, her mother and several other members of the commune stood crowded around the Wanderer as he sat in the shade of their tree and stretched his tired legs. The ash was so thick upon him that his age and complexion were indeterminate.
“Sutter is too far,” he argued with Maria. He may have been trying to yell, but the ash was also thick upon his lungs. “You won’t reach the firebreak before it catches up with you, not with the wind at its back. I’m going down to Sacramento. You should do the same.”
Sacramento is a death trap. Mallie heard it often. She hoped she wouldn’t hear it now. Please, let me see the city.
The sun’s edge had turned a hazy, jagged cyan.
Portents and Manifestations
As the winter thaws and the cold winds of the north recede, the heat of the south brings sea breeze and torrential rains. The greater the downpours are, the worse the fire season will be.
Invigorated by the rains, dense snarls of creeping grass sprawl across the land, binding every ruin and tree in invasive overgrowth. It creeps into the cracks made by the rain, and pushes apart concrete and wood with ease.
Summer's heat bakes the land, turning grass to straw for lightning to turn into fire. The first rumbles of the season remind you that you should already be packed and have a plan of escape.
By foot, horseback, or vehicle, they come. They move in the dark, often without light or sound so as to avoid raiders and ghouls. Be wary in assisting them, a desperate and ailing nomad may not always be your friend.
An dark haze blots out the horizon and turns twilights to crimson. Without a respirator, breathing is a labor that aches in your chest and burns in your lungs. Hot winds leech the moisture out your skin until it cracks and peels.
A cascading grey as quiet as snow. Bitter on the tongue and sharp in the eyes, it smothers the landscape. It clogs the ventilators of your respirator and seeps into the earth to seed the next season.
“Sacramento is a death trap,” Maria said, tone flat and tired of repeating itself. Their commune had spent the day arguing about where to go. “Rats, mosquitos, psychos and ghouls. And even if you survive all that, the city is overgrown with grass from the monsoons — the fire is going to burn everything south of Sutter. We are going to leave. You should do the same.”
A long and muttering silence followed. Mallie’s vision was starting to darken, but the indigo and violet flickers dancing along the sun’s edge were difficult to look away from.
She relented before her vision went black, and turned to watch the silence. The man had crumpled up, and dark lines of wet tears ran through the ash on his cheeks.
Stop crying. You’re wasting water. Words her mother had long forgot chiding her with, but which she would never forget.
“You won’t make it. I won’t make it.” The wanderer whimpered in a small, dry voice.
"Yes we will," Maria said. "We have to."
The fire was miles off, but the visage of it filled Mallie's vision, the dark blot of a black sun serving as a pupil to the eye of the inferno.
Stop crying, you're wasting water. Oof. Wildfires seem terrifying. I'm sorry you have had to deal with them. Makes great writing though. This is great. <3
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