marichiko

I'd been watching them from my hiding place in the air ducts over the roof of the gym. I knew places in this building no one ever dreamed of existancing. I hadn't been janitor in this place for 10 years for nothing. Hell, the janitor job itself had been my way of going into hiding every since my life fell apart 10 years ago. This whole comet thing seemed like only the latest in a serious of disasters that had turned my life upside down. Disasters had been my profession once upon a time. And in between disasters there had been to cool quiet of the Colorado forests where I cruised timber sales for the US Forest Service. Fire had always fascinated me. Fire had drawn me like a moth to the flame. I put in my application and passed all the rigorous tests. One morning the supervisor of the Uncomphagre National Forest sent out a radio message to me where I was spiked out with the timber crew. "Chief, pack your bags. You've been accepted for the Forest Service smoke jumper school up in Bozeman." The supervisor thought it was funny to call me chief since I'm a full blooded Navajo. The rest of the timber crew was yelling, "Congratulations, Fred!" as I climbed into the Forest Service truck to drive back down to the district office to catch the plane for Bozeman.

Three years later in the hot dry summer of 1994, they dropped our crew in the mountains outside Glenwood Springs to fight an uncontained fire that was roaring out of control. I looked down at the flames from our plane and I KNEW. I was second in command of our crew. I told our crew boss it was a bad place for a jump. He laughed. "You gonna start talking native superstitons at me, Fred?" So we made the jump and the crew boss was the first to die. It was a crown fire and we'd landed half way up a ridge. Trees were exploding all around us. Some of our crew tried to outrun the fire. They knew better, but they panicked. Some tried to deploy their fire shelters. In a fire storm like that, they were worthless. I managed to do a back burn on the area immediently surrounding the place where I'd landed. I crawled between two huge boulders and watch the flames engulf everything around me. I watched 8 brave men - my friends - meet hideous deaths. After that I quit the service and left Colorado, but I couldn't leave the nightmares behind. The comet seemed minor in comparison.

As I watched the motley group gathered in the gym, I was glad to see that Aaron was among them. He had a way of getting into mischief, but he was a good kid. I used to let him hide out with me when he got into trouble. I could sense a certain tension between the group leader, Patrick and the woman, Rebecca. Rebecca had a way of questioning Patrick without ever really putting it into words. Skye is just a young girl, but appears to be holding up quite well. Nelson, the intellectual, is an unknown quantity. They were talking about Durango, a place that it is only about 30 miles from the home of the Dinee'h, my people. I wanted to go home, and it would be easier to make the journey with companions, than alone.

I dropped down from my hiding place and walked toward them with my hand raised in a gesture of peace. "May I join you?" I asked.