The firefighter in front put his palm flat on the door glass and kept it there until Dawn got the lever pulled.
He was young. His face was black to the eyes, with a clean stripe across the bridge of the nose where a mask had been, and the shoulders of his yellow coat were white with ash. He came up the step and stood in the well with his chest going. Behind him the other three stopped on the road in a line and bent over with their hands on their knees.
"Jace Whitlow," he said. "Sumner engine. You're the school bus."
"Lift bus. Dawn Rasko."
"Wes." Jace looked past her down the aisle. "Didn't know it was you."
"Jace." Wes had come up behind her seat. "Command said you were holding the cut for us. An engine and a tender, far side."
"That was us." Jace spat black into the step well and wiped his mouth with the back of his glove. "A line came down across the road while we were going through. The tender hit it and went around. It's across both lanes with its cab over the drop, and my engine's stuck behind it, and the line's live, or it was when we left." He looked at Dawn. "You can't get through. Nothing gets through."
Dawn heard it and it didn't go in. Marty had said clean. Command had said open. Her hands had gone to the wheel and stayed there.
"Then we'll wait," she said. "Until you've cleared it."
"I can't clear it with what I've got. It's a tow truck and a lineman, and the lineman's on the other side of a mountain." He turned and looked down the bus, at the chairs, at Teeny in her shirt with her chin up. He lowered his voice. "Here's what I can do. We walk the ones who can walk. Back down the road we came up, around the tender, under the line, one mile to my engine. It can't come up, but it can take them down. It's smoky. It's a mile."
"Half these people can't walk to the bathroom," Rosa said.
She was standing in the aisle with a water jug in each hand. Jace looked at her.
"Then the half that can."
"And the half that can't, we leave sitting on a bus with a driver." Rosa put a jug down, hard, on the seat beside her. "Which half would you like to be?"
"I'm not asking you to like it."
"We don't split," Dawn said.
It came out before she'd thought it. Behind her Gene's chair creaked on its straps.
"Ma'am—" Jace said.
"Eleven and an aide. They came up the hill together and they go down it together." Her voice was steadier than her hands. "Tell me something else."
Jace looked at her a second longer. Then he looked at the road beyond the windshield, where the headlights lay on gray rock and the smoke moved across them in sheets.
"Then turn around," he said. "Air's grounded. The smoke's too thick for anything with rotors, nobody's flying till it lifts. The only other way off this mountain is the Tamarack road at the Saddle. If it's still there."
"I know the one."
"I don't." He pulled his helmet down over his ears. "Go carefully. There's more fire up the hill than there was coming down." He lifted a glove at Wes, and went down the step, and the other three straightened up and followed him back into the smoke in single file, and in four steps they were gone.
"Wes," Dawn said.
"I'll take the back." He already had his flashlight in his fist. "You'll be reversing blind. I'll be your eyes."
She hadn't asked him. She was glad of it, and hated that she was glad.
The road at the hairpin had a pull-out on the outside of the bend, a tongue of gravel that stuck out over the drop, and it was the only wide place within a mile. She needed all of it. The bus was thirty feet and some of it, and the road was one lane of cut rock, and to point it uphill she had to run the nose in against the bank, put the back end out over the tongue, and come around on the lock.
"Everybody sit down," she said, loud. "If you can't sit down, hold on to somebody who can."
She put her eyes on the mirrors. The long one over the windshield showed her the aisle, Bea's white bun, Vernon's folder, the black chair. The left one showed her smoke. The right one showed rock, close enough that she could see the drill scars in it, and between rock and bus the thin bright wedge of Wes's light, swinging.
She brought the nose in. Gravel crunched under the bumper. She stopped a hand short of the bank, put it in reverse, and the backing alarm started up, beep, beep.
Nobody had turned it off. She didn't have a hand to turn it off with.
"Come back," Wes called. His voice came through the shut door small and flat. "Come back. Keep coming. You've got a lot of road."
She came back. The left mirror went dark, and then it went empty, because there was nothing in it: no road, no shoulder, a place where the glass had nothing to show. She cut the wheel hard to the left and the nose swung toward the rock and the rock went past the lift side an arm's length off.
"Left, left. Hold it. You're good, Dawn. Come on."
She held it. The back wheels rolled onto the gravel tongue. She felt them go from road to stone through the seat of her jeans. Hal's cylinder rattled in its cart. The alarm went on.
"Little more."
She gave it a little more.
"That's the edge," Wes said. "That's the edge now, stop—"
She stopped. She'd stopped before he said it. The bus sat with its nose against the rock and its tail hung out in the dark, and she put it in first and turned the wheel the other way, and the engine took up the load, and the bus began to come around.
The back went down.
There was no bang. There was a soft crumbling noise under the floor, like a shovel going into dry sand, and the bus dropped at the left rear, and the whole floor tilted toward her side and went on tilting. The lift side lifted. The driver's window showed her nothing but smoke and the dark under it, nothing at all, and the seat belt came tight across her chest and she hung in it.
Her body had been here before her head knew: the grass pressed green against the glass, the whole world gone sideways in a second and staying there, and a small voice somewhere in the back saying Miss? Miss? Her wrists locked on the wheel. Her mouth was open. She heard herself breathe in and not out.
Behind her the bus came apart.
It was every loose thing at once. The tie-down hooks rang in their tracks. Something big slid, and Vernon shouted, and Gene's chair banged against its straps, and Gene was shouting too, no words, one long note. A water jug went down the aisle end over end. Teeny said a word that went through the noise like a nail.
Wes shouted something at the back of the bus. She couldn't hear it. The lift side scraped rock with a long grinding shriek, a thing she felt in her teeth, and then the whole bus hung still, canted, with the engine running and the alarm going, beep, beep, beep.
She didn't move.
"Dawn." It was Ruth. Ruth's voice was flat, as if she were reading from a list, and it came from the third row, from the high side, from somewhere above and behind. "Dear. Your hands know this road. Let them."
Dawn looked down.
Her hands were on the wheel. They were white to the wrist and they were not shaking. They were holding exactly where they'd been, ten and two, waiting.
In the long mirror, at the back of the bus, Len Okafor had his arm around his wife. He had thrown it across her without anyone asking and wedged his big shoulder into the seat back to take the angle, and he was holding her flat against the cushion with all his weight, his face calm. Doris had both her hands on his sleeve. She was saying, "Good, Len. Good man. Hold on."
Dawn took her foot off the brake, put it on the gas, and eased the clutch.
The back wheels spun. She felt them spin in nothing, a light free whirr, and she stopped. Too much. She'd go over. She let the engine fall back to a mutter and sat there with the sweat running into her eyes.
Wes's light came around the side of the bus and put a long white shadow across the windshield.
"Don't touch it." He was at her window, shouting. He had his gloves on. "Don't touch anything. Let me get under it."
It took him eleven minutes. She watched the clock on the dash for every one.
He went under the back of the bus on his belly with the light in his teeth, and then he came out and went off along the cut, and came back with rocks, one in each arm, and went under again. Rosa went out to him. She didn't ask; she took the next rock off him and walked it back herself. Dawn couldn't leave the wheel. She sat with the brake on and the bus hanging and watched the two of them go back and forth across the beam of the headlights, a man and a woman in an ash storm, building a floor out of nothing.
Hal's cylinder had gone over in the slide. She hadn't seen it. She heard it when the engine dropped: a thin dry hiss from the third row, steady, not loud.
"Rosa," Hal said. He said it gently. "Rosa, girl. Something's wrong with my tank."
The hiss went on.
Wes came to her window and rapped it with his knuckles. "Ready. Give it low and easy, forward, when I say. Don't let her back."
"Wes. The oxygen," Dawn said.
"I know," Wes said. "It'll keep a minute. Go."
She gave it low and easy. The bus shuddered. She felt the rear wheels take hold on rock and the weight shift off the drop and come back to her all at once, and the floor rocked level, and she was driving the bus up out of a hole with her whole body. Then it was road under all six wheels and she stopped, and her right foot was shaking so hard it chattered the pedal.
The nose was pointing uphill.
She put the brake on and sat for a second and then she got her bag from the footwell.
Hal's cylinder lay in the aisle where it had slid, on its side, with the cart beside it. Rosa had it upright already. Hal sat still with his tube in and his chin up, looking at nothing, and he had his big hand over his heart.
The hiss was coming from the little brass head on the top, from the dial that set the flow, where it joined the hose. The fitting at the base of the dial had a crack in it, hair-thin, from the lip to the thread.
"It's not the valve," Rosa said. She had her face close to it. "Not the tank. It's the thing on top."
Dawn had her bag open on the seat. She'd carried a roll of black electrical tape in it since she was seventeen. She tore a strip off with her teeth and wound it, tight, overlapping, three layers, then three more. She put her thumb on it. The hiss stopped, and then it came back from under the tape. She wound another ten turns.
"Will that hold?" Rosa said.
"It's held every school bus in this county together since before I was born."
It didn't stop it. It slowed it to a seep she could only hear when she put her ear to it.
Hal's hand came out and found the dial. Dawn watched him do it. He looked at the number, and at her, and he turned it back a notch with his thumb. Then another half.
"What are you doing?" Rosa said.
"Turning myself down." His voice was dry and amused and a little breathless. "I've breathed worse on a lookout."
"Hal, you're on two," Rosa said. "Ruth says you've been on two since June."
"I'm on one and a half now."
"You can't—"
"Rosa." He was gentle with her. "I'm eighty-four. I'll sit still and think about something nice."
Rosa looked at the gauge. She looked at the cart and at the tape and at the wedge of clock on the dash through the windshield. She did the sum, lips moving, and Dawn watched her do it.
"Four hours," Rosa said. "If he sits still."
"Four hours," Dawn said.
She put the tape back in her bag. She had tape on her fingers and the smell of ash on her hands, and she stood in the aisle with her hand on the back of Hal's seat and didn't know what to do with it. Ruth was watching her. Ruth had her canvas bag on her knee and both her hands on top of it, and her face was white with ash, and she looked exactly as she had when she'd told the room who went first.
"You did well, dear," Ruth said.
"I put it in a hole," Dawn said.
"You took it out."
Dawn went back to the wheel.
Wes came in last, wiping his hands down his coat. He stood in the well, breathing. Under the soot his face was gray. For a moment he didn't move, and then he reached out and put his hand on the pole by the door and held it.
"That was a good turn," he said.
"It was a bad turn," Dawn said.
"It was a good recovery," Wes said. He looked at the road through the windshield. "I'll walk the front now, if you like. See what's up there."
"Stay in," she said.
She didn't know why she'd said it. He looked at her and she looked at the road.
The bus pointed up. She released the brake and the engine took up its low growl, and she let the first slow yards roll under her, and she lifted her eyes from the mirrors for the first time in a quarter of an hour.
She'd come down this road forty minutes ago through smoke. Ahead of her now it was a different road.
The hill above the bend was burning. Not the trees. The ground. The grass on both slopes had gone up while they were turning, ditch to ditch, a low roll of orange flame lying along both sides of the road with the dark gap of the road between, and it was leaning in over the gap in the wind, each side reaching for the other. Where the headlights ended there was no smoke to see. There was light.
Behind her Rosa said, softly, "Cloths up. Everybody."