And she knew, she damned well knew in her heart, that she’d been a fool. She should never have trusted him to keep his end of the deal.
Not when there was nobody she could trust.
Chapter Eight
Caleb woke to the news of a fire that had broken out overnight in the Adelaide Hills, and his heart slammed into his chest, his first thoughts for Ava. He tried to call her, only to have her phone go straight to message bank. Every time he tried it went straight to message bank, and finally he left one telling her to turn on her radio and listen for updates or better still, get out now.
He headed to the station consumed with guilt. If he’d still been at her place this morning – if he hadn’t gone home – if he’d left his bloody I-care-about-you speech for another time, a later time, he would have brought her down to the city with him, even if kicking and screaming. He wouldn’t have let her stay up there. He would have given her the keys to his unit. Then whatever happened, he would at least have known she was safe.
The station was buzzing. Every available firey had been called in for what they had been dreading all summer long. And every single one of them knew the monster they could be facing and what was at stake. In no time from those first reports, from the city and suburbs, it looked like the entire range was alight, palls of thick grey smoke rising like massive clouds.
He’d grown up in the Adelaide Hills. Half the people he’d gone to school with still lived there. The house he’d grown up in at Reynolds Ridge, the little stone school house where he and his brother and their friends had gone to school, the scout hall where he’d stuck a fork through his foot planting tomatoes, all of it under threat.
Along with Ava. He’d left her alone up there – was she still there? – and with a fire breaking out and already burning on so many fronts, god only knew where the fire would break out next.
His crew screamed out of the station, lights flashing, heading to a tiny hamlet in the direct path of the flames to help out the local CFS crews who had radioed for assistance. There was no time for regrets then, no time for guilt, when one hundred percent of his energies was required to focus on the job. Working with the local CFS crew and pumping water out of a backyard swimming pool, they managed to push the flames back from one house while the house next door couldn’t be saved and was razed to the ground. They came upon two dogs tied up outside another home, tying themselves in knots as they reared in panic, howling in fear as the roaring firestorm approached, and managed to cut them loose them before a fireball leapt from the tree tops and flames engulfed that house too. They found a woman in tears running along the road, her car and trailer broken down, desperate to get to her beloved horses and begging them to save them, when they’d just come from that direction and knew it was futile and there was no hope for any poor animal caught up in that, and they snatched her, weeping in despair, to safety too.
Time after time, they battled the flames and sometimes they won, but sometimes they were beaten back and had to retreat and just let the fire have its head and try to attack it from a different angle.
But when finally, exhausted, they stopped in at the local sports club taken over for feeding and watering the emergency workers, Caleb had time to pay heed to the roiling feeling in his gut. His phone proved useless, telephone towers down, communication limited to radio contact. Even learning that Dylan was up there in Uraidla at Fire Command Centre was no damned good to him when he couldn’t get a bloody signal to ask him for updates.
All he knew was that, like the sick feeling in his gut, the fire was growing.
Watered and fed, they were sent back out to the fire ground, working side by side their fellow crews and the water tankers to try to get a handle on this massive roaring beast.
At night they battled on, the clouds glowed red from the fire dancing over the range and looking like the very gates of hell.
And, as one day rolled into the next, the fire relentless in its hunger, devouring everything in its path, it was nothing to the hell he felt inside.
Where was Ava?
In the end, it was two days he hadn’t been able to contact her. Two days of fires raging out of control and taking out phone towers and huge trees falling and blocking roads and not knowing whether she was still at her home or evacuated and holed up somewhere.
Two days of hoping and praying that if she was still home, that the fire didn’t make it into the Uriarra Gorge or there’d be no stopping it.
Two fucking days and nights of not knowing and he had never felt more powerless in his life.
But there was one thing Caleb did know. That he’d been wrong that night, to tell Ava that he cared for her, wrong to let her think that was all it was.
Because you didn’t feel like a part of you would die if anything happened to someone you merely cared about. You wouldn’t feel like you had lost everything there was to lose.
No, this thing he felt for her had grown bigger than that. And when he finally managed to track Ava down, he was going to damn well tell her.
The promised rains arrived on the morning of the third day, delivering relief to weary firefighters on the fire ground and terrified residents who’d been in the path of the fire alike, but there was still no rest for Caleb
