Imagine that you\’re a young couple on holiday at an Airbnb in the town of Seven Oaks. You\’re there for a month to get away from the madness of the pandemic and social distancing guidelines and the fear of getting sick. Suddenly, you\’re caught in the crosshairs of a California wildfire. That\’s what happened to Veer and Maya.

[#]

Veer had made incredibly good time, mostly because he had jogged the majority of the way. Now he was sweaty and gross, despite the strong wind that kept finding him as he went. At least the run had cleared his head a bit and put him in a more positive mood. It would be lunchtime by the time he got home again. Or, at the least, a late brunch-time, but he and Maya would have something wonderful to eat and, either way, things would be okay.

Thinking about the argument he\’d had with Maya the night before, he still felt like he was right. He still felt annoyed with Maya for treating him like an imbecile. He understood her desire to legalize their union with a quickie wedding, especially since they had a baby on the way, but he was his parents\’ only child, and they wanted to celebrate their son\’s coupling with the pomp and circumstance of a big, fat Indian wedding. His parents wanted to postpone the wedding initially scheduled for October 3, 2020, to next summer. Maya\’s parents wanted to go ahead with the nuptials, with only thirty people in their backyard. Hence, the row yesterday.

But now, with the adrenalin coursing through his lungs, Veer was beginning to find that the whole darn thing didn\’t matter. It wasn\’t important, not in the grand scheme of things. Not compared to all the blessings that life has heaped upon them.

The Seven Oaks Market was on Pine Flat Road and was limited compared to the overstocked stores you would find all over the San Francisco suburbs. Yet, Veer had got used to shopping there and appreciated it—it felt quirky and different. He also loved renting DVDs from the little kiosk that was located on the same commercial plot as the store—which made him feel giddy and nostalgic for a bygone era. Okay, so this two-bit little town did have its charms.

Veer frowned as he picked up some skewered kebabs and fries, one of Maya\’s favorite meals, turning their situation over in his mind. Yeah, there were things he loved about staying in Seven Oaks, but that was because the rental house had been his and Maya\’s private world, a sanctuary away from the warring families, where nothing else mattered but them and the baby growing inside his beautiful fiancée.

But now it was looking like their parents were coming to their senses and that things back home might finally get sorted out. This Cold War, this self-imposed isolation had taken a lot longer than he ever guessed it would, but it had worked. San Francisco was their home. He was coming to understand that and missed it more every day.

As the shop assistant eyed all the food that Veer had loaded onto the conveyor belt, he realized that missing San Francisco might have contributed to the argument; perhaps he had been feeling more vulnerable than he had appreciated. The assistant was eighteen or nineteen, he guessed, with short hair dyed jet black and cut into a wavy bob. There was a hint of crimson on her lips, about as much eye shadow as the store would probably let her get away with and two large disc earrings that created one-centimeter holes in her lobes.

Once he would have thought of her as cool and mysterious, would have been drawn to her—the kind of girl he liked to pursue, or be pursued by. \”You gonna want some bags?\” the girl asked with a demure yet knowing smile. In some ways he still did.

Veer nodded, not having brought even one bag with him. \”Yes, please.\” He watched the girl as she got two bags out and wondered what her story was. Probably lived with her parents, maybe even born and raised in Seven Oaks. She looked too hip to stay in such a small town all her life, though. Was she saving up, perhaps, trying to get a deposit for an apartment rental in Los Angeles or San Francisco? Or Bakersfield or Riverside, at least? Somewhere where she could explore her potential, whatever that potential happened to be. Veer found himself suddenly concerned with the girl and her future, determined that she wasn\’t going to be spending it in Seven Oaks.

He wouldn\’t want to raise a kid to spend their whole life in a small mountain town like this.

The girl—Aimee, he had now noticed on her name badge—looked up as she passed the bags to Veer and caught him staring at her. She blushed a little but the look she gave him back wasn\’t entirely displeased.

\”Haven\’t seen you before. Are you visiting?\” she asked from beneath fluttering eyelashes.

Before Veer could reply a man came running into the store. A messy-haired, overweight white man wearing a Harley-Davidson shirt, he was sweating heavily and trying to take in enough breath to speak. When a word finally came, it was the only word that was needed.

\”Fire!\”

Strapping on his face mask and, with the others crowding around him, Veer turned and headed for the door, to see what was going on for himself.

Veer was some way out into the parking lot before he could turn and get a good angle past the building and the fir trees that stood sentinel beyond it. Once he could see, however, the sight was like nothing Veer had ever seen before. Rising up from the high ridge to the west was an incredible column of smoke—it stretched from north to south as far as he could see, rising straight up as a solid wall that appeared to have no end. Its plume widened until it mingled with the clouds above, forming an oppressive ashy dome.

Veer noticed that Aimee and the store manager had already started back towards the store, and he found himself stood there in the parking lot, with two bags of shopping and a terrible feeling building in his gut. Deciding to dump his shopping bags in the parking lot and head back to their house, Veer pulled out his phone and tried to get hold of Maya—not that he expected it to have a signal. Sure enough, it went straight through to her voicemail.

\”There\’s a fire, Maya,\” Veer said into the phone, \”and everyone seems worried. \”I\’m on foot and out at the market, so I\’m gonna try to come and get you, but you should get to Sarah and Derek (their neighbors) for safety first, yeah.\”

Veer almost took the phone away to press the red button on the screen and end the call, but he paused, the phone still a centimeter or two from the side of his face. \”I love you, Maya. I love you so much.\”

Taking a long look at his soot-covered sneakers, Veer ended the call, noting that the battery was under fifty percent. It had been important to say, even though he knew what saying it the way he had said it meant; the way it let all those fearful feelings in and the way it was letting his cruel imagination think that the last exchanges they would ever have might have been angry ones.

On Pine Flat Road, he had spent the first few hundred yards after making the call trying to flag down a lift, but only two cars stopped, and neither of those wanted to head east and towards the direction of the fire. Understandable, he guessed.

All the traffic he saw was heading west. Some waved or pointed or even blasted their horn at Veer, pointing desperately for him to head back the other way. One man even stopped.

\”You don\’t want to be heading that way, partner,\” said a wizened-looking man with a thin black mustache and a pointy chin. \”I\’ve just come from out on Hwy 84 and I\’ve never seen anything like it. The fire is massive, friend, and fast, real fast, and heading straight for the town. I ain\’t waiting for no evacuation order, I\’m heading out to Los Angeles until I know what this thing is doing. You wanna do the same. I\’ll give you a lift if you want.\”

The genuine look of concern on the man\’s face when Veer said that he was heading back towards his pregnant fiancée made the pit of his stomach drop away.

Looking up, Veer could see evidence of the fire passing overhead. But, it wasn\’t until he crested the hill that Veer got his first glimpse of what was happening on the eastern horizon since leaving the parking lot at the Seven Oaks Market.

Veer was not at all a religious person, but as he looked at the approaching fire and smoke column, the only words that came to mind tended to be Godly: holocaust, Qayamat, apocalyptic. Holy crap! He had just come to understand in a way that he hadn\’t truly grasped up until that moment just what deep shit the whole town of Seven Oaks was in.

    [#] 

There was a lot more smoke—so it seemed to Maya—than there had been only twenty minutes before. What had been a vague smudge on the horizon not so long ago had now become thicker smoke, rapidly increasing, being blown past, and even overhead. She could tell that it was windy outside, and the smoke moved fast, making it hard to tell where exactly it was coming from. 

Instinct led Maya to her phone, thinking that she should message or call Veer—at least find out where he was. She was still annoyed with him. Things were getting too late in the pregnancy for such boyish behavior. She was even more annoyed that he had just vanished this morning. What did he think he was doing? Was he trying to make her feel guilty or something? Hoping to make her worry about him and his state of mind like some attention-seeking man-child? 

Still, she was worried about his state of mind and where he was, so the stupid shit was working a little. Of course, that wasn\’t the point. The point was that Veer had left his pregnant wife on her own and now there was smoke in the sky and she was getting a little . . . well, quite a lot, genuinely bloody scared.

Maya picked up her mobile phone and stared at it, waving it back and forth slightly as it flickered between having one bar of signal and no bars at all. Considering how the town was in the middle of nowhere, the mobile coverage around Seven Oaks wasn\’t so bad, Maya had always supposed. However, they were out on the edge of town in the house they had rented and it seemed that sometimes getting a usable mobile signal was about standing in a certain place on one leg with one of your hands held high in the air. 

She pulled up WhatsApp so that she would be using the property Wi-Fi, rather than the primary cell signal. The call just rang and rang, however, and he didn\’t answer it. If Veer was doing this on purpose, she might have to kill him.

\”Screw this,\” Maya said, her voice eerie in the otherwise quiet house, and ambled off­—in her usual duck walk—to put some clothes and a mask on. A couple of minutes later, she headed out to the outside of the house, holding up her phone and slowly rotating around while trying to get a signal. As soon as Maya walked into the steel-covered haze she knew the face mask she had gotten accustomed to wearing during the pandemic wasn’t going to help her anymore.

Still, at about fifty feet from the back of the house, two clear bars of signal appeared on the phone as she held it in front of her. Before she even had a chance to consider whether she wanted to dial Veer\’s number or maybe send a message and seem a little less paranoid, Veer\’s missed call notification came up on the phone screen. Checking it, Maya found that it was from about ten minutes before.

The phone showed that there was a voicemail message, as well, which Maya noticed as she wandered slowly and aimlessly further out into the unkempt garden with its dense undergrowth, where it started to catch the slope down towards the creek. Maya brought the phone up to her ear and began to listen at the same time as she glanced over to her left.

\”Maya,\” came Veer\’s voice on the other end of the phone. It was distorted and crackly in the way that voices often are over a mobile phone when there\’s not a lot of signal to work with. \”It\’s Veer,\” he added as if it was somehow necessary. The lines of trees that had previously blocked some of what Maya could see, now opened out a little to show a much better view of the land in front of where she stood.

Straightaway, she came to realize that the wind had picked up tremendously; gusts above thirty miles an hour were bending the pines over to the southwest at a thirty-degree angle, causing several unsecured objects to fly across the yard. She watched a white plastic chair become airborne a little north of the creek and slam partway through the western property line\’s chain-link fence. The chair hung there, quivering in the wind right where the fence caught it, appearing to levitate a foot off the ground. 

 The smudge on the horizon was no longer a smudge at all, but a thick, charcoal-black smear, as if a child had taken the side of a black crayon and spent several minutes rubbing it vigorously across the sky.

\”There\’s a fire, Maya,\” Veer\’s voice said into her ear \”and everyone seems worried. I\’m on foot and out on Skyway. I\’m gonna try to come and get you, but you should get to Sarah and Derek for safety first.\”

There was a pause and, for a moment, Maya thought it was Veer putting the phone down. Then he spoke again, a tone in his voice that was different even over the bad line, which sent a sickening wave of fear through her. \”I love you, Maya. I love you so much. And, I\’m sorry . . . (here, his voice cracked) for earlier.\”

[#]

Sarah was already approaching the front of the house when Maya returned from the back garden, her wind-whipped hair looking like an abandoned swallow\’s nest. As much as it was a relief to see her, the long-time resident\’s worried expression only deepened Maya\’s panic. 

\”Maya, honey,\” Sarah called. \”Looks like there\’s a big fire nearby.\”

\”I\’ve seen it,\” she replied, \”I was just out in the back garden and the sky to the . . .\” Maya began to cough—a tickle in the back of her throat, similar to how she felt when spring allergies began had set her off. 

\”Could you tell how far?\” Sarah asked as she reached her.

\”I don\’t know,\” Maya replied, breathing hard to get her coughing under control. \”The big black blotch is just on the horizon, but . . .\” she looked upwards, where every break in the tree cover showed thick grey tendrils of smoke rising to stain the sky. There was an acrid odor, and ash was drifting down like snow, settling on her eyelashes.

Sarah looked at the house. \”Where\’s Veer?\” she asked. \”Is he in the house?\”

\”Um, no,\” Maya said, finding herself embarrassed and reluctant to tell the truth, despite the situation. \”He went out to the shops on Skyway.\”

Sarah looked over at the Tesla, mild confusion on her features. \”On foot?\”

\”Yep,\” Maya replied with a shrug and a roll of her eyes. \”I can\’t get through to him,\” she said with a small tremble of her lips. She kicked at the grimy, sooty ash collecting under her feet and felt hope deflating like an old balloon.

Sarah hugged her. \”You want to come in with us, honey?\” she offered.

Maya nodded gratefully.

[#]

Tuesday, September 11, 2020, 2:00 p.m.

\”This is Melvin Stein reporting from just outside of the sleepy town of Seven Oaks in San Bernardino County, California, where a fast-moving wildfire seems to have started this morning somewhere in the area to the northeast of town on Hwy 84.

Ground crews report that the canyon is roaring with furious fire. Unchecked by man or nature, the merciless consumption ebbed, then flowed, exploded instantly, as a rich pocket of dead pines combusted like a Kuwait oil well fire. An hour earlier, flames the size of skyscrapers sprinted up the sharp western face of the surrounding hills all the way to the top. The rolling and crackling sounded like a million fireplace fires released from their controlled confines, free to rampage wildly. Punctuating that sound was the terrific snap and crash of enormous pines as the inferno leapt uphill, roasting everything in its path. Throughout the day, firemen saw animals fleeing the fire, hopping and darting frantically to put as much distance as possible between them and the leaping flames. Deer were overtaken at a full run.\”

 [#]

Maya and Veer managed to escape the inferno that ravaged the town of Seven Oaks—the chicken coop on their property did not.