Blackshot Battalion
It was a great convection engine beginning to chug to life, the leaping fire taking its first shuddering breaths as it created its own atmospheric currents to feed itself ever more oxygen. It pulled at the crew’s clothes, a buffeting now which would soon turn to yanking as the fire burned hotter and demanded more and more and more. It would eventually become so greedy it would snap trees with its snatching winds, pulling all into itself in its infernal rapaciousness.
Then the crew was running, sprinting as fast as they could under the bulk of gear they carried on their persons. It was only seventy-five, maybe a hundred yards to the dozer-line cut across the ridgeline yesterday and as one the crew surged upwards toward it.
On The Grind
Her family had been struggling against this exact fight for generations, fending off land-hoarders and corporate conglomerates since they had first settled the area in 1889. They had fled the South, finding promise and early success as homesteaders on the land straddling the Great Plains-Ozarks-Deep South triangle. All in all, the early Hatcher clan had managed to grow their modest holdings five-fold over two generations – whether from generationally nurtured skills in the sugarcane fields of Louisiana, those created in the harsh new environment, or a mix of both.