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.