Chapter Text
No one was there to greet him when he finally arrived at the small rest stop at the park’s edge in his used truck. Keith stepped out of the driver’s seat, swung his backpack over his shoulder, and let the car door fall shut. He left the keys inside; someone would be coming along to collect and store it until his return at the end of the summer.
Keith eyed his surroundings—tall redwood trees, bright green leaves, towering cliffs, a stunning blue sky—and steeled himself. He had an eight mile hike ahead of him just to get to the lookout. Once there, he had three months to spend surrounded by trees and rocks, completely cut off from civilization and all of the shitty people in it.
The Altea Nature Reserve was a sprawling park of forests and canyons located in wildfire territory. A fire lookout’s job was pretty self-explanatory: keep an eye peeled for wildfires and make sure visitors don’t accidentally start one. It was a well-paying gig that didn’t require any special degrees or experience. Just three months of self-imposed exile.
After what went down at the Garrison, Keith had nowhere to go. So nowhere was exactly where he went.
He took out his map, a confusing document of swirling contour lines and faded ink, and found the dirt path that would eventually lead him to Red Lion Lookout—his new home for the rest of the summer. Beside it was a wooden bulletin board covered in bleached posters bearing slogans like, “Only YOU can prevent forest fires!” and “Fireworks are ILLEGAL within park bounds!” Keith flicked a peeled corner on the fireworks poster and set out down the path.
Though he knew that eight miles wasn’t that long a hike, it felt endless. Dappled sunlight filtered through forest canopy gave way to rocky inclines. Small cliffs blended into lush rivers and animal tracks. Terrain that changed around every corner stretched out Keith’s sense of time. After an hour of walking and climbing, he spotted a stag grazing by the path. It must have heard or smelled his presence, but it remained unmoved.
Sweat collected underneath the tufts of hair at the nape of his neck. The employee manual suggested getting a haircut and shaving before starting as a fire lookout. Keith didn’t bother. If his long black hair grew out, what did it matter? The point of solitude was to be by his goddamn self. It wasn’t like the redwoods could comment about his appearance.
The thought was freeing. For the first time since he could remember, Keith wasn’t beholden to anyone. He could feel his memories of the Garrison—of Shiro—dropping away like left behind luggage. Baggage from another world to be claimed at another time.
He arrived around dusk. Red Lion Lookout looked the same as the fire lookout on the cover of the employee manual. It was a square structure on 40 foot high stilts with large glass windows on every wall. Unlike the manual, this tower had a bright red roof. Easy to spot from far away. A small shack Keith believed was an outhouse and shower stood off to the right of a narrow staircase twisting around the structure’s legs. He climbed the wooden stairs, paying no heed to their creaking and sighing.
The lookout appeared bigger from the inside, but only just. It had all the essentials—a bed, sink, stove, desk. Four lightbulbs attached to the ceiling. A box of leftover canned food and linens from the former lookout, plus a plug-in fan and an empty journal. In the middle of the room, a strange metal cylinder with a map was fastened to the floor.
Keith dropped his backpack on the floor, kicking up a small storm of dust. Home sweet home.
Before he began to unpack, something on the desk caught his eye. It was a handheld radio and a sloppily scrawled note that said, “CALL LANCE FOR TRAINING.” His boss, perhaps?
The radio was a small, red device that neatly fit in the palm of Keith’s hand. The brand name BAYARD was inscribed in white along the side, and the buttons to adjust the volume and open transmission were arranged in a neat row.
He held the radio to his mouth and pressed his thumb on the transmission button. “Keith Kogane, reporting for duty.” He winced at his own words. Old habits die hard. Keith waited a moment before continuing more casually. “Is anyone there? I just got here and I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to do.”
The radio’s speaker exploded with static as someone adjusted the frequency and volume of the channel.
“Hey fresh meat!” a cheerful voice said through the radio. “Welcome to Red Lion Lookout. My name’s Lance, and I’ll be showing you the ropes. Or dictating them. Whatever. Anyways, do me a favor and look out your northern window.” Keith crossed the room, still holding the radio to his mouth. The sun had set hours ago, so he squinted over the treetops. “See that mountain? See the little box perched on the cliff? Where the cablecars end up? Wave!”
Keith raised a hand in that direction. The small, silhouetted building peeking through the trees must be the lookout tower where Lance was stationed. It didn’t seem so far from this altitude, but on foot it would take hours to reach.
“You waving yet? You waving? See me waving? You see me?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m waving,” Keith responded. In truth, he could barely see the tower at all, let alone the lookout inside.
“Good. If there’s ever a natural disaster, alien invasion, or some other calamity, everybody gets on a cablecar and reports here to Blue Lion Lookout for extraction. Because I have access to the park helicopter pad.” Lance sounded very pleased with this fact. “Or, if you need rescuing, I’ll swoop in and save you. I’m sort of an ace pilot, no big deal.”
“Got it.”
There was a lull on the other side of the line. “Cool,” Lance finally said. “So new guy, what are ya running from?”
Keith narrowed his eyes, and frowned in the general direction of Blue Lion Lookout. “Why do you think I’m running from anything?”
“C’mon. No one takes this job unless they have some tragic backstory. I just want to see how your trauma compares to the other lookouts at Green and Yellow.”
“Sorry to disappoint, but I don’t have much of a backstory,” Keith answered. “I’m just a Garrison burnout looking for some fresh air. That’s all there is to it.” Keith placed the radio in its charger, satisfied that the conversation was finally over. Five minutes talking to that guy made three months of total quiet sound heavenly.
But to assume that Lance was done talking was too optimistic.
“Wait a second, you’re Keith? From the Garrison? Garrison prodigy Keith?” Lance asked. “No. No, no, no, no, no. First you overshadow me in pilot school, then you show up at freaking Altea to ruin my summer gig?”
Keith had come to this park to live in this stupid tower so he could escape the Garrison and all its memories. Some asshole dredging it back up again was irritating, but that same guy having the gall to say Keith was ruining his summer? He snatched the radio off the receiver.
“What the hell is your deal? I don’t even know you,” Keith said into the radio.
“He doesn’t know me he says, what the hell is your deal he says! We were in the same Garrison entry class. You got the only fighter pilot position, and I got put in cargo. You’re the cause of my tragic backstory!”
He felt a twinge of sympathy, but a twinge wasn’t nearly enough for Keith to back down, not when he was this keyed up. “You sucking at flying isn’t my problem.”
“I’ll fly the chopper down there and make it your problem!”
Keith smiled that cocky, shit-eating grin that often got him in trouble at the Garrison. “So that’s where your second-rate cargo piloting license got you. The emergency airlifter at a national park in the middle of nowhere.”
“Look, systemic job security in the freight and shipping industry is nothing to joke about. And also not my fault. Not that it matters since I’m your superior officer now. Ha! Guess we know who the real failure around here is.”
Keith’s jaw tightened. He replaced the radio in its charger, because no way did he come here just so some cargo pilot could mouth off at him. He unzipped his backpack and started unpacking his possessions and wiping the dust off the counters. The large windows on every wall grew opaque as dusk gave way to night.
“Hey Keith? You there?” Keith didn’t even look at the radio. He took his knife out of his pocket and rank his finger along the smooth metal. “Sooooo, uhhhh, I guess we’ll put off training until tomorrow. Lance, out.” Lance’s voice crackled through the speakers before it went silent.
Keith fell asleep that night to the rhythmic whirring of cicadas and the rustling of leaves.
He slept in the next morning and missed the sunrise. The pillow provided in the lookout was a bit musty for his taste, but it was nothing he couldn’t get used to in time. And he had all the time in the world.
The day was spent getting the lookout tower in order. Keith swept the room, cleaned out the outhouse, cleared spiderwebs out of the shower. Many hours were lost washing windows so that Keith could feasibly see the outside and repairing the analogue clock on the wall. He swore the second hand ticked too slowly, but had no other clocks to compare. The one thing he didn’t touch was the round thing in the center, which looked like some sort of official equipment.
Keith scribbled a small entry in the empty journal on his desk.
Day 1
First day on the new job, no fires spotted. Yet.
He read over his handiwork and felt that the content was a bit thin. If Keith was just going to record whether or not he saw any fire, he’d never write anything at all. He tapped his pen on the paper a few times. Cautious, he wrote ‘Shiro,’ only to immediately cross it out. It turns out he wasn’t quite ready to dive into his past either. Recording fires would have to do.
Lance didn’t check in again until late afternoon.
“Hello?” Eyeing the radio sitting in its charger, Keith didn’t move to answer it. He heard Lance sigh. “That’s what I thought. Look, I don’t know if you’re there, but here goes. Sorry for the questions and accusations and all that. I obviously crossed a line or struck a nerve...somewhere. So, yeah, sorry. I’ll drop in again in an hour to repeat all that, in case you’re out.” The line went dead.
It wasn’t much of an apology, but it was more than Keith had expected from Lance. He let the silence lie between them for a while before getting up to answer.
After clearing his throat, Keith reopened communications. “I guess if we’re working together for the next three months, we might as well try to get along.” Keep it professional. In the very least, Lance would give Keith something to fill up the lonely hours in his tower.
Lance’s sigh of relief fuzzed the audio. “Good to hear. There’s all this other crap I’m supposed to teach you, and the silent treatment would have made that kinda hard.”
“Let’s just get it over with.”
“Uh, sure. Alrighty, see the contraption in the middle of the room? That’s called the Alfor Fire Finder.”
Lance was talking about a circular topographic map attached to a cylinder as tall as Keith’s waist. Two sights stood parallel on with side of the circle. They reminded him of the scope of a gun, but more primitive. The Garrison budget was in a very different league than the National Park Service. Learning to do things without a computer’s help was a part of the job.
Keith vaguely heard a popping sound behind him, but he was too fixated on the fire finder and the sound of Lance’s voice to notice. “If you see smoke, this little buddy will help you locate the source, even in the dark. Pretty handy. Okay, let’s start by looking at the—the fuck? I mean, just move the—Shit!”
“What?”
“Eastern window. Now.”
Keith spun for a moment before figuring out which window pointed east. He crossed the room and looked outside. A stream of smoke rose from the trees. He heard a crack, and a firework whistled through the air and towards the sky. It exploded in a shower of red and blue sparks.
“Hell no,” Lance said through the radio. “Keith, you gotta get down there and stop those fireworks. We’re three months into a drought, anything hotter than a fried egg could light up the entire forest if it hits the wrong patch of dry leaves. Looks to me that they’re coming from the lake, around, uhhhh, 43 degrees north, 107 degrees south.”
“How did you—”
“Behold, the power of the Fire Finder! I’ll teach you how to do it on your own later. Get moving!”
Keith nodded once and stopped himself. Gestures and facial expressions were completely lost over radio. “On it.”
“Make sure you bring your Bayard.”
“My what?”
“Your radio! No point in having an emergency pilot on hand if you can’t tell me you’re in trouble.” Keith grabbed the Bayard radio on the way out and stuck it in his pocket.
Day 1 of his new job—his new life—was finally giving him something to write about.