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1
The family members settled for the night among the sweet-smelling spindle trees and eucalyptus along the eastern boundary of the yard. They had been restless all day from the sharp scent of smoke in the air, the far-off call of sirens, the busy staccato motor noise of humans in the hills around them. Delinquent flames showed on a ridgeline to the north, orange-black in the distance.
Dread of fire, an age-old fear, was bred into their bones. They gathered as a family that sweltering October night, the last of their lives. For all their nervousness, they performed their usual evening rituals, grooming one another, shaping their tree-bough bedding for the night. Janey and Arbor, always the best of friends, played at tossing clumps of leaves and broken-off sticks onto the cargo nets strung between wooden posts below them.
They fell into wakeful sleep one after another: Mister Jeepers, Monk, Chow-Chow, Stella. Veronica curled up with the playful youngster she had adopted, Bee Bee. Pamela slept with her daughter, Amy. Eric paired off with the elderly Bess.
Out of the dark came a laser pinprick of light. Odd, dancing, crimson, it searched among its targets until it settled upon Booth, the pepper-haired patriarch, who lay alone in a self-created sling of branches high up in a eucalyptus.
The gunshot broke the night open.
The family startled instantly awake, and the yard echoed with screeches, barks, and howls. As the others scattered, Booth remained inert and motionless at the foot of the tree.
The night air filled with sharp, echoing reports, one after another, spaced among the screams. Moment by moment, the members of the family fell. The big chain-link fence cut off all retreat. There was nowhere to run. The killing took but six minutes.
Finally only a single lost soul survived, an eight-year-old male, running along the ditch on the grassy western side of the compound, frantic after the death ruckus of the others. He sped not away but toward the shooter.
Confused, or angry, bent on revenge.
The ruby laser dot searched, discovered, settled. Five grams of copper-clad lead caught the last survivor with a glancing blow on his right shoulder, spun him around, and pushed him into the concrete ditch.
Then, silence. A few night birds called, poorwills and mourning doves. Above, through the leaves, the far-off, uncaring stars. Somewhere to the east a two-stroke engine sputtered, sounding barely there.
Later that night, the dry October winds pushed the flames down out of the hills into the parched grasses and brittle, needle-heavy trees of the compound. But the wildfire found nothing left to kill and, in its impotent rage, could do nothing more than cook the dead.
