PSYCHO WINGNUT INFERNO

-a wildfire slasher saga from the mind of James Barnums

Our tale of treacherous psychosis and murder begins with a very strange man sitting alone in his low rent lodgings in Eugene, Oregon.  The fact that it’s summer is evident by the bright sun and blue sky, which is barely visible through the black pentagram emblazoned tapestries covering the windows.  The date is July 10th, in fact, about the time summer really arrives in wet and soggy Western Oregon.  This man, Jacob Langley aka “Joker” to his fellow firefighters (a moniker given to him because of the insane grin that is usually visible upon his countenance) with long blonde curly hair and a very wild look in his eyes, concentrated his scattered attention on lighting candles on a make-shift altar with wooden matches.  His hand was quite jittery, very likely due to the fact that he was coming down from a sizable dose of crystal methamphetamine.  Finally, he was able to accomplish the task of setting the candles aflame.  A statue of Beelzebub sat in the center of the altar.  The horned goat glared ominously with red eyes at his disciple, who in turn stared back at the menacing image with reverence and awe.  Jacob sat with legs crossed in front of the altar and began to chant in some obscure forgotten dialect.  Occasionally, a few words in English left his mouth including “Praise Lucifer, Exalted One” and “All hail Satan, Prince of Darkness”.  Following about 5 minutes of steady chanting, he grew quiet and entered into a state of malevolent meditation.  His eyeballs began to roll disturbingly in their sockets.  His eyelids fluttered spasmodically as he slipped into deep demonic trance.  Suddenly, a cheap pre-paid cellular phone started ringing and vibrating on a nearby table.  Normally, this would not have brought Jacob out of his trance but because he was on call with the forest fire crew, his eyes popped open and he grabbed the phone.  A glance at the incoming caller on the tiny digital screen verified that it was the Willamette Woods fire crew calling.  Jacob shook his head back and forth rather forcefully in an effort to return to reality before answering the call.  “Hello”, he murmured after regaining a bit of composure.  “Hey Jacob” the familiar voice of fire crew boss Jimmy Clifton resounded with urgency.  “Get to the fire station NOW! The crew has been called to a wildfire in Central Washington.”  “Ok boss”, Jacob replied.  “I am on my way.”  He blew out the candles, gave a small final bow to his evil master, grabbed his gear and quickly scurried out the door.

A hundred miles away on the outskirts of the city of Portland, two friends sat on a couch, passing a multicolored glass water pipe back and forth.  “Man, this snow bud is really potent!” exclaimed James Barnums aka “Stream”, referring to the high quality indica variety of marijuana that they were smoking.  The tall bearded man exhaled a cloud of dense smoke and coughed forcefully.  His equally tall but clean shaven and lankier friend Tim Baldwin aka “Hammerhead” took the pipe and stated, “Yeah, this is some of the best weed we have had in a long time” in agreement before proceeding to toke.  Stream finished coughing and stated, “This has not been much of a fire season so far.  Being two hours away from headquarters does not seem to be causing us any problems.”  Stream and Hammerhead had broken with company policy by relocating from Eugene to Portland without informing their superiors.  Technically speaking, as “on call” firefighters, they were not supposed to be more than an hour away from home base during fire season.  “Well, it’s only the 10th of July.  This is when things usually get rolling”, Hammerhead replied.  From out of nowhere, both of their cell phones began ringing simultaneously.  “Oh shit” Stream shouted.  “That could be the fire call!”  They both rushed over to their phones and saw “Willamette Woods” clearly displayed on caller ID.  Stream answered the phone and was mildly annoyed to hear the voice of Assistant Crew Boss, Ken Brooks, on the other end.  Stream got along well with almost everyone from the fire crew but just could not see eye-to-eye with the anal power-tripping Ken Brooks.  “Hey James”, Brooks said in his usual pissed-off sounding voice.  “We have a fire call.”  Everyone else on the crew referred to James by his long term nickname “Stream” but Ken Brooks refused to do so because he deemed it “unprofessional.”  “Ok”, Stream stated.  “Hammerhead and I are out camping on the McKenzie River (a flat-out lie) but we will get to the station right away.”  “Fuck!” Brooks shouted as if someone had just taken a massive poop in his morning breakfast cereal.  “Get your asses down to the station- NOW!”  Hammerhead had been lucky enough to get the call from Jen, Willamette Woods mild-mannered office assistant.  “We are a little out of town now” he explained, “but we will get there as fast as we can”.  “Ok, no problem” she assured him.  “They really need people with your high level of experience on the crew.  They won’t leave without you”.  Forty-five minutes later, as they were driving down Interstate 5 at 90 miles per hour, Jen called Hammerhead’s cell phone again.  “They are about to leave without you!” she exclaimed.  “Ken Brooks is fiercely pissed at both of you, while Jimmy Clifton is trying to talk him down.  Looks like a couple of rookies are taking your place.”  Even though the elder Clifton was the Crew Boss and Brooks was merely his assistant, Brooks held a lot of favor with the company owner.  “Don’t let them leave”, Hammerhead sequestered.  “We will be there soon!”  “I will try to stall them” Jen responded, “but hurry up!”  Just as Hammerhead was hanging up the phone, cars were starting to back up in a traffic jam on the Interstate near the southern outskirts of Salem- the state capital.  “Shit, we don’t have time for this” Stream shouted.  Suddenly, he veered the tiny Geo Prism that he was driving on to the right shoulder of the interstate highway and began passing stopped cars at a high rate of speed.  “Oh my God” Hammerhead screamed.  “We are going to die!”  To say that it was a white knuckle ride from Portland to Eugene would be a major understatement.  Miraculously, they made it there safely in less than an hour and a half.  As the Geo was pulling in to the dusty Willamette Woods gravel parking lot like a bat out of hell, the company pick-up trucks were pulling out.  When Clifton and Brooks saw that it was Hammerhead and Stream in the little red car, they slammed on the brakes, stopped, and threw the two rookie replacements out of the vehicle.  “Get in the fucking truck!” Ken Brooks yelled at them.  “It’s only because we need experience on the crew that I am letting you come but I will deal with you assholes later!”  Stream and Hammerhead, both very relieved to have made it in the nick of time, did as instructed.  They had come very close to missing the chance to earn a few thousand dollars a week!

This is a good opportunity to explain a bit about the workings of the company known as Willamette Woods and contract forest firefighting crews in general, since most people that are not directly involved with contract crews know very little to nothing about them.  Willamette Woods is a privately owned company that obtains contracts from state and federal government to suppress wildfires.  Even though the firefighters do not work directly for the government, they are under close supervision by “overhead” government officials during every assignment.  Each crew consists of 20 firefighters including a crew boss, assistant crew boss, and a few squad bosses that share the daunting task of keeping 15 or so underling grunts in line and focused on the job at hand.  Thus far, you have been informed of the occurrences that transpired for 3 of the 20 firefighters from the crew (Jacob, Hammerhead, and Stream) on the day of July 10th.  While it is not necessary to give the details of what led all 20 individuals to the fire station that afternoon, you should be made aware of the back story of one more important person in our narrative, a strapping young lad known as Jeff Zahn.  For you see, a glimpse into his psyche will reveal much about the horrific events that are about to unfold.

Is it possible for one man to “accidentally” kill two people on separate occasions during the course of a brief two year period?  If the words of Jeff Zahn are to be believed, that is exactly what happened to him.  Jeff was still in bed during the early afternoon of July 10^th, sleeping off a hangover from the night before.   He had spent the night drinking with his rowdy friends in the infamously rowdy neighborhood of Eugene, Oregon known as “The Whitaker”.  If you’re ever in Eugene and want to get into some craziness, Whitaker is undoubtedly the place to go.  The neighborhood has even adopted the Jolly Roger pirate flag as its coat of arms, if that gives you any idea of the mentality of its many unorthodox residents.  As the clock ticked past noon on that summer day, Jeff mildly thrashed about in bed.  He was deep in that subconscious realm where dreams merge with memories.  Unfortunately, the slices of the past that penetrated his weary mind were quite unpleasant.  “No, no!” he mumbled in his sleep as his body twisted the sheets around him.  Jeff was reliving an incident from 4 years earlier.  He was on the edge of a freight yard in Milwaukie, Wisconsin.  A full moon combined with a small campfire to create an eerie glow on the graffiti covered train cars that were going nowhere.  A group of men of the hooligan ruffian variety were standing in a circle, intent on the blood sport that transpired within the center.  Life has taken some strange turns to lead him to this point.  Jeff’s youth had been pretty normal through his completion of high school in West Eugene.  It was after high school that his life and the path of normalcy took two distinctly different routes.  Rather than moving on to college as most of his compatriots had, he decided that he wanted to travel and see what the USA really had to offer.  The only problem was that with his meager background, he had no money to finance these endeavors.  His solution was to take to the rails as a freight train hopper.  At first, he stayed alive through panhandling and petty thievery but was barely able to obtain enough to eat in this manner.  It was on the train tracks outside of Albuquerque that he encountered his first street fighting competition that offered cash compensation.  Basically, all competitors would throw money into a pool and then proceed to beat the hell out of each other.  It was a last man standing, winner takes all, bare-knuckled, brutal endeavor but Jeff discovered quickly that he was one tough son of a bitch and more often than not, he walked away with some cuts, bruises, and a pocketful of cash.  At 6 foot 4 inches tall, he was a muscular 200 pound man with very large hands.  He was somewhat surprised to discover that after a few shots of liquor, he seemed almost impervious to pain. This made him a natural in the rough and tumble world of street fighting.  His bouts had numbered in the dozens before that fateful night in Milwaukie that currently caused his restless sleep.  His dreaming mind could see it all so clearly, even though the events had transpired years earlier. Jeff stood across from a big black guy in the moonlit circle, as the onlookers cheered, jeered, and shouted for blood.  The fight had been pretty much even up to that point.  The black guy was big and tough.  He had landed a few good shots to Jeff’s face.  The young fighter could feel his eye swelling and his nose starting to bleed as he realized that this dude might get the best of him.  Jeff had noticed before the fight that he was not quite feeling up to par that evening.  He had attributed it to the fact that he had fucked some little freight hopping slut in a boxcar a mere hour before the showdown.  When he came all over the grungy girl’s backside, he noticed that the amount of semen expelled was quite excessive.  So much so, that she had expounded, “My God, you’re spewing a fucking lake back there!”  It was never a good idea to have sex before a physically challenging activity and he felt that he had given up more of his essence on this occasion than usual.   So when he finally gained a slight advantage over his combatant due to a missed punch, he wanted to go ahead and put him away.  The black guy flailed wildly as his potentially devastating right hook missed his mark.  Jeff leaned in and landed a mighty left jab to the face, which caused his opponent’s broad nose to explode in a torrent of blood.  He was left stunned and defenseless from the broken nose, so when Jeff brought down a powerhouse left hook, no attempt was made to block it.  That should have been the end of the fight right there.  The black man’s eyes rolled back in his head in a way that Jeff had seen many times.  This was a clear indicator that he would soon be laying on the ground.  Unfortunately, one of the bloodthirsty spectators at the edge of the circle screamed “Go ahead and take him out!” at this point.  That was undoubtedly what had egged him on, but when Jeff looked back at the scene so many times later, he knew that he alone was responsible for his own actions.  Instead of letting his victim fall to the ground, Jeff decided to go in for one more punch.  He delivered a vicious right hook that impacted heavily with the left side of the brawler’s face, very near the temple.  In retrospect, Jeff realized that he had come close to knocking the guy’s brains out.  A river of blood erupted from his right ear with such force that it sprayed the ground a few feet away.  Finally, the defeated fighter hit the ground like a bag of bricks.  He never got up.  His body convulsed as he took his last breath and all life slipped away.  The cheer of the 10 or so people surrounding the scene was close to deafening.  No one had ever seen action like that before!

Jeff continued to toss and turn in bed as his dreamscape moved on to a different scene altogether.  He was transported from the Milwaukie freight yard to a thick brambly forest outside of Fort Hood, Georgia.  Zahn was not a man without conscience.  Shortly after the Milwaukie incident, he had given up freight hopping and street fighting altogether.  He had spent a quiet reflective year living with his parents again in Eugene before he decided to enlist in the US Army.  He figured that his brawler background could serve well in the military.  Instead of just beating the shit out of people for money, he could utilize his angst to combat the enemies of freedom throughout the world.  This feeling of becoming part of a greater good was very much what inspired him to enlist.  Yet, destiny had something entirely different in mind.  As they were conducting training exercises a mere month into boot camp, Jeff was assigned to participate in mock “seek and destroy” missions in the thick Georgia forest to prepare for actual warfare.  He snuck up on his “adversary”, a dumb kid from Iowa who was hiding behind a loblolly pine tree, without making a sound.  If not for the events that happened that day, Zahn would have undoubtedly made a remarkable soldier.  When he was less than 40 feet away from the teenage recruit, who seemed to be lost since there was no corn field in sight, Jeff pulled his rifle and fired 3 rounds into the cornhusker’s chest.  The kid from Iowa hit the ground with a thud and Jeff later remembered thinking, “Wow, he is a good actor, at least. “  As he walked up to the blue eyed blonde teenager lying on the ground, Jeff said “Ha, ha, I got you.  You better be more careful next time.”  It was then that Jeff noticed pools of blood, real blood, soaking through the slain man’s fatigues.  He fell to the ground, sobbing beside the dead kid.  That a mistake like this had happened was almost unbelievable.  Of course, the rifle was supposed to contain blanks but someone had accidentally inserted live rounds.  The Army covered it up, gave a bullshit story to the kid’s family, and granted Jeff Zahn an honorable discharge when they realized how traumatized he was from the incident.  He spent less than a month in the Army after this experience, during which he hardly ate, slept, or talked and was merely a shell of a man.  The “friendly fire” fatality, combined with the Milwaukie freight yard manslaughter, was just too much for Jeff to handle.  He was plagued with guilt and insomnia.  Some part of him could not help but wonder if all of this had happened for a reason.  Perhaps he was on Earth to eliminate the weak and inferior.  If the Universe chose his role to be that of the Grim Reaper, maybe he should just embrace it.  Most people were stupid and deserved to die anyway.  Then he realized that this line of thinking was insane and to be avoided.  He could not kill again.  He had to control himself.  It was this thought that made him cry out in his delirious hung over sleep on the afternoon of July 10^th.  Suddenly, the phone rang loudly awakening him from disturbed slumber.  He had it to his ear before he was even fully conscious.  The voice of Ken Brooks on the other end brought him completely back from dream land.  “Jeff, we have a fire call.  Get your ass to the station- NOW!” Brooks insisted.  “Be there soon”, Jeff replied.  He splashed some cold water on his face, grabbed his duffel bag, and hit the street running.

“You two got really lucky on that one”, Squad Boss Anna Ellis said to Stream and Hammerhead as the company vehicle left town.  “I feel kind of bad for those rookies” she continued, referring to the two guys that had been replaced at the last minute.  “They were both really excited to go to their first fire”.  Anna Ellis was only in her late 20’s but had been fighting forest fires for quite some time.  She was 6 foot 2 inches tall, 190 pounds of muscle, and was one tough lesbian chick.  She could beat most of the men on the crew in a fight without much trouble.  She had obtained a full scholarship to the University of Texas on the rowing team, which was evident by her powerful arms and biceps.  If Anna started swinging a pulaski (a firefighting tool that looks much like a pick-axe), it would be advisable to get the hell out of her way.  “Yeah, too bad for the rookies” Gary Mackerly chimed in.  “But it would not be the same without Stream and Hammerhead out here.  Plus, I am just starting to get Stream savvy with the radio.”  He referred to the fact that this was Stream’s first season as a Squad Boss Trainee, hence Mackerly had been instructing him on proper radio communication.  Gary Mackerly was the oldest person on the crew, by far.  He was so old, in fact, that when he farted; a cloud of dust exuded from his backside.  He had decades of experience and could have easily been a crew boss, but he just did not want to deal with the responsibility and headaches involved.  Gary stroked his long white mustache as he rode in the front passenger seat of the vehicle.  This was one of the old timer’s signature gestures.  Stream leaned forward from the backseat and playfully smacked Gary on his baldhead.  “Hey, I would be lost without you to instruct me, old man!” Stream joked.  Gary turned back and gave Stream what he called the “hairy eyeball”, a crazy ass look that was somehow both comical and very intense.  “Don’t give me that look, man” Stream said.  “Save something for the hill.  We are not even out of town yet!”

In one of the other pick-up trucks, Jeff Zahn was driving with Ken Brooks sitting beside him.  Ken had taken Jeff under his wing, as of late, and was trying to mold him into a top notch firefighter.  That would have been all well and good, except for the fact that Brooks was such an asshole.  “Speed up, Zahn” Brooks instructed.  “You’re driving like my fucking Grandma.”  Jeff was happy to be moving up the leadership ladder with the company but he was having trouble coping with the added pressure from Brooks.  Another Squad Boss, Randy Keisenzeigel, chimed in from the back seat.  “I just don’t see why Jimmy Clifton is Crew Boss on this run”, he stated.  “I know that I could do a better job.”  Randy was the epitome of a power hungry control freak.  Clifton had trained Keisenzeigel during his early days as a firefighter but Randy had grown to disapprove of the laidback Clifton’s laissez-faire leadership style.  “If I were running this outfit” Randy continued, “you better believe we would be a lot more polished.  I would not allow long hair, facial piercings, all of this crazy Eugene hippie shit and we would march in a straight line to chow every night”.  Randy was an incredibly clean-cut guy amongst a crew of misfits.  For him, Willamette Woods was simply a stepping stone en route to a career with the government.  “Well, you’re not running the show, Adolf” said Brooks.  “So shut the fuck up!”  This comment caused everyone in the truck except Keisenzeigel to erupt with laughter.  Even though Ken Brooks was a major prick, he could be very funny sometimes.

For the most part, the eight hour ride to Central Washington State was uneventful.  When they pulled into the ICP (Incident Command Post) late that night, most of the crew members were hoping that they would be allowed to set up camp, get some sleep, and start work the following day.  This was often the case when they traveled several hours or more to a wildfire.  Yet, that was not the scenario that unfolded on this occasion.  Jimmy Clifton and Ken Brooks were inside the Forest Service Ranger Station for about 15 minutes discussing logistics and strategy with the Incident Management Team, while the crew readied their tools and equipment in the well-lit parking lot.  It was obvious by the urgency with which the Crew Boss and Assistant Crew Boss returned that they were not about to set up camp and drift off to dream land.  “Ok, listen up, people” Jimmy Clifton informed them in a deep commanding voice.  “We are starting out on night shift, Initial Attack.  He placed a topographical map in the center of the hood on one of the trucks and pointed in the upper left corner.  The crew gathered around the vehicle to study the map.  “The fire is working its’ way up this drainage now where lightning struck, the point of ignition.  They feel like we have a good chance of catching this thing if we jump on it hard tonight.  Otherwise, if it manages to climb out of this draw, it will cross the creek and burn into this entire wilderness. “As he made this last statement, his hand waved across the entire map, indicating the importance of them stopping the fire before it reached that section.  “It is very steep terrain with large Douglas Fir and Hemlock old growth trees.  There will be lots of snags (dead trees) and widow makers out there so it’s a heads up situation all night long.”  Jimmy continued, “All right let’s jump in the rigs and head out there to bust some ass!”  Following these words of encouragement, the crew loaded up and took off in their four truck caravan down a nearby Forest Service dirt road.  Their task was set before them.  It was going to be one hell of a long night.

The Willamette Woods crew leapt into their mission wholeheartedly.  They were bound and determined to prevent the fire from spreading across the small body of water that was labeled “Brice Creek” on their maps and into the vast Glacier Peak Wilderness Area.  What they did not realize was that they were working towards an impossible goal.  For you see, before their vehicle caravan even arrived on that dirt road in the middle of nowhere, the fire had already moved beyond that boundary.  As is so often the case in this line of work, they had received complete misinformation from the Forest Circus government morons atop the chain of command.  When Clifton and Brooks were being told by the Incident Commander that they needed to focus all of their efforts in keeping the fire West of Brice Creek, it was already voraciously burning up the woods East of there.  Information dissemination can be a major problem with so much bureaucracy involved.  The crew broke into its usual Initial Attack formation with the chainsaws in front, swampers behind them (guys that drag away the wood being cut by the chainsaws), followed by the hand tools (pulaskis, shovels, grub hoes).  They desperately tried to cut a three foot wide path into mineral soil, which theoretically at least, would prevent the fire from spreading.  As they were cutting line straight up hill in the darkness with major flames and heat all around them, Hammerhead swung his Pulaski and yelled at Stream, “Damn, this is some pretty gnarly shit!”  Smoke was billowing into their faces.  The bandanas that they had over their mouths and noses did little to improve their ability to breathe.  “Yeah, I know” Stream yelled back over the chainsaws and popping of the fire.  “I wish that I had not drunk so much beer last night now!  My guts are feeling pretty queasy.”  Suddenly , a tree that was torching right above them burnt through and fell towards the fire line.  “Snag!” someone screamed at just the right moment, causing Hammerhead and Stream to split apart.  The burning hemlock fell directly between them.  It was not a huge tree but still could have caused a major injury.  Stream used his shovel to throw dirt at the burning log, which brought the flames down considerably.  The sight of the bright orange flames and embers in the darkness was impressive and surreal.  Don “Mad Dog” Ruske was just a bit ahead of Stream in the line of firefighters.  He was cutting away at a dead log with his chainsaw, when it became apparent that this log was also a bee’s nest.  It was home to a hive of aggressive and nasty yellow jackets, to be more precise.  A cloud of angry buzzing yellow jackets filled the air.  Unfortunately for Stream, they flew directly at him.  He received a few painful stings on his neck and parts of his body that were not covered by protective gear.  “Fuck!” he screamed as he flailed his arms wildly.  Either through some allergic reaction or perhaps because last night’s beer just had to come out, Stream had the sudden, undeniable, unstoppable urge to take a shit.  “Stepping out!” he shouted to no one in particular.  He walked about 40 feet away from the fire line into the darkness and realized that he was teetering on the edge of a rather steep precipice.  He turned around, dropped his pants, and sent explosive diarrhea projecting over the side of the cliff.  Yes sir, this was turning into a delightful night on the hill indeed!

Somehow Willamette Woods managed to keep working at this frenetic level until the sun appeared in the Eastern sky.  Shortly after dawn, they received radio communication from overhead which told them that Brice Creek had been compromised (at no fault of their own) and that Glacier Peak Wilderness was now burning and spreading fast.  This changed the dynamic of the entire operation.  Fire crews were being deployed from all over the region.  Instead of trying to hurriedly catch the fire, they were now focusing on back burns and corralling the flames into a certain area.  After about 15 hours on the hill, Willamette Woods was instructed to go set up camp, get some rest, and await further instructions.  Luckily, they were not to remain on night shift and would be working in the daytime for the remainder of the Tri-Pan Fire, as the incident was now officially named.  Almost everyone on the crew fell asleep immediately after they fell into their tents at base camp, even though the weather outside was warm and sunny.  They were all thoroughly exhausted.  One person that did not go straight to sleep was Jacob “Joker” Langley.  He had inhaled a bit of crystal meth a few hours earlier so he was not quite ready for bed yet.  Besides, he had a very important call to make to a very important individual by the name of Satan.

Jacob reclined on his back in the tent and spoke quietly to his omniscient master.  “Yes, Lord Lucifer…I understand.  Thank you for allowing me access to your dominion.”  One of the reasons that Jacob thoroughly relished firefighting (he had never revealed this to anyone) was that when he was surrounded by flames in the forest, he felt almost as if he were at home in Hell.  By becoming immersed within a giant inferno, he felt that much closer to his Master.  “Yes…they are weak, my Lord.  They are stupid for not following you.”  He began to mumble incoherent nonsense as his face and body twitched.  His eyes closed and facial muscles erratically shuddered.  Finally, he came back into himself and opened his eyes.  The glare in them was truly demented.  “I will teach them, Lord Satan.  I will bring them into the darkness” was the last thing that he said before he fell into a deep and restful sleep.

Another firefighter that did not go right to sleep that afternoon was Don “Mad Dog” Ruske.  He tossed and turned miserably in his sleeping bag to no avail.  Don had been on the crew for a few years and had gotten the nickname “Mad Dog” from his overkill skills with the chainsaw.  It was said semi-jokingly among crew members that when Ruske was cutting fire line, he would cut half the trees down that needed to be cut and all of those that didn’t.  “Shit, this sucks”, Don said as he tossed and turned yet again.  Don had dealt with a rather harsh heroin addiction for years.  He truly wanted to rid himself of the stuff but just could not escape its grasp.  He appreciated the opportunity to remove himself from temptation by going to work in the wilderness for weeks at a time and distancing himself from his skeezy contacts.  Still, as any recovering addict can verify, dealing with withdrawal symptoms is no easy task.  “Fucking bitch”, he muttered.  To compound his problems, Don was in the midst of a nasty break up from his wife, whom he had caught in bed with his “best friend” a month earlier.  “I will kick you in the cunt, fucking whore” he said as he pictured his unfaithful wife’s face in his mind.  He would like nothing more than to put her permanently into a hole in the ground.  Just before he had gotten the fire call, she had announced her intentions to prevent him from seeing his son in the future.  Her official reason was due to his addiction but he knew that it was really out of spite.  He rolled over in the tent, removed some pills from a bottle, and swallowed a few down with a sip of water.  While he did not have any opiates, he was prescribed to the anti-psychotic medication Seraquil.  This often helped him calm down enough to sleep.  His years of therapy and treatment for schizophrenia were a secret that he guarded closely from his fellow firefighters, since he did not want to alarm them as to his unstable condition.  Another reason that he was tightlipped about his mental history was that such powerful tranquilizers as Seraquil were not permitted on the job so he could not let overhead know that he was taking them.   Don Ruske brooded and tossed for quite a while before the medication finally kicked in and he was able to fall asleep.  Now that the reader is becoming more familiar with this motley crew, I am sure you are probably thinking that this bunch of rejects would be hard pressed to paint a house, much less extinguish a forest fire.  It was never said that everyone on the Willamette Woods crew were perfect people, without problems.  If the truth be told, these fools had more issues than Time magazine!

Day after day unfolded in the wilderness.  The Willamette Woods crew sweated, toiled, and worked their asses off.  An advantage for them of the fire’s exponential growth (by day 10 it had reached 20,000 acres) was job security.  In their line of work, it is quite plausible to work one’s self out of a job.  If they actually put the fire out, they would be sent home where they would wait around for the next assignment without pay.  In their current situation, they were averaging 15 hours a day, which translated to some serious overtime pay.  They would all be looking at some rather fat bank accounts when they returned to Eugene.  An advantage of this type of work is that they had nowhere to spend their money in the wilderness so it just continually stacked up.  Their food was provided for free by the federal government, so that was an expense that they did not have to pay for out of pocket.  As the days moved on and fatigue increased, tensions ran high amongst some crew members.  Randy Keisenzeigel made a habit of undermining Jimmy Clifton.  So much so, that Randy would approach the Strike Team Leader and Division Supervisor (government overhead) and say things like “Clifton is going about this all wrong.  I disagree with his tactics entirely.  Here is what I would do…”  This was definitely bad form and did not encourage crew cohesion and solidarity.  Jacob Langley and Don Ruske butted heads over trivial matters.  A potential fist fight was thwarted when Anna Ellis jumped between the two and shouted, “If you fuckers don’t back off, I will kick both of your asses!”  The intense look in her green eyes showed that she was not kidding in the slightest.  They stood down rather than face the humiliation of being beat up by a woman in front of the entire crew.  Ken Brooks continued to ride Jeff Zahn hard, treating him like his own personal bitch.  Brooks had Zahn handling all of his Assistant Crew Boss paperwork as a “training measure”, which was highly unorthodox.  Zahn began to cave under the pressure.  His already fragile state of mind fell apart as he grew to resent Brooks more and more.  Amongst the crew members with sunnier dispositions were Hammerhead, Stream, and Gary Mackerly.  Their mental states were undoubtedly enhanced by a bottle of “special” hot sauce that Hammerhead had concocted.  They would add a few drops of the hash oil infused Tabasco to every meal.  Their THC levels were floating so high that not much could get them down.  Their joking and smiling even aroused suspicions among other crew member s, who speculated that they were sneaking off into the bushes to smoke weed.  This was a big no-no, since if anyone got caught with illicit substances, the entire crew would be sent home and lose the opportunity to make money.

The standard procedure for fire crews is that they work 14 days consecutively after which they are required to take 2 days for rest and recreation before returning to the hill.  Following 14 days straight of intense back breaking labor, accumulated fatigue becomes a major factor.  It is somewhat of a rarity for a contract crew to work 14 days on an assignment, take 2 days R & R, and then return to work on the same incident but that is exactly what occurred to Willamette Woods on the Tri-Pan Fire.  They received the news on the 13^th day that they were being “rolled over”.  They would receive paid R & R in Wenatchee, WA (the closest larger town) wherein they would stay in hotel rooms, eat at restaurants, have the chance to do laundry etc.  This made everyone on the crew ecstatic.  Not only would they finally be afforded some creature comforts, but they were in a position to return and make more money.  By the 14^th day, end of shift and heading to town was the only thing on anyone’s mind.  Visions of cold beers, big steaks, and soft beds danced in their minds like kids picturing toys on Christmas eve.  Most of that day was spent doing tedious “mop up” maneuvers.  This task involved finding and extinguishing heat in areas that had already burned over.   It’s definitely not the most exciting part of the job, but it all pays the same.  They had to hike 7 miles out of the wilderness to their vehicles so as afternoon moved on; Jimmy Clifton mobilized his troops and said “Alright everyone, let’s get the heck out of here.  The first case of beer is on me!”  They had walked less than a mile when suddenly the radio erupted, “Willamette Woods, we have a large slop over on Division Charlie, near the division break with Delta.  You are the closest crew to the slop over so you must engage.”  The color ran out of Clifton’s face as the news came over the radio.  This meant that they would have to turn around, hike back a few miles, and then go up a very steep mountain and dig hotline around a large section of fire that had burned across the line.  Ken Brooks pretty much spoke for the entire crew when he shouted, “Son of a bitch, that’s like putting 5 pounds of shit in a 1 pound bag.  We are fucked!”  Moans and groans of disappointment and despair were audible as the crew turned around and marched in the opposite direction from the luxuries that they so desired.

The crew of 20 tired and weary individuals moved with extreme urgency towards Division Charlie and the difficult task that awaited them there.  There was a real sense of immediacy since they needed to punch some line in around the slop over as soon as possible to keep it from spreading.  Jimmy Clifton, being older, with bad knees and a hefty beer gut, could not move as fast as some of the younger people on the crew, so he sent a few squad bosses and several grunts ahead to begin line construction.  Evidently, the Jackson Hot Shot crew was also in the general vicinity.  Willamette Woods copied radio traffic which revealed that the shot crew was being sent to the slop over as well.  Jeff Zahn, Hammerhead, and Stream led the uphill march at a brisk pace.  All three of the firefighters stood at 6 feet 4 inches tall, so their long legs were helpful in covering ground quickly.  They were often referred to collectively as “Team Oaxaca” because they travelled together to Oaxaca, Mexico to live cheap during the off-season and that was their primary topic of conversation on the hill.  As they made a sharp turn and began the more vertical portion of the uphill climb, the decision was made to cache their chainsaws in the bushes.  The rationale was that the Jackson Hotshots could provide saw support and save them the trouble of lugging the heavy machinery up and down.  Zahn, Hammerhead, and Stream were the first to reach the division break and the slop over.  They engaged immediately as they began to pound the ground with their tools in a frantic effort to dig line around the 2 acre section.  Shortly after their arrival, the Jackson Hot Shots appeared on the scene.  With their 48 inch saw blades and extreme physical fitness level, they were able to make an impact very quickly.  Eventually, the rest of the Willamette Woods crew arrived and with customary teamwork and precision they were able to do what they do best, which is known in the industry as hotline construction.  Everything was coming along nicely until they reached a point where they were digging fire line on a steep hill below the slop over.  By this time, the slop over had been burning actively for a while and the trees above were fire weakened.  Suddenly, a hemlock that was about 60 feet tall and over 4 feet in circumference snapped into  two massive pieces.  Luckily, Jimmy Clifton was engaged in the most important activity that a crew boss can do, which is looking out for the safety of his crew.  As the tree fell, Jimmy screamed at the top of his rather formidable lungs very loudly, “Snag, Snag!”  Stream was working right below the raging fire when he heard his boss’s warning.  He looked up to see the hemlock falling to his left.  He was relieved to see that he was clearly not in its path.  However, before that thought could fully register in his mind; the tree collided with another and bounced back in the opposite direction.  It changed course and was now falling directly towards him.  The tree was so big and coming down so fast that all Stream could think of was a giant hammer squashing a cartoon character.  There is no doubt that if the hemlock had hit him at that velocity, his brains and guts would have been splattered all over the side of the mountain.  Stream was left completely in the open, so he could not seek refuge behind the trunk of a large tree as his training had instructed him to do on such an occasion.  He had but a millisecond to react, yet there really was only one action to take.  The ground that he was working on was very steep, but he would have to take his chances with an aerial maneuver.  He leapt headfirst with all of his might directly over the side of a steep embankment.  As he was flying through the air like superman, his hardhat flew off his head and tumbled down the hillside.  The tree landed with a mighty crash at the exact place where he had been standing a moment before.  To those that were working around him, it looked as if he had simply disappeared over the cliff.  Somehow, he landed on his back with his head facing downhill about 30 feet down the embankment.  The intensity of the situation caused him to black out for a few moments.  When he came to, the radio on his chest was chirping.  The voice of Jimmy Clifton resonated through the speaker.  “Stream…Stream.  Are you there?  Come in. Are you alive?  What’s your 20?”  Stream took a deep breath and responded, “I am here…off the side of a cliff.  I think I am okay.  Give me a minute.”  Stream took a few moments to regroup and then began crawling back up the hillside, recovering his hardhat en route.  Miraculously, he had survived the ordeal without a scrape.  As he crested the ridge on his hands and knees, he saw Drew Carlson, a young rookie, sitting down with his eyeglasses in his hand.  Drew was sobbing like a baby.  Tears poured profusely down his face.  When Drew saw Stream crawling toward him, he said “My God, you’re alive!”  “Of course, I am alive”, Stream replied.  “I wouldn’t have it any other way!”  Drew had witnessed the whole crazy scenario and had broken down partially with concern over his friend and superior but also because the realization hit him for the first time that the danger in this profession was very real.  Basically, any of them could be killed at any time.  Jimmy Clifton and a few others rushed down to reconnoiter with Stream and verify that he was alright.  Now they were faced with the dilemma that this large burning tree was lying across the line, threatening to ignite unburned wilderness.  “Fuck!” Clifton said.  “We need to get this tree off the line.  I knew we shouldn’t have left our chainsaws at the bottom of the mountain.”  The Jackson Hotshots were busy working on the other side of the 2 acre slop over and could not be easily called over to deal with this.  Stream jumped up and sprang into action.  “Fuck this tree!” he shouted.  “It tried to kill me.  I am going to mutilate this motherfucker!”  The big bearded lumberjack looking dude grabbed his Pulaski and started chopping.  “Son of a bitch…bastard” he grunted between swings.  It took 3 men (Stream, Hammerhead, and Zahn) about fifteen minutes of steady chopping in shifts but finally, the hemlock was cut in two and dragged aside.  Stream practically glowed with a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction when it was done.  Shortly thereafter, the slop over was deemed caput and Willamette Woods was told to get their asses to town for some much deserved R & R.  If they had been weary before, they were straight up haggard following this latest bout of energy exertion.  To bring up troop morale, Clifton coaxed Stream, who was at the back of the line, “Hey man, why don’t you serenade us out of here with a few Doors tunes?”  The classic rock band was a favorite of both of them.  “Sure, no problem” Stream said.  A moment later he began singing in a loud baritone that was a close facsimile of Jim Morrison.  “Show me the way to the next whiskey bar…oh, don’t ask why…oh, don’t ask why. Show me the way to the next little girl, oh don’t ask why.”  Everyone that knew the words joined in the singing as they marched.  Clifton was right.  It definitely lightened the mood.

The crew happily settled in to their budget hotel lodgings at The Wenatchee Motor Lodge later that evening.  Due to the late hour of their departure from the hill, they ended up hiking for a few hours in the darkness.  The fact that they could barely see where they were going by headlamp through thick clouds of dust (there had been no rain in Central Washington for quite some time) combined with their level of complete physical exhaustion, made the long hike less than pleasant.  When their heads hit the pillows that night, each and every one of them fell asleep immediately.  On the following morning, the crew went to a nearby diner for breakfast.  The food was way better than the slop that the government had been feeding them.  After the meal, they broke off into smaller groups to tend to laundry, shopping, etc…  As they were splitting up in the diner parking lot, Jimmy Clifton pulled Stream off to the side, palmed a $50 bill into his hand and said “Hey man, if you come across any good weed, look out for me.”  Stream had proven to be a veritable ganja magnet in past years and on past runs.  His gregarious nature and somewhat freaky appearance (curly hair and long beard) had scored pot for the crew in such far flung locations as Missoula, Montana and Cour de Lane, Idaho.  “Okay”, Stream replied.  “I got you covered”.  As many on the crew were busying themselves with menial tasks, Stream decided to jump whole heartedly into the mission of getting fucked up.  “Who wants to give me a ride to the liquor store?” he asked a group of firefighters that were standing around the parking lot.  Only certain people were allowed to drive company vehicles and Stream was not one of them.  Gary Mackerly quickly spoke up.  “I can handle that” he said.  “I am about ready for a cocktail myself.”  He stroked his long Wild West looking moustache as he said this.  Anna Ellis interjected, “I will come along, as well.  Let’s do this!”  As the three of them were about to jump into the truck, Randy Keisenzeigel came up and began to speak in a loud voice.  “Okay, I have an announcement.  I am only going to say this once so everybody listen up.  If anyone needs a draw, now is the time to get it.  Step up so that I can write your name and dollar amount on the list.”  Randy was in his element, wielding authority over the mindless peons, as he saw them.  He was referring to the company policy wherein firefighters can receive a small portion of the money that they had coming to them in advance, since their paychecks were gathering dust back at the office in Eugene.  “I will take a draw”, Hammerhead spoke up.  “Two hundred bucks would be helpful.”  “Okay” Keisenzeigel continued, ever the diligent bureaucrat.  “I need you to sign here, and put your initials here and here.”  Hammerhead stepped up to do so and a small line formed behind him of other interested parties.  “Alright” Anna announced, “Let’s blow this popsicle stand.”  She, Gary Mackerly, and Stream jumped into the truck.  With Gary in command at the wheel, they left the diner and were off to buy booze.

As they were leaving the liquor store, Stream launched into a diatribe regarding the merits of Platinum brand vodka, of which he had just purchased a half gallon.  “It is really the best for the price”, the alcohol enthusiast insisted.  “It goes down smooth as silk and since it has been filtered seven times , Platinum is so clean that it hardly gives you a hangover.”  Mackerly gave Stream a mellow version of the “hairy eyeball” through the rearview mirror to the back seat and said, “Yeah, we get it, you like the stuff.  Why don’t you get a job as a company spokesperson instead of driving us up the wall out here?”  This kind of playful banter made up a large part of the dynamic between Stream and Gary.  As these words were leaving Gary’s mouth, the truck meandered slowly (the speed limit was 25 miles per hour on the downtown street) past three girls that were walking together on the narrow sidewalk.  Stream leaned over and sized them up.  There was a brunette chick whose hair was matted into large dreadlocks, a redhead that was covered in tribal tattoos, and a short feisty looking Asian girl (a rarity in the great white central Cascade region).  They were all young and attractive.  “Holy sheep shit, Batman” Stream shouted.  “Look at those fine ass chicks over there!  Pull over Mackerly!”  “Pull over where?” Mackerly questioned, “on the sidewalk?”  “Yes” Stream responded.  “Pull over anywhere!”  Anna Ellis rolled her eyes but said nothing.  If the truth be told, all three of the firefighters in the truck had a reputation for getting freaky with the ladies.  Gary wheeled the truck over to where it was parked halfway on the sidewalk and halfway on the road, adjacent to the hot young girls.  Stream rolled down the back window and said, “Hey girls, what’s up?  What’s there to do in a bumfuck town like Wenatchee?  We’re national heroes brought in from Oregon to save your forest.”  Stream never hesitated in playing the “national hero” card.  The girls laughed and the dready one said, “There really isn’t shit to do here but get wasted.”  “What a coincidence” Stream continued.  He pulled the large blue bottle out of the brown paper bag in his hand and displayed it to them.  “That is what we are about to get into ourselves.  Wanna party?”  “Sure”, the tattooed redhead responded.  “You’re damned right”, the Asian chick chimed in.  “My place is just down the hill here”, the dreadhead expounded.  “Well, hop in” Stream coaxed the trio.  “We will give you a ride.”  Anna Ellis and Gary Mackerly could hardly believe what was happening as the girls piled into the backseat with Stream.  It was a tight squeeze but Stream figured that somehow he would manage as the Asian girl’s lovely tan colored skin pressed against his own of the much pastier variety.  When all of that hot young sexiness was securely loaded into the truck, Gary put his foot on the gas pedal and steered them toward the inevitable fun that was to follow.

The brunette’s apartment was only a five minute drive from where they had been picked up.  The six of them entered the place and plopped down on couches in the living room, with the exception of the apartment owner.  She went to the kitchen to get cups and ice for the orange juice and vodka.  “Do you know where to score any weed?” Stream asked.  “Our entire crew is jonesing.”  She replied from the kitchen.  “I have a little bit.  Go ahead and pack yourself a bong hit, if you want.  I can call some friends to get more.”  Stream picked up a small bud from the coffee table, placed it in a large glass bong, and toked up.  He exhaled and said, “Oh yeah, that is just what I needed.”  Their supply of hash oil hot sauce was running low and besides, smoking has a different effect than oral ingestion.  He made eyes with the well-proportioned Asian American who sat on the couch across from him.  Her big brown eyes and full pouty lips were extremely inviting.  She responded with flirtatious glances of her own.  ‘That’s really what I need’ he thought to himself.  Mackerly picked up the bong, took a hit, and passed it over to Anna.   “So you all are firefighters, huh?”  the redhead entered the conversation.  “Tell me more.”  “We work for Willamette Woods based out of Eugene, Oregon” Anna explained.  “So are you guys like hotshots or something?” Red questioned.  Anna was about to respond when Stream spoke up.  “I will field this one” he said.  “We are a step above the shot crews.”  This was complete misinformation.  Hotshots were way higher on the food chain than their Type 2 contract crew.  “Willamette Woods is an elite unit of upper echelon firefighters.”  The bullshit artist continued.  “They call us in for jobs that most people just can’t handle.”  “Wow”, the petite hotty said.  She was obviously very impressed.  Anna mumbled in a low voice, “The shit is getting deep in here” while Mackerly chuckled.  They spent about two hours drinking vodka, smoking pot, and discussing topics as diverse as movies, music, and politics.  When Red got up to use the bathroom, Stream hopped onto the couch beside the short sexy girl. He casually put his arm around her and she did not seem to mind. With a casual inquiry, he discovered that she was of Cambodian descent, born in the USA and her name was Karina.  Anna was lightly beating on a small djembe hand drum when Mackerly said, “Hey guys, we need to get back to the hotel.”  “Cool”, the dready said as if they had all been invited.  “We can stop at my friend’s place and pick up that weed on the way.”  Stream gave Anna and Gary a knowing expression.  Their chances of getting some action that night were looking better and better!

Everyone from the crew was amazed when Stream, Gary, and Anna showed back up at the hotel with three hot chicks.  They were also profoundly grateful for the ounce of high quality organic bud that they brought via special delivery.  It was quickly broken down into smaller parcels so that everyone could partake.  Jimmy Clifton, in particular, was especially stoked.  He patted Stream on the back, said “Thanks buddy, you’re my man!” and scurried away to lock himself into his hotel room and regain equilibrium.  The stresses of the Crew Boss position are such that one really needs a way to blow off steam.  While the crew members were all very adamant about not bringing pot on the hill, what they did in their off time was their business as long as it was kept discreet.  Being from Eugene, Oregon (pothead capital of the Universe), almost everyone in the organization was well immersed in a lifelong love affair with THC.  If the reader should find it concerning that the people being hired to protect our wilderness are a bunch of weed smokers, consider in contrast that their rival crew Sketchum based out of Springfield, Oregon (methamphetamine capital of the Universe) are all a bunch of tweakers.  Stoners are much better at keeping level heads and making rational decisions than speed freaks!  Following dinner, the crew got down to the serious matter of partying their asses off.  Stream and Hammerhead (who were sharing a room) organized a small get together in Room 213 that slowly escalated throughout the evening.  By 11pm, Jeff Zahn, Gary Mackerly, Anna Ellis, the three Wenatchee girls, and a rotating cast of other characters were in attendance.  Clifton popped in intermittently to smoke joints and share from his large supply of Budweiser.  They tried to keep it low key, especially since Keisenzeigel paced back and forth on the balcony like a sentry on duty.  Everyone knew that he would report any wild behavior to the company owner the moment that they returned to home base.  After two solid weeks of ass busting labor and sobriety, they were basically having the time of their lives!  Stream poured drinks of his favorite Platinum vodka that were so stiff it almost seemed as if he had skipped the orange juice altogether.  They had brought a few small hand drums from the dreadlocked chick’s apartment.  A nice primal rhythm started up and people began dancing.  The next thing you know, the tattoo covered redhead decided to let it all hang out and started removing her clothes.  She shimmied and shook her way through an excellent amateur strip tease.  Within moments, she was completely naked and the other girls began to follow suite.  All three of them had gorgeous bodies.  The brunette was the big breasted of the bunch with a natural D cup.  She really seemed to enjoy pressing her tits together and rubbing them in the firefighter’s faces.  Anna Ellis, who was pretty drunk by now, threw caution to the wind and stuck her face between the ample cleavage to perform the act known in some circles as “motor boating”.  Karina’s ass was so perky and plump that you could have bounced a quarter off of it.  Stream bent her over his knee and decided to give the naughty babe some much needed discipline.  Every time that he spanked her, she quivered with absolute delight.  Gary Mackerly enjoyed every moment of the lap dance that the redhead was giving him on a lounge chair in the corner.  People began to cheer as the scene grew wilder.  The drumbeat picked up and the dancing took on a very carnal quality.  Jeff Zahn whirled around the room with some pink lacey panties on his head.  As this all escalated, they got louder and louder.  Suddenly the door flew open (which should have been locked) and Ken Brooks and Randy Keisenzeigel were shocked at the scene before them.  “What the hell is going on here?” Randy demanded.  “We are having a blast!” Hammerhead declared.  “Well, the party is fucking over!”  Assistant Crew Boss Ken Brooks insisted and unfortunately, he had the authority to enforce it.  “Everybody out of here except for whoever’s room this is” he continued in a stern voice.  “You girls get your clothes on and go home; you should have never been here in the first place!”  “Oh, come on”, Stream pleaded.  “We will quiet down!”  “It’s too late for that”, the incessant party pooper insisted.  “People are trying to get some rest and you guys are howling like a bunch of lunatics down here.  Everybody get out.  Now!”  With that said, the girls got dressed and departed.  As they were being ushered out the door by that great henchman of the Gestapo himself, Keisenzeigel;  Karina turned to Stream, put her hand up to her ear to represent a phone, and said “Call me”.  Stream thought drunkenly to himself, ‘Did she give me her number? I don’t think so.’  The other firefighters all left the room.  They slumped away with their heads down in a state of defeat.  “Now get some fucking sleep!” Brooks shouted at Hammerhead and Stream as he gruffly slammed the door and walked away.

A light knock came at the door of Room 213 at 2:45am.  Had it not been so persistent (it went on for 4 or 5 minutes before being acknowledged), there is no doubt that the drunken sleeping man known as Stream would have remained that way.  He groggily rose from the comfortable hotel bed to respond.  ‘Who the hell could be knocking at this hour?’ he thought to himself as he cracked the door to see who was there.  A glance through the crack revealed the feisty little Asian girl and her two friends standing behind her.  “What’s up?” Stream questioned, still getting his head around the fact that he was awake and that they were there.  “You didn’t think that we would let you guys leave town without getting some of that national hero dick, did you?” the Cambodian beauty questioned.  She reached her hand inside the door to pet his crotch as she said this.  “Oh shit”, Stream stammered as his member began to stiffen.  He looked back inside the room at a snoring Hammerhead on the other bed.  Not only was his buddy completely passed out; he was an honorable man with a fiancé in Thailand. Action like this would not interest him anyway.  “Let’s go down to Gary and Anna’s room”, Stream suggested, “and be quiet!”  The redhead replied with a lascivious look on her face, “Yes, let’s do that.  Let’s go see Gary.”  Evidently, she had a thing for old dudes.  Even though Mackerly was getting close to cashing in on his Social Security money; he still somehow managed to get more ass than a toilet seat!  Gary responded to Stream’s light tapping with the “hairy eyeball” and a brief utterance of “What the fuck?” when he saw the bevy of honeys that were standing behind him.  Stream pushed his way inside before any argument could be presented.  Within a moment of entering the room, the redhead grabbed Gary and passionately kissed him.  Stream and the shorty also began making out heavily.  “Anna is not going to like this” Gary said, but he did nothing to stop the chick from unbuttoning his pants and pushing him back onto the bed.  Anna was sleeping soundly in the other bed.  “She will be pissed if she wakes up”, Gary said to Stream.  “Oh, I don’t think she is going to be pissed!” the brunette insisted.  She walked over and pulled the blankets up from the bottom of Anna’s bed.  This made the fact that Anna was sleeping in the nude apparent to everyone in the room.  The dreadlocked girl then proceeded to crawl headfirst under the covers.  Anna’s eyes popped open in a state of shock, yet she was only awake for a brief moment before the horny chick’s probing lips and tongue reached her most sensitive area.  A steady slurping sound commenced from the act of cunnilingus beneath the blankets.  Before long, Anna had a huge smile on her face and began to lightly moan.  The brunette had been 100% correct in her assertion that being awakened in this manner would not bother Anna in the slightest.  Redhead was now grinding her body erotically against Mackerly.  The old codger decided to lie back, relax, and let her do all of the work.  “Well, it looks like we have got the bathroom” Stream said to his eager companion.  He took her by the hand and guided her in that direction.

The naughty little vixen pushed Stream back onto the closed toilet seat and dropped to her knees in front of him.  She removed his semi-erect penis from his pants and licked lightly at the head.  It began to bulge, cobra-like, while his entire length grew and thickened.  She swallowed the head entirely and expertly worked her mouth down the shaft.  Within moments, he was as hard as a brick.  She suckled at his dangling balls and then licked him thoroughly from the base to the tip, covering his manhood with her saliva.  The fabulous young nympho worked at it with extreme gusto for a little while and then playfully popped the head in and out of her mouth.  She used such suction in doing so that every time it popped out, it made a loud noise.  This drove Stream absolutely insane.  He loved every instant of it.  She slapped his dick playfully against her face and looked up at him with those big beautiful brown eyes.  Her full pouty lips were made more so by the oral exercise.  Finally, Stream could take no more of this enticement.  He reached down and pulled her to him, enthusiastically kissing her gorgeous mouth.  “I am glad that you brought those shoes”, Stream said as he bent her over the sink.  “Otherwise I don’t think that we would line up so well.”  Evidently, the girls had gone home and put on the hooker clothes during their two hour absence from the hotel because she was now wearing a red miniskirt, white fishnet stockings, and six inch open-toed black stiletto heels.  Considering that she was about 5 foot 1 and Stream was more than a full foot taller, the shoes were the only thing that would make sex while standing at all possible.  He bent her over the sink and pulled up the red miniskirt.  She had no panties on underneath and as he discovered when he reached his hand down for a touch; her shaved little pussy was already dripping wet.  So much so, that her inner thighs were soaked. “Damn, honey” Stream coaxed as he slapped her gorgeous ass with his rock hard cock.  “You’re ready for this, aren’t you?”  “Oh yes, baby, give it to me!” she pleaded.  Their eyes met in an intense gaze in the bathroom mirror as this exchange took place.  At first, Stream would only insert the head of his penis in shallow strokes.  She moaned and groaned with delight but the teasing was getting to her.  “Give it to me, motherfucker! Give me that big white anaconda” she insisted.  Stream reached around and used his right hand to circularly rub her clitoris, as he finally gave her all that she wanted.  “Oh, my God, right there!” she screamed as he fully entered her.  “Keep it down” Stream admonished with concern that they would wake up firefighters in the next room and be hurled into a world of shit when Brooks and Keisenzeigel were made aware of the cause of their awakening.  Yet there was no keeping it down for this chick.  She moaned and yelled with wild abandon as Stream proceeded to fuck the living shit out of her.  Luckily, the ventilator fan in the bathroom was running. It was loud and could serve to cover at least some of the noise.  Stream settled into a nice primal rhythm while he bounced the little freak’s luscious ass in his hands.  Her juices dripped all over him as she had an intense orgasm, soaking his balls completely.  He tried to remember if he had ever had any pussy before that was this good. He didn’t think so. He spanked her rather forcefully, which only served to excite her more.  Their eyes were locked together in a primal dance as old as time itself in the mirror.  She shouted “Yes, baby, yes!  Right there. Oh my God, I am gonna cum again!”  She howled like a banshee as this orgasm ripped through her, causing Stream to cover her mouth with his hand in an attempt to stifle her screams of ecstasy.  He rubbed her perky tits as he fucked her.  The large brown nipples grew pert and hard from the sensual touch of his fondling fingers.  Finally, he decided that he had to paint those titties white.  He could hold off no longer.  In fact, it was practically a miracle that he had made it this long, considering that he had not been laid in weeks.  “I want to cum on your tits, baby” he said.  “Yes, please” was all that the nympho replied with.  She dropped to her knees in front of him, pushed her breasts together, and stroked his throbbing cock with her hand.  Suddenly, thick rivulets of white jissom exploded across her chest and neck.  She continued to stroke him and somehow, he continued to cum, literally covering her with this gushing fountain of semen.  “Oh fuck”, he shouted as a shiver of pure pleasure ran throughout his body.  This was undoubtedly the most intense orgasm of his life.  He was just noticing that he was weak in the knees and could hardly stand when she said, “Damn, my firefighter man.  That’s a lot of cum! I hope you saved some for the next round.”  Before he could voice a murmur of protest, she went back to work with those thick and beautiful lips at the skillful art of fellatio.

The next day that the crew spent in Wenatchee was considerably mellower, even for Stream, Hammerhead, and the wild party syndicate. Miraculously, they received only a mild berating from Ken Brooks that morning at breakfast.  The twinkle in his eye as he fussed out the revelers from the previous night revealed that perhaps Brooks’ biggest complaint was that he had not been invited to the fiesta.  Randy Keisenzeigel reluctantly agreed not to snitch to the company owner, as it would reflect poorly on the entire crew and that would not be fair since most of them had not been involved with the debauchery.  Anna Ellis, Mackerly, and Stream were left with an inside joke that they had turned Wenatchee into “Wet-snatch-ee” but they kept their conquest on the down-low for posterity purposes. Evidently, the loud mewing of their sex kittens had not awakened anyone else, which was a relief to everybody involved.  All in all, it was one of the best R & R periods ever for almost everyone on the crew.  Unfortunately, it turned out not to be a very pleasant two days for one crew member in particular.  Young Drew Carlson, the rookie that had broken into tears after seeing Stream fly off a cliff, spent much of those days in anguish over whether or not to remain on the crew for the next 14 day run that they were now obligated to.  He was horribly homesick, physically run down and after the incident with Stream; he began to seriously question whether this was the right line of work for him.  The problem was that they needed 20 people to operate as a functional crew.  This was specified in their government contract, so one man down meant that the entire crew would be sent home.  Finally, he decided to approach Jimmy Clifton with his dilemma on the morning of their second day off in town.  Jimmy Clifton, very much the humanist, related to Drew’s situation and saw that with his precarious state of mind, he would not be of much use on the crew anyway.  Having your head in the game is pretty much a pre-requisite of wild land firefighting.  Jimmy made a quick call to the Eugene office and ascertained that if they acted immediately, they could have a replacement firefighter sent up by Greyhound bus in time to return to the hill on schedule the following day.  Wheels were put into motion that would have an extremely detrimental effect on Drew Carlson.  His mentality actually improved that afternoon with the realization that he was headed home and that his departure would not rock the boat with the crew too much.  Clifton even informed him that this would not constitute an exclusion from being able to work in the future and that once he was rested and feeling better to call the office so that he could be put back into rotation.  However, as these words left the Crew Boss’s mouth, Clifton realized that it was very unlikely that he would ever see Drew in Nomex again.  Jimmy informed Carlson that he would be given a ride to the bus station at 9pm that night so he should just take it easy and relax in the meantime.  Drew went to an ice cream parlor that evening and indulged in a giant banana split.  This definitely helped to improve his mood.  At 8:30pm, he was back at the hotel, all packed up and ready to go when Clifton knocked on his door and said, “Drew, if you’re ready, Jacob is going to drive you down to the Greyhound station.”  “Jacob?” Drew questioned. “Really?”  “Yes” Jimmy replied.  “Is there a problem with that?”  Drew could think of no complaint to voice except for the fact that the guy gave him the creeps so he kept that to himself.  “No, that’s fine” he replied.  A few minutes later, Drew went downstairs and tossed his duffel bag into the back of one of the pick-up trucks.  When he opened the door and sat in the front passenger seat, Jacob seemed to be mumbling to himself but he quickly shut up when he realized that he was no longer alone.  As they wheeled away into the summer night, there was an unseen entity in the vehicle as well.  It was an extremely regrettable fact for Carlson, that the co-pilot of the truck was none other than Lucifer, the Prince of Darkness and master of all that is evil.

“Thanks for giving me a ride”, Drew commented, in an attempt to make small talk.  Jacob stared straight ahead with a bizarre look on his countenance.  Drew had to repeat himself to receive any acknowledgement.  “No problem, dude” Jacob eventually mumbled in response.  A few minutes after they left the hotel parking lot, Jacob started talking to himself again.  Drew could not make out the words but it sounded very strange nonetheless.  It reminded him of the babbling of the little possessed girl in the film “The Exorcist”.  At the very least, leaving the crew would get him away from this nut job as well as “Mad Dog” Ruske who had been extremely irritable and giving him a hard time.  Jacob took an unexpected left turn off the main thoroughfare onto a darker side street.  “Is this where the bus station is located?” Drew inquired.  “I thought it was on Main Street”.  Jacob once again acted as if he had not spoken.  Jacob turned to stare Drew in the eyes as the truck moved slowly down the vacant back street.  The weird look on his face took on the veneer of pure psychosis.  When he spoke, his voice had a low gurgling quality that was intensely disturbing.  “Are you a religious man, Carlson?  Do you believe in God?” the wingnut asked him.  This line of questioning came from so far out of left field that at first, Drew had no idea how to respond.  Eventually, he replied honestly “Well, I was raised Methodist but I would not call myself practicing. I haven’t been to church in years.”  He wondered why this guy was asking and even more so, he was concerned that there could be no bus station in the industrial part of town that they had now entered.  “Look, Jacob”, he said.  “I don’t see what that has to do with anything.  You’re going the wrong way for the bus station.”  “Would you like a Christian burial?” the lunatic questioned.  This interrogative statement made him worry that much more.  “Pull over, man.  I am getting out”, Drew insisted.  He attempted to unlock the passenger door but Jacob had the auto-lock set so that only the driver could control it.  “Just answer the God-damned question” Jacob said in a very forceful tone.  “Do you want to be buried as a Christian?”  Drew really did not know what to do so he provided an answer in hopes that it would calm the driver down.  “Yeah, I guess” he said.  “I have always leaned toward cremation but I don’t see what that has to do…”  Jacob harshly interrupted him by yelling, “Well, fuck you and your savior, Jesus Christ!  Fuck you both forever!”  Suddenly, a switchblade knife appeared in Jacob’s right hand.  He pressed the release button so that Drew was looking at 6 inches of sharp cold steel.  “Jacob…what the fuck, man?” he screamed.  “Pull over!”  Before he could get another word out of his mouth; Jacob plunged the knife into his chest.  “This is for you, Lord Satan!” the killer shouted.  “This is all for you, Master!”   Once he started stabbing, he did not stop.  Drew reached his hands out to try to stop the assault but this accomplished nothing except for a few nasty slashes in his palms.  The demented maniac slammed the blade into his victim’s chest, again and again.  “No, no!” Drew yelled but was quickly unable to speak from the blood that gurgled up inside his throat.  “Die, fucker, die” Jacob yelled and when the stiletto pierced Drew’s rapidly beating heart, it did not take long for him to do so.  His lifeless body slumped in the seat.  Jacob had stopped the truck to commit the stabbing. When he realized Drew was dead, he started to drive again.  He opened the passenger door and quickly pushed the corpse out onto the pavement before the blood could drip down onto the seats.  The cadaver hit the vacant street with a thud.  Jacob put his foot on the accelerator and sped away from the morbid scene.  Thus, the future of Willamette Woods was forever altered in a most terrible way.  The bloodletting had begun!

Unfortunately for the crew, a major heat wave hit the region shortly after their R & R period in Wenatchee.  The already hot July weather became absolutely scorching.  It was a very dry heat with Relative Humidity readings dropping to single digits.  This made the conditions that they were forced to work in that much more difficult in multiple ways.  First off, there is the obvious fact that they were sweating their asses off in the 104 degree heat.  Next, the excessive temperatures led to extreme fire behavior that made the fire harder to extinguish and even more dangerous.  Tempers tend to flare up as the mercury climbs and that was definitely the case with the already irritable Don “Mad Dog” Ruske.  On their second day back on the hill, he and Gary Mackerly were working together during a mundane “mop up” assignment.  “I don’t know why they had to send that little wet back fucker in as Drew’s replacement”, Ruske vented to Mackerly as they poked around with their hand tools.  His bigoted comments referred to the 5 foot tall Mario Carmelito, a native of Oaxaca, Mexico that had arrived at the Wenatchee Greyhound station as a replacement on that fateful night when Drew Carlson’s spirit left this planet.  “I am glad that they sent Mario”, Mackerly said in defense of his friend and co-worker.  “He is a really hard worker and he knows his shit forwards and backwards.”  Carmelito was in his mid-40s and had been in the firefighting game for a long time.  “Bullshit” Ruske vehemently spat.  “He is just another fucking immigrant trying to take our jobs.  I can’t stand these beaner motherfuckers taking over our country.  My Dad fought in Vietnam for this place.”  Mackerly took a long hard look at the racist asshole and said, “I fought in Vietnam, Ruske, and I think that good people like Mario make our country better.  What kind of bug crawled up your ass to put you in such a foul mood anyway?”  Ruske had been brooding for weeks almost non-stop over his philandering wife that had left him for his “best friend”.  He had tried desperately to score smack during their stay in Wenatchee but had no luck in the po-dunk hick town.  These factors combined with the heat were rapidly pushing him toward his boiling point.  He looked over at Mackerly as he gripped the handle of his Pulaski.  He knew that a few good swings with the sharp ax could remove Mackerly’s head from his shoulders.   He pictured the old geyser’s head flying through the air in his mind and came very close to taking a chop.  Instead, he broke into a sadistic grin at the gruesome thought and said nothing in response.  “Fuck, you are weird” Mackerly said as he walked away to find someone more pleasant to work with.  The glare in Don Ruske’s eyes was practically strong enough to burn holes in the back of the old timer’s bald head.  The “Mad Dog” in Ruske’s mind was chomping at the bit.  His rabid inner canine was ready to break the leash and run rampant.

Jeff Zahn’s tormented psyche was not faring much better than that of Ruske.  At least, he had a legitimate reason to be upset, since Ken Brooks persistently continued to give him a hard time.  Zahn’s punishment for being involved with the naked girl hotel room party was to do all of Brooks’ assistant crew boss paperwork for the rest of the run.  He also had to shine Brook’ boots at the end of every 15 hour work day.  It made no difference that the main instigators of the party (Stream and Hammerhead) received no punishment whatsoever.  Brooks relished every possible opportunity to rub Zahn’s face in the proverbial poop, thus his mere presence at the Bacchanalian gathering had to be dealt with in an aggressive manner.  It was a classic case of an Alpha male flexing the muscle of power over a subordinate.  If not for the fact that Crew Boss Jimmy Clifton would have never agreed to it, Brooks would have had his underling clean those boots with his tongue.  At around the same time that “Mad Dog” Ruske and Mackerly were having a petty squabble regarding the merits of a certain Mexican, Brooks was happily involved with the harassment of his number one bitch boy.  “So if an active fire with a five foot flame length consumes fifteen acres in an hour and a half, what is the current spread rate?” Brooks questioned Zahn on the sunny mountainside.  They were standing in a rock bed with no shade in sight.  The fiery sun seemed to be literally cooking Zahn’s brain.  Brooks had the big red Fireline Handbook in his hand and was reading from it.  His sadistic twisted sense of humor had dictated that this was the perfect place for a pop quiz.  The thick Fireline Handbook contained all kinds of random information that most firefighters never retain.  Zahn stared vacantly ahead at this bothersome query, wondering what the fuck Ken Brooks was talking about now.  “Wipe that idiotic look off your face”, Brooks demanded after a few moments of sustained silence, “and answer the God-damned question.  What is the rate of spread for the given data?”  Jeff had no clue as to how to respond.  As he looked at Brooks’ too-round rosy fat condescending face, he had a flashback to the freight yard in Milwaukie. He remembered what it had been like to ball up his fists and beat his opponent to death.  He thought about how good it would feel to do the same thing right now.  He would take absolute delight in teaching this smart ass a lesson, once and for all.  He could imagine how his hands would feel as they made impact with the fat face, again and again.  Finally, he blurted out “Twelve, the answer is twelve.”  Brooks looked at him as if he were a complete moron.  “I said five foot flame LENGTH, not five foot flame height.  You’re such a retard!”  the assistant crew boss yelled as he lightly smacked Jeff in the head with the handbook.  Somehow, Jeff kept himself from grabbing Brooks by the throat and squeezing very hard.  He did not know how much longer he would be able to control these violent urges.

Hammerhead and Stream had the good luck to be working in an area that was well shaded on that sun-sizzled afternoon.  “Man, I can’t believe we came through Wenatchee unscathed”, Hammerhead said in reference to the miraculous lack of disciplinary action from the hotel room incident.  “Yeah, it’s too bad that Brooks is busting Jeff’s balls over it but I guess that’s to be expected” Stream replied.  Hammerhead used the pick end of his Pulaski to bust up some burning embers in a smoldering hole while Stream sprayed the area with a hose.  “I can’t believe Brooks is riding him like that”, Hammerhead stated.  “I have noticed Jeff talking to himself a lot lately.  I hope he holds up under the pressure.”  Both friends were aware of Zahn’s background and the potential time bomb that was ticking between his ears.  “Anything could happen.  That is for sure.”  Stream said stoically.  “You know who scares the shit out of me?  That guy Jacob, Joker, or whatever they call him.  I caught him eyeball fucking me last night over chow.  The dude had a look on his face that was very Doctor Demento.  He is a straight up whack job.”  Hammerhead chuckled and said, “Well, maybe if he snaps, his first victim will be Randy Keisenzeigel.  I wouldn’t mind seeing that little Nazi knocked off.”  Of course, he had no way of knowing as these words left his mouth that the fanatic Satanist had already taken his first victim.  The perturbed firefighter continued with his monologue.  “I overheard Randy on the phone the other day at the hotel room.  He didn’t think I could hear him but he was talking to the company owner about the money given out in draws during R & R.  That prick had the nerve to insinuate that I was trying to scam the company by not paying back the $200.”  He was referring to the money that had been advanced from his upcoming paycheck while they were in Wenatchee.  “What the hell is he talking about?” a genuinely perplexed Stream questioned.  “I have no clue”, Hammerhead responded, “but that is what he said.  I mean…you know me.  I am an honest guy, a real straight shooter.”  Stream nodded his head in agreement.  Everyone knew that Hammerhead would never try to rip anyone off.  It just wasn’t in him.  “It’s got me pretty pissed”, he continued.  “I am thinking about taking some kind of revenge.  I am just not sure what to do yet.”  Stream laughed and said, “Well, don’t do anything to get fired.  Your fiancé isn’t going to be too happy if you can’t afford to fly to Thailand this year.”  “I hear you” Hammerhead explained, “but I have been fed up with Keisenzeigel’s power-tripping bullshit for a long time.  I think somebody needs to give him what he deserves.”  The look in his eyes indicated that wheels were turning.  Stream had no doubt that some kind of revenge plot was afoot within his friend’s mind.

TO BE CONTINUED……

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