Chris MacKenzie was back as Alpha’s lead firefighter, and Donut, once again in the back of the buggy, reclaimed his role as deejay. The tune was Rammstein’s “Du Hast,” a thrashing metal song that riffs on traditional German wedding vows and repeats “until death separates” ad nauseam. Nobody in the buggies, of course, knew what the foreign lyrics meant. What they liked was how the pulsing bass line psyched them up for the task at hand. Not long after noon, the hotshots arrived on scene. The wind blew the smoke north across Iron Springs Road, and the column was lying almost parallel to the ground. As they drove through the plume, the hotshots on the left side of the trucks could see a line of flames ten feet tall, maybe higher, churning through the brush and coming straight at the highway. Donut turned around to the other hotshots in Alpha. “Get your fucking shit together,” he said. “This is what we signed up for.” Steed rearranged Alpha and Bravo after Bunch’s and Renan’s departures, and Granite Mountain was a slightly different crew than they had been on Thompson Ridge.
