Wildfire at Dawn by M. L. Buchman

dualies that looked even more hard-used than her own Ford 150.
    She parked and locked her truck. Whoever they were, none of them could leave until she decided to let them out. It had been a long and harrowing morning. She’d led her first group since Grayson Masterson up onto the ice and snow. Everything had gone as perfectly as it had in the fifty jaunts she’d led before, but her nerves were a wreck. She needed a glass of beer and some quiet time on the porch. She did not need a god damn smokie convention.
    She had hoped that Johnny might be around, maybe he’d be willing to cook because she was tapped out. And no one delivered take-out a half hour drive out of town.
    Now she was hoping he was around so that she could kill him, slowly and painfully in front of all his friends.
    She stalked up the driveway, kicked his Jeep’s tire for good measure when she passed it. Then she registered the sounds which were echoing through her forest. Chainsaws, plural. And the biting roar of a wood chipper.
    She broke into a run. This was her land. No one was supposed to be logging here, ever. They—
    The spectacle at the end of the drive brought her to a stumbling standstill. Twenty feet of chip truck was parked at the head of her driveway. It was painted glossy black with brilliant red-orange flames climbing the sides. It was the Mount Hood Aviation paint job. Behind it, an equally well-maintained and brightly-painted chipper was shooting a steady arc into the back of the truck.
    Three people in hardhats and wearing heavy gloves were feeding in dead branches. She turned to the trees to see a half-dozen of them had people up them. Those trees, actually all of the trees for three-quarters of the way around her property no longer had any of their lower dead branches. The people in them were working so fast that the branches appeared to be falling in a continuous cascade.
    “Pretty great, huh?”
    “Shit!” Laura about jumped out of her skin when Johnny put his hand on her waist from behind. He wore a hardhat, climbing harness around his waist, and had a chainsaw slung over his shoulder as if it was the most normal thing on the planet.
    “What the hell, Johnny?” She waved a hand helplessly at the trees and fended off his attempt to kiss her. He was covered in sawdust.
    “Your place is a fire trap, Space Ace. Been making me crazy since the first time I came out here. In a fire all that dead wood cooks off,” he snapped his gloved fingers. Then he pulled off the glove and tried again with better results. “Massive amounts of fuel just begging for a fire to rip right through it. We had a promised dark day today, so I invited the crew out to do a little fire mitigation in exchange for pizza.”
    “Did you think about asking first?”
    His brow furrowed for a moment, then he shrugged off the idea. “Can’t say that I did. Doesn’t matter. I wanted you to be safer. This was something I could take care of for you.”
    She turned back to inspect what was happening. There were six sawyers in the trees. Another six or eight were dragging branches over to the chipper—swampers he’d called them when explaining how a crew fought fire.
    This was his specialty. There probably weren’t all that many people who knew more about protecting residences from fire than Johnny.
    “We okay with this?” he sounded a little worried. Clearly he was starting to rethink his initiative.
    She kept her back to him to hide her smile. It was hard not to feel charmed that he’d recruited all of his smokejumper friends on their day off to help protect his girlfriend.
    “Space Ace?”
    Laura let him suffer a little longer, but could barely keep the smile out of her voice as she let him off the hook. “You said something about pizza?”
    Out of the corner of her eye, she could see him pointing upward.
    Masked by the sound of the chainsaws, a small black helicopter—with the inevitable red-flame-on-black paint job—was slowing to a stop overhead and