Heart on Fire Read online

  “He probably bumped his head, or something bumped it for him. Head injuries aren’t easy to figure.”

  Janine ran her fingers gently across Chad’s forehead; her fingertips located a bump at Chad’s left temple that Ethan had as much as predicted would be there. Discoloration of surrounding tissue had already begun, only now evident in the dim lighting.

  “If only he’d make some tiny sound.” He was so silent, Janine couldn’t really be sure he was still breathing until she reconfirmed by finding his pulse at the base of his neck.

  “Nothing to do for him, now.” Ethan was stoic. “We can only sit back and hope for rescue. Base camp knows we’re in this area, and they’ll send out a chopper from Cougar as soon as it’s safe for them to come in after us.”

  The sooner the better.

  Janine took Chad’s hand and held it, giving it a reassuring squeeze.

  His dusty fingers didn’t return the pressure.

  She was more worried about him than she had ever been worried about anything or anyone in her whole life.

  She knelt by the wreckage, there beside the man for whom she’d come to care so deeply in such a short time, and she prayed, giving thanks for their survival and asking for oh-so-much more.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ETHAN PREDICTED THE LIGHTNING and carried the unconscious Chad to a safer distance from the downed metal helicopter. Janine followed along and staked out a place for herself beside both men and up against an exposed outcropping of rock that poked above the mat of fallen trees.

  “I have to go back for some things,” Ethan said and left his two companions for the return balancing act to the precariously perched chopper.

  Janine scooted to cradle Chad’s head on her lap.

  She looked out across the expanse of landlocked logjam, fearful for the scrambling Ethan even if he seemed perfectly cognizant of what was needed for him to do what he was doing. Janine wished she were as confident as he was.

  The buildup of static electricity continued. Janine’s skin tingled with it, and she became genuinely concerned for Ethan who was now scrounging around within the metal of the wreckage.

  When the atmospheric fireworks began, Janine couldn’t believe her eyes. Never in her life had she seen such a close-up display of so many streaks of yellow and blue-white light crisscrossing the heavens in so many different directions and angles, sometimes all at once.

  Flames thrust first one way and then the other, providing bursts of brightness, like day, within an otherwise dimness that was going darker with each moment from more floating ash and smoke.

  Janine was sure she saw flickering blue outlining the helicopter wreckage at the very same time a particularly large stab of brilliance split the sky with an accompanying sonic boom.

  In the darkness, made darker by the preceding blast of brilliance, Janine was temporarily unable to see anything.

  She was afraid. As long as she could be assured, though, that Ethan was alive, she was confident he would, somehow, if humanly possible, see all three of them to safety. Were she to be left alone with an unconscious Chad, she doubted just the two of them would survive.

  So, was Ethan still alive and, if so, where in the hell was he?

  Another lightning bolt traced the exact path of the one just before it; so much for lightning never striking the same place twice! There was a sudden clamp of something, over and onto Janine’s arm. Her accompanying scream was completely drowned out by the loud crashes of thunder that attended two more slashes of white-light across the sky.

  She grabbed for whatever crawled her arm; undoubtedly, it was some denizen from the netherworld summoned by the hellish incantations that rumbled the mountain and bathed each and every thing in eeriness.

  Embarrassedly, she discovered it was only Chad’s hand which now rested on her arm, without her having seen him lift it to get it there.

  “Chad?”

  The next flash was a blessing in that it gave Janine the light she needed to see that Chad’s eyes were open, the magical gold of his gaze somewhat glazed, but....

  “Hey, Babe,” he asked, wondrously able to see her, too. “What’s up?” So much for the stereotype response of all those once-revived: “Where am I?”

  She leaned over and kissed his lips, unable to help herself. Albeit dusty, the kiss was one of pure joy.

  He groaned twice as she helped him into a sitting position. No matter his outward appearance, he obviously hadn’t been left unscathed. At least, though, he was conscious. At least, though, he was alive.

  “Ethan flew us out of the crater, but we’ve gone down in the blow-down area,” she said.

  “Where is Ethan?”

  Sweet Jesus, yes, where was he? Janine had lost track.

  “He’s at the helicopter, trying to find anything usable.” She refused to believe Ethan had come this far, only to have been electrocuted. “He should be back any minute.”

  “Actually, he’s back, now,” Ethan said and materialized on Janine’s right. His naked torso was revealed in another flash of light.

  If he looked downright skinny when dressed, his chest and stomach were actually a maze of deeply defined and well-delineated muscle groups.

  “Hey, Chad, welcome back to the real world—as hellish as it turns out to be.”

  He deposited his discarded shirt, which he’d converted into a carrying sack, into a niche in the rock.

  “How are you feeling by the way, buddy?” he wanted to know.

  “A headache,” Chad admitted.

  “You whacked your head a pretty good one. Double vision?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “Any other major aches or pains?”

  Janine was confident, from personal experience, that if Chad had any that Ethan would ferret them out.

  “I’m afraid my leg is a bit screwed up.” It was the same leg Chad had injured in the earthquake. “This isn’t exactly the kind of therapy Hank ordered.”

  “Your shoulder?” Ethan, as well as Janine, remembered that Chad’s shoulder had suffered damage in the earthquake as well.

  “Pretty much the same as before.” Chad rolled both of his shoulders to test for any discomfort.

  “What about gut pains?” Ethan asked as calmly as he’d asked Janine when she’d performed for his check-list.

  Chad was none too quick with a response.

  “So, where does it hurt?” Ethan was quicker on the uptake than Janine. He didn’t sound nearly as concerned, though, as she suddenly was at that moment.

  “A slight something, here.” Chad rested the fingertips of his right hand against the lower right quadrant of his abdomen.

  Ethan unbuttoned Chad’s shirt and peeled the material back to reveal the man’s chest and stomach.

  Janine shivered at the exquisite beauty of square pectorals and washboard abdominals that looked so perfect but possibly concealed a dangerous and possibly deadly flaw somewhere beneath.

  Ethan pushed down on Chad’s fingers which, in turn, pushed down on Chad’s belly. When Ethan released the pressure, Chad’s face clouded with obvious discomfort.

  Chad groaned, and Janine painfully sensed all of the willpower he had probably put into not making that sound.

  Ethan refastened the bottom button of Chad’s shirt, and Janine took over the re-buttoning from there. Her fingers grazed Chad’s bare stomach and chest as she concealed them beneath the material.

  His body looked so healthy, so perfect. Janine didn’t want to believe it was anything else but. However, she’d seen the pained expression on his face. She’d heard his telltale groan.

  “What exactly is his problem?” she asked Ethan.

  Ethan shrugged. “Could be a lot of things. Pulled muscle. Internal bleeding. Appendix.”

  “Probably a pulled muscle,” Janine told Chad. It just couldn’t be anything else. Internal bleeding or a damaged appendix sounded way too serious, considering how far removed they were, at the moment, from medical assistance.

  “Pro
bably,” Chad played along with a cheerful grin.

  “Definitely nothing that won’t hold out until rescue.” Ethan, too, was prepared to be optimistic, but there was something about the way he said what he said that didn’t quite give Janine the assurance for which she wanted, needed, and hoped.

  “It does look as if the mountain is summoning in additional cloud cover,” Chad said.

  For the first time, Janine noticed that the non-stop lightning bursts were dimmer than they’d once been. She’d assumed it was electricity finally in decline.

  “More cloud cover will make it more difficult for anyone to find us, yes?” she tried to keep her voice calm, cool, and collected. If she succeeded, it was purely façade. Their lives could very well depend upon how quickly helped pulled them off the mountain.

  “They’ll find us,” Ethan assured.

  Janine, though, glanced again toward the heavens, seeing no blue sky, seeing even less evidence of an already dimmed-to-near-invisibility sun.

  “A combination of real clouds and ash could sock us in here for days,” she said, made uncomfortable by the probability of just that happening. How many times, during the history of the mountain’s recent volcanic activity, had she read or heard that observations were made difficult because of unfavorable weather conditions?

  “I’ve salvaged some food and some water.” Ethan ignored Janine’s dire forecast. “I even found a couple of candy bars to sweeten the pot. Unfortunately, though I looked far and wide, no sign of our Coke.”

  “You and Janine go ahead and eat something,” Chad suggested. “I’m not hungry.”

  “You have to eat!” Janine hoped she wasn’t getting hysterical. There was something about the shrillness of her voice, up at least an octave from where it normally was, that she didn’t like.

  She’d come way too far to crack now. Doing so wouldn’t help any of them. It was just that she hadn’t seen Chad through this much to see him fade away just because he decided to make sacrifices that gave Ethan and her extra bites of chocolate.

  “If he’s not hungry, he can always eat later,” Ethan said. That sounded logical. Except, there was something—once again—about the way he said it that carried more emphasis than his words.

  Nor did Janine miss the furtive glance Ethan and Chad exchanged before including her.

  “If Chad has any kind of stomach injury—” Ethan said, and Janine could sense he’d finally decided to come clean. “If,” he emphasized, apparently disturbed by the expression on her face; Janine could well imagine his fears that he’d soon be stuck with an injured man and an hysterical woman. “—then, it’s probably better he hold off eating or drinking anything for as long as he can.”

  “Of course.” Janine consciously willed her heart to be still. Surely, she and Chad hadn’t come all of this way to end up their days on a rock in the middle of a powder-dusted carpeting of fallen trees, lightning laser-beaming the sky, a mountain billowing black smoke, locked from rescue by a cloud cover socking down around them as securely as any burial shroud.

  She felt closer to Chad now than ever, her initial attraction even more cemented by their having survived the crash together.

  There was no denying that there had been a certain something that had existed between them from that very first moment she’d spotted him at the picnic table in her parents’ backyard. And that something had only been reinforced and built upon by the earthquake, the kiss over milk and sweet rolls, the more intimate kiss beneath the moonlight, and the dusty kiss beneath the presently dimmed sun.

  She went back to worrying about Chad’s possible internal injuries from which people were known to die even when not on the side of a mountain that, for all intents and purposes, might well be literally about to blow—and for not the first time.

  Janine was determined to savor whatever remaining moments Chad and she now had. Why analyze the why of them when they could be so short-lived, no others on the possibly catastrophic horizon? If they got out of this alive, that was the time to figure out what it all meant—if it meant anything at all.

  “It’s going to be all right, Janine.” Chad took her hand in his and squeezed it reassuringly with his strong fingers.

  How often she’d squeezed his hand when he’d been unconscious, hoping for even a fraction of the pressure he now returned with such ease. At least, he was conscious. At least, he was alive.

  “I’ve waited way too long to find you to lose you now—in a bang not of our own making,” he assured her with a good-natured smile.

  She tried her best to smile back.

  “Rescue will be here any minute,” she said, her words sounding hollow in her ears and deafened by continuing atmospheric and ground rumbles, creaks, crackles, moans, and groans.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  NIGHT CAME WITHOUT a rescue helicopter or an airplane even heard over and above the prevailing sounds of a mountain in major disorder.

  Black became blacker, and then blackest, ripped by non-stop frequent slashes of lightning.

  Janine wasn’t even sure it was after nightfall until Ethan said it was and added that it was likely all search parties had been pulled back until morning. His Rolex watch had fared their misadventure far better than Chad and Janine’s less expensive timepieces.

  “At least it’s doubtful we’ll freeze to death,” Chad said, still trying to make the best of their obviously deteriorating bad situation.

  The temperatures, all around, were high, not to mention muggy because of moisture-laden clouds which had joined the dusty swirls. Janine was constantly reminded of how it was in a greenhouse, except here there were none of the accompanying exotic and beautiful plants in attendance. This landscape remained barren, bleak, desolate, seemingly sterile, and smelling of Hades.

  She let Chad’s arm that was around her, pull her closer.

  She laid her head against his shoulder but wasn’t likely to go to sleep. How could anyone sleep with the very rocks oozing heat beneath them, the sky on fire overhead, the mountains liquid interior rumbling every second?

  Except, always an exception to every rule, Ethan slept like a seeming baby. Lightning flashes revealed his face strangely relaxed. His naked chest regularly and evenly contracted and expanded with exhalations and in-draws of dust-saturated breath.

  How many wars would Janine have to fight, how many hours spent sitting beneath this volcano, before she became jaded enough to sleep through the possibility of death so close and in relentless prowl?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  WHAT WAS THERE, those three hours later…what mysterious warning signal that simultaneously went off inside all three victims…that had Janine, Chad, and Ethan suddenly wide awake and turned as one toward the mountain’s hazy silhouette in the gloom directly to the south of them?

  Janine gasped audibly as a new more intense red glow expanded until the crater of Mt. St. Helens, visible through the serrated edges of what remained of its collapsed North Face, seemed lit by an additional maze of colored spotlights turned on from within.

  “It’ll be all right.” Chad hugged her more closely.

  But how could it be all right when, like the tipped cauldron that Janine had once seen at Kaiser Aluminum’s Mead pot line, during a high-school field trip, the mountain began its slow spill of fiery contents?

  “Oh-ho!” Ethan’s startled understatement emphasized Janine’s worst fears.

  A river of magma was on the move toward them.

  Chad wasn’t nearly fit enough to get out of its way on his own. Nor did it seem probable or possible, either, that Ethan and Janine, together, or separately, could carry him far enough, fast enough, to save him.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “WE’RE FARTHER FROM the crater than we seem,” Ethan tried to reassure.

  It sounded to Janine like ongoing rationalization for his insistence that they stay put, little chance of a successful get-away in a darkness made surprisingly darker by the glowing river of molten metal approaching from the distance.


  When sunrise finally arrived, not alleviating the darkness by any means, but making the air opaque enough to distinguish objects better, there was no doubt in Janine’s mind that Ethan was preparing to move out.

  “No one is going to find us in these conditions, unless they’ve help with coordinates,” he said. “Our position is no longer viable for just waiting around—if it ever was. If the magma has momentarily stopped short of the blow-down area—” Yes, Janine realized, the lava flow had stopped, at least for the moment. “—we’re going to be in even worse shape if it starts flowing again,” Ethan continued. “These trees have laid around long enough so that they’re going to light up fast and furious when a match that big touches them. I’m surprised there haven’t been more fires, what with all the flying sparks and lightning strikes. Possibly, the thick dust covering everything isn’t conducive to ideal combustion, but wood is wood is wood and won’t hold out against magma forever, even if that wood is thoroughly dusted. So, if we’re not done in by the lava, we’ll be exposed to the resulting fire. If the lava and fire don’t do it, we’ll be asphyxiated when the resulting smoke adds itself to this already lung-clogging atmospheric mixture.”

  Janine looked out over the maze of fallen and twisted tree trunks that Ethan proposed be traveled over and through before there could even be a chance of escape.

  “Chad can’t possibly make the attempt,” she said and knew she wasn’t telling Ethan anything he didn’t already know.

  “Of course, he can’t,” he confirmed. “We’ll have to leave him as comfortable as possible and come back for him once we reach help. Once I’ve a helicopter at my disposal, I’ll bird-dog it back here, set down, and pull Chad out of the literal line of fire.”

  “Set down a helicopter where?” Janine asked. She’d been thinking all along that, even if rescue did arrive, the helicopter would have to hover and lift them out on ropes or cables.

  “Set it down, right there, of course.” Ethan pointed.

  Janine couldn’t stifle her shiver of disbelieve. What Ethan was pointing out as a potential landing pad was the summit of the rock outcropping against which they were holed up. At the most, the space to which he referred, precariously tilted in the bargain, was less than eight feet by eight feet.