Heart on Fire Read online

  “It’ll be a piece of cake,” Ethan assured, “compared to some of the pick-up spots I’ve had to deal with in the military.”

  Never doubting his skills as a pilot—he had gotten them out of the crater, hadn’t he?—Janine nevertheless suspected his proposal was impossible. What’s more, there was no way she could go with him and not lessen whatever chances his military expertise gave him for survival.

  “I’ll make Chad and myself as comfortable as possible until you get back,” she realistically volunteered.

  “Janine, you’ve got to go with him,” Chad insisted. He’d been lying quietly up until then, his eyes shut; Janine had hoped he’d sleep until she could get Ethan safely on his way.

  “Let’s do be practical, shall we?” she argued. “I’m not prepared to stay behind just because I think you need some kind of nursemaid or moral support. I’m merely increasing all of our odds for getting out of here alive by assuring Ethan the best chances of his getting out for help. He’ll be nothing but slowed down by having me hanging around his neck each step of the way.”

  She raised her hand to keep Chad from interrupting. It didn’t escape her notice that she was getting no argument from Ethan who obviously joined her in her assessment of their situation.

  “If I went with Ethan,” she continued, “he’d probably have to leave me somewhere along the line when it became plain I couldn’t keep up. I’d rather be left here with you, and have company, if you don’t mind.”

  They were distracted by momentary additional fireworks from the crater. Columns of liquid metal slopped upward, breaking at their thinning upper edges into colorful droplets that cascaded back from view. At any moment, the brew bubbling in that natural cauldron could overflow even more of its viscous contents; the river of lava, now stopped, would be on the move again and cover whatever the remaining distance necessary to ignite the blown-down timber laid out, like kindling for a fire, all around and under then.

  “I’m not in shape,” Janine admitted, although it was an admission she didn’t relish making. “I got breathless that night you and I took a simple walk, didn’t I?” That was the night he’d kissed her, and she’d kissed him back. “I’d never make it across there.” She waved an emphasizing arm toward the gargantuan carpet of splintered tree trunks. She didn’t add that she had her doubts about Ethan making the journey even in his obviously prime physical condition.

  “I wish you’d chance it, anyway,” Chad argued. He wasn’t looking any too good. Oh, he was still the most attractive man Janine had ever seen, but that wasn’t what she meant by good in the present context. Janine was pretty sure he’d taken a fever during the night, even if the high external temperatures had her hoping—please, dear God!—she was mistaken.

  His golden eyes had a glazed quality that made her worry that his head injury was more than he was letting on.

  It didn’t help any that the potential danger offered by a possible internal injury kept him from eating and drinking.

  Janine had finally succumbed to hunger and to Ethan’s insistence, and she’d eaten half a turkey sandwich and swallowed a few mouthfuls of precious bottled water. Thus, depleting the skimpy provisions Ethan had salvaged from the wreck.

  Ethan pulled his shirt and its contents from the niche where he’d stuffed them. He laid them on one of the tree trunks that supported them from beneath. He untied the bundle as he’d done the night before when he’d pulled out the turkey sandwich and divided it between Janine and him.

  “We’ll divide the food three ways,” Ethan said.

  “Two ways,” Chad contradicted. If he was sinking, he still had his wits about him at the moment. “You forget that I’m on a diet for health reasons.”

  Janine couldn’t help wonder if it would be worse starving to death or screwing up a damaged stomach by eating. She decided the latter was worse. Bible prophets, not to mention Gandhi, among others, had often gone on long fasts and recovered from them.

  “You’ll be using up far more calories than I will,” she told Ethan, moving two of three candy bars from her pile to his. “If I get weak, I can collapse where I stand. You’ll have to keep moving.”

  Ethan broke one of the returned bars in half and returned one of those pieces to her pile. “I want you functional when I get back,” he said, aborting all argument.

  He picked up the bottle of water.

  “Dividing one bottle of water is going to be more difficult,” he said.

  “You take it,” Janine said, seeing that as the only feasible solution. If they had any hope of getting out of there, it rested entirely with Ethan and with God. God didn’t need water, but Ethan did.

  “Take a nice big swallow, then,” Ethan offered her the bottle. “I insist,” he said authoritatively when she hesitated. “And I do mean a good swallow. It’s going to have to hold you over through some pretty hot times. And it’s liable to get only hotter around here before it gets cooler.”

  She took one good drink, strangely thirstier afterwards than before. She recapped the bottle and passed it back to him.

  “I’ll try to be as quick as I can,” he said and added the water to the pack he’d made of his shirt. He perspired. Droplets of his sweat converged across the top of his chest and drooled down the deep groove formed between his pectorals.

  “I still think Janine should go with you,” Chad injected. His face screwed up in noticeable discomfort as he shifted himself into a higher sitting position against the rock.

  Ethan seemed seriously to consider Chad’s final plea. God help them all if he agreed!

  “Janine?” Ethan asked. Was he really willing to risk his chances by dragging her along? If he was, she wasn’t.

  She shook her head.

  Curiously, she watched him unfasten his bundle yet again. What he brought out this time was a Bible.

  “I’m loaning this to you until I get back,” he said. “It belonged to a dear friend of mine: a really nice guy. I mean, everyone but the enemy liked him. He’d enlisted and really liked the war zone. He did his job and did it damned well. He saved more than one life, my own included, by being right where he should have been and doing right what he was supposed to do at the right time.”

  Ethan’s eyes took on a distant quality, and Janine expected he was looking through her, seeing that other time, that other place, to which he referred.

  He shook his head to clear it. His voice, which had gotten softer and more dream-like in the telling, returned to normal.

  “He got himself killed by a sniper,” Ethan said, swiftly.

  Janine suspected there was a good deal of pain for Ethan in the telling.

  “While he was dying—I mean, I knew he was dying, and he knew it, too—I asked him why in the hell it had to be him. He was the only really religious one of our bunch, and don’t let anyone ever tell you that war makes converts of all soldiers. The notion of no atheists in foxholes might have been true of World Wars I and II, but recent wars have made more atheists out of Christians than vice versa.”

  Even the mountain had the good grace not to interrupt. St. Helens sat large, forbidding, and foreboding, but silent, with only a faint attending glow visible within its cupping crater to hint that it wasn’t yet through with any of them.

  “Anyway, I asked him why he had to die,” Ethan continued finally, “and he said we all had to die—sometime. Catholics, Christians, Jews, atheists. I’ve still never quite forgiven God for taking him, and, I guess, that’s just something God and I will eventually have to straighten out between us. All that’s pertinent, here, is that there are never any guarantees about when and where we go down for the final count.”

  Janine knew what he was saying. If she stayed with Chad, she could very well die with him. There was nothing that said for certain that she could hope to survive with him. If her time had come, then it had come. Granted, she still had the opportunity of free choice, of choosing for herself whether to go or to stay, but she could just as easily die out there in the gloom wi
th Ethan as here with Chad. Of the two men who might be with her at the end, she preferred that it be Chad.

  Last night, cuddled beside Chad, there by the rock, aware that the sweat on his brow and soaking his shirt was as much the result of his inner temperature as it was of the heat and the humidity around them, she had finally admitted to herself that she loved him. She didn’t know how the miracle had happened in so short a time, especially since she had fought against the seeming improbability of it having happened.

  But suddenly faced with the death of either of them, or both of them, at any moment, false denials of what she felt for him were suddenly ridiculous. Having found love, and admitting finally to having found it, made the prospect of her death a bit easier. Better to savor and enjoy the sweetness of love than to pretend it doesn’t exist, especially since she couldn’t really believe any of them was going to get out alive.

  “Hurry back, Ethan.” She was surprise by how calm she could sound. “We’ll keep the home fires burning, in one way or another.”

  Ethan retied his shirt so that the sleeves and shirttails were somehow joined to make straps. He slipped the improvised pack onto his back.

  “I don’t think Chad would mind you giving me a quick kiss for good luck, Janine,” Ethan said. “Would you Chad?”

  Janine kissed him—albeit briefly.

  His lips were dry and tasted of dust.

  He smiled, saluted smartly and left.

  She watched him thread his way along the catwalks formed by the toppled timber.

  “You were never that free with your kisses around me,” Chad said, his voice gently chiding.

  “That’s because there was always the likelihood of far more complications to my life from your kisses,” Janine confessed and walked to sit down besides him.

  She didn’t resist when he wrapped her waist with one arm and pulled her close. The time for pretense was over.

  She wondered if he was in good enough shape for—

  Quickly, she discarded any sexual fantasies as entirely out of the question, under the circumstances. It didn’t matter that they might die without consummating their love for one another, with a physical union, but she could live with that. Hell, she could die with that.

  “What could you have possibly thought complicating about my kisses?” Chad asked, seemingly all innocence.

  “Okay, I love you,” she told him. He might as well know it before they both died. If he didn’t return the emotion, that was okay, too.

  “Well, I’m glad to hear that,” he said, “because, as it turns out, I’ve loved you from the very first moment I set eyes on you.”

  He kissed her, and she kissed him. Oh, she did enjoy the wondrous sensations of his lips so sensuously pressed against hers.

  “I’m afraid you love a man not much competent, at the moment, to court you with anything but kisses,” he apologized and pulled her tighter to kiss her again.

  “We have plenty of time,” she told him, although she doubted he believed that bit of bravura any more than she did.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  WHAT MAGIC THE WAY the wind (or some other atmospheric force) shifted clouds and dust to reveal the patch of blue sky!

  With the break in the weather, there came the first real ray of sunshine, although diluted, that Janine or Chad had seen since before Ethan had left two days before.

  More welcome yet was the accompanying breath of air that seemed dust-free even if it wasn’t.

  “See, things are looking up,” Janine encourage cheerfully.

  “Right!” Chad said. Anyway, that was how Janine interpreted it by reading his lips. The sound he made, in reality, was undecipherable.

  As if embarrassed by his unseemly croak, Chad shut his eyes and either feigned sleep or went to sleep—Janine couldn’t tell which.

  His lips were dried to the point of splitting into blood-red cracks. His tongue was swollen, his face dust-covered and gaunt as death itself.

  It was Chad’s steadily deteriorating state that kept Janine from a more acute awareness of her own less-than-adequate physical and mental well-being.

  She sat close to him in order to keep her eyes on him. Often now—she wondered if he noticed how often—she’d feel for the pulse spot on his neck to make sure his heart was still beating.

  She opened the Bible that Ethan had left with her, and she took advantage of the better light to read. During the varying degrees of light available over the last couple of days, she’d taken to reading aloud, because the sound of her voice gave her, and she hoped Chad, decided comfort.

  As she read, she kept her ears open for the sound of an airplane or a helicopter. If she held out little hope of Ethan having gotten through, the break in the cloud and dust cover, as small as it was, meant the rescue teams could at least see them if luck brought them anywhere close.

  She stopped reading and surveyed the sky above, surprised to notice that other holes in the gloom were now admitting rays of light to crisscross the landscape like spotlights at a rock concert. The effect was weird and unsettling. Besides which, the sunlight she’d so happily welcomed was making her only hotter. The way it glared down upon her, there was little shade. Suddenly, she worried that, among other things, Chad and she might suddenly end up with sunstroke.

  “Chad?” She put the book aside. “Chad?” Why was she more and more surprised each time he opened his eyes? “Maybe you should take off your shirt and use it to protect your face from the sun. Do you think, between the two of us, we could manage that?”

  He tried his best to unfasten his shirt buttons, but his fingers obviously weren’t up to the task.

  “Let me.” Janine was frightened by how difficult it was, even for her, to perform the usually simple task. In normal times, she could have completely dressed and undressed him in less time than it took her to get his five buttons undone.

  The exquisite muscle definition of Chad’s chest and stomach seemed out of place in those surroundings. It simply didn’t go with Chad’s face which, while still surprisingly handsome, was haggard and strained.

  By the time they got as far as getting his shirt off, the sunlight was gone, garroted out of existence by a closing in of the cloud and dust around it.

  She rolled the hard-won shirt and used it as a pillow for his head.

  She picked up the Bible but—whether because of the contrast from sunlight to gloom, or because the returned dimness was simply too complete, or because her eyes were failing under the strain—she couldn’t make out the printed words.

  She started to cry. She didn’t want to. What’s more, she knew it was a waste of precious body fluid.

  On the other hand, she deserved a good bawl and suspected it would make her feel better when it was over. She’d held out a long time without shedding a tear, but something about the continuing hopelessness of Chad and her positions, only emphasized by the short-lived break in the weather, signaled her need for some kind of major catharsis.

  She wasn’t sure how long she cried before she felt the reassuring pat of Chad’s hand against her arm. She looked at him, and her heart went out to him.

  She pulled herself together, as best as she could, for his sake.

  “Sorry about that,” she apologized and wiped away the last of her tears.

  He continued to pat her arm reassuringly, as if telling her, without words, that things would turn out all right.

  But how could things turn out all right?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  JANINE SMELLED WOOD smoke, and that made it more difficult to breathe.

  She knew, without even looking—she hadn’t the strength to lift her head from Chad’s shoulder—that the cauldron had spilled more hot metal, and the timber in the blow-down area had finally caught fire.

  What had Ethan said? If the fire and the lava don’t get us, we’ll end up asphyxiated: something like that. Janine wondered if she really cared.

  It might be better to just die and leave this hell on Earth for whatever awaited on
the other side.

  She would have willingly died if she wasn’t compelled to stay grounded for Chad’s sake. Despite everything, he still lived.

  If Chad were to die, though…. If she felt for his pulse one of these times and couldn’t find it.… Well, then, she would die, too, and willingly.

  Living was so painfully difficult in this pocket of Earth where the air was becoming more and more toxic, the blackness becoming more and more filled with deafening drumbeats.

  No one could be subjected to so much suffering for so long and survive it.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  BLUE SKY? SUNLIGHT? Yes! A dream, then? Whiffs of smoke blew in gossamer veils across that hole in the sky.

  The smell of burning wood was a constant irritant.

  The crackling of flames remained a distinctly loud and staccato precursor of doom in Janine’s ears.

  Chad was beside her. Did he see the blue? Did he smell the smoke and hear the flames?

  Janine felt for his pulse and couldn’t find it.

  She’d felt for her own pulse and couldn’t find it.

  The tips of her fingers were numb and unfeeling. Or, maybe, she and Chad were dead, although she could recall nothing in her life that warranted her spending her afterlife in such a hellish place as this.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  HOW HOT THE AIR!

  How suffocating the swirl of dust that levitated to engulf them!

  How ridiculous the metal bird perched so precariously on the edge of its nest, threatening to topple and fall within the dusty breeze.

  “Janine, you do look like hell!”

  “Ethan?”

  “I said I’d be back, didn’t I? I said landing would be a cinch, didn’t I?”

  “Chad, it’s Ethan.” She turned to Chad who wasn’t there.