by Roland Smith
Mark looked down at the pugmarks. “Or we could walk in the opposite direction.”
“You mean walk back down to the road?” John asked.
“Yeah.”
“Suit yourself,” John said and continued walking in the direction of the pugmarks.
“Mr. Charm,” Mark muttered.
Nicole smiled. “Are you really okay?”
“I’m fine. You’re the cat expert. What do you do when you run into one in the dark during a volcanic eruption?”
“Cats generally go after the weakest or the slowest.”
Mark looked at his camera. “This thing is going to be the death of —”
A lightning bolt struck the ground not twenty feet in front of them. Nicole and Mark were blown off their feet. They landed on their backs with the air knocked out of them.
Nicole raised her head and gulped for breath. The air was filled with the sharp acrid smell of ozone. She wasn’t exactly sure what had happened. She sat up.
“Mark?”
“Yeah.”
She could barely hear him. It was as if she had cotton stuffed in her ears. And there was something the matter with her vision. Flashes of bright light pulsated across her eyes, making it impossible to see more than a few feet away.
“Did we just get struck by lightning?” Her own voice sounded a mile away from her.
“No,” Mark said. “But it was close. Too close. Can you stand up?”
Nicole turned her head, surprised to see that he was right next to her.
“You sound a million miles away.”
“Eardrums,” he said. “We’ll be okay in a little bit. Can you stand?”
“I think so.”
She felt him take her hands and pull her to her feet.
“I’m having a hard time seeing,” she said.
“That will come back too,” Mark said, his voice sounding a little less muffled. “The flash was pretty bright. Blinded me too for a minute, but things are beginning to come into focus again.”
“What about —” Nicole began.
“That’s my next stop,” Mark said. “I’ll run up ahead and see how he’s doing. He probably didn’t even notice that we nearly got hit.”
Nicole doubted that.
“Wait here,” Mark said.
She wasn’t about to wait there. She followed him.
Fifty feet away, they found John Masters lying on the ground. His eyes were closed. He was pale. His right foot was turned at an unnatural angle. Nicole kneeled down next to him.
“He’s not breathing,” she said.
As Chase and Cindy reached the first floor, the air went still. They stopped and looked at each other.
“The rumbling is gone,” Chase said.
Cindy nodded. “I hadn’t really noticed the noise until now.”
“I wonder what it means,” Chase said.
They walked into the kitchen and saw Tomás standing at the window. He was holding two young children in his arms and looking out at Popocatepetl. Guadalupe stood behind him, stirring a delicious-smelling stew on top of a woodstove.
“The moon,” Tomás said in English, giving Chase and Cindy a rare smile.
They joined him at the window. The full moon shined brightly next to the plume, casting an eerie light down the mountainside.
“Is it over?” Cindy asked.
Tomás nodded. “For now.”
“How do you know?” Chase asked, hoping he was right.
“Experience,” Guadalupe answered in surprisingly better English than Tomás spoke. “The worst is behind us. We will mourn our dead, then we will rebuild.”
Tomás put the two children down and looked at the bump on Chase’s head.
“I’m fine,” Chase said.
“Good.” He handed Chase his go bag. “We need to fix the generator.”
Chase pulled his headlamp out and slipped it on.
The tiger stood listening in the stillness. He looked up at the moon until the ash cloud hid the light. He drank more water. The people were close. He could hear them talking. He was hungry.
“Breathe!” Nicole shouted. She was on her knees next to John Masters, doing rapid and deep chest compressions with the heels of her hands.
“What can I do?” Mark asked, a look of panic and fear on his face.
“Nothing.” She stopped the compressions, moved to John’s head, tilted it back, filled his lungs with two quick breaths, then started the compressions once again.
Mark paced back and forth. John Masters’s luck seemed to have run out. “What are the chances of getting struck by lightning twice?” he shouted in angry frustration. He looked up at the plume, expecting to see more lightning, but the flashes had been replaced by moonlight. The plume seemed to be breaking up, the wind blowing the ash cloud to the east.
And it’s quiet, Mark thought. Popocatepetl’s roar had stopped. The only thing he could hear was Nicole’s rhythmic compressions as she tried to bring Lightning John back to life.
“Breathe!” she shouted again. “Please!”
Chase and Cindy followed Tomás out the back door of the orphanage. He led them over to a locked shed. He pulled a key ring out of his pocket and unlocked the double doors. Behind the doors was an impressive collection of tools. Power tools, hand tools, compressors, a portable generator, a welder …
Chase smiled. He has his own private tool stash. Visiting Lago only once a year, it must have taken him years to accumulate all of this stuff.
Tomás started picking tools off the wall and shelves and putting them into a heavy-duty canvas bag. He looked at Chase and pointed to the portable generator and the dollied acetylene torch used for cutting metal.
Now Chase knew why Tomás had asked for his help. It wasn’t to wield tools, it was to haul them.
“I can carry something,” Cindy said.
Tomás offered her his go bag.
“Not a chance,” she said. She grabbed the dolly with the heavy acetylene and oxygen tanks.
“Breathe!”
John Masters did. His mouth opened. He sucked in a loud gulp of air.
“You saved his life!” Mark shouted.
John stared up at them, disoriented and confused. “What happened?”
“Lightning,” Nicole said.
“Again?” John said weakly. He tried to sit up but didn’t get very far. He collapsed back onto the ground with a groan.
“I’m afraid I broke, or bruised, some of your ribs giving you CPR.”
“Where’d you learn CPR?” John asked weakly.
“Lifeguard class, but I’ve never had to do it on a real person.”
“Thanks,” he said hoarsely. “Not for the ribs, but for sav —” He stopped in mid-sentence.
“What’s the matter?” Nicole asked, concerned.
“Where’s the sound?”
Mark smiled. “While you were taking your catnap, the volcano shut down.”
“Catnap, huh?” John laughed, then winced in pain. “How long was I out?”
“You mean dead,” Mark said.
“How long?”
Nicole looked at her watch in surprise. “Only four minutes or so,” she said. Her arms ached from pushing on his chest.
John tried to sit up again, but it was no good. The pain was too bad.
“Just stay down, for crying out loud,” Mark said. “Four minutes is enough to cause brain damage, but apparently it didn’t in your case. You’re still crazy. And Nicole didn’t give you the complete diagnosis. Your right leg is broken, or at least twisted up pretty badly. Since you weren’t breathing, we didn’t think it was important.”
“Well, I’m breathing now.” John tried to raise his head to see his leg but failed. “Take a look at it.”
Nicole and Mark looked without touching it. His right foot was at a right angle to his leg and swelling out of his boot.
“It’s your ankle,” Mark said. “It looks broken.”
“I might be able to set it,” Nicole said. “But I’d
have to go back down to the tree line to get wood.”
“Even if you set it, I wouldn’t be able to walk.” John laid his head back down and looked up at the sky. He laughed.
“I don’t see anything funny about this,” Nicole said.
“I’m laughing at your grandmother.”
Nicole wondered if John Masters did have brain damage after all.
“She told me the lightning was going to find me again,” John explained. “I guess she was right.” He looked at Nicole. “She also told your father that if you didn’t come, something bad was going to happen. I guess she was right about that too. I’d be dead if it weren’t for you two.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Mark said.
“I wouldn’t say that,” John said. “You kept us smiling. That’s worth more than you know.”
There was something different about John Masters. He wasn’t the John Masters from half an hour ago, or even from the day before.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Mark asked.
Nicole was about to ask the same thing. He seemed to have lost his intensity. He looked like Chase’s dad and sounded like Chase’s dad, but he didn’t act like him.
“Aside from my ribs and ankle?” John asked.
“Yeah,” Mark said. “You seem … I don’t know … cheerful, I guess.”
John thought about it for a moment, then smiled. “I guess you’re right. I do feel cheerful. It’s been a long time.”
“And you do realize that we are stuck on a mountain?”
John nodded. “If this ash went away, we could make a call and get some help. Tomás, Chase, or Cindy might be at Lago by now. I hope they’re there.”
“The moon was out for a minute,” Nicole said. “But the blowing ash has covered it again.”
“Where’s my go bag?”
It took a while for Mark to find it. The go bag had ended up twenty feet away from where John lay.
“It’s totally hammered,” Mark said. “Struck by lightning. Everything inside is burned or melted.”
“Check your sat phones and see if there’s a signal.”
They checked and shook their heads.
“That’s it, then,” John said. “You two go ahead without me. Leave me one of your phones and a bottle of water. If you think about it when you get to Lago, send somebody up here to get me.”
“Funny,” Nicole said.
“That lightning bolt must have wiped out your short-term memory,” Mark said. “There’s a tiger wandering around. We can’t leave you out here like some kind of roadkill.”
“We can’t stay here,” John said. “Nobody knows where we are. Lago isn’t very far.”
“I don’t feel right about leaving you here,” Nicole said. “You’re injured.”
“I’ll go,” Mark said. “You stay with John.”
“I’ll go,” Nicole said. “You stay.”
“Stop!” John said, some of his former intensity returning. “You’re not going by yourself, Nicole. And, Mark, you don’t speak Spanish.”
“I’m sure someone in Lago speaks enough English for me to make them understand that we need help.”
“You’re wasting time. No more debate. Give me your phone, Mark.”
Mark fished his phone out of his go bag and handed it over. Nicole gave him a bottle of water.
“I still don’t feel right about this,” Nicole said.
“Just go,” John said.
Mark set something down next to him. “What’s that?” John asked.
“It’s the camera. Keep an eye on it for me.”
“Will do,” John said.
He listened to them walk away.
Cheerful, he thought. It’s more than that. Content is more like it. That first bolt of lightning took something away from me. Maybe the second one brought something back. I’m so dense, it took not one but two bolts of lightning to square me away.
He hoped Chase was okay. He was eager to see his son.
The tiger saw the lights and walked toward them. The smell of food was in the dusty air. It was time to eat. Time to drink. Time to find a safe place to rest with a full belly. He heard the human voices. Unfamiliar voices. He was nervous, but he didn’t care. Hunger drove his fear away, and his paws toward the dancing lights.
“There!” Mark said, pointing.
“I see them,” Nicole said. Down the mountain, maybe a quarter mile away, several small fires flickered in the dark.
They started down.
“I haven’t seen any of those pugmarks in a long time,” Mark said.
“I haven’t either. He must have gone off in a different direction.” Nicole no longer cared about the tiger. Her mother and sister and Chase were close.
The generator was inside the bottling plant, which had been badly damaged by the earthquakes. During the day, when the plant was running, the generator was used to run the pumps and filters and conveyor belts that produced their famous Montaña water. At night and on weekends, when the plant was idle, the generator was used to power the village.
The bottling plant was a lot more sophisticated than Chase had expected it would be. When Father Al had told him about their famous water, he’d had an image of villagers kneeling next to the lake, filling the plastic bottles one at a time, screwing on caps, and tossing them into the back of an old pickup truck. He couldn’t have been more wrong. Aside from the church, the bottling plant was easily the largest building in the village. They had entered through a loading-dock door, which had been open when they arrived. Backed up to the dock were three relatively new trucks with the colorful Montaña logo painted on the panels.
A few of the ceiling tiles had fallen and there were thousands of plastic bottles, empty and full, strewn across the floor, making for treacherous walking with the portable generator he was carrying and the acetylene tanks Cindy was pulling. Tomás had tried to take the tanks from her, but she had slapped his hand and told him to quit being ridiculous.
The power plant was in a separate room at the far end of the building. When they got there, Tomás had Chase fire up the portable generator and set up some lights so he could see what he was doing. Tomás started by checking the electrical connections with his ohmmeter.
In the corner was an old sofa. Cindy plopped down on it, and within seconds she was sound asleep.
Chase watched Tomás’s clever hands and mind at work, systematically examining the generator from one end to the other. He wondered if Montaña water had existed when Tomás was growing up in the orphanage. He doubted it. The bottled-water craze hadn’t been around long. Forty years ago, when Tomás had lived in Lago, they probably really did just scoop water out of the lake.
A villager saw the two lights coming down the mountain and alerted Father Al. He and a small group of men met Nicole and Mark just before they reached the square. Nicole quickly explained who they were and what had happened to John Masters.
“How far up the mountain is he?” Father Al asked.
“Two miles,” Mark said. “Three at the most.”
Father Al asked two of the men to go into the church and get a stretcher. “You say he was struck by lightning.”
“Yes,” Nicole said.
“And he lived.”
“That’s right,” Mark said. “And that’s not the first time he’s been struck.”
“A miracle,” Father Al muttered, and crossed himself.
“Are my mother and sister here?” Nicole asked, almost afraid to hear his answer.
“Oh, yes,” Father Al said. “They are in the orphanage, asleep. They have been injured.”
“How badly?”
“Your mother is worse off than your sister, but if we can get her to a hospital soon, I think she will recover.”
Nicole looked at Mark. He smiled. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll take them up to retrieve Lightning John.”
“Thank you, Mark.” She gave him a hug, then turned to the priest. “Where’s the orphanage, Father?”
“Behind t
he church, but please try not to wake them. At this point, sleep is the best medicine. In fact, it is our only medicine until we get them to a proper facility.”
Nicole smiled and started toward the square, but she didn’t get far. She froze in mid-step.
“Oh, no!”
“What?” Mark hurried over and looked down. He swore.
Father Al joined them but didn’t understand what they were staring at on the ground.
“There’s a tiger in the village,” Nicole said as calmly as she could. “We need to get everyone into the church until we find out where it is.”
Tomás waved Chase over and showed him a handful of fuses. “In the shed,” he said. “In a red box. Bring the box.”
Chase smiled. He had always liked Tomás’s way of communicating.
Clear and concise.
“I’ll bring them right back.”
He headed out of the generator room toward the loading dock, happy to have something to do, and hoping that the fix was as simple as a new fuse.
An odd sensation overcame him as he walked past the conveyor belt. He stopped. The hair on the back of his neck prickled. He felt the same unpleasant sensation he had felt not two days before. Something was watching him. He could feel its eyes on him.
It can’t be.
He slowly moved his headlamp around the huge room. Bottles, boxes, equipment, and enough shadows to hide an elephant.
It’s my imagination. I’m just tired. I’m having a flashback.
But he knew none of this was true. There was a tiger in the building.
Nicole had told him that the most important thing was containment, but he didn’t think she meant to contain the animal in the same container you’re standing in. At the farm, they’d had a shotgun and a tranquilizer. Now he had nothing.
Cindy and Tomás have less than nothing. They don’t know the tiger is here.
He looked behind him. The light shined through the generator door. He looked in front of him at the loading-dock door.
Midway.
If he made a run for the generator room and slammed the door, the tiger could leave the building. There were people in the square. The church door was open. The orphanage door was open. The tiger could go wherever it wanted.
