by Susan Stoker
She stepped into the stream, which was about two feet deep, and looked around. Which way?
Her decision could have a direct result on whether she lived or died.
Taking a deep breath and hoping for the best, she turned right…and headed straight toward the flames. It was slow going, but she refused to leave the stream. The water was obscuring her path…she hoped.
She hadn’t gone more than a half mile when she thought she heard something behind her. Not stopping to look back, Erin saw a miracle in front of her. A logjam.
Well, not exactly, but close enough. A tree had fallen across the stream and formed a sort of blockade for the water. Other sticks and debris had gotten clogged behind it.
Her heart beating faster than she could ever remember it beating when she was in the gym or working out, Erin looked up at what sounded like a freight train coming straight for her.
It wasn’t a motor, but a wall of fire. Bigger, hotter, and meaner than anything she’d ever seen.
She wasn’t sure what she’d expected when she’d started the blaze; a slow-burning wildfire that would be easy to put out while still being a flashing beacon for anyone looking for her. But the flames that were bearing down on her weren’t that. Not even close.
They were horrifying and scary. The trees in this area were bigger than where she’d set the fire. The grass more abundant. There was a lot of fuel for the flames, and it was being consumed at an alarming rate.
Knowing the flames were actually her bigger concern at the moment, more so than the hunter, Erin quickly ran around the fallen tree and knelt in the stream. The water wasn’t terribly deep, but she hoped it was deep enough. It flowed around her from somewhere upstream with a surprisingly strong current. The image of boiling alive as the flames heated the water like a pot on a stove ran through her mind, but she ignored it.
Erin used her hands to frantically scoop out an area near the head of the tree so she could fit underneath it. Hiding under a pile of combustible dead tree limbs wasn’t exactly the best decision when a wildfire was bearing down on her, but at the back of her mind, she knew she not only needed to hide from the flames, she needed to hide from the man hunting her as well. Either would kill her without thought. The water and this felled tree were her only hope of surviving.
She clawed her way through the stray sticks and leaves pressing up against the large trunk lying across the stream. She took a deep breath and ducked under the tree and water, but had to come back out because, once she was under the log, there wasn’t enough space between the limbs for her face to get above water for air.
Not daring to look behind her at the fire she knew was dangerously close, Erin moved to the head of the log on the bank of the stream. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but got excited when she saw that the tree was forked at the top. She moved more debris out of the way and dug beneath the tree, closer to the bank this time, and took another big breath. She ducked under the dam once more but this time closer to shore. She wiggled her body toward the bank until her head and chest were lying in the mud, above the water line but still shielded between the limbs of the tree. Her lower body was below the surface, hidden by the downed tree and other debris.
Her upper body position made the mud and dirt on the edge of the stream start to shift, and she moved her hands over her head to try to hold the earth in place.
Erin heard the fire bearing down on her from one side and, incredibly, heard the hunter yelling from her other side.
“Where are you, wildcat? You can’t survive that fire. Come back this way and I’ll make sure you’re safe. Time-out. You hear me? Time-out!”
She shook her head. The man was insane. Time-out her ass. Yeah, maybe he wouldn’t shoot her if she went back to him, but he’d certainly drug her again, and possibly bring her to another state to start his insane hunt all over again. She couldn’t forget the way he’d made her eat out of the dog bowl as if she really was nothing but an animal. Allowing her ankle to heal wasn’t an act of compassion, it was the sign of a serial killer. She’d sooner be burned alive than trust him. The thought of being in his clutches again made Erin’s skin crawl. She shivered.
Wait…
No. It wasn’t the thought of being the cyborg’s prisoner that gave her that feeling.
It was ants.
She’d found the perfect place to hide—but so had other creatures of the forest.
She felt the first bite on her elbow. Then a second followed.
Erin closed her eyes and exhaled silently. There was no time to find another hiding place. Between the fire and the hunter, she had to stay right where she was. She might survive the fire bearing down on her by hiding in the water, and she might be able to elude the hunter in the process, but she was still going to die. Fucking hell.
Conor decided that firefighters were insane. He’d rather face a man with a gun twenty times over than the flames that were slowly getting closer and closer. They were hiking along the edge of the fire. The seven firefighters were digging a trench as they went, trying to create a firebreak so the flames wouldn’t have anything to feed on when they got to this point.
The heat was incredible, and Conor was sweating profusely. The men, and Penelope, worked mostly silently, communicating through hand signals as they quickly and competently did their best to keep the fire from spreading.
A noise to their right startled Conor so badly, he turned and had his pistol out before he’d even thought about what he was doing.
“What the fuck?” Moose said as they all stopped to watch what had made the noise way out in this part of the forest.
It was a donkey. A small one. A really small one.
“Oh my God!” Penelope exclaimed. “It’s on fire.”
And it was…sort of. The donkey was smoking as it came running toward them. Its head was up and it was staring right at them. It didn’t stop until it was in front Penelope. His body was literally smoldering.
“Shit, give me a water bottle,” Penelope demanded to Moose, holding out her hand.
The big firefighter didn’t hesitate, simply unclipped his water bottle from his pack and handed it over.
Penelope unscrewed the lid and put her hand on the donkey’s head. “Easy, boy,” she murmured. “You’re okay. I got you.” She slowly began to pour water over the donkey’s back. The animal didn’t move. He just gazed up at Penelope with big brown eyes. As the water hit his skin, steam rose. “Oh, you poor thing,” Penelope crooned as she continued to put out the smoking embers on his body.
After several water bottles, the embers were out and the donkey was still steaming.
“It’s tiny,” Moose observed. “I mean, I’ve seen small donkeys, but this one is really small.”
“Hmmm,” Penelope responded, obviously not truly listening.
The donkey really was in pathetic shape. His mane had burned off, leaving nothing but black stubs of hair along the back of his neck. Any hair he’d had on his sides had been burned as well, and there were patches of red, burnt skin in their place. Conor couldn’t tell what color he’d been originally.
Penelope rubbed the animal’s nose gently. “I’m so sorry. You’ll be okay now. Go on home and your owner will take care of you.”
The donkey didn’t move, except to nuzzle Penelope’s waist, making her take a step back. Moose was there to keep her upright. He wrapped one arm around her waist to steady her, and the other reached out to lightly stroke the donkey’s neck.
“I estimate him to be around thirty inches tall. Normally these guys are around thirty-six, although I’ve seen some as small as twenty-five,” Moose said.
“Do you think he’ll be able to find his way home?” Penelope asked, looking up at the man who had his arm around her.
“Yeah, Tiger. I’m sure he will.”
“We need to move,” Pops said. “We’re right in the line of that fire and it’s looking uglier than it was five minutes ago.”
And he was right. The crackling and poppin
g of wood as it burned was louder now than it was even a few minutes ago.
Everyone picked up their tools and started digging again.
They continued for several minutes, and Conor looked behind him when he heard something. It was the donkey. He was following them.
“Go on. Go home,” Conor said, trying to shoo the animal away. He didn’t budge, simply kept his eyes on Penelope…the human who had saved him.
Conor shook his head and gave up. “If he’s too stupid to run to safety, there’s not much I can do.”
“I don’t blame him,” Penelope said as she dug. “If I was in pain and came across people who helped me, I wouldn’t want to leave them either.”
Conor shrugged. He didn’t really care if the donkey stuck close to them. He just wanted to find Erin. He wanted to be out of the middle of this fire and wanted his girlfriend to be safe.
The group continued to parallel the flames for several hundred yards. The heat increased and the sound of the fire was intense. Just when Conor was going to voice his concerns and suggest they run like hell, the most spine-tingling sound he’d ever heard seemed to echo around the area.
It was a scream.
He couldn’t tell if it was human, but it didn’t matter. His feet were moving before he thought about what he was doing. He leaped across a scrub bush and ran headlong into the forest. He heard Moose call his name, but he didn’t stop.
The heat of the fire was more intense now, but all Conor could think about was whether the scream had come from Erin. He stopped short and stared at a mass of pine trees in the near distance. They were crackling, and flames burst from the tips of the branches as if the trees themselves were lighters being flicked on by an unseen hand.
His eyes whipped down to the base of the trees—and he saw the source of the inhuman scream. It wasn’t Erin.
It was a man. A tall man who was dressed from head to toe in camouflage. He was standing in the middle of the group of trees, boxed in by flames.
As Conor watched, the man’s clothes burst into flames from the intense heat even though the fire hadn’t yet reached him. Conor only got a glimpse of what he thought was the man’s skin melting from his face before he was tackled to the ground.
He hit with an umph and his world went dark.
Pops had tackled him and covered them both with a fire shelter. It looked kind of like a sleeping bag, or a burrito wrapped in aluminum foil. Conor knew it was a last resort for firefighters caught in the line of a wildfire. But it wasn’t failsafe. The shelter was designed to withstand temperatures of five hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Basically, it would protect them from the radiant heat that came from a fire, but it likely wouldn’t protect them from direct flames.
The sounds inside the shelter were scary. Conor was face down in the dirt with the other firefighter on top of him. The crackling of the fire was deafening and the heat inside the shelter was stifling.
They stayed under the shelter for the longest ten minutes of Conor’s life. Every time he tried to get up, Pops would press harder against him, letting him know without words that it wasn’t safe.
Finally, just when Conor couldn’t stand being confined in the small, hot space any longer, Pops moved off him. Very carefully, he peeled back the edge of their shield and, after looking around, sat all the way up and shoved the shelter away from them.
Conor looked around him in horror. The fire had obviously passed right over them. The heat from the flames and residual heat would’ve killed them if it hadn’t been for the shelter.
Conor turned to the other man and shook his hand without a word.
After the initial shock of what had just happened passed, Conor remembered why he’d been there in the first place.
Looking around, he noted that some of the trees around him were black and charred, but surprisingly there were a few that looked unscathed.
“It’s because of how fast the fire was moving,” Dirty-D explained, rising from his own shelter, seeing where Conor’s gaze had gone. “Even though it was hot, the flames didn’t have time to catch some of the trees on fire. We were lucky. The worst of it seemed to be higher up. If we’d been standing, we would’ve been in big trouble, but because we were on the ground and covered, the heat and flames skipped right over us.”
It was amazing and terrifying at the same time. Conor looked to where he’d last seen the man who’d screamed. He was lying about fifteen feet from where their shelter had been.
Conor slowly walked over and nudged him with his foot. The man didn’t move.
He kneeled and turned him over—and stumbled away in shock.
Conor had seen a lot of bad things during the course of his job. Mutilated animals, dead bodies, people who’d been hurt while enjoying the great outdoors, but he hadn’t ever seen anything as gruesome and horrifying as what he was seeing right then.
The man’s face had literally melted. Conor could see the bones of his eye sockets and face. It was gruesome. He heard one of the other firefighter’s gagging and quickly turned the man back over. As an EMT, the man had likely seen plenty of things as well, but a melted face wasn’t something the average person encountered on a regular basis.
Looking around more carefully, Conor saw a melted crossbow lying nearby, along with a quiver of what had most likely been arrows. Frowning, Conor knew that crossbow hunting season had long been over. There was no reason anyone should be hunting in this area, but definitely not with that kind of weapon.
His jaw tightening, Conor immediately knew this was probably the man who’d kidnapped Erin. Who else would be out in this area with a crossbow?
The rest of the group found them, the donkey following Penelope a lot closer now.
“Thank God,” Moose exclaimed. “We weren’t sure what happened to you three.”
Conor shrugged. “Pops saved my life. Got the shelter over us both just in time. This guy wasn’t so lucky.” He motioned to the dead man on the ground with his head. “Good to see y’all are all right.”
“It was close. Tiger insisted on protecting that damn animal,” Moose said, shaking his head.
“What?” Conor asked, his brows shooting upward in disbelief.
“I couldn’t just leave him to die. Not after he came to me for help,” Penelope defended herself, patting the animal standing at her side. “I got him to lie down, then got on top of him and covered us up.”
“And he fit in there?” Conor asked.
“Barely,” Moose said. “Good thing they’re both so small.”
“Wow.” Conor really didn’t have any words for that. He kind of wished he’d seen it, but then again, even if he was with the rest of the group, he wouldn’t have seen a thing because he’d have been under his own shelter.
He glanced at Moose. The man looked pissed and dumbfounded at the same time. It was a well-known fact that Moose had feelings for Penelope. But he’d been taking his time, as Penelope was still dealing with the aftereffects of being kidnapped by terrorists overseas. But the tender expression of longing on Moose’s face as he watched her bond with the donkey made it even more obvious. Of course, Penelope was clueless—or pretending to be.
“That the guy who kidnapped your woman?” Buff asked.
“Don’t know, but if I had to guess, I’d say yes,” Conor said, then looked around. For a brief moment, he wanted to go back to the command post. He didn’t want to find Erin, not if she’d been caught in the wildfire as they had been. But he dismissed that thought. He loved her. If she was dead, he needed to be the one to find her.
He took a step past the dead man on the ground toward the black, charred forest behind him. Then another. He stopped and turned to the others. “I need to find her. I understand that you have a job to do.”
“Fuck that,” Pops said. “The fire is way beyond us now, we’d have to go all the way around to get back in front of it. You said yourself that you thought Erin started this fire to either get away from whoever had kidnapped her or to bring attention to where she wa
s. If that’s true, it’s possible she could be nearby. Especially if he was here. It’ll be easier to search with eight than with just one.”
Conor swallowed hard and nodded, more grateful than he could say for the support. He was close with the men, and woman, of Station 7, but the commander’s reaction, a man he hadn’t met until today, a man who’d literally saved his life, proved that no matter where they were stationed, volunteer or paid, firefighters were an honorable bunch.
“’Preciate it. Keep your eyes open for footprints or anything out of the ordinary. If she saw the fire or that asshole coming, she might’ve tried to hide.” It was what he would’ve done. Conor took point this time since there was no fear of the fire coming back this way. There wasn’t much fuel left for it.
The strange group—seven men, one woman, and one very grateful donkey—proceeded through the blackened countryside, their eyes peeled for any sign of Erin.
21
Erin lay still under her makeshift shelter. She couldn’t feel the ants crawling on her arms, shoulders, and neck anymore, but that could’ve been because she was numb. Or maybe they’d been burned off. She had no idea. But she knew she was in trouble.
The sound of the hunter’s horrified scream had been bad enough, but she’d barely heard it over the sounds of the fire consuming everything in its path above her. She couldn’t help but try to wiggle her upper body even farther into the mud on the side of the stream, which made more ants swarm out of the nest she’d inadvertently disturbed.
But she didn’t have time to worry about them, as the fire was suddenly there. She held her breath and eased back down into the water, ducking her head under for as long as possible. She had to come up a few times to gasp for much-needed air, but each time the temperature was almost too intense. She felt the heat on her upper back and shoulders and tried to sink farther back under the water.
After what seemed like hours, but was probably only minutes, the sound decreased and she moved her upper body out of the water. She stared up into the surprisingly blue sky and was actually shocked she was still alive, that she could breathe. Well, she could’ve if she hadn’t been bitten by ants. Breathing was a problem. A big one.
