Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [138]
With one good leg, Karrabotsos had gotten ahead of Steve with his two bad knees.
“You making it, Haywood?” Deering called down.
Steve’s wooden pace slowed and then he stopped. Clare imagined heat searing his back and thighs, burning his skin as though his Nomex clothing was made of paper. He swayed forward and planted both hands on the slope, pain twisting his features.
“Steve!” That shrill scream was her voice. She couldn’t move with Devon’s arm heavy over her shoulders.
Deering plunged back into the waist-high brush. Like a skier, he made a series of sidehill leaps, steadying each landing with a grab at the tough grasses. The fire was less than a hundred feet away when he reached Steve and slung an arm around his back.
Clare’s heart pounded while Steve redoubled his efforts. Deering speeded him along, half dragging him when he faltered. They passed Karrabotsos when he lacked fifty feet to safety, but now the heat blasted like a blowtorch and the foul taste of char filled the back of Clare’s throat.
Deering kept pulling Steve toward bare rock.
Clare stared at Karrabotsos. Not fifteen feet below, the pilot wasn’t going to make it. Her arm was still around Devon, supporting the most precious thing in her existence.
As though he spoke in her ear, Frank’s voice said distinctly, “Go!”
Without thought, she shoved her daughter uphill and leaped toward the inferno.
Fire swirled around Karrabotsos. An errant prayer came to Clare, that this was going to be like passing a finger through a candle flame. Perhaps if they moved fast enough . . .
She grabbed him by the arm. He gave a shout, more a scream.
“Go!” she echoed the voice in her head. “Go, go!”
For an instant, they teetered together on the verge, but she dug in her boots and pulled. The soft gravel gave. She raised her leg and tried to get elevation, and managed to keep half their gain. The next time she put her foot onto a tuft of tough grass, then another. Teeth clenched, she wasn’t letting fire have another soul.
Everything seemed to be in slow motion as she dragged Karrabotsos up and out of the flames. The world was on the other side of wavering orange air that shimmered and distorted. In the last few feet, Deering grabbed Karrabotsos’s other arm and they made it to clear air.
The acrid, animal aroma of singed hair stung Clare’s nose in the same instant she felt Devon’s hands slapping at her head. Thankfully, the wind had whipped the flames away from her skin.
Steve flailed at Karrabotsos’s burning hair as the pilot collapsed to his knees. His fire retardant flight suit was in good shape, but his face showed bright scarlet. “God, that hurts,” he moaned.
With the burns he’d already suffered, this was going to be nasty. “Okay,” Clare snapped. “Let’s get him on board.”
She and Deering pulled Karrabotsos to his feet and assisted him up the unstable gravel slope. It was just as she’d feared, tough and treacherous footing. Behind, Clare noted that Steve and Devon were helping each other.
When they reached the chopper, Deering maneuvered until Karrabotsos could sit in the doorway on the deck and scoot backward. White lips pressed together as he slowly made it inside.
Clare helped get him situated with Devon on the rear seat in the back of the Huey. She placed herself between them to keep an eye on both.
“I’m sorry I lost the first aid kit,” she said.
“Nothing in there that would help.” Although Karrabotsos’s burns were blistering, he bore them with the stoic air of a man who had seen much worse.
Clare turned to Deering. “Get us in the air!”
He moved toward the front seat.
Steve looked at the skid and the step up to get inside with a reluctant expression. Flying over the mountain’s sharp rocks and steep slope must have brought back a frozen peak in Alaska, where he’d faced the worst a man should have to. Now he waited once more to fly with the man Clare knew he despised.
With a painful grimace, he climbed in. Wrestling the handle, he slammed the sliding door home, and met her eyes. “Hell of a job you did back there.