Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [82]
Her fault.
With arms that ached, she struggled to hold the foil that flapped in a sixty mile-per-hour wind. Her leather gloves blackened and she gritted her teeth against her burning hands. The fire built to crescendo, sounding like a jet squadron taking off from an aircraft carrier. Communication between shelters was now out of the question.
Steve’s weight felt solid and Clare was glad she wasn’t alone like the rest.
The smoke thickened. Pressed as close as possible to the ground, she struggled for oxygen. Gripping the tapes as hard as she could, she burrowed her face into the dirt, sucking air from the porous, sandy soil.
God help her, Devon was coming tomorrow and she had to be there. She couldn’t die on this remote mountain, when not ten minutes ago life had been fine.
A little voice whispered that Frank had felt that way too.
Steve realized that he must have blacked out, for the shaky breath he took was perceptibly cooler. Once he’d had anesthesia, that same sensation of being here and then . . . being here. His head spun as wildly as on a college drunk, back when he’d seldom imbibed.
Outside, the only sound was the diminished crackle of flames.
The quiet after the agonized cries spiraled him back. The still silence that had fallen after the Triworld jet jerked to a halt had been replaced by a quick whoosh and crackling. For the rest of his life, fire would remind him of the night he’d thrown off his seatbelt, thinking to leap to his feet and pull Susan and Christa to safety. Shocked into immobility, realizing they would never need his protection or love again, he would have remained with them. He’d been saved because two fellow survivors saw his plight, fought him from the fuselage, and restrained him from going back in.
At the height of the Hellroaring’s passage, he’d wondered, as he had while the plane fell, if this was it. To live through the crash, bury his family, and die in a worthless shake and bake? His redemption had died with Susan and Christa, but in defiance of his denial, at the height of the firestorm, Clare had murmured something that could only have been a prayer.
She lay beneath him, small and still. He lifted his weight off her with an effort, willing his knees to support him. He lifted his right hand, the one less burned, and touched a pulse in the side of her neck.
She shifted slowly, as though waking from sleep. Through the reek of burning, Steve smelled their mingled sweat.
He’d thought of her on the mountain. How she’d studied him with a steady gaze, as if she saw beyond the sodden wretch that drink had made him. That is, that he’d made of himself.
Her high-boned cheeks and generous mouth; that bronzed skin that invited a man to smooth his hand across it . . .
He rasped her name with a smoke-raw throat. She moaned.
His trembling right knee signaled that it was about to collapse.
Her hands disentangled from the shelter and she turned over beneath him. “We made it,” she whispered, her tearing eyes triumphant.
A surge of gladness that they had come through . . . together, made him not sorry that he couldn’t hold himself up any longer.
His weight came down, his body covering hers, feeling a tautness in her that sang. He did not believe it was his imagination. For the first time since Susan, he knew the touch of a woman, warm and full length, shocking him with its rotten timing.
“Ten hut!” The troops’ leader sounded as though his boots were planted beside their shoulders. He’d been useless when they were trying to start the truck, but now he wanted to play commandant.
Steve threw off the shelter in a swift movement, pushed himself off Clare and leaped to his feet.
The world had changed.
The road was a blackened shadow of the grassy strip. Dead pines stood with needles burned off, their bare limbs looking naked and somehow obscene. A layer of white ash covered the ground and a charred smell pervaded everything from Steve’s clothes to the pores of his skin.
The troops emerged, climbing unsteadily to their feet. Here and there, someone nursed a burned