Wildfire

by Toni Draper

  He could hear the beast as it galloped behind them. He felt its breath on the back of his neck. Still he ran, surrounded by the voices of the others. Some were asking their God for forgiveness, others sent out never-to-be-heard messages of goodbye and I love you, and a select few bargained for the miracle of salvation, offering promises of change and renewal should they make it out alive.

  That’s when Peña shouted, “This is it, guys! The moment we hoped would never come! It’s now or never! The only chance we’ve got! Deploy your units!” That was the signal for the men to pop open their Shake ‘n’ Bakes, the emergency blankets they hoped would protect them from the fatal intensity of the heat. But against a fire of this magnitude, they weren’t too convinced.

  Despite the noise of the fire all around, Peña heard zippers being pulled open and the rustle of canvas pouches as they were emptied, then the crinkle of aluminum fabric unfolding. He stopped and placed a limp Isa on the ground so he could get out his own. Knowing there was no way she could take care of herself, he had no choice but to pull his shelter over them both. He quickly scuffed away the duff with the sole of his boots, moved Isa onto the dirt he’d cleared, and laid his body over hers. While holding the rear of their life preserver down with the toes of his boots, he pulled the front over them like a cocoon and held down the sides as close to the ground as he could. There was nothing else to do.

  Beep…beep…beep…

  The monitors attached to Mena in her hospital room had sounded steadily for so long that Alex was momentarily stunned to find they had changed their tune. But when Mena began unexpectedly thrashing about, causing alarms to go wild, she hurried into action. Mena’s abrupt movements had tangled some of the wires she was hooked up to and knocked others loose, wreaking havoc and speeding up the electronic waves bouncing off the walls and around the room.

  At first, Alex’s fear was that Mena might be convulsing, but as she moved closer to get a better look, she realized she must have been having a terrifying dream of some sort.

  As she untangled and reattached sensors that had twisted and come off, she spoke to Mena softly, soothingly, “Sh… it’s okay. You’re okay. You’re safe here in the hospital.”

  “No, no!” Mena kept repeating. “Not safe, the fire! I have to help!”

  Mena was finally waking up. Alex pulled the rail up on the far side of the bed to keep her from falling, then, in an attempt to calm her, she gently leaned over and touched Mena’s shoulder. At the contact, Mena gasped, sat straight up, and reached for her, crying and emitting what sounded like a wounded animal’s wailing.

  “It was just a dream. It’s okay,” Alex comforted her.

  Mena’s breathing finally slowed, and Alex let go.

  “It was all so real,” Mena said.

  “Well, if you feel like telling me what you dreamed about, I might be able to reassure you that’s all it was.”

  “There was a fire.” Mena paused as she attempted to recall the details that had frightened her during the night.

  “Go on. What else?”

  “Isa was there, in the fire. And some of the others. She was hurt. Badly. Well, I don’t really know, but my crew had to deploy their shelters, and that’s never a good thing.”

  Compassion showed on Alex’s face. “Maybe it’ll help you if I tell you that your friend Isa is just fine. She was here earlier, maybe that’s why you dreamed of her, but I can assure you she hasn’t been hurt. As a matter of fact, no one, other than you, has been brought here from the fire. Thankfully.”

  Alex kept a close eye on the readings of the monitors that were busy tracking her vitals.

  Eventually, Mena exhaled loudly, licked her lips, and leaned back on the pillow Alex had repositioned behind her head. Her eyes were open, but they didn’t appear to be completely focused. Alex’s attention was divided between what was happening with Mena and the machines, and just as she was about to call for the attending physician, Mena drifted off again. After a few minutes of watching her for any changes in her condition, Alex wrote some notes on her chart and left to report what had happened to the medical team.

  Mena’s eyes fluttered, then slowly opened, and she started to truly wake up. As she left her protective comatose state behind in the fog, her head pounded. A hypersensitivity to any and all forms of light was the next sensation she became painfully aware of, as the pupils of her eyes alternated between extremes of dilation. She had to learn how to adjust to the intensity of all that was white, bright, and painful to her eyes, shielded as they had been for so long by the dark of sleep. The first face she saw was one that was unrecognizable to her for the moment, but it would soon become quite familiar.

  “Well, hello there,” Alex greeted her with a smile.

  Mena’s eyes continued to blink as Alex took her wrist to check her pulse. “We’re glad to have you back, Ms. Mendoza.”

  Mena heard the voice and understood the words, but her eyes were having trouble focusing. With excruciating effort, she managed to keep them mostly open. As she became aware that she was no longer out in the forest, but lying in a hospital bed, Mena gathered the strength and lucidity to ask, “How long have I been here? How long have I been out? What happened?”

  “How much do you remember?” Alex asked as she rang the station for attention. When the desk nurse entered, she told her, “Go get Dr. Johnson. This time, our patient really is waking up.”

  Alex reached for the controls and slowly raised the head of the bed, just a little, enough so Mena could take a sip of water, which would better enable her to talk. She moved the Styrofoam cup closer and bent the flexible straw over and into her mouth. Mena managed to wet her lips, that was all, but it was enough for now.

  Too tired to take more, she backed her head away, laid it gently against the pillow, and closed her eyes before she spoke. “I remember the fire, and the smoke, and running to the Jeep for my radio. That’s all.”

  Alex told her, “That’s a good start. It will all come back to you in time. For now, while we wait for the doctor, I’ll fill in a few of the blanks for you. Two of your fellow firefighters found you. One of them saw an empty vehicle and went in search of its owner. That would be you, so I’m told.” She smiled before going on. “From the report I got, you were found somewhere north of the city, near a place called Elden Tower. One of your rescuers, your friend Isa, came with you in the ambulance. She’s still here.”

  Mena looked around.

  “She just went down the hall to get a bite to eat. She’s going to be upset with me when she gets back. I assured her there was no way you’d wake up during the few minutes I forced her out. But to get back to your original question, only been a few hours since they brought you in.”

  Mena struggled to sit up, but her head reeled, and the room spun, so she allowed Alex to take her by the arm and gently ease her back down.

  “Whoa there, missy! Not so fast. That was quite a fall you took, you know.”

  Mena remembered her head, and the blood. She reached up and felt the bandage just as the doctor pulled aside the curtain and came around.

  “You gave us quite a scare, Ms. Mendoza,” he said, “but your friend down the hall had faith in you and knew you’d pull through. And it looks like she knew what she was talking about.” He pulled the films and test results out. “I just got the results of your MRI. It looks like whatever swelling that may have caused you to concuss is all but gone now. I see no reason you won’t make a full recovery, and it looks to me like you’re on your way.”

  He then turned to Alex and said, “Go ahead and decrease the drip, slowly. We should be able to take her completely off it within the next day or two. If all goes well, as it’s showing every indication it will, she should be able to get out of here shortly after that.” With that, the doctor said his goodbyes and moved on to the next patient along the route of his rounds.

  At that very moment, Isa ret
urned from the cafeteria and entered the room to find Alex by Mena’s side.

  “Mena,” Isa spoke softly, “It’s so good to see you awake, to have you back with us.”

  “She’s still having a lot of pain,” Alex explained, as she checked the dosage of chemical relief the doctor had ordered. “It’s normal. Her body is waking up, and her mind is attempting to process the extent of the damage. Although we’re decreasing the amount of medication keeping her sedated to deter movement, we had to give her a stronger dose of another to help ease the pain. She’ll go back to sleep or be in a groggy daze, I’m afraid, for a while longer.”

  Seeing the anxious and pained expression on Isa’s face, Alex shared, “The doctor was just here with the results of her scan, and there doesn’t appear to be any swelling.”

  Isa tried her best to smile at the news before the nurse reminded her, “Even so, she’s not quite out of the woods yet.” She looked at Isa and smiled softly. “You’ll want to make sure she takes it easy for a few more days and do your best to keep her from getting involved in anything too physically strenuous or mentally upsetting until she’s made a complete recovery.”

  Chapter 3

  Later that evening, her bag packed and her digital boarding pass in hand, Sydney stared into an empty fireplace. The whole house was empty. Even her dog, Jenny, who’d been dropped off with a neighbor, was gone. Numb and still in shock, Sydney settled back in her chair and relived the conversation she’d had with Isa. While savoring the warm and calming effect of the scotch on the rocks, she wondered if she’d missed anything.

  It was only by a stroke of luck that she’d been in her office that morning to take the call. With only five days left until the start of the second mini-mester, she’d been unable to focus at home and had gone in to work on a syllabus. She was diligently pounding away at one when the phone rang. Normally, she didn’t teach during the summer. Instead, she used the free time to travel, research, and write. For the second year in a row, however, she thought the class and students would serve her as a much-needed distraction. How life can change in an instant!

  Steeling her nerves for the rollercoaster that was soon to come, Sydney polished off the near-empty bottle of White Horse and put her plane reservation in her purse before heading upstairs to the bedroom. She had once shared it with Mena, who—thank God—she hadn’t lost. Her mind swirled with memories of the time she’d spent with Mena, wondering about all that had happened since she’d last seen her and the imaginings of what she would find now. Not just physical damage that may have been done, but emotional scarring that may have taken its toll. Eventually, her body’s need for rest won out over the stress of her mind, and she was able to drift off. But a peaceful sleep was not to be.

  She tossed and turned as one dream overlapped and melded into another. During one of her waking moments, between the disturbances created by her subconscious and as she waited for her heart to calm its beating, she decided it was no use and gave up. Reaching for the notebook she kept on her bedside table, she recorded a date and wrote down all that she remembered.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d dreamed of a tiger, and she wondered again why the animal was so present in her mind. The last time, as she’d watched a young woman she’d been having lunch with walk away and up some concrete steps, the big cat had sauntered across the grass at the top of the hill. As the woman reached the place where their paths would cross, the animal turned to go right down the stairs on the other side of the rail. The woman turned to her right at the top and walked off. This time, there was a storm, and she was at home. Lightning lit the backyard in intervals, and each time, she saw the tiger, getting closer and closer. Just as it crashed through her back patio’s door, she woke up.

  She’d been intrigued by the meaning, the symbolism inherent in the appearance of such a returning beast, and she looked it up. Most everything she read interpreted the night vision to mean the dreamer was running away from personal feelings and emotions. I guess they were close to catching up to me this time, she thought.

  She closed her spiral, put her pen away, and thought about her time with Mena, where it had gone wrong. Not wanting to rock the boat too early in their relationship, she hadn’t told Mena how she’d felt like she was losing control. It was no longer she alone who decided how each day would unfold; now there was another making choices for her. One with no idea how even a simple act like pocketing the car keys instead of leaving them on the counter was causing her fear and anxiety.

  While Sydney had told Mena about her uncle and what he’d done, she hadn’t explained to Mena how that translated into her need to feel safe at all times and at all costs. How something as seemingly insignificant as Mena closing a door Sydney had left open when showering had affected her sense of security and caused her panic attacks to return. She had, eventually, brought it all up with a therapist in counseling, and that had worked wonders, but there was much she’d never revealed to Mena. They had really just begun to scratch the surface of one another when their time together was cut short.

  Before she knew it, it was six a.m., and although she had barely slept a wink, most people were just rousing themselves for a day at work. After showering and dressing, Sydney loaded her bag into her car and closed the trunk. She headed east on Interstate 70 toward Baltimore-Washington’s Thurgood Marshall International Airport. Traffic on the highway was starting to pick up. She’d left earlier than she needed to, concerned she’d run into a stalled rush once she hit Interstate 695, Baltimore’s Beltway. It had far too many loops, lanes, entrances, and exit ramps for a driver at her most alert; that was something Sydney, at the moment, was not. She hadn’t stopped thinking about Mena since she’d received the call. Since then, even more old memories and what-ifs had clouded her brain, forcing out all other thoughts.

  Before she knew it, she was making her way toward the terminal’s long-term parking lot. After exiting the empty shuttle, she rolled her bag through the building, catching only a glimpse of the large stained glass crab that stood as an otherwise stately visitor’s welcome. The first time she’d met Mena at the airport, they’d posed for a picture in front of the sculpture’s giant front claws, a memory that still served as her cell phone’s lock screen. This morning, however, she didn’t allow herself to linger in the memory for long. She rolled her wheels away from the artfully crafted crustacean before her tears could fall.

  She removed her shoes and placed her purse and bag on the conveyor belt that would pull them through the security screening block. Having packed nothing but clothes, there was no reason for scrutiny or delay, thus she was able to quickly move through to the gate at the end of Southwest’s hall. There, she joined several other travelers in wait, some businessmen and women, visiting relatives, and other vacationers.

  The flight was bound for Phoenix, a desert city steeped in triple-digit heat, deep in the heart of the weather map’s blistering red zone. As a die-hard northerner who loved the change of seasons and couldn’t live without the refreshing cold and invigorating snow, Sydney couldn’t imagine why anyone would choose to live or even go to such an inferno of a place without a compelling reason or for more than a temporary sojourn.

  She allowed her thoughts to drift for a moment to the heat she’d suffered during her previous stay. She didn’t know how Mena could stand it in southern Arizona. She stopped her memory there before she got too caught up in the depths of emotions in which she could easily drown. Over the years, she had mastered the technique of keeping her feelings far beneath the surface. Now wasn’t the time to let the deluge pull her into the undertow. She switched her focus to the purpose of her journey, where it remained, until it was interrupted by a voice over the intercom, announcing her flight’s preparation for departure.

  Once inside the aircraft, she squeezed her bag into the overhead compartment, plopped in the nearest seat, and buckled up. She wasn’t used to flying coach, but it was only going to be a three-and-a-
half-hour flight, and she was prepared to make the sacrifice to be on the earliest plane she could find to her destination. Ordinarily, she would have read or slept, but in such cramped quarters and given the circumstance, she knew she’d be able to do neither and that every minute would be agonizingly stretched out.

  As the Boeing 737 was pushed away from the gate and taxied down the runway, she closed her eyes and only vaguely heard the flight attendant as she, on behalf of the captain, welcomed them aboard Flight 1858 with nonstop service to Phoenix, Arizona before going over the safety procedures. Soon after, the jet took off.

  Isa was in the waiting room by the nurse’s station when the entrance door to the building swished open and a woman pulling a suitcase on wheels hurried in. She knew, before she’d heard her say, that this was Dr. Sydney Foster, Mendoza’s ex, the woman she’d called. What she didn’t know was whether she should approach her and introduce herself or stay back in the shadows and see how Mena’s past, in her present and future, would play out.

  The nurse at the desk looked up. “May I help you?”

  “Yes. Thank you. I’m looking for a patient by the name of Jimena Mendoza. She was brought in yesterday. From the fire, I’ve been told.”

  As the woman reached for the patient’s file, she asked, “And you would be?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I can’t give out any information until a relationship between the visitor and patient has been established. It’s hospital policy.”

  Sydney glared at her incredulously. “I’ve come from across the country because I was called. I’m listed as her emergency contact. We’re…a couple…partners. We’re in a relationship.”

  The desk nurse excused herself and was on her way to check with a supervisor when Alex, who happened to be within sight and earshot not twenty feet down the hall, stopped her and asked, “Erika, what’s the problem?”