She could worry about it when she pulled him clear of the fire. She could think again, breathe again, feel like a human being again, when she pulled him clear of the fire.
She repeated this affirmation to herself. Tried to focus on it like a prayer. Transmit the sentiment to a better place. Make it real somehow.
The dragging sped up as they cleared the last of the roughage. Luck started slipping through her fingers again, so she looped an arm under him to get through the last of it, her gait going to an uneven stagger for those last four steps. She strained, struggled still to hold onto the heavy, sweat-slicked body. Pushed herself to the finish line.
And then she was out. Clear. Free.
She lowered Luck’s body to the asphalt, moving slowly, delicately, with care. Her mind recording every detail.
She saw the blood on the back of his head just as she pulled her hands away. With the fire of the fallen trees no longer backlighting the agent’s features and swathing him in shadow, she could see the red soaking the hair where the neck and back of the skull met.
So the ankle wasn’t the only injury he’d suffered. He must have gotten walloped pretty good all over. Battered by the branches. Agent Luck was laid low.
But how low?
And then she was coughing. Gagging on her hands and knees next to him. The smoke invaded her lungs, her throat, her eyes, worse than before. Dry hacking sounds sputtered from her throat, tears spilling down her cheeks. Some part of her knew that she could feel it now, could suffer now, because they were clear of the fire. The outside world could get in once more, could assail her.
She fought it. Tried to stop whatever was wracking the muscles along her ribcage, squeezing cough after cough out of her. It took time and effort to slow it down, time she didn’t have.
She swiped tears from her eyes, and the coughing stopped at last, dying back to muffled little croaks that spilled out of her spontaneously, hoarse sounding barks. She took small, shallow breaths, afraid to breathe too deeply lest it start all over again.
Her focus shifted back to Luck. Time to see how bad it was.
She turned him over in slow motion. Nestled his shoulder blades to the blacktop. Cupping the bloody cranium as she lowered him.
He looked dead. A lifeless kind of still. Face as blank and slack as could be. Skin waxy and glistening and strange. Wet. Like a mannequin that’d been spritzed with a spray bottle a few times for no good reason.
She needed to be sure. Needed to. Now or never.
She held her breath as she checked. Almost didn’t want to know, even if she had to.
Her fingers snaked along the clammy neck. Finding the proper place. Feeling for a pulse.
Nothing.
She held the two fingers there for a long moment — the tips of the index and middle fingers motionless just in front of the curved muscle of Casey Luck’s neck, the flesh a little cool to the touch.
And no thoughts occurred her as she sat there, the fire swirling in the forest all around her. A vast black sea of nothingness entering her skull instead. The void. The abyss. Endless. Nameless. The big nothing that stretched out to span eternity, to swallow all life in time. Waiting only to take us all.
And then she felt it.
A pulse. Thready. Weak.
But it was there.
Chapter 70
Luck’s eyelids fluttered. Closed again. For a second Darger thought he was back under, out again for the time being, but then he opened them once more, and his gaze locked on hers.
She could see the moment when the pain of his ankle hit, a wince wrinkling his features, a wet hiss escaping his lips. His hand squeezed hers. Hard. The other hand clutched at his shirt, ringing sweat out of it.
“Your ankle is broken,” she said, removing her jacket respirator to speak. “But we still need to move. You can lean on me. I’ll be your crutch.”
She gestured to the road, hand flinging the way the hospital lay.
Luck stared that direction, eyes seemingly clear enough but hard to read. After a moment’s hesitation, he nodded.
Darger helped him up, and he draped one of his arms over her shoulders so he could hop along on his good leg. She hesitated another second, wanting to get a better read on him before they moved out.
“You remember what happened?” Darger said. Again she watched his eyes for signs of his state of mind. “You got your bell rung pretty good.”
“I remember the hospital, the car exploding,” Luck said. “Burning trees falling. It’s all kind of jumbled up, I guess.”
“That’s OK. That’s most of it, anyway. Let’s move.”
The heat was overwhelming, the smoke thicker than ever. But they hobbled forward, finally approaching that bend in the road after staring at it for so long.
Luck did his best, but it was a slog, and their progress was reduced to a slow shuffle. Darger was happy to be going at all with the way his ankle looked. Tattered meat with goddamn bone sticking out of it, the dislocated foot flopping around enough to turn her stomach if she made the mistake of looking at it.
She focused on the surrounding forest instead. It had been transformed, the leaves and brush eaten up by the fire. What was left had a sparse look. Stark. Columns of orange with skeletal lines of black where the tree trunks remained. The tinder may have burned up, but the inferno still had fuel enough to keep going for a long time.
“That’s it,” Luck said, prying Darger’s attention away from the trees.
They’d reached the end of the curve in the road, the hospital now visible in the distance at last. The building squatted at the bottom of the hill, the expanse of parking lot lying at its feet. It was a long way off yet, but it was there. Real.
Luck fumbled with his jacket as he went to press it back to his mouth, almost lost it. He caught it, though. Pinned it to his chest and regained his grip.
And Darger’s confidence began to grow for the first time during this ordeal. Her eyes fixed on the parking lot ahead. Their destination was in sight, as impossible as that notion seemed until just now. They could do this.
Survival is the only thing now. The only thing.
They moved to the hill, starting down the final descent. The incline made it tough for Luck to hop along, gravity constantly trying to pull him into a downward stumble. His progress came in big uneven jolts forward.
Maybe she was crazy, but Darger thought the smoke seemed to be clearing as they took those first steps down the hill.
Fresh air? Maybe it made sense. Hot air rises. Smoke rises. Maybe it would drift up and away. Leave them air to breathe in the valley where the hospital lay. Maybe.
The words echoed in her head again.
Survival is the only thing.
They kept fighting the slope, working their way down the hill in fits and starts. Based on how they’d handled it so far, the hill would take them another five minutes or so, Darger thought. Then they’d be done and whatever would happen from there would happen.
For now, she only had to get through the next five minutes. She could do that. She could do anything for five minutes.
She felt lighter than she had all night. Alive. Filled with passion, inspiration, hope.
Survival is the only thing. And it might be within our reach.
A strange sound shook her out of the abstract — a wet cluck emitted from Luck’s lips.
And suddenly he was pulling, pulling, jerking away from her. Falling. Spilling down to the strip of dirt and gravel that divided the asphalt from the wall of flame. A little mew came out of him as he hit the ground — the pain of the broken ankle prying a cry out of him, Darger thought.
Luck picked himself up, held himself steady on hands and knees.
“Are you OK?” she asked, reaching for him to help him stand again.
His only answer was to vomit into the dirt of the shoulder, head lolling along with the heaves.
Darger closed her eyes. Breathed deep, the faint damp from her jacket trying and failing to fight off the smoke i
nvading her mouth, her throat, her lungs.
She’d been afraid of this, ever since she’d seen the bloody spot on the back of his head.
Luck had a concussion.
Chapter 71
Thankfully, Luck’s vomiting spell was over quickly. Darger leaned down, offered her shoulder to him. He climbed her torso the best he could, getting up onto his knees, looping himself around her collar bone, and then the two of them stood together. He spoke as she helped him back to his feet.
“I’m sorry, Jill,” Luck said.
Darger didn’t know what to make of that. Was he mistakenly calling her Jill — his daughter’s name — or was he apologizing to the actual Jill even if she weren’t here to hear it? She licked her lips.
“Sorry for what?” she said.
“I didn’t know… I mean, it caught me off guard is all. Came out of nowhere and just…”
He shook his head. Re-gathered his thoughts. Tried again.
“I’m just sorry I threw up, Jill. Left a mess to clean up. That’s all.”
She thought about correcting him, let the words form on the tip of her tongue, and then she thought better of it. What would it help? He didn’t know what the hell was going on, did he? What would pressing him accomplish?
“Let’s not worry about that right now,” she said after a second. “You’re doing fine. We’re almost there now.”
He stared a hole into her then, blinking. She wasn’t sure how much of what she said was getting through.
He seemed more confused than he had been before, the disorientation settling over him all at once, as though his concussion hadn’t fully taken hold until he sealed its existence with a spray of vomit, completed some bodily ritual. She knew that wasn’t true, of course, but it seemed like it.
Had he been this loopy since he woke, and she couldn’t tell until now? It must be so, but she could hardly believe it.
He babbled on a little as they shuffled down the hill in slow motion. Fragmented thoughts spilling out of him. Sometimes lucid, focused on the hospital ahead, getting out of the fire. Other times he lapsed into various levels of confusion, hallucinations, a couple times talking as though they were back in Detroit or Ohio instead of LA.
“Holy shit,” he said after a stretch of silence, startling her. His shoulders twitched a little, and Darger realized he was flinching back from the fire.
“What?” she said.
He pointed at the woods around them, engulfed in flames. Slurred out his response as though drunk.
“Fire. It’s on fire.”
By the time he said it, she could hear that the resolve was already draining from his voice, some part of him realizing that the fire wasn’t a new occurrence after all, that he’d know about it all the while, and his scrambled brain had forgotten somehow. Momentarily. Swiss cheese holes in his short term memory. It was like he was stitching together the pieces of a dream, finding it a constant struggle to hold all of reality together in his head.
He let his soggy jacket flop to his side, and Darger redirected him to hold it up to his mouth, physically lifting the hand holding the wadded fabric and pressing it toward his face before something triggered in his addled mind and he remembered what to do.
“Forgot. Sorry, mom,” he said.
Yikes. Jill was better than mom, Darger thought, if only a little.
They trudged on, picking up speed as the land leveled some toward the bottom of the hill. Luck still stumbled every few steps, but the recovery didn’t take as long on the flatter surface.
The lot seemed to grow before them, looked more like a body of water than something solid — a spreading pool of asphalt, a puddle growing wider and deeper. Closer. Closer.
Orange jumped and flickered in the windows of the hospital. The lobby was a gleaming brightness shining through the front glass. Burning bright.
Smoke twirled off the top of the building. Plumes of black coils rising without end, up and up and up. And Darger could see where the fire’s tantrums had taken out chunks of the roof, the flames licking up from the freshly opened wounds, raging tendrils reaching for the sky.
The final step on the road almost caught her off guard. She looked down from the building in the distance just in time to see their feet cross onto the shinier blacktop of the lot. It felt softer, just a little more give under her boots, but it was solid ground. Real. They’d made it.
For the first time, they were able to move away from the fire, feeling the faintest touch cooler as they hobbled out toward the center of the lot. Whatever chance they had of making it through this, their best hope was right here, on this black smear of land coated with a layer of bitumen and stone.
Darger let out a big breath, and the exhalation seemed to carry physical weight off of her person. Lighten her load. They’d made it. A tingle spread over her body, the disbelief making all the tiny hairs perk up across her arms and along the back of her scalp.
They moved to a decorative bed of mulch in the center of the lot and huddled there — an oval-shaped landscaping flourish encased by curb, a ring of red woodchips encircling a lone maple tree. This one would be OK, she thought. If any of the trees might make it, this little guy would. He had a whole parking lot between him and the rest of the fire, after all.
After she made sure that Luck got to the ground safely, she leaned her back up against the little tree. Felt the strain release in the muscles of her back, in her neck, along her abs.
She closed her eyes and focused on the feeling of relief spreading through her body. Took a few deep breaths out of her wadded jacket. It felt incredible to sit. She’d forgotten how good that could feel, the simple act of sitting when you needed the rest. She’d taken it for granted for so long.
It was still hot. Infinitesimally cooler than the road, maybe. Faintly detectable. It wasn’t quite the level of difference that she’d hoped for. Still, the fire was a good couple hundred feet from them now. That had to be good for something, didn’t it?
Her gaze landed on the scattering of cars still in the lot. Maybe one of them had something they could use, if only a bit of water to drink. Her mouth was so dry she was having trouble swallowing. But the idea of standing up again, of having to do anything more strenuous than blinking, made her want to cry. She’d do it, though. In a minute. For now, she’d gather what strength she had left.
She drifted. Let her mind go still and blank, relax for this tiny fraction of time. She had to enjoy this little victory, even if she could only muster a sliver of enjoyment at that.
Then her eyelids fluttered open. She couldn’t forget about Luck, though. She had to keep an eye on the concussed bastard.
Glancing over at him, she watched his chin bob down toward his chest, eyelids drooping closed. Another concussion symptom, she knew. He was passing out.
Years ago, it was thought dangerous to let a freshly concussed person sleep. Coma was a feared result. These days, they knew that wasn’t true.
Still, she wanted to keep him talking. Better to keep him conscious in case they needed to move out again.
“You alright over there, Agent Luck?”
His eyes snapped opened — too wide for a second. A few blinks and a head shake seemed to clear them, bring fresh life to them. He nodded once, gave her a thumbs up.
“Yeah. Yeah. All good here, Darger.”
“Want to sit up? Put your back on the other side of the tree there?”
“Uh, yeah, sure.”
He slid over, moving gingerly due to the ankle, which Darger still couldn’t bring herself to look at.
“Good,” she said. “I know you’re tired, but let’s try to stay alert for now. Just in case, right?”
Because who knew what the wind and flame might bring next?
Chapter 72
Updates flood into the conference room now, seeming to come in little waves. Endless streams of people pour in and out of the room.
A suited and coiffed higher-up who Klootey doesn’t recognize currently dominates the roo
m. He stands at the lectern in a suit that costs a little more than what Klootey makes in a month — probably Gucci or Brooks Brothers or some fucking thing — chattering away on his phone. He’s getting updates from some personal contact in some federal agency or other — maybe the NSA? — about satellite imagery of the land surrounding the hospital, a bird’s eye view of the fire via some hunk of metal orbiting the planet, maybe a hundred and forty-four miles or so straight up.
The smoke blocks most of the view, but the team is going through the archived footage. Looking for any signs of Luck or Darger. They should know soon, and this suited slack dick will tell them all about it as soon as they do.
Klootey clutches a sweaty can of Mountain Dew in his paw. He’s already guzzled down two of the things and several glasses of water before that, but he can’t stop himself. Needs something to fill the time, something to fill the void, something to do.
The suit holds up his index finger, and everyone in the room goes silent all at once.
“Got something. They think they’ve spotted the Lexus. Looks like it didn’t make it. Tangled among some downed trees and burned. Exploded even. A total loss.”
After a stretch of quiet, a woman’s voice speaks up from the back of the room. It might be Beck.
“Do they think… Were Darger and Luck still in the vehicle?”
“They’re working to confirm that now.”
Klootey takes a big pull on his Mountain Dew can, accidentally making a loud slurping noise, lips smacking on the can in the hushed room. Heads snap his way. A lot of dirty looks taking aim at him and his beverage.
“Sorry,” he says, almost under his breath.
Mr. Fancy Suit’s finger stabs the sky again.
“Wait. We’ve got footage of Darger and Luck fleeing the vehicle on foot. Moving down the road. Back toward the hospital.”
Everyone falls quiet as the suit listens to the talk on the other end of the line, nodding his head along with the rhythm of the words in his ear.
“We’ve got eyes on them now. They’re in the parking lot outside the hospital. The male subject, Casey Luck, looks to have suffered injuries. But they’re alive.”
Violet Darger (Book 6): Night On Fire Page 29