Heart on Fire

by William Maltese

She looked anxiously toward the car and hoped Lou had somehow made it there, but the car was empty.

  “If you two wanted a little privacy, you could have just asked me nicely to get lost.” Lou wearily lifted her head above a pile of freshly deposited dirt at least six yards from where she’d begun her ride on the shifting earth. “I really think that might have been easier and a damned sight more hospitable.”

  “Yeah, right!” Chad helped her to her feet; she was dusted with the same fine gray powder that had sprinkled Chad and Janine and made the moon a filmy cataract eye above them.

  “To the car, I think, yes?” Lou suggested. Even as she did, the ground moved again.

  Janine had taken Beginning Gymnastics in college, and she knew just how walking on a trampoline felt. Except, while she could judge the give and take of stretched canvas, these troughs and peaks were too low and too high to gauge successfully.

  They didn’t make it to the safety of the car, but they were able to scramble against the auto and use it as a brace as well as a shield between them and the latest waterfalls of stone that tumbled the mountain.

  Suffering vertigo and nausea from her inner balance system thrown temporarily for a loop, Janine again surrendered to the comfort of Chad’s offered arm, snuggling closer and closer to him even when all the forces of nature seemed determined to shake them apart.

  Below the road, several trees that had survived the major jolt, but whose hold on earth had become tenuous, crashed to their deaths, knocking down other trees in the process.

  “How many more aftershocks as powerful as that one, do you think?” Lou asked when the pause finally came.

  “You tell me,” Chad said; his guess as good as hers. “However many, I think we’d better move from here while the moving is still good.”

  The chasm had widened behind the car, actually threatening to swallow the vehicle like those much-publicized sinkholes were always gobbling up houses, along the Gulf Coast, on the prime-time news.

  “Drive out?” Lou dubiously eyed the latest obstacles nature had strewn across their pathway. There was no way they could risk taking the time to clear away stones, which meant waving good-bye to her Ford’s already suspect never-the-best suspension system.

  “I think the more we can get over our heads, besides the black night sky and the mountain, the better off we’re going to be.” Chad gave a jerk on the car door. Despite its evident protests, the result of new massive denting and damage, the dirt-coated metal finally came open.

  Janine had visions of the car not starting. Wasn’t that the way it always happened in the movies? But the motor turned first time. Lou, who had obviously had similar fears, gave a quick prayer of thanks under her breath. Chad looked as if he were the cat who’d swallowed the canary.

  “Fasten your set belts; this is going to be a bumpy ride,” Chad warned, doing his best Bette Davis imitation.

  Janine could only envision any ride being smoother than what she’d just been through.

  The car moved slowly over the rubble, its riders waiting expectantly and nervously for more aftershocks. Janine was positive one was due the exact moment the car came precariously close to the drop-off as Chad maneuvered them around a large rock that the car couldn’t possibly have ridden over. Additional earth-shakes, though, held off. When the next one did come, it—along with the others that followed—was comparatively insignificant.

  “I do believe the worst may be over.” Chad finally allowed himself that bit of optimism. He flashed Janine a triumphant smile, much like a climber who had just mastered some exceptionally difficult mountain terrain in the company of a heartfelt friend.

  For the first, but not the last time, Janine remembered how wonderful it had been pressed so tightly against his hard and muscled body while the hailstorm of rocks had fallen helter-skelter all around them.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  DR. ROGER LEWIS LOOKED a little ragged around the edges, and he was; he assured himself that things could be worse. He dispensed with all superfluous introductions, as regarded the new arrivals. “The facilities were designed to withstand just this sort of event,” he said and actually sounded more confident than he looked and was. “That said, people are less ideally designed and, Lou, I’m afraid Jack was….”

  “Hurt?” Lou interrupted. The hysterical sound of her concern told anyone who listened—it certainly told Janine and Chad—that Lou’s involvement with Dr. Jack Ledben was certainly more serious than Lou was want to let on.

  “…sideswiped by a falling bookcase, actually,” Roger continued. His accompanying look commanded Lou not to go off the deep end just because of what was actually a minor incident compared to all else Roger had to deal with at the moment. “It’s only a scratch. How about the three of you? You look a little battle-weary, to say the very least.”

  “We were out of the car and clearing the road of debris when the quake hit.” Chad was spokesman for the three. “I’m afraid we all got shook up just a bit. Lou has a nasty bump on the back of her head at which Hank should take a look.”

  “And you seem to have developed a slight limp since last I saw you,” Roger observed. Very little escaped him.

  “A sprain, I think,” Chad confessed. “Actually, my shoulder is what’s giving me the most trouble.”

  “Hank is in the dispensary,” Roger said. “I want all of you to check in with him. Then, I can use all the help I can to get things straightened out around here. Everything that wasn’t bolted down took quite a little ride, and there’s been considerable breakage.” He had something even more specific in mind for Janine. “Miss Woof, I would especially appreciate it if you’d look in on the kitchen as soon as you feel up to it. We could all use some coffee, and Jenny, the girl in charge, pending your arrival, was one of our casualities.”

  “Dead?” Lou figured the worst, her face ashen.

  “Hardly,” Roger assured. “Hysteria. It was her first earthquake, and she happened to be in the restroom at the time. I’m hoping she’s settled down a bit by now, but she certainly was none too steady on her feet before and after the outhouse tipped over and before Hank gave her a sedative.”

  “Come on, Janine.” Chad took her arm. “No time like the present to get a clean bill of health and get into the thick of things, as regards your new job.

  “Sorry about your introduction to our little place,” Roger apologized before Janine got led away. “I’d hoped for you to have a more sedate and mundane hello to the premises.”

  He smiled ruefully, combing large fingers through his shock of tousled red hair. Someone shouted something about “broken beakers” and some ruined lab experiment.

  Janine and Chad lost Lou to Jack Ledben at the dispensary.

  Jack wasn’t as strikingly handsome as Chad, and he was dark-complexioned where Chad was all sunny blond, but he had decidedly masculine good looks that complemented Lou’s feminine attractiveness. He had a bandage over his right eyebrow, another combined wrapping of the index and middle fingers of his right hand.

  The line at the dispensary, once long, was non-existent when the three got there. While Roger had insisted everyone check in, most everyone had been and gone while Janine, Lou, and Chad had been slowly driving the rock-strewn, and periodically shaken, road up the mountainside.

  “A little lousy on your timing, aren’t you, Janine?” Dr. Hank Heidelburg said in greeting. Having been with the U.S. Geological Society team on Mt. Rainier when Janine had been working summers at the Henry Jackson Fish Hatchery, he remembered how she’d contracted poison ivy one particular summer; Hank had taken full advantage of her lying-in to get in some chess with her. “Shall I prescribe bed rest so I can win back some of my losses from Rainier?”

  “I suspect that depends upon whether you’d prefer chess to coffee,” she said; Hank looked confused. “I’m here to head up the kitchen staff, remember?”

  “You wouldn’t see if you could run down a few missing butter horns while you’re at it, would you?” he asked. “I’m s
ure there should be some around somewhere, but Jenny couldn’t find a proverbial pot to …” He aborted his intended derogatory finale and smiled. “Jenny is such a nice girl, but she does need some supervision to get her organized. I think anyone’s coffee, after hers, will seem God-sent.”

  “I hear she took the earthquake hard.” Chad scooted to a sitting position atop one of the two examination tables.

  “It’s nothing from which she isn’t going to recover. “Earthquakes can be a little unnerving for even us veterans. Why, I remember a quake I went through in Calcutta in.…” He apparently thought better of continuing his story at the minute. “I’ll tell you both about that when we have more time—and are hopefully all eating butter horns—if I haven’t told it to you already. Right now, I suppose, we’d better get on to dealing with this quake, or the results thereof. Janine, if you would proceed into the ladies’ dressing room, right over there, please.” He pointed to a small area curtained off from the main room. “Chad, I’ll just have you strip down to your skivvies right here and now if you would, please.”

  “It’s my shoulder that’s bothering me, doc,” Chad argued.

  “I doubt your shoulder is giving you that limp you hobbled in here on,” Hank argued.

  Janine disappeared behind the curtain and wondered if she were required to strip, too. She decided not. Aside from a few minor scratches and bruises, she’d survived pretty well. Chad had kept her amazingly well protected during the rainfalls of rocks that had skittered down the mountainside.

  “Anything indicating magma flows?” Chad asked Hank; Janine’s ears perked up.

  “Not that I know of,” Hank replied and, then, asked Chad to raise his right arm. “Ethan came down from the fumaroles yesterday and said he thought there was an increase in steam from all of the vents on the North Slope. There was so much cloud cover, though, he couldn’t be sure. He’s up there now with Simmons. They went up as soon as the quake let things quit bouncing a bit. They’ve radioed back no sign of any blatantly new activity. The old mountain apparently just experienced a more pronounced burp than usual.”

  Janine had inadvertently left a break in the curtains when she’d entered through them. It wasn’t a large crack, but she realized quite suddenly it did give her a good look at Chad who was now minus his shirt, pants, shoes, and socks. Her immediate reaction was to turn away out of respect for Chad’s privacy. Her second reaction was to rationalize that it wasn’t as if Chad were stark naked. Having been raised in a household of boys, Janine knew everything there was to know about the anatomical differences between the sexes. She’d certainly seen her brothers, and lots of other men, in swimming suits. Chad’s Jockey bikini briefs were admittedly skimpier than some bathing trunks, but they were certainly sufficient so that Janine needn’t feel guilty when shifting to get an even better look.

  She examined his physique for flaws. It was inconceivable that a man so attractive in clothes could be equally attractive, or more so, when most of his clothes were off. If there was anything physically wrong with Chad’s body, though, Janine couldn’t see it.

  He had the smoothly chiseled musculature of those gymnasts she’d sometimes seen shirtless in the WSU gymnastics room. Either his chest was hairless from his neck to his slightly indented navel, or the hair he did have there was too fine and blond to be noticeable. His arms were molded with muscle, and his legs looked straight off some classical Greco-Roman sculpture in a museum. In fact, his whole body seemed to be one that Praxiteles would have jumped at the opportunity of carving from marble in that sculptor’s heyday of doing Greek art.

  “Nothing too horribly wrong with your shoulder that I can see,” Hank diagnosed for Chad. “Although if it continues to give you problems, stop by in a couple of days, and we’ll give you some pain killer or another more extensive look-see. Same goes for your leg. I’d tell you to stay off the leg, but I know just how far you’d go toward following that good bit of advice, so I’m assuming it’ll mend in time if you just don’t go out of your way to use and abuse it. You’ll have some nasty bruises along your back and along the backs of your legs—”

  “Ouch!” Chad responded when Hank touched a particularly nasty and tender bruise.

  “—but there is nothing to do for those but let them look as bad as they please before they go away. Now, get dressed and go make yourself useful.”

  “Janine?” Chad asked.

  Embarrassed by what she assumed was his discovery that she was observing through the crack in the curtain, she blushed a deep scarlet and turned away. Chad’s query, though, had nothing to do with her playing Peeping-Jill.

  “I’ll see that she finds her way to the kitchen,” Hank promised. “Or, if I find anything seriously wrong with her, I’ll send you word. Confidentially, she looks in far better shape than you do. The next quake, I recommend that you follow her lead.”

  “Right!” Chad replied; Janine noticed how he modestly didn’t boast that he was in his present condition, Janine in her present condition, only because he had acted as a human shield between her and rainstorms of stones.

  Hank joined Janine in her curtained cubicle. He verified what they both suspected; she was in A-1 shape, considering everything. She vaguely remembered a blow to the back of her head, but it must have been a glancing one, because it hadn’t broken the skin or even left a detectable bump.

  Hank gave her directions to the kitchen and told her she’d probably find Brad Wayne waiting there for her. “Brad’s the token college jock hired on to do the heavy work in the kitchen area. Please don’t, like Jenny did, count upon him being of much help in preparing menus or meals.”

  He turned his attention to Lou who showed up as Janine was on her way out. “And, where have you been hiding with this goose egg of yours?” he asked her, his fingers probing her chestnut-colored hair at the back of her head. She’d been less lucky than Janine. “Are you seeing double, by any chance?”

  Janine stopped, but Hank hadn’t completely shifted all of his attention from her to Lou. “You, young lady,” he told Janine, “can do everyone the most good by getting to the kitchen, fast, and getting it operational. There’s nothing more demoralizing to any group than having its food come out less than mouth-watering—which is what it has been doing for these past couple of weeks. Though, bless Jenny, even Brad, they did give it the old college try.”

  “I’ll be fine, Janine,” Lou assured.

  “Oh, became a doctor of medicine, did you, on your wild ride up the mountain?” Hank mocked. “You just let me decide whether you’ll be okay or not.”

  Lou looked duly chastised, in a good-natured sort of way, and Janine headed for the kitchen.

  “You want coffee, we’ve got someone coming to make it,” said the young man with the build of a weight-lifter when Janet poked her head into the kitchen.

  Brad was in the middle of the floor, trying his flour-covered best to sort scattered pots and pans that had been obviously dented in their recent unruly descent from their hangers along the walls. He hadn’t looked up, apparently having merely sensed Janine’s presence.

  “I do believe I am the scheduled coffee-maker,” Janine said with a smile.

  “Really?” He turned his head in her direction and scrambled to his feet. He brushed off a pair of fringed jean cut-offs that revealed his highly muscled legs to good advantage. His equally flour-dusted T-shirt, complete with its WSU logo, sprouted his large neck and a pair of well-developed arms. “Everybody has been in here looking for coffee and something to eat, and I never could figure out how the coffee pot works.”

  “I think one WSU alumni and one WSU student can handle the problems here, don’t you? I’m Janine Woof, by the way.”

  “We’ve been eagerly awaiting your arrival, Janine Woof. And I do mean eagerly.”

  “You’re Brad, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So, can you at least point me in the direction of this coffee machine, Brad?”

  It was one of the multi-pot perco
lator affairs found mainly in restaurants. It was very simple to operate if you knew the procedure. It was very frustrating, though—poor Brad!—if you hadn’t a notion of what you were doing.

  Janine quickly got the coffee brewing and found Hank’s requested butter horns in the walk-in freezer next to the butter beans. Not with the bread, where she would have expected. Every head of every kitchen had his or her own system that worked best, and Janine suspected her predecessor’s was going to take a little revising before Janine was comfortable with it.

  She spread the rolls out on large trays after generously slathering the top of each roll with butter. She slid the trays in an oven kept operational, like everything else at the camp, by the generator that had been brought in for just such emergencies. As soon as the rolls and coffee were ready, she had all intentions of loading up a platter of rolls and sending Brad around the camp with it. As it turned out, though, the smell of brewing java and baking butter-soaked sweet rolls brought everyone to her. There was a line-up well before either coffee or rolls were ready.

  Roger arrived soon after serving began in earnest, as drawn by the luscious scents as was everyone else. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you every woman can cook,” he told Janine, savoring his latest bite of butter horn as if she’d made it from scratch.

  “Amen,” Hank agreed from across the room. He’d been one of the first to the kitchen when the rolls came out of the oven. After sending Janine in search of them, he’d obviously not been about to let everyone else reap the benefits of his efforts without him.

  “Of course, Jenny was hired to assist in the kitchen, not take charge of it,” Roger added, “so it’s not fair to criticize her. She did the best she could in a pinch, and none of us have turned into walking skeletons because of it, but.…” He shook his head, leaving it at that.

  “How is Jenny?” Janine asked. She had to smile at Brad who was attacking two large rolls and a large glass of milk at a nearby table; he’d obviously forgotten that butter-soaked sugar-filled sweet rolls were hardly standard diet for any aspiring college athlete in training.