Heart on Fire

by William Maltese

  “I beg your pardon?” Chad was right on cue. If he laughed, Janine was prepared to strangle him.

  “The angel asked her what she was doing there when there was still work for her on this Earth,” Marianne said softly.

  Chad had the good grace to take it all in with a straight face.

  “The angel told her to get into her car, without even bothering to dress or pick anything up but her car keys, and drive here,” Marianne continued. “She’d had this trailer sitting here for years. She and Great-grandpa used to come here fishing as a change of pace from the tourist-crowded streams around their other cabins on the North Face.”

  There was the sound of someone on the steps outside. In one coordinated movement, Marianne, Janine, and Chad stood up.

  “Marianne?” a clear and strong voice asked from just beyond the screen.

  No one in the room had any doubts who was doing the asking.

  Sarah Zent, all eighty-nine pounds of her, came spryly inside to join them. She didn’t have to be told who her guests were, either.

  “Ah, my dear,” she said, as if she’d known Janine for as long as she’d known her own great-granddaughter. She extended her hand to Chad. “And, you must be Dr. Samuels who Melissa said, and rightly so, ‘is as handsome as the Devil himself.’”

  “For a brief moment, Janine hadn’t a clue as to the identity of the mysterious Melissa to whom Sarah Zent referred. Then, quite suddenly, like a flash of lightning, she realized that Sarah was the one and only person Janine had ever heard call Great-Grandma Woof by her Christian name.

  CHAPTER NINE

  WELL, JANINE BELIEVED, she had found one woman who hadn’t exactly been taken in by Chad’s considerable charm.

  “I do believe,” Chad said, laughing, “that Sarah Zent truly believes she was saved from the eruption by an angel just so she’d be here, today, to protect you from me.”

  Janine and Chad were headed back to the helicopter where Ethan was killing time by entertaining the local kids by letting them take turns sitting in the pilot’s seat.

  “She did rather give that impression,” Janine agreed. Her smile was primarily the result of her embarrassment felt for the good-intentioned Sarah who had come very close to making a fool of herself. Janine could only guess what Great-Grandma Woof had imparted over the phone, before the lines had gone earthquake dead, but it seemed to have convinced Sarah that Chad was intent upon leading Janine down the road to perdition.

  Thank goodness Chad had a sense of humor, or he would have certainly been less indulgent of Sarah’s third-degree. Anyone would have thought he was on the witness stand for some heinous crime, Sarah the Chief Prosecutor determined to nail his sorry ass to a plank.

  “She seems to have a far greater respect for my skills of seduction than I do,” Chad said and watched Ethan shoo away the kids in preparation for takeoff.

  Janine and Chad ducked for the resulting downdraft from the suddenly spinning blades.

  Janine was thankful she wasn’t required to make conversation for the next few minutes of entering the helicopter and strapping herself in the harness and seat belt—this time without Chad’s assistance. After which, the sounds inside the chopper were loud enough to make conversation difficult if not impossible.

  “Heading up!” Ethan nonetheless announced, and they were off like thrill-seekers on some carnival ride.

  They headed north in an eastward curving path that, Janine assumed, was designed to keep them out of ear-shot and eye-shot of the camp. Roger might wonder what the helicopter was still doing in the immediate area.

  “Ethan is going to take us up for a close look at the crater before he attempts any kind of set-down,” Chad shouted, his mouth so sexily near Janine’s ear that she felt the movement of his lips.

  She watched, fascinated as the chopper skimmed tall treetops until the trees disappeared, and the south rim of the massive crater was suddenly directly below them. The 2,100-foot hole, on the other side, had been made by an explosive force estimated to have been the equivalent of 500 Hiroshima a-bombs; it was a sight to leave Janine in complete wonder.

  Oh, she had seen all the newspaper and magazine photos, seen it all on TV, seen it all from a passenger seat on a commercial airliner flying at 27,000 feet some hundred miles to the north, but none of that had prepared her for the other-worldliness of the close-up reality. She honestly felt as if she’d been transported from the Earth to the moon via one of those science-fiction gismos (“Beam me up, Scotty!”) that had so often dissolved, and then reassembled, Star Trek’s Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.

  There were no woods growing the North Face. Certainly, nothing grew on the new dome couched inside the pit like an egg inside a nest. The trees that had once formed forests as thick as those Janine had flown over to get there, had been toppled toward the horizon in a complicated weave and covered with dust to turn the landscape a uniform gray.

  Although she knew that ecological recovery was in process, that there were bracken ferns, fireweed, asters, lupines, thimbleberries, avalanche lilies, trailing blackberries, and pearly everlastings in bloom down there, those isolated clumps of green were lost in the full scope of utter desolation whose main punctuation marks were deep gouges in the landscape, serrated ridges, and enormous potholes, many of the latter filled with steamy brews whose mists only occasionally shifted to show seemingly pea-soup contents. The remains of Spirit Lake, visible to the north-northeast, once turned as completely gray as the rest of the landscape by the May 1980 explosion, was beginning to regain a hint of its original blue, but that was the only visible sign of hope on the vast Hieronymus Bosch canvas.

  “We’ll take a closer look at the dome,” Chad said, tapping Janine’s shoulder.

  Ethan took the copter down on cue.

  They passed through the filmy whiffs of vapor gone airborne from the hump of swollen earth below; the dome looked less egg-like than alien aircraft skidded to an unscheduled stop.

  Even as Janine watched, a bright orange glow blossomed where there had been only dark rock before.

  Unbelievably, solid stones from the spot levitated directly toward her.

  The flung rocks looked insignificant only until she realized they had to be damned big for her to see them so clearly from that distance. That realization was struck home more forcefully when the first of them actually hit the aircraft and lace-like lines simultaneously appeared on the windscreen.

  She’d later remember that Ethan and Chad shouted something, but she never would remember what, probably because she was so concentrated, at the time, on the sheer marvel of what she was seeing.

  The chopper swerved sharply, in an attempt to make it to the leading lip of the crater, and over to the other side. All of the while, there were accompanying ping, ping, pings of volcano-tossed stones colliding with, and sometimes penetrating metal.

  Suddenly, there was no seeing the dome within the crater. Everything below was seemingly nothing more than one boiling cloud of dust and cinders.

  The helicopter lost altitude, became completely immersed within a polluted miasmic atmosphere that burned Janine’s eyes and clogged her lungs.

  Ethan and Chad’s continued shouts still refused to register intelligibly on Janine’s mind long enough, loud enough, for her to decipher. There was simply too much attending noise and things happening for any one thing to be successfully singled out for proper analysis.

  Deep inside of her, Janine had the inexorable suspicion that she was going to die. It made her unbearably sad. Not because she found death so frightening, although she certainly did find it that, but because Chad and she had been unable to fully explore their possibilities for a genuine relationship.

  There was a sudden darker engulfment of everyone and everything.

  Janine gasped for air and choked on more dust.

  There was a cacophony of sounds: Chad’s sounds, Ethan’s sounds, Janine sounds, mountain-in-eruption sounds, the helicopter-being-bombarded-and-going-down sounds.

&nb
sp; Fear? Was that what Janine was feeling? It all happened too quickly for fear. Fear was often the product of anticipation, and whatever this was had come without decipherable forewarning. This was just suddenly there, death a likely consequence. And, quite frankly, death might well be preferable to the tremendous heat that she sucked into her lungs, along with the dirt and the grit and the ash.

  If she smelled sulfur and brimstone, which she did, both aromas attributed to Hell, she could only think that Chad and Ethan and she, in the end, should have been able to count on better forever-afters.

  No denying she was surprised when the darkness temporarily swept to one side, and she realized they were still airborne. That feat seemed more and more miraculous as the metal and plastic cocoon in which she continued to reside played out its tin-can-hit-by-rock racket all around her.

  They were still moving forward, too. Toward where and toward what were entirely uncertain as the darkness returned with more heat, more dust, and more nose-and-eye-burning stench.

  If they hit the inside of the crater, it would be like birds hitting a plate-glass window.

  Janine knew she should pray. Except, there was simply too much happening to pray.

  Suddenly, there was the inside crater wall less than three feet in front of her face. Had she been able to extend her arm through the cracked and heat-blistered helicopter windscreen bubble, she could have touched the volcanic surface and brought back traces of it on her fingertips.

  The rock wall slid down, and a vast slope of land slid up to fall away towards a distant gray horizon.

  Up and over the lip? Safe? Janine didn’t feel safe.

  If her looking-for-the-best mind-set, assaulted as it was by negatives from each and every side, could deliver her from the suspicion that she may yet be delivered from the belly of the beast, it, also, told her that death could just as easily await her at every next second. The revealed landscape was desolate as the helicopter dropped closer and closer to it.

  “We are going down!” And who screamed that? Chad? Ethan? Janine?

  Certainly, Janine knew for a certainty that they were going down. The ground was simply on the rise too damned fast not to.

  “Chad?” How sad that two people possibly destined to find true love should end up first finding death together.

  Chad’s head lolled forward on his chest. Dead already?

  Janine didn’t want Chad dead. She didn’t want to die, either. She wanted them both to have the time they should have had to sort out what kind of relationship—if any—they would have together. It was infinitely unfair that she and he should have their free choice taken from them by a mountain that had already claimed 61 lives and was now preparing to snuff out three more.

  No denying the impact that telescoped her spine, jarred every bone in her body, and rattled her teeth.

  The sounds of tearing and twisting and denting metal were inhuman screeches that grated raw nerves. A sudden Boom! Boom! Boom! quick-filled all the available airspace around them.

  Then, silence.

  So, was she dead or alive? It wasn’t as easy to determine as she thought it should be, because of the complete darkness and the fact that she was unable to move. Mentally, she seemed out of contact with any part of her physical body.

  She tried to put what had happened into proper sequence: the flight over the dome…the suddenness of the mountain in eruption…the copter up and over one edge of the escarpment…the ensuing descent…the crash.

  Was the present darkness part of the Hereafter? Was it the lead-in to some glorious light to follow? Was it the never-ending ethereal world of the damned, so full of dirt and dust that there would never be another sunrise?

  Or, was the blackness only the result of Janine’s eyes shut so tightly?

  She opened her eyes to an unnatural twilight. She became even more disoriented. There was definitely something out of whack, out of kilter, askew.

  Why did she look like she looked? Why did Chad look the way he looked? Why did Ethan look the way he looked? Could all of this twisted metal in which they were cocooned really be…what?

  “Chad?” She looked to him to put some meaning to the madness, although it was obvious he was unconscious and wouldn’t be immediately answering any questions.

  “Janine?” It was Ethan who was asking.

  Janine wanted it to be Chad speaking her name. She feared if it wasn’t, then he was dead. She didn’t want Chad dead. She didn’t want him seriously injured, either. How could Ethan or she get a seriously wounded Chad adequate medical attention?

  “Ethan?”

  What exactly was Ethan’s position and condition? What, for that matter, was hers?

  Jesus, they were dangling upside-down like bats!

  Her sudden awareness of their hanging made her acutely aware of the blood already rushed to her head.

  Ethan was first out of his harness and seat belt. There was the loud crash of his ungainly descent and scramble for more normal alignment.

  Metal was bent even farther as Ethan moved some bits of crash-distorted fuselage to access Janine.

  She was alive. Ethan was alive. Oh, please, dear God, let Chad be alive!

  “Let me get you down,” Ethan said; Janine’s fingers just couldn’t successfully manipulate the sudden puzzle of metal clasps that held the confining straps against and around her.

  “See about Chad, first,” she said. “I think he’s hurt.” She couldn’t bring herself to suggest he was dead.

  “I don’t see any way of getting to him before I get you out of the way.”

  Her snaps released her, and she fell. Her coordination all shot to hell, she would have landed directly on her head, probably broken her neck, if Ethan hadn’t been there to direct her tumble and catch her.

  Once she was down, she turned her attention to Chad, and Ethan was quick to lend a hand. After only a few seconds, however, it was obvious that there was no longer enough room for the three of them. Common sense persuaded Janine to slide off to one side and let Ethan take charge.

  The view beyond the immediate confines of their squashed container wasn’t anything to raise Janine’s spirits. It was, in fact, totally nightmarish.

  All around was a gray and dusty landscape made more so by the smoke that completely covered the now-very-dim sun.

  They’d crashed outside the North Face and in the blow-down zone whereon thick forest had existed until the May 1980 blast of the mountain had leveled all the trees like so many dominos gone down.

  If Janine bounced up and down, where she stood, she was aware how a supporting cross work of interlaced fallen timbers, beneath the downed helicopter, bounced, too. The spring-like response might well have cushioned their fall and saved their lives, although their landing hadn’t seemed even vaguely cushioned at the time it happened.

  Off to her left, the crater of Mt. St. Helens, visible through the collapsed serrated edges of its North Face, was filled with a maelstrom of spark-specked blackness. The size of the mountain and its present mushroom cloud, combined with the desolation on all sides, made Janine feel small and bug-like.

  Up, down, and sideways, fine dust was suspended in the air, only some of it continually gravity-dropping to powder everything. They could survive the crash only to end up suffocated beneath ash like the victims of ancient Pompeii.

  “Give me a hand, Janine,” Ethan called her back to the more optimistic reality of him alive, her alive, and…Chad? Oh, Chad, please be alive!

  “His shoulder harness is really fouled,” Ethan explained his slow progress, “but I think I’ve about got it. Just try and make sure he doesn’t drop on his head when I release all support.”

  Easier said than done, because with Ethan and Janine crowded around, there wasn’t enough space into which Chad could descend from his hang-space position, except into his resulting sprawl over Janine’s back and onto Ethan’s left knee.

  Afterwards, they somehow managed to manhandle him outside, although he was dead-weight the whole way
. Janine shuddered at the dead part of dead weight.

  She slid her fingers along Chad’s neck. His skin was warm, not cold. When she felt his pulse, she started crying.

  “He’s alive!” She couldn’t help but say it aloud.

  “Well, thank God for that!” Ethan agreed.

  Janine wiped the back of her hand across her eyes and came away with a streak of tears and mud.

  It helped tremendously that Ethan remained so seemingly calm, cool, and collected. He’d been in battle zones before, of course, and this was definitely a battle zone. If the enemy, in this case, was a mountain and not men, that didn’t make the situation any the less potentially deadly.

  “Just what is your condition, do you think, Janine?” Ethan asked.

  “I’m fine, but Chad….”

  “Forget Chad for the moment,” he insisted. “I want you consciously to take stock of your body. Chad has no apparent serious lacerations, with no immediate evidence of internal bleeding, but I won’t likely know what’s wrong with him—if anything—until he wakes up and tells me. But you’re conscious and lucid. Shock sometimes masks injuries and, if that’s the case, I want you to sort yours out, here and now. Can you do that?”

  “Right!”

  “Take it from the top,” Ethan instructed. “Run your fingers physically through your hair and check for soreness and the stickiness of blood.”

  She did as she was told.

  “Now, carefully check your shoulders, arms, and hands. Any broken fingers? Any serious sprains?”

  She shook her head no.

  He continued his running commentary, making her walk, wiggle her toes, do deep-knee bends.

  When he finished his check-list of to-do’s, he smiled.

  “You seem to have come through pretty well for a rookie,” he complimented. “Now, if Chad would just oblige by coming around, too, we could all pat each other on the backs before getting on with more pressing matters.”

  “I’m worried about Chad,” Janine stated the obvious. “Do you think it’s serious?” If anyone knew, Ethan would.