26. Anything Except This
Anything Except This
For several minutes after the worst of the fire moved east, Harris let himself pretend the granite still counted as shelter.
It had saved them from the fire front. That didn’t mean they could stay there.
The wind that had driven flame over the ridge was now pushing smoke back beneath the ledge, where the shallow recess trapped it against the stone.
There was nowhere for it to clear. Each gust brought another dirty layer rolling along the ground, thick enough that Harris could watch it gather in the beam of the flashlight before it swallowed the light entirely.
The heat had eased, but the air was getting worse.
Jay was breathing roughly beside him, too fast, with a thin catch every few breaths that Harris had started listening for without meaning to.
He had panicked when the smoke first thickened and pulled too much of it deep before Harris managed to slow him down.
Now every breath seemed to cost him more than the one before.
Harris’s own throat felt flayed raw, and anything deeper than a shallow breath threatened a cough, but Jay had gotten the worst of it.
Harris could feel that much without knowing anything more technical than what his hand told him where it rested over Jay’s ribs: the rise beneath his palm was too shallow, the pauses too long.
Staying put was no longer the safer choice.
The old burn lay only a few hundred yards uphill.
The earlier fire had stripped most of the timber and brush from that section of ridge, leaving open granite, short grass, and far less fuel for tonight’s fire to work with.
More important now, it was exposed to the wind.
Whatever smoke crossed it would have somewhere to go.
Here, beneath the ledge, it had nowhere to go at all.
Another gust pushed a dense sheet beneath the granite. Jay coughed against his sleeve, the sound starting low in his chest and taking too long to stop.
Harris watched the smoke thicken between them and the opening.
They had to get out.
The problem was getting Jay there.
He had folded against Harris sometime during the worst of the heat, forehead tucked near his shoulder, one hand still twisted into the front of Harris’s jacket. Harris kept his palm over Jay’s ribs because their movement had become the only measurement he trusted.
The next breath came shallow.
Then another.
The pause afterward lasted long enough to make Harris count.
“Jay.”
A faint sound answered him.
Harris caught the back of his neck and shifted far enough to see his face. Soot darkened the skin beneath Jay’s eyes, and his gaze drifted before it managed to settle on Harris.
“We have to move.”
Jay looked toward the smoke rolling past the opening. “Where?”
“Old burn. Above us.”
“How far?”
“Few hundred yards.”
Jay nodded, but the motion looked delayed, as though the answer had needed to travel farther than it should have before making sense. When he tried to push himself up, he made it halfway before his eyes closed.
Harris caught him before his head struck the rock. “Hey. Look at me.”
Jay opened his eyes again. There was irritation there for a second, familiar enough to loosen something in Harris’s chest, and then even that slipped away.
“Stay awake.”
“I’m trying.”
The words were quiet, with none of Jay’s usual argument tucked inside them, and Harris hated that more than he would have hated a joke.
Harris had no idea whether keeping him awake was actually the right thing to do for smoke inhalation.
He knew getting harder to rouse was bad, and that was about the limit of his medical expertise.
Mostly, he couldn’t stand the thought of Jay slipping somewhere Harris couldn’t reach him.
As long as Jay opened his eyes when Harris said his name or tightened a hand around his arm when Harris touched him, there was something Harris could ask of him. Something Jay could give back.
So he kept touching him.
A hand at the back of his neck. Fingers against his cheek. His palm over Jay’s ribs, counting each breath as it came.
Then Harris forced his attention back to the things he could actually do: cleaner air, higher ground, water, movement.
Harris found the intact bottle beside them and held it to Jay’s mouth. “Small drink.”
Jay swallowed once, coughed, and turned his head away.
Harris didn’t push him. The second bottle had split against the granite, leaving only a shallow mouthful trapped at the bottom, so he poured that into the first and checked what remained.
Less than a third. Enough to matter, not enough to waste.
He tucked it inside his jacket and crawled out first.
Heat struck him immediately—not the violent blast from before, but enough to tighten the skin along his face.
Smoke crossed the slope in broken sheets, and pieces of bark drifted past with their edges still glowing.
Harris got to his feet, and the mountain tipped beneath him hard enough that he reached instinctively for the granite.
Pain tore through his right palm.
For the first time, he properly looked at the hand he had used to knock the ember off Jay’s shoulder.
Angry red skin extended from the center of his palm along the inside of his wrist, with blisters lifting near the base of his thumb.
He flexed his fingers once. They worked, more or less, which would have to qualify as good enough.
Behind him, Jay had made it onto his hands and knees.
“Wait.”
“I’m coming.”
“Jay.”
Harris crouched and caught him beneath both arms. The burn flared so sharply his vision narrowed.
“Harris, your hand.”
“Later.”
“You keep—”
The rest disappeared into a cough.
Harris pulled him upright. For several seconds Jay stood with both hands gripping the front of his jacket, his forehead nearly against Harris’s shoulder, and then his knees folded.
Harris caught him around the waist. “Arm around me.”
Jay obeyed without argument, which frightened Harris more than the fall had.
They started uphill. The trail had disappeared beneath ash deep enough to conceal loose rock, burned roots, and holes where brush had collapsed inward.
Harris kept himself on the downhill side, one arm locked around Jay’s waist while Jay leaned more heavily against him with every yard.
His flashlight cut a weak cone through the smoke, and beyond it the mountain seemed to stop existing altogether.
Jay stumbled twice in the first twenty yards. Each time his full weight sagged against Harris, and each time the same ugly thought arrived before Harris could stop it: how little it might take for Jay to disappear if Harris lost his grip for even a second.
A trunk split somewhere to their left.
Harris heard the crack before he saw movement through the smoke. He dragged Jay against him and dropped behind a shoulder of rock just as a tree came apart across the slope.
Something heavy struck Harris along the left side.
Pain detonated beneath his ribs so completely that for several seconds he could not get air. Then Jay moved beneath him, and the inability to breathe became secondary.
Harris forced himself upright, coughing hard enough that the pain sharpened with every pull of air. “You hit?”
Jay shook his head.
Harris ran one hand over his shoulder and back anyway, checking for heat or blood until Jay caught his wrist.
“Not hit.” His eyes were half-lidded, but the look in them was clear enough. “I’m still here.”
The words should have helped. Instead they landed somewhere Harris did not want to examine, because still implied a condition that could change.
He got them both upright again. Every deep breath now dragged something sharp across his left side—bruised ribs, maybe cracked—and he filed the possibility beside the burned hand and the cough building lower in his chest. None of it changed what Jay needed.
The old burn was less than two hundred yards away, and Jay was not going to make it there on his feet.
Harris set down the first-aid pouch and radio long enough to shift Jay’s arm from around his shoulders.
Jay frowned. “What’re you doing?”
“Carrying you.”
“Harris.”
“Ain’t asking.”
Jay looked at Harris’s hand and then at the way he had gone protective over his left side. “You’re hurt.”
“Can you walk?”
Jay tried to straighten. His knees softened almost immediately.
That answered it.
Harris crouched with his back toward him. “Arms around my neck.”
Jay hesitated.
“Now.”
After a moment, he obeyed. Harris caught him beneath the thighs and stood.
Pain tore through his burned hand and into his forearm while his ribs seized around their combined weight. Smoke tightened his chest until the first breath came out as a cough, and for one ugly second his legs threatened to fold beneath them.
They didn’t.
Jay was not a small man. Under any other circumstances Harris might have pointed that out just to hear whatever insult came back, but now Jay’s weight felt wrong in a way that had nothing to do with how heavy he was. He was too loose against Harris’s back, too willing to be carried.
“Stay with me.”
A breath touched Harris’s neck.
He started climbing.
For the first fifty yards, Jay gave him something whenever Harris said his name—a sound, a word, enough to prove he was still there. Then he stopped answering.
Harris took three more steps before he understood that the silence had changed.
“Jay.”
Nothing.
He stopped, his own breathing hard and uneven now, sweat cooling beneath the smoke ground into his clothes. A faint breath still touched his neck, but when Harris said Jay’s name again, there was no answer.
“Open your eyes.”
Jay remained slack.
The mountain disappeared.
A hospital room opened in its place so completely that Harris nearly stumbled: Nell’s hand inside his, cooling while the machines continued making their useless noise, Harris still holding on long after there was anyone left to feel it.
For one disorienting second, he was there again.
Then Jay’s weight shifted against his back.
No.
Harris started climbing faster.