Wildfire (3 page)

“I’ll go up and get one.” He glanced up towards the highway. “Where’s that deputy, anyway?”

“Busy, I’m sure.” Again, she began her painstaking search, half afraid she might trip over a body in the dark. Trying hard to fight back her memories of the crushing grief she’d felt years ago.

She’d never wanted to see Josh Bryant again. Yet right now, she’d give anything to see him alive and well.

Five minutes passed.

Ten.

Fifteen.

The moon was just a sliver and cast faint light that filtered weakly through the heavy pine branches above.

A bright beam of a light bounced crazily through the trees and soon Danny was at her side.

“I could only find one flashlight,” he said, his voice somber. “But honestly—I think this is a waste of time.”

The hair at the back of her neck prickled. “Did you hear that?”

They both froze. After a long pause, Danny shook his head. “Maybe it’s just a marmot.”

“At this elevation? I don’t think we’re high enough.” She heard another distant branch snap. “And that would have to be a world-class sized rodent.”

“Maybe a coyote, then.” He started walking. “If it’s a bear, we’d better get
outta
here. Did you hear the news last week? A bear strolled into a campsite and mauled a twelve-year-old girl—dragged her right out of her sleeping bag, and that wasn’t more than five miles from here. Three adults had trouble scaring it off, and the DNR still hasn’t tracked down that bear.”

“Wait.”

She heard the sound again. The rustle of underbrush. Another twig snapping. She tensed. “Hello? Is anyone out there?”

Danny paled, no doubt reliving the attack he’d experienced a few years back, but he stood his ground.

“Here you go, Danny.” She unsnapped the can of bear repellent from her belt and tossed it to him, then cradled her rifle across her chest and turned on her flashlight. “Go up to the truck and watch for the deputy’s patrol car.”

He glanced around, then stared in the direction from where they’d heard the noise. “You oughta come, too.”

“I can’t leave until I finish checking this out, and I need to do it now.”

“But—”

“Go, Danny. I had to park quite a way down the road, so it could take that deputy a while to figure out where we are. The faster we get some help, the better.”

She watched him disappear into the gloom, then listened for sound of his ascent up the cliff face. When he yelled out that he’d made it to the top, she breathed a sigh of relief.

Turned.

And heard the sound of something thrashing through the brush…coming closer.

T
essa stilled and slowly moved her rifle from the crook of her arm into a ready position. Easing sideways, she toed at the dried grass underfoot to avoid stepping on anything that would make noise.

A sudden, fitful breeze eddied through the trees, bringing with it the unmistakable coppery scent of blood. Her stomach lurched when the breeze picked up and the scent grew stronger, more cloying.
Josh?

She wavered.

Not wanting to go farther.

Knowing she had to, if there was still a chance that he could still be alive.
Please Lord, if this is Josh, let him be all right. Help me bring him out of this safely.

After a brief silence, she again heard the sound of something crashing through the brush, heading her way.

Biting her lip, she moved more quickly, whispering a constant litany of prayer. If she could smell blood, any cougar, bear or coyote in the vicinity could, too—and it was a blatant an invitation to a free meal.

Now, as she stepped around a rocky ledge, the odor hit her full-force, triggering a gagging reflex and making her stomach roil. And then, barely visible in the dim light, she saw it—a bloodied, mangled…corpse?

She bit back a cry. Swung the flashlight into position and swept it across…

A large buck.

Likely, road kill that had gone over the edge of the highway, then dragged itself into the brush, given the odd angle of its hind legs. And if her guess was right, something big already had dibs on the carcass, and would fight to the death to defend its meal.

She moved back, intending to give the deer wide berth and rapidly put it between her and the oncoming predator.

Her boot hit something more yielding than the rocky, hard-packed ground. She angled the flashlight down…and this time, couldn’t hold back a scream.

A pale, outstretched arm was lying in her path.

“Josh—can you hear me? Josh!”

A wave of pain rolled through him when someone grabbed at his shoulder and shook it. Insistent. Demanding. He fought his way up through a suffocating blanket of confusion and pain, then let himself slip back into the deep comfort of oblivion.

“No,”
that same voice whispered. “You’ve got to wake up.
Now!
”

The voice was oddly familiar, though her words seemed to ricochet inside his head without any real meaning. He groaned. Then forced his eyes open and found himself looking up into a face lit with eerie highlights and shadows by a flashlight laying on the ground.

All around was darkness.

“Look, I know you’re hurt. You’ve lost a lot of blood. But you’ve got to get up.
Now.
We’re in a very bad place here. I have no doubt that a bear picked up our scents a long time ago, and that it’s very close by. Understand?”

Tessa?
He nodded—just once. The motion set off a renewed explosion of fireworks in his skull.

“Help is coming. We just need to get as far away from that bear’s meal as we can.”

Confusion swirled through his thoughts as she somehow dragged him to his feet and thrust a long, straight branch into his hand. She draped his other arm over her shoulders. One step. Another. Each sent a shock wave of pain through his damaged leg, despite the makeshift splint he’d made earlier.

The bear was at the road kill now—he could hear the sounds of ripping flesh—and then it fell silent.

Sniffing the air, maybe, and rising on his hind legs.

The bear grunted as it crashed forward through the brush, then halted—a false charge, probably, intended to warn away any competition.

Though an empty threat didn’t guarantee the next charge wouldn’t be for real.

“Can you stand on your own?” Tessa said sharply. She loomed closer for a quick look at his face, then propped him against a tree. “Stay put.”

A faint wash of moonlight filtered through the overheard canopy. He could see her pull her rifle from her shoulder and double check its load.

The bear was close enough that Josh could detect its strong odor now, and he could hear it coming straight at them.

“Hang on,” Tessa said. “I don’t think either of us is ready to wrestle any bears in the dark.”

She aimed at the sky and the crack of rifle fire cut through the darkness like an explosion.

Silence.

Then she fired again and the bear beat a hasty retreat, barreling through the trees like a runaway bulldozer.

“That bought us time, but we still need to get out of here.”

“You’re…right,” he managed, trying to focus on where she stood.

But the ghostly pale birch trees started to shimmer and sway, and the stars spun in the sky as the sharp report of the rifle magnified. Filled the terrain with mortar explosions and billowing sand and a deadly rain of rock and engine parts and bodies…and screams.

Always the terrified, agonizing screams.

His vision dimmed. And when he hit the ground, the earth felt like a welcoming embrace.

Tessa sat on a hard plastic chair in the emergency room waiting area, offering a sympathetic smile to a young mother trying to calm the screaming baby in her arms.

Standing up, she paced the small room, then went to the emergency room doors and stepped outside to breathe the cool night air.

“Ms. McAllister? Is that you?” A young nurse hurried to Tessa’s side. “You aren’t leaving, are you?”

Tessa turned, her melancholy thoughts turning to fear in an instant. “Is something wrong?”

“They’re taking your friend into surgery. The surgeon wants to talk to you, right now.”

“Me?”

Nodding, the nurse spun on her heel and hurried away through the double doors marked No Admittance, and led Tessa to the first triage room, where Josh lay on a gurney with IV tubes dangling above him and a digital monitor marking his heart rhythm.

Dark bruises were already forming on the right side of his face. A laceration angling from his forehead to temple had been closed with butterfly bandages—the wounds a garish contrast to his pale, almost gray skin.

His eyes were closed. He lay perfectly still.

And it took very little imagination to imagine that he was already dead.

She’d once felt nothing but anger toward him, but now all she wanted was to see his long, dark lashes flutter open and to see those hazel eyes sparkle with laughter.
Please God, be with him. Help him make it through this.

A middle-aged woman in a white lab coat, with a stethoscope dangling around her neck, stepped away from the bed and offered her hand. “I’m Dr. West. Mr. Bryant said that he has no relatives here. I understand you’re a friend.”

A friend.
She was hardly that, but she understood the situation. “I guess so.”

Two orderlies appeared at the door. At the doctor’s nod, they bustled into the room and began preparing the gurney for transport. Within seconds, they’d wheeled him away.

“Josh has signed a release allowing us to share his information with you. The CT scan shows significant damage to his spleen. We can sometimes achieve healing through bed rest, but this looks like a Grade III injury. Given his lab values and escalating heart rate, this bleed is just too big for that.”

The woman’s words seemed to be coming from far, far away. Tessa blinked and tried to focus. “So you’ll have to take it out? Isn’t that bad?”

“A total splenectomy would place him at much higher risk for infections, so we’ll first go for a more conservative approach and try to repair it. Our orthopedist needs to surgically repair the tibia and fibula fractures. Your friend is actually a very lucky guy, from what I hear about that accident scene.”

She tipped her head toward the X-rays mounted on a lighted screen, and even from a distance, Tessa could see multiple fractures just above Josh’s ankle.

“Just sit tight,” Dr. West continued. “He has a good chance of coming through all of this without any permanent repercussions. Do you have any questions?”

“Just a good chance?” Tessa asked, feeling faint. “Only that?”

“There’s always risk with sustained blood loss. He’s shocky, so it’s urgent that we get that internal bleeding stopped, STAT.” The surgeon glanced at the clock on the wall. “They’re getting him prepped, and I need to get up there. The nurses will keep you informed.”

“Th-thanks.”

“By the way, the secretary has tried calling his family members out East, but she hasn’t had any luck so far. You’ll be here after surgery is over?”

Tessa nodded.

“It’ll probably take a couple hours, depending on what we find, and then he’ll be in recovery for at least an hour.” Dr. West gave her a sympathetic smile. “If you want to run home and change your clothes or get something to eat, you’ll have time. The nurses can loan you some scrubs.”

Clothes?
Tessa looked back at her, feeling a flash of confusion.

“From what I hear, you saved his life, you know. You can be very proud of that.” She rested a gentle hand on Tessa’s shoulder. “I know this has been a stressful night.”

After the doctor hurried out of the room, Tessa glanced at herself in the mirror over the sink in the corner and drew in a sharp breath.

Under the harsh lighting, her blood-stained shirt and jeans were an all-too vivid reminder of her frantic efforts to stem the flow of blood from Josh’s leg.

The emergency vehicles had arrived twenty minutes after she’d found him semiconscious, his jeans and shirt soaked in blood, and his makeshift bandages doing little to stop the bleeding.

Somehow, she’d completely blanked out on her own appearance until now.

Feeling as if she were moving through a dream where the earth had just tilted sideways, she shivered and reached for the back of a chair, her hands clammy.

It had been a long time since she’d regularly talked to God. Given her faltering faith and anger at Him, maybe He didn’t even want to hear from her now.

He probably wouldn’t bother to help, because He sure hadn’t years ago when she’d needed him most.

But seeing those orderlies wheel Josh away filled her with the most overwhelming fear she’d ever felt in her life since…

Shoving those memories away, she gripped the back of the chair tighter and choked back the tears clogging her throat.

Dear God—please, please help him. Not for my sake, but for his. Please…

Josh shifted his weight awkwardly, hampered by the heavy cast on his left leg and IV line taped to his arm. The last two days had passed in a medication-induced blur of drowsiness, interspersed with visits by nurses who prodded and poked and took his temperature every hour, and lab techs who seemed to take special pleasure in drawing endless vials of blood.

This morning, he’d agreed to nothing stronger than Tylenol, wanting to keep his mind clear. Now, with Sheriff Michael Robinson standing at the side of his bed, he was thankful for that decision.

The tall, dark-haired man reached out and shook Josh’s hand. “I’ve stopped in a couple times,” he said. “But you were always asleep or off having some sort of test. How are you feeling today?”

“Like I was run over by a bulldozer. But better than yesterday, anyhow. The doc says she’ll release me tomorrow.”

A groove deepened in the man’s cheek, and Josh’s fingers subconsciously flexed, needing to grasp a camera that could capture those craggy, rugged facial lines.

Alarm rushed through him and he struggled to sit up, then fell back, weak and exhausted. “My…cameras…”

“My deputy has all of your things in lock-up at the station. All safe—unless the crash impact damaged anything.” The sheriff glanced down at the clipboard in his hand, then he gave Josh an easy smile that didn’t mask the intensity in his gaze. “What brought you out here?”

“Photo assignment.”

“Newspaper?”

“
Green Earth
—a magazine. My…ID card is in my billfold.”

The sheriff looked down at his papers and frowned. “We didn’t find one at the scene. The ER nurses say it wasn’t with the clothes you were wearing, either.”

Josh closed his eyes, thinking about the four credit cards he carried, plus other personal information…and his last photo of his fiancée, Lara, taken just hours before a roadside bombing took her life.

“It would’ve been in my back right pocket.”

“I’ll send a deputy out to the scene and have him look. Soooo…how long have you been in the area?”

The man’s tone was a little too folksy, and Josh suddenly knew that there was more than just an accident report on that clipboard. “I get the feeling you’ve done a background check on me already,” he said quietly. “Find anything interesting, Sheriff?”

A brief smile flickered at the corner of Michael’s mouth. “Nothing on record…though not everything is, usually.”

“Can I ask why you’d need to do that? Or is it protocol on anyone who ends up in this hospital?”

“How long have you been in Wyoming?” Michael’s voice hardened. “And where were you staying?”

Uneasy now, Josh shifted against the pillows. “I’ve been in the Wolf Creek area for a little over a week. I have—or did have—a campsite, west of the Snow Canyon Ranch property line.”

Michael pinned him with an intense look. “How would you know where that is, exactly?”

Some of his memories from just before the accident were still hazy, and now Josh frowned. “I—I’m not sure.”

“You know the McAllisters?”

“Tessa, from college. I—I knew she used to live around here, but we never kept in touch.” At the sheriff’s satisfied expression, Josh realized the man must’ve already talked to Tessa, and was just checking for inconsistencies in Josh’s story. “You can check my credit card charges, if you want. There’ll be gas station charges starting in Washington, D.C., a week ago. You can also call Sylvia Meiers at the magazine. Her number is…” he searched his memory, and came up blank. “It’s probably in my…”

“Billfold?”

“I’m afraid so.”

Michael cleared his throat. “Can you remember anything about your accident?”