Fire and Ice – Chapter 25
Standard disclaimer applies.
I've realised that I can't quite wrap the story up in one chapter so this will not be the last one. Possibly one more after this then hopefully I can wrap this up. Thanks to everyone who left a review. I really hope you enjoy this chapter. I'm sorry if some words are unfamiliar. I promise it's not likely to be a typo (though I'm not immune to them!) but it's more likely to be a word common to the UK.
The sheriff watched Luke's fingers drumming nervously, alternating between the side of his legs and the car seat. Though their little diversion hadn't cost them much time, to Luke it had seemed a life time. There seemed to be a sudden urgency charging through him and it was starting to make Conibear twitchy himself.
Partly to distract his companion and partly out of genuine curiosity, Conibear asked a question that had been playing on his mind for a while. "So, Mr. Danes, if you don't mind my asking how did Jess end up living with you in the first place? Have you raised him since he was small?" He glanced away from the road to gauge the man's response.
Luke's face creased into a frown and he folded his arms across his chest, a little awkwardly. Sensing his reluctance, Alex started to back-pedal but before he could voice his thoughts, Luke began speaking. "No, not long. Not as long as I would have liked. Or should have, I guess." He looked over at the sheriff, who simply raised his eyebrows in a question. Luke sighed. "His mom, my sister, had – has - problems and his dead beet of a father upped and left them." He paused. Family business was usually strictly private as far as the Danes were concerned but Luke figured Conibear had done enough for both him and Jess, to warrant a little information. For his part, Alex didn't push.
"I always knew in my gut that she wasn't handling the whole…single motherhood thing well but…" He trailed off angrily, his hand unconsciously making a fist by his side.
Alex gave a small shrug. "Not your job to look after your sister, surely?"
"You look after family. Period," Luke insisted, forcefully. "Doesn't matter what it costs you. But I was quite happy with my life exactly the way I had it and I didn't want it changed." Luke stared down at his lap and mumbled softly. "I didn't step up. Not when it would have made a difference. Now I'm just…" His lip curled in self-deprecation. "The clean-up crew."
Alex slowed for an animal in the road. As he did so, he pursed his lips, thoughtfully. "So it's too late for the kid? He may as well just pack it in and give up now? Is that what you mean?" He felt Luke's head snap around to him though he kept his eyes tracked on the road.
"No!" Luke snapped. "He's a damned bright kid. He reads more than anyone I know – well, nearly anyone I know. I mean, he needs a kick up the backside every now and again to keep him on track but he could do so much if he just…" Luke finally trailed off and gave a slight smile. "Okay. I get the point."
"Point?" Alex asked, guilelessly, not able to smother his grin.
Luke rolled his eyes. "Yeah, ha-ha. Okay. It's not too late. But I miss the time I lost with him, when I could have been making his life a little easier."
"Sounds to me like you're making up for it now. I don't know many uncles who'd go to the lengths you are to get their nephews back. I can see he means a lot to you."
Luke sighed again.
"Yeah, but when he leaves his crap all over the bathroom and plays his music at a volume that makes my ears bleed and when I can't even ask him what he wants for dinner without a smart-assed reply I do kind of wonder why."
Alex chuckled. "The way I understand it, that's just teenagers." Suddenly, he turned his attention away from their conversation and his eyes went to the side of the road. "What have we got here?" he muttered to himself, slowing down and pulling over. Luke squinted to see in the dark.
"Looks abandoned," the sheriff remarked as he stopped behind the black car. Luke rolled his eyes and groaned.
"Another one? Is there some electro-magnetic pulse that we don't know about, shorting out all the vehicles around here?" Conibear turned to him and smiled in sympathy.
"I'm sorry. I know this is frustrating but I need to check no-one's hurt." Suddenly Luke felt foolish and a little selfish for his preoccupation. He waved away Conibear's explanation, in embarrassment. "No, I get it. Go ahead."
Nodding, Alex got out and made his way cautiously around the sleek, black car. With little else to do, Luke did the same though when he heard Luke's car door open, Conibear waved him back, wanting him to keep his distance, just to be safe. Luke hung back, compliantly, while Alex shone a flashlight into the car and peered through the windows.
"Anyone in there?" Luke called.
After a moment's more inspection, Alex shook his head and beckoned Luke forward. "Nope. But there's a flashlight still in the door and what looks like a GPS plugged in to the charger. Looks like whoever was in here left in a hurry." He moved round to the front of the vehicle and scribbled down the license plate in his notebook. "I'm going to have the station run a check on the plates. See if I can't find an owner." He moved back to his car and glanced up at Luke. "This will only take a minute."
Luke nodded. He turned away from the abandoned car and, while he half-listened to Conibear calling in the plate, Luke wandered away, across a small ditch and into a nearby field. The ground was thick with mud from the still falling rain and Luke winced as his boots squelched beneath him. Muttering darkly as he felt the mud slide up around the bottoms of his jeans, Luke heaved his foot out with a satisfying sucking sound.
With a slight grimace, Luke leaned down to examine his foot. And that's when it caught his eye. Fluttering in the wind, battered by the rain and half buried in mud, Luke leant down to retrieve the book. He clenched the paperback in his hands for a moment, not quite daring, not quite believing it could be true. Luke screwed his eyes shut and pressed the book to his chest. It felt familiar, it felt heavy in his hands and as he clung to its well-loved pages, Luke was flooded with images of a dark, tousled-haired young man who would curl up on his mattress, a book much like this folded in his lap. A book like this that was given pride of place on his diner counter when its owner was meant to be serving customers.
His heart began to thump hard in his chest and Luke immediately took a step further towards the field. Then another. Ahead of him, there seemed nothing apart from the dark and the rain but that didn't seem to stop his legs taking yet another step.
"Mr. Danes!" Luke half-turned to Conibear. The sheriff was standing by his car door, radio still in his hand. "I've just got a result on this plate and I think we may have something interesting. Guess who this car is registered to? None other than your Mr. Franklin Mariano." Luke's eyes widened and his grip on the book tightened. It was then that he saw Luke clutching something to his chest.
"What have you got there?" he asked. Picking up his flashlight, he shone it over in Luke's direction and began to make his way over to join him.
"It's Jess' book!" Luke called back, desperation straining his voice. Conibear frowned and shone his light towards the other man, careful not to dazzle him. The strain in Luke's voice was apparent. "You sure?" he asked.
Luke hesitated for a moment and though he was facing Conibear, his foot continued to take another step backwards. "I think so. I mean, it isn't named or anything but…he loves this story. It's called Howl. I've no idea what it's about. Like a werewolf book or something only he's way too smart to be reading books about werewolves. So I don't know. But I just know, you know? It's his. And this car is his grandfather's and…" Suddenly Luke stopped and turned. Something in the distance had caught his eye, caught his hearing. "Do you see that?"
He was peering hard into the night, just beyond a spread of trees. Conibear frowned. "See what?"
"That!" Luke shouted, pointing to where an orange glow began to light to the sky. "Fire!" Luke yelled and then he was off running, tearing towards the rising glow. Dimly, he heard the sheriff running back to his car but Luke didn't stop to listen. He was now convinced: this was where he'd find his nephew and he only prayed he wasn't already too late.
Jess' moments of strength and movement came in short, un-sustained bursts as the nausea and dizziness rolled over him in waves. Whenever clarity permitted, Jess fought to sit up, take account of the danger. The heat was becoming over-powering – it burned his eyes, his nose and mouth. Jess' chest was wracked painfully with a coughing fit and he screwed his eyes shut tight while he tried to block out the smoke.
The fire had not yet reached him and Jess tried once more to lift his injured leg. With a strangled sob, he gritted his teeth and once again gripped his leg around the puncture site. Through his torn jeans, Jess could see the wood protruding grotesquely through the skin, splitting his thigh apart. It felt a little ridiculous to be squeamish to look at it when there were far more pressing concerns.
The fire began to crackle and spread up the wooden walls and beams, gently licking the wood with flickering tongues. Dimly, Jess recognised the sound of a beam cracking and smashing to the ground, somewhere near the entrance. If he had any realistic chance of wrenching his leg off its wooden spike and making a mad dash for the door, then this fallen beam would have been a problem. As it was, Jess hardly thought it mattered.
In the last few moments of lucidity that Jess reckoned he had, he allowed his brain, his tangled memories to offer him whatever comfort they could. Faces and familiar voices swam in-front of him, in and out of focus and Jess fought hard to hold on to one of them, just long enough to make him feel less alone.
That, Jess considered, was a little strange for him. For as long as Jess could remember, he had always envisaged dying alone. It wasn't from any macabre desire to be morbid or even to preserve his stance as a loner. It was simply that, aside from possibly the person who was killing him, Jess couldn't imagine there was anybody who would really want to be there with him. More to the point perhaps, the boy had never been able to think of someone that he would want to see in those final moments. Dying was intensely, indisputably personal. Where-ever he went afterwards, and even in this moment Jess still couldn't decide if there was anywhere to go, he would be going there alone. It was a moment in his life that belonged solely to him, no-one else could take it away from him and if left to his own devices, in his own mind Jess could make it beautiful.
But now? Now he found that, against all odds, there was someone that he wanted to see. There were people who had touched his life who he desperately now wanted to touch his death – to lend him some of the peace they somehow brought with them. However, the images would not come, no matter how hard he tried to conjure them. The warm, kind faces ghosted in and out of his presence, tormenting him, just out of reach. Jess lay back and closed his eyes, determined not to cry as the heat around him intensified but it was so damned hard. Even the people who weren't real, who lived only in his mind, wouldn't stay with him.
It was harder to think clearly. Jess weakly tried to open his eyes but found that they would not. His body no longer seemed to obey his commands. His chest, eyes, throat, nose, skin…everything burnt. Reflexively, he tried to vomit, his chest heaving violently but Jess wasn't aware of this. As his mind shut down, he allowed himself to feel whatever peace he could scrape together from the small mercies that obliviousness afforded him, like a beggar at the feast.
Jess! Something stirred within the boy's mind. Jess! Again that voice, his name. Was it coming from inside his head? It had sounded more distant. Dimly, he thought about opening his eyes, about trying to respond. But it hurt so damned much to stay awake. The voices had talked to him before. Perhaps they were here to comfort him at last?
"Jess! Son! Where are you?"
Another sound now joined the voice: clattering, movement, like frantic footsteps and debris being moved out of the way.
Was someone coming his way? It wasn't possible. He was alone. He was meant to be alone. This was right. He had accepted this. It was peaceful. It was his.
"Oh Jesus – Jess hang on! I'm coming." The voice was clear, though. Damn it, it was so clear! And it was getting nearer, louder. Slowly, Jess' body, his mind began to come into focus and with it came the pain, the panic. He opened his eyes, screwing them shut again when the black smoke swept inside.
Through the hazy images he saw a bulky figure rush to his side and drop down on to the floor. Jess frowned. His hallucinations had never amounted to more than disembodied heads. A strong pair of hands gripped the sides of his face. The fingers were calloused but comforting. "Jess? Thank God. Don't worry, I'm going to get you out of here. Can you tell me where you're hurt?"
The boy finally had to admit it. Someone was there. Someone was actually, physically there. He opened his eyes again and squinted up. Though his brain could not fathom the whys and wherefores, Jess was in no position to dwell on the lunacy of the situation. Sure, the last time he had seen his uncle Luke, he had been ripping the man's heart out while storming out of their ramshackle little apartment. The fact that he was now kneeling across from him in a burning barn in the middle of No-Wheresville was neither here nor there. If anyone could find him out here, Luke could.
For his part, Luke was scared to death. Plain terrified. He only hoped his nephew couldn't see it written all over his face. From the second he had spied him lying on the ground, Luke had feared the worst and prayed for a miracle. As Jess began, groggily, to stir beneath his hands, Luke's heart leapt. He watched the boy's eyes crack open and saw the look of bewilderment cross his face. Yeah, you and me both, kid, Luke thought, grimly. He wasn't a particularly religious man by nature but there was something in the air tonight which had shaken him, deeply.
He smiled down at his nephew, aware of the urgency of their situation, but not able to resist a moment of connection. "It's okay, Jess," he assured the boy, trying to gauge his thoughts. "I'm really here."
To his surprise, Jess simply rolled his eyes and smirked. "Course you are," he croaked, painfully. "In my mind you don't have that ridiculous cap." Luke's hands reflexively shot to his head, feeling the cap in question and his face broke into a wide grin. God, the boy was still as sarcastic as ever and Luke had never loved him more!
Suddenly, Luke snapped back to business. "Okay, Jess. Hold still, I'm going to lift you." He frowned when he saw Jess frantically start to shake his head.
"No," the kid mumbled. "M' leg." Jess leaned back from his hands, as Luke had moved them under his back, ready to lift. Luke frowned and removed his hands, immediately moving further down Jess' body to survey his legs more closely.
As soon as he saw the damage, Luke nearly lost what little he had eaten on plane. Bone was visible through the skin of his left leg, the flesh mottled, twisted and bright red. But what really stopped the breath in his chest was the wooden spike protruding through the boy's jeans. Quickly, Luke leaned down to see the plank of wood beneath Jess. He bit his lip and fought to keep his voice even.
"It's not too bad, Jess," he reassured him. Jess choked out a hard laugh but secretly appreciated his uncle's efforts of lying to spare his feelings.
Cautiously, Luke moved his hands around the leg in question and tested its movement. The moment his hands touched the flesh, Jess' head shot back in pain, his face stark white against the bright red colour of his lips. He heard the strangled cry that Jess couldn't quite hold back. Immediately, Luke stopped. But the fire was getting nearer to them by the second and the smoke would get the both of them before too long. Where-ever Conibear was, he couldn't move Jess any more easily than Luke could.
"I'm sorry, Jess." Luke admitted. "I don't know how to do this without causing you pain."
Jess barked a hard and bitter laugh. "For God's sake, it doesn't matter any more, Luke: just do it!" And so Luke did. He grasped the boy's leg firmly, braced his knee against the plank of wood the shard was still attached to and then, in as fluid a motion as he manage, he lifted. It moved slowly, painstakingly slowly, flesh travelling through the splintered wood. Luke concentrated hard on his job – on disturbing the leg as little as possible – and tried to block out the rest: the bones undoubtedly wrenching themselves the wrong way, the flesh tearing wider as the bottom of the leg finally cleared the tip of the wood and on Jess' screams.
As soon as the leg was clear, trying to keep the boy as still as possible, Luke lifted him into his arms. The fire was spreading from the sides of the room, into the centre. Jess was barely conscious now. The effort of trying to maintain his composure during Luke's ministrations had all but wiped him out. He lay, trembling and exhausted in his uncle's arms. Luke began to cough loudly.
"Mr. Danes?" From outside the barn, Luke could hear the sheriff's voice and the wail of sirens coming nearer. He made for the exit, pausing briefly at the other man who lay near by. Luke was no doctor, but he hadn't thought there was much that could be done for him, even if his attention hadn't been focused on his nephew. The fire had obviously started around him. Luke winced at what had become of this man and hoped to God that he was dead before the fire got him.
As Luke reached the exit he saw Alex Conibear running towards him. Luke hadn't even realised how much he was coughing until he hit the fresh air again. Deep coughs wracked his body and jostled his nephew, mercilessly. Conibear's expression clearly told Luke what he and the boy looked like. He took a stumbling step forward in the mud as the rain continued to turn the field into a bog.
"There's a man inside," he coughed to the sheriff. Alex followed his gaze in and nodded.
"Okay, take the boy well away from the building and lay him down before you fall over." He took off his jacket and wrapped it around his nose and mouth, backing up a step as he prepared to run inside. Luke shifted Jess in his arms, needing to do as Alex suggested and put him down, for both their sakes but not before turning back to Conibear, in alarm.
"No!" he protested. "He's dead, there's nothing you can do for him. It's getting worse in there. Stay out." Even as he spoke, Luke moved further away from the rising flames and knelt down, stretching his nephew out as carefully as he could on the grass. How he wished he was a medical man and had some idea of how to limit the boy's injuries. His gut instinct told him the way he moved the kid had possibly done more harm than good but he'd seen no other way of getting Jess out of immediate danger.
When he'd safely laid him down, Luke turned back to where the sheriff had been standing, dismayed to see him gone. He could only pray the man had more experience at this than he did. There had at least been a relatively clear path to the door when he had passed through. Luke sank to the ground, taking slow deep breaths. If Jess needed CPR, he was in no state to give it at the moment. Thankfully, though his breathing was shallow and his pulse weak, they were both still there. The boy's bright red lips spoke of smoke inhalation and the painful red colour of skin, mixed with the black soot which coated his face and clothing, painted a bleak picture.
Taking off his flannel shirt, Luke tried his best to use it to staunch the flow of blood from Jess' leg. The amount of blood, pooling through the mud and mixing with the grass and rain was causing the man's stomach to flip. He pressed down as hard as he dared on the wound, not wanting to aggravate the broken bones any further. In that moment, coughing hard, Conibear emerged from the building, just moments before the doorway collapsed behind him in a mixture of flames and timber. He was empty-handed and looking as grim as Luke had ever seen him.
He watched as Alex made his way over to where Luke had moved to, shaking his head slowly as he approached. "He was buried too deep and," he paused a second, "his body wasn't in any condition to move." Luke nodded understandingly but he could see from the anger in the man's eyes that he wasn't used to failing or to leaving someone behind.
"You did your best," Luke assured him. But Conibear was already waving him off. Instead he moved to Jess, lying deathly still on the grass.
"I take it this is your nephew?" Again, Luke nodded. The hand that wasn't holding the shirt was gently stroking through the teenager's hair.
"His leg is hurt," Luke pointed out. "But he seems to be breathing okay." Conibear checked his breathing for himself and then leaned in to look at his leg, briefly moving Luke's shirt aside.
His expression hardly altered when he saw the wound but he pursed his lips, thinking.
"Ambulance is coming up now. We'll keep the pressure on till they get here – best let the experts work on him as much as possible now. But don't worry. He'll be fine." As if on cue, the sirens grew louder and louder until they were wailing around them.
Blue and red flashing lights lit the sky as men and women jumped out of vehicles in ordered chaos, barking orders efficiently and quickly. Paramedics were suddenly surrounding them, swarming in. Luke nearly jumped. He knew they were there but it still took him by surprise. They moved around his nephew, taking readings, inserting needles, applying splints, attending to the puncture wound, fixing blood-pressure cuffs and covering his nose and mouth with an oxygen mask. Luke tried, irritably, to brush away the ones who tried to minister to him but Conibear quietly persuaded him to just let them do their job. The sooner they were done here, the sooner they would head to the hospital.
And so Luke acquiesced. They did their jobs, they loaded his nephew onto a gurney and bundled Luke in, wrapped in a blanket, to sit alongside him. All the while, Luke couldn't take his eyes off the boy, couldn't quite believe that he really was right there beside him. The ambulance doors slammed shut and Luke leaned forwards and gently took Jess' hand in his.
That's it for now. One, possibly two chapters to finish it now. Thank you for reading so far. Please drop me a line if you have a minute - I really appreciate it.