Through Fire

Through Fire - Chapter 05

Flint stood on the red rocks at the edge of the canyon and stared down into the deep gulf, frowning as he sought to make out the slightest hint of motion in the smoky black wreck below. Something felt broken inside him, smashed apart and smouldering like the burning pieces of the Comet. Tendrils of smoke wafted up the canyon and brought him an acrid smell, a combination of scorched hair, burnt plastic and choking ozone. He ignored the stink and kept watching. Diana came and tried to pull him away but he barely noticed her, and she vanished back to the rig. He held his watch as the sun fell behind, and cast his shadow, long and dark, over the canyon. By then shadows had already wrapped the Comet's remains in a thick dark shroud, but still, small fires glowed like distant stars. When his shadow fell across the canyon, those fires diminished, and at last they faded away, leaving nothing more than a smoky tang that lingered in his nose and throat. 

When at last he looked up, Flint couldn't tell where his shadow ended and the night began, as if his personal darkness extended all the way from his body to the far side of the canyon. In some obscure sense he felt it had to, that his shadow had to reach that far, for in shadows his friend lay, and perhaps his hope lay there too, for he felt his hope had left him, lost in the fall, but if his shadow could cross the canyon, perhaps his hope could too, and find something better than this chilling emptiness in the night, for the night itself was the world's shadow, and only at night did the dark sky sparkle with the fleeting effulgence of stars.

With that wish, he slipped off his old leather jacket, and looked down into the abyss. "Warmth, Vern." He threw the jacket into the depths, and it vanished. Then he turned his back and walked, stiff and weak, to the Rhino, where he sat in the pilot's seat, the cockpit unlit, switched on all the external lights, fired up the turbine, and took the Rhino slowly, slowly, back across the rocky scrub-land to the way. Once he got the smooth black surface under the rig, he aimed the machine northeast, following the line of the way and the route of the race, and locked it on the cruise setting. Then he started to rise to take a long hot shower, when fatigue overwhelmed him, and he fell back in the chair, and slid down into the warm dark silence of sleep.

+

Hands reached down in the dark waters where he floated, lifted him high in the air, into a place of light and screeching. He tried to tear free and dive back down, but the hands shook him harder, and the noise resolved into a high-pitched voice calling his name over and over. He woke with a gasp, eyes wide and bleary, and found Diana leaning over him, clutching the lapels of his blue shirt, and shouting into his face. "Flint, thank God you're awake, look!"

He blinked several times, pushed her aside, grabbed the wheel, and scanned the way ahead, certain there had to be a rock rushing up to smash them. He even imagined, in his half-awake state, that Blenner had somehow come back from the dead, and was now hurtling down on them in a flaming rig from hell.

Nothing.

His brows furrowed as he scoured the way for an obstacle, another rig, anything that would explain Diana's frantic efforts to wake him. At last he shook his head. "What are you talking about? There's nothing to see."

She pressed her lips together in a tight line, and rolled her eyes. "Not out there. Here," she said, and jabbed a finger against the gauges behind the wheel.

Flint wiped sleep from his eyes, leaned forward, and peered at the fuel gauge. "Oh shit."

"Right?"

"Three percent? Are you fucking kidding me?"

She gasped. "That's a bad word Flint."

"Yeah, sorry, but three percent? Are you f-"

"Flint! Stop cursing and do something."

He looked from the fuel gauge to her worried red eyes, and out at the rolling black length of the way, and when that gave him no comfort, he looked further afield, at the grassy plain that extended on the left, and the thick dark forest that rose up the hill slopes on the right. He shook his head. "Oh, this is not good."