The Wizard's Herbarium: The Wolf Child

Part 39

Colt couldn't remember falling asleep. He only remembered the despair that had flung itself over his shoulder and then weighed him down. He woke to the feel of heat in his face, as though he'd just stuck his face in a hot oven. When he opened his eyes, he found nightmare fuel right in front of him as the forest burned down around him. The stench was the worst thing about it. Normally, the smell of burning cedar from a campfire was welcome, but the smell of charred wood and dead things invaded his senses, sticking to the inside of his nose in place of the tiny hairs that were burning and causing an itching sensation.

Before he'd found himself surrounded by the flames, Colt had been determined to sit there, wasting away. He couldn't deny that humans had good instincts, however, as he leaped to his feet as though narrowly avoiding a drop-kick to the back. Terror flooded him, overriding any logical thought in his mind, and Colt ran. He was no better than an animal fleeing the fire, mind invaded by panic and raw instinct. He fled away from the flames in whatever direction his legs took him. There was no thinking about which way was best - there was no thinking at all. When the flames blocked his way, he turned and ran in the opposite direction. The smoke that blotted out the sun clogged his lungs and made it difficult to breathe. Colt began to cough, great heaving things that ripped and tore at his insides. Colt slowed. The heat was unbelievable. He was stumbling around in an oven, imagining that his insides were beginning to cook. His blood would boil and sizzle, exploding through his skin like popcorn. Maybe his organs would melt into squishy puddles and his bones would become as blackened as the trees. That was all in his imagination, but after a while, Colt wasn't so sure anymore. He could swear that he was feeling all of those sensations in his body for real. He wasn't going to survive this. There was no way he was going to come out alive as the flames raged faster than Colt could run. He was going to burn up alive in there.

He didn't really believe in God - maybe there was some kind of higher power out there - but not God. No matter what his beliefs had been, Colt knew he was being punished as, with a terrible crack, a nearby tree split and then began to fall. It fell dramatically, like a kid in a drama skit, its branches twirling around like a dancer. Colt veered sharply out of the way, the fear in him that the great flaming trunk might land right on him. While, he avoided the trunk with much relief, as the tree fell, a spinning branch whizzed by his face. Instinctively, Colt turned his head away from it, only for the end of the branch to whip into his eyes. A howl of pain ripped through him and the horrid smell of burning flesh stung his nose. Colt rubbed at his eyes, tapping out the flames that licked at his hair and singed his eyebrows.

He stumbled, wiping at his eyes and yowling, unsure whether the pain came from the blow or the burns.

Colt hardly registered it as his shoes scraped across asphalt. There was the squeal of tires that made the little hairs on the back of his neck stand on end, a screech of metal and the feel of air whooshing past him. His heart stopped and, for a horrible moment, Colt thought that he was actually going to die. Blind, and coughing from all the smoke, he couldn't do anything more than stand there, frozen stiff as a vehicle careened past him.

After everything had settled down, silence engulfed him.

He couldn't open his eyes through the pain, so Colt called out, not quite knowing where the vehicle that had narrowly missed him had gone. All he heard was the crackling of flames, and then, a small voice. He rushed forward, following the sound of the voice with his hands outstretched in front of him. Colt hoped that he didn't trip and impale himself on a shard of metal or something. With the luck he'd been having, Colt wouldn't have been surprised. His hands smashed into the vehicle first and Colt felt a dull pain bloom in his wrists.

"Hello?" Colt called, feeling along the side of the car to try and determine what position it was in. "Are you okay? I'm here. I can help."

"Get me the hell out of here!" Answered a woman's voice, boarding on hysterics. At the panicked sound, Colt had to swallow his own fear that edged at the corner of his mind.

"Okay," he said, hoping that he sounded confident.

The car was turned over onto its side and Colt was feeling along the roof. It was an old truck, his hand skirting over rust patches and a small cab. It was the type of truck that belonged to the locals in the area, a cheap but reliable thing. Not the overpriced pickups that were raised so far off the ground for it to be even remotely aerodynamic. With massive cabs and tiny beds that couldn't even fit a plank of wood without it sticking out the back.

"What's taking you so long?" she asked, her voice raising to a screech in her panic, and Colt found himself glad that he couldn't see the forest fire somewhere behind him. He couldn't see, but he could hear the pops and snaps of the wood that were like gunshots. He had to move faster, and Colt tried to open his eyes, only for blinding pain to sear over his face.

"What's your name?" he asked, hoping to calm her down a little. It's what rescuers in the movies did, right?

"Are you kidding me?" she shouted. "We're about to get cooked alive and you want to make introductions?"

Colt was feeling his way around the vehicle, using her voice and his hands as a guide. If she wasn't getting out on her own, then Colt took it to mean that she couldn't get out on her own.

"I'm Colt," he went on, unsure whether he was continuing to chat because he needed her voice to know where she was, or to keep himself calm.

"Oh, God. You need to run," the woman was saying, hysterics bleeding back into her voice. "Run! The fire is right behind you and dammit all if I'm going to bring someone down with me."

"But-" Run. That would mean leaving her alone, in the truck where she couldn't get out. Running would mean leaving her to burn alive. Bile rose up in his throat at the thought. As he stood there, Colt could feel the heat at his back, greater than any campfire he felt before. Well, of course it would be worse, it was a forest fire. He could hear the woman's laboured breaths. She must have been injured - she was probably injured, and through the terrible noise of the forest crumbling into ash around him, Colt wondered how it was he could hear her breathing in the first place.

Colt would later regret it when he ran. He hesitated beside the truck a moment longer and then he ran. Maybe running was exaggerating a little. Without his eyesight, his run was more of a fast stumble with the hope that he didn't trip over a root or debris and crack his skull open.

Colt made it back to the highway, his knees threatening to buckle when he went from walking on the soft, uneven grass to the unforgiving pavement. Now, he could feel the heat on the hard surface, as though he were holding the bottom of his feet to a campfire.

Even without his eyesight, Colt moved quicker than before now, but it wasn't just the threat of the fire that made him rush away. It was the screams, or rather, the fear of the screams that drove him forward. Burning alive wasn't a painless process, and he imagined that hearing someone die like that was going to be far worse than any horror movie he'd ever seen. He felt disgusted with himself, the guilt rising in his throat like bile. He should have been grieving over the loss of a human life and not just thinking about himself. Colt wished that he was a better person.