Page 157 of The Fire Line

Jay tried to follow. The first attempt broke halfway through. The second was marginally better. By the third, he could at least feel the difference between breathing and panicking.

Harris’s own breathing wasn’t exactly calm. His pulse hammered visibly at his throat, and the hand around Jay’s forearm still trembled.

That helped too.

Harris was afraid. He was simply better at functioning while afraid.

Another blast of heat sent them instinctively toward each other. Jay caught the back of Harris’s neck, Harris’s arm came around him, and for a moment they were simply lying there holding on while the mountain burned outside.

The heat kept building.

Until then it had come in waves, each one rising and easing enough to let Jay believe the worst might already have passed. This one stayed. He felt it through his jeans where his leg pressed against stone, through his jacket, through every place Harris’s body touched his.

Outside, something enormous caught.

White light filled the opening.

Jay turned toward Harris at exactly the same moment Harris turned toward him, their foreheads knocking together hard enough that under any other circumstances one of them might have complained.

Neither did.

For the first time, Jay stopped wondering how long the fire would last.

He wondered whether there would be an after.

The realization came without drama. No sudden inventory of his life, no collection of final regrets. Just the knowledge that he and Harris were lying beneath a piece of granite while a mountain burned around them and that there was nothing either of them could do about what happened next.

Harris’s forehead stayed against his.

Jay could feel him breathing.

That was enough. It had to be.

They stayed pressed low through the worst of the heat, speaking only when they had to. Jay concentrated on keeping each breath as shallow and controlled as he could, but his chest had already begun to hurt from the smoke he had pulled into it earlier.

When Harris reached for the bottle and pushed it toward him, Jay shook his head.

“You.”

Harris started to object.

“Some.”

Harris took a small mouthful. Only then did Jay accept the bottle and do the same.

Eventually the roar began moving farther along the ridge. Neither man trusted the change at first. They stayed flat beneath the granite while individual sounds slowly separated again—branches burning, timber falling somewhere beyond the rock, wind crossing exposed stone.

Jay’s lungs did not seem to understand that the worst might be passing.

A cough caught low in his chest and built until he could no longer suppress it. The first one led immediately into another, harder, then another, twisting his body against the stone.

Harris rolled toward him at once.

“Easy.”

There was nothing easy about it.

Another cough folded Jay in on himself. Harris got an arm beneath his shoulders and drew him partly onto his side, lifting his chest away from the ground and bracing Jay against him so he wasn’t fighting the coughing flat against the stone.