“Who was your best friend?”
“I don’t know!”I shout.
“Try!”
I force my mind back.John G.Matthews Elementary school, the big white doors to the outside, the brick facade, the playground with the wood chips where I seemed to get a splinter a week.
“Wayne,” I shout back.“I got that poor bastard in alotof trouble, too.”
“What kind?”
I take another breath, skin burning, fire roaring.I inhale dirt and cough a little, but I try to remember the shit that Wayne and I got up to, even if I have no fucking clue why Porter wants to know all of a sudden.
“One time I stole horse shit from my parents’ barn and put it on the principal’s windshield,” I shout.“And Wayne didn’t do anything, but he was standing there when I got caught, so he got into just as much trouble as me.”
“Horse shit?”Porter shouts back.“When you were in first grade?”
“Grew up on a ranch, had more access to it than eggs,” I shout.
“How’d you get it to his car?”
Suddenly, it dawns on me what Porter’s doing.He’s keeping me talking, keeping me as distracted as he can, even though he’s got a hell of a broken leg and is in the exact same position as me.
“Used grocery bag,” I shout.“But once I got busted I had to clean it with my bare hands.”
There’s a sound, and I think Porter islaughing.Everything still hurts like hell, but it’s working, even if only a little.
“What was your first car?”I shout back.
“A piece-of-shit Ford from the seventies,” he shouts.“But I could get it up to ninety-five on the interstate.”
He tells me about cars.I tell him about horses and guns and schools, digging deep to remember details,anythingto keep my mind off the fire, the pain, and most of all, the horror that I might burn to death.
Clementine’s rock is still there, solid.As Porter and I shout back and forth, telling each other the inanities of our lives, I’m thinking of her, the little funny things she says:I feel like a noblewoman.I’m sorry the mountain lion doesn’t respect you.
I think of her naked in the moonlight, of her lips around my cock, but mostly I think about justbeingwith her, hiking or driving or just sitting around.God, I just like it when she’s around.
I can’t give up withouttalkingto her again.I can’t.
Gradually, I realize the intense heat is lessening, the air that seeps in through the tiny cracks no longer quite as superheated.The roar has died down, and even though it’s still hot and loud, I realize: the worst is over.
It might be a long time before we can get out, since the protocol is not to leave until someone outside gives the all-clear, but we’re going to make it.
Holy fuck, we’re going to make it.
ChapterThirty-Five
Clementine
I don’t knowhow long I sit there.It feels like time has stopped, like I somehow escaped reality and this dark, cold stairwell is the only place where none of this is happening.My eyes adjust and the darkness sharpens into shadows.
I count my breaths and force my mind blank.I have the feeling that I’m supposed to be upstairs, gathered around the radio, letting my coworkers and strangers hug me and reassure me that everything is going to be fine, that Hunter’s going to be fine, but I can’t.
Ican’t.If I could find a smaller, darker place I’d be in it.
After five minutes or five hours, I hear voices above, echoing through the hall.Slowly, they separate, two people calling to each other.
One is Jennifer.
