Chapter 12-3
593 Words
Laura had kept glancing over her shoulder as she worked the hoses. She’d now sprayed both the front and back of her home as well as repeating her coverage on the side toward the flames. She had planted alternating rhododendrons and red-twig dogwoods along this side of the cabin, one so pretty in the spring, the other in the winter. She began working on the shrubs.
A man came out of the woods as another helicopter joined the first one above the fire.
Too tall for Johnny, too short for Tim, and too narrow- shouldered for Ox.
She shifted the hoses further along the cabin wall.
When she looked back, the man was much closer. His clothing was wrong. He’d lost his hardhat somewhere. He had dark hair and patrician features.
It only took her a moment to attach a name to the face, Grayson Clyde Masterson.
“Hello Laura.”
Her world slowed down in that instant. Slowed down so much that she couldn’t help but assume it was some sort of a human survival mechanism. She even had time to be surprised at the feeling of her heightened perception.
The fires suddenly made sense. Grayson had burned a whole side of Mount Hood, but he’d done it very carefully. Everything had been perfectly timed to trap her party in the heart of Zigzag Canyon. Only Johnny’s quick work had saved the day and the mountain.
Grayson had lit these fires as well. She had refused him passage to her bed and instead taken in another who would appear inferior to Grayson in every single way: stature, heritage, and career.
Laura also had time to note what Grayson was carrying. In one hand, a wine bottle with a rag dangling out of the top. In the other, a small bit of silver that might be a lighter.
Behind him, descending so fast it looked as if it was about to crash, a helicopter plummeted toward her horse corral. It pulled up at the last second. Someone who’d been in the cargo bay dove out the door, doing a rolling landing, and began sprinting in her direction.
Still in her slow motion world, she saw Grayson flick his lighter and move it toward the wick on his Molotov cocktail.
It was Mark leaping over the corral fence, too far away to help.
Around the side of the house, Johnny appeared. One moment not there, the next running at Grayson.
He too would be too late.
She saw the instant that Grayson noticed Johnny’s approach. His sneer twisted into a snarl. The moment before, he’d probably been planning to burn her cabin right before her eyes. Now he planned to burn her lover.
The cold of the twinned brass hose nozzles still chilled her hand.
Grayson lit his incendiary at the same moment she raised the hoses from where they’d been drowning a rhododendron. He c****d his arm back to heave the flaming bottle at the oncoming Johnny.
She hit the bottle with both nozzles. It was knocked out of Grayson’s hands and fell to the ground behind Grayson, not a dozen paces from her or her cabin. But it didn’t break. Instead it merely rolled in slow motion, still aflame as she continued shifting the hose toward her next target.
The twin sprays of water caught Grayson full in the face at the same moment that Johnny slammed his axe handle into Grayson’s gut.
Grayson stumbled back.
It took forever for him to fall. Like a tree falling, first only a look of surprise to indicate the loss of balance. Then flailing arms. Then—
Laura couldn’t look away from the unfolding disaster.
- Writer
