Rain of Fire Read Free

fiercely glad this morning’s quake wasn’t happening in Yellowstone where she would be forced to deal with it. Her love-hate relationship with the park region balanced uneasily at best.
    Looking at a wall map showing the Pacific and the earthquake epicenters and volcanic terrains surrounding it, she knew it was too soon to feel relief. Sometimes, whether because of celestial alignments or seismic waves propagating through the planet, quakes tended to happen in widely varying locales in a sort of chain reaction.
    Behind her, Stanton remained silent. Kyle assumed he was watching the monitor, but with a sudden jerky move, he seized her arm. Thinking he was about to say something about Brock Hobart’s uncanny skill or blind dumb luck, she turned to him.
    Instead of speaking, he gave a small gasp. His hand clutched her like a claw even as his body began to sag.
    Leaping to cushion his fall, she found him a dead weight. His cup hit the floor with a clatter and rolled under a table. A trail of smoke curled from his cigarette, dropped from nerveless fingers.

    “Kyle, thank God you’re here.” Stanton’s wife Leila entered the ER, her heels tapping on the tile. The sixty-five-year-old moved with the grace of a much younger woman.
    “I was with him when he had the stroke,” Kyle said.
    Going into Leila’s embrace, she was struck anew by how fine-boned her friend was, draped in the delicate softness of a gray silk dress. For the first time since Stanton’s collapse, tears pricked Kyle’s eyelids. She’d been too busy calling 911, screaming in vain down the hallway for anyone else there that early in the morning, and waiting by his side for the paramedics.
    Leila must have felt the change in her, for her arms wrapped tighter. “God, Kyle, not Stanton.”
    Her anguish was all it took to set Kyle’s dammed-up tears flowing. Though the age difference between the Jamesons and her was not so great that they could have been her parents, she had always treasured both Leila and Stanton as dearly as though they were bound to her by blood. Especially after losing her maternal grandmother, who had raised her after Hebgen Lake. Being in a hospital reminded her of Franny’s last days and that ultimately, nobody got out alive.
    “How is he?” Leila pulled back and wiped her wet face without shame.
    “They’re doing a CT scan.” Kyle dashed at the salt tears on her own cheek. “After that, he’ll be moved to a room.”
    The two women took seats in a small waiting area. A tattered copy of yesterday’s newspaper littered the floor, but Kyle’s focus was too shattered for her to read. She tried not to watch the wall clock as its hand leaped forward to mark each interminable minute. Though dry-mouthed, she did not dare leave for coffee.
    After an hour’s wait, she thought she was prepared. However, when she pushed open the door of Stanton’s hospital room, she found out otherwise. He lay slumped on his side with his eyes closed, his skin as ghostlike as the transparent tubes connecting his IV bag.
    Leila’s gaze rested upon her husband. They had been friends first, or so the story went, but her look bespoke a deep and abiding love, one Kyle had always envied. After a disastrous relationship of her own when she was twenty, Kyle had believed up into her forties that she’d someday meet the right man.
    “The doctor said he was awake,” Leila murmured.
    “Should we let him sleep … or maybe call somebody?”
    Blue-veined eyelids flickered then opened. “Stop that infernal whispering.” Stanton’s voice, though weak, projected attitude.
    Leila tugged Kyle along with her to his bedside. “Look who’s here?”
    “I see who’s whispering.” He fixed them with a look composed half of iron will and half of melted wax where the left side of his face sagged.
    When he reached out with his good right hand, Kyle met him. She kept her eyes on his, wondering if he could see out of them both. Part of her wanted to cry or run, but