Spooky Story Photo Prompt 3: I'm Still Married
Did you know that pine trees explode when they’re on fire? They do. And the sap turns into fuel, so it’s like Nature’s little incendiary bomb surprise. You find yourself shot down and stabbed by high velocity shrapnel and simultaneously splattered in boiling hot tar that burns and blisters and instantly catches on fire.
Let me back up. My name is Eli, and I was just driving down the highway when a burning man fell on the side of the road and I stopped to see if I could help him and then I was in way the hell over my head and in a world of hurt.
I was on my way back to make up with my wife, or try to. We’ve had a lot of trouble and me working on the road so much hasn’t helped. With the risk of COVID and quarantine here and there, we’ve only seen each other a few times in two years. But I’m done with my job. I quit. They wanted me to cover Ukraine next and honestly, enough is damned enough. Let a younger kid more hungry for it go looking for the next great story. I will find something closer, or at least something that lets me stay with my wife and not in a pool of assholes half my age in Oregon. I’ll tell you, the writing pool covering the BS going on there in Portland wasn’t much better than the shit going on in the little compounds we were telling everyone about.
Anyway, I was gonna see if this was the olive branch that might save my marriage. Then that guy. Oh man, burned and beat up and insane, not making sense. I backed along the shoulder to get back to him and he was waving his arms and screaming something before I even got to him. “Well,” I thought… “If I can cover this fire from a human interest angle maybe a local paper or station would pick me up?” I was already popping the trunk hatch on my SUV when the guy collapsed against the hood of the car and was starting to make sense. I hopped out, ran around to him with the water bottle from the console (it’s all I had) and opened it for him. He drank and tried to tell me his friend was still back there, insert random gesture of his arm towards what looked like bright green forest and his name is Ranan.
I called out on my phone and reached the highway patrol, they said they’d be here at this mile marker and then informed me there was no way I was rescuing a fire victim, the fire was 20 miles away from this mile marker. I told them to send an ambulance and gave them my license plate and car details. I texted my wife and told her something had come up (“Doesn’t it fucking always?” I could hear her in my head) and I left the man with my car and the water and what was left of my bag of only partly funky snack mix from the last gas station.
I shouldered my camera bag and pulled out my camera and secured it around my neck and then just took off straight into the woods. I have this little roll of bright pink plastic tape that I use to mark off my area when I’m photographing on the street, so for everyone involved I started stopping to tie a pink bit of the plastic tape along my path every few yards. No smell of smoke, no fire. I called out looking for anyone in front of me and kept going forward.
Now, something strange happened to me after just a few minutes. I can’t explain it. I was counting off my steps and trying to keep myself oriented. I’ve been a hiker and backpacker most of my life, growing up in the mountains I think a lot of us are, whether we planned to be or not. I’m pretty good at staying oriented. And keeping a mental count of my steps, I know I didn’t go more than 100 steps, but when I turned around I couldn’t see the pink of my tape. I started back right away, counting my steps again. At 100 I had the tape, right in front of me. So I turned back and did the same 100 steps again and turned around and couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t see the damn tape. And I could smell smoke. Really strongly.
I could have run back. Maybe should have. The lure of the story was certainly part of this. And really, I was on the verge of just turning back because I was freaking out a little but I thought I heard a man calling out for help. Story or no story, someone needed help and I couldn’t just leave. I secured a ribbon and started moving faster forward.
At 100 steps I turned and… the ribbon behind me was nowhere in sight. There was low smoke everywhere in the trees and undergrowth and it was getting hotter, noticeably warmer. I called out and called out and thought I heard a reply, this time to my right. I tied my ribbon turned right and found a spot just a yard or so away and tied two pieces there so I’d know I’d turned right here, just in case… and I moved off even faster. I never stopped tying the ribbon tape and after that first time when I lost sight of the ribbon, I never could see my ribbon when I tied the next one. I just counted on being able to retrace my steps.
The fire line had fingered up and through the trees at 89 of the next 100 steps. Low, angry red coals and beyond them hot black and red hell. It just was suddenly there. I turned to see that I’d already lost sight of my damned ribbon again and felt my heartbeat pick up. Ahead of me was still green, and the fire was closing on the copse in front of me. I had green to the front of me and fire on both sides. I heard that sound again, in front of me. There was some sort of little cave or broken space between rocks and I thought his voice was coming from there. I continued forward and stopped again, seeing his boots just sticking out from the cave. I took some photos of the hell all around him and the green right at his feet and then I ran forward to him. He was basically unconscious.
I’ll probably go to hell. I stopped and took about 1000 photos in every angle, walking up and around, risking the smoke and the fire. It was so hot and so amazing. Then I put my camera away in the bag so it wasn’t bouncing on my chest and went back to him and brought him up over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry.
Now, it sounds all cool now like I’m this big buff photo taking dude with hiking and backpacking and can carry an unconscious man through a forest. That’s totally not true. I’m a moderately fit former backpacker and hiker and know how to fireman carry from boy scouts and it was hella hard. I could make about 30 steps and then I had to stop and lean on a tree. By the time I reached my first ribbon, almost 200 steps farther than it should have been, I was absolutely exhausted. The fire wasn’t, though. It was on us. I put him down at the double ribbon that signaled my right turn and pocketed the pieces (pack in pack out, yay boy scouts) and then tried to rouse him. He coughed and sort of roused and then screamed and rolled over with his hands over his head.
That’s when the pine behind me exploded. The fire couldn’t have been so close. It couldn’t have burned to this point yet. I was rolling and screaming and covered in burning hot sticky sap and blood and then I was dragging him while we both half crawled and half ran in the direction of the next leg of our journey towards the ribbon. Again it was forever far away and the fire was forever fast behind. At about 250 steps I had to pick him up again and this time was pure agony. My legs were shivering with the effort, my back and shoulders were screaming angry and I just kept counting and panicking and trying to find my ribbon in the dense smoke ahead. At the next ribbon I pocketed it and then dragged him up to his feet again and begged him to run with me. We were shambling, but the poor man did manage to carry his own weight.
Three hundred steps between them now, maybe more. And the fire coming harder and faster behind us. He collapsed again next to what should have been almost the last tape. I tried to rouse him and I couldn’t wake him. His breathing was super shallow and sounded really labored. Now, mine wasn’t much better, but I was still erect and conscious and he really wasn’t. I was hating his buddy back at the car with my bottle of water, and was hating myself for being an idiot do-gooder like a hero or something. And when I tried to pick him up I found I just didn’t have the strength.
And then a tree bomb went off. Too close for comfort. How the hell was the fire getting so close so fast? Forest fires don’t move this way. It was damned following us, pursuing us. I found the psycho strength I needed and I got him awkwardly onto my shoulders, digging holes in my shoulder and back with body parts now actually limp and heavy. I actually would find where my camera bag and undershirt had played holy fuck with my skin and I had bloody marks that are still pink scars, to go along with the shiny burns on my right arm and the right side of my face and all of the speckled scars where unknown to me I’d been shredded by tree shrapnel down my whole right side.
This time was only about 200 steps, or I was losing count. I stopped collecting the tape. I mean, come on. If I stopped it was going to mean I stopped for good or had to leave him behind. I felt like I owed this nameless man more than that after all this. And owed myself. Another about 200 steps to the 100 step marker. Then it was only 130. Then about 120. I was making good time in my frantic escape. Then 100. Finally. I couldn’t remember how many it had been before I started noticing I couldn’t see the one behind anymore. I couldn’t remember how many I’d tied in all. I just kept going and when I fell for the second time I could hear the road noise and there was no smoke anymore. I couldn’t hear him breathing anymore, and I couldn’t pick him up. I rolled us both over and coughed and cleared his face and put my cheek by his mouth. He was barely breathing, but it was there.
“Almost there, buddy. Oh my god, we’re almost there. Stay with me.” And I dragged him. His armpits over my forearms, my hands knotted on his chest and me backing towards the road I stopped every few feet calling out hoping his buddy was there, or the cops by now… someone… anyone… oh gods. I fell backwards over a bush and looked up and found there was open sky above us. Darkening open sky. And then there were voices. People scrambling down from the road. I was about 20 yards ahead of my car, going backwards had clearly lost me some sense of direction. It was all good. We got a lift to the hospital. The wife was actually there to meet us!
I’m still married. I guess she likes that I am the hero that saved two men (the one I dragged out actually started this fire, by the way. Poor bastard.) I got my photos published, got paid lots of money for them, in fact. Lots of money. (She might like this part, too. She certainly hasn’t complained about it much since we bought the new house.)
But nothing happened the way I wanted. See… I’m like a bigfoot hunter. A strange stories guy. What I did wasn’t possible. Those ribbons that kept moving? Yeah. The cops found the few I’d left behind. They confiscated my camera (not before I’d transferred the photos to the cloud while we were in the hospital) and did all sorts of research on my images to figure out how I tricked them. They found nothing because I didn’t. And that doesn’t make it better.
The fire really was almost 23 miles from where I entered the woods. It was simply not possible that in just 4 hours I’d hiked 23 miles twice, the second one with a man on my back. The firemen got the fire under control and they found some of my pink tape markers, and they were close to a mile apart each. My insistence that I was counting off 100 steps at a time didn’t matter. To the best of my memory and the pieces of tape I did manage to remove from the forest I’d walked maybe 3000 steps… on the way in, anyway. Coming back out I lost count of how many times I had doubled or trebled my count before finally catching sight of the pink plastic. Still certainly not enough steps to account for the mileage.
And the photos… my sense that something was following us. That the fire was pursuing us and moving unnaturally? Well… in just a few of the photos I snapped there looks like a person (I’ve been told it’s a broken tree here, an old post with some debris there… you know. All the things we discredit Bigfoot photos with, too) coming out of the fire. It’s most noticeable in the photos I snapped before I found Renford (hell of a name, huh? Like I said before, poor bastard) where there’s a thing in the middle of the frame right above him.
Or maybe not. I don’t even know if I care anymore. I took 1000 photos and about 100 of them have sold for half a million dollars already, so… I’m comfortably taking whatever jobs I want and… the most important thing is that I’m still married. Scars and questionable fame and all.
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