Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

“Dang, the cap’s on tight,” she said, handing it to Trent and taking the flashlight.

He gripped the cap hard and gave it a good twist, but it didn’t budge. It was a twist-off, wasn’t it? “Here, give me a light on this,” he said, holding it out so Donna could shine the flashlight on it. The flashlight was even brighter than the light in the cab, but he squinted and looked at the cap. It was just a black cylinder over the narrow neck of the bottle, but he was able to tilt it so he could see up inside through the glass, and there were threads. Something didn’t look right about them, though, and after a moment’s thought he realized what it was.

“It’s left-hand thread!” he said, twisting the other way, and the cap came off with a loud hiss.

“It’s pressurized, too,” Donna said.

Bubbles immediately began forming inside, and foam started running over the top. Trent held the bottle over the would-be fire and let it drip onto the kindling and the rag beneath it, then capped the bottle again when he had enough to test whether or not it would burn. No sense wasting it if it didn’t. Or if it did, for that matter. Especially if it did.

The odor was enough to tell him for sure he wouldn’t be drinking the stuff, even if it proved safe. Distilled garlic would have been sweet compared to the stench that came off the green foam. But that was an encouraging sign, since anything that stinky had to have at least one volatile component to it, and volatile gasses were generally flammable.

He set the bottle on the ground behind him and rubbed his hands clean on the wet weeds underfoot, then dried them off as best he could on his pant legs before striking another match. Donna held the flashlight on the sticks while he stuck the match in toward them.

The stuff caught with a whoosh like rocket fuel. Trent snatched his hand back, but not before the hair on his wrist was singed. Flames roared upward at least three feet, burning bright blue all the way. The kindling sizzled and hissed, turned black, then burst into flame on its own, adding a yellow tint to the overall fire. Trent felt the heat, way hotter than a normal campfire, against his face and hands.

“Woo hoo!” he said. “That did it.”

Donna clicked off the flashlight and held out her hands toward the fire. “Don’t let it go out.”

The kindling was disappearing like ice on a stove. It didn’t so much burn as melt, dripping down to the wet ground in little rivers of fire that bubbled and hissed as they continued to bathe the wood above them in flame. Trent shoved a couple of inch-thick sticks onto the top of the pile, then set an even bigger log on top of them. The kindling burned down until the flames were only a foot high, but they curled around the new stuff and started it melting, too, adding its liquid wood to the puddle of fuel.

“It’s like plastic or something,” Donna said.

Trent wondered what kind of toxic fumes it was giving off. Plastic fires on Earth were usually bad news, but this stuff seemed to be burning clean, with hardly any smoke. And it put out enough heat that a person could stand back a ways. He wasn’t sure about cooking meat on a stick over it, but they could sure as hell put a pot of water on and boil it.

He held his hands out and let them warm up for the first time in hours. Oh, yeah, that felt good. Suddenly it was starting to look like a much better day.

They filled an aluminum cook pot with water from the creek and hung it by a wire from a tripod made of the longest arrows that Trent could find. He was afraid they might melt, too, the way the flames came roaring up from the puddle of molten wood, but he learned how to damp the fire down with a flat rock over part of the puddle before the arrows caught. He kept the end of a log sticking over the edge of the rock, providing a constant drip to replenish the pool, and managed to keep a fairly even fire going that way.

They got their folding camp chairs out of the pickup and settled in to soak up the heat. Donna got a box of macaroni and cheese out of the camper, and when the water started to boil, she threw the macaroni in. Stirring it was a trick, until Trent duct-taped a spoon to the end of an arrow so they could do it from a distance. The macaroni took longer to soften than the seven minutes the directions said it would; probably the effect of lower air pressure on the boiling temperature of water. It didn’t matter; they were content to just sit and warm themselves by the fire while it boiled.

Donna had brought two mugs and two packets of hot-chocolate mix. When the macaroni was done and Trent had removed the pot from the flames, she dipped the mugs in the pot and filled them with water before she drained the rest of it out and added a squirt of squeeze-butter and the cheese packet to the noodles. She put a little powdered milk in with the cheese and stirred the whole works together, and it came out looking and smelling surprisingly like macaroni and cheese.

She opened the hot chocolate packets and poured them into the mugs of hot noodle-water. Trent wondered how that was going to taste, but balanced against the extra time it would take to boil a fresh pot of water, he agreed with her choice. He hadn’t realized how cold he was until he’d started warming up, and he wanted something warm inside him right now.

It tasted pretty good. A little doughy, maybe, but that was probably just the power of suggestion. When Donna was done stirring hers, he raised his mug in a toast and said, “To Katata and Magalak, who gave us fire.”

“Hear, hear!” she said, and they clinked their mugs together.

The fire lit up the tree overhead, and a good swath of the meadow beyond. The pickup’s chrome bumpers and roll bars and door handles glinted in its light, and even its red paint took on a luster that hid most of the dents and scratches it had picked up in the last couple of days. It was amazing how much better things looked in the right light.

Trent looked for glowing eyes out at the edge of the firelight’s reach, but there were so many glistening raindrops on everything that he would have missed anything that didn’t move. He imagined he and Donna were being watched, though. As hard as this wood was to light, he figured fire wasn’t very common around here. He wished he could believe that the rat-cats would stay away from it, but the one he’d seen this evening had acted more curious than afraid of new things. He made sure his rain jacket didn’t cover the pistol, and kept his ears perked for noise. At least this fire didn’t crackle and pop the way a normal fire would.

He and Donna ate the macaroni and cheese straight out of the pot. The hot chocolate hadn’t killed either of them, so they didn’t figure the noodles would, either. Water was water, after all, and ten minutes at a full boil should have killed anything living in it.

The food tasted wonderful . “Why is it,” Trent said between bites, “that everything tastes better when it’s cooked over a campfire?”

Donna shook her head. Her blonde hair was wet and stringy but it still glowed like gold in the firelight. “I don’t know,” she said, “but it does. Maybe it’s because your taste buds are the only part of your body that’s not miserable.”

“Hey, come on. We’re warming up.”

“Thank goodness for that.” She turned to toast her left side for a minute, and Trent actually saw steam rising off her jacket.

After they finished off the macaroni, Trent took the pot to the stream and rinsed it out, then brought it back full and hung it over the fire again. “It ain’t a whole lot,” he said, “but it ought to be enough to wash up with.”

“My god, a bath, too!” Donna said. “You’re my hero.”