6:52 A.M.
NATALIA WHIRLED AROUND. SEEMINGLY oblivious to Zion’s shout, Darryl kept walking unsteadily forward, his eyes at half-mast.
He almost looked like he was drunk, but that was impossible. Wasn’t it?
What now? Everyone was looking at Natalia as if she could keep working magic. But what if she was fresh out of tricks?
She hurried back to Darryl. Only when she was standing nearly nose to nose with him did he stop shuffling forward.
“Out of my way!” he said irritably. “We need to keep moving.”
His words sounded slurred. Had he had a stroke? But when she examined his face, it looked symmetrical, without an eye or a corner of the mouth drooping.
“This will only take a second. Can you hold out your arms for me?” She demonstrated holding her arms straight in front of her. Zion looked terrified. In an effort to lighten the atmosphere, Natalia added, “Like a zombie?”
“Why?” Darryl sounded annoyed but still complied. He held both arms out at shoulder level, and neither one drifted down.
“And smile for me?”
It was more a grimace, a baring of the teeth, but it, too, was even. So it probably wasn’t a stroke. But something was definitely wrong. Darryl looked paler, and beads of sweat dotted his forehead.
Blue whined and nosed him again. All this morning, Blue had been bothering only Darryl. No one else. While he had responded to Susan’s attentions, for the last few hours he had ignored her.
Because of their keen sense of smell, dogs could detect things far earlier than humans could. Maybe Blue hadn’t been sniffing for food. Hadn’t Natalia read about dogs who could smell health problems like cancer or an oncoming seizure?
“Darryl?”
His eyes closed completely as his head nodded forward. He looked like he was going to sleep. Standing up.
Repeating his name, she shook his shoulders until his rheumy eyes slowly, reluctantly opened. “Darryl, are you on any medication?” As old as he was, the answer had to be yes.
He roused himself with obvious effort. “I’ve got a whole medicine cabinet full.”
“For what?”
He made a scoffing noise. “Cholesterol. Blood pressure. Enlarged prostate.” And then came the words she had already begun to suspect. “And diabetes. Type two.”
Usually with a type 2 diabetic you worried about high blood sugar. Because they were less responsive to insulin, glucose from their food could build up in their bloodstream, reaching dangerously high levels.
But just like a diabetic’s blood sugar could overreact and skyrocket, it was also easy for it to plummet. And in the last twelve hours, Darryl hadn’t eaten more than a couple of mouthfuls of food.
Missing meals, hiking for hours—it was only logical he had low blood sugar. By this point, all of them were probably a little hypoglycemic. But because Darryl’s body did a bad job of regulating the level of sugar in his blood, he was being affected much worse than any of them. That change in his blood sugar must be what Blue had been smelling.
If he was in a full-on crisis, Darryl’s breath should smell sweet even to a human nose. But when Natalia leaned forward and sniffed, all she smelled was sweat.
He swore and took a step back. “What are you doing?”
She didn’t answer. She remembered the first aid instructor’s words: “Blood sugar’s like building a campfire. You start with kindling, small stuff that burns fast and hot, but then you need the big logs. Simple sugar is the kindling. For the big logs, you need something more complex, like trail mix.”
“Does anyone have any juice or pop?” Natalia asked the group. “Hard candy? Even a cough drop? We need to get some sugar into Darryl as fast as possible.”
But when she looked around, everyone was shaking their heads. Zion’s eyes were wide and his hands were pressed against his mouth.
“Wait a minute!” AJ said excitedly. “Susan—didn’t you have some sugar with your coffee supplies?”
At first Susan looked confused, but then her expression cleared. “Yes!” She set down her pack and fished out a plastic bag. Inside it were two sandwich bags. One was filled with coffee grounds. The other held about a quarter cup of white sugar.
Natalia tore a hole in one corner of the bag so it would act like a spout and funneled the sugar into her water bottle. Then she remembered. This was creek water, not pure water.
“Would the LifeStraw take out the sugar?” she asked Wyatt.
He bit his lip as he thought. “Yeah. I think it would. But it’s better to risk him getting giardia than a diabetic coma.”
She shook her water bottle hard and then handed it to Darryl. “Drink this. It’ll bring your blood sugar back up.”
As he tilted his head back, she wondered how long the sugar would fuel him. A few minutes? Even as long as an hour? However long it was, she was afraid it wouldn’t be enough.
“I hate to say it, but don’t we need to get going?” Beatriz asked. “The smoke is getting thicker.” Now that they were at the bottom of the long, steep slope, they could no longer see the flames, just smoke.
Darryl handed the empty bottle back to her. “Just let me lie down for a little while.”
“I’m afraid we can’t,” Natalia said.
Beatriz was right. The smoke was thicker.
In a panicked voice, AJ called out, “Wait a minute—where did Susan go?”
“Not again,” Ryan groaned.
“There she is!” Zion pointed.
Susan pushed her way through the bushes on one side of the trail. Her hat was no longer on her head. Instead, she was holding it with red-stained hands. And inside the hat were …
“Blueberries!” Zion shouted.
“No, um, they’re buckle … buckle harries.”
Wyatt helped her out. “Huckleberries.”
“Right!” Susan looked relieved. She held out the hat to Darryl, who put a few berries in his mouth with a trembling hand.
Natalia’s elation was over almost before it began. How much time would the huckleberries actually buy? Berries were certainly better than sugar water, but they still were mostly fruit sugar, which would break down quickly. Huckleberries weren’t the fuel Darryl needed to keep his internal fires burning. And once those fires were reduced to coals and ash, he really would have to lie down, because he wouldn’t be able to walk. Which would be followed by seizures, coma, and finally death.
“Are you guys sure you don’t have any kind of food left?” she pleaded. “Something you might have forgotten or were saving for later?”
Lisa cleared her throat. Ryan put his unburned hand on her shoulder as if to caution her, but she shook it off. “Actually, there’s an Uncrustables in Trask’s pack.”
“What’s that?” Natalia couldn’t even be mad. If Trask were her kid she might have “forgotten” about food for him, too.
“It’s like a small kid’s sandwich with peanut butter and jelly. They call it that because they cut off the crusts.”
The jelly would only provide Darryl with additional sugar. The bread would be a slightly more complex carbohydrate. But the peanut butter would be the big log. Its protein and fat could give Darryl the endurance he needed.
Wyatt turned his back to Lisa to give her access to the child carrier. Trying not to wake Trask, she gingerly unzipped the pocket holding the wrapped sandwich. Meanwhile, Susan showed the others what to look for, and they began to search for more huckleberries.
The smoke had thickened, and now it rolled down the hill toward them like fog. They were all coughing now, but at least Marco wasn’t coughing any more than anyone else.
Lisa ripped open the packaging and handed the sandwich to Darryl. It was no bigger than the palm of his hand. But Natalia thought it might be just enough.
It was going to have to be.
While Darryl chewed and swallowed, Beatriz came up to Natalia with cupped hands and red-stained lips. “Here, try some.”
Natalia popped a berry between her lips. She let it rest on her tongue for a second, dusty and warm. Then she pressed it against the roof of her mouth until it exploded on her tongue, sweet and sour and a little grainy. Saliva flooded her mouth. Meanwhile the others were popping berries in their mouths as quickly as they were plucked.
Darryl was already looking better. They were going to make it. Her shoulders relaxed.
Wyatt and Ryan were bent over the map while Wyatt traced a path with his finger.
“So you think three hours tops?” Ryan asked.
“Um, guys…,” AJ said in a shaky voice. At his tone, Natalia’s heart jolted in her chest. She turned and looked up.
The fire had reached the top of the ridge above them. Flames leapt from one tree to the next, roaring hungrily. The breeze carried the rank smell of burned-out ground and charred forest.
Showers of orange sparks began to streak past them. Lisa cried out as a burning windblown piece of moss hit her shoulder. She batted it out.
The tallest of the trees on the ridgeline became a torch, orange against the smoky-gray sky. Then it swayed, creaked, groaned, and began to tip. Toward them.
“It’s coming down!” Wyatt yelled. “Hurry!”
“But it’s too far away,” Natalia protested. Even if it did fall, wouldn’t it just land on the loose rocks covering the hill?
She didn’t have it in her to run. She barely had it in her to walk. Still, she managed to pick up her pace to a shuffling jog.
With a sound that eclipsed even the hungry roar of the flames, the burning tree crashed with a bang on the steep scree slope behind them. Even through the soles of her boots, she felt the impact. Behind her, Beatriz swore in Spanish.
Natalia turned to see why. Her stomach bottomed out. No, she thought. No, please, God, I’m not seeing this.
The tree, still coated in flames, had landed pointing downhill. But instead of coming to a rest, it began to slide with a terrible grinding noise. The two thousand feet of loose rocks, which had been like a no-man’s land the fire couldn’t cross, now became a liability as, one by one, the burning tree’s branches caught and then were torn off.
Each time a branch was ripped away, the tree’s trunk moved faster, until finally it was just a giant burning wooden missile.
And it was coming straight toward them.
“Run!” Wyatt shouted, grabbing her hand! “Run!”