Page 61 of Jackson

“Woah, Gonzalez, look!”

Breaking out of my thoughts, I stumbled and ran right into Barker’s back, causing us both to fall into the dirt.

“Jesus, fuck! Watch it,” he spat out.

I grunted and slowly pushed myself up onto my hands and knees, watching him do the same out of the corner of my eye. The haze had grown thicker in the time we’d spent walking this way. Even through my coveralls, I could feel the telltale signs of heat.

I grabbed at the scarf hanging around my neck and pulled it up over my nose.

“What I was trying to fucking say before you fucking shoved me,” Barker went on, getting to his feet again. “Was that I think I see fire.”

“Fire?” I lifted my head. “We should head back then.”

“No way. Shots this close up are gold. I’m not passing that up.”

Getting to my feet, I brushed the dirt off of myself. “We’re not getting caught up in a damn forest fire, you idiot.”

“We’ll be fine.” He waved his hand. “We’re too high up for it to get us.”

“What?”

What the hell did that even mean?

“Did you not pay attention to any of the demonstrations? The air is thick up here because of the smoke rising. That means the fire is down farther. I bet there’s a hill we can stand on to see it.”

“We’re not getting that close.” Turning to glance over my shoulder, I realized I couldn’t see jack shit. Not even the subtle reflections from the other inmates and firefighters’ coveralls.

Shit, we’d gone too far away from the group.

“Barker, come on. Let’s just go back. You’ll get your shots when we’re back with the group.”

My anxiety was already rising from potentially being this close to a wild fire. That shit was unpredictable and I wasn’t about to get caught in something I had no idea how to get out of.

He ignored me completely and set off in the direction of the thick smoke, the reflectors on the back of his coveralls slowly disappearing from view. Panic flooded me, my mind being torn in two different directions of wanting to go back to try and find our group or follow after Barker to make sure nothing bad happened to him.

The guilt would eat at me if I went back to the group and left Barker behind to potentially run into trouble without any help.He was being an idiot, true, but no one deserved to go out like that.

Quickly darting through the trees, I caught up with him just as he was coming up to a small overhang. The heat was intense the closer we got to it, and soon, flames were dancing wildly among the dry brush.

My hand shot out to instinctively grab at the back of his coveralls. “We need to go back.”

He raised the camera up to his goggle-covered eyes and snapped a few pictures. “Damn, this issocool. You ever see anything like this?”

“No,” I admitted. “And I don’t really want to. Come on, let’s go.”

I tugged at him and tried to force him to come back with me, but all it really did was get him to tell me to ‘fuck off’ while he snapped more photos. My skin felt like it was melting inside of my suit, the heat intense enough for sweat to trickle down my back.

Barker pulled himself out of my grasp in order to move along the overhang, bypassing a tree that was half-rooted out of the soil and hanging over the empty air of where the fire was. He grabbed a hold of one of the branches down close enough for him to reach, using it as a way to swing up onto the bend in the tree’s trunk.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Shut up,” he said, lifting the camera again. “You’ll thank me when we get extra time out in the yard?—”

Beneath him, the tree gave way from the overhang and crumbled to the ground.

CHAPTER 26

Ayen

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