Page 14 of Bronx

I was tired, my throat was dry and burning. We were nearing the end of our job and visions of steak and potatoes danced through my head. I was thinking about just that when someone yelled. "Heads up!"

I looked up from the soil I'd been overturning with my shovel. A fast moving wall of flames was cutting across the low brush just above us. Another freak blast of air pushed it faster. It swept over the dry fuel like a hot glowing tsunami.

My gaze shot to Bulldozer down in the ravine. He hadn't heard the warning.

"Bulldozer!" I yelled as loud as I could.

He glanced up just as another gust blew the fast moving flames down the side of the ravine and through the massive oak. Dry from the hot summer and drought, the tree's sprawling branches ignited instantly.

Bulldozer took a step back and fell over some of the brush he'd cleared.

"Man down!" I yelled and raced toward the ravine. Flames started to lap at my arms. I took a hard left, trying to stay out of the path and still get to Bulldozer. He pushed to his feet just as I looked his direction. The next gust was long, intense. I covered my face to keep the debris from my eyes. I heard more voices and footsteps pounding the ground behind me, then someone yelled.

I opened my eyes, grit assaulting my eyeballs. The flames had flowed down into the ravine like an uncontrolled waterfall. Smoke and flames made it hard to see. The whole ravine was filled with fire.

"Bulldozer!" I yelled just as Helix and Angus reached the ridge I was standing on. We yelled for him, but there was no answer. All we could do was hope that he had crawled out the other side of the flames. That's what we all told ourselves as we chopped brush and dug soil to douse the flames that poured into the ravine. The parched landscape was so combustible, the fire quickly ran out of fuel, climbing and clawing its way out of the ravine.

"Go south," Angus called to King and Kaos. "Get ahead of it." They were reluctant to leave, worried as the rest of us that Bulldozer was still down in that ravine.

He'll be sitting on the other side, chugging water and ready to laugh at us for getting so freaked out, I told myself. The smoke was dense and my eyes burned with chalky ash. My pulse pounded louder than my feet as I hiked down into the charred gully.

Helix and Angus flanked me on each side, then Helix picked up his pace. He flew down toward the smoke and ash. The flames reached the ridge on the opposite side and tumbled over. King and Kaos would have to hurry to get in front of them.

Another gust of wind cleared some of the smoke and ash, giving us a clearer view of the scene at the bottom of the ravine. It wasn't a scene any of us wanted to see.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck!" Helix yelled as he raced toward Bulldozer. "Bull, buddy, we're coming. Hang on! We're gonna get you."

Angus and I were right behind Helix. We reached Bulldozer just seconds later. Helix was already dropped to his knees next to his friend. Excessive heat had pushed us all to strip down to our last layer of clothes. The flames were out. We'd considered the danger over, but with nature, anything was possible. Today it had gotten us good, it had gotten Bulldozer good. His burns were massive and bad. Blisters were already forming on his arms and face. He groaned in pain. He was still alive.

"We've got you, buddy." Helix yanked off his shirt, rolled it up and tucked it gently under Bulldozer's head. He pulled the canteen off his belt and pressed it to Bulldozer's mouth. It was blistered and raw. Bulldozer coughed and sputtered and flailed his charred arm to push it away.

Angus pulled out the satellite phone on his belt and punched in the message for man injured, send helicopter. He sent off our coordinates.

"I'll run back and grab a sleeping bag. We can carry him to the pick-up location in the bag." There was no reason to bring a first aid kit. Bulldozer's injuries were far past that.

I had to push out of my head just how badly he was hurt. It wasn't a time to lose focus. Mixx had just reached the top of the ridge. He looked down into the ravine and saw me running toward him.

"What do you need? I'll toss it down to you," he called.

"Get me a sleeping bag." I kept moving up the sheer hillside and seconds later Mixx appeared. He tossed a sleeping bag down and I caught it.

"Do we have coordinates for the pick up yet?" Mixx called.

"Angus is getting them."

"Can you guys get him out of the ravine on your own?" Mixx asked. "I'm going to catch up to Kaos and King."

"Yeah, we've got it. Go on ahead." We were all in strategic plan mode, acting almost as if this was just a drill. It was easier than thinking about the reality of what had just happened.

The next hour was pure adrenaline. Each one of us could have recalled every detail like the fucking hole I twisted my ankle in, causing me to nearly drop my end of the sleeping bag, the mumbles from Bulldozer, complaining we were a bunch of clumsy dumbfucks, every rattler and lizard we scared off the rugged path on our trek down the rocky mountainside, our shortest cut to the helicopter clearing. My heart hadn't stopped pounding even long after we'd arrived at the site.

A wave of relief fell over us when the helicopter appeared over the peaks. And none of us mentioned that halfway down the mountainside, Bulldozer had stopped making any sounds.

Helix, Angus and I had gotten Bulldozer to the helicopter clearing as fast as our feet could carry us, but with injuries as devastating as his, every second counted. With our line of work, seconds were hard to shave off. We were in the middle of unchartered wilderness. There were only coordinates and satellite phones to connect us to the world. That only got us so far.

We turned our faces from the debris kicked up by the helicopter blades and stood in horrified silence as they carried Bulldozer off to the trauma center. We took a second for brief hugs. No one spoke of his chances. No one spoke of Bulldozer's silence. No one spoke of the dreadful possibility that we'd just lost one of our own. It was still too surreal to process. Every person experienced times in their lives when they wanted badly to believe they were just having a terrible dream, that soon they'd wake up to sun streaming in through the curtains. We were experiencing our moment right then on that weed covered clearing. We all just wanted to be jostled awake, to erase the horrid nightmare. But no one was going to wake us. This was reality, the reality of the job we chose.

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