Hidden Heart Read online

  “I’ve got bad news for you, Woodchuck,” he said, his voice sinking as Theo slipped back under the overhanging foil wrapper. “I think once you care about someone, your dignity is a thing of the past.”

  “Mm,” Theo said, snuggling in next to him. “I suspect you’re right about that. You need to make plans to say goodbye to yours now. Just saying.”

  “If you’re lucky, I’ll die first, and you can hang on to yours,” Spencer warned him, tongue firmly planted in his cheek. He was not prepared for Theo to smack his arm. “Hey!”

  “Don’t be an asshole,” Theo snapped. “I’m cold and I’m wet and I’m scared, and you’ve got a fever like the surface of the sun. This is no time to even joke about that.”

  “Woodchuck, this here is the only time to joke,” Spencer mumbled. He was suddenly exhausted. It took the last of his strength to stretch out his arm and tuck Theo back in against his shoulder. “When shit’s dire, you joke about it so you know shit could always be worse.”

  “I don’t see how shit could be—”

  “Don’t say it!” Oh Lord, of all the dumbass rookie moves.

  “Superstitious much?” Theo prodded.

  Spencer shook his head, eyes closed. “Theo, please believe me. When you are taking a miracle of steel a thousand feet into the air on faith, superstition does not even cover it. Don’t tempt fate. It’s a real fucking thing.”

  “All right,” Theo said, and his pat on Spencer’s chest, far above the wound in his side, gave Spencer some hope. “Okay. You’re right. I shouldn’t mess with fate. I’ve tied a couple of the foil blankets to the rails that look out from under the trees. They’re flapping in the wind, so hopefully that makes us easier to spot.”

  “Good thinking,” Spencer murmured. “How many of those things did you bring?”

  Theo let out a strangled laugh. “Enough to keep a soccer team from freezing to death in case our bus broke down. My father was a former Marine, and he taught me not to mess around when it came to being prepared.”

  And for some reason this tickled Spencer too, but he was too tired to do more than smile as his eyes closed and he nodded gently off.

  Stupid

  THEO couldn’t believe he nodded off. But then it really had been something of a day.

  Warm—or as warm as he could get under the blankets—and tucked against Spencer’s chest, soothed by the patter of the rain on the foil blankets, he rested his head on Spencer’s shoulder and felt as safe as he’d ever felt in his life.

  He woke up to the dark and the sound of a vicious animal promising death and mayhem.

  He struggled to sit up and get his bearings. The raft strained against the garden hose and bumped against the trees, and water still rushed underneath the slats. He and Spencer Helmsley were still on a tiny ex-porch in the middle of a big flood; that hadn’t changed.

  “How you doing, Spence?” he asked softly.

  Spencer’s breathing was getting a little ragged—fast and hard—and Theo could hear congestion in his lungs already. God. Spencer seemed to have all the faith in the world in his friends. Theo really hoped they would come through!

  “Spencer?” Theo prodded again, and Spencer took another rough breath and swallowed painfully. “Here, do you need some Gatorade?”

  “Yeah,” Spencer rasped. “I mean, it sounds like dog poo, but it’ll probably be good for me.”

  “Wow, that’s almost emotionally mature,” Theo chided, hoping Spencer would give some back.

  “Don’t count on it,” Spencer said weakly. “Too much bone-deep stupid here for that.”

  Theo suddenly shoved up, barely remembering to keep Spencer covered. Night had fallen since he’d sat down, and he wagered if he checked his phone, he’d find it was after six o’clock. He hadn’t had any bars at Thelma’s—he never did, unless he was close to town. The cell tower was next to the community center, and if Imelda had been clearing out when she’d called Theo, he imagined he still wouldn’t have coverage.

  But that’s not why he was scrabbling for his phone now. Through the plastic bag he pushed the emergency flashlight button and leaned against the railing, shining the light in the direction of the cluster of trees they were anchored to.

  “C’mon, Stupid,” he muttered. “I know you’re out there.”

  “I’m right here,” Spencer muttered from the little fort next to him.

  “You’re not who I’m talking to!” Theo said excitedly. The water under his flashlight looked mysterious, like mist, constantly moving, never solid, but Theo knew better. “Here kitty, kitty,” he called in his best cat voice. “C’mon, you stupid sonuvaduckmuffin, come to Daddy.”

  “Who in the fuck are you talking to?” Spencer said very clearly from under the blankets.

  “Oh!” Theo could see him now, in… a bucket? Had that cat been floating all day in a bucket? No—that wasn’t a bucket—that was… “Oh Jesus, is that Thelma’s plastic wheelbarrow?”

  “They make those things out of plastic?” Spencer asked, puzzled. The blankets started to move and Theo thumped the top of them.

  “Stay still,” he said. “I got this. And they do make plastic wheelbarrows, with big plastic wheels, for little old people who don’t need to be hauling the steel ones around. And apparently they’ve got just enough drag on the bottom to keep her twenty-pound cat safe for this entire gawdawful miserable pusbucket of a day.”

  “Wait a minute,” Spencer warned before breaking into a wet, painful cough that sounded like it was ripping up his entire body. Great. And like that, infection had set in. Theo could say it. Fuck. Fuck this storm, this flood that had taken his home, this weird chaotic day, and fuck that the guy who’d fallen out of a helicopter to rescue him was getting sicker by the minute and there wasn’t a thing Theo could do to help him. Fuck this shit.

  Theo was helpless. As helpless as he’d ever been in his life, and he’d been there for Big John’s heart attack and for Kimberly’s quiet passing with Annie on her chest. Those deaths he’d felt were in the order of things—there’d been warning. His parents had made the most of their time. But this, floating down the damned valley on Thelma Andreas’s porch with a guy who made his heart ache was all kinds of chaos and all kinds of wrong, and right now, as dark set in, the one thing Theo felt like he could do, the one thing Theo felt like he could control, was rescuing poor Stupid from a cold and lonely death in a plastic wheelbarrow.

  Before Theo could think too hard—or second-guess himself—he’d grabbed the extra barge pole from the deck and sloshed down the first step to reach out with it. With the branch extended, he was close. Now that his eyes had adjusted to the dark, he put his phone in his pocket and grabbed hold of the wooden rail, took another frigid step into the water.

  “God, Spencer, this is freezing,” he muttered. “How did you do this for hours?”

  He heard the rustle of foil but couldn’t risk looking up from what he was doing.

  “And don’t move—it was finally getting dry down there.”

  “Woodchuck, it was no drier under there than it is out here,” Spencer muttered, his voice unmuffled. “Now I need you to rethink what you’re doing here, because there’s more space between that cat and that stick than I think you kn—fuck!”

  “Fuck!” Theo didn’t even hear the splash he made, or feel the barge pole slip out of his hand. “Fuck! It’s freezing! Oh my God! Jesus! Fucking shitballs! Fuck!”

  “Theo!” Spencer called. “Man, what are you—”

  But Theo had spotted the wheelbarrow and poor Stupid, hearing human voices, had perched on the side curiously. A sodden mess, his thick fur saturated by rain, the cat looked bedraggled and pissed off and more grateful to see Theo splashing toward him than Theo reckoned a cat had a right to look. Theo could barely breathe for the cold, but he’d grown up swimming in mountain runoff. His body knew this shock; he knew he’d recover. Just a few more strokes and—

  “Augh!”

  “Well, hell,” Spencer muttered, voice carry
ing over the water. “I guess that cat knows you!”

  Stupid had taken a leap of faith from the wheelbarrow to Theo’s back, claws digging into his head, and Theo turned and began a torturous, slow, sodden stroke back to the raft. He was shaking, his limbs getting leaden, dragged down by water and jeans, as the cold got worse—probably because his body temperature had been so low to begin with.

  Oh God. He wasn’t going to make it. His hand came in contact with a step, and he struggled to find purchase.

  “Hang on there,” Spencer barked, voice raw. “Hang on. I gotcha, big guy.” And miracle of miracles, the other barge pole appeared in the darkness, nearly bashing his nose in.

  Theo grabbed it, and Spencer used what little was probably left of his strength to haul Theo up the stairs, one at a time, until he was tugged limply up to the porch.

  Where Spencer grabbed the cat by the scruff of the neck and tucked it under one arm before dropping the barge pole and shaking Theo until his teeth rattled.

  “What in the fuck do you think you were doing!” he shouted.

  “Stupid!” Theo protested.

  “I know it was stupid,” Spencer yelled hoarsely. “How could it not be stupid! The whole purpose of us here on this fucking raft was to save your life, asshole! Why would you want to put that at risk—how stupid can you get?”

  “The cat’s name is Stupid,” Theo yelled back. “And how’s it fuckin’ feel, Spencer! How’s it feel to worry over someone, be helpless over someone, because they put themselves on the line to do something for someone else and didn’t give a shit about themselves!”

  “It feels like shit,” Spencer snapped. “You’re making a relationship sound terrifying about now, do you know that? I am legitimately frozen to my fucking balls—was that your intention? Because it worked! If I could, I would jump off this raft and swim the fuck away because you scared me, you fucking moron. How could you do that to me?”

  Spencer ended his cry with a cough that shook him, hard and to the bone, and some of Theo’s adrenaline wore off and most of his mad.

  He wrapped his arms around Spencer’s waist and buried his face against Spencer’s shoulder and clung.

  “I scared me too,” he admitted. “I… I lost everything else, Spence. I…. Everything. My town, my home, my family. I thought… Jesus, if I could only save the fucking cat.”

  “Aw, kid,” Spencer mumbled, shuddering in Theo’s arms. The cat was wedged between them, exhausted and probably warm for the first time all day. For a moment, the world stopped, and they were the only two people in it.

  And then the world dipped suddenly beneath their feet and slid violently downward, sending Spencer, Theo, and the cat sprawling to the deck of the raft.

  “Oh shit,” Theo muttered. “The barge pole!”

  “Motherfucker!” Spencer snarled, struggling to sit up, Theo in his lap. “Shit! I’m sorry. I had to pull it out of the knot to get you and… shit!”

  Theo stayed sitting and scooted to where Spencer was, and together, Theo’s arm around his waist, they looked in awe and terror at what was to come.

  The rain hadn’t stopped, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t moonlight, strong-arming itself through the clouds, filling the entire valley with a sort of ambient gray, a filter of twilight with which to view the violent lake of cold-boiling water that took the place of Theo’s pleasant little valley.

  The water levels must have risen since Theo had tied the boat off, because the giant dip they’d felt that had sent them sprawling had been the raft getting sucked into the path of the water as it thundered its way out of the valley. The road had created its own ferocious current, like a riptide in the ocean, and they were currently riding that road of water toward the bottleneck of the valley, where they would be spit out and launched across the canyon below.

  “Oh God,” Theo whispered.

  “I’m sorry,” Spencer rasped. “Oh fuck, Theo. I’m so sorry. This is all my fault—”

  Theo grabbed the hand without the cat. “This isn’t your fault, Spence.”

  “I grabbed the fucking barge pole—”

  “You saved my life,” Theo told him truthfully. “I wasn’t going to make it. I… I….”

  “Hush!”

  “What?” Theo stared at him, irritated because they were probably about to die and Spencer had shut him down midconfession.

  “Do you hear that?” Spencer demanded. “Do you?”

  “Oh my God!”

  “That’s the Black Hawk!” Spencer gasped. “Oh holy fuck! Theo, do we still have a foil blanket or two?”

  Theo grabbed them and they spread them out on the flat of the deck before Theo pulled out his phone again and shined the light on the foil, reflecting it back into the night sky.

  Together, they searched the skies in tense silence, checking their roaring progress through the valley with panic in their eyes.

  “I see it!” Spencer cried. “Do you see it? Coming over those trees? It’s heading right for us!”

  Theo looked over his shoulder at the rapids again, and up at the Black Hawk, its searchlight on full.

  “Yeah,” Theo said, swallowing. “Spence, it’s gonna be close.”

  “We should get closer to the railing,” Spencer agreed. “They might want to drop a cable down to hold us still.”

  Theo scooted back and waited expectantly for Spencer to do the same but he sat, shoulders slumped, chest heaving in and out.

  “Spencer?”

  “On my way,” he rasped, but he didn’t sound convincing. Oh hell.

  Theo half stood and scuttled over to grab him under the armpits. “C’mon, Spencer, help me. Act like you give a shit!”

  “I’m sorry, Woodchuck, but you scared the last of the shit out of me by swimming after the stupid cat. It just could be I have no shits to give.” He said it, but he was pushing with his legs and his feet, even though the rest of him felt as leaden as Theo had when in the water.

  Theo braced his stomach and his knees and pulled. “You don’t look this heavy—there’s gotta be some bullshit hiding somewhere in there. Help!”

  Spencer grunted and gave one more shove, and Theo was able to prop him up against the ice chest, Stupid cradled in his arms. “And I told you,” he panted, “the cat isn’t stupid. That’s just his name.”

  Spence nodded and used his chin to cuddle the terrified animal against his chest. “Someday you’ll have to tell me how that happened.”

  The Black Hawk was close enough to be loud now, and Theo had to spend most of his energy clinging to the post support and Spencer’s arm while the updraft from the blades rocked the little craft. For a terrible moment, Theo thought it overshot them, and then he realized the helicopter had paused long enough to drop a coil of rope, as Spencer had suggested, timing the drop to intersect with the craft with some serious precision.

  “That’s impressive,” Theo said, letting go of Spencer to scramble forward and grab the rope. It had a carabiner loop and he darted to one of the corner four-by-fours that held the porch together and secured it, his heart pounding in his ears. He’d seen how far they’d come toward the valley bottleneck as the chopper had hovered, and oh… oh God. The water was getting rougher.

  Rope secure, he looked up into the chopper to see the same woman—Elsie, he knew now—looking down from the open door with another man on the other side.

  “How’s he doing?” the man shouted, and Theo looked worriedly to Spencer.

  “Crappy!” he called back. “Injured, cold, infected already—you may need a basket!”

  Spencer mumbled something, but it got drowned by the wind. It was most certainly an expletive.

  “Fuck!” yelled the man at the cargo bay. “Elsie, what’s the maximum for the basket?”

  “Five hundred pounds,” she replied smartly, and the man nodded.

  “You get him in the basket,” he called to Theo. “And then sit on his sorry ass and we’ll pull you up. There’ll be a strap for you, but brother, we have got no time and
no men, you hear?”

  “I hear!” Theo said, with a worried glance toward Armageddon, which was bearing them onward with all speed.

  The basket took a good two, three thousand years to lower, and Theo stood, holding on to the rail of the rocking platform, waiting for it like he could will it to go faster with his mind. When it finally got close enough for him to stand fully and guide it down, he had to haul with main strength to get it close enough to Spencer to be sure he could help him in.

  “Spencer!” he shouted. “Man—”

  “I hear you.” Spencer took a gasp of air, and with the hand not holding the cat, he shoved himself up enough to topple into the basket, turning at the last moment so he’d lie face up and not squash the cat, and making a sound like a wounded bear as he probably contorted the wound in his side. Theo started to make busy with all the straps when the raft started bumping and shaking too much for him to even see the blur of his hands. He glanced up enough to see that they had entered the churning bottleneck and looked to the man in the helicopter.

  “The anchor line,” he called. “Do you need me to—”

  “Get in the fucking basket!” his rescuer called. “And hold the fuck on!”

  Theo threw himself on top of Spencer then, full length, grabbed the handles on either side and buried his face in Spencer’s neck.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled. “Hope I’m not hurting you.”

  “Isn’t that my line, virgin?” Spencer rasped. “If you’re saying it with our clothes on, this may be a bad idea.”

  Theo’s shoulders shook, and he kept his eyes squeezed tight against tears as the world disappeared beneath him again, and he and Spencer fought the wind buffeting their bodies and threatening their safety as they dangled from the sky.

  Other People’s Stories

  FOR a moment, Theo thought he was going to be sick as the basket rocked inward and outward on a very short lead.