"That's, uh, yeah," Darlene said, "that's a good idea, yeah."
It was, too! She ran her free hand over her head, prodding at her hair some like she was adjusting it or getting it nice, even though it was totally greasy and tangled and a bit matted with blood and probably if she undid her ratty braid now she would never get it back together again because it would hurt too much with how the twists and turns of the process would tug at the gashes in scalp, a few days healed now but still tender beneath the bandages. But anyways, being out of sight was smart because then they wouldn't have a repeat of what had happened yesterday, no explosions and screams and little bits of metal embedded in flesh, which was for the best.
Darlene wasn't official keeper of the fire or anything, but since she'd set it up and enjoyed it so thoroughly she felt a little responsibility for dealing with it. She'd been feeding it now and then, and now that it was time to go it was also time to extinguish it. She was still feeling this mix of anger and hurt and sad and so she turned it around in her head a little, and told herself that she was putting the fire to bed, which felt better. She scooped loose dirt and sand and dumped it on the logs, tucking them in and watching the flames disappear for now. She'd read somewhere once that embers smoldered for a long time, that maybe Chernobyl or one of those other giant nuclear disasters from the eighties was in fact still burning deep underground beneath its concrete cap, a reaction that generated the oxygen it consumed or something of that sort. That was good to think about, because it meant her little justification wasn't even pure fantasy.
The real reason to quell the flames, of course, was so that they didn't get out of control in the group's absence and lead to somebody getting blown up.
As to Sakurako? They'd wait for her, of course, but Darlene was pretty sure she wasn't coming back. It wasn't that she was beat up and had lost a lot of blood and could barely hobble along—okay, it was a little those things, but mostly it was that Darlene had been there too, with Stephanie, and she sure hadn't felt any compulsion to return. Yes, things were a little bit different. Things hadn't been as directly personally traumatic here and now as what had happened at the cave. There were no bodies to put to rest, but Sakurako seemed to have her goodbyes to say just the same. It was a shame. She was a good person to be around, even if it had been weird and awkward how they met. The explosion had put that all behind them, and for one more night things had been almost okay.
That was all they could reasonably ask for now: bits and pieces of kind of alright moments, tiny spots where life was just life and not fear and pain and an end rushing right at them.
The fire pit was a faintly-smoking pile of dirt surrounded by stones. Darlene got her gun back out from where she'd tucked it in her bag (which she'd carried around with her while on her errand, because she liked these two pretty well and mostly trusted Abe at least but also he had made off with other people's things at least once already!) and held it in her right hand, just in case. She nodded at the others, smiled, headed for the foliage.
She had no idea how they were going to measure an hour with any degree of precision, but then, it wasn't actually important. They were just sticking around to make themselves feel better.
((Darlene Silva continued in
Little By Little))