Grist 04 - Incinerator (35 page)

“Wasn’t that dramatic?” Hoxley asked happily, turning the faucet closed. “ ‘Prepare to meet your maker.’ Those nineteenth-century playwrights really knew their audience. Well, your maker is going to have to wait a few minutes. And why shouldn’t he? The bugger invented time, didn’t he?”

The smell of kerosene filled the truck. I felt my eyes slam shut, and I sagged against the rigidity of the stool.

“I’m sorry we won’t have a chance to discuss time,” Hoxley said, and I opened my eyes to see him turning knobs on the larger of the two stoves. “Is it a straight line or a circle? Does it only happen once. Is there some price, as Dylan said, that we can pay to get out of going through all this nonsense twice? Another quote, maybe more to your liking than the earlier ones.” He twisted the last knob and limped to the door, opened it, and stood in it, a tall black silhouette with the face of death.

“There are children out there,” I said in a voice higher than Shirley Temple’s. The stove was hissing.

He shrugged. “Can’t be helped. Everything gets boring. Well, this is new. Maybe I’ll experience a last flicker of interest before it’s over. I think I’d like that.”

“Wilton,” I said.

“Or maybe not,” he continued, oblivious. “It’s so hard to find something one truly enjoys these days.” He gave the faucet handle an experimental twirl and then turned it off again. For a moment he stood silent, head down, as though listening to something. Then he looked up and straightened his shoulders. “ ‘Bye, Simeon,” he said. “And, hey. ‘Bye, Mom.”

The door closed behind him, and a moment later, flames erupted outside the windows.

23

Last Spark

The instant the
door closed behind Hoxley, Mrs. Lewis began to scream.

I found my way to my feet, the stool pinning my arms behind me, and went to the window. A ridge of flame leapt and shimmered in the weeds about ten feet from the truck. It extended from one edge of my view to the other. For all I knew, it went all the way around.

Now that I was standing, I could smell the gas from the stove. Well, at least we weren’t going to burn to death. When the flames reached the truck, we were going to be spread like peanut butter all over San Bernardino. A last favor for an old friend.

Mrs. Lewis continued to shriek as I backed to the stove and felt for the knobs. I found them, but with my fingers taped together, there was nothing I could do. I tried to brush up against the sides of the knobs and turn them that way, but they wouldn’t move. The gas was sweet and foul and heavy in my throat.

“Be quiet,” I said, and then I started to cough. I was too close to the stove to grab a safe breath, so I backed away from it until I hit the far wall of the truck. I took a lungful of air, held it, and went back to the stove, pushing against its edge, crowding against it, and then, with all my strength, shoved myself away from it and across the corridor into the wall behind me.

The seat of the stool smashed into the back of my head, and I went down like a tree. There was no way to catch myself with my arms immobilized, and my forehead cracked the floor. For a moment I may have gone out, because it seemed to me that Mrs. Lewis stopped crying.

Then a high wail split my ears, and I was back, lying on the truck’s dirty floor with blood in my eyes. The corrupt smell of the propane invaded my nostrils as I fought to my feet again. Okay, change of plan.

Don’t hit something high enough to drive the seat into your head, stupid. Hit something lower.

This time I pushed off from the wall and hurtled back into the edge of the stove. I collapsed immediately to my knees, my head ringing and the hand I’d slammed on the counter firing off high-voltage pain signals, maybe something broken there, but I’d heard one of the stool’s legs crack.

I tried to breathe shallowly as I waited to gain the strength to rise again, and Mrs. Lewis suddenly said, “What are you doing?”

“Tell you later,” I said. My voice was thinner than Kleenex. “Can you get out of that thing?”

“Of course not,” she said, sounding like her old self. “If I could, do you think I’d be in it?”

“Right. Well, hang tight. Here we go again.”

When I stood this time, I seemed to feel the trailer heaving beneath my feet. For a moment, I thought my knees would give way, and I narrowed my focus against panoramic death until I was seeing and feeling one thing only, the stool crumbling like matchwood the next time I hit the counter. When I’d reached the far wall, I wiped the blood from my forehead onto the cool glass of the window and watched the fire. It had advanced a foot or so, and the flames were higher, feeding frantically on the weeds.

“This is going to hurt me more than it does you,” I said to Mrs. Lewis, and this time I threw myself back with such force that I stumbled even before I hit the counter, the leg of the stool striking the counter’s edge
above
my hands this time, and even as I smashed onto the floor, watching bright points of light bounce around inside my skull, I felt the stool go to pieces behind me.

Well, not quite to pieces. The seat, as I saw when I could open my eyes, was next to me on the floor, but I still had at least two of the legs trapped between my back and my arms, and of course there was the one good old Wilton had taped directly to my wrists. But the important thing was that I could get them over toward one side now; the important thing was that I might be able to sit down.

First, though, I had to stand up. I counted to ten and tried, but I couldn’t make my muscles work. I could tell them to do anything from the neck up, but below the Mason-Dixon Line they weren’t listening. I flexed everything I could locate, including a hand that felt bigger than a boxing glove. The pain had shut down, shock coming to the rescue, and I was happily and comfortably congratulating shock on having the sense to intervene when I realized I had to get away from the hissing stove.

Like a sidewinder, I wiggled across the floor to the door and tried to breathe through the crack at its bottom. The air coming through it was hot.

“Are you all right?” Mrs. Lewis said.

“Practicing my polka,” I said. “We’ll be dancing in no time.”

“Where’s Eddie?” she asked. It shut me up. “He took Eddie,” she said.

I managed to get to my knees without blacking out. I was wringing wet, and I’d left an oval pool of blood on the floor. I got one foot under me and then the other, and, leaning against the wall, pushed myself upright. My ears were ringing, and my eyes refused to focus. The truck’s interior looked as it might have if I’d been seeing it through moving water.

Taking one slow step after another, I crossed to the counter. I had to sit on the counter.

It had been so easy the first time, the time Wilton had told me to do it. Put the hands on the counter behind me, give a little jump, and
allez-oop.
But now I couldn’t use my hands, and I didn’t have a little jump in me, not even a very little jump. Not a single decorous Easter-bunny hop. The counter was almost as high as the small of my back. It might as well have been as high as the walls of Troy.

“I can’t get up there,” I said to myself.

“Up where?” Mrs. Lewis said. Then she began to cry again. “Where’s Eddie?”

I was getting sleepy. I thought about resting. I’d closed my eyes and let my head slump forward when I heard screams. They were outside, far from the truck, but they cut through the aluminum and through Mrs. Lewis’s sobs, and they galvanized me. Wilton had gone to work.

The frog’s legs twitched on the electrified plate again, only they were
my
legs this time, and I was sitting on the counter, my arms twisted impossibly to one side, the legs of the stool bisecting my back at an angle like misaligned bicycle spokes. The wooden block with the carving knives wedged into it was directly behind me, and I pushed my hands against it, feeling blades slicing through tape and into skin, feeling hot new wetness behind me, but sawing up and down anyway until the stool leg taped between my hands fell free with a clatter onto the countertop, and I could open my slick, wet fingers. Willing myself to be careful, I pushed the tape between my wrists against the black at the edge of the block, angling veins and arteries away from the other one. I cut myself, deeply, and yanked upward involuntarily, and my wrists were loose.

They were a mess. They looked as though I’d loaned them to someone for suicide practice, but the cuts were clean, and the blood, while plentiful and disconcertingly red, wasn’t alarming. I held my hands above my head for a moment, willing the blood to stop, and then realized I didn’t have the time.

“We’re going,” I said to Mrs. Lewis. “Can you walk?”

No answer, just a kind of steady keening that put me in mind of an Irish wake. “Well,” I said, sliding down from the counter, “you’re going to have to.” I pulled both of the knives from the block and glanced outside the windows. The fire was washing against the walls of the truck. “In fact,” I said, “you’re going to have to run.”

First I snapped off the knobs on the gas stove. Then I went to her and sliced through the first spiral of fiber tape. “You’re going to do what I say,” I said, pausing. “Because if you don’t, you’re going to die. Do you understand me?”

She stopped crying.

“That’s better,” I said, sawing away. “Here’s the plot. Wilton turned the gas on in the big stove and then set fire to the weeds outside.” I’d started at her feet, and the plastic had parted to reveal slippers and a pale blue terry-cloth robe. She probably dressed for national holidays. “The second problem is how to run across the fire, but even in those slippers you can probably manage it. The first problem is how to open the door without blowing ourselves over the rainbow.” I cut through the last length of tape, and she glared up at me, face shiny with sweat, blond hair matted against her face. Her eyes were puffy, but whatever despair had seized her, it had had the sense to retreat. “Can you stand up?” I asked.

“You look terrible,” she said. It wasn’t a particularly compassionate tone.

“I’m not going to look any better, either,” I said, using a bloody sleeve to smear more blood across my face. “Not unless we work out a way to step outside while remaining physically intact.” I heard my voice enunciate the fussily correct words from a distance, like listening to a practiced orator talking to me from the bottom of a well. I put out a hand to keep myself upright.

“Gas,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

“Are you
listening
to me? I told you, Wilton—”

“Wilton,” said the Ice Princess dismissively. “We need something to put over the door.”

I looked at her for eight or nine of my remaining heartbeats. “Right,” I said. “Something to put over the door.”

With both knives in my right hand, moving more carefully than may or may not have been strictly necessary, I got myself to the door. It didn’t seem to take more than a week. Wilton’s rubber coat was heavier than I’d thought it would be, or maybe I was weaker than I’d realized, but I lifted it up, stretched it open, and drove a knife through its shoulder at the upper left-hand corner of the door. Then I repeated the action with the other shoulder, and there it hung, a more or less impermeable air curtain.

“Suppose it’s locked?” she said at my side. I hadn’t heard her move.

“Why would catering trucks lock from the inside?” I asked. “To keep the food from escaping?”

“Try it,” she said.

I lifted the right edge of the coat and tried the handle. Locked.

“Smart guy,” she said. “I always get smart guys.”

I leaned against the counter. It was either that or fall down. “Well, lady,” I said, “I’m the last one you’re going to get.”

“I doubt it,” she said. “Excuse me.” And she shouldered past me and slipped beneath the rubber coat. I stood there, watching the bulge of her back, and then I heard a sharp
snap,
and the coat flapped as the door banged open against the side of the truck, and she was gone.

Having let the little lady kick the door out, the smart guy had no choice but to follow. I eased the coat back an inch or two and looked out at the panorama of flame, and then she called,
“Left,
stupid,” and I saw that Hoxley hadn’t ringed the truck with fire; intentionally or not, he’d left a path for us, and it was still open.

But the flames were licking at the right-hand side of the door, and the coat was blowing away behind me, and it all seemed to add up to a good reason to run. I jumped off the steps and sprinted around the truck, heading back toward the Haunted Castle, and I was almost there before the truck blew behind me with a
whoosh
and then a sound like a train hitting a timpani, and the shock wave knocked me flat on my bleeding face into the weeds.

When I looked up, the hills in front of me were on fire.

The screaming was louder now, a kind of steady white noise, and people who, I realized, had been rushing by me, toward the truck and the parking lot, suddenly dropped to their knees or fell on their backs. Those who were still standing milled uncertainly, regarding the flames from the truck like the last chapter in their personal serial. A child let out a shrill sound like a steam whistle.

“Go on,” I shouted, getting up. I pushed a man and woman in the direction of the truck. “You can get around it. Go to the parking lot. Get out of here. Go!”

In front of me, the turrets of the castle and the roofs of the town beyond it were black silhouettes against a slanting line of flame that climbed slowly upward, circling the natural hollow in which the Faire had been set. I scrubbed blood from my eyes and followed the blazing track up the slope as though it were the trail of a prey, and at the end of it
there he was,
spiraling upward and around the bowl like the Flaming Man in a nightmare, leaving footprints of fire wherever he stepped. And, for another precious heartbeat, everything froze.

Fire burns up.

Except for the trailer, he hadn’t ignited anything between the people and the exit.

He was sparing them.