They skidded to a halt twenty yards short of the building. Orange flames were shooting from the roof and licking out of two of the windows. Art could feel the heat on his face.
“We can’t go in there,” he said. “We can’t do anything.”
Seth shook his head and ran forward. He got to within ten feet of the front door when a cloud of red-hot sparks gushed out over the transom. He turned and came reeling back, gasping for air.
The heat from the burning house was increasing. Raindrops turned to puffs of steam as they hit the slate roof. “The tank,” Art cried. “The propane will blow. We have to get away.”
He took Dana by the arm and started along the road. Joe, Ed, and Helen were approaching. He waved them away! As he did so Dana pulled free from his grasp and turned back.
“Come on, Seth,” she cried. “You can’t do anything.”
Seth had not run. He was a dark figure against the burning house. Flames were spewing out of the walls. As the front door cracked and burst open, Seth shook his head and ran to the car. There was no place to turn it without driving closer to the house. Art heard the engine race, then the car came zooming crazily backward, almost hit Dana, and veered at the last moment into a thicket of rhododendrons.
Art ran across to yank open the driver’s door. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Seth was panting, leaning over, pulling at something in the rear compartment. He emerged with his arms full of boxes and a batch of papers.
“The telomod kits.” He nodded toward the load of boxes. “I told you, we left them in the car. It was too close to the house. But this should be far enough—”
The explosion was a vivid flash of red and white. The sound was a flat, heavy thump. Moments later, burning debris from the house showered all around them. Art cowered back, shielding his face with his forearm. Seth dropped the papers that he was holding. A blast of hot air blew them along the ground. Dana, standing farther back, dived and managed to trap them on the muddy ground.
Art stared at the ruin of his house. The front wall tilted inward at a crazy angle. The chimney stood intact, but all around it roof slates were cracking in the heat. Each one as it split threw off random sputters of red sparks. Flames poured from the bedroom window, and the whole structure was beginning to settle. Nothing inside could possibly have survived.
He felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Joe. “Come on. Let’s get back to Ed’s place. Don’t even think of trying to go in there. It’s not worth dying for objects.”
Joe hadn’t heard Seth’s shout before they started running to the burning house. Art turned to him. “You don’t understand, Joe. I’m not worried about my things — I’ve got spares at my house in Olney. But Oliver Guest was inside there.”
“Then I say it again. You don’t go in. That murdering sod’s the last person to risk your life for.”
“He was tied up and helpless.”
“Good. He deserved to die like that. And good riddance.” Joe walked away.
Art went across to Dana and took her hand. In silence, the group moved slowly along the path. The rain fell steadily. By the time they reached Ed’s house they were soaked, and the fire behind them was beginning to burn lower. Art took a last look back. The cabin was settling in the downpour, in gouts of blue flame and dying spurts of red-hot ash.
They went inside. Without being asked, Ed poured drinks of moonshine for everyone. Seth set the test kit boxes carefully on a table at the entrance. Dana brushed mud from the batch of wet papers and took a casual look at the top sheet. After a moment she frowned and read more carefully. Finally she went across to where Seth was sitting.
“I thought you said Guest didn’t tell you how to use the test kits.”
“He didn’t.” Seth was drinking fast, and too much. “Unless we can figure it out for ourselves — pretty long shot — we’re nowhere.”
Dana held out a sheet. “But this is the description of how to use the test kit. You can see, the first test is described here, how to do it and how to interpret it. The other pages give the same thing for the other tests.”
“Gimme a look at that.” Seth grabbed the sheets in a filthy hand and bent over them. After a couple of minutes he scowled and shook his head. “Ain’t that the damnedest. You’re right, this is the whole shebang. He never told me he’d written it out.”
“I think he intended to use this when he bargained with us for his own future. Naturally, he wouldn’t say ahead of time that he’d documented everything. But there it is.”
Art had been listening in on the conversation. “Let me take a look.”
He skimmed the first couple of pages, not reading as carefully as Dana. Seth waited until he looked up, then said, “Well?”
“It’s the document we need. But this is all too pat.”
“That’s what I thought. Too neat.”
“What do you mean?” Dana asked. “Isn’t this just what we want?”
“It is. And it ties everything up.” Art handed the sheets back to Dana. “Guest is officially dead, so the government doesn’t hunt for him. We have the telomod test kits, and we know how to use them, so we don’t have to look for him. Everybody lives happily ever after.”
“Including old Ollie,” Seth added. “Tell you what, tomorrow morning we go over to your house. No good doin’ it now, everything’s too hot to touch. But I’ll make a bet with you. We won’t find a body in the bedroom. We won’t see a sign of one, there or anywhere else.”
By morning the rain had eased to a thin drizzle. Before breakfast, Art, Seth, and Dana were heading over to the cabin. They had slept in Joe’s house, which had more space. It also had more dogs. Dana had been wakened by three of them soon after dawn, as they wandered in to scratch and sniff at the interesting new female scent. She had thrown them out of the bedroom, but remained up. Art soon joined her. He couldn’t sleep. Seth was up already. For all Art knew, he had been awake all night.
The burnt-out house had been reduced to a chaos of wet ash with an intact chimney protruding at one end. Everything was red-hot beneath the sodden upper layer of gray.
It was easy enough to find the bed. The iron headboard and footboard were intact and upright, sticking up from a cluster of fallen roof slates.
“See,” Seth said. “Nothin’.”
He had a straight sapling that he had cut on the way over. Now he reached in from outside and raked the long stick across the mess next to the headboard.
“Nothin’,” he repeated. “Hey, wait a minute.”
The sapling had run across an uneven hump. He moved it a couple of feet, and poked again.
“Son of a bitch. What’s that?”
Something irregular in shape lay between headboard and footboard. It was impossible to tell what it was without direct examination. The three walked gingerly forward, hearing the sizzle as their shoes went through the crust of ash to the still-smoldering layers beneath.
“My feet are starting to burn,” Dana said. “Can we pull the whole thing out? Unless it’s too hot to hold.”
Working together, they dragged the remains of the bed onto bare ground. The iron end parts fell away as they went, creating showers of black ash and hot sparks. Slate fragments and patches of ash dropped off the object that lay on the bed. Once they were clear of the ruins of the house, Seth and Art carefully removed the rest of the debris.
What came into sight was unmistakable. A human body lay faceup on the charred bed, most of its flesh burned away to reveal blackened bones.