Micky, at the back of the dead end, didn’t want to confront Preston Maddoc in part because of his greater strength and in part because of his lighter. He would probably use it to set their clothes afire.
Flames seethed over the walls along the forward half of the passageway. In a minute, the hungrily feeding fires would join from side to side, creating an impassable wall of death.
The haze of smoke thickened second by second. She and Leilani were coughing. Already, a rawness burned in her throat. Soon they wouldn’t be able to breathe unless they dropped to the Hour. The moment they were forced to the floor in search of clean air, however, they were as good as dead.
She turned to the back wall of this blind alley and tried to claw newspapers and magazines out of the construction, hoping to burrow through to another passageway where the flames had not yet reached. The bundled publications were so tightly packed that she couldn’t pry them loose.
Okay. All right. Topple the damn thing. All this crap was just piled here, wasn’t it? No one had cemented it in place. No one had reinforced it with rebar.
When she pushed against the palisade, however, it felt every bit as solid as anything the pharaohs had built. At the end caps of some passages, she’d been able to see that the maze walls were always at least two and sometimes three stacks thick, with sheets of Masonite and plyboard between layers. Perhaps more support structure existed than met the eye. She put everything she had into a shove, without effect, and then tried to rock the wall, attacked it with rhythm, pressing and relenting and pressing again, hoping to start the trash swaying, but it wouldn’t sway.
Turning to face Maddoc beyond the flames, she pulled Leilani to her side and gathered her courage. She saw no option now but to rush the entrance, get out before the flames closed the way, and try to take Maddoc down before he could harm them. Bowl him over, try to kick his head if he fell — because if she fell, he would be trying to kick hers.
Paper whispered when it burned in great volume, crackled and popped and hissed, as well, but whispered, as if divulging secrets printed on it, naming names, citing sources.
Preston realized that he had lingered too long in the smoke and heat when the burning paper began to whisper the names of those whom he had killed.
The foul air remained breathable. Yet even before the smoke grew dense enough to clog the lungs, the air assailed with lethal toxins spewed out by burning materials, gases that were invisible compared to the roiling soot, but no less dangerous. The manufacture of paper required numerous chemicals, which fire liberated and transformed into even more effective poisons.
If he were hearing the names of those he killed, he had inhaled enough toxins to half unscrew his mind. He’d better get out of here before he became disoriented.
He hesitated, however, because the sight of the Hand and the Slut Queen, trapped in the blind alley, thrilled him. He hoped they would run the fiery gauntlet before their sole escape route closed forever. Maybe they’d misjudge the moment, be caught by the shifting flames, and go up like torches — a spectacle he was loath to miss.
The vodka-sucking whore pulled the girl against her. She seemed to be trying to work out a way to use her body to shield the kid when they made their run for it, as if a few burn scars could possibly render the Hand any uglier than she already looked.
Abruptly, a section of the stacks on one side of their passage collapsed onto the floor between them and Preston, releasing clouds of sparks like fireflies and great black moths of paper ash. They could no longer exit without wading through knee-deep, furiously blazing debris.
Fate sealed, the woman and the girl retreated to the back of the cul-de-sac.
They would live another three minutes, five at most, before smoke flooded through here in smothering tides, before they became a pair of animate candles. Preston dared not wait for the final act, lest he be trapped in the house with them.
A heavy weight of disappointment lay on his heart. Their final throes, witnessed firsthand, would have given him much pleasure and thus would have added to the total amount of happiness in the world. Now their deaths would be nearly as useless as their lives.
He consoled himself with the thought that the Black Hole’s batch of lumpy cupcakes was baking in her oven.
As Preston turned away, leaving these two wads of living tallow to the mercy of the fire, the woman began to cry out for help at the top of her voice. Excited by the note of desperation in her pleas, he lingered a moment longer.
An answering shout, arising elsewhere in the maze, startled he had forgotten the three loud blows, likely the sounds of someone breaking down a door — further proof that the polluted air was already affecting his thinking, clouding his judgment.
Heartened, the woman cried out again, again, making a beacon of her voice.
Another answering shout rang above the rapidly rising chant of a million tongues of flame, and to Preston’s left, about ten feet away, a big man in a colorful Hawaiian shirt appeared out of the mouth of another passageway. He carried a revolver.
With a shocking disregard for ethical conduct, the sonofabitch shot Preston. They were strangers; neither of them had the informed perspective necessary to judge the other’s usefulness to the world; yet the ruthless bastard squeezed the trigger without hesitation.
When he saw the stranger raising the gun, Preston realized that he should fling himself backward and to the right, but he was more a man of thought than action, and before he could move, the impact of the slug punished his hesitation. He staggered, fell, rolled onto his stomach, and scrambled away from the shooter, away from the cul-de-sac in which the woman and the girl awaited burning, around a corner, into another run of the maze, shocked by the intensity of his pain, which was worse than anything he’d experienced before or had expected to be forced to endure.
‘We’re here!” Noah shouted to Micky and the girl. “Hold on, we’ll get you out!”
Only a few minutes old, the blaze had grown astonishingly fast throughout the front of the house. Not a man who had often — or ever — suspected that uncanny forces were afoot in the world, never having gotten so much as a single nape-hair bristle at a scary movie, Noah Farrel couldn’t shake the feeling that this fire was different, that it was somehow alive, aware, cunning. Prowling the maze with strange purpose. Seeking more than just fuel to feed its bottomless appetite. He knew that firefighters sometimes felt this way, that they called it the Beast. When flames hissed at him, when from morn distant and fully involved corridors rose what sounded like grumbling, snarling, and thick-throated cackling, Beast seemed a fitting name.
The door to the enclosed porch and the back door between porch and kitchen had been left open when he and Cass broke in. Interior doors had been removed a long time ago. Now the superheated air in the house sought the cool day beyond the bottle collection, and the accelerating draft drew smoke and ashes and hot embers through the labyrinth, and coaxed the conflagration toward a richer supply of oxygen.
Largely, the fire remained confined to the front half of the house. That wouldn’t be the case much longer.
With smears of wet blood from his oozing scalpel wound, Noah had left markers on the stacked-paper walls along the route they’d followed. He was afraid that if they didn’t begin to retrace their path soon, smoke would blind them to those crimson signs.
He squinted into the mouth of the dead-end passage where but a moment ago Maddoc had been posted. About ten feet long. The first four feet of both walls were afire. On the floor, a deep threshold of burning debris barred entrance. Micky and the girl, visible beyond shimmering curtains of fire, couldn’t be reached from here.