His world had turned upside down—literally.
He was laying on his back on the ceiling of his cab, staring up at the driver’s seat and the floor. Where the windshield had been there was now nothing but a few loose pieces of shattered glass hanging from the windshield’s surround like rotten teeth in an ancient mouth. He could feel a warm breeze flowing through the space into the cabin. The breeze was pulling in smoke with it too—it was starting to fill the wrecked cab. Gray-black fumes snaked over the inverted dashboard and flowed towards him like morning mist down a hillside.
There was almost no sound. He could hear a creaking, squeaking noise that sounded like a rusty weather-vane or the unoiled wheel of an old bicycle. He strained to listen for any other clue. There was another sound beyond the squeaking; a crackling, popping noise, and it was getting louder. As the crackling grew, so too did the smoke. It became thicker and blacker, filling the cab with creeping black tentacles.
Fire!
Byron’s short-circuited brain finally made the connection as realization shot through him. He was going to burn to death—or suffocate to death first—if he didn’t get out of this cab.
Tendrils of fear wrapped themselves around his heart and he sucked in another deep lungful of the choking black smoke. His eyes itched painfully and tears welled up in response to the smoke, blurring his vision even further.
He had to get out.
Byron reached his arms out, placed his hands palms up against the body of the cab and pushed. Pain coursed up his left side and struck his heart, paralyzing him with its intensity. A mewling whimper crawled from between his lips and he collapsed back onto the ceiling, sucking in great puffs of air between clenched teeth. The fetid air made him choke and almost vomit; it was becoming less and less breathable by the second. Through the swirling smoke that now filled most of the cabin he could make out yellow flames flickering dimly. He could hear the fire growing in intensity.
Terror sent adrenaline coursing through his body — he was not going to let himself die here, not like this — and with a snarl, he pulled himself up into a sitting position.
The pain was horrendous. His vision swirled and darkened, the urge to throw-up was almost unstoppable this time, but if he blacked out now he knew that would be all-she-wrote; it would all be over for him, he would lose consciousness and choke to death on his own vomit.
“But I’m chosen,” he whimpered, as unconsciousness threatened to swallow him again.
With an almost super-human exertion of will he fought back the darkness, pushed it away from him until finally the interior of the overturned truck swam back into view.
He was upright, his left hand braced against the inverted back of his driver’s seat and his right hand holding the rim of the shattered windshield. His right foot was jammed in what was left of his trucks steering wheel. It had snagged through the gap between two of the wheel’s spokes and was caught up against the dashboard and the steering column. The steering wheel had folded over on itself in the impact and trapped his foot in a clam-like vice. His foot, bent at a right angle to the ankle, felt numb, and as he strained his neck to get a better look at it, he could make out white bone jutting through the skin of his ankle. The ragged point of bone protruded through the bloody torn skin, an amateur carver’s attempt at whittling a spear point.
Portia strained to reach his foot but the angle was too obtuse and the pain from his ruined ankle too intense. His stomach muscles began to twinge and shudder with the strain of holding himself in this awkward position, until finally and with a frustrated yell of despair, his body collapsed back to the floor.
The shroud of smoke swallowed him, leaking into his nostrils, draining down his throat into his lungs. Oxygen depleted, his brain struggled vainly to remain alive but succeeded only in ordering his lungs to suck in even more of the poisonous fumes that were killing him.
Finally, consciousness began to leave him and he knew he was going to die.
A pale hand thrust through the empty space where the windshield once was, its long elegant fingers groping blindly through the smoke. It grabbed Portia’s trapped foot and wrenched it free of the buckled steering wheel. The pain was incredible, overwhelming his nervous system, and overloading every nerve in his body to the point that he couldn’t even scream, The last thing Byron Portia’s dying mind registered was the beautiful hand of God as it reached down through the swiftly approaching blackness to claim him.
Eleven
Jim Baston exited the mall and walked over to the parking lot.
There was no police cordon or sudden rush of emergency personnel hurrying to greet him with thermal emergency blankets in hand, concern stitched across their faces and a thousand questions about his well-being waiting on their lips. No cadre of reporters thrusting microphones at him, asking if he had any idea what had happened, the lights from their cameras blinding him.
Instead, all that waited for him was what he first took to be snow. Holding out a hand, he allowed a flake to settle gently onto his palm. It was ash. Gray evanescent ash, falling in a flurry from the leaden sky, settling lightly on the hot concrete and bringing with it a reek of burning rubber laced with the campfire smell of wood and turpentine. Together they produced a sickly, syrupy odor that clogged his nostrils like tar, burning the back of his throat with each breath he inhaled.
Rummaging through the pockets of his jeans and jacket, he found nothing he could use to block the choking smoke. Placing his hand over his mouth, Jim jogged back inside the mall and zagged into a kid’s clothing store near the exit.
The doors shushed efficiently open as he entered the air-conditioned store, the clean air a soothing relief to his already raw throat. Child shaped mannequins showed off the season’s latest styles, their unsettlingly still forms scattered around the store in various frozen poses. The place seemed eerie without the presence of human staff and customers, as though he had stumbled into the lair of the medusa and at any moment might catch a glimpse of her and be instantly turned to stone.
If this were one of those old horror movies he grew up with, he’d be hearing single piano notes right about now. Unable to control his irrational fear any longer, Jim grabbed a handful of pre-teen dresses from the nearest rack and ran out of the store.
There was an oiliness to the air. It stuck to his skin making it slick and dirty.
Jim’s eyes smarted painfully. He resisted rubbing them lest he get more of the crap in his eyes. The torn strip of summer dress he now wore over his mouth and nose provided a modicum of protection against the pollution but he could still smell the stench of burning rubber and felt its chemical tingle in his throat and tasted the acidic sourness in his mouth.
The thick plume of smoke he had seen rising into the air earlier, now filled most of the southern horizon. Vast clouds of smoke roiled and billowed; angry, black and purple bruises forming against the skin of the abused sky. Most of the western skyline was gone too, buried beneath a black shroud of smoke, the sun a barely visible afterimage and, he realized with horror, the buildings visible earlier had now disappeared behind the solid bank of smoke rolling inexorably towards his location. Jim could see unruly spires of flame leaping high into the air: the source of the Pompeian snowstorm that now fell on the city. Tendrils of smoke drifted free from the main body of the massive fire and hung overhead the mall, the advance guard of the rapidly approaching firestorm, blown by the high altitude winds.