Harken

18 Snowflakes And Fire

The moment that the fire licked its way across the floor and hit my mother’s medicine cabinet, suddenly everything on screen went aglow. Her alcohol-based remedies and mixtures began to pop and feed the flames as Wyck walked slowly through the kitchen door, and I began my screams again.

The absolute silence of Wyck was now even more terrifying than his incessant babbling had been. I yelled to him but he didn’t stop. He’d gotten what he wanted.

“See, Teddy?” Morgan went on. “This is what makes us different from the worthless eaters. It’s called death. It’s most curious. It’s like an end—to everything—for a human.”

She gestured at the screen. “He lived with that human for a very long time. He might even think he is a human like her. I don’t understand it.”

Teddy grinned. He wasn’t watching me anymore, he was watching Wyck’s screen, reveling in the fire as it slid across the carpet in the place I’d once lived in. Morgan, seeing that her son’s interest in me had waned, reached forward and pressed a button, and her screen died.

I was left with only the cracking sounds of the fire, the breathing of Wyck as he moved toward my house’s back door. The smoke began to gather and mask the walls and the pictures that hung there. Surely the fire department would come! Surely they would save my mom and Alli—where was my sister? Had Wyck already shot her and left her dead upstairs?

The fire was too powerful. The police would never arrive in time.

My gaze spotting something off the screen. Beside my bed on one of the tables was my cell phone. I could grab it…I could call the police! I stretched my hand out. My phone was only inches away. I pushed harder, letting the strap pull higher against my arm, cutting off the blood pressure so much that my hand went scarlet. My bonds slid up, tightening on my arm, the chemicals on my other side again starting to take over.

The end of my finger scraped the volume button on my phone. One more inch…

The woman in the white coat turned around from her desk and spotted me. Gently, she reached out and touched my phone, sliding it across the table, too far away from me. I collapsed. She shook her head in scolding.

“You’re a very difficult person to sedate,” she said, voice like the croak of a frog. She took my outstretched hand and slid to place it back beside me on the bed.

But that was close enough. I seized her by her wrist, pulling her toward me with all the rage that I’d pent up behind my tears. My motion took her by surprise and she fell over across me. Her flailing arm hit the I/V from my other elbow, ripping the needle out.

The moment the chemicals stopped, my mind emerged from the muddy water. The woman fell over, but in the second between her falling from my bed and when she would have struck the floor, I exploded in all directions.

There came the sound of four giants tears as the straps and mattress burst into frayed string and material, a crash as the table beside me went flying when the scales on my hand hit it. I erupted from the bed so wildly that my razors cut the plaster of the room’s walls, the back of my other fist landing squarely into the woman’s chest, sending her flying to crash into the television screens.

All in the space of a second, I was free.

The room rang with crashes as the tables went flying, the instruments clattered against the floor, my claws tore at the tiles and the computers until they were sliced into bits of metal and glass on the floor, pounded like dough into each other. My shout was a roar of fury, sparks flying from the television screens as I spun and turned the room into wreckage.

The lights disappeared over my head, likely as a result of my claws tearing them straight from their sockets. I was immediately engulfed in darkness but I didn’t stop, taking to the air, pounding the backs of my hands into the ceiling. Every strike was painless, the scales like armor protecting me as the ceiling buckled. I was so filled with rage that I was nearly blinded until I’d carved a hole in the roof: tiny at first, then growing with each punch, until daylight streamed through, and all the processed air was replaced by the scent of outside.

I gave the ceiling one final slam, the floor rocking beneath my feet and the room swaying on unstable supports. Grabbing my cell phone from the floor, I launched into the air, sliding through the hole that I’d created, blinking as I found myself escaping into another world.

I had erupted from a trailer that was hitched to the back of a large truck. It came as a shock—the fresh air, the sunlight, and the clouds in the sky. The room of horrors had been a small square box that nobody would ever pay attention to, parked behind a grocery store. I could see people driving around the corner, pulling in to parking spaces, picking up food for their families, while I had just emerged from a prison they didn’t even know existed.

There was no time for me to let the alarm wear off. I rose higher against the heat of the sun. The ground disappeared, the trees and the battered trailer left behind. The moment I could see the city I knew exactly where I was—not even a few miles from Arleta.

At first I thought that I could call the fire department from my phone but I was in too much of a panic to get my fingers to press the right numbers. I was focused on a single, desperate thought: reaching the house in time. I would fight Wyck off with my own hands if I had to.

Don’t die! was all I could think, a painful internal sob like a black hole threatening to consume me from the inside out. I couldn’t cry now. I couldn’t waste what precious breath I had.

I saw smoke in the distance: thick, black and repugnant, like the morbid breath of a volcano. My eyes and throat burned as I found myself in the way of the smoke. I coughed but didn’t pause, diving from the sky and ignoring the flashing lights of the fire trucks as they raced down the highway far below.

The ground came upon me in seconds. I hit my backyard and rolled in a flurry of grass and dust. I got to my feet instantly, shaking my hair out of my eyes, looking up in horror for a moment just because I couldn’t stop myself. The entire house from floor to rooftop was already burning, shingles and wooden supports breaking off, red and orange fire flaring out of the broken windows. The back porch had collapsed onto my mom’s swing and my sister’s now-melted drawing easel. I could see through the kitchen window that fire and ash continued to rain inside. A firefighter’s water would do nothing to stop this in time. Even the roof that I’d sat upon not many hours before had already caved in with crater-like holes.

I heard a pop like a gunshot and the back door of my house exploded, shaking me as a rain of shrapnel and splinters flew in all directions. I dashed toward the house anyway, the heat rising with every step as I ran up the porch and shot through the door.

It was an inferno. Fire had crawled up the walls in erratic patterns, the ceiling ablaze and dropping ash where giant, jagged pieces of wood had already fallen. Furniture was alighted like giant torches, the noise deafening as everything crackled and flames leapt from one end of the room to the other. And the smoke! It burned my nostrils and lungs and eyes, like airborne toxins entering me, so that I stumbled back toward the door again just to breath.

“Alli! Mom!” I yelled, but the fire masked my voice. I got to the kitchen but my mom wasn’t there anymore. I called for my family, spinning in a circle and hoping that maybe my mom had awakened and crawled to safety. All of my skin felt sunburned at once.

There was a crash as something fell through the ceiling from the second story. Orange and black and red rained like hot sequins around me as I dove for cover in the doorframe. I still couldn’t see my mom, and I was running out of time. Could Wyck have dragged her somewhere?

I found one safe step then another, trying to reach the stairs as the broken boards wobbled under my shoes. My mom’s medicine cabinet was wrecked. The couch was destroyed. Everything I’d once known was melting away before my eyes.

At the bottom of the stairs, I saw the most horrific sight of all.

A body lay crumpled like a discarded doll, only the head visible beneath giant beams of fallen wood that had crushed her body. Her eyes were open but stared blankly, emptily—wide in shock, but showing no Glimpse.

I was too late. My mom was dead.

Everything stopped.

The hallowed face of my mother was a single fragment of peace in the hellfire. Her face, though bruised and beaten, showed no fear of death—no concern for herself, dying in the same way that she had lived. I stumbled forward, falling to my knees in front of her, trying not to look at her blood soaked shirt. I touched her open fingers but they did not move to curl around mine, her empty eyes continuing to stare, her lips parted like she had tried to utter her last words but had been cut off by the unrelenting fire.

A falling beam smashed our coffee table behind me. The chairs scattered when the ceiling panel above them crumbled. I paid no heed to any of this. It was like a tragedy film was playing out around me and I was stuck in its script. Kneeling before the broken body of my mother, I was merely an actor in a screenplay. A puppet in a show.

This isn’t how it was supposed to happen…

I was broken from my tears when part of the second-story balcony collapsed behind me, striking me in the back and hurling me forward. My hands flew up into a mask that deflected the debris from my face, but I was now perched against the wall across the room, coughing for air. I inhaled smoke. My mom’s face was already gone, now covered by what had been our ceiling. I’d seen her for the last time.

I couldn’t mourn for her any longer, not as the house was collapsing and there was still one hope left. I soared into flight over the stairs, shouting my sister’s name. I hit the floor above but had to catch myself as the wood crumbled beneath me. Alli’s room was already taken over by the flames. But I knew if she had run to hide anywhere, it would have been my room next door.

The burning had not neglected my bedroom. My dresser was toppled with my clothes spilling out in piles—likely the work of Wyck as he’d ravaged my house in his quest to defile it. All the camera lenses were knocked to the ground and shattered, thousands of dollars of my life’s savings spilled across the room.

But worse: my Great Work. As I spun, I saw that every photograph was alighted; the ones on the ceiling breaking off and fluttering like flaming snowflakes to the floor. All of the faces were blackened with holes through them, their eyes fading against the smoke. It pierced my heart to see all of them dying like the slow-burning carcasses of old friends.

I panicked and almost ran to save them. But my sister was still somewhere in the house. My Great Work was nothing.

I threw my closet door open. She wasn’t there. I stepped back and the floor shifted from under me again. Where was she? I spun to get out but found that the floor outside my room had already collapsed.

I wasn’t ready to give up. So I slammed shut what remained of my door and went to the wall I shared with my sister’s adjacent room. Even then I hesitated, though only for a second, before my fingers went flying to rip my work down, tearing the photos to pieces and letting the shreds hit the floor without so much as a glance. The wall beneath it was already hot, my fingers stained black. But I went on, slamming with my fists and digging with my claws into the already weakened panels, hoping that I could break through.

My eyes burned as ash and wood stuck to my sweaty face. An opening finally broke. It was like I had opened a furnace. I could not step inside, fire leaping through the wall at me and my scaly hands flashing once again to my protection. Still, I forced myself ahead, trying to look inside, to see if I could drag my sister out.

I saw her shoes across the room, shrouded in smoke.

“Alli!” I shouted again. But there were just too many flames to see, and the smoke only served as a precursor to the explosion that threw me off my feet.

I was standing one second, vigorously fighting to press forward, and the next I was in the air, powers struggling to catch me, my back slamming into the opposite wall. I tried to get up, but couldn’t as the smoke slowly began to seep through my lungs.

Hands grabbed a hold of me. I was pulled through the window, hit with fresh air that expelled the smoke.

Someone held me up. Wyck? No. Someone else.

I struggled to keep my eyes open, and through slits I saw that I was hanging over Callista’s shoulder. We were high in the air, the wind whirling in gusts against my face.

“I couldn’t save them,” I said. I collapsed into her arms and didn’t even try to hold back my tears anymore.