Serena felt as if she had launched into space and then fell out of orbit back to earth. The explosion split the shanty in half, and the walls made a tortured noise as they cracked. The diamond-shaped windows on the rear wall blew inward, and flame spat through them like they were the mouths of dragons. Black stains bloomed across the gray metal, which sizzled and popped as it became brittle.
The shock wave split Lauren and Blue Dog apart. The shotgun banged to the floor, empty and harmless. Lauren was thrown skyward, and she slammed into the door and then through it, spilling out of the space and disappearing with a cry. The impact struck Blue Dog square in the back and swatted him to his hands and knees. He swung his head to clear his scattered brain, and his long hair fell across his face like an Afghan hound. He pushed himself up to his feet and swayed, a silhouette framed by fire behind him. His head nearly grazed the roof of the shanty. His left arm dangled at his side, useless, but he still had Serena's gun in his other hand.
Blue Dog raised her gun and pointed it at her head. She could make out the whites of his eyes and his bared teeth. Ash fell into his wound, making him twitch. "Do you want me to make it quick for you?" he asked.
"Fuck you."
The flames licked at his back. "Burning to death is a horrible way to go," he said.
Serena half-wanted him to pull the trigger.
"See you in hell," he told her, and then he turned and leaped through the doorway.
She was alone and trapped. It felt as if she were in hell already, with huge fires and the caustic smell of melting steel to torture sinners. The winter cold vanished, and she felt a superheated burn from a ferocious, merciless sun. The rear wall was almost totally ablaze, and the fire toyed with the wood veneer on the other walls, beginning to catch and streak closer. Smoke choked the enclosure. She covered her mouth and nose with her free arm, but the gray cloud made its way inside her face. She gagged, and her eyes went dry.
Serena threw her weight to her right. The cot rocked on its frame and fell back. She tried again, trying to overturn the cot, so she could get both hands on the floor and find leverage with which to push herself backward and out the door, using the mattress and frame on her back to delay the fire's assault. She rocked again, feeling the cot lift an inch off the floor before slamming down. She made a fist and shoved it against the wall, but the cot stayed rooted to the floor.
The shanty lurched. The opposite end, where the fire was, dipped at an angle, and Serena heard hissing as if she had poked a nest of snakes. She realized now that she was in an ice house out on the lake and that the hissing she heard was steam as the fire burned its way through the tough layer of ice. The shanty was beginning to sink, creating a slushy pool for her to drown in if the fire didn't get her first.
The intensity of the flames shooting through the windows diminished by degrees as the propane tank slipped into the water, but the fire fed on the fish house itself now, chewing into the wood and insulation, exploding empty bottles, surging uphill toward the cot. The first of the fire trails outlined the open door in wild orange and threw a shower of sparks that made black, smoking holes on the mattress. Some of the sparks hit her skin and ate their way inside like hungry rats. She couldn't help herself; she screamed. It was a terrible taste of the fate that awaited her, to die like that, searing away to bone and dust square inch by square inch.
She braced her left hand on the floor in a futile attempt to push herself backward from the onslaught of the fire. Her hand found something hard and cold, and she realized it was the revolver, which had slid around in the commotion and wound up back within her reach. She scooped it up and stared at it.
One bullet. It felt like a cruel joke to find the gun now, when it was useless to her.
Except for one thing.
Serena watched the flames draw closer like an inexorable army. They danced on the ceiling, and chunks of hot metal fell around her. They swirled like bright ribbons on the walls. They charred the bottoms of her feet, as if she were walking on coals. The smoke grew thick as fog and clouded around her face and blinded her. She tried to suck in air, but there was nothing to breathe but ash and fumes, nothing to see but haze, nothing to hear but the death throes of the shanty as it imploded, nothing to smell but the roasting of her own flesh.
She still had the gun in her hand. She had one bullet, and she couldn't miss.
One bullet to escape all at once from the pain, the flames, and the poison.
One bullet to help her find the nothingness room in the corner of her soul, where she had escaped as a child, and make a home there forever.
Serena put the gun in her mouth.
Stride sprinted toward the shanty from the west. Half of the shack was fully immersed in flames, and the lake was slowly pooling around it and drawing it back into its grasp. He could feel the wave of heat from where he was. He had seen these gas fires before, and they were always deadly and complete, reducing metal, wood, glass, and tissue to a flat, smoldering wreck, nothing more than a black rectangle on the ground. It never took long, never more than a handful of minutes.
He shot around the corner of the shack and spied a snow-covered sedan, its door ajar, and the boxy outline of a van parked twenty yards from the shanty door. The wind had blown the snow clear, and he recognized the Byte Patrol logo. It was a caricature of a nerd dressed like a cop, with a laptop in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. The cartoon laughed at him.
Someone half-limped, half-ran toward the front of the van. He was tall and huge, and Stride saw his long hair flowing madly in the wind.
"Stop!"
The man froze and swiveled to look at him. Blue Dog's eyes gleamed with recognition across the short distance that separated them.
"Where is she?" Stride shouted.
The man gestured his head at the burning fish house and smiled. Stride ran for the door of the fish house, which was already a ring of fire. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Blue Dog's right arm coming up, and he reacted by instinct, diving to the ground and rolling as two bullets ricocheted off the ice around him. Stride twisted in the snow, yanked his gun from his jacket, and fired back. His bullets thudded into the side of the van. Blue Dog jerked open the van door, and Stride fired again, four more times, missing the man's head by an inch and turning the window into popcorn. Blue Dog ducked, spun away from the van, and weaved as he ran through the blizzard, using the vehicle as cover as he headed for the trees.
Stride let him go. He scrambled back to his feet and pounded on the steel wall of the fish house. "Serena!"
The heat and intensity of the fire drove him back. His boots splashed in a foot of cold lake water where the ice was melting. The walls of the shanty were beginning to bow.
"Serena!"
He got on his knees and doused his head in the freezing water and lay down so that his whole body was soaked and frigid. Hypothermia was the least of his worries now; he just wanted to slow down the fire from taking hold on his skin. The wind bit at him, the heat burned, and the banshee screamed.
Stride stared into the maw of the devil.
As he prepared to jump through the doorway, he heard something that made his heart stop. Rising above the noise of the storm and the fire came the sharp crack of a single gunshot.
57
Maggie steered for the fire.
As she rounded the jagged edge of a peninsula, she saw the fish house burning like a pagan bonfire, ushering up a sacrifice to the storm god. The fire illuminated the entire inlet. She could see the twisting of windblown snow, the tin boxes of other shanties hunched against the blizzard, and the outline of birch trees like stick figures on the coast. As she navigated around the other fish houses and got closer, she could see a man outside the shanty, and even at that distance, she recognized Stride.