“Catherine!” Tony screamed. “Catherine! Are you in there?” He slammed his fist over and over. The side of his head throbbed from where it had connected with the window, and the circumstances—well, it all felt too much like one of his dreams. “Catherine, goddamnit!”
He rammed his shoulder into the door, then tried to kick it, but he was kidding himself. He rattled the knob. Kept screaming her name. The dog barked and barked. He left and ran back around the side of the street to where the homeless guy was sitting under the Goodwill’s awning, smoking a cigar or blunt and watching the city burn.
“Hey man,” said Tony. “I’ll give you all the money in my wallet if you help me break a door down.”
“What kind of door?” he asked, curious but noncommittal.
“I don’t know—a fucking door. A door I can’t break down.”
“Hold on, I got you.”
He picked up a few of his rags and wandered into the unlocked Goodwill. Tony waited for a minute and thought about leaving. Then the man emerged from the store, carrying a crowbar like a sword. They reached Catherine’s apartment, and Tony emptied his wallet into the man’s hands, maybe sixty-five bucks.
“Thank you much,” he said. “This illegal?”
“Look around, man,” Tony said frantically. “There’s nothing fucking illegal anymore. Now help me open the door or give that to me.” He pointed madly at the crowbar. “My daughter’s in there.”
The man shot him a horrified look, big folds of his brow bunching into tension. “Well, why didn’t you say. Here.” He handed the bills back. “I can’t take your money. Not for God’s work.”
Tony jabbed two fingers into his chest. “Keep the money. Open the fucking door.”
The man slammed the end of the crowbar into the frame and pried. A minute of wrenching, each of them taking turns, and the door ripped open in a crack and shriek of splintering wood.
At first he thought he had the wrong apartment, and then he thought maybe looters had torn through, and he feared for his daughter. But then he recognized the place was just a dump. Pizza boxes and liquor bottles and fast-food containers littered every surface because the garbage bin was overflowing. Every dish in the sink, dirty laundry strewn over the furniture. He swung the sat-nav’s flashlight back and forth, trying to make sense of the person who lived here, and it revealed yet another table where empty vodka and tequila bottles stood like mini skyscrapers in a diorama.
He made his way to the bedroom and found Catherine in a beanbag chair, a dead VR set and headphones wrapped around her face. Her mouth hung open and drool ran down her lip. She wore sweatpants and a T-shirt with no bra. There was a glass with a small pink straw poking out and the entire room reeked of booze. She was breathing, though. The dog trotted up to her and licked the tips of her dangling fingers, but she did not respond. He pulled the VR set from her face.
“Catherine,” he said gently. Her eyes didn’t even flutter. There were garbage bags taped across the window, blacking out the room. He didn’t see her phone anywhere.
He still had the bag of Gatorades and splashed some of the sticky beverage on her cheeks. “Cat.” She looked terrible. Her hair was matted. She’d put on weight since he saw her in December, and her skin was riddled with acne. He splashed more Gatorade. “Khaleesi,” he said.
Finally, she swiveled her head to get away from the moisture. Her eyes slid open. She looked drunk, high, and confused. “Daddy?”
“Honey, we’ve gotta go.”
“What?”
“We’ve gotta go. There’s a fire.”
“Huh?” She looked around her room, as if trying to remember where she was. “Whose dog is that?”
Tony took a moment to scan the room, looking for evidence of what else she might be on. He had a father’s impulse to open all her drawers, ransack the medicine cabinet, search under her bed, but there was no time. She drank a bit of the Gatorade, but she couldn’t walk without Tony’s help. She laid an arm around his shoulder and leaned into him, feet dragging, eyes slipping open and shut.
“I fell asleep with the VR on,” she mumbled. “It was a space journey. I was going to space.”
When he got her outside the apartment, the homeless man was still standing there with the crowbar.
“She okay?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” said Tony. From their perch on the second floor, he could see the glow of the fire just over the hill, hear its steady raging thunder, watch its embers drifting down onto roofs. They would never outrun it, not with Catherine the way she was. She didn’t have a car. The sat-nav still worked, but who would he call? And what was the likelihood any kind of rescue would reach them before the fire engulfed the neighborhood? He thought of Ash’s report. Buried amid an unexpectedly tender story of his younger sister convincing him to reveal his sexuality to their mother, there’d been a few useful suggestions for what to do in a wildfire. “What’s around here? Something brick and big. With a basement maybe. Something that won’t ignite right away.”
The homeless guy looked at the dog, as if it might know, and the dog looked right back at him.
“The middle school,” Catherine slurred. “S’pose,” she added. And she gestured vaguely to the south.
“Help me,” Tony begged, but the man was already sliding under Catherine’s arm to keep her upright.
“He smells,” complained Catherine.
“You ain’t fresh out the bath yourself, sister,” said the man.
They struck off down Catherine’s street, a savage wind raking heat and embers across their faces. The heat was so intense, it created a sunburned feeling on his skin. From the map it looked like there was some kind of movie studio to the left, but the flames had reached it. A few of the structures within the gated compound were already burning. The only other sound besides the fire was the dog barking at them as it bounded ahead, urging them on, Lassie-like. Catherine wasn’t dead weight, but she was close, her feet barely carrying her.
Tony could’ve cried with relief when he saw the campus. Thomas Starr King Middle School had trailers and classroom annexes that would catch, but the main building was solid brick. A few of the houses surrounding the school were already igniting. The tops of the palm trees surrounding the PE field were torches, raining embers on the campus. Tony hustled their ragtag crew across the basketball courts, the soccer fields, and to the main building. The doors were locked, but it only took his friend a moment with the crowbar to bust out a window and crawl inside to let them in. Tony checked the sat-nav. There was an SOS button, and he activated it. He texted Holly anyway, telling her what had happened, where they were, and that he was sorry. Then he ducked into the school. They found the stairs to a basement, and there, along with a boiler and janitorial supplies, they hunkered down, soot-covered, smoke-reeking, and thirsty, hoping the walls of the building would hold, and the fire wouldn’t eat all their oxygen.
It was hot as hell in that basement, lit only by a haze of orange splashing down from the window near the ceiling. He found a flashlight in a supply closet, but there was nothing else of use. No food, no water. The temperature ticked up the longer they sat there. The smell of smoke leaked down to them but not the substance itself. The second it crept under the metal door at the top of the stairs, it would mean they were done. Catherine had fallen back asleep in the corner of the room, using her arm as a pillow. The dog settled near her, resting its head on her feet. Tony tried to give her some of the last bottle of Gatorade, but she just wanted to pass out. He drank a little and offered the rest to the homeless man. Tony thanked him for everything he’d done. “Probably just so we can die down here instead of out there but thank you anyway.”