The fire spread quickly. She started to laugh and scream, feeling her head split open, and then she was completely in the cloud.
It feels like someone hitting you with a sledgehammer, to which they’ve stuck a thumbtack, point out.
The bullet hit me high in the left shoulder, spinning me to crash into the first bank of seating. For a moment my vision went black, the impact to the back of my head hurting more for a moment than the shell wound.
I hit the ground hard and rolled, tried to push up with my left hand, felt something like cracking glass shoot along my arm. I reached up and grabbed the top of the wooden frontage with my right hand, hauled myself up.
Blood was running out of my jacket. My whole arm felt hot. The pain in my head already felt like nothing at all, and I knew that my shoulder was going start feeling worse real fast.
I ran into the corridor at the end of the room. A sharp, right-angle turn took me into darkness. I could hear the echoes of Gary shouting from somewhere up ahead, however, and I chased the sound.
When I made another right, I heard the sound of my footsteps change, flat and quiet, and knew I must be in a chamber of similar size to the one I’d just left. I pulled out my cell phone and flipped it open, the screen shedding a weak light as I stumbled forward.
This room had no seats, was more like a storage vault or an antechamber for the other room. I ran straight through it toward the other end.
On the other side was a door to another short corridor, with two possible exits on either side. I realized I must now be close to the series of tunnels that had delivered us to the large chamber in the first place.
A high-pitched laugh/scream echoed down one of the corridors toward me. The girl. Then a shout that didn’t sound like Gary. It had to be the man who’d shot me. I wanted to see him again, and soon.
I held the phone up toward both of the openings in turn and saw a smear of something dark that could’ve been blood on one wall. I took the corridor next to it. It felt like this was angling upward again. As I ran up it I could smell something new. Not the body smell from before, though that was present. Something acrid and dry.
I started to heard different noises ahead, too, and thought I must be gaining on either Gary or the other man, even though they didn’t sound like voices or footsteps.
It was getting warmer.
Then I knew what the smell was. It was smoke. Something was on fire. The noise I’d heard was crackling and the sound of burning wood. I stopped running. I didn’t want to head into a dead end full of fire. I wasn’t sure I could find my way back the other way, however, and I didn’t want to get stuck the wrong side. Whatever I wanted to do, the longer I took, the harder it would get. So I started onward again.
Soon the light from the phone was reflecting back at me, bounced against billowing smoke, showing me nothing, so I stuffed it into my pocket. I pulled my coat off, crying out as it snagged the wound, then held it up over my mouth. I could breathe less painfully, but it didn’t help my eyes, and as I kept pushing forward, I was half blinded, keeping my back to the wall and sliding sideways along it, knowing I had to keep going however much my body wanted to run in the other direction.
Then it was suddenly hotter and louder, and I lurched into a room I’d seen before, the one with the body bags. This time I’d come into it from the far end, near the body in the chair. It was still there, the plastic flicker lit by flames that filled the center of the room.
I headed away from it toward the right-hand wall, now a blaze of burning books, pulling myself over furniture, shoving crates aside in an attempt to put something solid between me and the flames.
I stepped on at least one of the bags on the floor, breaking something inside. At the other end of the room, I saw a shape silhouetted in the doorway.
I shouted Gary’s name. He didn’t hear me, or if he did, he just kept on running anyway.
In her head, Madison was now sprinting along a tide line, as if she and her mother and father had gone for a walk on Cannon Beach at the end of a long afternoon, and her parents were chatting happily, and the weather was fine, and so she’d gone running ahead, feet pounding over the sand, running along the edge of the world. She would run to the end and then turn around, come back to her parents with open arms, and her father would bend down to catch her, the way he always had, even though she was too big for that now and they both knew it, though they pretended they did not.
But somehow she was also running beside a different body of water, and in a different time. She was running along Elliott Bay, here in Seattle, ten years ago and in the dead of night, fleeing in the knowledge that someone was coming after him/her and that whoever it was wanted her/him very dead. That they discovered what lay buried beneath the basement of his house in the Queen Anne District, and the others hidden under the building here in Belltown, and decided that his behavior could not be tolerated anymore. They had come for him just ahead of the police, and he’d managed to get out of the house, but he knew they were serious, and his advantage would not last long. Marcus had always suspected that Rose had been behind the decision, Joe Cranfield’s little protégée stretching her wings. Now he knew that it had been Shepherd who’d been there to do the Nine’s killing work, barely a month after he’d agreed to the bargain struck in a hotel bar here in Seattle—a bargain Marcus had designed, because he’d known, with the experience of many lifetimes, that the shadows at the end of this life were drawing in.
They had chased, and he had run, toward a trap with Shepherd standing at the end.
In a way Marcus respected this. Shepherd was the obvious choice, and who could blame him for working both sides? But had they known that Marcus was still alive when they’d sealed him in the bag and left him to scream himself to death in the pitch-black of that cellar room?
Yes, he believed they had.
That was not nice. That was not the way they were supposed to leave. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve died. It’s never something you look forward to. And as Marcus watched the child try to deal with the situation she was in, he began to feel darkness gathering once more. Shadows he was not prepared to confront again so soon.
Though her head was full of movement, in reality Madison was going nowhere. She was crawling on hands and knees along a corridor, dragging herself through dust and ash, unable to see anything. Her lungs were so full of smoke it felt like someone had shoveled earth into them. She’d burned her hand and arm in the room where she’d set the fire, caught by surprise at how quickly it had taken, and the pain was intense. She did not know in which direction to go, and she’d had enough. Of everything.
She was not going to survive this. She knew that. So she was trying now to find the way to another place, one deep inside, pushing the man away, knowing how much he wanted to be back but feeling his grip falter as he realized she’d rather be dead than live like this, that this girl was not prepared to be his home.
Then she banged into something. She raised her head, sensing that it was a fraction lighter here. There was cooler air coming from somewhere, too.
In a flash of clarity she was aware that she was no longer in a corridor, but in more open space—and that what she’d run into was the foot of a staircase.
She hauled herself onto the bottom step and started pulling herself up the wooden stairs. All she had to do was get up them and then run, really run this time. There was a door to the street up there, and past it was the outside world. She could get out through it and then keep running.
Straight into the busy road, without looking left or right. It would be a sad solution, but it was workable. And it would teach Marcus a lesson. Be careful which little girl’s body you try to steal.