He gritted his teeth and with the effort of the damned began to roll to get the fire out. Whether he was successful or not, he didn’t know, but for the moment he was alive. Was his cap aflame too? He snatched it off. It glowed with a dozen red cinders but it was not yet burning.
He began to crawl. To where?
To anywhere but here.
And now the real Matthew Corbett emerged. It took hold of the young man who had found himself in a gray kingdom of indecision and regret, whose mind had become a sluggish set of gears that did not mesh, whose spirit had been pummelled and thrashed by the memory of murder in the wilderness. The real Matthew Corbett peered out from desperate red eyes in a bloodied face. The real Matthew Corbett, who had survived so much pain and hardship and dangers that might have put any other man on his knees or in his grave, recognized that he was in the burning wreckage of Doctor Jason’s treatment room. He saw the ceiling, riddled with tentacles of fire like Professor Fell’s octopus, beginning to collapse. He saw the open trapdoor on the floor.
He saw a way out.
Mindless of all sensation but the need to survive, he began to pull himself toward the open square in the bricks.
Once there, he did not hesitate. He turned himself to descend the ladder into the pool of darkness below, and reaching up he got hold of the trapdoor’s inner ring and slammed it shut over his head just as a new rain of cinders fell from above.
Then he lost both grip and balance, and he tumbled downward into what might have been a hundred-foot hole.
But more like ten feet. He recalled the breath whooshing from his lungs, though by this point any more pain was simply a proof of life. He was on his back in the dark. No, not quite dark; he could see the glow of flames through small cracks in the trapdoor. Would the fire eat through it? He didn’t know. Would it steal his air? He didn’t know. Was he burned and smoking? Didn’t know that, either. He was in, as Hudson Greathouse might have said, one shit of a pickle.
He faded in and out. Fire sounds, burning away. The smell of smoke, scorched cloth and blood. He began to laugh at something, though he wasn’t sure what it was. Maybe he was weeping; again, he didn’t know. But at the center of his mind the real Matthew Corbett held rule, and that calm personage said Hold on.
Definitely he was laughing, he decided. Chuckling, really. The way those two bastards had jumped off the floor. And then he thought of Berry and his cold voice saying I was confused and the bitter tears watered his face.
No, he realized. Not bitter tears.
It was actually water, and it was streaming down through the cracks in the trapdoor.
The bucket brigade at work, he realized. Fighting to save the Mallorys’ house. And perhaps they could save what was left of it, for this time not all the firebombs had ignited. Did he call out Help me? Or was it just Me? For he was himself, found once more in fire and blood, and he thought My name is Matthew Corbett, and by God I am going to live.
He thought the worst of the explosion had gone upward or been absorbed by the walls of Doctor Jason’s bedroom. The thing was, he had not resisted the blast. He had not had time to resist, and though he was in pain he didn’t think he had suffered any broken bones.
There was a lesson to be had there, he decided. He vowed to decipher its meaning later, if he survived to do so. At the moment he had more important and more strenuous work to do. And it was going to hurt, but it had to be done.
He turned himself over on the cellar’s dirt, found his way to the bottom of the ladder, and began to pull himself up.
At last—somehow, with a will to live that rivalled his episode in the well at Fort Laurens—Matthew reached the top. He placed a hand against the trapdoor. It was not hot, but it was going to be an effort. He was stewing in sweat, he had very little strength and what remained was departing on a fast horse. He pushed. And pushed. And pushed some more. “Help me!” he shouted, but could he be heard? He had to keep pushing.
The trapdoor opened a crack. Matthew got the fingers of his left hand into it and kept the pressure—a dubious term, in this instance—up with his right hand. He put the back of his head against the trapdoor and shoved upward with everything he had, and suddenly the trapdoor came open with a crisp crackle and slam.
Climb up, he told himself. And stand up.
He entered a smoking, still-burning ruin where a house had been. The flames were low, however, having been for the most part bested by the bucket brigade. Matthew climbed out and sat on his knees, his head lowered; he was trying to make sense of what he should do next. Ah, yes! he recalled. Stand up!
He got to his feet by the shakiest of efforts. Instantly he threw up what tasted like a sick man’s portion of smoke. Then he began to stumble through the wreckage, his fearnaught hanging in burned tatters from his shoulders and his face freighted with blood. He became aware of shadows in the smoke, moving hither and yon with their lanterns through this new world of burned and broken timbers, smoking piles of rubble and things that had melted and reformed into objects unrecognizable as being of the earth and possessions of man. Matthew staggered toward one of the shadows and said—or thought he said, because of the shrill ringing in his ears—“Do you have some water?” He had no idea why he said that, other than he was terribly thirsty.
The shadow came forward and became a shape that became a man that became Marco Ross, the blacksmith. Ash-blackened and filthy, he was…but then again Marco Ross was usually ash-blackened and filthy, so it was all the same.
The blacksmith, a big enough man for his job, stopped in his tracks and gave a gasp like a weakling woman who is in need of air lest she faint dead away.
“Corbett?” he whispered.
It is I, Matthew thought, before his knees collapsed and he went down like a brain-hammered bull.
“News,” said Hudson Greathouse, pulling the visitor’s chair closer to Matthew’s bedside. He went on without waiting for an invitation from the grape-colored lips in a face mottled with black bruises. “McCaggers has found the corpses. At least…some of what could be found. He’s got two blankets over there with the…uh…remains laid out. It’s not pretty.”
Matthew thought it must be terribly ugly. And horrible for Ashton McCaggers, whose gorge rose at the sight of a bloodied finger. Piecing together two charred bodies would be a scene plucked from McCaggers’ worst nightmares. For the eccentric and soft-stomached coroner, it would be at least a four bucket day. And without Zed to help him, the more the worse!
“I’ll say it again.” Greathouse stared out the window at the late-afternoon sunlight. “Everyone has a time. This wasn’t yours…but it was a damned close call.” His deepset black eyes left the window and found Matthew’s red-shot swollen eyes. “When are you going to tell me what you were doing in there?”