The Cloud

car, smooth down my shirt, a reflexive maneuver I imagine enhances my professionalism. I pull sunglasses from a shirt pocket and don them.

“I’ll stay in the car.”

“Join me.”

Faith sighs. She steps from the car, lips pursed. Each time she accedes to go along with me, I trust her less. But this time she’s going to come in handy. She can be partner and decoy to allow me to find and focus on Sandy.

Just then, a better option for breaching the learning annex presents itself. The building explodes.

33

A siren wails.

I orient. Black smoke swirls in the form of a twister from the back of the annex.

“The delivery truck.”

“What?” I can read Faith’s lips but can’t actually hear over the siren or stunned eardrums.

I sense movement and turn to see a police cruiser and a van careening up the driveway behind me, followed by the din of another oncoming siren.

I run up the concrete staircase leading from the lot to the heavy annex doors. As I near them, they swing open. A mousy woman I think I recognize from my previous visit bounces out, blinking, waving. “I’m sending them this way.” I don’t take her meaning until the first boy juts through the doorway. Then another, then a stream. Most in their early teens wearing blue uniforms. Hooting and hollering. Mingled with them, a few younger kids in street clothes. No Sandy. Something tells me she’s in there, in the back, where smoke mingles with gurgles and pops.

I press myself against the open door, avoiding the scrum. Waiting for my moment. It comes shortly, a lull in the dense parade. I head into the stream, and the annex. Inside the doors, ordered chaos. The mousy woman directs a thinning group of boys to safety. Their diminishing numbers, coming from a set of double doors that lead to the inside, suggest most have cleared out already.

The mousy woman looks at me. Then her eye catches an oversized teen carrying two cans of paint-arts- and-crafts class, I think-but she clearly sees the tools of imminent prank or vandalism and, comically, snags the boy’s huge arm in her own wiry talon. I whisk by her, skirt a handful of blue-clad boys, slip into the guts of the annex.

Temporary walls and smoke. A long hallway, beneath the cavernous ceiling, bisects classrooms separated by some cheap material, rollers at the bottom that give the place a hollow, tinny feeling. I peek into the room on the right. A library. Books on the walls, the floors, a bookshelf yanked down. I’m about to turn away when I see the boy. Under a table, rocking, a book in his lap that he’s reading or cradling. “Hey!” No recognition, his eyes remain down. I take a half dozen steps to him. He looks up. Says something.

“What? You’ve got to go.”

“It’s mine.” He pulls the book to his chest. An illustrated Treasure Island.

“You have to get out. It’s all yours. Take it with you.”

I cough, once, twice, a couple of more times for effect. The thickening smoke will be dangerous in another few minutes.

Then: Boom! A mid-sized explosion comes from the back of the building. Like an appliance erupting, something localized. The boy crawls out, stands, sprints past me, clutching the book. I follow him back into the hallway. He heads to the exit. I head the other way, now not a soul in sight. Smoke pours from a room near the back. And within it, a figure, walking, emerging. I blink. Is it a boy? He looks translucent, an apparition. Isaac?! I blink again. The image is gone, just my imagination coming out of the smoke. I wretch out a cough. A thin carpet of gunpowder-colored smoke coats the high ceilings, resolving into a gray fog as it floats lower to the ground.

I’m about to pass the next room on the left. Better check. Inside, a small kitchen, refrigerator, microwave, bag lunches on a folding table, a break room for the staff. No boys. Move on. A few steps more down the hallway, the next room on the right. An open doorway. Inside, folding tables and chairs, easels around the edges, pails on the tables filled with pencils, pens and markers, paint cans in the corner on a drop cloth. No boys. Nothing to see here. But then, my eye catches something on the outside, through the windows. A hulking figure, a stout man wearing a blazer, carrying a briefcase. He looks out of place. I know his actual place: an alley in Chinatown. The man who blackened my eye. He’s moving by the window, quickly, looks up, must sense me, staring in my direction. Can he see me? He semi-smiles, cocks his head.

There’s another explosion.

The stout man propels forward, like a projectile, but still on his feet. He’s not felled, not even thrown, just accelerated, toward the front of the building, like a bad special effect in a 3-D movie. I duck to avoid a smattering of shattered glass. I reorient, not really in danger, the explosion having come from the outside, the back of the building. I’d bet my fees for a hundred blog posts that’s where Sandy is.

I scramble back into the hallway. I sprint into the darkening air to the last two doors on the right, covering my mouth. I ignore the heat wave growing by degree with each step. I reach a door two rooms away from the one pouring the lion’s share of the smoke and now, I can see, licks of orange flame.

“Help!” A voice rises over the gurgles and pops. I blink away the heat and peer through the door. Sandy stands at the other end of a room. Trapped.

Between her and me is a wooden desk, or what remains of it. It’s fully enflamed. It’s on its side, blocking her path to the door. Outside, more trouble. A burning delivery van, white and wide-load, like the one I saw driving up here earlier, pressed against the building. Its nose is smashed into a gas pump. A diesel pump. The explosion explained? Instant guess: bad man from Chinatown drives van into pump?

I focus back on the narrow room where Sandy stands. It’s separated from the one next to it only by the shattered remains of a glass wall. It dawns on me what I’m looking at, and standing in the doorway of: an observation room. The glass wall allowed whoever sat in this narrow room to look at whatever was happening in the much larger room just to my left, the one that is consumed with flames. I squeeze my eyes shut to protect my retinas, dispel the heat. I open them and look at the enflamed room and see only a puzzle of images: long cafeteria tables with lines of burning laptops on top of them; on the far end, a pile of handheld devices that look from here like portable video game players; walls painted with murals, going up in flames, including an image of an imposing but smiling ninja juggling a half dozen balls, his black ponytail curling up in flames. Below the Ninja, tinged with flames, I can make out the painted words: “Masterful Juggler.”

A computer at the far end of a table pops with a mini-explosion. On the floor, in the far corner, a freestanding little kids’ basketball hoop burns. It looks like a scarecrow, demonic.

I pick up a scent, something unnatural.

Chemical fire. Something powerful and deliberate. The smashed diesel pump a decoy? An ostensible accident and an excuse for a fire?

I look back to Sandy.

“Are you okay?” I shout. She gives me a “what the fuck are YOU doing here” look. She turns away from me. She lifts a chair, like she’s going to clear away the jagged glass left in the window so she can make her escape, then drops the chair. She looks at me. “Save yourself!”

A minute ago, she yelled for help. Now she’s showing she’s got it all taken care of, bravado in front of a journalist, even now. I hear sound coming from the hallway behind me, voices, feet. Friend or foe? Before I can check, Sandy lifts the chair again, spins it through the jagged window glass, creating a wide berth. She’s got an exit. She’s not taking it. Instead, she’s throwing a metal storage box out of the observation room. Then another. They’re filled with folders.

Sandy looks at me.

I feel a hand on my shoulder.