I was getting sleepy. I thought about resting. I’d closed my eyes and let my head slump forward when I heard screams. They were outside, far from the truck, but they cut through the aluminum and through Mrs. Lewis’s sobs, and they galvanized me. Wilton had gone to work.
The frog’s legs twitched on the electrified plate again, only they were my legs this time, and I was sitting on the counter, my arms twisted impossibly to one side, the legs of the stool bisecting my back at an angle like misaligned bicycle spokes. The wooden block with the carving knives wedged into it was directly behind me, and I pushed my hands against it, feeling blades slicing through tape and into skin, feeling hot new wetness behind me, but sawing up and down anyway until the stool leg taped between my hands fell free with a clatter onto the countertop, and I could open my slick, wet fingers. Willing myself to be careful, I pushed the tape between my wrists against the black at the edge of the block, angling veins and arteries away from the other one. I cut myself, deeply, and yanked upward involuntarily, and my wrists were loose.
They were a mess. They looked as though I’d loaned them to someone for suicide practice, but the cuts were clean, and the blood, while plentiful and disconcertingly red, wasn’t alarming. I held my hands above my head for a moment, willing the blood to stop, and then realized I didn’t have the time.
“We’re going,” I said to Mrs. Lewis. “Can you walk?”
No answer, just a kind of steady keening that put me in mind of an Irish wake. “Well,” I said, sliding down from the counter, “you’re going to have to.” I pulled both of the knives from the block and glanced outside the windows. The fire was washing against the walls of the truck. “In fact,” I said, “you’re going to have to run.”
First I snapped off the knobs on the gas stove. Then I went to her and sliced through the first spiral of fiber tape. “You’re going to do what I say,” I said, pausing. “Because if you don’t, you’re going to die. Do you understand me?”
She stopped crying.
“That’s better,” I said, sawing away. “Here’s the plot. Wilton turned the gas on in the big stove and then set fire to the weeds outside.” I’d started at her feet, and the plastic had parted to reveal slippers and a pale blue terry-cloth robe. She probably dressed for national holidays. “The second problem is how to run across the fire, but even in those slippers you can probably manage it. The first problem is how to open the door without blowing ourselves over the rainbow.” I cut through the last length of tape, and she glared up at me, face shiny with sweat, blond hair matted against her face. Her eyes were puffy, but whatever despair had seized her, it had had the sense to retreat. “Can you stand up?” I asked.
“You look terrible,” she said. It wasn’t a particularly compassionate tone.
“I’m not going to look any better, either,” I said, using a bloody sleeve to smear more blood across my face. “Not unless we work out a way to step outside while remaining physically intact.” I heard my voice enunciate the fussily correct words from a distance, like listening to a practiced orator talking to me from the bottom of a well. I put out a hand to keep myself upright.
“Gas,” she said, wrinkling her nose.
“Are you listening to me? I told you, Wilton-”
“Wilton,” said the Ice Princess dismissively. “We need something to put over the door.”
I looked at her for eight or nine of my remaining heartbeats. “Right,” I said. “Something to put over the door.”
With both knives in my right hand, moving more carefully than may or may not have been strictly necessary, I got myself to the door. It didn’t seem to take more than a week. Wilton’s rubber coat was heavier than I’d thought it would be, or maybe I was weaker than I’d realized, but I lifted it up, stretched it open, and drove a knife through its shoulder at the upper left-hand corner of the door. Then I repeated the action with the other shoulder, and there it hung, a more or less impermeable air curtain.
“Suppose it’s locked?” she said at my side. I hadn’t heard her move.
“Why would catering trucks lock from the inside?” I asked. “To keep the food from escaping?”
“Try it,” she said.
I lifted the right edge of the coat and tried the handle. Locked.
“Smart guy,” she said. “I always get smart guys.”
I leaned against the counter. It was either that or fall down. “Well, lady,” I said, “I’m the last one you’re going to get.”
“I doubt it,” she said. “Excuse me.” And she shouldered past me and slipped beneath the rubber coat. I stood there, watching the bulge of her back, and then I heard a sharp snap, and the coat flapped as the door banged open against the side of the truck, and she was gone.
Having let the little lady kick the door out, the smart guy had no choice but to follow. I eased the coat back an inch or two and looked out at the panorama of flame, and then she called, “Left, stupid,” and I saw that Hoxley hadn’t ringed the truck with fire; intentionally or not, he’d left a path for us, and it was still open.
But the flames were licking at the right-hand side of the door, and the coat was blowing away behind me, and it all seemed to add up to a good reason to run. I jumped off the steps and sprinted around the truck, heading back toward the Haunted Castle, and I was almost there before the truck blew behind me with a whoosh and then a sound like a train hitting a timpani, and the shock wave knocked me flat on my bleeding face into the weeds.
When I looked up, the hills in front of me were on fire.
The screaming was louder now, a kind of steady white noise, and people who, I realized, had been rushing by me, toward the truck and the parking lot, suddenly dropped to their knees or fell on their backs. Those who were still standing milled uncertainly, regarding the flames from the truck like the last chapter in their personal serial. A child let out a shrill sound like a steam whistle.
“Go on,” I shouted, getting up. I pushed a man and woman in the direction of the truck. “You can get around it. Go to the parking lot. Get out of here. Go!”
In front of me, the turrets of the castle and the roofs of the town beyond it were black silhouettes against a slanting line of flame that climbed slowly upward, circling the natural hollow in which the Faire had been set. I scrubbed blood from my eyes and followed the blazing track up the slope as though it were the trail of a prey, and at the end of it there he was, spiraling upward and around the bowl like the Flaming Man in a nightmare, leaving footprints of fire wherever he stepped. And, for another precious heartbeat, everything froze.
Fire burns up.
Except for the trailer, he hadn’t ignited anything between the people and the exit.
He was sparing them.
There were police now, pushing people in front of them, big men in blue uniforms, swearing and sweating as they shoved. One of them, like a cliche on a crude recruiting poster, held a little girl in his arms.
I pushed against the crowd, fighting my way upstream with fists and elbows, heading for the other side of the bowl. In the streets of the ersatz town, the reflections of fire danced the flame fandango on the walls. It was emptier here, and I could run. Most of the people were already behind me, sprinting for the relative safety of internal combustion, their magic carpet out of C3.
My ankles told me I was running uphill before my head knew it. I was too busy sucking air and following Wilton’s stick-thin figure with my eyes to know what my body was up to. He’d gone more than halfway around the bowl now, slanting uphill all the way and moving laterally ahead of the flames. His track, I saw, would eventually lead him to the crest. It would have to; he couldn’t double back without roasting in his own fire.
Shots.
They popped softly in the air like dud fireworks, and I saw men, just dark shapes, on top of the hill. As I labored upward, they fanned out, some ahead of Wilton and some behind him. A few of the men extended their arms and silly little spurts of flame, insignificant in the Kingdom of Conflagration, were followed by more pops.
Wilton stopped suddenly and sat down as though the hill had pushed a chair beneath his feet.
He was seventy-five yards above me now, and the men were a hundred yards above him. The funnel spouted fire over his head as he sat, a nimbus for the god of combustion, probably roasting gnats but not much else. I stumbled and fell, and he got up.
He was moving again, in the same direction as before, touching the fire to the ground at every step. Some of the police who had tried to get at him from behind found flames climbing the hill below them and retreated, either straight up or up and toward Wilton. I was running again, much closer to him now, making an impossible amount of noise, and when Wilton finally heard me, I was near enough to see the smeared death’s-head of his face and the irregular line of his teeth. They were bared as though he were trying to chew his way through the air.
