“Yes, exactly.”
“Just like I’m supposedly Dredd Yancy?” Derrick’s dark eyebrows knitted so tightly a ridge formed between them. “A man whose brother browbeats him to pitiful submission, whose wife left him and had another man’s baby, and who eventually acted on all that bottled-up rage and shot his own father? And then blamed another man because he was too much a coward to take the fall? That Dredd Yancy?”
“You aren’t him anymore,” I said, with as much conviction as I could muster. “It’s not too late to move beyond all of that. Leave the past behind, forever.” The urge to weep pushed again at my chest. “The past needs to stay in the past, from now on. We don’t belong there.”
“It’s all right,” Derrick murmured, patting my arm; inept at offering comfort, he attempted nonetheless. “I know you’re worried about your husband. I’m so sorry.”
I thumbed tears from my eyes. “I have to believe he survived. I can’t lose him now. Not after everything we’ve been through.”
“If we make it out of this place, back to the right timeline, I mean, what if I don’t remember any of what happened here?”
Before I could answer, a low-pitched, resonating rumble vibrated through the floor. Startled, we sprang to our feet; Derrick gathered me close in a gesture of protective masculine instinct. But in the next second we were forced to brace against each other in order to remain upright. The rumbling shuddered through our bodies. If there had been plates or glasses on nearby shelves, they would be shattering around our ankles.
“An earthquake?” I shouted.
The fog swirled, an indifferent mass offering no answers. Nothing in sight suggested alarm but the vibrations increased in intensity.
“Come on,” Derrick decided, leaning close to be heard. “We can’t just stand here!”
Holding tightly to one another, we stumbled forward.
We extinguished the candle lanterns and tried to sleep; in the darkness, our backs lightly touching, Patricia and I lay alongside each other while she nursed Monty and I curled on my right side, facing Malcolm. He sat on the floor near my side of the bed, angled toward the door and with his rifle braced over his lap; we couldn’t bear to stop touching. The late hour and the rain canceled the need for words but our caresses spoke volumes. I stroked his hair, his face, committing its contours to memory; from time to time he gathered my questing hand and kissed my fingers, one by one, or simply placed my palm against his cheek.
Maybe an hour passed – my eyelids drifted closed at last, weighted with near-delirious exhaustion. The thunder eventually rolled east of Windham but the rain continued unabated, weeping over the boardinghouse and muffling the sound of someone’s passage along the hallway. The furtive steps infiltrated my half-dozing mind, shaping into a blurry gray nightmare. A man crept along only yards from us, rabid eyes fixed on the bedroom door. He wanted us dead with a desire hinging on insanity. He was losing touch with reality, with everything but the need to consume our lives. A small pack of strike-on-the-box matches curled in one hand, a bottle of whiskey in the other. In the dream I hovered along behind him, ghost-like, watching mutely.
My legs jerked beneath the covers.
Wake up…
Camille! Wake up!
My eyelids parted in time to observe our closed door flare with radiant light, sudden and shocking, like a firecracker exploding in an empty black sky. Time skidded to a painful halt, each subsequent moment stumbling forward, one to the next, like an injured runner. Backlit by orange heat, Malcolm and Cole fired their rifles repeatedly at the door – now ablaze – and the adjacent wall, a hail of destruction, the rifle rounds splitting the drywall as though it was tissue paper. Patricia and I huddled together on the bed, Monty wailing between us, unable to blink, unable to process what was happening. Thick smoke swelled inward and long arms of flame encompassed the ceiling beams – and sense suddenly overpowered immobility.
“Get up!” I shouted, grabbing Patricia’s elbow, half-dragging her and Monty from the bed. Rain poured over the exterior of the boardinghouse but this interior space would be engulfed in less than a minute. The rain wouldn’t save us from burning alive if we remained stationary.
But we’re on the second floor!
We can’t jump to the ground from up here! What about the baby?!
Of course Fallon had realized all of these things.
“Malcolm!” I screamed. “Cole!”
Smoke billowed, stinging my eyes, closing off my lungs. Heat blistered my skin – a fleeting image of us splayed on a charcoal grill bounced through my mind. Malcolm’s pupils reflected the flames, his face bathed in searing red. He threw aside his rifle and clenched hold of my elbow, understanding the necessity of jumping to safety. We couldn’t chance a dash through the fire. The entire wall was now overwhelmed – in seconds the floor and ceiling would follow suit. Cole used his rifle to break the window, scraping the stock along the remaining triangle-shaped shards, clearing the way as best he could; cool air rushed inside as he leaned out, sparing precious seconds to scan the ground below.
“The bed!” I cried, pulling free from Malcolm’s hold, scrabbling to tear the quilts from its surface before they became ash; their bulk could pad the landing. The floor torched my feet, clad in nothing but dirty socks, as I bunched the blankets against my chest; we could hardly see through the smoke.
“Hurry!” Cole bellowed.
I leaned as far as I dared over the windowsill, letting the blankets tumble directly below. The ground appeared impossibly far away – like the speckled, chlorinated water miles beneath the high dive at the city pool of my youth. There was exactly no time to decide in which order we should exit the room, only that Patricia and the baby could not go first.
Malcolm shouted, “I’ll go, then Camille, and we’ll catch you, Patricia! Cole, you help her down!” And without another
