It was over in a second. Kiss Kiss was still flinching away from the scalding knob when the flames exploded through the opening. Bathing her body in fire.
“Fuck!” Savy cried.
Clay skidded to a stop on his half-melted boots and retreated as far as the staircase, before a blood-curdling shriek halted him. “Helllllllp! Meeeeeee!”
And Clay looked frantically for a blanket, a curtain, something to smother the flames. “Drop and roll!” he yelled, and Kiss Kiss locked on to his voice. Ran right for him. A five-and-a-half foot tower of flame. Clay froze, watching her come, marveling at how the silicone in her breasts burned with a raging blue flame. “Helllllllllll!” she shrieked.
I agree. Hell is very low.
Just before the flames reached him, Savy flung a chair into Kiss Kiss’s path and Karney’s girlfriend stumbled sideways, collided hard with the banister, spun, pitched headlong down the staircase, and made terrible thunder slamming off risers and balusters. Clunk-Clunk-clunkclunkclunk!
Kiss Kiss ended up curled at the bottom, her body twisted and her head screwed around, so that her chin was resting between her shoulder blades. Eyes staring up at them. Eyes on fire.
Clay was helpless in that moment to think of his mother, unable to rip his gaze from the fallen body, the sizzling face, the flayed scalp, the eyes devolving into ocular pools that looked like melted wax. When her mouth moved, Clay gasped and his hands tugged at his own hair in horror. One foot started down the stairs.
Savy snatched him by the back of his shirt. “No!”
“Still alive,” he cried. “Still alive!”
“She’s not. We are, Clay. But not un-fucking-less we move!”
The chorus of “Eyes of a Stranger” grew warped and abruptly cut out as the fire ate its way into the unseen speakers. The flames were close now, climbing the house faster than they could, the heat stifling. Everywhere wood and plastic seemed to crackle and hiss. Clay turned from Kiss Kiss and blundered down the long hall to the third-floor staircase. The air was already choked with smoke and Clay had composure enough to reach out and drag Savy to the floor. “Stay low. Keep your mouth covered.”
Their shirts pulled over their noses, they crawled along on hands and knees. The smoke stung Clay’s eyes, slowed his breathing, dulled the importance of the messages darting between his brain and body. Just ahead was Savy’s ass and scrambling boots, moving past the Bob’s Big Boy. No exits appeared. All those exterior doors they’d seen on the way in and every one of them had vanished. Finally, Clay grabbed Savy’s foot and motioned toward the nearest room. They crawled in and Clay slammed the door. “Heat rises,” he panted. “We’ll never make it to the top.”
“What then?” Savy tried to clear her throat. “The window?”
They hurried to the room’s single portal, stared out at the sunshiny world outside—and the ravine that dropped straight off the edge of the property. “No way,” Clay said. “We’d fall eighty feet before we touched a thing.”
Savy glanced around the space, a guest bedroom with a king-size bed. “We could tie sheets together, make the drop not so bad.”
“What would we tie the sheets to?” Clay turned and saw smoke creeping under the door. “We need an exit on the other side of the house.”
Savy didn’t argue. Holding his breath, Clay led the way back into the hell of the house, scampering low and quick. He tried a door, found it locked, took two shallow breaths inside his shirt, and advanced. Visibility was so bad now that when Clay looked back he could hardly see Savy in the haze. She was crawling slower all of a sudden, and he was afraid if he didn’t keep checking on her, she’d recede into the smoke and be gone forever. At the same time, his own eyes were fighting to close, the haze stabbing small, intensely sharp needles into their soft meat.
Clay knocked into the suit of armor and almost brought the whole thing down on him. Another door appeared. But Clay could feel the heat on the knob before he even touched it. The fire was taking the house frighteningly fast. Of course. Karney had rigged it that way.
Behind him Savy was coughing violently. Clay’s own head was pounding. His heart was pumping tar. His guts were tightening. How quickly the end was coming for them. How much it would be like drifting off to sleep. So easy to give in. The next doorway, and whatever lay behind it, was their last chance. Clay crawled back across the hall and inside. Savy slammed the door and lay motionless for a long moment, breathing against the floor.
Clay slapped himself, then slapped Savy, until she flinched awake again. “Stay with me,” he croaked.
Then his own eyes rolled up and Savy had to slap him back to life.
Tearing off his shirt, Clay wrung it up as tightly as he could and shoved it under the door. Only then did he realize they were kneeling on grass. Savy seemed to understand this at the same time and they stared upward, hoping to witness open sky.
Instead, they saw white ceiling, trisected with heavy beams that held several large hanging lamps. They were in the room Clay had spotted on the way down, the one with the John Deere mower. The grass was real sod that apparently grew under lamp-power—Kentucky bluegrass, or something significant to Davis Karney, because he had selected the space as his trophy room. Grammies, American Music Awards, and other kudos in various shapes and sizes, all of them in stand-alone cases that lifted from the grass like museum displays—or grave markers—in a bucolic meadow. Tour posters and gold and platinum Demons’ records lined the walls, obscured in the gathering smoke.
Lifting herself, Savy stumbled to the trio of windows—each boasting a Karney and the Demons album cover in stained glass—and her fist knocked against one to gauge their thickness. “Break through,” she said, and they searched the
