Timothy Hallinan - Incinerator

Well, not quite to pieces. The seat, as I saw when I could open my eyes, was next to me on the floor, but I still had at least two of the legs trapped between my back and my arms, and of course there was the one good old Wilton had taped directly to my wrists. But the important thing was that I could get them over toward one side now; the important thing was that I might be able to sit down.

First, though, I had to stand up. I counted to ten and tried, but I couldn’t make my muscles work. I could tell them to do anything from the neck up, but below the Mason-Dixon Line they weren’t listening. I flexed everything I could locate, including a hand that felt bigger than a boxing glove. The pain had shut down, shock coming to the rescue, and I was happily and comfortably congratulating shock on having the sense to intervene when I realized I had to get away from the hissing stove.

Like a sidewinder, I wiggled across the floor to the door and tried to breathe through the crack at its bottom. The air coming through it was hot.

“Are you all right?” Mrs. Lewis said.

“Practicing my polka,” I said. “We’ll be dancing in no time.”

“Where’s Eddie?” she asked. It shut me up. “He took Eddie,” she said.

I managed to get to my knees without blacking out. I was wringing wet, and I’d left an oval pool of blood on the floor. I got one foot under me and then the other, and, leaning against the wall, pushed myself upright. My ears were ringing, and my eyes refused to focus. The truck’s interior looked as it might have if I’d been seeing it through moving water.

Taking one slow step after another, I crossed to the counter. I had to sit on the counter.

It had been so easy the first time, the time Wilton had told me to do it. Put the hands on the counter behind me, give a little jump, and allez-oop. But now I couldn’t use my hands, and I didn’t have a little jump in me, not even a very little jump. Not a single decorous Easter-bunny hop. The counter was almost as high as the small of my back. It might as well have been as high as the walls of Troy.

“I can’t get up there,” I said to myself.

“Up where?” Mrs. Lewis said. Then she began to cry again. “Where’s Eddie?”

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.