M Sellars - The Law Of Three

“Okay.” He gave me a questioning gaze to match his tone. “What’s it mean?”

“How many times do I have to tell you…” I began.

“Hold on,” Deckert interrupted and motioned for us both to be quiet. “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” Ben asked.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “It sounded like it was coming from upstairs.”

Ben shook his head. “I didn’t hear anything.”

We stood in relative silence, gazing up at the drop ceiling over our heads and listening intently. Detective Deckert still held his hand up, frozen in place as we waited.

“Listen.” His eyes grew wide as the noise filtered down to us. “There it is again.”

To me, it sounded akin to a screaming hiss, coupled with a dull roar, and occasionally punctuated by a popping sizzle. It was muffled by the walls and ceiling above us, but it was definitely growing louder by the second. There was something frighteningly familiar about the sound, and I was searching my memories as fast as I could, trying to place a cause with the effect.

Before I managed to make the connection, my friend spoke up. “Hear something hell, I can smell it.”

He wasn’t the only one. The acrid bite of burning wood and synthetic materials now mixed with the earlier odors in the basement and wafted through on a thin layer of smokiness.

“Seems a bit strong to be someone’s fireplace,” I observed.

Suddenly, the piercing wail of a smoke detector lanced its way through the basement from the direction of the stairs.

“Holy Jesus, Mary Mother of God,” Deckert muttered.

Ben skipped past any semblance of muttering and went directly to exclamations. “Sonofabitch!”

He was already moving when he bellowed the expletive, hooking around me and heading for the stairs. Deckert and I followed close on his heels.

This particular staircase was positioned such that it formed a steep angle diagonally against the far wall. Due to the structural design of the foundation, in order to keep that angle from being far too oblique, it reached a small landing near the bottom, then made a ninety-degree turn, and continued down for another short flight of steps. The stairwell, in and of itself, had been a part of the remodeling project and was now enclosed by thin sheets of paneling applied directly to the wooden studs.

Ben was several steps ahead of us and hit the bottom stair at full speed, launching himself past the other two and onto the landing. By the time we reached the opening, we could hear him bounding upward and coughing violently.

Deckert urged me ahead, and I stumbled for a moment, raking my shin against the edge of the stair. I groped for a handrail and found none, so I pushed off and started upward again, ignoring the pain in my lower leg. As I hit the landing with the older detective puffing hard behind me, I made the turn and was immediately enveloped in a thick haze of smoke.

The detector in the stairwell was still screaming at full volume, echoing from the paneled walls and drilling an intense pain deep in my ears.

The cloud of smoke was increasing at an alarming rate, and it easily began to overtake the narrow space as it billowed in from beneath the door. I came to a sudden halt as my eyes began to water and burn. Partially blinded, I held my arms outstretched, trying to feel my way up the staircase, and lurched forward.

My heart was racing, and I involuntarily sucked in a deep breath of the polluted atmosphere then immediately hacked it outward, sputtering and choking as I fell once again on the stairs. I could hear Ben up ahead of me barking out his shallow breaths and then the heavy sound of a body against solid wood as he threw his weight against the door. The thud was followed by my friend’s choking voice. “Owwww! Shit! Jeezus! Goddammit!”

I pulled the neck of my shirt up over my nose and mouth and dragged myself upward. Deckert was immediately to my rear, and he grabbed my arm in an attempt to help me up, but he was already breathing so hard when we hit the landing that the sudden rush of smoke was taking a far quicker toll on him.

The din of the fire was echoing from the walls, and dangerous sounding creaks and groans were now beginning to insinuate themselves into the fray.

I squinted hard in the darkness of the thickening atmosphere and saw a pinpoint of reddish-orange appear above me. It started to grow, and I realized that I was standing directly beneath it. I threw myself backwards, barreling into Deckert, and propelling us both into the wall at the bottom of the landing. The slab of paneling that angled up over the stairs suddenly erupted as flames ate through, fed by the noxious gases the treated laminate was expelling. The smoke detector began to warble sickly as the blaze lapped at it with an arcing fan of orange. A moment later, there was a loud snap followed by a crash as the sheet of paneling broke apart and fell across the stairs.

Bright orange light illuminated the cloud of smoke in the stairwell as the roar of the conflagration announced its arrival. I thought I could see the silhouette of my friend moving at the top of the stairs. I started upward amid the rush of heat and began kicking the flaming pieces of pressboard off to the sides in order to make a path.

I was still working at the task when he started down through the maelstrom. My ears were met by the cacophony of a repetitive thump, and before I could look up, I collided with my friend.

“Down!” he croaked, grabbing me by the shoulder and twisting me around. “Back down!”

I pushed forward, taking hold of Deckert’s arm as I went and pulling him back down the stairwell with me. The three of us stumbled back into the basement hacking and gulping at the less tainted air. I looked back and could see the smoke now curling along the ceiling at the mouth of the stairs, stretching grey tendrils to undulate languidly along the acoustic tiles. The paneled wall along the stairs was starting to bow and discolor, and in the amount of time it took me to suck in another breath, yellow flame began to pry open the seams.

“It’s fuckin’ blocked or somethin!” Ben sputtered the words and then coughed hard before continuing his frenzied explanation. “I couldn’t budge it. Besides that, it’s hotter than hell.”

“There’s got to be another exit,” I appealed.

“In the back,” Deckert wheezed. He had lost his hat in the rush, and his hair was sticking out in disarray. He seemed to be having even more trouble breathing than Ben or me, and he was fingering his tie in an attempt to loosen it.

“Carl, are you okay?” I reached over and worked the knot loose for him as I stared into his face.

He managed to spit out a response. “Yeah, yeah, I’m okay.”

He was lying. His face was pale, and I could see that his left hand was clenched into a fist.

“Come on,” Ben urged, hooking a hand under one of Deckert’s arms as I took hold of the other. “We gotta get outta here before…”

The fluorescent fixtures in the ceiling buzzed loudly and immediately doused, throwing us into almost complete darkness. The smoke was now rolling into the room behind us, and it was no longer content with hanging in wispy cloudlike formations around the ceiling. It had taken on a life of its own, and it was intent on filling the room to capacity with its airborne virulence.

A wave of heat was pushing through the room, chasing away the earlier frosty atmosphere that had plagued me. We started forward across the darkened basement, aiming for the dim light of the doorway some forty feet away. We had taken three steps when from behind us there came a noise unlike any I’d ever heard.

The initial sound hammered into my ears and drove directly into my skull, jarring every bone in my body. It was followed immediately by a dull roar that swelled in pitch to a persistent ring, all underscored by my ears feeling as if they were full of water.