Julia Spencer-Fleming - To Darkness And To Death

“Foreman. Extinguishers.”

“Tell him Jeremy Reid told you so.” Her wide-eyed shock at his name would have been comical under different circumstances. “That’s right, Jeremy Reid. So lay off my father.”

She bolted without another word. Jeremy looked toward the old mill. If he could get inside, he should be able to break through a window on the river side and jump. He was a strong swimmer, confident of his ability to keep even a scared and injured man afloat for the time it would take to reach the riverbank downstream from the building. If he could get past the fire. Into the water. Fire. Water.

He grinned to himself and dashed toward the river rolling past the old mill. He scrambled down the steep bank faster than he intended and wound up staggering the first few steps into the black water. It was dark down here, dark and fast-moving and steeply angled. He was afraid he would lose his footing or become disoriented if he waded in, so he forced himself to sit in the knee-deep water, sit, stretch out, and duck his head beneath the surface.

He came up gasping and yelping with pain. Christ, it felt like someone had taken a nutcracker to him. He staggered, dripping, up the bank, cupping his poor beleaguered balls. It would be a miracle if he was able to father children after this.

Facing the fiery door, he wondered if a good drenching was enough. Then he thought of the poor bastard stuck in there. It would have to be good enough. He took off his sopping suit jacket, draped it over his head, and ran inside.

Running through flame: crackling and hissing and a smell, not of smoke but of gas; heat coiling about him, his shirtsleeves crinkling, his pants legs stiffening; and then he was out, steaming but unharmed. He stumbled forward, sidestepping the antiquated machinery, wondering what was going to happen when the fire hit those monsters. Would they melt? Explode? “Hello!” he called. “Randy? Are you in here?”

Over the consuming growl of the fire, he heard a noise like a cross between a gulp and a cry. “Here! I’m over here!”

Jeremy followed the sound toward the back wall. He was expecting-He didn’t know what he was expecting, but it wasn’t a guy his own age, lying on the dusty floor, surrounded by a backpack and pieces of food, bleeding from an iron stake shoved into his gut. Jeremy dropped to his knees. “Jesus Christ!” he said. “What happened?”

“Millie. She had this thing…” Randy waved toward the wound. A palm’s width of black iron stuck up from the side of his abdomen. “I didn’t pull it out,” he said weakly. “I thought it might bleed more.”

Jeremy rested his hand gently on Randy’s shoulder. “That was good, man. Good thinking.” He glanced up and saw right away that his breaking-the-windows idea had a serious flaw in it. The casement-style windows facing the river were a good twelve or thirteen feet above his head. “You just take it easy, man. I’m going to get you out of here. I need to take a look around, but I’m not leaving you. You got that?”

Randy nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Jeremy rose and turned around. He considered the machines. Could he shove one under the window? To serve as a platform? He pushed against a few tarp-covered shapes and found they weren’t going anywhere without the help of a forklift. He went closer to the fire, grabbed a pallet, and dragged it to the back wall. He returned, took another, and hauled it away. He got a third from the stack, but by then the fire had spread too far, and he lost the rest of them. He prowled the grotesquely lit floor, looking for more pallets amid the detritus of a hundred and thirty years of papermaking. There were maybe four that were sturdy enough to use. He mentally measured their height against the wall. Stacked up, they might boost him high enough to leap for the casement of one of the windows. They weren’t going to allow him to bring Randy with him.

He had noticed the washroom as he circled through the building. Now he walled away the tiny hammer-beat of panic that was thudding against his ribs and went to check it out. It was small and stinking, as if rodents had died in the walls. The one window was another impossible-to-reach casement. But, he was amazed to see, the gravity-flush toilet still worked, and when he pulled the chain, water gushed into the bowl.

For a moment, he thought about wetting himself down again and making a break for the door. The fire had spread-to his eye, it seemed to be spreading faster than was natural-but one man, soaked and running at top speed, could probably still make it. One unburdened man.

He looked at the water, visible in flashes of firelight. This had probably been the executive washroom in his great-great-grandfather’s day. He felt sad, and sick, and proud, all at once.

He returned to Randy’s side. He could feel the heat now, even back here at the edge of the river-side wall, harsh and oppressive. He knelt down. Randy’s eyes were closed. “Hey, man. Are you still with me?”

“Yep.”

“Great.” Jeremy tried to infuse his words with as much confidence as possible. “Look, we’re going to wait this out until the fire trucks get here. They’re on their way already. Your wife called them.”

“Lisa?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s okay?”

“She’s fine. We’re going to be fine, too. Hang on, I’m going to pick you up. It may hurt.”

Randy’s whimper as Jeremy hauled him off the floor was almost lost in Jeremy’s grunt. “Jeez, man,” he gasped, staggering across the room. “You must be solid muscle.”

“Yeah.” Randy gritted the word out.

Jeremy squeezed sideways through the door of the water closet and laid the other man on the floor. “I’ll be right back,” he said, panting. He grabbed the first tarp he could find and dragged it off its machine and over to the water-closet door. He did the same with another tarp, hurrying, because he could see the fire, literally see it leaping and flowing, claiming more and more of his great-greatgrandfather’s mill. Finally he snatched up a pickle jar he had seen half-revealed by Randy’s backpack. He unscrewed it, dumped the pickles and juice as he bolted for the water closet, and plunged it into the bowl. He poured water over Randy, over himself, over the floor, over the tarps. He poured and flushed, poured and flushed, until he realized that he could see the interior of the tiny room clearly by the light of the fire. The blaze had reached the far wall.

He abandoned the pickle jar in the toilet, heaved the tarps inside the water closet, and shut the door. Feeling his way in the dark, he edged to Randy’s side, tugging the dampened tarps over them until they were both completely covered.

“This reminds me of pretend camping as a kid,” he said. “You know, crawling under a blanket?”

Randy made a noise halfway between agreement and pain. Jeremy stripped off his jacket and, folding it, placed it under Randy’s head. “Don’t get discouraged, man,” Jeremy said. “Help is on the way.”

“I’m sorry,” Randy whispered.

“For trying to blackmail my dad? You should be. When we get out of here, you’re going to go straight, right?”

“I’m sorry… I thought you were a rich snot.”

“I am a rich snot,” Jeremy said, smiling.

“Why are you helping me?”

Jeremy thought for a moment. “Well, you know.” He didn’t know how to put it into words. “You, me, we’re all human beings. We have to do right by each other.”

There was a long pause. Jeremy listened to the muffled sound of the fire’s roar. He didn’t hear any sirens. He told himself he wouldn’t be able to, over the other noise. Finally Randy spoke again. “If you get out of this and I don’t, will you do me a favor?”

“You’re getting out of this. Don’t worry.”