Brian Freeman: The Bone House

Amy pushed Katie down with a shout. Her eyes locked on the purple plastic cylinder in Katie's hand. She waited for a cloud of flame to billow over her body as the flash ignited the alcohol, but Katie spun frantically in a series of empty clicks without triggering a spark. The mechanism was wet and useless.

Katie's fingers unclenched, and she dropped the lighter, but she reached out in the same instant and scooped the butt of the gun back into her hand. Amy grabbed the girl's arm and hung on. They rolled, scraping across glass, mingling alcohol and blood. Hilary saw the gun caught between the two girls and threw herself hard toward the wall as the flying barrel pointed toward her stomach. The gun didn't go off. Instead, as Katie squirmed away and aimed from her knees, Amy caught Katie's hand and grabbed her index finger before the girl could slide it on to the trigger. She bent back hard, snapping the bone. Katie screamed. The gun fell like a stone, and as the two girls struggled, Amy kicked it, and the gun slid across the floor and bumped into the far wall.

Hilary rolled across the bed and collected the gun. She pointed it at the ceiling and shouted at the two girls, who were entwined on the floor.

'Stop! Stop it now!'

Amy scrambled to her feet, pulling Katie with her. She threw Katie against the wall, and Katie landed with a groan, holding up her hands, crying with pain. Amy backed away toward Hilary, who trained the barrel on Katie as the girl bent over with her hands on her knees and tried to catch her breath.

Outside, the sirens soared in volume, seemingly from every direction. Police cars sped toward them down all of the side streets, converging on the house.

'That's it, Katie,' Hilary told her. 'No more.'

Amy slid an arm around Hilary's waist and leaned into her, weak and exhausted. She had enough strength to stare at her friend and the wreckage around her. The broken bottles. The blood-stained glass. The body of Gary Jensen, on his back, eyes open, a burnt red hole in his forehead.

'How could you do this?' Amy whispered.

The air wheezed in and out of Katie's lungs. The girl squatted and retrieved an unbroken, unopened bottle of gin, which was tipped on the floor at her feet. Hilary gestured at her with the gun.

'Stop.'

Katie picked up the bottle and shrugged. 'Go ahead, fire. One little spark will turn all of us into a fish boil.'

'Put the bottle down,' Hilary repeated.

Katie rested her head against the wall with her eyes closed. Her face was streaked with blood. Her clothes were torn. She twisted the cap off the bottle, breaking the paper seal, and drank, not caring as gin dripped out the sides of her mouth. When she stopped drinking, she hung on to the bottle by its neck, letting it dangle at her side.

'I heard them screaming,' Katie said. 'As the fire got them. You never forget.'

'Turn around, Katie. Start walking. We're leaving the house.'

'Dad said I should have killed him, too,' Katie said. 'I didn't understand back then. Now I do.'

Katie splashed gin at her feet and down her jeans and across her bare, bloody arms. She poured it over her head. She soaked the carpet, which was already sodden. Fumes rose in invisible waves around her; billowing into the shut-up room. The smell alone was enough to make Hilary's head swim.

The girl dug in her pocket and pulled out another cigarette lighter. 'I always have a backup.'

'Katie, don't do this,' Amy told her.

Katie's face was blank, like a bone-white, empty page. She didn't even seem to be in the same room with them; she was in a different house, with her dead family. She extended her arm, her thumb poised over the sparkwheel. Hilary aimed the gun at her, but she couldn't risk pulling the trigger. Katie cocked her thumb without looking at them or seeing them. With a sad smile, she spun the wheel and lit the flow of butane with a single, deadly flick.

A tiny flame popped from the top of the lighter. There was an instant in which the entire room was nothing but that insignificant fire, no greater than the light of a candle. Then the flame found the gathering fumes, and the first fireball erupted, wispy and gaseous, burning itself out in an orange burst. Hilary and Amy leaped back. Katie held the lighter upright, still lit, and she tilted the neck of the gin bottle downward. The liquid streamed through the glass and became a silver waterfall splashing toward the flame.

'Get down!' Hilary screamed.

She threw herself and Amy toward the floor just as the alcohol struck the lighter. The flame defied gravity and shot upward in a burst of lightning into the bottle and turned it into a bomb. The heavy glass blew outward in a lethal explosion of needle-sharp shards. Katie's face and torso were instantly shredded. The fire latched on to the fuel on her clothes and skin and turned her into a column of flames. She spun like a dancer, her flesh charring, her body consumed. She screamed like a dying animal, but only until the fire sped down her throat and began eating her from inside out, choking off her voice as her lungs melted.

Hilary dragged Amy toward the windows on the opposite side of the room. She tore off the curtain rod, and the heavy fabric rippled to the ground. Outside, through the glass, the world glowed with the revolving red lights of police cars driving on to the lawn around them. Inside, the doorway leading out of the bedroom was engulfed in fire and impassable, as Katie's dying body became a pyre. Sparks arced toward the bed, smoldering on the linens.

Hilary tried to pry open the lock on the window, but it was painted shut and wouldn't move. She looked around the room and saw an antique brass lamp on the nightstand closest to her. She grabbed it with both arms, dragging the cord out of the socket and winding up as if she was holding a baseball bat.

'Duck!' she shouted at Amy.

The girl dropped to the floor. Hilary threw the lamp into the window, and it burst with a singing clatter. The lamp disappeared down to the ground below them, leaving jagged knives of glass clinging to the wooden frame. Air rushed in, feeding the fire, which gnawed closer to them as it spread across the bed and climbed the walls. Searing heat burned their faces. Sparks exploded like fireworks to the ceiling and fell inches away at their feet.

Hilary bunched the fallen curtains around her hands and knocked the remaining fragments from the window. She looked out through the open square, seeing lights and vehicles drawing closer, feeling the cold of the wind and the wet rain tease the heat of the fire, and seeing the waving branches of the nearest maple beckoning to her like a rescuer. The ground was a long distance below them.

She thrust Amy toward the window. 'Jump! Jump for the tree!'

'What about you?' Amy shouted as she squeezed her body into the frame.

'Jump!'

Amy leaped forward, arms outstretched, and disappeared into the arms of the air. Hilary glanced over her shoulder in time to see the entire room burst like a red ball and surge toward her. She forced her torso through the window opening and wedged her foot on the bottom of the frame. She felt a scorching heat erupt on her back, and she knew she was on fire. She didn't look down.

Hilary jumped.

She felt the tree branches stabbing her as they took her into their arms. Her fingers grasped like claws, and she found one thick branch with her hand, only to have it peeled away by gravity as she fell. She clung to another for a split second before her weight dislodged it, and it broke with a crack, sending her downward. Another branch stopped her with a hammering blow to her back, and she ricocheted forward, falling again, her clothes tearing, her skin pummeled with scrapes and punctures.

She landed hard on her side and rolled through the mud, and when she stopped, she found herself on her back, staring up at the web of branches that had saved her. Fire spat through the broken window overhead like the tongue of a devil. Rain gently poured through the light and cooled her and washed away the blood, and the mud and puddles stamped out the flames that had licked at her back. She tried to move, to pull herself away to a safe distance, but her pummeled muscles refused to budge. All she could do for now was lie on the ground and wait.