Bentley Little: The Burning

They all backed up.

The second bottle had been saved in case the first wasn't enough to start a fire, but that wasn't necessary. Flaming drapes blew outward through the broken picture window, accompanied by billows of black smoke. The sitting room and the foyer were hellish infernos. Another window shattered. And another.

They stood staring, the night darkening around them as the fire grew brighter, moved to other rooms, came onto the porch where Ned's unbroken bottle had landed, touched the shake roof.

Jolene thought she heard a cry of rage from somewhere deep within the blaze, a crazed infuriated bellow that blended with the roar and crackle of the conflagration. Would the fire reach the cellar? she wondered. Even in the upper basement, there wasn't much to burn. Although it seemed highly unlikely that the flames would penetrate the trapdoor, a living person would still suffocate down there from lack of oxygen and probably die of smoke inhalation.

But whatever was down there was neither living nor a person.

Perhaps the heat from above and the weight of the collapsing house would crush the cellar until it was nothing but a pit full of smoldering ashes.

Skylar looked up at her. "He wasn't in the basement," he said, as though reading her thoughts. "Not really. He was in the whole house."

He hoped he was right.

And as he watched the fire, held tightly to his small hand and heard once again that bellow of rage, she thought that he probably was.

Thirty-six

Promontory Point, Utah

An old guy who looked like a prospector with three cameras hanging around his neck lay butchered at her feet, his torn, broken body covered with blood and vomit.

Her vomit.

Angela wiped her mouth, her stomach still feeling queasy, the stench of death strong in her nostrils. All about her were the dead and dying. She had no idea what that thing was that had come through here, all wild claws and silent destruction. She knew only that it was made of mold, the same black mold that had been transferred to her by the corpse in the tunnel, that had taken over Babbitt House and corrupted her roommates.

But just as in Flagstaff, she was apparently immune. The mold had no effect on her. As far as she could tell, it had no effect on any of the Native Americans either.

It affected only white people.

The conclusion appeared inescapable. In Flagstaff, it turned them into raging bigots. Here, it slaughtered them with abandon. Angela could only assume she had been spared because she was of Mexican descent, a minority.

As crazy as everything else was, the concept of a politically correct monster seemed the most ridiculous and hardest to believe. How else to explain what had happened, though? The Chinese dead and their cohorts had spared her and all of the Native Americans but struck down with fury the Caucasian camera crew from CNN. Did that mean . . . ?

She looked around frantically until she saw in the crowd the familiar face she'd been searching for.

Derek.

He was still alive.

They'd been separated in the melee, and she was irrationally, exuberantly grateful that he was unharmed.

She recalled the photo of Derek's father she'd seen in his house, Mrs. Yount standing next to a man considerably darker than herself.

Derek saw her the same instant she saw him. He ran over, giving her a hard, desperate hug. Her heart skipped a beat, and she was suddenly suffused with a feeling of dread. Where was his mom? And his brother? She hugged him back and could tell from the lurching of his shoulders and the tight way he pressed his face into her hair that he was sobbing.

No, she thought.

Yes, she knew.

Around them, as if on cue, perhaps following the same instinct that had led them here in the first place, the Native Americans joined hands and started chanting. It reminded her of that Hands Across America thing her parents had done before she was born, although there seemed something vaguely religious about it as well. Many of the men's eyes were closed, and it looked to her like they thought they were going to die and had decided to passively await their fate, the hand-holding and chanting demonstrating their acceptance of death.

As two heavyset men moved to join the line of hand-holders, Angela saw, lying on train tracks behind where they'd been, the body of Derek's mother slit open from throat to groin, her bloody innards spilling onto the railroad ties. Sickened, she looked away, trying hard not to throw up, though she doubted there was anything left in her stomach to disgorge. She felt a distressingly deep void within her, an aching hole that threatened to grow wider and wider until whatever self she had left fell in and disappeared. It was like a sharp stab to the soul to see her friend's mother that way, and to know that his little brother lay somewhere around here as well, murdered and mutilated. She started praying. It was conditioning more than anything else. Habit. Praying made her feel better, gave her comfort in time of need.

Always before when she'd prayed, there'd been uncertainty behind it. She'd sent out her wishes and gratitude hoping they would be heard. But this time to her complete and utter shock there was an immediate connection. She was filled with the unexplainable yet irrefutable knowledge that she was speaking directly to an entity that heard and understood her. Only . . .

Only she was not sure it was God. It was powerful, no doubt about that. But she sensed things about this being, and its attributes were definitely not those she associated with the Almighty. It was close by, for one thing, not an omnipresent force but a specific entity existing within a clearly defined space. For another, it seemed offended somehow, angry, filled with the sorts of petty human emotions that should be beneath a deity. Not that the Lord himself hadn't exhibited the occasional pettiness and petulance from time to time-but that was when he'd been a young God, in the Old Testament, just learning the ropes and trying to figure out the boundaries between himself and his creations.

This thing wasn't young.

She was afraid to stop praying, afraid the connection would be lost. The entity to whom she was talking might not be a god, but she felt safe in its company, protected by her communion with it. And the more she spoke, the more she opened herself and made explicit her fears and wishes, the closer she seemed to come to this awesomely powerful being. She had the impression that it knew who she was, that her coming here had been arranged or somehow preordained, although that made no sense and she could not imagine how she could help, what possible use she could be, what she could bring to the table.

Derek was still hugging her, leaning on her, sobbing and holding her tightly. Her hands were clasped behind his back, her eyes closed as she prayed.

There was movement beneath her feet, accompanied by an audible rumbling, and at that, her eyes snapped open. As a native of Southern California, she'd lived through her share of earthquakes, and those experiences had made her wary and alert to any seismic phenomena, instinctively ready to bolt or seek cover at the first sign of geologic instability. This wasn't an earthquake, though. She knew it immediately. The second her eyes opened, she saw a figure beginning to coalesce from the land surrounding them, elements of earth and sky coming together to form a single beast, as though the substance of each component making up this plain was being drawn particle by particle from its inanimate source by an invisible force and shaped into a monster.

But was it a monster?

It drew itself upward from the ground, rising as tall as a building into the still night air, illuminated by the light of the recently risen moon. It was indeed horrible to look upon, this thing of rock and sand and cloud and brush. Recognizable ingredients had been put together in such a way that the end result was not only unfamiliar but profoundly disturbing. At the same time, she was not afraid of it. She faced the massive figure. There were no arms or legs, but there was very definitely a face. It hovered somewhere in the middle of the thin wavering form: ancient angry eyes, a beak-ish nose, a lipless maw that was at once overlarge and tightly constricted. Yet despite the being's hideous appearance and overwhelming size, she was not really frightened. Awed, yes, but not scared.