Andrew Pyper - The Guardians

Shuffle past Randy to the bottom of the celar stairs. There is only my own breath. And the fire working its way through the house. Licking and swalowing.

You won't make it .

I hear this so clearly I assume at first it is the boy. But it belongs instead to someone who wishes only to point out some salient facts that might be escaping my attention.

If you think you're carrying this girl up those stairs, you're crazier than Ben ever was .

So I'm crazy. Ben would have long known what I've come to recently learn, and have confirmed as I take the first step up. Sometimes, crazy helps.

It gets me al the way up to the kitchen, where I'm forced to lay Tracey down again. There's the serious heat now, doubling itself, cooking the air so that each breath is like swalowing oil. Through the archway I can see that the fire has already claimed most of the living room. A widening throat of orange and black. The plaster wals colapsing. A carbon skin it is halfway to shedding.

A cold finger touches the back of my neck.

I spin around expecting to see the boy. And for a second it is the boy. Glaring at me, flushed and threatening tears.

"Stay with me," Randy says.

I charge at him.

My legs fluid, powerful. The fist that aims at Randy's head and lands a solid blow feeling swift and Parkinson's-free, breaking the line of his jaw with a tidy, audible pop. I'm a Guardian again. Young and fuly armoured, meeting some Sugar King or Winterhawk thug with unhesitating violence.

Stay with me .

I can't hear Randy anymore, but those are the words his already sweling lips are working around. It's not the fire that frightens him; it's not even death. It is the immensity of his loneliness opening wide inside of him.

I charge again. Driving my palms into Randy's throat. It pushes him over the linoleum edge and down the celar stairs. For a moment he is a writhing outline against the dark. And then, without any sound of impact, he's gone.

I stand over Tracey, staring down at her as though trying to understand what she is.

Go !

I bend and lift Tracey over my shoulder. Hold her there, caught in an Atlas pose. Unable to step forward or back, disoriented by the smoke, the dizziness that came with lifting her.

NOW !

My knees start to fold, but I lean into it, turning their failure into a hopscotch march. The back door frame has already colapsed, forcing me through the kitchen, then into the halway. The wals busy with fire. There is nowhere to turn where the heat doesn't take burning swipes at our skin. Tracey's hair swaying over my back.

Halfway down the halway I stop. It's the cramping muscles, what feels like some kind of cardiac episode. It makes it impossible to carry her another foot, but in fact it is only the sort of thing that would be difficult for me even under the most uncomplicated circumstances.

But I got Tracey out of the crawlspace. Somehow I managed that. I got her out.

And if I did that , why can't I do this?

So I jerk ahead, waist first, a statue with one last, unhardened part. Lurch toward the front door.

This is me. I'm doing this. And with this thought comes a dangerous elation. Not yet. If I get out of here, I can sit on the curb and laugh my guts out. Just not yet.

I open the door with a single twist of the knob. A rectangle of smooth night appears. Then the cool air on my face, the porch steps groaning under my weight as I make my way down and tumble onto the lawn. Tracey Flanagan roling off my back to lie on the grass, face up, eyes open and blinking. She looks as surprised by the stars as by the fact she is alive.

Then she turns my way. A shared recognition between us, as though we have known each other for uncountable years.

Randy.

I'm already working my way to my feet, crawling back up onto the porch.

The heat again. A line between the autumn night and the fire so defined it feels like passing into a different world altogether. Walking through something as solid as brick or stone.

The fire has encircled me now. I'm not sure if I'm in the halway, the kitchen, or if I took a wrong turn into the living room. There is nowhere to go even if I had the capacity to move, which I don't. The brief reprieve from symptoms has already passed, leaving me rigid and faint.

He is only an outline in the smoke at first, unmoving and featureless. But with a single step forward he is more real than he has ever appeared to me. Oblivious to the fire, the lick of hair caught in his eyelashes and jumping with every blink. Coming to stand so close that even through the sulphurous air I can smel the rank, burnt-sugar sweetness of him.

Stay with us .

The boy holds my hand. On his face an expression of mock relief, a mimicry of Carl's features when we held hands in the Thurman kitchen the first night we left the coach alone in the celar. But unlike Carl's, the boy's hand is cold, and his grip is meant not to comfort but to hold me in place. To keep me in the fire forever.

I fight him. Or I tel myself I must try to fight him, to wrench myself free. To not listen. But al my body alows is a brief spasm, just another of the symptoms that have no purpose or strength. So tired now the disease is al that's left. That, and the boy.

Stay .

And I wil. Perhaps I never had a choice. If home is the place you spend most of your grown-up life working to forget, then this is mine.

Overhead, the sound of timber giving way. I look up in time to see a sheet of plaster breaking free of the ceiling before it crashes onto me, pinning me flat to the floor.

I had felt the heat before this—had been thickly swimming in it, drowning in it—yet only now do I lend it my ful attention. It's because I'm burning. Trapped beneath what might be half a ton of century-old debris, the original nails and mouldings and support beams of the Thurman house. Stil conscious, stil within the reach of pain, but al of it to disappear soon.

The fire breaks a window. The high tinkle of glass atop the low growl of flames.

Then the boy is tugging at my arms. Apparently it's not enough for me to slowly burn to death. He wants to dislocate both of my shoulders too. When I don't move, he tugs again, and again.

Some part of me shifts. Yet other parts feel as though they are being left behind. Limbs torn from their sockets.

I open my eyes and work to turn my head to an angle where I might see who has put his hands on me, but the smoke has left me blind. If I am expecting to see any living thing it is Randy, horrificaly burned. Randy, who seeks to pul me against him so that the two of us might be fused by fire.

The hands lift me up, throwing me onto narrow but strong shoulders that carry me through the haze before tossing me into the air. There is a new pain to go along with the previous ones. Sharp teeth biting my skin in too many places to count, like being attacked by a swarm of yelowjackets.

And then the ground. Sudden and cool, and me roling through the grass, clothes smoking and, if I'm not hearing things, some part of me sizzling. I keep tumbling in order to extinguish any live flames I've lost the ability to feel.

Now when I open my eyes there is the sky, the stars distinct, hovering close. Licks of flame reach out from the upper floor, as though the house is claiming the night for itself. It draws my sight to the shattered living-room window. The same window where fuckt had once been drawn in dust. The window I'd been thrown out of.

What felt like stings in fact the cuts of glass teeth.

Then, through smoke so dense it is like another part of the wal, the boy leaps out. Landing on the ground with a thud, his body crumpling. His clothes, his hair, his skin blackened by smoke. His eyes the only colour—worn denim blue—that he lets me see.