The Burning Man (3 page)

He’d dealt with armed attackers more times than he could count, and was known in the department as a guy who always stayed cool under pressure. But he’d never faced off against a child with a gun.

“Okay, kid,” he said, keeping his voice calm and even. “Why don’t you just put the gun down.”

The girl was breathing fast and shallow, her pale blond hair crackling with static. Her eyes were wide, with too much white around the thin green irises and dilated pupils.

“Come on, sweetheart,” he said, holstering his gun and taking a cautious step closer. “Now, why don’t you be a good girl and...”

He reached out and grabbed the girl’s fragile little wrist, tilting the gun in her hand so it pointed up toward the ceiling.

Suddenly it felt like he had grabbed a live wire, or stuck his hand into a microwave oven. Some kind of strange blistering heat seared through Tony’s fingers and up into his arm, causing the skin to bubble and blacken. He wanted to let go but it was as if his fingers had been fused to her wrist.

And in a sudden awful flash, the house was gone. The whole neighborhood was gone and he and the little girl were standing in the middle of what appeared to be a massive junkyard, with wrecked cars and washing machines and twisted metal scrap. Only all of the cars looked foreign and strangely designed, and the brand names on the various broken-down appliances were unfamiliar.

For a moment he forgot the pain. Then, before Tony could get a handle on this bizarre turn of events, he felt the intrusion of an unwanted presence inside his brain. The girl was in his
thoughts
. He could feel a weird resonant echo humming through his neurons, as if she was using them to play cat’s cradle. Like the two of them were twisting together, and synching up on a molecular level.

Then, just like that, the connection was severed, and the two of them were back inside Randall’s house again.

A fountain of sparks rained down from the light fixture above their heads. Light bulbs popped like corn and the dirty carpet burst into flame, releasing choking, toxic smoke.

Tony’s right sleeve was on fire, too, and whatever plans he may have had for dealing with the little girl were forgotten in that instant as he spun away from her in a blind panic, shielding his face from the flames with his left hand.

As he twisted his burning right arm, Tony’s uniform sleeve disintegrated into glowing ash and the fingers he’d clenched around the little girl’s wrist snapped and shattered like burnt breadsticks. The heavy gun in her hand thumped to the carpet and she just stood there, wide green eyes staring.

Tony tore out into the front yard and dove to the sandy ground, rolling to smother the flames. But the feeling of burning deep inside his flesh could not be quenched. He felt as if his arm had been filled with napalm maggots that were steadily chewing their way up into his torso and head.

He grayed out for an unknown length of time, woozy and dull with shock, but still able to hear shouting and sirens around him. Then there were hands on his body, lifting him. He tried to fight them, but there were too many. That’s when he realized he was on a stretcher, about to be put into an ambulance.

“Officer Orsini?” a voice was saying. “Stay with us, okay? We’re gonna get you to the hospital.”

A paramedic, a woman. Broad, bland face with no makeup, hair hidden under a cap. Cold, clinical blue eyes behind pale lashes.

He turned away from her ministrations, back toward the smoky, burning house. Randall was already gone, carted away to the hospital—or the morgue, if Tony was lucky. But there was a woman and another blond girl, younger, standing together on the sidewalk. The woman looked like she had a broken nose, but seemed otherwise unharmed.

The girl was physically fine, but clearly hysterical.

Meanwhile, on his left side, another paramedic was coddling the little monster who had burned him, checking her vitals and asking if she was alright. Her eyes were still glazed over and far away.

Tony lunged toward her, ripping the IV out of his good arm and screaming.

“She did this!” he howled. “She’s a monster! A demon! Get her!
She did this to me!”

The woman paramedic tried to restrain him, but he let her have it, punching her in the gut with his good hand and then shoving her back as he climbed to his unsteady feet.

Couldn’t they see that this little girl wasn’t a child at all? She was the goddamn
antichrist.
He had to find a way to stop her, before the unholy power she possessed was unleashed on the unsuspecting world.

He staggered, dizzy and nauseous, sky and ground whirling, untrustworthy as he reached instinctively for his gun. The movement sent a bolt of blinding pain through the ruined stump that remained of his right hand. He nearly blacked out again, but forced himself to hold it together, fumbling to undo the grip of the pistol with his left hand, until he was able to pull it out of its holster.

He managed to get his awkward left forefinger through the trigger and pointed the gun at that little blond monster, but then the ground seemed to spin beneath him, and his shot went laughably wide.

Behind the girl a black firefighter staggered and dropped to his knees, his heavy yellow turnout coat going crimson down one side.

Then Tony was being tackled by several enraged firefighters and restrained, howling and flailing as the red-faced woman paramedic filled a syringe. Next there was a sharp sting in the meat of his twisting arm.

Then nothing.

* * *

Olivia had no idea how she wound up out on the front lawn. The last thing she remembered was Randall.

Randall coming through the door all casual and preoccupied like nothing had happened. Like breaking her mother’s nose for the third time that year and threatening to kill her was no big deal. Olivia knew her mother would never have the courage to stand up for herself, so it was up to Olivia to stand up for her. Because she believed in her heart that if she didn’t, Randall really
would
kill her mother. Maybe her and Rachel, too.

So what had happened? She remembered pulling the trigger—once, then again—and Randall falling back on the porch with blood soaking through the leg of his oily jeans. Then, as a rush of intense, conflicting emotions overwhelmed her, she felt as if her consciousness was eclipsed by a roiling, electrified thundercloud.

There was a terrible smell of burning that filled her head, choking her, suffocating her. Then she was here, on the front lawn, the house behind her engulfed in smoke and flames.

Rachel!

What had happened to her little sister? What about her mother? Were they trapped inside the house?

She scrambled to her feet, only to be held back by a burly Hispanic paramedic with glasses.

“Hey, now,” he said. “Take it easy.”

“My sister,” Olivia said, her voice rough and scratchy from the smoke.

“She’s fine, honey,” he said. “She’s over there with your mom. Your dad has been taken to the hospital in an ambulance. He’s going to be fine, too, so don’t worry.”

“He’s...” Her voice seemed to dry up in her throat. “He’s alive? But I...”

She suddenly lost all the strength in her legs, and was forced to sit straight down on the scratchy grass. She felt as if she was going to throw up.

She could see an ambulance in the driveway, and thought for a fleeting moment that she saw Randall strapped to a stretcher, but it wasn’t him. It was a cop in a singed uniform. Something about him seemed eerily familiar, like déjà vu or something from a half-remembered dream. He didn’t seem to be conscious, and one arm was all wrapped up and packed with ice.

“What happened?” she asked.

Before the paramedic could answer, Rachel came running out of the smoke and chaos, flinging herself so hard at Olivia that she nearly knocked her over backward.

“Hey,” Olivia said. “It’s okay, kiddo. We’re okay.”

She looked up at her mother, standing just behind Rachel. Her eyes were both swollen down to pink, puffy slits, and her nose looked like a rotten tomato. She seemed to be crying, but her face was so messed up that it was hard to tell.

Olivia stood, keeping her arms around Rachel, and pulled her mother gently into the embrace.

“We’re okay,” she said again.

She really hoped that it was true.

Olivia stood on the beach with her arm around her little sister. It was a Tuesday afternoon, at the tail end of the summer high season, and Neptune Beach was still humming with tourist activity. Mostly chubby, sunburned families with kids and leathery seniors in sun hats. A man played Frisbee with his dog while two girls Rachel’s age shook sand out of their towels.

No one seemed to care what Olivia and Rachel were doing there.

The salty wind whipped Olivia’s hair around her face and the warm, gentle surf bubbled around her bare feet. The sun was high and bright in a clear blue sky. Another beautiful, perfect postcard kind of day. Another day her mother would never see.

Rachel pressed her face into Olivia’s shoulder, sobbing as their mother’s best friend Joelle carefully unscrewed the lid on the cheap aluminum container that held all that was left of Denise Dunham.

“Should I say something?” Joelle asked, looking back at Olivia like she was the adult and Joelle was the fifteen-year-old.

Joelle was a good person, with a huge heart, but she was flighty and clueless most of the time, flapping around like a frightened chicken. Her being seven months pregnant and awash in baby hormones didn’t help matters at all. Unfortunately, she was the only adult that was willing or able to help scatter Denise’s ashes on the beach. Olivia and Rachel had no living family.

“Go ahead,” Olivia said, her voice tight but steady.

“Denise,” Joelle said, tears ruining her thick mascara. “You were my best friend since sixth grade and... um... you loved the beach. We had such fun times here, you, me, and the girls.” She choked up for a minute, lips stretched thin and tight. “And now we’re here, to scatter your ashes in the ocean like you wanted, so your beautiful spirit will live forever in the beautiful waves.”

Olivia found her mind drifting during Joelle’s awkward and corny but heartfelt speech. Drifting back to other, more vivid memories of her mother. Not tan and happy on the beach, but pale and skeletal, wrapped in an oversized hospital gown, her eyes already dead and waiting for her body to catch up.

It had all happened so fast.

* * *

Her mother always had headaches, for as long as Olivia could remember, but they got worse when Randall left.

After the “accidental” shooting that left Randall with a limp and a monster pain pill addiction, he’d come back from the hospital all smug and more insufferable than ever. Olivia just went along with his story that she had been playing with the gun, and it went off by accident, but a day didn’t go by that she didn’t wish her aim had been better.

Olivia ran away several times, but always ended up coming back for Rachel’s sake. She just couldn’t leave her little sister alone with that abusive scumbag, because if he was going to hurt someone, Olivia preferred that it be her. She could deal with it.

Then, one day, Randall was just gone. No explanation, no goodbye, nothing. Olivia was ecstatic, convinced that her mother would finally start to live again.

But that’s not what happened.

Denise withdrew even further, refusing to leave her room for days on end. She slept most of the time and when she was awake, she was like a hollow-eyed shadow of herself. Her headaches got so bad that she was unable to work, and they had to go on welfare. There was a time when Olivia came to wonder if her mother’s headaches were just an excuse for her to lock herself in her room with her pills and the TV, leaving her daughters to fend for themselves.

Cleaning the house, packing lunches for Rachel, handling all the bills and groceries and everything, Olivia had been filled with deep, simmering resentment. So much so that she wanted to grab her mother by the fragile, pipe-cleaner arms and shout.

He left you, but we’re still here!

The strange thing about it was that Olivia’s terrible resentment somehow made her guilt-twisted love for her mother even stronger. So if her mother needed to be taken care of, then that’s just what Olivia would do.

They were in the middle of another pointless, depressing argument about the overdue power bill when her mother had her first seizure.

“I told you not to open bills and leave them lying around your room, where they’ll get buried and forgotten,” Olivia was saying. “Just give them to me right away, okay?

“Okay?”

But her mother didn’t seem to be listening. She was staring at the floor, mouth slack and eyes blinking slowly.

“Mom?” She put a hand on her mother’s skinny shoulder, exasperation evaporating. “Mom? Are you okay?”

And
bang
, her mother went down, twitching, eyes rolling up in her head and urine puddling beneath her on the carpet.

* * *

The doctors wouldn’t tell Olivia anything for weeks.

Inconclusive results.

More tests.

Specialists.

But Olivia knew the truth. She saw it in their faces and the way they refused to meet her gaze for more than a second at a time. And then, finally, there came a day when they couldn’t hide the truth from her anymore.

It was an inoperable tumor. Cancer. Six months was a generous estimate.

They still wouldn’t meet her gaze.

Standing there in the hushed hospital hallway with her inconsolable sister, Olivia had wanted desperately to scream. To punch walls and kick out windows. To shake her fist at the sky and rail against the unfairness of it all.

But she didn’t. She just nodded and signed forms and accepted leaflets and the phone numbers of various child welfare agencies and grief counselors. Taking care of things, the way she always did.

* * *

Joelle shook the jar over the incoming waves and the pale, powdery ash fell like impossible snow across the water. The three of them were silent for a long minute, each one lost in their own thoughts. Joelle and Rachel cried. Olivia didn’t.