The Crack in the Lens (24 page)

Or, Our Last Chance for Salvation Goes Up in Smoke

I got set to dodge knowing it would do me no good. To my left were trunks and chairs and other assorted bric-a-brac. To my right was the pile of magnesium canisters and ether bottles and other assorted explodables. And the Kriegers were no more than twenty feet off anyhow.

Left or right, forward or back, I was dead.

There was a rustle of movement behind me, a scratchy scraping sound followed by a soft
shhhhhhh
.

“I got one more thing to say, Krieger, and you’d damn well better listen.”

Gustav held up his last match. Lit.

“Pull that trigger, and we
all
die.”

As one, Mr. and Mrs. Krieger dropped hollow-eyed gazes to the ground—and the magnesium powder they’d apparently forgotten all about. It was everywhere. On everyone.

Old Red moved slowly out of the dark room and started sidling toward the stairs. “Come on, Brother. We’re leavin’.”

“Good idea. I think we done wore out our wel—”

The tiny flame of Gustav’s lucifer fluttered and dimmed as I stepped up close.

I’d stirred up enough breeze to just about put it out.

Old Red and I froze for a moment, and the fire grew brighter…while moving to within an inch of my brother’s fingers.

We had to move fast. Only we had to move slow.

“Just get to the stairs,” Gustav whispered to me. “Then we got a chance.”

We edged away from the Kriegers side by side, fearfully watching them fearfully watching us. They still had their guns up, ready to shoot, but so long as we had that powder beneath us, they didn’t dare.

Just as we reached the first step, my brother let out a growl—a long, raspy
grrrrrrrrr
.

The flame had reached his fingertips. He was burning.

“Get ready to run,” he grated out through gritted teeth.

“Too late,” Mr. Krieger sang, grinning again. “You’re snuffed.”

The match had gone out.

“Go!” Old Red barked, flicking the still-smoking matchstick at the dark room.

It arced harmlessly into the gloom and disappeared.

We were all of three steps up the stairs when Mr. Krieger pulled the trigger. The Bulldog’s kick was more than he was ready for, though, and the shot went wild, thumping into the ceiling nowhere near us.

The real surprise—for all of us but Gustav—was the flash of flame around Mr. Krieger’s hand, and the scream that followed.

When Mrs. Krieger first got the drop on us, I’d put the gun on the ground. Into the magnesium. Now the sparks from the shot had turned the whole thing, for just an instant, into a brilliant little sun that lit up the cellar with harsh white light.

I stopped, staggered by the sight of it, and my brother shoved me toward the top of the stairs.

“Go go
go
!”

I stumbled upward, yet I couldn’t help looking back.

Mr. Krieger fell to his knees, howling in pain, and the Bulldog dropped from his hand—along with his blackened, sizzling fingers. The gun metal was white hot and still sparking when it hit the dirt.

“Mortimer?” Mrs. Krieger said.

Then there was another flash of light, one that raced like a bolt of lightning along the floor. It started with the gun, then ran through Mr. Krieger to Mrs. Krieger and on.

Mrs. Krieger’s wedding dress went up in flame like a pile of old newspapers.

Mr. and Mrs. Krieger did, too.

As they shrieked and thrashed, the flare continued around the room, leaving smoke and flames wherever it went. Sheets and furniture caught fire. The stuffed alligator was a ball of flame in an instant. The mirror all but exploded, spewing a million tinkling shards every which way. Then the magnesium flash was mere feet from the cans and jars piled up by the dark-room door, and I finally tore my gaze away and focused all my attention on the task at hand: getting the hell out of there.

Yet when the burst of light came, I saw it still, though I was at the top of the stairs with my back to the basement. The world around me bleached solid white, and then the heat came in a great gust that lifted me off my feet, hurling me forward and pelting me with chips of wood and dirt and hissing, sputtering chunks of I know not what (and I dare not guess). Finally, as I tumbled and screamed, the sound came, not so much as a boom as an angry roar—the kind you might imagine Satan himself making as he was cast into the pit. It was the last thing I knew for a time, for somewhere between flying through the air and slamming to a stop, I blacked out.

I awoke to ungodly heat and the smell of smoke. Someone had hold of my shoulders and was shaking me hard.

“Otto…Otto, you gotta get up,” I heard my brother say—barely. It felt like a bale of cotton had been stuffed in my ears. “You gotta get us outta here!”

For a moment, I wondered how I could have my eyes closed yet see nothing but white. Then I realized my eyes
weren’t
closed—and ever so slowly the brightness faded, and I could see.

I was stretched out on my back, Old Red kneeling over me. There was something peculiar about the way his own wide-open eyes seemed to peer past me, staring at some point to the side of my right ear.

“Gustav…?”

“Oh, thank God!” My brother’s grip on my shoulders tightened. “I can’t see a damn thing, Otto! The blast blinded me, and this whole place is goin’ up in flames!”

“Holy shi—”

“We ain’t got time to moan about it! We gotta go!”

“Right.”

I sat up—and nearly flopped straight back to the floor again. My head was spinning like a top.

“Help me up.”

Together, we got me to my feet.

What I saw cleared my head fast.

We were in the hallway toward the back of the house, outside the kitchen. There’d be no escaping through the servants’ entrance, though. The blaze in the basement was so intense it had shot straight up through the floorboards. The kitchen was a wall of flame.

I had no choice but to take us out the other way, through the foyer—or what I assumed was the foyer, since all I could see thataway were dim swirls of smoke in the darkness.

“Come on.”

I pulled Old Red into the gloom and ashes, and for all intents and purposes, we were
both
blind. Within seconds, we were coughing so bad we could barely stay upright, too, yet I kept limping forward, tugging my brother along beside me.

I thought I was running us toward the front door, but it was solid wall we hit. We bounced back with stunned grunts, and I lost my grip on Gustav. I was able to grab him again quick, though, and I held tight with one hand while groping along the wall with the other.

My fingers found a doorknob, and I twisted and pushed.

We weren’t out yet, though. By the time my eyes teared away the soot and adjusted to the light—to the fact that there
was
light again, though not much—we were in the middle of the Kriegers’ library. The fire wasn’t as far along there, but it was coming on fast: The floor itself was smoking, almost too hot to walk on.

“Don’t move!” I hollered at my brother.

“I’m blind, not deaf!” he shouted back.

I let him go.

There was a reading chair nearby, and I hefted it up and wobbled toward one of the library’s oversized windows. My first toss came in low, hitting mostly wood and plaster, only a couple chair legs busting through the glass. On my second try, the chair went sailing out onto the lawn.

I turned back to collect Old Red. All around him were pockets of fire, spots where the blaze below had eaten up through the floorboards. Any minute—maybe any
second
—the flames were going to reach the lowest row of books, and the whole room would go up like the tip of a match.

I ran over to my brother and started dragging him back toward the window. After a few steps, though, the heat under my feet flared up into agony, and there was a little flash of light from below.

My shoes and pant legs were sparking and charring. Gustav’s, too. The magnesium dust we’d picked up downstairs was getting set to ignite.

I stopped and bent over, about to swat at the smoldering sparkles. But Old Red knew what was happening just from the pain and the crackle of cooking leather.

“Don’t touch it! You get that crap on your hands, it’ll burn clear to the bone! Just
move
!”

Move I did—right into the cloud of stifling smoke that had popped up between us and the window. There was no time to beat around blind looking for the windowsill. I just charged into the black eddies and jumped where I thought I should jump, towing Gustav along with me.

Something clipped me on the shoulder, whipped me around, and I lost my hold on my brother. I spun as I fell, crashing down onto something hard and soft at the same time.

There was no time to see what it was. I was outside, but I hadn’t escaped the flames. I’d brought them with me.

My shoes were on fire.

I screeched and kicked, pure panicked animal.

“Otto! Otto!” Gustav was yelling somewhere close by, and simply hearing his voice reminded me I had a brain. I could do more than just react. I could feel the fear, the pain, and still
think
.

I thrashed out of my vest and wrapped it around my feet, and after some wriggling and tugging I managed to pull off my shoes and toss them away.

My feet hurt like hell, but at least they weren’t frying any longer.

“Otto?” Gustav said.

He was on his knees on the other side of the chair I’d come crashing down on a moment before. His gaze was pointed over my head.

He was still blind.

“I’m here…I’m alright,” I said, and I wormed over to him and touched his hand. “Come on. We’d better get back a ways before the whole house falls on us.”

I pulled myself through the grass, Old Red crawling along beside me, following by sound. When we were far enough off, I turned and looked back at the Kriegers’.

The home’s fancy facade was all aflame now, every eave and gable and turret burning, consumed by the inferno raging up from below. The heat of the fire had created a powerful updraft, and cinder-edged pages from burning books sailed off into the sky, some of them flying so high they looked like the very stars the smoke had curtained from view.

It was an awe-inspiring and awful sight. Beautiful, dreadful. But I didn’t get much time to soak it in.

There were shouting voices and hurried footfalls out on the street. They grew louder fast.

“We just lost every scrap of proof we had, you know,” I said.

“Oh, it probably don’t matter,” Gustav sighed. “I don’t guess they’re in the mood to listen anyway.”

His face was as blackened as a minstrel’s, his clothes askew, his sightless eyes watering. Yet a strange calm had come over him, a serene passivity. It was as if he was trying to fix his features in that expression of dignified repose that makes folks at a wake look down and say, “It’s like he’s just sleeping.”

“Over there! It’s them!” someone shouted, and then they were on us—black silhouettes that swarmed into the yard and tore us apart.

“Now, let’s not be hasty, fellers” was all I got out before I was treated to my first kick. More followed. Lots more, from lots of different feet.

“What did you do? What did you
do
?” a voice kept asking, but the stomps and punches never stopped long enough for me to answer. I was hauled up, hands grabbing my shirt, my pants, my hair, yanking me this way and that so I could be spat upon and called “Killer!”

It was no use trying to run or fight back. I’d lost track of my brother, and everyone pushing in around me was just another part of the same big bloodthirsty thing—a wolf with a hundred heads. It wasn’t going to stop snarling and snapping its jaws until Gustav and I were dead.

Then there was a swirl in the crowd, a chaos within the chaos.

“Stop it!” a woman shouted. “Let ’em go!”

“Yeah!” a man joined in. “They’re innocent, dammit!”

Lottie and Bob came shoving through the throng.

The men who had hold of me didn’t let go, though. They just swiped and kicked at Bob and Lottie, too.

“Get outta here, you crazy old whore!” one of them was dumb enough to say.

Lottie went at him with both claws.

It was two against an army—and then
three
against an army as Old Red’s friend Suicide Cheney fought his way to Bob and Lottie’s side, fists flying.

Then
four
as Brother Landrigan came wading in bellowing, “Stop this insanity!”

That brought
five
and
six
and
seven
and more as Landrigan’s followers crowded in after him, trying to build a wall of bodies between us and the mob.

One by one, the men clutching onto me were peeled off and pushed away. The last one refused to stop getting his licks in, though, flailing at me as he raved and spewed spittle.

“…meddlin’ sons of bitches gonna beat out your brains stupid bastard…”

It was Sheriff Ike Rucker himself, and I can’t tell you how much it saddens me to say I lacked the strength for a single swing at him. Not that it was needed.

A hand grabbed Rucker, jerked him around, then clenched into a fist that slammed into the man’s mouth, sending blood and teeth flying.

As Rucker sank out of sight, I found Milford Bales standing before me.

“Order!” he bellowed, spinning away to face the roiling crowd. He drew his Colt and fired it once into the air. “Order! There will be order!”

He was still standing that way—gun up, shouting for order, the Kriegers’ house a giant wick of flame behind him—when I felt my knees start to buckle.

Well, why not?
I thought.
I’ve earned myself a good faint
.

So I had one.