The Burning Man

by Christa Faust

  “You’re right,” Olivia said, dodging a toaster-sized hunk of concrete with a crooked length of rebar sticking out like a spear. “Look, that ramp leads up to another level. Can you make it?”

  “No problem,” Kieran replied. She had a feeling he was lying.

  They walked up the ramp, while behind them, the lower parking level was swiftly blocked by a collapsed roof. But the upper level was pure chaos, packed with panicked people trying to get to their cars. The driveways were jammed, everyone honking and swearing out their open windows. Emergency personnel were struggling to help people evacuate on foot, and move people who were injured.

  Olivia spotted the SpeedyShip truck almost immediately.

  “There,” she said. “Hurry!”

  When they got to the truck, Kieran grabbed his backpack and his own coat. He took the time to put his coat over Olivia’s shoulders before digging out his meds.

  “We can’t drive out of here,” Kieran said, dry swallowing a pill. “We’d better go on foot.”

  “I can’t,” Olivia said. “I have no shoes. I’ll freeze to death out there!” She paused for a moment, then said, “You go.”

  “Like hell,” he answered.

  Up at the top of the exit ramp, a white SUV had just reached the exit when a sedan rammed into it from behind. The driver, a pudgy young man in a stained lab coat, got out of the SUV and—to Olivia’s surprise— hauled the older Asian man out from behind the wheel of the car and starting belting him with wild haymakers.

  Emergency personnel ran to split up the fight and the chubby guy went wild, screaming and flailing and headbutting a firefighter so that his helmet flew off.

  “Let’s go,” Kieran said, suddenly lunging into action and pulling Olivia with him toward the still-running SUV.

  Olivia realized what he had in mind and silently cheered. The fight had spread down the ramp, and panicked people were shoving and stampeding wildly all around them. When they got to the SUV, Kieran flung open the passenger-side door, shoved Olivia in, and tossed his backpack into her lap, then got in behind the wheel.

  People dove out of their way as Kieran punched it and roared up the ramp, then out into the driveway. He had to swerve several times, barely missing an incoming emergency response vehicle and two parked fire engines.

  Just as he made it out onto Red Oak Road, the left wing of the building shuddered and bowed outward, and then came crashing down in a vortex of dust and flying paper.

  55

  Kieran and Olivia drove for several hours without stopping, trying to put as many miles as they could between them and Potsdam.

  Finally, they stopped at a department store on the way to pick up some clothes, shoes, and a coat for Olivia. Fully dressed in normal things for the first time in ages, she started to feel like a person again.

  She felt free.

  “What do you think was really going on back there?” Kieran asked as he pulled out of the store parking lot.

  “Honestly, I don’t know,” Olivia replied, turning her face to stare out the dark window at nothing. “The part I just can’t figure out is, why me? Why did Doctor Lansen want me?”

  “Do you have... you know, powers?” Kieran asked. “Like that crazy chick?”

  “Of course not,” Olivia replied. “And if you would have asked me a month ago if I thought that kind of thing existed at all, I would have laughed in your face. Now, I’m not so sure.”

  “Maybe that black stuff Doctor Lansen was trying to inject you with has something to do with it,” Kieran suggested. “Like maybe that was some kind of formula to activate psychic abilities in the brains of his subjects.”

  “But what was the deal with the babies?” Olivia asked, shuddering at the memory of all those bottled stillbirths.

  “I’m just glad I got you out of there before you had a chance to find out for yourself,” Kieran said, reaching across the seat and taking her hand.

  They planned to make it to Albany, but by the time they reached Schenectady, they were both utterly exhausted. They found a forgettable franchise hotel called the Co-Z Inn, and while she waited in the car, Kieran checked-in using the credit card his mom had given him.

  Their room was on the far end of the second floor, with an uninspiring view of the highway.

  They’d been there for several minutes before it fully dawned on Olivia that she was alone in a hotel room with a boy.

  “Well,” she said pointlessly, but she didn’t have any idea what to say next.

  “You can have the bed,” Kieran said, suddenly flushed and his head bowed.

  “What, are you gonna sleep on—the floor?” Olivia asked.

  “I thought...” he shrugged with a crooked smile. “I don’t know.”

  “I have a rule,” Olivia said, a smile of her own blossoming across her lips. “Anybody who saves my life gets to sleep with me.”

  Kieran looked up at her.

  “Sleep with you?” he asked, looking back at the bed. “Or, you know... sleep with you?”

  Instead of answering, Olivia kissed him.

  At first he seemed almost flabbergasted by this turn of events, shoulders hunched and hands up and open. But moments later, he had his arms wound tight around her and was kissing her back like his life depended on it.

  She pulled him toward the bed and then shoved him down on his back. He bounced comically on the springy mattress, causing one of the pillows to fall off the side.

  “Wow,” he said, running his fingers through his hair. “I guess I’m still feeling a little shaky.”

  “Then I’d better be on top,” Olivia replied, pulling her brand new T-shirt off over her head.

  * * *

  Afterward, he lay with his head on her chest for a few quiet minutes.

  “Are you thirsty?” he asked, tracing the shape of her jaw with his fingertips. “I think I saw a soda machine out in the hall.”

  “Actually,” she said. “I’d love a glass of water.”

  “Cheap date,” he said, getting up and pulling on his boxer shorts. He padded over to the bathroom, and Olivia watched him peel the paper wrapper off a drinking glass then fill it from the tap. He took a deep drink himself, and then refilled it and brought it back to her.

  “Thanks,” she said, sitting up in bed to take the glass, and feeling suddenly shy and awkward.

  She drank the water and handed the glass back to Kieran. He took it and looked down at it, as if it held some kind of important clue. Neither one of them spoke for several long seconds.

  “Come back to bed,” Olivia said, reaching out to touch his sharp hipbone where it poked above the boxers’ elastic waistband.

  “Okay,” he said, setting the glass on the bedside table and sliding his legs under the covers beside her. Instead of lying down, though, he remained sitting up and turned toward her, slipping one arm around her waist and pulling her close.

  “I guess you know how bad I wanted this to happen,” Kieran said. “I mean, not you getting kidnapped and everything.”

  Olivia laughed and shook her head.

  “I know what you mean,” she said.

  She kissed him lightly and pushed his tangled hair back from his face.

  “I...” He was flushed, jaw clenched, and his gaze dropped to the left. “I think I love you. I mean, I know I do.” He looked up at her, eyes raw and vulnerable. “I love you, Liv.”

  Olivia felt her breath catch, her heart beating way too fast. She knew she was supposed to say it back to him, but those three little words felt so loaded, so serious. The kind of thing that, once said, couldn’t be taken back.

  She’d never said those words to anyone but Rachel and her late parents, and they seemed so different now, suddenly layered with complicated nuance and meaning. Like magic words you say to open the doorway to a mysterious new world.

  She thought again of Rachel, who claimed to be in love with a different boy every day of the week and tossed those words around like heart-shaped confetti. Why couldn’t she be like th
at?

  Why did everything have to be so serious all the time?

  Besides, she was fairly certain that she was in love with Kieran, and had been even before he rescued her. Looking into his familiar eyes and seeing such open, guileless trust made her feel safer than she’d felt since her father died. So why did she feel so conflicted? Why did working up the nerve feel like jumping off a building?

  Guess that’s why they call it “falling in love.”

  Just jump, she thought.

  “I love you, too,” she said.

  He took her face between his hands and kissed her a little too hard. As she kissed him back, she felt some deep inner floodgate open, unleashing a deluge of overpowering emotion.

  She broke the kiss and looked up into his eyes, placing her hand in the center of his bare chest.

  That’s when it happened.

  It started with the baby-fine hairs on her forearm prickling and standing up as a crackle of static shot through the cheap polyester comforter beneath her. The overhead light flickered and Kieran frowned, lips twisting into a grimace as he reached up and put his hand over hers, clutching at his chest.

  “Kieran?” she said, cold fear surging through her veins. “Kieran what’s wrong? Is it your heart?”

  His mouth moved, but nothing came out. His shoulders hunched down, spine curling inward as veins bulged in his temples.

  “Hang on!” She pulled her hand free from his iron grip and ran to his backpack, unzipping it and frantically pawing through the contents. “Hang on, Kieran!”

  When her desperate fingers closed around the orange pill bottle, she turned back to Kieran and he was no longer on the bed. She ran around the side and found him lying on his side on the scratchy carpet, unmoving.

  He wasn’t breathing.

  56

  “No,” she said, pill bottle dropping from her numb fingers as she ran to him. “Jesus, no.”

  She grabbed the phone and dialed the front desk.

  “Call 911,” she said, her voice sounding much calmer than she felt. “My boyfriend had a heart attack. Room 207. Tell the paramedics I’ve started CPR.”

  She hung up the phone without waiting for a response, and rolled the unresponsive Kieran over on his back to begin chest compressions.

  She had completely forgotten about her broken arm.

  Unable to perform the standard, two-handed compressions, but with no time to lose, Olivia stood over him and put her full body weight behind her right hand, like she was doing one-armed push-ups on his sternum. It worked at first, but the strength and energy required to maintain the correct pace was exhausting, and she could feel herself getting winded less than a minute into the effort.

  But she couldn’t give up on him.

  She had to keep going no matter what.

  Yet panic was winning. She tried to keep it at bay, but she could feel it gaining the upper hand, devouring her from the inside out. Fear and love and anxiety and anguish and a thousand other unnamed emotions swarmed inside of her like angry hornets as Kieran remained inert and lifeless. Her one hand just wasn’t strong enough, and her recently healed ribs began to send sharp jolts of painful protest through her body.

  She had to come up with another idea, but she was afraid that he would die if she stopped. Somewhere, someone was chanting breathlessly, “No... no... no... no...” She desperately wished they would stop, and then realization dawned.

  It was coming from her.

  The panic was mounting, cranking up to an eleven, and she could smell a sharp, metallic ozone scent in the crackling air.

  Then there was a massive, blinding flash, as if lightning had struck every wall of the room at once. All three lamps exploded, every outlet gave off a burst of sparks, and the television screen shattered into a thousand flying daggers. Olivia threw her body over Kieran, barely feeling the sting of glass fragments in her bare back. She used her arm to protect her eyes.

  When she looked up, the room was lit only by flickering blue flames shooting from the electrical outlets and crawling up the wallpaper. It was rapidly filling up with acrid smoke. She had only seconds to act.

  She grabbed the first piece of clothing her fingers found, Kieran’s crumpled T-shirt, and pulled it on over her head. Then she got herself into a squat position and rolled him onto his stomach, hooking her elbows under his shoulders and pulling him up and toward her so that his chest was pressed against hers.

  She grabbed his wrist and pulled his arm over her shoulder, into a fireman’s carry. Her aching ribs screamed in protest, but she ignored them. Settling his weight onto her back, she gripped his arm in her good hand, hooked the elbow of her broken arm around his thigh, and staggered toward the door.

  Opening it, she had to turn sideways to get him through.

  Out in the hallway, she found that all the lights were out and flames were pouring out of every electrical outlet and light fixture. The smoke was so thick she could barely see, but she could hear shouting and running feet as panicked guests fled the flames and ran for the stairs.

  Stairs.

  Olivia was going to have to carry Kieran down the stairs and out of the building.

  She’d practiced the fireman’s carry, briefly lifting other students in her CPR class for a few seconds at a time. But it was one thing to lift a conscious, standing person, and something altogether different to carry an unconscious, unresponsive one down a flight of stairs.

  But she didn’t have a choice. So she shut out the noise and chaos around her, and focused intensely on each step, one after the other, as if she was doing a particularly hard set at the gym. She could feel the heat of the flames on her skin, making her sweat and rendering her grip treacherous and slippery. Smoke filled her mouth and nose, making her lungs feel as if they were loaded with rusty nails.

  By the time she made it to the stairway at the end of the hall, her legs were already shaking, her spine and ribs throbbing with the pain of his crushing weight.

  Looking down the first flight of metal stairs, the task seemed utterly insurmountable. While going down was certainly easier than going up, she was close to the end of her endurance, and was absolutely terrified of falling and dropping Kieran.

  But every second that ticked by—during which he wasn’t receiving CPR, while the flames and smoke were spreading—made it less and less likely that he would survive.

  She squared her shoulders and took the first shaky step. With only one good arm, she was unable to steady herself using the railing, but she managed to stay upright. She had to take each step slowly—excruciatingly so— placing one foot down, then bringing her other down beside it.

  Each time, she paused to catch her balance and her breath. She kept on pushing herself to go faster, picturing mothers lifting cars off their endangered children, and reaching deep down inside herself to find hidden reserves of strength she never even knew she had.

  It wasn’t enough.

  57

  She made it to the first landing before her legs gave out and she collapsed to her knees, a frustrated scream of anguish wrenched out from between her clenched teeth.

  All her life, Olivia hated to be told she couldn’t do something, just because she was a girl. She fought every day to prove that she could outrun, out-shoot, and outwit any boy in school. Her endurance was top-notch, and she constantly pushed herself to go heavy, to beat her previous best.

  Now, when it really mattered, she just wasn’t strong enough.

  It didn’t even occur to her that by getting him this far, she’d already accomplished an impressive feat of strength and willpower. She was facing what could be the darkest, most brutal failure of her young life, and all she could think about was that she couldn’t stop.

  She couldn’t give up.

  She struggled to lift her right leg so that her bare foot was flat on the floor, then shifted her weight forward and tried to bring her other leg up into a squatting position. She made it for a precious second, but misjudged her balance as she tried to rise,
and wound up falling backward instead.

  Kieran slipped off her shoulders and thudded bonelessly to the floor.

  For a second, all she could do was lie there with her head on his belly, dizzy and gasping with black and red shapes dancing in the corners of her vision.

  “Kieran,” she said, spinning toward him and gripping his clammy hand. His face was the color of skim milk, eyes rolled back but not completely closed. “Kieran, stay with me. I’m gonna get you out of here, or die trying. Do you hear me? You stay with me!”

  She hooked her elbows under his armpits and started dragging him toward the next flight. Bouncing him down the steps on his ass was far from ideal, but so was leaving him to die on the landing. She was so beyond exhausted that she wasn’t even sure that she could make it down the stairs on her own, but she didn’t hesitate. She backed down as quickly as she could, pulling him with her.

  His head lolled against her thighs, flopping from side to side.

  Halfway down the flight, she slipped and bloodied her bare knees against the metal edge of a step but still managed to stay upright and hang on. Kieran’s rumpled boxer shorts were starting to scrunch down off his skinny ass, but she couldn’t risk her grip to try and pull them back up.

  It was all about the next step. And then the next one, and the one after that. She blocked out the agony in her lungs and ribs and knees. She blocked out the fear of failure and death. She blocked out everything but making it down each and every single step.

  And then there were no more.

  She’d hit the first floor landing.

  She collapsed back on her ass, clutching Kieran against her chest and graying out for a precious handful of seconds. With no idea of how much time had slipped away, she snapped back into focus, feeling like she was going to throw up and gasping desperately for oxygen in the smoky stairwell.

  Forcing the rising bile back down, she lurched to her feet, pulling him the last few feet to the stairway door.

  She pushed the door open with her shoulder and backed into the chaos of the hotel lobby.