Burrows

by Reavis Z. Wortham

  His head swam. “What the hell is happening?”

  Smoke billowed into the attic. The crude ventilation system Cody had suspected was very real and efficient, pulling in fresh air to feed the ferocious fire below. Cody knocked a large rat off his leg using his flashlight as a club. “This place is on fire!” He grabbed John’s arm and struggled to pull him upright.

  “The roof! We have to break through now!” Rats, mice, rotting human body parts, and bitter, toxic smoke nearly pushed Cody’s tired mind to the edge. With an effort from deep within he choked down the panic that rose like bile. His eyes focused on the lowest section of the roof sloping to within reach.

  “I need to call them so they won’t shoot us when we break through the roof!” Cody pushed the button the walkie talkie. “Boss, you there? Hey, somebody answer this thing!” He shook the walkie talkie, not realizing he’d accidentally turned it off. Another rat clawed up his leg, and he danced sideways to kick it off.

  John tried to clear his mind. He staggered weakly to his feet and kicked his way to the closest underside slope of the roof. Cody picked up a plastic palm tree with one hand and slapped at the rats trying to climb John’s legs.

  “No more!” Cody shouted and dropped the tree. He aimed his pistol upward, emptying the magazine into the shiplap only inches above their heads. When the slide locked open on the big .45, he ejected the clip, slammed another one home and repeated the process, finishing the ragged circle. When the slide locked back again, he snatched Ned’s six-shooter from behind his belt and emptied it as well to further weaken the wood.

  Despite his weakness, John understood his role. He pushed Cody aside and punched at the dark, splintered boards with his huge fist. He quickly broke out a large section only to find a layer of sheet iron still holding them prisoner.

  “Son of a bitch!” Cody shouted.

  As smoke filled the attic, the rats retreated from the two men and scrabbled for escape through a hole in the corner behind George’s rotting corpse. As more and more squirming bodies piled on the remains, George sank deeper into the vile, soaked mattress.

  Chapter Forty-six

  Fire, everywhere, fire…

  ***

  Sheriff Griffin stood huddled miserably in the cold. Sleet had finally beaten the leaves off the surrounding trees and turned the world white around them. The fire moved at an unimaginable rate and quickly overwhelmed the puny efforts of the small town fire department.

  “Can’t you get anything on the radio?” he shouted over the wind. Flames shot out of the windows as the inferno ran wild.

  Ned could barely contain himself. “Get that water higher!”

  “You let me do my job!” a fireman shouted.

  Behind the firemen, dozens of men surged forward, offering to help. O.C. held his hands toward the crowd of civilians, both black and white. “There ain’t nothin’ y’all can do. We don’t have any more hoses, and a bucket brigade would be like pissin’ on the fires in Hell. Let these men do what they know to do, and y’all get ready to start emptying them houses here on this side before the fire jumps the street.”

  The conflagration was a physical presence the men felt, and heard, and smelled. It roared with an angry life of its own. The north wind blew a toxic cloud over the emergency responders and the crowd of onlookers.

  Fire Chief Nate Jackson crunched through the sleet and stopped beside O.C. “The fire won’t jump, not in this sleet storm. But what we’re breathing might kill us all. We can’t leave, but these people need to get out of here.”

  “I know it, but John’s in there and they’re anxious. They don’t know what to do.”

  “They can pray.”

  “You can bet they’re already a-doin’ it.”

  “Chief Jackson! There’s smoke coming from that house over there.”

  O.C. turned from the shout to see a small frame house across the street from the train station. Smoke boiled from vents in the pier and beam foundation, and around loose, ill-fitting wooden windows. “Jackson, I thought you said the fire wouldn’t jump in this storm.”

  “It won’t. It couldn’t have!”

  “Well it by-god did!”

  “I bet somebody left the stove on and it caught fire. I’ll get somebody in there.”

  Chapter Forty-seven

  The well-fed flames turned The Cotton Exchange into a five-story hell smack in the middle of Chisum, Texas.

  ***

  Cody finally realized he’d turned the walkie talkie off. He flicked the switch. “Boss, you there?”

  The radio crackled to life in his hand. “Yeah, son, we’re here. Y’all have to get out! The building is on fire!”

  “No sh…,” Cody began. He was cut off as an explosion in the attic not far away partially took out a section of the roof.

  A potato chip can, tightly packed with gunpowder, nails and pieces of metal, worked perfectly. George’s deranged mind planned for it to take out at least one person and hopefully more. But his plans hadn’t covered the unlikely event the device would be covered by a body and hundreds of rats. As the corpse collapsed inward, the metal trigger released with an audible click. The explosion that should have showered the interior of the attic with deadly shrapnel was absorbed by the mass of rats, and George’s own rotting body. Deflected like a giant shotgun shell, most of the blast went straight up.

  Cody staggered and caught himself. He was covered with a fine red spray. Most of the blood was from the rats, but a few small pieces of steel struck his right side.

  John was luckier. From the corner of his eye he’d seen the mass collapse and remembering what Cody had said about booby traps, crouched just as the corner exploded.

  The radio in Cody’s hand cracked through a coating of red. “What’s going on in there? John! Cody!”

  Coughing from the smoke, Cody tried to answer but something was wrong with the radio. He glanced down and saw the send button was completely gone, along with a chunk of his right thumb.

  The wound was numb for the moment, but he knew it would only be a few minutes until feeling came screaming back into the damaged hand.

  “You all right?” John’s words were muffled through eardrums hammered by the explosion.

  Mentally disconnected and also half-deaf, Cody turned toward the center of the attic, barely registering his partner through the swirling smoke. Holding up his damaged hand, his eyes filled with tears. “Define all right.”

  The new hole in the roof acted as a flue, drawing more thick smoke into the dark attic. Another dampened sound was added to the melee. They instinctively realized if the sound had penetrated their damaged eardrums, it was monstrous and terrible.

  It was the roar of an oxygen-fed blow torch.

  “Get out that hole!” Cody shouted and pointed to the opening. “The fire will be here any second!”

  The flames roared up the tunnel like an open furnace.

  Chapter Forty-eight

  An open volume by Robert Frost burst into flame and the words, “Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice,” were consumed…

  ***

  From their position overlooking the backside of the Exchange, the two riflemen were temporarily blinded by the detonation. Blinking to clear their sight, the youngest of the two keyed his military walkie talkie as flame and smoke billowed into the storm. “Boss, this is Red. I thought for a minute the whole roof back here blew out.”

  Griffin strained to see through the smoke and flames. “Any idea what’s going on?”

  “Nope. Somebody was shooting holes in the roof, but there was an explosion about forty feet away. I can’t hardly see a thing from the flash and the smoke…wait a minute.” He stopped and closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and peered through the scope again. “Jeeze!”

  Another explosion blew out the right front corner of the Exchange, taking out most of the major support on that side. The front of the warehouse sagged and fell outward. The firefighters dropped their hoses and ran. The crowd
outside finally saw for the first time what the interior was like, as if someone had ripped the outside corner off a wax paper milk carton, revealing an ant burrow made from trash.

  Every eye strained to see, hoping they wouldn’t find their fellow deputies in the rubble. Flames roared outward, burning hot and bright.

  On the opposite side, aiming over the roof’s ridge line, the rifleman tightened the sling wrapped around his wrist, positioned the stock snugly against his shoulder and lined the crosshairs on the ragged hole.

  Though the volume of sleet was already steady, the skies opened, and ice pellets rattled so hard the brick building was nearly obscured across the street.

  The horrific sight emerging onto the roof shocked Red. He was back on the radio in a second. “Sir, I’ve got two people crawling through the smoke onto the roof through about a million rats that are coming from everywhere and sliding right over the edge.”

  Griffin clutched the radio in a white-fisted grip. “Do not fire, deputy. Do not fire! What do you see? Are they our men?”

  The second rifleman squinted through his scope and two completely unidentifiable, smoke-blackened apparitions crawled out of the hole.

  “I can’t tell yet.”

  Griffin cursed. Would nothing go right this night? “Hold your fire unless they shoot first, understood deputy?”

  “Yessir.”

  Ned snorted in disgust. “Oh hell, Griffin. Ask that boy if one of them is a skinny white kid and the other one a big black bastard.”

  Chapter Forty-nine

  The fire was out of control, intensified by accelerants such as kerosene, paint thinner, alcohol, gas, and oil. Support beams, studs and joists weakened and collapsed…

  ***

  John crawled out first, pushed from behind by Cody. As soon as his partner rolled out, Cody hauled himself onto the frozen roof, cutting himself on the jagged edges of the metal blown outward by the explosion. They immediately slipped toward the edge, and the drop five stories below. Luckily, the ice hadn’t yet formed a strong crust. Cody jammed his boot heels into the rusting sheet iron to gain a foothold. John slipped for a terrifying second before his shoe sole caught against a nail that had worked its way free over the years.

  With those precarious anchors, they lay gasping in the sleet. Their breath made thick clouds in the cold air.

  Flame shot outward and then sucked back inside to be replaced by thick, acrid smoke. The ice beneath their bodies quickly melted from the intense heat only inches below. With a groan Cody closed his eyes and lay still for a moment, oblivious to the sleet stinging his face, and the increasing temperature underneath.

  The wind sucked the black smoke from the hole, blowing it away behind them toward the front of the Exchange. Cody twisted to look back over his shoulder. Flames leaped into the night air.

  “We need to get off this roof before the fire catches us.”

  “How we gonna get down?”

  Cody peered through the curtain of sleet and saw two men waving from the roof of a house just across the street. It felt odd to wave back, but he raised a hand, and then saw the rifles. “They had a couple of snipers over there, watching.”

  “Think they’ll shoot?” John closed his eyes under the clean, icy downpour.

  “They better not. Not after all that.”

  Chapter Fifty

  The fire fed indiscriminately…

  ***

  Griffin’s radio crackled to life. “Sheriff, it’s them. Our guys crawled through the roof and they’re working their way to the edge. Send us a ladder truck around here real quick.”

  “Well, glory!” Ned shouted.

  O.C. clapped in applause. The men surrounding the car radios heard the good news and a cheer went up around the Exchange.

  Griffin nearly leaped for joy. “Great! Keep an eye on ’em.”

  “Yessir.”

  Sheriff Griffin turned to the only reporter he trusted. “Our boys are out. We’ll have a statement for you in a few minutes.”

  The Chisum News reporter nodded. “I appreciate that. Do you have a statement about the house?”

  Griffin went cold. “What house?”

  “The one across the street here. Someone noticed smoke coming out of it a few minutes ago and I heard a fireman say it’s blocked like the Exchange.” He pointed to the house now totally engulfed in flame.

  Griffin turned around and watched the firemen direct their hoses onto the little structure behind them. Flames licked along the eaves and smoke boiled from the windows.

  “No. I don’t have a thing to say, except it looks like it’s on fire.”

  Minutes later, Griffin heard a shout and saw Cody and John get out of a police car and limp toward Ned. O.C. put his hand out to hold Griffin in place. Ned rushed forward on shaky knees and met them halfway.

  His stomach unclenched with relief when he finally hugged them. “You boys look like you’ve been through the wringer.”

  “Yeah, and now I know just what that means.” Cody let the old lawman hang on for as long as he wanted.

  Ignoring O.C.’s orders not to watch, the kids saw the two filthy men step behind the safety of the cars and fire trucks. They shot out of the car and raced through the crowd, nearly knocking Cody down.

  “Uncle Cody!” Pepper grabbed his waist. “You’re safe! And damn, you stink!”

  Top hugged him tightly. When he saw John alone, leaning against a police car, the boy let go of Cody and tapped Big John’s leg. “You all right?”

  Exhausted, he grinned down at the youngster and roughed his hair. “I am now.”

  “Y’all don’t go in that other house.” Top pointed at the smoke across the street. He’d been watching the firemen as they fought the flames.

  “Not likely,” Cody agreed.

  Smoke billowed from the storm drains as slush poured in. The rich odor of burning pitch from hundred year old pine almost smelled good, compared to the filthy air they’d been breathing all night.

  “Griffin!”

  The sheriff turned toward Cody’s voice.

  “Kendal didn’t get in and out through the Exchange. That house is the entrance. There’s a tunnel under there which connects everything and he walked in and out of there as open as you please, probably passing right by y’all and laughing the whole time. Let it burn Griffin, just like the Exchange. Both fires will burn everything clean and we’ll be shut of all this.”

  John didn’t comment. Two ambulance drivers rolled a stretcher toward the worn out lawmen and he sat down to let the cold, clean air wash over his tired, filthy body.

  “He’s been snakebit,” Cold told one of the drivers.

  “What?”

  “John was bit by a copperhead in there. Y’all need to get him to the hospital.”

  “We’re waiting on someone to take him.”

  Cody stood. “You take him now. The ambulance is sitting right there.”

  “He’s colored.”

  Cody saw red. He grabbed the man’s coat and threw him to the side. “Get him to a doctor!”

  Two colored men in overalls stepped forward and took John by his arms. “We’ll take him, Mister Cody.”

  “I ain’t-a goin’ to no hospital.” Feeling fuzzy, John shook his head. “Ain’t a goin’.”

  The tallest man in khakis and a red cloth coat didn’t like that idea at all. “You’ll die, or at least you’ll lose that thumb.”

  John wiggled his swollen fingers. “Take me to Miss Sweet. She’s been curing snake bites all her life. She knows what to do.”

  “You gonna make it, Cody?” John had no intention of leaving until he was sure Cody was all right.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Then I reckon I’ll go.” Without another word, they hurried the big deputy into an old car that shot off south of the tracks, detouring way around the burning house the firemen had all but abandoned.

  The ambulance driver regained his feet and disappeared into the crowd. A policeman handed Cody a cardboard cu
p of lukewarm coffee.

  Griffin finally joined him, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “What did you find in there?”

  The tired young constable sipped the weak brew and contemplated the burning house while a different ambulance driver wrapped his thumb and examined the shallow wounds in his chest and side. “Dead people, or parts of them.”

  He told Griffin about what they’d encountered in the house of horrors. When he finished, a crowd of silent men had gathered to listen. “We didn’t find Alvin, but I have a good idea it was him we smelled when me and Andrews moved that first bale of papers. If they can get that fire put out, I imagine you’ll find his body not too far from the front door. He probably just died and George left him, or he might have been able to move enough to drop one of the deadfalls on himself. If that happened, George wouldn’t have been able to get him out, so he probably just left him.”

  “Did you ever get a look at Kendal?”

  “Never laid eyes on the man, but I think we heard him a few times. You said he got out.”

  “We believe he did, but we haven’t found him yet.”

  “Them reporters keep asking to talk to somebody,” Sergeant Blair interrupted. He nodded toward the jostling crowd gathered behind the barricades.

  Griffin shrugged. “I’m not talking to the bastards.”

  Ned’s eyes flicked toward the Sheriff.

  “Here comes Wayne Brewer.” Blair recognized the Channel 12 News reporter, followed by a cameraman.

  “Dammit.”

  Ned frowned at his grandchildren. “Y’all need to get back in the car where it’s warm.”

  Pepper pulled the oversize coat up tight around her neck. “I know.”

  “Grandpa?” Top tapped his grandfather on the side.

  “You too, boy.”

  “I know, but I have something to tell you.”

  The old man looked down at the worried boy. “Hum?”

  “I know where that Kendal feller might be.”