CHAPTER 54 MATT

54

Matt

MATT FOUND HIMSELF UNABLE to move.

The girl had done that. Spoke to him without words—

Hope not ever to see Heaven. I have come to lead you to the other shore; into eternal darkness; into fire and into ice.

She put a thought in his head. Not only that, but the thing with him and Addie, she—

Someone banged on the door, tried the knob, and shouted when they found it locked.

"Matt! The library!"

Gabby.

He snapped back and rounded the desk, fumbled with the lock, and opened the door.

Gabby grabbed him by the arm and pulled him to the large window facing Main. "Look!"

The library was on the opposite side of the street about a block down. Thick black smoke was pouring from an open window on the second floor. Ed McDougal and Ben Molton crowded up next to him. Conner Evans was at another window. Matt craned his neck and shouted, "Sally, did you call—"

"Nobody picking up at the fire station!" she replied before he could finish.

The fire station was only two doors down, across the street from the library.

"Oh my God!" Gabby gasped, covering her mouth. "Is that Arwa Gilmore?"

Tied to a chair, the old woman stumbled out the double doors of the library and rolled down the granite steps to the sidewalk below. She was on fire.

An image of her name scrawled on the girl's arm flashed through his head—her name with a line drawn through it. He pushed it away. "Ed! Ben! You're on the volunteer squad, right? Come with me!" Matt shouted on his way out the door.

He bolted down the sidewalk. When he passed the fire station, he waved an arm and yelled over his shoulder, "Find out what the hell is going on in there!"

Both Ed and Ben were overweight, huffing as they tried to keep up, but they heard him.

Matt tore off his jacket as he crossed the street. When he reached Gilmore, she was under the chair, still alive, her body jerking and thrashing, covered in flames. What might have been a scream moments earlier was now nothing more than a guttural moan coming from the place her mouth had been. Matt kicked at the chair, rolled it over, and smothered her with his jacket. Little good that did—she'd been doused in some kind of accelerant; he could smell it.

The woman stopped moving.

She was gone.

Matt dropped back on his hands, out of breath.

The sky was filled with black smoke. It wasn't just coming out the open windows now, it was coming from the roof. The clock tower was completely engulfed.

Across the street, Ed McDougal was pounding on one of the fire station's large garage bay doors. He glanced back at Matt. "I can see people inside, but they won't open up!"

"What do you mean, they won't open up?!"

Matt barely got the words out before one of the doors started to rise.

Engine number 7, the older of the two, roared to life. The engine revved and someone let out two loud blasts from the air horn.

Still standing in front of the door, Ed McDougal gave Matt a thumbs-up.

The door was only open a third of the way when the throaty engine revved again and came crashing through, sending aluminum cascading down both sides of the truck. Ed managed to swivel his large frame about halfway before the truck struck him. It didn't even slow as he vanished under the chrome bumper and thumped under the tires as the heavy vehicle rolled over him. Matt couldn't make out who was driving, only a silhouette, but they flicked on the lights and siren, gave the air horn another blast, and turned left on Main, picking up speed as they headed out of town.

Clearly in shock, Ben Molton stood motionless off to the side of the station house, staring at the large stain that had been Ed McDougal only moments earlier. Thankfully, the truck had left him facedown.

If not for the heat of the fire, Matt might have remained on the ground next to the dead woman in the chair, as catatonic as Ben appeared to be, because his brain wanted to stop—wanted everything to stop—but he felt the flames hungrily eating away at the library like a cancer working from the inside out and managed to snap back, knowing that if he didn't move, those same flames would find him. The wind gave a hardy gust, and Matt realized the heavy smoke above the library was alive with glowing embers. They left the rooftop and floated lazily above, some landing harmlessly in the grass and on the pavement, others vanishing from sight as they drifted over the various buildings on Main Street. Most of those buildings were over a hundred years old, and at least half were constructed of wood. They'd go up like a tinderbox.

Matt forced himself to his feet and darted across the street. "Ben, we need to get that fire out!"

"Yeah, the fire," Ben replied flatly, trance-like. He glanced down Main, in the direction of his house, and muttered in a voice that sounded half asleep, "I'll be right back, buddy." Then he was gone, shuffling down the road as if he were on some Sunday stroll, all else forgotten.

Matt let him go; he didn't have time to chase him.

The Bend's second fire truck was still in the other bay, but when Matt stepped through the mangled door and got a good look at that second truck, he realized all its tires had been slashed. The fire ax was still embedded in the left rear. Not only had someone destroyed the tires but they cut up all the hoses and pounded the various connectors and valves to the point of useless. Fire extinguishers littered the floor, their contents sprayed out, depleted, coating everything in white.