Fire Spirit (35 page)

Craig struck the window again, and this time it shattered. Flames gushed out of it like a dragon breathing fire, scorching Craig's face and singeing the front of his hair. But in spite of the intense heat, he plunged both hands into the car, unbuckled Jeff's red-hot seat-belt, and grasped him under the armpits. Shouting with pain and effort, he heaved Jeff's shoulders through the window, and then managed to grab his belt and manhandle him out on to the driveway. One of Jeff's sneakers tumbled, smoking, down toward the street.

Jeff lay face-down on the red-brick paving, his face blackened and his T-shirt smoldering. He was quaking with pain.

‘Craig! We have to get him away from here!' Ruth shouted. ‘That car is going to blow up any second! Ammy – call nine-one-one, now! And when you've done that, bring out some blankets!'

Both of Craig's hands were a mass of blisters, but he managed to heave Jeff over on to his back. All of Jeff's hair was burned down to his scalp and his ears were curled up like two bacon-rinds. Craig took his arms and Ruth took his legs, and between the two of them they managed to shuffle him across the driveway and lay him down on the grass, sheltered from the blazing Grand Prix by Craig's Explorer.

‘We have to cool him down!' said Ruth. ‘Craig! Listen! Open up the garage and bring out the hose!' She knew that Craig was hurting, too, and already showing the first signs of shock, but Jeff was so badly burned that he needed immediate first aid if he wasn't going to die.

Craig opened the door of his SUV and pressed the remote control which lifted the garage door. He limped inside and turned on the garden hose which was fixed to the wall. Then he reeled it out across the grass, soaking his pants and his shoes.

Ruth was kneeling beside Jeff, shushing him and reassuring him that help was coming. She took the hose with trembling hands and adjusted it to a fine spray, waving it slowly up and down so that he was drenched from head to foot in cold water. Jeff groaned and murmured, ‘What are you doing, dude? That really
hurts
.'

Amelia came hurrying back out of the house, carrying a large blue honeycomb blanket. ‘I called them!' she said. ‘The ambulance, and the Fire Department, both.'

She looked over at the Grand Prix. The flames were leaping so high that it looked like a monstrous Fourth of July bonfire. Several neighbors had begun to gather in the street, although sensibly they were keeping their distance.

‘Ammy, keep down!' said Ruth, and almost as soon as she did so, the Grand Prix's gas tank exploded with a deafening bang, and a lurid orange fireball rolled up into the sky. The wreckage of the Grand Prix was blown clear over the rockery and on to the lawn, where it lay on its side underneath the basswood tree, burning so fiercely that the lower branches caught fire.

Craig sank down on to his knees, holding up his hands as if he were begging for mercy from an unforgiving god. Ruth looked over at him, and knew how much pain he was suffering, but all she could do was pray that the paramedics wouldn't take too much longer.

Amelia, though, was standing at the side of the lawn, her hands by her sides, looking slowly to the left and then to the right, and frowning.

‘Ammy!' Ruth shouted at her. ‘Ammy, are you OK?'

‘I can hear them!' Amelia called back. ‘I can hear them! They're coming closer! They're all coming through from underneath! Hundreds of them! Hundreds and hundreds!'

TWENTY-ONE

R
uth and Amelia had to wait until two thirty in the morning before the doctor came into the waiting-room to see them. Amelia was curled up on one of the couches, although she hadn't slept, and had spent the night whispering her songs to herself, songs about boys and rain and unfulfilled love affairs. Ruth stared at her own reflection in the night-blackened window and thought how tired she looked, and how lonely.

They heard the doctor's sneakers squelching along the corridor before he eventually appeared. He was in his early forties, swarthy, balding, with thick-lensed eyeglasses and black bushy eyebrows, and fuzzy black hair on his forearms.

‘Mrs Cutter? I'm Doctor Bercow. I'm in charge of the team who have been taking care of your son, Jeff.'

‘How is he? Can I see him?'

‘Not just yet, I'm afraid. We're keeping him in a totally sterile environment because of the extent of his burns. His airway was damaged by the flames so he's on a respirator at the moment, and we're giving him fluids to keep him from going into hypovolemic shock. He's suffered second- and third-degree burns to his face and hands, and first-degree burns to a further twenty per cent of his body surface area.'

‘Oh, God,' said Ruth. She paused, and then she said, ‘He's not going to
die
, is he?'

Doctor Bercow took off his glasses. There were plum-colored bags under his eyes and he looked as if he hadn't had a good night's sleep in a month. ‘So long as Jeff doesn't contract any serious bacterial infection, I'm pretty confident that he's going to pull through. I won't try to pretend that it isn't going to be touch-and-go. He's going to need extensive skin-grafting, once he's stable. But he was comparatively lucky that your husband pulled him out of that car so quick. His burns could have been a whole lot worse.'

‘How about my husband? Is he OK?'

‘Your husband, yes. We've treated his hands with antibiotic cream and we've given him some heavy-duty painkillers. He's asleep right now. When his hands heal, he'll probably have some scarring, and maybe some stiffness in the fingers of his left hand, but apart from that he should make a complete recovery.'

‘Thank you,' said Ruth. She sat down again, suddenly exhausted. ‘You will keep us posted, won't you?'

‘Of course I will, Mrs Cutter. Right now, though, it's just a question of wait and see. If I were you, I'd take your daughter back home and get some sleep. I doubt if things will change very much in the next eight hours. Come back around eleven.'

‘You're right. That's a good idea. Come on, Ammy. How about it?'

Amelia abruptly sat up and stared at Ruth, with her eyes very wide. ‘They're talking much louder now!'

Doctor Bercow said, ‘Excuse me?'

‘They're not whispering any more. They're jabbering.
Jabber-jabber-jabber
. Like they're really excited!'

Ruth put her arm around Amelia's shoulders and gave her a squeeze. ‘She's over-tired, that's all. It's been a very traumatic night.'

‘I know
you
can't hear them,' said Amelia. ‘But
I
can, and Martin can – although Martin can't hear them nearly as clear as me.'

‘That's enough, Ammy. Tell me about it when we get home.'

‘But there's hundreds of them.
Hundreds
!'

Ruth took Amelia's arm and led her out. Doctor Bercow opened the doors for them and said, ‘Don't worry, Mrs Cutter. I promise you that if there are any developments, we'll call you right away.'

‘Thank you.'

‘By the way,' he said, as he walked them to the hospital entrance. ‘Do you have any idea how your son's vehicle caught fire like that? He doesn't have any burns that I would normally associate with any kind of accelerant. Gasoline, or kerosene, or any kind of chemical.'

‘I don't know what caused it – no, not yet. Maybe an electrical fault. One of my colleagues from the arson unit will be taking a look at it over the next few days.'

‘It was
him,
' said Amelia, in a low, conspiratorial voice. ‘
He
did it, that Creepy Kid. And now he's going to let them all through. “Come through! Come through!” That's what he's telling them! “Come through!”'

Ruth gave Doctor Bercow a weary smile. ‘Time for a glass of warm milk and bed, don't you think?'

Doctor Bercow nodded. ‘Sounds like a plan to me. If only. I have a six-year-old boy to attend to, with thirty-five per cent burns. He thought he could be like the Human Torch, in
X-Men
. Soaked himself in barbecue-lighting fluid and struck a match.'

They drove back to St Joseph's Hospital at eleven forty-five the following morning. The clouds were inky black as they drove along West Sycamore. The rain drummed furiously on the roof of Ruth's car and hammered on the streets and sidewalks, throwing up a fine mist of spray, through which pedestrians walked like ghosts with umbrellas.

Jeff had been moved from the emergency operating theater to one of the fifteen beds in the intensive care unit, so Ruth and Amelia were able to see him through a window in the side of his room. His face was charred black and scarlet, and glistening with antibiotic ointment. He was still on a respirator to help him breathe, and he was hooked up to a drip of lactated Ringer's solution to replace the bodily fluids that were weeping out of his burns.

A red-haired nurse with a saintly, medieval face said, ‘The first twenty-four hours are always the most critical. But your Jeff seems to be a real fighter.'

Ruth didn't know what to say. She could only stand there looking at Jeff with her hand pressed over her mouth and tears in her eyes. Amelia touched her shoulder and said, ‘He'll get better, Mom. I know he will. I can
feel
it.'

They went in to see Craig, who was propped up in bed, both hands bundled up in white gauze. His fringe was prickly where it had been singed by the fire, and his eyebrows had gone, which gave him an oddly surprised look.

‘Ruth! Hi, honey! Hi, Ammy! Did you see Jeff yet?' His voice was slurred and he seemed to find it hard to focus, but the nurse had already warned Ruth that he was doped up with morphine.

Ruth sat down beside his bed. ‘The doctors seem to think that he has a real good chance of pulling through. But, oh – his poor face. He's going to be scarred for life.'

‘It's all my fault,' said Craig. ‘I never should have listened to that Creepy Kid. I should have tossed him out of the car as soon as he showed his face. I don't even know how he got in there. How did he get in there? Between Conradt Street and West Sycamore, we never stopped once.'

‘Come on, Craig. You couldn't have known what he was going to do.'

‘I should of known. In fact I
did
know. He burned Tyson to death, didn't he? And you
told
me that he was connected to all of those fires. But I left Jeff in the car with him. How darned stupid was that?'

‘Craig, honey, he would only have found another way to hurt us. He wants me to quit investigating these fires, and I don't think he's going to give me any peace until I do.'

‘So
are
you going to quit?'

‘I don't know, Craig. It's my job. It's my duty. And how many other innocent people are going to get burned to death, unless I find a way to stop him?'

‘So what's next?' Craig wanted to know. He waved one of his huge gauze-bandaged hands toward Amelia. ‘You're going to let him incinerate Ammy? Then you?'

‘You have mummy hands,' said Amelia.

‘Mummy hands?'

‘Like the priests started to make you into a mummy, but after they wrapped up your hands they decided they were bored with it and stopped.'

Craig gave her a wry smile. But then he said, ‘Ammy – listen to me. You have to forget about all of this stuff about people coming through from underneath. If you think you hear them, put on your iPod and turn it up loud. I don't understand who these people are or what they want, but I don't want the same thing happening to you that's happened to Jeff.'

‘The Creepy Kid won't hurt me,' said Amelia, emphatically. ‘He won't hurt Mommy either.'

‘How can you possibly know that?'

‘Because he loves us.'

‘He
loves
us?' Ruth asked her, in total surprise. ‘If he loves us – jeez, he has a funny way of showing it. He killed poor Tyson, he almost burned Jeff to death, and look what he's done to your daddy's hands. How can you possibly imagine that he
loves
us?'

Amelia slowly turned to stare at the opposite side of the room, as if the Creepy Kid were standing in the corner, invisible to everybody except her. Outside the hospital, off to the north-east, they heard a crumbling rumble of thunder, like a department store collapsing. ‘The Creepy Kid doesn't have a mommy and he doesn't have a sister and he wants us. He thinks that
we'll
take care of him.'

‘Why does he think that?'

‘Because I can see pictures of what goes on inside of his head. They're like scratchy old movies. And sometimes I can hear him crying. I think I know what he wants. He wants us to love him. He thinks everybody should love him, and he doesn't understand why they don't. He doesn't know how creepy and horrible he is. He doesn't know how bad he
smells.
He wants to do dirty things. But he wants everybody to love him, which is why he burns people.'

Craig looked at Ruth and pulled a face to show that he couldn't follow any of this. Amelia said, ‘Ask Martin. He knows more about it than me.'

The red-haired saintly nurse came in and said, ‘I'm sorry, but Mr Cutter needs to have his fluids and his blood pressure checked now, and then he should get some rest. You can come back around three this afternoon, if you like.'

Ruth kissed Craig on the forehead. ‘I still haven't told you how brave you were, pulling Jeff out of that car. You were amazing.'

‘No, I wasn't,' Craig protested, in a drowsy voice. ‘I should never have allowed it to happen in the first place.'

‘Daddy,' Amelia whispered. ‘It wasn't your fault.'

‘Of course it was. It was totally my fault.'