“I think she’s dead. We had a—gas leak. She lit a match.”
Avon walks toward the wreckage of the neighboring house, still burning. He wonders for a moment what’s taking the fire department so long to respond, but then he realizes they’re probably all in the mountains trying to keep the world from ending.
He goes around back, finds that most of the first-floor siding has been blown off. Inside, he surveys the charred wreckage gun up. He figures if he finds her, this Witch, and she’s still alive he’ll put two bullets in her head and call it mercy. Either way, problem solved. He steps through the hole in the wall into the room where Simon slept. The mattress is a smoldering stain now, the wicker chair consumed in its entirety.
There is no sign of the Witch. Avon kicks open a burning door, peers into the next room—a living room from the look of it—still actively on fire. Where the kitchen used to be, there’s just a hole.
“Lady?” he calls, but quietly, the way you lure a frightened animal. There are no lights on in the house except the dancing orange flicker of the flames. Shadows move across the walls. Avon walks through the living room toward an open door. Closer, he sees it is a bathroom, white tile unmarred. He toes the door open the rest of the way.
“Lady?” he says again, “are you in here? Need me to call the hospital?”
He ducks inside, gun up, sweeping. Despite the flames, the bathroom is humid, condensation running down the walls, the floor slippery. It feels like a hothouse inside or some kind of sweat lodge. The mirror over the sink has cracked from the heat. In it, his own face is fractured, lit from behind by the burning living room.
Then he becomes aware of the sound of running water and his eyes go to the tub. The faucet is on, the bath filled to overflow, water running down the porcelain onto the floor. Avon steps closer. The water is murky, blackened by soot and ash, but there is the suggestion of a figure inside. Is that—he leans closer—a body? He lowers the gun, squints at what, it becomes clear, is a charred figure submerged beneath the surface. As he peers under the water, it seems to clear, the body becoming easier to see. Male, female? He can’t tell anymore, any discernible features burned away. The head is a charred lightbulb on a thin black neck. Could it be her? The Witch?
And then the eyes open, and Avon falls back, hitting the sink with his hip, the impact spinning him around.
“Jesus,” he says, as he slips on the wet tile and falls hard, the air going out of him. His gun skitters across the floor and out the door. He lies stunned, as behind him he hears the sound of falling water and realizes that the charred corpse is rising out of the tub. He scrambles onto his back in time to see her rise, impossibly black, water raining from her seared skeleton.
She is looking at him.
He propels himself backward, some instinct in his basal ganglia telling him to keep his eyes on her, what now in his soul he realizes is the Witch, an actual witch, tool of Satan. He bumps his head on the doorjamb, corrects, feeling the heat of the flames on his back. Under his hands the wooden floorboards are crumbling, but he doesn’t stop. All the while the Witch walks after him, slowly, like a death you can’t outrun.
In his heart, Avon knows that when she catches him she will consume him, and his life will become her own, putting skin back on her bones, putting hair back on her head, and he will burn forever in the devil’s playground.
His hand finds his gun, the metal so hot it burns him, but he doesn’t hesitate, just grabs it, pulls the slide, chambering a round, and fires. The first two shots knock her back, and then he is on one knee in a shooter’s crouch, emptying his clip into her as she flies back into the bathroom, bounces off the wall, and disappears from sight.
Avon rises, ejecting the empty clip. Reflex has another one out of his cargo pants pocket and into the gun in under three seconds, and he chambers the first round, ready to go again if that bitch comes back for seconds. But then he hears a cracking sound, like a tree snapping in two, and half the roof comes down. Avon, by sheer instinct, dives out of the way. Feeling the rest of the house coming down, he scrambles toward the kitchen’s absence, blinded by smoke, racing on his hands and knees toward the smell of fresh air, and then the floor disappears from under him, and he tumbles out of the house and onto the concrete outside.
He gets to his feet and runs, still blind, crashes into a fence, the burning house listing toward him, ready to topple over. He rears back and hits the fence again, then again, driven by the heat and by this core certainty: the Witch isn’t dead and she is coming for him.
He hears the wood splinter, smashes the fence again, and then he is through, tumbling forward onto dirt. He scrambles up, moving away from the feet, away from the inevitability of death. And then Girlie grabs him, stops him, her voice in his ear. But the fear is still in him, so he pushes her away, brings up the gun, steps back off the curb, trying to find some tactical distance. As he does, he blinks away the soot and smoke, his eyes clearing. He sees them there, Girlie and Rose, the boy and the judge’s daughter. And something else, a shadow figure in the flames, standing impossibly still in the heart of the fire.
“We need to go,” he tells Girlie. “Now.”
Keeping the gun up, he nods toward the car. “Get in the car now.”
“But,” says Girlie.
“Now!”
Simon sees the fear on Avon’s face. He knows what it means. She isn’t dead. He grabs Story’s arm.
“Move,” he says.