Painfully I sat up until I could see Gary again. He had become a pillar of molten flame. His enormous overstuffed body shook convulsively as burning fat seeped from his broken skin and dribbled down his limbs like candle wax.
As I stared-and believe me, I was staring, there was a brutal hypnotic quality about the horror before me that would not let me go-he struggled to recover himself, to regain control of his body. The pain… I can’t describe the pain he felt. No one could, no one living. Human beings don’t ever experience being burned to death, not the same way Gary did. Our brains can’t take the overwhelming stimulus. We black out and are spared the worst of the misery.
The dead don’t sleep. They don’t faint, either. Gary was dying in the most excruciating way possible but he was not allowed the mercy of unconsciousness. I could see him trying to regain control of his rebel body, to fight through the pain. His hands flexed, his arms came down. He was trying to grab something. Anything. Me.
I barely rolled out of the way as a massive burning arm slammed down on the flagstones beside me. I could feel the heat coming off of Gary, I could feel the super-heated air displaced by his strike. My feet pushed hard to get underneath me, my arms flexed to lift me off the ground. If I didn’t get up to a standing posture in the next second I was doomed.
Gary swung around, his arms extended like clubs, the light they gave off dazzling me as I slipped just under his grasp and came up with my back against the wall. He pulled back an arm and tried to punch me with an enormous burning fist but I managed to dodge. The punch collided with the wall and shattered the bricks there.
I had a moment of safety. Gary was blind-the fire had turned his eyeballs to cooked blobs of jelly. He cast about, this way and that trying to find me in his personal darkness. I decided not to give him the chance.
I turned and ran and slipped into a corridor leading out of the tub room-and found myself face to face with a dead man in scorched denim overalls. I had forgotten about Gary’s personal guards. This one didn’t seem pleased at all by what I’d done to his master. His broken hands grabbed at my shirt and his mouth came open, his teeth angling for my shoulder. I reared back, trying to break his grip but it was no use-he’d gotten his index finger tangled in one of my belt loops. The best strategy I could think of was to knock him into Gary’s bathtub, hopefully setting him alight, but if I had tried that I would have been pulled in right after him.
The dead man’s jaw stretched open wide, preparing for the bite, when something truly surprising happened. Whatever animating spark, whatever life force I could find in Overalls’ eyes (and there wasn’t much) drained out of him. His eyes rolled back in his head and his knees buckled. Lifeless, twice dead, he slid down beside me and nearly yanked me off my feet.
A dead woman with cornrows in her hair appeared to replace him but she dropped dead before she could even touch me. Good thing. I was still busy trying to untangle Overalls from my belt loop.
I got free and ran-just ran as fast as I could, with no idea where I was going. I came to the bottom of a flight of stairs and tried to remember whether the dead had dragged me down or up when they took me out of the pumphouse. I was still standing there in indecision, desperate to get out of the dark fortress, when I heard footsteps from above coming toward me. Two sets of footsteps. One slow, measured and rhythmic, the other jumbled and chaotic as if someone with no coordination at all was trying to keep pace. I’d heard footsteps like that before, in the hospital in the meatpacking district. That had not ended well.
There was no place to hide and I had no weapons. I would have died, no question, if the creatures coming down the stairs had wanted to take my life. Lucky for me they didn’t.