“I think so. Why?”
Darby had one more idea. Last-ditch didn’t even do it justice. She grabbed a handful of brown napkins from the counter and mashed them into the bagel toaster. Pressed the plunger. It clicked, like a gun’s chamber closing, and inside it, the toaster’s heating coils warmed.
Jay watched. “What’re you doing?”
She knew she had ten, maybe twenty seconds, until the coils turned red-hot.
We are the motherfucking rescue.
She grabbed a half-drunk cup of black cowboy coffee — Ed’s, maybe, long cold — and chugged it on the run, squeezing Jay’s fingers and racing for the restroom. Hand in hand. Running for that tiny window.
“Don’t stop, Jay. Don’t stop—”
“You’re sure fingers grow back?”
“Yep.”
*
Ashley bashed his way inside. He vaulted the window on his unhurt hand, careful not to slash his palm on the jagged glass, and coughed on a pungent odor. Boy-howdy, it was potent. The fuel can must’ve spilled, and mixed with the bleach and Sandi’s pepper spray vapor to create a truly noxious atmosphere.
He rubbed his stinging eyes as he clambered in, aiming the nailer, sweeping left to right. First he saw the crumpled bodies of Ed and Sandi near the Colorado map. Legs sprawled open in the immodesty of death. Blood mixing with the gas on the floor, swirling vivid ribbons.
Beside them, baby brother Lars.
Oh, Lars.
On his belly. His head twisted sideways in an ocean of red, his hair mussed, his eyes still drowsily half-open. His throat a meaty slash. His jugular cut to the bone; a human Pez dispenser.
The scrawny kid who’d worn an Army surplus helmet and combat boots to junior high school, who loved ranch sauce on his Famous Star cheeseburgers, who’d re-watched Starship Troopers until his VHS copy strangled the VCR with black ribbons — he was gone now. Gone forever. He’d never play the new Gears of War on Xbox One. All because he got sucked into a school bus driver’s ill-fated little ransom scheme. Because between the changed locks, the cops, and the blizzard, this entire week had careened wildly off the rails.
And it all would’ve been manageable, still, were it not for Darby.
Darbs. Darbo. That fiery little redhead from CU-Boulder who broke into their car with a shoelace, of all things, who handed Jaybird a knife and tipped an already volatile night irreversibly off-course. He suspected his entire life had been building to this confrontation. Hers, too. She was his destiny, and he was hers.
In a better universe, perhaps he’d marry her. But in this one, he’d have to kill her. And, unfortunately, he’d have to make it hurt.
Oh, Lars, Lars, Lars.
I’ll make this right.
I promise, I’ll—
He heard a whoosh to his right and he whirled, aiming the cordless nailer, expecting to see Darby and Jaybird cowering behind the coffee stand. But Espresso Peak was empty. Pierced with nails, dripping with gasoline, messy with tipped cups and plastic fragments, but empty. They weren’t here.
He noticed the toaster was crammed with brown napkins.
The noise he’d heard?
A cloud of gray smoke, curling from the toaster’s glowing coils. A sizzle as the napkins ignited. Ashley ran his tongue along his upper lip, tasting gasoline vapor, and then it all made sense.
“Oh, come on—”
*
A fireball ripped through the restroom’s triangular window, pushing a scorching wave of pressurized air. Darby leapt outside, a half-second ahead of the blast, bouncing off a picnic table and landing hard, twisting her left ankle.
She felt a sickening pop.
Jay turned, a few paces ahead. “Darby!”
“I’m fine.”
But she knew she wasn’t. Her ankle throbbed with jarring pain. Her toes went instantly numb; a sharp mess of pins and needles inside her shoe, like invisible fingers pinching her nerves—
“Can you walk?”
“I’m fine,” she said again, and another surge of fire roared through the broken window above her, drowning out her voice. Another wall of hot air threw her to her knees in the snow.
The visitor center erupted into towering flames behind them, tongues of fire pumping a column of filthy smoke. It climbed the sky, a furious tornado-swirl of glowing embers. The size and of closeness of it was overwhelming. Raging heat on her back, the whining suction of devoured air. The charcoal odor of fresh fire. The snow lit up with orange daylight and the trees cast bony shadows.
Jay gripped her hand. “Come on. Stand up.”
Darby tried again, but her ankle folded limply beneath her. Another surge of nauseating pain. She hobbled forward.
“Is he dead?” Jay asked.
“Don’t count on it.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means no.” Darby pulled Lars’s handgun from her jeans. She wasn’t sure if Ashley had been inside the building when the fumes ignited, but she hoped her improvised firebomb had at least blown his eyebrows off. But dead? No. He wasn’t dead, because she hadn’t killed him yet. She could rest when she’d fired her stolen .45-caliber bullet right into his smirking face. No sooner.
“I hope you got him,” Jay said as the inferno swelled behind them, turning the world foggy with low smoke. The moon was gone. The trees had become jagged ghosts in the fire-lit smog. Big Devil held its blackened shape as it burned, a cage of roiling fire around an epicenter of bone-cracking heat.
And now the glowing embers descended like fireflies from the darkness, peppering the snow around Darby and Jay. They sizzled on contact, hundreds of tiny meteors striking puffs of steam. Too fast to outrun.
“Jay. Take off your coat.”
“Why?”
“There’s gasoline on it.” Darby tugged off her own Art Walk hoodie and hurled it into the snow. Seconds later, a spark touched it and it erupted into blue-orange flames, like a campfire.
Jay saw this and tore hers off immediately.
“See? Told you.”
More embers descended around them, more fireflies riding the winds, and Darby followed Jay one painful step at a time. She couldn’t stop. Her hair was still soaked with fuel. One errant spark was all it would take, and she’d come too far and fought too hard tonight to be killed by a goddamn spark.
She peeled a wet strand from her face. “The parking lot. We’ll get into Blue—”
“What’s Blue?”
“My car.”
“You named your car?”
“I’ll run the engine to keep you warm. And . . .” Darby trailed off as they trudged through the smoky darkness, letting the next thought go unsaid: And while you’re sitting in Blue’s passenger seat, I’ll go find Ashley and shoot him in the face.
And end it, once and for all.