Cole Perriman's Terminal Games (49 page)

She jerked hard against the blade again and again. Every pull was punctuated by a piteous yelp from her assailant. And now, through a process of involuntary empathy, Auggie’s pain seemed to course up the knife blade into the nerve endings of her hand, first aching and stabbing through her fingers, then rising up her wrists until it began to pound horribly and rhythmically through her entire arm. Every jerk of the handle hurt her as much as it did him, and soon they were crying and groaning in near unison like a pair of crazed lovers.

Losing blood and weakened with pain, Auggie collapsed onto the section of floor the flames had not yet reached. Marianne placed her foot squarely in the center of his chest, gripped his upper arm tightly with one hand, and pulled ferociously on the knife handle with the other. The bloody weapon came free. Marianne felt the pain slip away from her body.

But the fire and the smoke were closing in on her, and the thundering flames were nearly deafening. She could barely breathe, and her heart was pounding horribly. The kitchen was a wall of flame, and now the front entrance was completely blocked by fire. Even so, the front door was the only possible avenue of escape.

Gasping horribly, Auggie hiked himself up on his elbows and began to rise. He seemed to have suddenly regained his strength, and Marianne fully expected him to be on his feet and upon her before she could make an undoubtedly futile dash for the burning doorway. Her last possible hope was to finish him off—to kill him.

Marianne crouched down and straddled Auggie’s pelvis, pressing him down again, supporting herself on her knees. She scanned his torso for a moment, roughly calculating the position of his solar plexus—that soft, vulnerable center where ribs and muscles converged. If she struck precisely there, the blade should meet little resistance. And if she angled the blade upward under his rib cage as she drove it in, it might—just might—strike his heart. She took the knife in both hands, drew it back.

She heard the figure weakly murmur.

“Marianne!”

She recognized the eyes. She lowered the knife and leaned forward.

“Marianne!” he cried again.

It was no longer Auggie’s high, falsetto voice. Auggie had fled this wounded body. Marianne recognized this deeper but more frightened voice.

It was Stephen.

So he had been one of them all along! The possibility had never occurred to her. For a moment, Marianne was flooded with a sense of kinship that she had never before felt for Stephen. He had succumbed to the same horror that had very nearly overwhelmed her, too. Stephen had had no protection against it, no means of escape once he had started down that dark pathway.

*

“No room! No room!”

It seemed to Auggie that now the interior of the car was all that was left of his mind. There was nothing outside of it, save for the reflection of faraway flames on the windows. He had fled the burning house, rushed across the street, and closed himself inside the car. He waited then, filled with curiosity, to discover the answer to the question that he had asked Marianne—that she had so oddly refused to face.

What is death? Once you have discovered the edge of that secret place, how can you not want to know?

But this ghastly, imagined world in which he found himself was cramped and claustrophobic. The walls and windows of the car seemed to be closing in. He began to flail and thrash about on the front seat, pressing his hands and elbows against the doors and windows. It was a mistake to have shut himself up in here. He could no longer remember his imaginary little tricks for opening doors and windows. He was trapped. He screamed wildly, desperately.

“No room! No room!”

He longed to get out of this single cell, out of this minuscule outpost of his imagination. He struggled to go back to the infoworld, back to the Basement—a boundless plain of uncut metaphor containing the essence of absolutely everything. Now he would willingly leave the haunting question unanswered if he could only find his way out of his own insane imagination and back to
reality.

“No room! No room!”

But he knew there
was
no Basement anymore. There was no reality. He had destroyed it all himself. He had brought about his own doom, and now he could not even share death with all the scattered cells like the one enclosing this little piece of his mind, all of them alone, all of them disconnected, all of them shriveling into nothingness. He felt death overtake him as he gasped out one last time …

“No room! No room!”

*

Marianne put the knife down on the floor. She knew that Auggie was gone. She could not kill Stephen—and she couldn’t leave him here to die.

Her head was whirling. She couldn’t catch her breath. Her chest was heaving so violently that she wondered if her heart might burst. Blackness nearly overcame her, but she seized control of her senses.

Marianne shook her head, trying to collect her wits. She pulled on Stephen’s arms, lifting them. Not even half-conscious, Stephen let out an animal groan of pain. He was rock heavy. Marianne had defeated this same body in a brutal, hand to hand struggle, but now she wasn’t sure if she could move it out of the way of the encroaching flames. She surveyed her escape route. With a surge of alarm, she saw smoke billowing out of the front hallway.

There was no time to speculate. She dropped Stephen’s arms and grabbed the nearest throw rug. She rushed toward the front hallway, expecting to hurl herself defiantly on the flames and smother them in a matter of moments. Instead, the fire seized her like a gigantic, sweltering hand and slung her remorselessly backward, sending her tumbling helplessly across Stephen’s body.

The doorway belched a hideous cloud of black smoke. Even the brightness of the flames was momentarily obliterated. Marianne involuntarily inhaled hot blackness, and her trachea burned. She began to cough convulsively. She thought she might vomit.

Crouched on her knees, she grabbed Stephen’s arm with her right hand while still clutching the throw rug with her left. She squinted at the flames through her tears. She pounded the floor in front of her, desperately trying to make some headway. All the while, she kept yanking Stephen’s arm. She repeated this pounding and yanking endlessly, rhythmically, knowing full well it could not be of any use now. She knew the smoke would finish both her and Stephen before the fire reached them.

Then, one by one, her senses began to turn off. Her tactile sense ceased to register the scorching heat and the exertion of her limbs. The nauseating smoke stopped burning her nostrils, and the roar of the flames turned into a blissful silence. Only her vision remained, and her eyes ceased their terrible stinging. The whole scene became wonderfully silent and wonderfully clear. She could see the flames curling up around the doorway and the billowing black smoke. But the flames and the smoke no longer threatened her. They came no closer.

What has happened?

There was a kind of suspension about the conflagration, a kind of flatness. Yes, that was it. The danger had stopped being a reality. It was a scene, that was all. The flames repeated the very same arching, leaping motions again and again, and the smoke continued to roll in the same repeated, chiaroscuro balls.

It was a program. It was a loop. It was all made from little squares of electronic light. She could make out each and every one of them, some red, some yellow, some black, some white, all flashing on and off like a dense and impenetrable galaxy of fireflies.

But those flashing squares slowly broke out of their loop, reshaping themselves, forming a different image. They became a wilderness of grinning clown faces shaped from little specks of yellow, red, black, and white. Marianne dizzily realized she ought to be frightened of those faces, but her nervous system could no longer feed her mind with fear. She saw her hand, all the fleshy pixels, reach up and tenderly sweep the scene away. Everything dissolved into staring brightness and white noise.

*

The minute Nolan had realized that the words on the phone were spoken by Auggie and not by Marianne, he had rushed out of his house, jumped into his car, and driven out of Los Angeles. He knew that Marianne was in danger, but hardly dared imagine what sort of danger it might be.

Now he was cursing the curving streets and the mischievous dead ends leading up into the hills of Santa Barbara. He had never been to Marianne’s house before, and although he knew her address and had a map handy, he was having a devil of a time finding it. But at last, he found the street that apparently led to Marianne.

Her house was easy to spot.

It was the one that was burning.

“Christ!”
shouted Nolan, as he screeched his car to a stop in front of the house.

He could see the fire and smoke inside the charred windows. Smoke was starting to billow out from under the edges of the tiled roof. As he jumped out of the car, he heard the sound of sirens—the fire department, he hoped. He ran to his trunk, pulled out an army blanket, and rushed toward the front door. He used the blanket to seize the scalding hot doorknob. He turned the knob and pushed. To his relief, the door opened. But a cascade of flames swept outward, shoving him back onto the stoop.

*

The woman awoke to find herself sprawled across the front seat of her car. Every joint of her body ached. She rubbed her eyes and pulled herself upright behind the wheel.

What am I doing here?

Fragmented memories careened through her mind—a smell of gasoline, a burning flower, another woman in terrible danger. Were these images from another nightmare, like the terrified face of the drowning woman who haunted her sleep? Or like the more nebulous images of splattering blood and the terrible fall from a skyscraper that lurked in her nighttime landscape?

She gripped the steering wheel tightly.

The hard surface of the steering wheel was no dream.

The pungent smell of gasoline on her fingers was no dream.

The house blazing across the street was no dream.

The white, red, and black ski mask lying beside her was no dream.

A rush of immediate memories flooded into her head, much too fast for her to stop them.

“Auggie was here,” she whispered. “I was with him. I saw him. I saw what he did. But he’s gone. He’s gone.”

The roar of the flames was becoming more audible, but above that sound she heard the wail of approaching fire trucks. Tears came to her eyes as she started her car and drove away.

*

Nolan saw the fire trucks pulling up. But the seconds it would take for the firemen to reach the house might be fatally long. He plunged on into the flames, covering his face with a handkerchief. He used his free hand to lash out against the flames with his blanket, beating the walls and floors in a desperate effort to drive the fire away from him.

Nolan had managed to get about five feet into the front hallway when he heard loud cursing behind him …

“You stupid son-of-a-bitch, get the fuck out of there!”

But Nolan didn’t stop lashing out against the flames. He kept moving forward into the searing heat and choking smoke. Suddenly, he felt a new force driving him forward. It was a spray of water—as powerful a force as the fire itself, but incongruously cold. It knocked Nolan to his knees.

He looked up and saw a wild, roaring cascade of water spraying all around him, forcing the flames to flee back inside the house. A moment before, he had hardly been able to breathe through the smoke. Now he could hardly breathe through the watery mist. Nolan crawled forward on his knees, still clutching his handkerchief and the blanket, following the retreating fire into the living room. The water continued to batter him fiercely from behind.

Nolan found himself in a tiny area in the center of the living room that had not yet been consumed by fire. He managed to rise to his feet. Through the smoke and mist, he could barely see two figures lying on the floor directly in front of him. One was draped over the other. The figure underneath was wearing a leather jacket and a ski mask …

Auggie’s face.

The figure draped on top was Marianne. As Nolan watched, the fire reached her, and her clothes and hair began to burn. He swept up her body and rolled it into the blanket and turned toward the front door and ran like fury. He was almost knocked to the ground by another explosion of water.

“Let me out of here, goddamn it!” he shouted at the unseen firefighter.

The water receded for a moment, and Nolan made his way out the front door with Marianne’s limp, blanket-wrapped body draped over his shoulder. He didn’t stop stumbling along with her until he reached the curb. Then he collapsed beside her on the ground, coughing and gagging.

From underneath the blanket, Marianne begin to choke and cough, too. It was the sweetest sound Nolan had ever heard. It meant she was still alive.

The fire chief came running up to Nolan, waving his arms and screaming like a little boy throwing a temper tantrum.

“You dumbfuck cretinous dickbrained cocksucking motherfucking moron!” the man shouted hysterically. “Just what the fuck did you think you were doing back there?”

Nolan flashed his badge.

“L.A.P.D., asshole,” Nolan said. “D’ya mind explaining how I got here before you did?”

The chief was cowed into silence.

Nolan slowly, delicately, pulled the blanket away from Marianne’s face. Much of her hair was singed away and the right side of her face was blistered and burned. Still choking and coughing, Marianne managed to speak.

“Stephen’s in there,” she said. “Somebody’s got to get him.”

“It’s Auggie,” Nolan said.

“No,” gasped Marianne. “It’s Stephen. Auggie’s ... Auggie’s dead.”

Nolan looked toward the house. Two firemen were bringing a man’s body out the front door. The man’s arms were flailing slightly, and Nolan was sure he was still alive. Then Nolan turned back to Marianne.

She had slipped away into unconsciousness.

“Better get her some oxygen,” Nolan ordered the chief.