The Burning Man (31 page)

The panic was mounting, cranking up to an eleven, and she could smell a sharp, metallic ozone scent in the crackling air.

Then there was a massive, blinding flash, as if lightning had struck every wall of the room at once. All three lamps exploded, every outlet gave off a burst of sparks, and the television screen shattered into a thousand flying daggers. Olivia threw her body over Kieran, barely feeling the sting of glass fragments in her bare back. She used her arm to protect her eyes.

When she looked up, the room was lit only by flickering blue flames shooting from the electrical outlets and crawling up the wallpaper. It was rapidly filling up with acrid smoke. She had only seconds to act.

She grabbed the first piece of clothing her fingers found, Kieran’s crumpled T-shirt, and pulled it on over her head. Then she got herself into a squat position and rolled him onto his stomach, hooking her elbows under his shoulders and pulling him up and toward her so that his chest was pressed against hers.

She grabbed his wrist and pulled his arm over her shoulder, into a fireman’s carry. Her aching ribs screamed in protest, but she ignored them. Settling his weight onto her back, she gripped his arm in her good hand, hooked the elbow of her broken arm around his thigh, and staggered toward the door.

Opening it, she had to turn sideways to get him through.

Out in the hallway, she found that all the lights were out and flames were pouring out of every electrical outlet and light fixture. The smoke was so thick she could barely see, but she could hear shouting and running feet as panicked guests fled the flames and ran for the stairs.

Stairs.

Olivia was going to have to carry Kieran down the stairs and out of the building.

She’d practiced the fireman’s carry, briefly lifting other students in her CPR class for a few seconds at a time. But it was one thing to lift a conscious, standing person, and something altogether different to carry an unconscious, unresponsive one down a flight of stairs.

But she didn’t have a choice. So she shut out the noise and chaos around her, and focused intensely on each step, one after the other, as if she was doing a particularly hard set at the gym. She could feel the heat of the flames on her skin, making her sweat and rendering her grip treacherous and slippery. Smoke filled her mouth and nose, making her lungs feel as if they were loaded with rusty nails.

By the time she made it to the stairway at the end of the hall, her legs were already shaking, her spine and ribs throbbing with the pain of his crushing weight.

Looking down the first flight of metal stairs, the task seemed utterly insurmountable. While going down was certainly easier than going up, she was close to the end of her endurance, and was absolutely terrified of falling and dropping Kieran.

But every second that ticked by—during which he wasn’t receiving CPR, while the flames and smoke were spreading—made it less and less likely that he would survive.

She squared her shoulders and took the first shaky step. With only one good arm, she was unable to steady herself using the railing, but she managed to stay upright. She had to take each step slowly—excruciatingly so— placing one foot down, then bringing her other down beside it.

Each time, she paused to catch her balance and her breath. She kept on pushing herself to go faster, picturing mothers lifting cars off their endangered children, and reaching deep down inside herself to find hidden reserves of strength she never even knew she had.

It wasn’t enough.

She made it to the first landing before her legs gave out and she collapsed to her knees, a frustrated scream of anguish wrenched out from between her clenched teeth.

All her life, Olivia hated to be told she couldn’t do something, just because she was a girl. She fought every day to prove that she could outrun, out-shoot, and outwit any boy in school. Her endurance was top-notch, and she constantly pushed herself to go heavy, to beat her previous best.

Now, when it really mattered, she just wasn’t strong enough.

It didn’t even occur to her that by getting him this far, she’d already accomplished an impressive feat of strength and willpower. She was facing what could be the darkest, most brutal failure of her young life, and all she could think about was that she couldn’t stop.

She couldn’t give up.

She struggled to lift her right leg so that her bare foot was flat on the floor, then shifted her weight forward and tried to bring her other leg up into a squatting position. She made it for a precious second, but misjudged her balance as she tried to rise, and wound up falling backward instead.

Kieran slipped off her shoulders and thudded bonelessly to the floor.

For a second, all she could do was lie there with her head on his belly, dizzy and gasping with black and red shapes dancing in the corners of her vision.

“Kieran,” she said, spinning toward him and gripping his clammy hand. His face was the color of skim milk, eyes rolled back but not completely closed. “Kieran, stay with me. I’m gonna get you out of here, or die trying. Do you hear me? You stay with me!”

She hooked her elbows under his armpits and started dragging him toward the next flight. Bouncing him down the steps on his ass was far from ideal, but so was leaving him to die on the landing. She was so beyond exhausted that she wasn’t even sure that she could make it down the stairs on her own, but she didn’t hesitate. She backed down as quickly as she could, pulling him with her.

His head lolled against her thighs, flopping from side to side.

Halfway down the flight, she slipped and bloodied her bare knees against the metal edge of a step but still managed to stay upright and hang on. Kieran’s rumpled boxer shorts were starting to scrunch down off his skinny ass, but she couldn’t risk her grip to try and pull them back up.

It was all about the next step. And then the next one, and the one after that. She blocked out the agony in her lungs and ribs and knees. She blocked out the fear of failure and death. She blocked out everything but making it down
each and every single step.

And then there were no more.

She’d hit the first floor landing.

She collapsed back on her ass, clutching Kieran against her chest and graying out for a precious handful of seconds. With no idea of how much time had slipped away, she snapped back into focus, feeling like she was going to throw up and gasping desperately for oxygen in the smoky stairwell.

Forcing the rising bile back down, she lurched to her feet, pulling him the last few feet to the stairway door.

She pushed the door open with her shoulder and backed into the chaos of the hotel lobby.

Firefighters in heavy turnout coats and frantic hotel staff members were managing the evacuation, helping coughing, terrified guests and guiding everyone out the big, double glass doors into the parking lot. Many were in their pajamas, nightgowns, or robes, and some just had sheets or blankets wrapped around their shoulders. Mothers herded crying children and maids helped frail, bewildered seniors. Paramedics triaged the injured, tending to burns and administering oxygen.

“Paramedic!” Olivia called in what she intended to be a clear, strong voice, but came out was a strangled, croaking wheeze. “
Help!”

An older black female with a man’s haircut and a flyweight boxer’s build responded immediately to her cry. She ran to Olivia’s side and began to methodically and efficiently check Kieran’s vitals.

“Heart attack, from a congenital heart defect.” Olivia said, the act of talking like broken glass in her smoke-scoured throat. “He’s been unresponsive for approximately eight to ten minutes. I started CPR but was unable to continue when the conditions in our location became unsafe.”

The gruff paramedic made a terse, non-verbal sound in acknowledgement, without turning her head or stopping her ministrations. A second paramedic, this one white and male with glasses and a shaved head, joined the first. Seconds later, the female paramedic looked up at her partner and shook her head.

“Wait,” Olivia said. “Wait, no...”

“I’m sorry,” the woman said, her hard, dark eyes softening. “There’s nothing more we can do for him. He’s been gone for some time. Most likely died instantly.”

“No,” Olivia said, shoving the paramedic aside and putting her hand on Kieran’s cold, unmoving chest. “No, that’s not possible. Don’t you have a defibrillator?”

“Defib can’t bring back the dead,” the male paramedic said. “It ain’t a magic wand, kid.”

“No,” she said again. “You just need to...”

She stopped, and leaned into Kieran, starting up her desperate one-handed compressions again.

“Come on,” she hissed between clenched teeth. “Come on come on come on.”

“Honey, don’t,” the woman said, putting a gentle, calloused hand on Olivia’s shoulder.

The compressions had shifted to angry hammer-fists, slamming into Kieran’s bony sternum again and again as a tortured, rusty scream welled up inside her.

Echoing Olivia’s unleashed scream, a wall of raging flame surged through the lobby like the leading edge of a nuclear blast. The female paramedic grabbed Olivia and dropped to the charred carpet, using her own body to shield her from the flash fire.

Olivia’s last thought as she slipped into dizzy blackness was that she was the one who was supposed to be doing the protecting.

And she had failed.

When Lorna Gilbert arrived at the Co-Z Inn, it was total chaos. She’d been on her way to New York City to report in at the Massive Dynamic head office, when she’d gotten a call saying there had been a blip on the trace that had been put on Kieran’s credit card.

They’d done it as soon as she’d reported him AWOL from the school. But when the call had come across the police band, reporting an explosion at that location, she’d floored it all the way there.

Lorna had been working for Massive Dynamic for twelve years, keeping a watchful eye on high-functioning Cortexiphan positives under the guise of a teacher, guidance counselor, or dorm mother—whatever the situation required. Before that, she’d worked in private security, and could still stand and bang with the boys without breaking a sweat.

Although she referred to herself as “Mrs. Gilbert,” and often told her charges that she had children because it made her seem more motherly, in reality she’d never even married. When she was younger, she’d experimented a bit, thinking that her disinterest in men meant that she was into women. By the time she was forty, though, she realized that she just wasn’t interested in intimate relationships at all.

On the other hand, she got a lot of satisfaction from taking care of her young charges, and often developed strong bonds with them, despite the fact that the relationship was built upon false pretenses.

Just now, she was worried sick about Olivia.

Olivia was a strange one, she had to admit that. She was so reserved, so quiet, so mature. Not shy at all—just intensely private. A loner. It had taken a lot of work to put her at ease, to get her to let her guard down, even just a few precious inches. But once she did, Lorna discovered that she was ferociously smart and thoughtful and even funny in her own quirky, deadpan way.

She’d sent one of their best security teams after Olivia when she foolishly went after that rogue cop on her own, giving them strict orders to protect her at all cost. But somehow, a sixteen-year-old girl had managed to give MD’s finest the slip, a fact she would never let them live down.

Lorna just wished that she could have found a way to communicate with Olivia, to let her know that those men were there to help her, not hurt her.

Through some kind of miracle, Olivia had found a way to beat that cop and save her sister, although to be perfectly honest, Lorna didn’t understand exactly what had gone down inside that house. It didn’t matter. She’d learned early on that there were a lot of things she didn’t fully understand, and she was okay with that. All that had mattered was that Olivia was safe, and being cared for at a Massive Dynamic research facility.

Until now.

Lorna didn’t know if the two explosions that occurred that day were both caused by Olivia, but this second one had to have been, since she was the only Cortexiphan positive in the building.

The parking lot outside the Co-Z Inn was blocked off by emergency vehicles, so she had to park across the main road and run over on foot to the burning hotel.

Firefighters were battling the blaze while paramedics and the walking wounded helped evacuate those who couldn’t walk. Crowds of fearful, shivering guests milled about the parking lot, unsure of what to do or where to go.

She found Olivia sitting on the pavement with a silver thermal blanket around her shoulders and a black female paramedic dabbing at a cut on her forehead. Her face was smudged with soot and her body language was slumped and utterly defeated.

In her eyes, the thousand-yard stare.

“Olivia,” Lorna said, squatting down beside her. “Thank god you’re okay.” She looked around, then back at the girl. “Where’s Kieran?”

Olivia shook her head, her face mask-like and emotionless.

“You mean you don’t know where he is?” Lorna asked. “Or...”

“He’s dead,” she said flatly. Then she lifted her head. “He’s
dead
, okay?” she snapped. “He’s dead, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Oh, honey,” Lorna said, wrapping her arm around Olivia’s shoulders. “I’m so sorry. Was it his heart?”

Olivia turned away and nodded. Lorna looked to the paramedic.

“Is she okay,” she asked.

“Physically,” the woman said, and she nodded. “She’ll be okay. But mentally?” She shrugged and started packing up her equipment.

“Come on, Olivia,” Lorna said. “Come back to the school. Rachel misses you. She needs you.”

Olivia looked up at her, a slight frown creasing between her pale brows.

“Rachel,” Olivia said. “Jesus, what am I gonna tell her?”

“Tell her the truth. Tell her that you stopped at a motel on the way home from the hospital, because you were both so tired,” Lorna said. “And then Kieran had a heart attack. It’s not a lie, it’s just not the whole story.” She helped Olivia to her feet. “Sometimes, people are better off if they don’t know the whole story.”