Melody Burning (18 page)

Still, he continued. Normally, he could do twenty stories with ease, thirty if he really wanted to push it. Then he’d rest for a couple of minutes and go on. There was no time for that now, and he forced his body to keep working, forced himself to ignore the torment in his muscles and the fire in his lungs.

Then, as he passed forty, he heard barking and immediately recognized Gilford’s voice. He cried out in anguish. He couldn’t let Gilford die in a fire! But Melody—she was in bigger trouble way up there.

Moving as fast as he could, he went to Tommy’s and dropped down.

“Hello! Anybody home?”

Only Gilford, who jumped up and down, snorting happily. The apartment was filled with a haze of smoke, and the detectors were buzzing.

He picked the wiggling dog up, went to the front door, and opened it. He already knew that this was safe; he’d seen from the crawl space that there was no fire here yet.

He could hear others crying out, and he ran up and down the hall, hammering on doors.

“Get out! Use the front fire stairs!” he shouted. They would be safe, at least for a while. He assumed that the pressure of the explosion would have blown in the doors on the back stairs, at least up to the lobby. So they were likely full of smoke, probably fire, too.

He ushered people toward the stairs, giving Gilford to a woman he didn’t know and making sure that Cheops, the Egyptian cat from 4033, and Modred, Sam and Angela Parker’s big old Lab, were also safe.

Then he returned to Tommy’s apartment and reentered the crawl space, continuing on his journey upward. As he passed forty-one, he saw elevator four stuck at an angle, smoke pouring up around it. From inside he heard terrible, terrible screaming.

He could not pass. He had to go over there. So he jumped the chase and headed for the smoke-and flame-filled elevator shaft.

He got to the elevator, which was shaking, and he could hear coughing and crying. Jumping onto the roof of the elevator car, he started choking, too, because the smoke was thick here. Just above him was the pull-down lever that opened the shaft to the fiftieth floor, but he was not going to pull it because it would only increase the draft, drawing the fire up from below even faster.

The cars had access hatches in their ceilings, but they weren’t really for escape. They were maintenance shafts, and narrow. He unhooked the four latches and pulled the cover off, pushing it away past the cable housing. Faintly, it went clattering away into the glow from below, which was rapidly increasing.

Inside the elevator, there were two people. One of them was Mrs. Scutter.

Her face was black, her hair partly burned, and she was shaking so badly that, when he dropped down into the car, he could barely lift her birdlike frame onto its roof.

There was a man there, also, and Beresford was horrified to see that his skin was raw and broken, his clothes almost burned off. This man was standing, looking down at himself, muttering.

“Come on,” Beresford said. “We’re getting out of here.”

Then he recognized this man. It was Luther.

His burns were terrible, but Beresford could only hate his father’s murderer. Had he been in the basement? He must have been. Beresford lifted him onto the top of the car, then he came out of the thick, overheated air only to find that the smoke around the car was practically impenetrable.

There was no fire control system in this shaft, and the flames already seemed close to maybe the eighth floor. Dropping down from above were molten bits of plastic burning off pipes and wire sheathing on the top two floors. The fireball that had come up this shaft and the north chase had set the underroof on fire, and flames were now spreading there. The fiftieth floor would be trapped, and roof access was probably already impossible.

Time was rushing by. He had stopped to rescue others, and now he feared there might be no way to get Melody and her mother out.

Dragging a shrieking Mrs. Scutter, he crossed the crawl space to the south chase, then moved a few feet until he was above one of his hatches. He threw it open and lowered her into the apartment. “Go feel the door. If it’s hot, don’t open it. If it isn’t, go to the front fire stairs. Do you understand?” When she nodded, wide-eyed, he left her.

Then he went back to Luther, but it was too late. He looked into the faded eyes, at the surprise and shock that still haunted them. Poor man, he thought. But ironic, too, that the person responsible for all the violations would also be killed because of them.

The other elevators were far down at the bottom of the shaft, enveloped in flames. He could only hope that nobody had been in them.

The chase was getting hot now and filling up with fumes. Even so, he returned and began going up once again, forcing himself not to waste breath by uselessly screaming her name.

The building shook, and suddenly he was casting a long shadow ahead. He didn’t need to be told what this meant—he threw himself into the crawl space between forty-two and forty-three just as a solid wall of flame came up from below and filled the chase.

He screamed then, not because he had been burned—he hadn’t—but because this meant only one thing. Melody was now hopelessly trapped.

C
HAPTER 18

I
don’t know what it is, but it smells
horrible
and there are bells ringing and I hear sirens and—
Mommy, the ceiling has smoke, the ceiling has smoke
.

It’s impossible; it has to be some kind of weird nightmare. I feel like I’m in mud or something, like I can’t move. From the hall, I hear terrible screaming, again and again and again, screaming and banging against the walls.

I try 911 on my cell, but it won’t work.

“Mom! Mom!” I go out into the living room, and she is there, bent over the phone. The front of her hair is all curled and black, and the whole place stinks of burned hair. She looks up at me, and it’s as if we are both dreaming as she says, “I can’t get this to work,” and hands me the phone.

This is not happening. It cannot be happening. I see that her bedroom door is shut and there is a sort of haze by the door, and under the door is flickering light.

This phone is dead. I curse at it, and she bursts into tears.

I have to get out of here. I cannot bear this, not one second longer
. I run for the front door and grab the handle—it’s as hot as an iron! I scream, and Mom screams, “DON’T OPEN THAT!”

She grabs me from behind, drags me away by my hair—
my hair, that’s right
—growling like a tiger, and, my God, she looks like a creature from another planet with big, bulging eyes and a face as gray as somebody already dead.

“Mom, here—” I run into my room and grab my computer and open it. It comes to life, so I call up the Internet, and
it works
.

“I’m online!”

I go to Twitter and tweet “Help we are burning Apt 5050 Beresford Melody McGrath Call 911 Help we are burning call 911 call call call 911!”

I press Update, and it just sits there going, “Loading.”
Loading
, oh, God, it’s not posting. I watch. It will not post! Come on, COME ON! But it will not post.

Then I realize the truth. That was a cached page. I’m not online at all.

As a helicopter passes the windows, I glimpse the pilots, their faces turned toward the building.

“Mom!” I run and grab my bedspread. The ceiling is now all cracked, and smoke is sort of shooting down in puffs, like people on the other side are blowing cigarette smoke through little holes.

“Help me!” I go back to the living room and start to open the door onto the balcony, but Mom grabs my wrist.

“No.”

“
No?
There’s a helicopter right there!”

“If we open that door, we’ll create a draft.” She says it quietly, as offhandedly as a teacher explaining a problem she has explained many times before. Then she covers her face with her hands and begins shaking. But then she stops.

“Mom?”

A great cry comes out of her, and she throws her head back with her fists to her temples and howls. I scream, too. I scream because she is screaming, and I know it’s because we are going to burn and there’s nothing we can do and nobody can save us.

The smell is horrible, and oh, God, I am so afraid. I am so afraid that I am just about to burn. I’m going on the balcony, and I am going to jump. If the fire comes near me, I will. I will!

Again, the helicopter passes. But what can they do? How can they help us?

Smoke is coming out of my room, so I pull the door closed. That is my life in there: my dolls, my snuggly Boo-Boo that my daddy gave me when I was four, my iPad, and, oh, God, the one thing I cannot lose, my guitar.

All of a sudden, a strange sort of calm comes over me. I am going to die, and I am going to either see God or be nothing. My mind starts saying it over and over—“see God or be nothing, see God or be nothing”—and that seems to make it all real and unreal at the same time.

“Mom,” I say as I return to the living room, “MOM! MOM! MOM!”

She comes out of the kitchen. We throw our arms around each other.

The water stopped working almost right away, so she was gathering up all the Cokes and stuff and soaking kitchen towels with them.

“Help me,” she says.

We line them up at the bottom of the front door. The door is so hot that the towels hiss when they touch it. The hall must be a complete firestorm, and that door is liable to blow open at any minute. In fact, Mom was right about not going out on the balcony. If we slide that door open, the smoke and fire will blow into the foyer and the apartment will become an inferno.

Again, I hear sirens. They seem miles away.

Mom grabs my shoulders. “They’re coming,” she says. She laughs and her face is scary. “They’ll be right up.” Solid confidence in her voice.

No, they won’t. I know what happens to skyscrapers when they catch fire. Everybody does.

I nod to Mom. She kisses me, covers my face with kisses.

“My baby, my baby,” she says, and I see over her shoulder that one of the towels we just put against the door is smoking, and then I see a slim tongue of flame rise along it, leaving a dark scar where it licks against the door.

I run into the kitchen and open the freezer, and there are still ice cubes in the icemaker. I pull out the whole thing and go back and throw ice against the flame.

The flame goes down, but the ice hisses into steam when it touches the door. I realize that our time is almost up—we must only have minutes. And no sooner do I think this than the flame comes back, and another one beside it, low, flickering.

Then there is another sound—
pop pop . . . pop . . . poppop.
It’s Mom’s bedroom door now. Her room must be full of fire, and the hollow wood door is not going to last much longer.

“Mom, we have to try to escape.”

“Don’t open the front door! Don’t touch it!”

“There’s that crawl space I was in, remember that?”

“Oh, that’s got to be a deathtrap.”

“We could break through the den closet. We could, I know it!”

She points upward. The ceiling is full of little cracks, and more of them are appearing by the second. I realize that the crawl space above it must be filled with fire. The ceiling will fall any second and I am going to catch on fire then, and it hits me all over again, the idea of burning and feeling that pain. I look again at the glass wall and the big doors and the balcony on the other side.

The sky has dozens of helicopters, some close, some farther away, all of them, I know, with cameras on this building.

“WHY DON’T THEY SAVE US?”

Mom has Perrier water, which she opens and pours over me. She cries as she does it, then she takes me in her arms and encloses me in herself as best she can. Long, deep red tendrils cross the ceiling.

“We have to try the balcony.”

“Don’t open doors and windows during a fire. Close all doors and windows.”

“Mom, it doesn’t matter anymore. Either we stay here and burn or we take our chances out there. A little more time, Mom! And maybe that’s all we need. Maybe all we need is a little more time, and they’ll get to us.”

“If we open that door, it’s over, honey.”

“What if they don’t know we’re even here? What if they think the apartment is empty?”

To get some attention we hang her bright red robe on the curtain rods, and when I get up on the couch, the air is so hot it hurts my head.

I decide that I will not burn. I will not let the fire destroy my face. I will jump instead. But I am so afraid of heights.

And yet I stood on the edge barely a week ago! How stupid that seems now. How incredibly, totally stupid and self-centered. Poor little rich girl.

Right here and now, I pledge that if I survive this I will become a better person. I go to my knees.

“God, if I live, I will change my life.”

Mom comes down beside me, kneeling also, and she bows her head. “Forgive me, Lord. I tried so hard, and I made mistakes.” She sobs, tries to say more, and can’t.

“We did it together,” I say to her.

We hug each other, and I think what I bet she is thinking, too, that ambition can make you great or it can make you evil, and if we get out of this, we are both going to change. We’ll use our ambition and my celebrity to do worthwhile things.