The Firebrand. Susan Wiggs

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СКАЧАТЬ ground his teeth together, for he knew if he spoke they would be words of recrimination. And what was the point of that, especially here and now?

      The wind picked up, and there was no way to stay ahead of the flames. He could hardly see his own wife in the thick curtain of smoke. For a few detached moments he felt adrift, his sense of direction unseated by a force too huge to control.

      Rand didn’t like things he couldn’t control.

      He drove himself harder, pulling insistently at Diana, who by now was so exhausted that she lacked the energy to complain. He focused on one thing and one thing only—getting to Christine.

      They passed Ficelle’s Paint and Varnish Factory, a long, low building that covered half a block. Firebrands rained down on the roof of the factory, and an ominous glow throbbed behind its small, square windows.

      “I think we’re almost there,” Rand told his wife. “Only a block to go.”

      Diana coughed. “I can’t see anything.”

      “It’s just there, see?” His heart lifted as he spotted the distinctive dome of Sterling House.

      Then a roaring gust of wind cleared the smoke like the parting of a curtain. It gave Rand a glimpse of hell. Sterling House, where he’d left his baby daughter, was engulfed in flames.

      “No!” he bellowed, and for the first time, he let go of Diana’s hand.

      As he started to run, an unnatural and toxic burst of white heat flared inside the varnish factory. A flash, followed by an earsplitting explosion, shattered the night. The detonation sucked the oxygen from the air, from his lungs, even.

      The force of it picked him up off his feet and blasted him backward. The landing broke his arm; he could feel the dull snap of the bone, the stunning pain. Gritting his teeth, he dragged himself up and dove for Diana, who lay slumped on the pavement.

      As he covered her body with his own, chunks of brick from the collapsing building rained over him. With his good arm, he tried to hold on to his wife and pull them both away, but the shower of bricks turned to a deluge. Rand could feel the breaking of his ribs, and then his shoulder was struck numb. The falling rubble kept coming in a thick, deadly avalanche, burying him and Diana.

      No oh no oh please…The disjointed plea was drowned by the lethal crash of the building. Diana made a sound—his name, perhaps—and her hands clutched at him. Something hard and sharp struck his skull.

      He had the sensation of floating, though he could not have moved amid all the falling bricks. There was no pain anymore. Only light. A hole in the sky, its edges burning, a white glow in the center.

      And then there was nothing.

      Chapter Five

      “Look at that,” Phoebe said, indicating a building by the river. “The hose crew has simply abandoned Sterling House.”

      The fashionable hotel’s distinctive glass dome glowed bright yellow as flames licked up its walls. In the smoke-filled street in front of the residence, a cart was reeling in its hoses and moving on.

      “I imagine they realized they could never control the fire,” Lucy said. They’d seen so much destruction on the slow journey to the bridge that she began to feel as beaten down as the crew. “Let’s pray the building was evacuated,” she added. Most of the hotel’s windows disgorged mouthfuls of flame. But on the second story, a single window stared at her like a blank, dark eye.

      As they drew closer to the river, she spied an elderly man struggling along the roadside with painful slowness. When a woman bumped him in her rush to the bridge, he stumbled.

      “Driver, stop for a moment!” Lucy jumped out of the cart. “I’m going to give my seat to that gentleman,” she said. Phoebe opened her mouth to deliver the expected protest, but Lucy held up her hand. “Don’t waste time arguing,” she said, pulling the shaken, wheezing man to the cart and tucking a saddle blanket around him. “You’ve got to get across the river before the bridge gets even more crowded.”

      “But if you do something noble, then I shall have to,” Phoebe wailed.

      “Dear, you must stay with the cart,” Lucy said, accustomed to mollifying her friend. “The most noble thing you can do is hold fast to this gentleman and keep him in the cart. I’ll follow on foot.”

      The elderly man shuddered and closed his eyes. Lucy put Phoebe’s arm around his shoulders and signaled to the driver to move on. Just then an earsplitting explosion knocked her to her knees. Phoebe squealed and the cart lurched forward, disappearing into a wall of boiling smoke. Someone shouted that a varnish factory had just exploded.

      Lucy stayed down on hands and knees, trying to recover the breath that had been knocked out of her. Her lungs seized up, unable to fill. She was suffocating. Lightheaded, half-mad thoughts shot through her mind, but her air-starved brain couldn’t grasp them.

      The firelit images around her left a trail through the night sky, like the tails of bright comets. The wind had an eerie voice all its own, keening through the flaming row of doomed buildings. Flying debris—paper, clothing, sheets of metal—littered the air. Everyone else had disappeared. The last of the stragglers had gone to the bridge and there was no one in sight. Focus, she told herself. She stared at a burning building across the way. She’d gone to the very exclusive Sterling House for tea a time or two, her stomach in knots from the lecture her mother had given her on acting like a lady, sipping her tea demurely, nodding in agreement with anything a man cared to say, keeping her scandalous opinions to herself.

      She wasn’t sorry to see the last of that place.

      What she saw next reinflated her lungs with a gasp of terror. The second-story window, the one she’d seen earlier, was now filled with flame—and a woman holding a bundle, screaming.

      Without any conscious effort, Lucy propelled herself across the street.

      The fire lashed out with a roar, its long tentacles of flame reaching for the hysterical woman trapped in the window, grasping her.

      Lucy stood alone under the window, the heat singeing her eyebrows and lashes. She had no idea how to help the poor woman. The hotel entry was impassable, its doors blasted out by the flames, the marble lobby melting in the inferno. She looked around wildly for a ladder, a rope, anything.

      The woman’s screaming spiked to a shrill peal of hysteria. Her dress or nightgown had caught fire. A second later, the screaming stopped. Then something fell from the window.

      Simple reflex caused Lucy to hold out her arms. The impact knocked her to the pavement, and once again the air rushed from her lungs. A cracking sound, like the report of a shotgun, split the air. The walls of the hotel shook, and the roof caved in, sucking down the big glass dome, and then the flaming rubble of the building itself. The woman disappeared, swallowed like a pagan sacrifice into the devouring flames.

      Lucy sensed a movement in the bundle she held, but there was no time to check. She forced herself to scramble to her feet. Still clutching the bedding, she ran for her life, hearing the swish of raining glass and the boom of gas lines igniting. With a glance over her shoulder, she saw a geyser of smoke and sparks where the hotel used to be. Racing to the river, she hurtled down the bank toward the water. She slipped in the mud, landed on her backside and slid СКАЧАТЬ