Chapter 6: Into the Fire
To say that everything in the house was on fire was not an understatement. I had landed on one of the few spots of floor that wasn’t on fire yet. But the wood beneath my feet had already started to glow a bright, lit-cigarette orange in a glowing spider web of heat as the floor began to ignite.
I dashed for the stairs. They were technically not on fire. However, the wall next to the stairs was. I ignored the flames on my left and grabbed the banister on my right.
The banister promptly fell apart.
I stumbled and kept going. I took stairs two and three at a time. In the middle of the staircase, my whole my foot went through the stair up to my ankle. I caught myself on the step three above it, preventing my leg from going all the way through. This meant I was fine, relatively speaking... Except flaming ceiling tiles came down on my right and made me jerk to the left, almost into the fiery wall.
Who used wallpaper anymore, anyway? And, seriously, was it made of turpentine or something?
I threw myself up the next set of stairs. When the stairs crunched under my feet, I ran faster before they could trap me again. When I made it to the top, the stairs collapsed below me. I took a quick glance around. Everything was on fire, and it did not seem like there could be anyone left alive in the building. But I knew I heard a scream. I also saw the front and side of the house on fire in full flame and disintegrating.
Therefore, check the opposite corner of the house. Duh.
I dashed along the upper hallway. The chandelier that hung as a centerpiece crashed right in front of me. I dove over it, landing awkwardly on my shoulder and rolling to my feet. Of course, this had to be the one day I had not worn my Golem armor. God, it sucked getting old. I didn’t know how Keanu Reeves did it. Having a stunt team probably helped.
All three doors at the end of the hallway were filled with fire. However, with door number three, I could see a room behind the flames—a room lined with bathroom tile. I was going to back up so I could build a running start, but I felt part of the floor under my heel gave way. I charged toward and leaped through the doorway. Thankfully, the firemen’s attempt to dislodge me with the hose had left me wet enough that I did not ignite upon contact with flames.
If this keeps up, I’m going to apply to jump through flaming hoops in place of the white tigers.
I landed in the bathroom. It was a like a sauna, but not on fire, yet. The floor had been soaked with water, as was the sink.
In the bathtub was an older gentleman. His hair was long and pale gray, nearly matching the snowy white cloud of his long beard. But he was also relatively big. I do not mean tall and wide, but heavy. More importantly, his leg was in a cast. Which told me all I needed to know about any attempt he made to leave the house when the fire first started.
I said nothing but reached down and grabbed him under the arm. He grabbed my shoulders and together we hauled him out of the bathtub. He put his weight on me, taking it off his injured leg. We were both soaking wet from the tub, so we forced our way through the flames of the bathroom door.
The rest of the upper hallway had completely fallen away; so had the stairs; so had the upper hallway banister.
We were not getting out the way I had come in.
He gestured into one of the rooms that seemed to be completely on fire. He knew the layout of the house, so I was not going to argue. I made a gesture as if to throw him. He nodded, acknowledging what I intended to do. I reared back and hurled him bodily through the fiery doorway. I leaped immediately after him so I could put him out in case he had caught fire.
I landed in the room, which was not entirely on fire; it had been blocked by a burning chest of drawers. However, this was the exact opposite corner of the house from where I had come in. More importantly, it had windows. There was no fire escape, but I was quite willing to risk breaking my own leg. I did not want to end up like Saint Lawrence, the patron saint of cooking (who died while being tied to a spit over an open flame).
I hauled my new acquaintance to his feet and brought him over to the window. I used my elbow to hit the pane of glass. It had already been hot and under stress from the destruction of a load-bearing wall. The glass shattered easily enough. I was still going to need a good soak and Bengay on my elbow afterwards.
My new acquaintance and I looked at each other as if trying to figure out which one of us would go first. Then the floor underneath has cracked with the sound of a tree about to fall. I gestured for him to go first. He did not fight me on it.
My new acquaintance caught his foot on the sill on his way down. He landed in a copse of bushes beneath the windows. The bushes were on fire. I jumped down after him, landing just short of the bushes. I rolled to avoid breaking anything this time. I turned back to the person I had saved and dragged him away before we could make any “Moses and flaming bush” jokes.
We worked together to head towards the firefighters, who did not look happy to see me. Though they were quite surprised to see the older gentleman I was with. The firefighters were impressed (perhaps amazed is more like it—as though a cop could not run into a burning building). I escorted the older gentleman to the ring of fire fighters.
In my absence, a crowd had gathered. A lot of them seemed to be Indian of some sort. Not an American tribe, but from India, which I noted also happened to be the ethnicity of the older fellow I was carrying. The women were dressed in bright, colorful saris; two of them used their pashminas to cover my new friend’s body. The men wore turbans. It took me a moment to recognize that they were, specifically, Sikhs.
The observers from the crowd broke free of the firefighters and came over to my elderly companion. They took his weight from me and showered him in hugs and kisses. They escorted him over to the nearest flat seat—the back bumper of the fire truck. Once my elderly gentleman was secure, the crowd turned it to me and assaulted me with hugs and kisses and various and sundry languages that I did not speak. Considering my ability to speak in tongues, which came and went, I was actually kind of surprised. Considering what I learned later, it might have just been a matter of there were so many languages being thrown at me that even the charism of speaking in tongues just plain gave up.
From what I was able to piece together, the man I saved was Oopajai Singh. Oopajai was the patriarch of a Sikh family, who helped out at the local Sikh temple—just down the block from my church.
I was not entirely clear about what they told me, but between being yelled at by the firefighters and being thanked by the gentleman’s family, the family either pledged a life debt, or they were threatening to kill me with that fire axe.
That last part may have been the FDNY, although I could not swear to it.
When I asked Oopajai how long he’d called for help, he croaked, “I could not call for help. Too much smoke.” Then he coughed for the next three minutes, just to have said that much.
A woman who may have been his daughter turned to ask me, “How did you know that he was in there?”
I gave her my best I don’t know, I just work here smile, and honestly answered, “Probably a message from God.”
Jeremy saw the fire truck had blocked off 222nd Street, so he didn’t even try to take the road. Instead, he made a right onto Jamaica Avenue, then a left around Food Universe. He pulled up to the corner at the other end of the block. The house on the corner was a great big block of a brick building. The site used to be the location of a UN ambassador’s house. It had been replaced by new construction during the housing boom, when people flipped houses and property on a regular basis.
This house was an overflow location for the local women’s shelter. It was technically owned by Tommy Nolan, but only because he had bought the building. The house mostly ran itself, but the Nolan family had spent plenty of time with the inhabitants. There wasn’t a lot of turnover, but enough that the people in the primary shelter looked forward to when they could move into the house.
Jeremy was one of the reasons the turnover was so high. He usually had conversations with the women who stayed there. It was well within walking distance of the office, so he was there at least once a week. By the next week, at least one woman left because their problem had been “fixed.” No one asked how Jeremy fixed the problems. Lena didn’t have to ask, since she was another reason turnover was so high. When she fixed problems, he stayed home to read Thomas Plutarch’s superhero novels. When he fixed problems, she could stay home and talk with her friend Adara, in Prague.
All this was something that Jeremy didn’t feel the need to explain to Ranger Lermon.
Jeremy turned off the engine for the office Humvee and disembarked. Lermon and Lena followed.
The Ranger looked up at the building. “What is this place?”
“Battered women’s shelter overflow,” Lena answered as she waited for him. “Hussar owns it.”
Lermon blinked, disoriented for a moment. Then he remembered that Lena referred to Nolan by the name for Polish cavalry. “Ah. Right. His inheritance. Didn’t know he and Baracus were that close.”
Jeremy scoffed as he strode up to the front door of the house. “They weren’t.”
“Baracus made a deal with Heaven,” Lena added. “We think the money was part of the deal. Something to give Hussar more resources on Earth.”
Lermon shrugged. “Makes sense.” He and Lena were a few steps down from Jeremy. “What are we doing here, exactly?”
Jeremy rang the bell and smiled. “You’ll see.”
The door opened. The Hispanic woman who answered was painfully young and even more painfully malnourished.
Jeremy gave her a little wave. “Hey, Izzy. Can we talk a moment?”
Isabella Soto winced at the idea, took a deep breath, and studied the Ranger. “What’s he here for?”
“He’s with us. He’s assisting us on a matter we’re hoping you can tell us about.”
She frowned. “What matter?”
“We would like you to tell us about...” Jeremy lowered his voice so no one nearby could accidentally hear him “... the monsters.”
The monsters in question were something Jeremy had come across in the course of his calls to local precincts. He had spent less time hacking and more time looking through local police reports and then cross-referencing them.
Either by sheer luck or Divine Providence (Then again, is there a difference? Jeremy wondered), Isabella Soto had been someone who Jeremy had already assisted. She’d had a pimp who had gotten her hooked on multiple miscellaneous substances. One night, after Isabella had been used as a punching bag by her final john, she’d had enough. She reported her assault to the police and moved into the shelter system. Since she resided in Brooklyn, the cops had shuttled her into Queens Village, and the Nolan network of shelters.
Isabella had then availed herself of Jeremy’s solution services.
When Isabella had told Jeremy her story, she had mentioned that, while she had been hooked on drugs, she swore that her pimp’s drug dealer had monsters on leashes like attack dogs. Jeremy had filed that detail away for later, just in case.
It wasn’t until Jeremy had found multiple reports from Isabella’s section of Brooklyn that directly referenced zombies that Jeremy had hit on what he was looking for.
It was almost a shame that her pimp had found himself floating face down in Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal within the week after her conversation with Jeremy.