AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Fire department, call out!” I start to hallucinate that help’s made it in time.
There are men at the other end of the hall, but it’s going to take them too long to get to me. I can feel the soot heavy in my throat as I work it to try and say something.
Still, I try. Even if I’m crazy and hallucinating in my last moments. I have to try. That’s all that I can do.
“Here,” I call quietly. “We’re over here.”
Nothing but silence.
If it was real, there would be someone rescuing us. Firefighters moving through the inferno.
A hallucination wouldn’t move to put oxygen masks around my face and the child’s face while they work to free us.
Help.
I’ve never tasted anything as sweet as the shaking, wheezing breath that I’m able to take. And I’ve never felt anything as amazing as the rattle I feel in the little girl’s chest.
More tears flow down my face as fresh pain sears through my body with the movements of the firemen working to free us. I grit down, forcing myself to stay awake. To memorize every single moment. I have to tell them who started it. Even if I die, they need to know who did this.
Finally, the beam is gone, and one of the firefighters is lifting me away from the girl so they can get her to safety.
They’re doing what I couldn’t.
Then it’s my turn and I’m carried outside and into the sunlight.
The noise is too much. There are so many things happening and so many people. Chaos all around.
I throw up over the side of the firefighter’s arms still holding me, and it’s a miracle he pulls the mask off in time for me not to fill it with vomit.
“Sorry,” I manage to say before a coughing fit takes me again, and I’m puking until my entire body is shaking with the exertion.
The man carrying me doesn’t say anything. He simply moves me to the grass in front of an ambulance, where a hundred people surround me.
Maybe not a hundred. It’s probably only one, but itfeelslike a hundred.
I try to take deep breaths, but I can’t do much more than gasp and throw up. The fresh air is too much. My lungs can’t handle it, and I feel like I’m in the fire all over again as my body struggles to adjust.
“Ray,” I gasp. “It was Ray.” This time my words are more than a whisper. “I saw him. He told me he did it.”
I shut my eyes for a second. Only a second. But when I open them again, I’m on the ground staring up into the face of a paramedic.
Jake is there, too, looking down at me with tears in his eyes.
“Hey, Lilly-girl. Don’t you dare die on me.”
“It was Ray.” I blink, my eyes rolling back in my head before I can focus on his face. “Don’t let him get away with killing me.”
I feel it, the darkness as my heart stops, just like I did the night I lost my baby.
Only this time?
This time I can see it coming, and I’m not going down without a fight.
25
JAKE
The blaze fillingthe elementary school has nothing on the hurricane of emotions coursing through my body as I watch the love of my life flatline on a gurney.
