Violet Darger (Book 6): Night On Fire
Page 1
Contents
Title & Copyright
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Epilogue
Author's Note
More From the Authors
About the Authors
NIGHT ON FIRE
Violet Darger Book 6
L.T. Vargus & Tim McBain
Copyright © 2019 L.T. Vargus & Tim McBain
Smarmy Press
All rights reserved.
Version 1.1
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Prologue
The groom had just peeled back the bride’s veil when the smell of smoke hit.
Wait. Was that right?
In the ensuing panic, Jason couldn’t remember the exact sequence of events anymore. Flashes of the day came to him out of order — a useless jumble of memories that pulsed through his head as he tried to escape the burning building.
In his mind, he could see the church as it had been before — rows of silent people. Sitting. Fidgeting. Fingers picking at their clothes and faces. Waiting for the ceremony to start.
Sunlight streamed through the windows up along the vaulted ceiling and glittered on the shiny wooden backs of the seating and the rails that divided the main altar from the nave. The glow shot through the stained glass and splotched sections of the wall in royal blue and red, elongated rectangles of color that stretched along with the angle of the sun.
The minister stood next to the lectern, an older man sporting thick glasses, smiling, fingers laced around a bible that he clutched to his chest. A little smile blossomed and ebbed on his lips, never fully leaving.
Above all, Jason remembered the anticipation building to something palpable. All of those waiting people. All of that anxious energy. It multiplied like bacteria, created a warmth in the air that made the room stuffy, made it hard to breathe.
In another flash, he remembered kissing Fran on the cheek in the little prep area in the chamber off the main floor of the church that she called “backstage.” Remembered worrying, for just a second, that he might have messed up her makeup or something. Everything about all of this seemed so delicate, so precious, made him feel so out of place. Part of him worried that he was going to blunder in and trample something, that he’d go to touch something and watch it fold up like moth wings, ruined.
Even the kiss itself had caught him off guard. He didn’t show affection that way often — considered himself the strong, silent type — but in that moment he’d lost himself, forgotten himself. Fran was his niece, almost like a daughter to him, and now she was all grown up, getting married.
He could still remember her laughing as a toddler — head tipped back, eyelids squinted to slits, little ringlets of hair bobbing along with the quaking round belly — laughing harder than he’d ever seen any child laugh. And he still associated that image with the woman she’d become — her sense of humor still as core to her being at 26 as it had inexplicably been at two. She taught improv now and periodically toured with a local group doing sketch comedy, made laughter for a living, albeit toward the starving artist end of the economic spectrum. Still, she’d always favored pursuits of passion to those financial, just like him.
The emotions that came along with her wedding surprised him, gripped him like a fist clenching in the center of his chest, overwhelmed him. His skin had tingled from the moment he’d arrived at the church, throbbed with pins and needles.
He’d never had kids of his own. Never would, according to the doctors. Maybe that meant more to him than he’d realized until today. And maybe that diagnosis from Dr. Miller played a bigger role in the divorce than he’d let himself consider — the straw that broke the marriage’s back.
Only sitting in the packed pews did any of this occur to him, in the quiet of the church, in the stillness of being alone while surrounded by people. He saw his life from a different perspective in this place — a fresh angle — saw the way his mind usually distorted aspects of the truth like those warped boxes of red and blue light that stretched out along the wall.
Funny how it all worked, life. You kept so busy that you only got the faintest glimpses of what you really wanted, who you really were — fleeting little glances at the truth that only came to you in the quiet moments if you looked for them out of the side of your eye.
And the big truth here seemed plain enough. Fran was as close as he’d get to fatherhood, and now she was a girl no longer. Her new life started today. They were all here to witness it become official, this ceremony cementing it to the satisfaction of both God and government.
Dennis, the guy she was marrying, seemed like an all right guy. Tall and long-faced with bad posture. Worked at a big marketing company. Something to do with computers, Jason thought. Kind enough, though. Agreeable. Gentle.
Except…
Maybe Dennis was a bit of a puss, if Jason was being totally honest. Scared of snakes and spiders. Unable to fix anything around the house. Hell, he had seen the kid’s face pucker into a contorted mess of wrinkles whilst sipping something as watered down as Coors Light, for Christ’s sake. Bitter beer face on more than one occasion.
Not much of a man by Jason’s old school definition, maybe, but he treated Fran well. That was something. So much had changed, Jason knew. Maybe the world was different now. Maybe the way we treated each other was all that really mattered, the only real way to judge someone’s character.
His mind fast-forwarded
to the main event. He sat in the pews among all the people as the ceremony got underway, shocked to find tears forming in his eyes as Fran walked down the aisle. Tears. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried. Had forgotten, somehow, that it was something that happened to you rather than something you did, the involuntary nature of the act striking him as strange, almost cruel.
He tried to fight it, the crying. Tried to squelch the emotions. Tried to will his eyes dry. Like he could wrestle his feelings, pin them to the ground and make them submit. Cast them out with some brute force of will power.
But the nostalgia only tugged harder at him as things proceeded. It submerged him, pulled him out into the deep. An angry ocean of emotions lurching in his skull. Chaotic and overwhelming.
And his consciousness drew up into that storm in his head until he couldn’t make out the words that the minister said. Instead, he experienced them as a drone streaming along with the image of Fran’s veil lifting, her green eyes looking deeply into the groom’s, like watching a foreign film with the subtitles turned off.
The smoke smell hit then, a blackened stench like that of charring meat on a barbecue with a foul chemical note intertwined. Jason felt his nose wrinkle.
He blinked a few times as his mind processed it. With an effort, he managed to break his gaze from Fran and Dennis, swivel his head to scan for the source of the bad smell.
Someone yelled then.
“Fire!”
And then everything moved very quickly.
A stampede of human bodies swarmed for the door. All shuffling feet and swinging elbows. Seeming to move as one frightened creature rather than individuals.
Screams and moans shattered the silence of the ceremony. Strange throaty sounds rising up — the screech of frightened animals.
Jason could hear his breath in his head. Too loud. Wrong.
The same room that had harbored that reverent quiet one second, convulsed with panic the next.
Twirling black smoke filled the space all at once. Clouded everything, its opaqueness rapidly thickening. It billowed from the little chamber off to the side of the main sanctuary and began to eclipse the sun streaming in those windows above, casting a darkness over everything.
Jason pressed forward into the mass of human bodies clogging the space between him and the exit, eyes looking past all of them to the double doors ahead.
The main chamber of the church tapered to a small foyer — an architectural funnel overflowing with humanity. The stampede had moved from the pews to this narrow doorway all at once, and all the torsos piled against each other. But their forward progress ended there.
No daylight peeked from around the edges of the door. Nothing.
The mob could only shift and jockey for position and thrash into each other.
The wall of bodies closed around Jason. Cinched him so tightly that he moved along with the whims of the crowd. They lifted him off his feet, swept him up in the swell of mankind pressing on the front door that wouldn’t seem to open.
He could picture an impossible image in the frenzy: the mob somehow lifting itself up like a tidal wave in the ocean, lurching up and up before folding itself forward with great momentum, crashing into the door, rolling back out to sea.
And as shoulders and elbows dug into his ribcage, a set of words opened in his head. Interrupted the present. Held him strangely still as though catatonic. Whittled all the panicked sounds down to quiet.
We’re going to die here.
We are all going to die in here.
The sounds of the mob returned, brought him back. The wood floor groaning beneath all those moving feet. And the whimpers. Panicked expressions. A wordless cacophony erupting all around him.
But no. It wasn’t wordless after all. He could make out one word rising above all the din. A raspy voice, full-throated and deep.
“Locked.”
Locked. It took a second to make sense of it. The doors were locked. They were trapped inside.
Again, he swiveled his head.
The black smoke undulated behind them. A strange wall of murk that twirled and tumbled about itself like liquid.
Still, it was the only way out. Had to be.
He pulled the collar of his shirt up over his mouth and knifed his way back through the mob, moving toward the smoke, moving into it.
He got low as the black surrounded him, one hand holding his collar over his lips, the other patting along the ground to try to feel his way along.
The windows were too high. He remembered that, even if he couldn’t see it now — all of the stained glass congregated far up toward the vaulted ceiling, out of reach.
But there had to be other doors. Another way.
He felt along. Fingers scrabbling over the textured carpet, knuckles butting into the leg of a pew now and again.
The heat gripped him as he reached the last row of pews and moved into the open. It was right on top of him and so intense it seemed to flush sweat out of every pore right away, made his vision blur and flicker along the edges. His mouth and throat felt raw, but he didn’t let himself dwell on it.
He squinted. Tried to see anything at all in the murk. But the black smoke rolled endlessly up. A thick wall of it undulating everywhere like some creature that belonged at the bottom of the sea.
Light erupted to his right. A curtain went up all at once. Flame climbed it and devoured it. Sent raining sheets of melted fabric down, sizzling and flickering and half-liquefied. He jumped back, just missing the fallout.
But the curtain told him where he was. It meant he was near the little side chamber, the little backstage area where he’d kissed Fran.
God. Fran. Was she OK?
He pushed the thought away. He had to focus on finding a way out.
He stepped around the flaming curtain, moving faster now. He couldn’t remember, but he thought there’d been a door in that little prep chamber. Thought. Hoped.
His fingers found the wall. Traced along it. Patting it. Frisking it.
He could hear the fire just next to him, though he couldn’t see it. Hissing. Spitting. Mocking him. Threatening.
The screams back toward the door intensified — the sounds of fear turning to those of pain — and Jason stiffened. Froze. Listened. He suspected the fire had reached the mob now. Inevitable.
Focus. Keep looking.
If he could find a door, he could yell for the others. Try to lead them by sound to the way out. Save them.
His fingers traced and retraced the seam before the realization hit. A doorway.
He jerked his hands for where the knob should be.
Nothing.
Panic.
Bile in his throat, on the back of his tongue.
His hands flailed where the door handle should be. Fingers brushing the smooth steel of the door.
The empty space seemed impossible. Something from a nightmare.
Too hot. Hard to think now. Sweat cascaded down his spine. An endless flow.
He focused. Slowed down. Worked his hands in wider arcs.
The protrusion bashed into the back of his knuckles. Found it.
He twisted the knob. Pulled the door open.
A rectangle of light sliced into the smoke. Tendrils rushed into the opening, twisting like tentacles into the open air.
He stumbled through the threshold into the light, into the cool. Down two concrete steps. Collapsed on hands and knees in the grass.
Very faint now. Head spinning.
Breathe.
Breathe and then yell for the others.
The wind hurt scraping into him, cold and fresh as it was. Ached in his throat and on his tongue as it sucked past into his lungs.
But the cool surrounded him. Enveloped him. Beat back the heat at last.
Safe. He was safe.
He breathed. In and out. The spinning in his head slowing, leaving him.
Need to yell for Fran. For Dennis. For everyone.
He pushed himself off the ground. Trying to
sit up.
But no. Something was wrong.
The heat surged in him again. Flushed his face. Too hot.
His breathing went ragged. Uneven. Not working right.
He coughed. Choked.
And his face clenched. Pulled taut. Felt like all the veins there constricted into piano strings.
He swiped a hand at his forehead, and a wad of melted flesh sloughed away at his touch.
Chapter 1
A blast of warm air tugged at Darger's hair as she passed from the plane into the jet tube and proceeded with the rest of the passengers into Terminal 3 of Los Angeles International Airport. The flight from Virginia to California had been delayed due to lightning at Dulles but was otherwise uneventful. No turbulence, no screaming children, no overly-talkative seatmates.
The air felt different here, that was for sure. Warm and dry. Scented with pine and salt. Back in Virginia, they were at the tail end of a moist, muggy summer. She couldn’t remember the last time it hadn’t rained for at least part of the day. During the most recent downpour, the basement below Darger’s apartment had flooded, and her landlord had to have a handyman come install new gutters.
She passed a bank of windows near the gate showing off a picturesque row of palm trees. As a kid, palm trees had always looked like some sort of weird Dr. Seuss animal to her, with an impossibly long neck and a shaggy green mane that obscured the face.
Crossing through a food court area, Darger got a whiff of freshly ground coffee beans coming from Starbucks. Her mouth watered, and she considered that a healthy shot of espresso would go a long way in warding off any looming jetlag. Then she saw the line stretching halfway across the food court and decided against it. She was already running late as a result of her delayed flight, and she had a ride waiting. She needed to collect her luggage and get a move on.
She glided down two escalators to the baggage claim area and wriggled through the crowd to Carousel 2. The horde shifted and swayed, a sea of people. Together their voices combined to form one collective murmur. Here and there a raucous laugh or shriek of a child stood out for a half-second before being swallowed up again by the babble.
There were other sounds, too. Suitcases clattering to the ground and wheels bump-bump-bumping over the seams of the tiled floor. Shoe heels squeaked. Somewhere to her left, someone slurped at the dregs of a drink through a straw, a hollow gurgling noise as they tried to suck up the last few drops.