Chapter 5 - THE COLLAPSE
The smell hit the room instantly—a thick, suffocating wave of mercaptan, the chemical additive put into natural gas to give it the odor of rotten eggs, mixed with the sharp, sweet stench of industrial solvent. It poured out of exposed pipes in the sub-basement walls, hissing like a hundred angry snakes.
Above them, on the ground floor, an open kerosene heater burned quietly on a wooden table.
“You’re crazy!” Claire screamed, her voice hoarse from where he had crushed her windpipe. “You’ll kill yourself!”
“We’ll all be together,” the man whispered with a terrifying, serene smile, his face blood-stained in the harsh beam of her flashlight. “Pure. Away from the world.”
Claire didn't waste another second arguing with a madman. She lunged toward Sarah’s chair.
She jammed the sharp edge of her trauma shears beneath the thick bands of duct tape binding Sarah’s wrists to the iron frame. Snip. Snip. The heavy steel blades cut through the industrial adhesive like paper. She sliced through the tape holding her ankles, then ripped the gag from Sarah’s mouth.
Sarah let out a weak, agonizing gasp, her eyes fluttering open. “My... my baby...” she whimpered, her voice barely a thread. “Where is... my baby?”
“He’s alive, Sarah! He’s safe at the hospital with Leo!” Claire shouted, grabbing Sarah under her armpits and dragging her heavy, unresponsive body out of the chair. “We have to move right now!”
The man in the cardigan pushed himself up off the stone floor. Blood was soaking the shoulder of his sweater, but he seemed entirely oblivious to the pain. He reached out with both hands, lunging toward Sarah like a specter.
“Sarah! Don't leave! You belong in the wall!” he shrieked.
Claire didn't look back. As he reached for Sarah’s trailing leg, Claire brought her heavy sneaker down with maximum force directly onto his broken neck wound.
The man screamed, collapsing back onto the wet stone floor, writhing in pain.
Claire hoisted Sarah’s arm over her neck, bearing almost the entire weight of the woman’s limp body. “Come on, Sarah! Step! You have to help me!”
Sarah, hearing the names of her children, summoned a microscopic surge of adrenaline, dragging her legs forward as Claire pushed them toward the narrow wooden spiral staircase.
They began climbing. Every step was a battle against gravity and exhaustion. The air in the stairwell was becoming toxic, thick with gas fumes that made Claire’s eyes water violently and her brain feel light and dizzy.
HISS.
The sound of the gas pouring through the structural walls was deafening now.
Above them, Claire heard the muffled sound of a heavy battering ram slamming against the steel basement door on the main floor. THUD! THUD!
“Vance!” Claire screamed at the top of her lungs, her head breaking past the sub-basement level into the lower crawlspace. “VANCE! DO NOT USE SPARK TOOLS! THE HOUSE IS FILLED WITH GAS!”
Her voice was lost in the roar of the storm outside and the deafening thuds of the SWAT breach team.
Claire dragged Sarah through the hidden panel back into the low-ceilinged crawlspace between the walls. They were ten feet away from the iron hatch that led back into the laundry chute—their only way out.
Suddenly, a loud, electric SPARK echoed from the floor above them.
An old, frayed wire inside the house’s compromised electrical system, shorted out by the rising moisture and the vibration of the battering ram, threw a cluster of bright blue sparks directly into the gas-saturated air of the parlor.
Time seemed to slow down.
Claire saw the blue flash through a crack in the plaster walls.
“DOWN!” Claire screamed, throwing her body over Sarah’s limp frame on the wooden planking.
BOOM!
The explosion didn't destroy the heavy stone foundation, but it tore through the ground floor of the Victorian house with devastating, violent force. A wall of orange fire flashed through the parlor, ripping out the rotting floorboards, shattering every remaining glass window on the first level, and blowing the heavy front doors off their hinges into the rain-soaked front yard.
The shockwave blasted through the hollow walls.
The wooden studs around Claire splattered into kindling. Plaster dust exploded into the air, blinding her, filling her throat with dry, suffocating powder. The ceiling above the crawlspace groaned as heavy roof support beams snapped under the sudden structural shift.
Claire was thrown sideways, her head slamming hard against an exposed iron pipe.
Sparks danced across her vision. Darkness pulled at the edges of her consciousness.
No... no, stay awake... she told herself, forcing her eyes open through the stinging dust.
The air around them was now on fire. Tiny trickles of flame were creeping along the ancient, dry pine studs inside the wall. The heavy smell of smoke rapidly overwhelmed the gas odor.
Beside her, Sarah was coughing weakly, buried beneath a heap of fallen plaster and broken wood lathe.
Claire pushed a heavy piece of drywall off her back, her muscles screaming in agony. Her left shoulder was dislocated, throbbing with a hot, sickening pain.
She looked back down the narrow corridor.
The wooden spiral staircase leading down to the sub-basement had completely collapsed into a pile of burning rubble. Through the flames below, she saw the silhouette of the man in the cardigan pushing himself up from the debris, his clothes caught on fire, his face twisted into an inhuman, demon-like mask of madness. He was climbing the broken studs, coming up through the floor like a nightmare rising from hell.
“Sarah...” Claire choked out, dragging herself on her stomach toward the woman. “Get up... please... get up!”
With her one good arm, Claire grabbed the back of Sarah’s sweater and dragged her toward the small iron hatch of the laundry chute.
She reached the hatch. It was warped from the explosion, jammed shut.
Claire raised her good arm, holding the heavy trauma shears like a hammer, and began slamming the steel joint of the blades against the iron latch.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
Behind them, the burning silhouette reached the top of the collapsed stairwell. His fire-engulfed hands reached through the smoke, inches from Sarah’s ankles.
“SARAH!” he screamed, his voice bubbling through the heat.
CRACK!
The warped iron hatch gave way, swinging open.
Claire didn't hesitate. She shoved Sarah feet-first into the dark metal chute.
“Slide, Sarah! Hold your breath!” Claire screamed.
Sarah slid down into the darkness, disappearing toward the bottom.
Claire turned back just as the burning man reached out to grab her face.
Claire raised her flashlight—the heavy, solid-aluminum tactical light—and smashed it with all her remaining strength directly into the middle of his face.
May you like
The blow struck with a sickening crunch. The man lost his grip on the burning timber and fell backward, plunging thirty feet down into the roaring inferno of the sub-basement below.
Claire didn't look down. She threw her body sideways through the iron hatch, sliding into the dark metal chute just as the upper floors of the house began their final, catastrophic collapse.
