Page 107 of Not Quite Dead Yet

Jet coughed, the thick black smoke reaching them first, claiming them. But it wasn’t just smoke she could smell. There was something sharper, more acrid.

Gas.

Billy grabbed Jet by the shoulders, pulled her back, kicking the door shut.

The smoke found other ways in, through the cracks, through the floor.

‘Is there another way down?’ Billy screamed, scrabbling at Jet’s neck, pulling her shirt up over her nose. He coughed, then covered his own.

‘Another staircase at the back!’ Jet yelled through thefabric, holding it with her one hand, flashlight and papers still gripped in her fingers.

‘Go!’

Billy pushed her ahead, back through the office. The smoke hovered lower now, eye level, blinding them, stealing everything but each other.

Jet crashed into a desk, a sharp pain above her knee. Kept going.

She couldn’t see, she couldn’t see, the flashlight only found more whirls of smoke, lighting it from within. She wanted to take Billy’s hand, but she couldn’t see it, had no hands to spare.

Couldn’t see, couldn’t see.

She planted her foot and the floor cracked beside it, a fault line of bright glowing orange that she could see.

Could see.

The floor crumbled away, down, an earthquake groan as it ruptured, melting into the inferno below.

Jet stumbled away from the hole, that widening mouth, falling back, crashing down.

She watched as it happened. She could see now, too much, the flames finding their way up here, clambering out of that hole down into hell.

With another groan, one of the desks tipped, lost its legs. It slid into that gaping mouth, lost to the flames below. Angie Rice’s desk, the photo frame tumbling in first.

Jet could see Billy now, on the other side of hell.

‘No, don’t!’ she screamed, too late.

Billy jumped clean over the chasm, crashing to his knees beside her.

He wrapped his arms under hers, dragged her to her feet.

‘This way!’

They ran to the other side, away from the flames chasingbehind them, eating up the carpet in widening rings. Finding more to consume. The desks. The walls.

Heat like nothing Jet had ever felt before, bearing down against her skin, pushing from behind, a sharp stab of it against her fingers.

Jet glanced down.

She screamed.

The papers clutched in her hand were on fire.

She dropped them.

The flashlight falling too.

A little white glowing triangle, abandoned behind her.