John Locke - Lethal People

The fire started in Greg and Melanies basement just after midnight and crept upward through the stairwell silently, like a predator tracking food.

Greg had never read the stats or hed have known that home fires can turn deadly in just two minutes and that his odds of waking up were three to one.

Against.

And yet both he and Melanie had managed it. Was it because shed screamed? He wasnt sure. But she was screaming now. Groggy, disoriented, coughing, Greg stumbled to the door. Like millions of others, hed seen the movie Backdraft, and although the proper term for the event depicted in the fi lm was a flashoverand not a backdraft, hed learned enough to touch the back of his hand to the top of the door, the doorknob, and the crack between the door and door frame before flinging it open.

As he did that, Melanie rolled to the edge of the bed and grabbed her cell phone from the charging cradle on the nightstand. She pressed 911 and cupped her hand around the speaker. Now that Greg was in motion, she felt better, like part of a team instead of an army of one. Only moments ago, Melanie had taken her panic out on Gregs comatose body by kicking, punching, and screaming him awake. When he finally began to stir, shed slapped him hard across the face several times.

Now they were working together. Theyd silently assessed the situation and assigned each other specific roles in an unspoken plan. Hed get the kids; shed get the firemen.

Melanie couldnt hear anything coming from the phone and wondered if shed misdialed. She terminated the call and started over. A sudden blast of heat told her Greg had gotten the door open. Melanie looked up at him, and their eyes met. She held his gaze a moment and time seemed to stop while something special passed between them. It was just a split second, but they managed to get eight years of marriage into it.

Greg set his jaw and gave her a nod of reassurance, as if to say hed seen what lay beyond the door and that everything was going to be all right.

Melanie wasnt buying. Shed known this man since the first week of college, knew all his looks. What shed seen in his eyes was helplessness. And fear.

Greg turned away from her, shielded his face, and hurled himself into the rising flames. She couldnt hear the 911 operator over the roaring noise, but she heard Greg barreling up the stairs yelling to the children.

She yelled, I love you! but her words were swallowed up in the blaze. The searing heat scorched her blistered throat. Melanie clamped her mouth shut and turned her attention back to the phone. Was someone on the other end? She dropped to her hands and knees, cupped her fingers around the mouthpiece, and shouted her message as clearly as possible to the dispatcher she hoped was listening.

Thats when she heard the crash-the one that sounded like columns falling in the foyer. Melanie figured the staircase would be next.

The kids room was right above her. Melanie instinctively looked up to launch a prayer and saw a thick, rolling layer of smoke hugging the ceiling. She let out a long, piercing wail. A terrible thought tried to enter her mind. She forced it away.

Melanie screamed again-screamed for her girls, screamed for Greg, screamed even as hot air filled her mouth and lungs and tried to finish her off.

But Melanie had no intention of dying. Not here in the bedroom. Not without her family. Coughing, choking, she crawled steadily toward the doorway.

The theory that the air was better near the floor apparently didnt apply to basement fires because thick, gray ropes of smoke were sifting upward through the floorboards. Melanies lungs ached in protest as the heat and flames stepped up the demand on her oxygen. Her pulse throbbed heavy in her neck. The hallway, a mere twelve feet away, had been rendered nearly impenetrable in the moments since Greg had left her. During that tiny window of time, the flames had more than doubled in height and intensity, and their all-consuming heat sucked so much oxygen from the air, she could barely maintain consciousness.

As she neared the doorway, a bedroom window imploded with a loud crash. Hot, broken glass slammed into her upper torso like a shotgun blast, pelting her face, neck, and shoulders with crystals of molten shrapnel. The impact knocked Melanie to her side. She shrieked in pain and instinctively started curling her body into a protective ball. The skin that had once covered her delicate face was gone, and the meat that remained broiled in the heat.

That would have done it for Melanie had she been fighting solely for her own life, but she was fighting for Greg and the twins, and she refused to let them down. Melanie shrieked again, this time in anger. She got to her hands and knees, made her way through the doorway, crawled to the base of the stairs, and looked up.

The stairwell was an inferno, and the bottom half of the staircase was virtually gone. Melanies heart sank. She screamed for her family, listened for a response. There was none.

Then, as if an angel had whispered it, Melanie had an idea. She got to her feet and made her way to the powder room. She turned on the faucets, soaked the guest towels. She staggered back to the area where the steps used to be. Tapping into her last ounce of strength, she screamed, Greg! and flung the towels as hard as she could, upward into the rising flames, in the direction of the kids room.

Had he heard her? Had he answered? She couldnt tell.

Emergency personnel arrived just four minutes after the 911 call was logged. Neighbors, hearing sirens, gathered in the street and watched in horror.

Later, when reconstructing the events at the scene, firefighters determined Greg had made it to the childrens room, opened the window, and hung a sheet from it to alert rescuers to the location. Hed had the presence of mind to gather both girls in his arms on the floor beneath him before dying.

Firefighters entering the bedroom through the window were impressed to find wet towels covering the girls faces. This is what saved their lives that night, they decided, though one of the twins died later on, in the hospital.

Son of a bitch, Augustus Quinn said. You are one tough son of a bitch, Ill give you that! Shakespeare it was not, but Creed should have been dead by now and wasnt. Lets call it a night, Quinn said.

They were on opposite sides of prison cell bars, sixty feet below the earths surface. It took a while, but Donovan Creed staggered to his feet, a vantage point from which he now grinned at the hideous giant manning the torture device. What was that? Creed said. Eight seconds?

The ugly giant nodded.

Give me ten this time.

Youll die, Quinn said. Though the two men had worked together for years, Quinns words had been uttered simply and gave no evidence of warmth or concern.

Creed supposed that for Quinn it was all business. Creed had paid his friend to administer the torture, and Quinn was expressing his opinion about continuing. Did he even care if Creed died tonight? Creed thought about that for a minute.

The ADS weapon had been created as a counter measure to the terrorists practice of using civilians as human shields during the Iraq War. Effective up to a quarter mile, ADS fires an invisible beam that penetrates the skin and instantly boils all body fluids. The idea was simple: you point the weapon at a crowd, flip the switch, and everyone falls to the ground in excruciating pain. You flip the switch off, collect the weapons, and sort out the terrorists. Moments later, everyone is back to normal. Unfortunately, during the testing phase, word got out about soldiers suffering irreversible heart damage and ruptured spleens. When human rights organizations got involved, the public outcry was so severe the weapon had to be scrapped.