When you’ve destroyed your best friend and she tells you she wants to be alone, when you want to give her time to process things before you turn over her boyfriend’s notebook to the police, there’s really only one thing to do.
Drink.
But drinking alone is depressing, especially in dire circumstances, and Luke and Rashid are both complicated.
I need a break. A reprieve.
And I get just that. Conrad.
We sit in Sally’s, him savoring his craft brew, me downing my wine and looking frantically around for Sally to get a refill. I barely hear what he says, something about how one benefit of the quarantine is that it has brought us all together. “We are a community,” he says. “We are all in this together.”
“You mean all the healthy Allan originals are in it together, and maybe the healthy Poe people are in it together, and they’re both scared shitless of people like me,” I say.
“You look healthy to me,” Conrad says. “Everyone here looks healthy to me.” His hand covers mine. His touch, as always, is calming.
I continue to look for Sally and instead see purple-eyed patron after purple-eyed patron. Natalie and her crew have been posting about how bars, and this pub in general, were cesspools for the disease. She makes it sound like Sally doesn’t wash her dishes, when all you had to do was look around on a normal night—before this all happened—to see students playing quarters or kings or other drinking games that cause fluids to mix about. I guess the bar has been mostly taken over by people who no longer care about catching it. They are already perfectly purpled.
“You know what I mean,” I whisper, and examine the wine in my hands instead of looking at the people around me.
Jared bursts into the bar, the door swinging violently behind him as the wind howls outside. Say what you will about him, he can make an entrance.
“You must not lose faith. It’s not too late to seek the right path!” His voice booms with charisma. I feel like a cartoon character that has smelled something and is drawn to it by its nose alone, feet dragging and scratching along the floor. The smell is Jared’s voice, the nose is my ear. It’s enticing.
“We must work together to eliminate the purple eyes! We must save ourselves!”
Okay, not so enticing that I don’t recognize a threat.
“We should go,” I say to Conrad.
Conrad says nothing. He just watches. His face is tense, but otherwise unreadable.
“My fellow Christians,” Jared continues, “as you would follow Christ, follow me out of this sinful dwelling and away from the evils of alcohol.”
Yeah, he sort of loses the audience there. Lambasting people with purple eyes is one thing. Lambasting a whiskey or a beer is quite another. At least in Allan.
Boos thunder across the room. Some guy throws a dart and hits Jared’s arm. Jared touches the cut. He stares at his hand as he rubs the blood between his fingertips. He looks so lost a part of me wants to go to him. But why would I try to help someone who’s out to get me?
Glass shatters near the front of the bar. Everyone shoots out of their seats to look. It’s a bottle with a rag in it. The rag has rapturous flames growing from its edges. Two more bottles stuffed with rags come flying in. Fragments of voices, panicked cries, pierce through the smoke.
As the fire grows and smoke prevails, people in the bar run and push aside furniture. I get stuck behind a table. My thighs feel tight against the wall as my chest is trapped by the dark and cloudy air. I claw at the wood, frantic and constrained. Not a good mix. Conrad reaches for me. I hold my hand out to him, stretching as far as I can, but a crowd pushes forward. They push him out the door. He’s like a fish, swimming upstream, trying to get back to me.
But he can’t. He’s flushed out of the bar. The smoke and my fear race together to choke me.
Sally hoses everything with a big red extinguisher, but it’s so much. The flames roam like evil hyenas, laughing and cackling at their own destruction. Burns blister around Sally’s knuckles and her coughs reach me across the bar as it empties further with every second.
I kick and thrash and thrust at the table. I breathe heavily with the exertion, but am only rewarded with stinging air that moves down my throat like peppers. I brace myself against the wall and push the table, smidge by smidge. Eventually, I get free. I rush toward an extra extinguisher on the wall.
“Get out of here, Sally. I’ve got this,” I say. Her coughing sounds horrid, almost like it’s echoing inside me.
Oh wait, it is. I’m coughing too.
“No,” she screams, and we both shower white, soft powdery liquid over the flames that lap at the bar as though they were merely kitten’s tongues and the wood were milk. The heat gets under my skin, cooking my muscles, melting my being, but I don’t stop. In seconds, Sally is gone. She is gone. I continue spraying. The bar stools where Luke and I sat. The seats where Mandy and I first met Rashid and Zachary. I’m half hero, half reminiscent fool as the arms come around me. They hurl me over a shoulder. The extinguisher slips from my hands and thuds to the fiery floor.
I can’t move. The air clears and the bar bounces away from me. With my head up, I bob along in the patch of woods near the bar, seeing the people outside and the sirens and the lights all escaping and getting smaller. When I let my head fall, I see the upside-down back of my savior. The hips are too narrow to be a woman. A ghostly white sliver of a back peeks between jeans and a green shirt. Rashid has luxurious brown skin and is taller than whoever this is. Luke is wider, stronger. And it can’t be Conrad. He was wearing his favorite red sweater. I know, because I helped him get ready.
The woods continue to bob and bob. Then it all stops. I’m plunked down.
Hard.
There is my savior. Jared.
He pulls back, ready to dart. I grab his hand. “I don’t understand,” I say, crawling to my knees, as if I’m begging for answers. “Don’t you want me dead?”
His face wrinkles in grotesque confusion. “No, if you died now, before I could save you, you’d go to Hell. Haven’t you been listening to me?” He runs his fingers through his hair in frustration. He jerks away.
“Wait, Sally’s still in there!” I scream.
“I got her before you,” Jared says, as he races back through the woods and toward the flames.
He took me far from the bar. I sit in a small clearing among trees, just able to catch the dimmest of glimpses of my fellow survivors through the cluster of bark. The sirens still make it through, and red lights bounce against branches as the rain starts to pour. Pour.
Right now, here, with the earth between my fingers, with the trees protecting me and the rain cleansing me, rushing along the light burns on my arm, I feel something. I feel something outside of my heartbeat, my brain. I stare at the stars and wonder at the fact that I can feel these prickly burns. That, between coughs, my weakened lungs can still take in bits of the crisp, fall air.
I am alive.
And that simple fact is enough for me to pray. Not to an entity. To nothing. To everything.