DYLAN
I’m tired when I get home. I won’t have trouble sleeping tonight. I feel so good about how much evidence has come together today that I unroll my makeshift whiteboard and hang it back up.
It’s hot, so I go to the thermostat and check the AC. It says it’s 80 degrees. I turn it down to 72, but the unit doesn’t come on. I turn it down lower, make sure it’s on AC and not heat, but it’s still unresponsive.
Great.
I go to the window and open it, and cooler air does breeze in. Mosquitoes are likely to come with it since there are no screens on my windows. Humidity is already settling over me.
I change into my sleep shorts and drop into bed, wearing my PTSD patch from a clinical study. It helps with my brain waves when I sleep, and when I wear it I don’t have as many night terrors. I hope I can shut my mind off tonight.
I drift in and out, but after a while, a swishing sound drags me from REM sleep. I sit up, groggy. It’s dark, so I can’t see what made the noise, but as I reach for the lamp, I smell a strong gas smell. I switch on the lamp and see that my carpet under the window is wet, and fumes distort the lines of the window.
Gas!
I jump up and lunge for the window when something else flies in, hits the floor, and rolls across my room.
Then I see that it’s a grenade.
I dive for the door and get out of the room, fling open the front door, just as the blast throws me off my feet. I hit the concrete breezeway outside my apartment. I’m dazed when I hear the crackle of fire inside.
People. There are people in the apartment below me. Next door. Behind all these doors . . .
Searing pain shoots up my leg until a flame erupts on my shorts. Slapping the flame out, I get to my feet and run into the blinding smoke. I have to get them out.
I yell at the top of my lungs. “Evacuate! Clear the building!”
Coughing, I find my way to the door next to me, bang on it, then run to the one on the other side of my apartment. “Open up! You have to get out! Fire!”
People are coming out now, and I yell over the railing. “Check on the people below me! Get them out!”
I bang on each door as I run to the staircase and stumble down. Smoke billows out through the shattered window in the apartment below me.
“Help evacuate!” I yell to people stepping out. “Get everybody out!”
The door to the apartment below me looks like it took as much of the blast as mine did. I pull off my shirt, cover my nose and mouth, and tie it around the back of my head to filter my air. Then I get down on my knees and crawl into that place. Fire covers the walls, and the smoke makes it hard to see.
“Anybody in here?” I call out. “Just yell so I can hear you!”
I hear a woman crying, and I crawl toward her. “Where are you?” I yell. “Talk to me!”
“Here,” she says, a few feet away from me to my right. The ceiling between her apartment and mine above her has burned through, and the smoke billows upward, but it’s still thick here near the floor.
When I touch her, I feel blood on her arms, her hands, and I doubt she can get out of here on her own. I get to my feet and pull her over my shoulder. She’s coughing, and I feel her warm blood down my back.
“Is there anybody else in here?”
“No. God . . . help me.”
I get her out the door into less smoky air. The red lights of a fire truck pull into the parking lot. “Over here!” I yell, then I cough my guts out as I stagger toward the ambulance coming behind the truck. “Help!”
Two EMTs appear and take her from me. I’ve never been so happy to see anyone in my life. The woman’s leg looks mutilated and burnt, and her hair is singed on one side. She, too, is coughing, trying to clear her lungs. They get her to the ambulance, then others rush to me.
I double over in a coughing fit. When I can speak, I assure them I’m okay.
“No, you’re not,” a paramedic says. “You have burns.”
“Just get everybody out,” I rasp. “There may be others.”
Other fire trucks arrive on the scene, and the firefighters take over, hosing the fire and evacuating the building. It doesn’t look like anyone else is injured.
As they get me into the ambulance, I wish I could have run behind the building to see if I could catch a glimpse of who threw the gas and grenade into my apartment. Whoever it was is surely gone by now.
As the ambulance carries me away, something inside me sharpens. Keegan is behind this. He must know I’ve figured him out and that I’m going to expose him.
He wants me dead. All I have to do is stay alive long enough to expose him.