I was upstairs. The Peter who belonged in this hour. I had been so focused on when Jonas might appear that I’d never even considered another me.
Upstairs, I, he, was drunk. Confused. And trapped by an inferno.
The heat was palpable. I couldn’t get within twenty feet of the stairs. I ran for the elevator, and stopped halfway there. It didn’t work. I ran back.
In the upstairs hall, through black, greasy smoke and the roaring fire, I glimpsed a frightened face. My own.
Did he recognize me? I don’t know. “The hall windows!” I screamed.
“Too small!” he shouted back. He glanced over his shoulder. “And the outer wall is burning.”
I heard sirens, louder by the second. “Fire trucks are on their way. Hold on!”
And with my heart in my mouth, I left him. There was equipment left to ruin.
“Help me!” upstairs me screamed.
But I couldn’t help him. I couldn’t help myself. Walls of flame barred the doors and the loading dock.
Something within me whispered, “But you can help yourself.” I had not yet attended to the cabinet-sized transceiver. Funny how I had left its destruction for last. I could once more wedge myself inside, jump back a day....
More of me, thankfully, recoiled. Upstairs, one Peter was roasting to death. Peter of some unknowable future had sacrificed himself, his long-suffering world, to send me a warning. For me to sneak away would mean leaving this transceiver operational. It might escape complete destruction in the flames. If, to play safe, I destroyed this unit yesterday, would I still have it when I needed it tomorrow?
I hadn’t forgotten how “random” flailing of the high-voltage line had flipped the cable end into the booth’s open access panel. Not to short out and fry the electronics. Not to make a cascade of sparks, then writhe itself back out.
No: to spot-weld connections, in just the right places, precisely enough to furnish power for several minutes. Long enough for Jonas to return, speak with me, and then take his contagious self... somewhen.
Accident? Coincidence? The odds of that circuit forming must be beyond astronomical.
Call it fate or the whirligig of time... if human frailty allowed it, something would have its revenges.
Choking on smoke and bile, disgusted with my momentary weakness, I flipped open the electronics compartment of this one remaining transceiver. I ripped out its entrails and buried them in red-hot coals.
My work was done.
All around, close now, sirens wailed.
Flames had penetrated the caged area, and I gagged on the sickening sweet smell of burning meat. Of Jonas. When a four-foot spool of power cable, too, caught fire, the acrid stench of burning insulation was a mercy.
With an earsplitting crack, something behind the fence, a transformer, perhaps, exploded.
I sat in a clear area on the concrete floor, one of the few spots that flaming debris had yet to claim. And waited for the fumes, the heat, or the collapsing roof to bring matters to an end.
~~~
I shuddered awake, coughing. Then the dry heaves hit me; I tried, and failed, to sit up. I only managed to bat a plastic mask off my mouth and nose.
“Peter!” I heard. “Lie still, honey.”
Victoria. She was kneeling beside me, trembling.
I was on a stretcher near a Rescue Squad van, its lightbar strobing. A husky man wearing scrubs nudged her aside and settled the mask back on my face. He said, “This is for oxygen, and you need it. It’s a miracle they got you out.”
They. Flat on my back, I counted five fire trucks. Crews wielding thick hoses sprayed the blaze, and neighboring buildings to which the flames looked poised to spread.
Victoria stroked my forehead. “I heard the sirens,” she said. “I... I had a bad feeling. I followed a fire truck.”
Over her shoulder, there was an apparition. I saw—at a second-story hallway window, lurid by firelight—a despairing face. My face. Just for an instant, then it was gone.
Sad beyond words, I turned away from Victoria and Peter both.