Page 12 of Take a Hike
“Let’s see if we can enlarge this window.” She gestured toward the small square of glass set in the wall behind the counter.
“Oh, I picked the wrong tool,” Charlie said, trying to hide her anxiety when her voice came out rusty from the smoke. “I want to smash.”
“Go on.” Fifi waved her toward the doorway, giving her a sympathetic smile that told Charlie her sister knew exactly what she was really feeling. “We smash. You screw—well, unscrew.”
She hurried down the short hallway to the back door, noticing it was definitely hotter and smokier now. Charlie wasn’t at all tempted to touch the wall this time. In fact, she carefully stayed in the middle of the hallway, as if playing a real-life version of The Walls are Lava.
The smoke made it tough to see, and she blinked tears from her eyes just in time to stop before she ran into the door. Crouching, she felt for the hinge, which was painted the samecolor—dark green—as the door. She set the screwdriver in place, although she wasn’t very hopeful with the paint slathered over the screws. There was little chance she could get the screws out.
With both hands, she cranked the screwdriver to the left, holding her breath as she strained.
“Come on, come on, come on.” When she started coughing again, she quit her muttered mantra and just put all her effort into trying to turn the screwdriver. When she heard acrack, she jumped with delight, sure that the sound meant the screw had broken loose of its paint prison.
Then the majority of her borrowed screwdriver fell into her lap.
Her stomach dropped, and she fumbled to grab the remains of her tool. A roaring sound distracted her from her fruitless task, and she looked up, just in time to see the ceiling burst into an upside-down sea of flames.
Unable to look away, Charlie breathed, “Well…shoot.”
Three
Forcing herself to tear her gaze away from the rippling flames covering the ceiling, she turned her back on the not-going-anywhere hinges. Charlie figured it’d be best to rejoin the others in the main coffee shop, where hopefully the fire wasn’t as well-developed. If it was, she’d suggest to Bennett that it might be time for his Plan B—B for Blow a hole in the wall big enough for them to escape through. Crouched as low as she could go and still walk, she took one step.
With a crash, a flaming chunk of ceiling fell to the floor. Flames shot up in front of her, and she leapt backward away from it, her back hitting the door. She turned her face away, throwing her arms up in front of her as embers stung any exposed skin.
Peeking through her upraised arms, she groaned. “You’re in a pickle now, Charlie.”
The ceiling and entire wall on her right was on fire, and black smoke filled the air, making it hard to see anything except the too-bright flames. The smoldering pile of ceiling tiles on the floor created the impression of a ring of fire in front of her, especially as the flames on the ceiling started to lick down the left wall, as well.
“Okay, so what do you do with a ring of fire?” she muttered to herself, her voice raspy. Pressing back against the door, she took asdeep a breath as she could without setting off a coughing fit and then sprinted forward. The heat was intense, growing hotter the closer she drew to the fiery ring, but she pushed on, launchingherself forward and up, sailing over the remains of the ceiling and landing on the other side—right on another pile of flaming debris.
“Ouch, ow, ow!” she yelped, hopping to another spot on the floor that was still hot, but at least wasn’t actively on fire.
“What are youdoing?”
Charlie froze. Those growled words definitely didn’t come from inside her head. Before she could figure out who was in the smoke-darkened hallway with her, she was swept off her feet and deposited none-too-gently over a pair of broad shoulders.
“What?” she squawked—or tried to, at least. All she managed was a hoarse rasp.
“What’re you doing, jumping into a fire?” The owner of the shoulders demanded.
“I wasn’t jumpingintoa fire,” she managed to croak in her defense. “I jumpedthroughthe ring of fire. Like Evel Knievel.”
He snorted. “More like a badly trained circus poodle.”
Suddenly, the shoulders, the voice, the crankiness, and thebunker coat her cheek was currently mashed against all came together in a light-bulb moment of recognition. “Kieran? What are you doing in here?”
“Saving your ass.”
“Ialready saved my ass,” she corrected him, wanting to push herself up and insist that she walk, but by the way her legs were trembling, she was a little worried that she wouldn’t be able to stand on her own, so she kept quiet—about that at least.
His only answer was another snort, which she distinctly heard despite it being muffled by his SCBA gear. He charged through the front room, and she peered through the smoke.
“Are Fifi, Bennett, and Lou already out?”
“Right after we got the door open.Theydidn’t jump into fires and make things difficult.”
“I didn’t—” The rest of her indignant response was lost in a flurry of coughing, and Kieran picked up the pace, running through the door and not slowing down once they were outside.
