Chapter 4 - Through the Flames
The heat was instantaneous and violent. Black, acrid smoke filled the small office, searing my lungs as I dragged myself across the floor on my stomach. The electrical shock had left my legs feeling like dead weights, but adrenaline forced my arms to move.
Cough! Cough!
"Help!" I screamed, but the roar of the fire swallowed my voice.
The flames caught the curtains, spreading rapidly toward the ceiling joists. The doorframe was a solid wall of bright orange fire—there was no way out through the hallway.
I looked up at the only window in the room. It was a high, narrow stained-glass window, bolted shut from the inside.
I dragged my body to the desk, grabbing the heavy claw hammer I had dropped on the floor earlier. Fighting through the overwhelming smoke that blinded my eyes, I dragged myself onto my knees, leaned over the radiator, and smashed the hammer into the window frame with all the strength left in my body.
CRASH!
Glass shattered outward. Fresh, cool rain air rushed into the suffocating room, feeding the fire even more.
Flames licked at my back, singeing my jacket. I hooked my elbows over the jagged window sill, hauled my upper body through the opening, and tumbled out into the muddy flower garden two stories below.
THUD!
I hit the wet earth hard, knocking the wind completely out of my lungs. I lay there in the pouring rain, gasping for fresh air, watching dark plumes of smoke pour out of my mother's house.
I looked toward the driveway. Marissa’s red sedan was speeding away down the quiet residential street, her taillights disappearing into the rain.
She thought I was dead. She was headed to the hospital to finish off my mother before the toxicology reports came back.
"No..." I gasped out, pushing myself up from the mud. "Not her... not Mom..."
My car was parked at the curb. I stumbled through the rain, collapsed into the driver's seat, and hotwired my own engine—a trick I had learned in my youth—since my keys were burned inside the house.
The tires shrieked against the wet pavement as I slammed my foot onto the gas pedal, tearing through the streets toward Mercy Hill Hospital like a madman.
Sirens wailed in the distance as fire trucks rushed toward my burning home, but I couldn't stop. The only thing that mattered was Room 218.
While driving frantically through the rain, I pulled out my cell phone, wiping the mud from the screen, and called Detective Marcus Reed—a old high school friend who worked in the local police department's homicide unit.
"Marcus!" I screamed into the phone over the roar of the engine.
"Arthur? What’s going on? I just got a call about a house fire at your mother's address!"
"It was Marissa!" I yelled hysterically. "She tried to burn me alive! She's been poisoning my mother with digitalis for months to steal her land! She's on her way to Mercy Hill Hospital right now to kill my mother before the toxicology report comes back! You have to get a unit to Room 218 NOW!"
There was a brief pause on the line before Marcus replied in a hard, serious tone: "I'm two blocks away from Mercy Hill right now in an unmarked cruiser. I’m turning my lights on. Hold on, Arthur!"
Fifteen minutes later, I slammed my car into the emergency loading zone at Mercy Hill Hospital. I ignored the security guards shouting at me, pushing through the sliding glass doors, my clothes soaked in mud and covered in black soot.
I sprinted up the stairwell, bypassing the slow elevators, taking three steps at a time until I reached the second floor.
As I burst through the double doors of the cardiology wing, I saw a terrifying sight at the end of the hallway.
Marissa was standing outside Room 218, dressed in a stolen nurse’s white scrub top, holding a large syringe filled with a clear liquid.
She reached for the door handle of my mother's room.
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"MARISSA!" I roared from the end of the hallway.
She spun around, her eyes widening in sheer, unadulterated horror as she saw me—mud-covered, smoke-stained, bleeding, but very much alive—charging down the corridor toward her like a demon raised from the ashes.
