Chapter Eighteen: See the Light

(2712 words)

Even from my spot in the center of that room, in the center of Tré’s room, I could hear the unmistakable snap! of a quickly growing fire outside of the room. Pulling away from my boyfriend, I hastily ran to the window and looked outside, my eyes widening in shock and horror. There was a fucking fire outside my window. And it was quickly approaching us.

I breathed in and out deeply as I leaned back against the wall, trying to collect my nerves and trying to not hyperventilate as I realized just exactly what the hell was happening now. A fire. A goddamn fire. It was going to burn the whole apartment complex down, maybe. It wasn’t just going to kill me and Tré, but hundreds of innocent people.

“Billie Joe? Are you -- are you okay?” he asked me quietly walking over to where I stood. I just looked up at him, tears really on the brink of spilling over now, a panic attack on the verge in the corner of my mind.

“Tré…” I mumbled, wrapping my arms rightly around his stomach as he wrapped his arms protectively around me. “I don’t want to die.”

“What d’you mean? We aren’t -- not dead yet, are we?” Tré asked me.

“We will be,” I whispered. “There’s a fire out there.”

Tré stepped back, looking at me in surprise. We stood there, frozen, for just a moment, before Tré started saying just barely audible words: “A fire burns today of blasphemy and genocide… the sirens of decay will infiltrate the faith fanatics.”

“What the… Tré, where the hell did that come from?”

“I made it up a while ago…” Catching my confused glance, Tré added, “Right before you texted me about the meeting.”

The meeting. Dammit, that seemed so long ago, even though it was only a couple weeks past at that point.

“Wow,” I breathed, just trying to look at him, just trying to look anywhere but the window. The inherent fear of panic was rising in the pit of my stomach, a fire just as fierce as the one outside my window raging inside my mind, sending my senses alight with crazy and maniac panic. My heart beat like a miserably tuned, off beat drum, leading dogs into war and reprimanding the little shreds of innocence in my soul.

I looked back at Tré, guessing that my fear and panic were evident in my eyes. I guessed then that we had two options: to go down right there and then, to go down in supposed glory (Gloria?) -- or to run away, leaving everyone to think we’re dead, and just hide out forever.

Guess which option my high on fear and adrenaline brain chose?

“Tré, c’mon… come on -- let’s go. I have an idea… t-take my hand, okay?” As I said this, I held out my hand to him. It shook in midair, shaking with fear and insanity and hysteria. It shook like a flag in the midst of a summer windstorm. “Tré… come -- come on, we have to go.” My voice was choked with tears as I watched him just standing there, frozen to the spot with his reciprocal of my own panic. “Tré?”

He still refused to move. I reached my hand out to him again, trying to get a hold of his hand. However, Tré was frozen to the spot, his eyes wide, shaking ever so slightly like a leaf in the harsh winds of a frozen over winter. The only motion that I could see at all were the tears that streaked down his face so slowly.

“We can do this Tré! C’mon… we have to… have to get out of here!”

“But --” Finally, he spoke. “But what if we’re supposed to die here?”

“To hell with faith, we are getting the fuck right out of here, got it?”

Tré seemed indecisive for a minute. “Come on, do you want to die here, alone, in some fucking fire or with me in glory?” I asked him.

“Decide in gloriam…” Tré whispered. To die in glory. Latin. Of course.

“Then come on!” I shouted, grabbing his hand and wrapping my fingers around his palm. Unyielding, he let me pull him out the door and down the hall, showing no remorse for anything in my way. People were yelling outside in the long hall that connected all the rooms, and I pushed and shoved my way through the thick crowd. The elevators were packed tightly, and so were the stairs.

However, the windows that lead out to the front of the building -- the hall fire escape -- was unopened and unused. Without thinking twice about it, I half dragged Tré to the window and tried opening it.

It was either locked or jammed.

Using all the force I had, I rammed into the window pane with my shoulder, glass shattering on impact and flying mostly outward. Some of the bits that had shattered were embedded in my shoulder, but I tried ignoring the pain and the bleeding as I swung a leg carefully onto the top of the fire escape ladder. Quickly, I stepped down, looking up and at Tré’s worried face through the window.

“Come on!” I mutt have screamed, for he did exactly as I had and carefully started to climb down the ladder.

I grimaced as I kept going down, warm blood trickling down my back and the wound itself stinging like all hell. To distract myself, I bit my lip hard and looked out behind the building, and sort of off to the side. The fire was just barely visible, but it was there all right. That’s when I saw people walking around it and holding up bottles of… something. Liquor? No -- even worse. Fucking lighter fluid.

They were serious about burning down the apartment.

“Tré! Faster, faster dammit!” I screamed, my voice getting scratchy from overuse and breaking with my oh so evident panic. “They’ve got fucking lighter fluid, oh god, they’re gonna burn it down, shit shit shit.”

“Quiet, stop thinking about it, just move. Get the fuck off this ladder and then… I dunno, get the hell away from here, right? Sooner we stop panicking and starting going then the sooner we’ll be away from the fire, right?” Tré said, kind of rambling by the end of the statement.

“Yeah. I guess.” My throat was so dry. “I think we’re gonna get off this thing and run like hell to… like, a hotel or something. Wait -- do you have any money?”

“No,” said Tré, and my hearts sank all the way into my intestines or something squicky like that. “But… I can hack my way into my parent’s debit card shit and get some money there. You know how they always act like I’m not there. I know a lot of shit I shouldn’t.” I could practically see his grin, which pulled on my heart painfully, so I kept hurrying down the ladder -- just so I could see Tré again and make absolutely, one hundred percent sure that he was perfectly fine.

The metal was cold beneath my hands and slick with the sweat that was freely flowing from my nervous palms and fingers. I started to bite my lip again, each step feeling more precarious than the last. I didn’t dare to look down, knowing what sight would befall my eyes. I knew that if I even thought about looking down, that I would be overtaken by curiosity and I would actually fall.

My heart raced beneath my so fragile seeming bones and flesh, ricocheting freely in a bloody ballet. It was a gory image -- but it was better than imagning me going splat at the bottom of the fire escape ladder. Or the image of me burning in this damn fire. Either way, it was the best image I could bring up.

The sount of my heart drumming in my ears reminded me of a certain short story that I happened to like a lot -- The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe. It was actually really interesting -- about a man who is insane (yet periodically denies it to the reader) and kills his father or master or whatever, trying just to get away from the gaze of a hawk like eye. He smothers the older man with a bed, before chopping the man up and putting the body beneath the floorboards. The police come and the character is ever so sweet and perfect, but is slowly being eaten from hearing what he assumes is the sound of the old man’s still beating heart. In a frenzy of panic and insanity, he reveals it all to the police officers.

That was totally random, but that was also better than imagining myself going splat or burning alive.

The trickle of blood was still uncomfortable though, and even though it had mostly stopped, my wound still stung.

Holy shit, I recall wondering mentally. If we’ve been climbing down long enough for the blood to have stopped… damn, this is one fucking long ladder. Huh.

“Tré…” I muttered, panting slightly. I guess we had been climbing longer than I had thought we had been climbing (fuck, was that confusing or what). “You… have you noticed that this ladder’s pretty damn long? I mean -- I think we’re almost at the bottom… but fuck, this ladder is long.”

“Yeah. I would really have to agree with you there. I mean -- fuck -- I can’t hear people screaming up there now. I hope they’re all right… woah, what the fuck dude, no way… they’re bitches,” Tré half muttered in reply to me (and himself, apparently).

“Talking to yourself… the first sing of madness,” I teased.

“Oh, Armstrong, don’t tell me you don’t do it too.”

“You fucking bet I do.”

“So we’re going mad together?”

“There’s no one I’d rather go mad with more than you -- oh shit, and I seem to have lost my ability to speak coherently.”

“Or the author just lost the ability to write coherently.”

“True.”

We both laughed a bit as we continued downward. Everything felt so surreal and distant now, my hands numb, my back numb, and I felt permanently blinded.

That was when I felt something soft and yet solid beneath my foot, instead of hard, flimsy metal ladder. “Tré! I made it!” I screamed in joy, watching his form slowly work its way down to join me. Finally, he was next to me again and he wrapped his arms around me, kissing my forehead. “Let’s go,” I whispered, grabbing his hand and starting to walk down the road to the town, away from the fire.

“Oh. Shit. Wait… Tré?” I said as I stopped, coming to a dreadful realization that lurked like cancer in the pit of my stomach. “Tré? How the hell are we supposed to get there? I’ve walked over the highway -- well, the highway… the long one, you know, when I was walking back here from the City -- and it takes ages -- days at least. So what the hell should we do?”

“Let’s see… we don’t have the materials to hijack a car,” Tré held up one finger. “No buses go down to the City from here, or from here to that other town.” Another finger. “No car.” Another one. “No bikes.” Yet another finger. “Nothing -- but I agree, we should go to the City and disappear.”

“Um, Tré? What the hell? How the fuck are we even gonna get to the damn City?”

“We could always hitch a ride.”

I slapped him. “You moron! We couldn’t do that!”

“Well, then I’m out of ideas.”

“So ‘m I.” I let out a long sigh. “We should just try getting some cast first or something, then see what we could do. At best… we could always hijack a bus or something.”

“Naw,” replied Tré, “it’s fucking impossible to drive a bus.”

“You’ve -- holy shit -- you’ve driven a bus?”

“Yep.”

“You get cooler and cooler and crazier and crazier every time we talk, did ya know that?” I asked him, playfully hitting his shoulder before interlacing my fingers in his.

“Mmhmm.”

“Narcissist.”

“I know I am -- but what are you?”

I didn’t have a reply to that. We just kept on walking, in silence, to the bank while trying to figure out what the hell to do.

Once at the bank, Tré hacked into his parents’ balance on the ATM thingy with barely any effort. Sometimes, being ignored pays off. He shoved around three hundred bucks in his pocket before heading back out with me in melancholy silence.

We made it to the highway then, and say down on the sidewalk, sitting with our legs crossed and our elbows leaning on our knees. We sat there in silence until we suddenly saw headlights and a car coming in from the old town, headed where we wanted to go. Inexplicably, it stopped right in front of us, and the heavily tinted front window rolled down to reveal a twenty five-ish girl with Italian features and short brown hair.

“Hey, need a ride anywhere?” she asked, grinning with straight white teeth. They seemed fake.

“Um… yeah.”

What was that rule about never taking rides from strangers, again?

“Hop in. Where ya headed -- the City, per chance?” she asked. As we stood up, she looked at us and our dirty appearances. “I’m Gina by the way.”

“Billie Joe,” I answered mechanically.

“Tré,” said my boyfriend.

“Well, then, come on in!”

“Why should we trust you? I mean -- you literally just drove over here and asked if we needed a ride. Seriously.” Damn me and my suspicious curiosity.

“Well, I think we’re in a similar situation. I’m headin’ over t’ New York eventually ‘cause I killed my -- er -- boyfriend, Vinnie. First I need to go down t’ Las Vegas, though, t’ pick my… friend, Virginia,” Gina said, a sparkle of mischief and glamour in her eye.

“Really?” It was Tré speaking suspiciously now. “And how d’ we know if you’re not just going to kill us or something if you get the chance?”

“Now -- why’d I do that? You look like ya don’t have much to either of your names, huh?”

Oh, if only she knew what would happen if she killed Gloria.

“Well, um, oh God…” I muttered. It was a serious dilemma -- first of all, our fire escape, well, escape would all go to ruins if this Gina chick really did kill us. But, on the other hand, we desperately needed a ride to the City. I was stuck between a rock and a hard place and it was not fun at all.

“Oh, fuck, why not,” I eventually said, nodding at Gina and grabbing Tré’s hand once more. “We are desperate… even if we’re not helpless.”

“Come on in, then.”

The back door opened and Tré and I walked in, sitting down but not buckling in. We never did, really. What’s the use if we might need to get away fast -- right?

Yep, we’re so fucking paranoid that it makes no sense -- but oh fucking well.

The drive was mostly silent and didn’t take that long to me. She played a bit of music, not too loud, but the music was good. Some old pirate station, playing some old punk stuff. Finally, Gina dropped us off outside a run down hotel -- apparently, it was cheap but actually pretty damn nice. We thanked her and watched her drive away -- away from her murder and toward her friend, all in the name of misery.

Tiredly and in a daze, we checked in and retreated to our room. Tré insisted on looking at my shoulder and reluctantly, I let him. He deemed it bad, made me take a shower, and went out to get some gauze and other similar things. Tré was back before long and he quickly -- although messily -- bandaged my arm. Once he was satisfied with the way my shoulder was healing now, we turned off the lights and fell asleep in each other’s arms.