Rivals by David Wellington Page B

at his clothes. Part of his
sleeve caught on fire so he slapped it out. To his left was a stairway leading
up, to the right an empty bathroom. He headed for the stairs—and then
jumped back as half a ton of bricks and girders came crashing down from the
upper floor, smashing the risers and filling the air with red dust that made
him cough.
    He didn’t have
much time. The ceiling above him was sagging, water dripping across the
plaster and then down the kitchen wall. He bent his knees and sprang upward,
smashing through the ceiling and the hardwood floor above, grabbing at anything
he could hold onto and pulling himself upward through the hole he’d made.
    He found
himself in a master bedroom, pale blue paint on the walls and satin curtains
covering the windows. The floor sloped to one side and the bed had rolled down
to smash against the far wall. It was partially blocking the doorway so he
grabbed it and hauled it out of the way, then jumped out into an upstairs
hallway. There were doors on three sides of him, then, and they all looked like
they’d jammed inside their crooked frames. He kicked one open and found a
bathroom with no ceiling—the floor was littered with broken wood and
burning shingles. The next door was a linen closet with all the towels and
sheets in a pile on its floor.
    One more door
to go. He got a good run up and hit it hard with his shoulder. It collapsed
instantly under his momentum and he rolled through into a girl’s bedroom with
horses on the walls.
    In one corner
of the room Mandy Hunt was curled up in a ball, wheezing and shaking. She
didn’t react when he shouted her name.
    Brent took a
step toward her—and the house shifted over to its right. The wall above
Mandy tilted inward and started to collapse, while all the furniture in the
room started sliding across the floor, squeaking as it ground its way down
toward the lowest part of the uneven floor.
    Plaster and
sheared-off sections of lath showered down on Brent’s head. He could hear
nails popping as they were pulled free of the floorboards, and downstairs he
heard a whoomping roar that he thought might be a gas line catching fire.
    At any second
the house was going to collapse under its own weight. He could hear the sirens
of a fire truck in the distance but he knew it would never arrive in time.
“Hold on, I’m coming,” he called, in case Mandy could hear him.
    The wall above
her kept collapsing piece by piece. A huge chunk of plaster pinwheeled down
from the ceiling and struck her on the shoulder, striping her pale skin with
blood. Brent dove across her just as the entire wall gave way and came
crashing down.
    He was
instantly buried in broken plaster and roof shingles. A length of metal
guttering whipped across his back and cut his shirt open but it only hurt for a
second before his body got its strength back.
    Beneath him
Mandy wasn’t breathing.
    Oh, no, he thought. No. I was so close.
    But
maybe—if 911 had sent an ambulance as well—maybe she could be
revived. Brent scooped her up in his arms and staggered upright to his feet,
shedding hundreds of pounds of dusty plaster and broken boards. He had to
struggle to breathe himself. The air was so thick he couldn’t seem to get any
oxygen. He couldn’t see anything and his ears were ringing.
    He could jump
straight up in the air, through the collapsed roof, but if he did he would have
to drag Mandy up through the rafters with him and she might get hurt. He
pushed through waist-deep debris instead, holding her up so her feet didn’t
drag in the jagged and broken mess, and shouldered his way back out into the
hallway.
    The fire had
spread while he was in Mandy’s room. It was racing up the walls, following the
wires hidden behind the plaster, and was dripping from the ceiling. There was
plenty of fuel to feed it and he knew if he wasted another second he would be
engulfed in flames. The bathroom, he thought—he had seen blue sky
through the broken walls of the bathroom. He