Doll Face

56

Ramona grabbed Lex by the hand and towed him out of the burning wreckage, navigating among heaped debris as everything came apart now that there was nothing to hold it together, no psychic atomic fission of an undead mind. Glass shattered and walls fell. Churning steam and roiling clouds of black smoke filled the air. Shards of metal flew. Electrical lines discharged their final volts as fuse boxes exploded one after the other.

They barely made it out of there before the real destruction began.

They ran across the courtyard, through the burning grasses until they reached the verge of the road, coughing on the gathering fumes. Below them, the town; before them, the factory in its death throes. It did not go easily the way an ordinary building might. There was too much sentient wrath and malevolence in every plank and nailhead. It had soaked up evil like a sponge and evil did not die easily.

The ground around it rumbled and shook, immense cracks opening up to all sides as if the earth was made of glass. The looming structure of the factory itself was burning, shuddering on its foundation, putting out an orange blaze that lit the dark sky and great rolling clouds of black soot that hung above it in a pall. There was a pained groaning sort of sound and one of the walls fell in and then another, gigantic flames rising up in red spikes. Everything was coming apart in there, shattering and snapping and incinerating. The sound of voices screaming echoed into the night in an eerie sibilance, rising in volume. The fire began to spread in all directions.

“That’s how it happened,” Ramona said as she watched it all. “The townspeople… they came up here and they torched this place. It was arson. They had to break the spell of Mother Crow, they had to sever the hold she had on them so they burned the factory with her in it. And the fire spread. It took everything.”

Lex drew a hand across his smudged face. “It swept from here right down into the town itself and burned it flat.”

Though the fire blazed hot and they could feel the heat blowing out at them in waves, they stood and watched, knowing they were right in its path. Something wasn’t quite over and they would not leave until it was.

The blazing structure trembled and shook. Even though it was falling apart, the glowing heat seemed to weld it together into a terrible black life force that refused death. There was a groaning, buckling sound as it became a living entity that fought for survival. They could see glaring red eyes like fireballs staring out at them as it tried to rise up like a blackened skeleton trying to pull itself free of a plague pit. It seemed like it was actually going to do it. A weird sort of thrumming noise came from it and the world began to roll with shockwaves as some critical mass approached like a nuclear core going critical.

“RUN!” Ramona cried out, making for the road.

She didn’t know what was going to happen, but something inside her knew that when it happened, it would be devastating beyond belief like Hiroshima at ground zero.

She saw Lex running and stumbling down the road back down toward the town. She saw him turn back and call out something to her, but she could not hear what it was.

Behind her there was a roaring eruption of pure energy and she was trapped in the center of chaos. It felt like millions of blades of light punched into her, lifting her up and throwing her through the air with crushing force. She was kicked into the deepest, darkest well within herself and then sucked back out to be launched with incredible velocity through screaming cosmic blackness.

No… no… please…

Whether it was her mind or her body that was in flight, she didn’t know. Perhaps both and neither. She was fired like a bullet through red vistas and green dimensions, cycled through time and space and matter, it seemed, particulated into shrieking dust that howled through skull-white anti-worlds and then into an immense outer blackness that was darker than anything the world had known or ever could know.

When it ended, she was crawling through the blackened ruins of Stokes, mindless and whimpering, her entire body stiff and hurting, a monstrous headache throbbing in her skull.

“Lex?” she heard her sobbing voice cry. “Oh… Lex, where are you?”

Covered in cinders, burned by hot ashes, she pulled her sooty, pain-wracked body through a warped doorway, coughing on the thick smoke that blew through the jigsaw of streets like a gritty ground fog. The house or building or whatever in the hell it was, was still smoldering. She hastily tore her shirt off and pressed it over her mouth so she would not asphyxiate.

Stairs.

The air might be better up there.

On her hands and knees, she climbed them, breathing hard, her muscles bunched and tense, an odd numbness in her limbs as if she had been stunned like a cow. Upstairs, it was warm, but the air was easier to breathe. She found a doorway and crawled through it, pushing it shut behind her.

She waited there, knees drawn up to her bare chest, leaning against the door, unable to even stand and find a chair. Her exhaustion was complete. Shaking in the darkness, she surrendered to it. For minutes or hours, she did not know.

“Ramona? Ramona?”

A voice was calling out to her and at first she did not recognize it, but slowly she remembered where she was and who the voice must belong to. She moved a bit, thumping her shoulder against the door.

“Ramona?” Lex called out.

Yes, she thought. I’m here.

He was outside the door now, pounding on it with his knuckles, calling her name. She could hear him breathing, the desperation just beneath his words. His voice was like that of a little boy who was holding back tears.

“Ramona?”

Her throat felt so very dry she could barely speak. She shifted, cocking her head, a strand of dark hair falling over her eyes that no longer could see. A crooked grin split open her white, flaking face as her hinged fingers reached for the doorknob. “Is that you, doll-face?” she said.