I grabbed Dunk under the arms and pulled him toward the front of the diner, toward the missing window, while trying to ignore the slick, red stain his body left on the floor behind us.
What came next is a bit of a blur. I think I nearly passed out again. I remember falling or the feeling of falling. I can’t be sure. Then I remember other arms around me. Hands groping, fingers grabbing at whatever they could. I remember being pulled out of the diner, over the concrete sidewalk, and out onto Brownsville Road.
“Breathe, kid, breathe,” someone said. “We called 911. Just lie still.”
I saw a face hovering over me. A middle-aged man in glasses and a plaid shirt.
My head rolled to the side, and I saw Dunk lying there, unmoving.
I took a deep breath.
Although the smoke was thick here, too, clean air was thicker and my lungs welcomed it. Strength began to seep back into my arms and legs, the fog over my thoughts began to lift.
That’s when I remembered Krendal.
I remembered Elden Krendal and knew he was still inside.
The middle-aged man in the plaid shirt tried to stop me. So did others. He grabbed at my shoulder and tried to press me back down to the pavement when I forced my body to stand. At that point, others in the growing crowd grabbed at me, too—apparently what I planned to do was evident in my eyes.
I stood anyway and drew in a deep breath.
I shook off the man in the plaid shirt, I pulled out of the grip of the others, and I ran back toward the diner with the sound of sirens wailing somewhere behind me.
Without the large plateglass window at the front of the diner, the growing fire had no trouble finding food, and when I passed through the window frame for the second time, I could feel the air rushing in rather than pushing out, sucked in by the hungry beast devouring the restaurant from the inside out.
I clambered past the ruined tables, chairs and booths, past the counter, toward the swinging door on the side leading toward the kitchen, the heat unbearable and intensifying with each step. My eyes caught a glimpse of the space through the opening where Krendal normally passed food, but I could make nothing out through the wall of black smoke.
Flames licked up the walls near the swinging door, and when I touched the metal, the heat burned my fingertips.
I knew the explosion had been one or more of the propane tanks Krendal stored in the back for the stove on the off chance city gas stopped working. The gas had shut down twice since Krendal owned the diner, and each time it had happened during the lunch rush. He kept three canisters of propane at the ready in case it happened again. He even taught me how to switch the hose on the stove from one to the other and back again, something he claimed with pride he could do in under ten seconds.
I lowered my head and pushed through the lopsided swinging door, hanging by only the top hinge.
Flames leapt up to greet me, followed by bellowing black smoke. I forced my legs to pump and pushed into the kitchen, jumping toward the tile floor on the right of the opening as the intense heat raced past me toward the fresh air outside.
With my face as close to the ground as possible, I wiped the tears from my eyes, the heat stinging.
The landscape was foreign to me.
The twisted remains of one of the propane canisters had crashed into the aluminum table that normally occupied the center of the kitchen. The table was now on its side, and the dozens of pots and pans and cooking utensils that normally filled shelves on top of the table were strewn around my limited field of vision. The floor was slick with the remains of today’s soup, the hot liquid soaking through the knees of my jeans.
I coughed. The involuntary action filled my lungs with smoke, tainted air.
I shouted out Krendal’s name, but the words came out as a garbled whisper.
Then I crawled in the general direction of the stove, my eyes pinched shut, my hands feeling the way, pushing through the mess on the floor. When I encountered the overturned table, I felt my way around it, the hot aluminum burning my fingertips.
I have no idea how I found him.
The kitchen wasn’t large, maybe four hundred square feet at most, but it might as well have been a desert and I the blind man trudging through the sand. I pushed forward on my belly over the slick tile, my hands flailing out in front of me, fingers outstretched. I heard part of the ceiling collapse somewhere to my right—the fire roared with newfound laughter at this, but I heard nothing of Krendal. And I was certain that if I found him at all, it would be by sound and sound alone, because within seconds of entering the kitchen, I couldn’t see anything.
My fingers brushed his leg.
At first I wasn’t sure it was a leg and I nearly went on, my thoughts muddled with lack of oxygen. As I grabbed at the material of his pants, his weak fingers wrapped around my wrist. I grabbed his arm and he took mine, and I knew neither of us would let go.
I immediately started crawling backward. With one free hand and two weak legs, I began to shuffle, pulling him along with jerks and tugs. We were halfway through the crooked kitchen door when another section of the ceiling collapsed, raining down on us. Krendal’s body jumped, and I knew something had landed on him or hit him, but I couldn’t see what. I didn’t stop moving. I pulled him through the door.
We were somewhere in the dining area when the second propane canister exploded, followed immediately by the third.
