Rebecca's Rising

The man stood in the shadows, shivering, rocking from foot to foot to keep his toes from freezing and watched his breath whiten in the frigid air. It was only late October, but up here in Vermont the unseasonably frigid night felt like January. Across the street the lights of Davis Hall burned through the clear air and reflected a dull glow off the frost-rimmed grass.

The man checked his watch. Two minutes to four a.m. Most of the college kids have turned in for the night because most of the room lights were off. The man didn't care about the kids at all. He cared about one single kid, in room 321, and he didn't care about him in the way a parent might. He cared about him the way a risk management specialist cares about looming liability. The kid wasn't a problem yet, but the man knew he had the potential to become a big problem. Nobody knew exactly when it might happen, but according to people who knew more about this than he, the kid had begun to glow with awareness in the past couple of days. It was too early. It was pure luck that somebody with the ability to see such things had spotted him and gotten word back to Salem. Awareness didn't normally develop, if it ever did, until much later in life, but if people said it was happening now, the man wasn't going to argue. As a risk management specialist, his job was to nip problems like this in the bud.

He looked again at the window of room 321. It had been dark for two hours, and he knew the room's three occupants were dead to the world. He'd made sure of that because earlier that afternoon, dressed as a University of Vermont janitor, he had picked the lock on their room and injected their pony keg with a little mixture of his own, a concentrate of dissolved sleeping pills that would put them down deeper than the alcohol ever could. The whole point was to make sure they were sufficiently unconscious so the smoke and heat could do their job.

And now as he watched the window, he saw the first wisp of smoke escape. It was very subtle. If he hadn't been staring at the window, he never would have seen it. It meant that the small incendiary device he had planted in one of the room's electrical outlets had ignited and was starting to feed on the old dormitory's walls. The device would never be detectable, not after the tinderbox dorm had fully caught fire. And it would definitely catch fire. He knew this because earlier that evening he had also disabled the dorm's sprinkler system. The three boys in the room would be dead within fifteen minutes. No doubt the other kids would die, too, but that couldn't be helped. It would be collateral damage, just like what the papers used to call it a few years earlier when the Air Force accidentally napalmed a village in Vietnam.

John Andrews tossed his head from side to side on his pillow and wondered for the hundredth time if he was going to hurl. Two hours earlier when he'd gone to bed he'd suffered through the exact same thing, and now here it was back, the room spinning like a top. He cursed himself for sucking down so much of the pony keg he and his suitemates had tapped. Stupid, really stupid, he told himself.

But then he corrected himself, he really hadn't swilled that much beer. He'd drunk more lots of other nights and not felt half as smashed. Same with his suitemates. Both guys could usually hold their beer, but they'd both been slurring their words, and when they first went to bed, he was pretty sure he'd heard one of them barfing out the living room window.

Now, strangely, he was awake again, and it was still the middle of the night, and he had the bed spins for the second time in a couple hours. How was this possible? Usually when he went to sleep with a load on, he slept like the dead until sometime around noon the next day. Only something had disturbed him. He struggled to remember. Had it been a shout? If that was it then he'd heard it in a dream because it had been an old lady's voice, but a harsh and forceful voice and incredibly loud, and there weren't any old ladies in Davis Hall.

John was having a terrible case of the spins. He kept his eyes closed and starting to sink back into sleep. He was so out of it he didn't even care if he blew lunch all over his bed. But then he heard the voice again. "Get up!" The voice slammed him, as impossible to ignore as a dental drill in his ear. It was even worse than that because it was coming from inside his head, like some strange old lady was locked in there wanting to get out.

He struggled to open his eyes, working hard against the heaviness of alcohol, feeling like a diver trying to swim to the surface in a pool filled with Jell-O. Had it been beer or tequila shots he'd been drinking? He really hadn't had that much to drink. How could he feel this hammered? He heard the voice a third time, a female drill sergeant shouting, "Get up!" and this time it slices through his drunkenness like a sharp knife cutting through rope. Knowing he had to stand if only to stop the painful caterwauling in his brain, he slid one foot out of bed and put it flat on the floor.

Weird. Davis Hall had a lousy heating system so the floor should have been cold, but it was hot. In fact, it was really hot. He pushed himself up on one elbow, took a deep breath through his mouth, and right away started to cough.

Boy am I a mess, he thought as he continued to hack. He tried to suck down another breath, but it caught in his lungs like a jagged piece of chicken bone. He sat up reflexively, and that was when he began to realize that, between the hot floor and the air, he had a much bigger problem.

He was still coughing, nearly retching, as he reached over and fumbled for his bedside lamp. When it came on a surge of panic helped sober him because he saw that the room was full of thick gray smoke, so much that he couldn't even make out the door about ten feet away.

He lurched out of bed, stumbled to the window, and threw it open. He shoved his head into the cold and took deep breaths until he stopped coughing. Slowly, as his brain started to work, he looked down three stories to the frozen ground, and then his eyes went across the street to where a man was standing in the shadows. The man was nearly invisible, just a shadow slightly darker than the night, but John hesitated because he thought the man was staring up at him.

"Help," he called, his voice hoarse from coughing and barely more than a whisper. "Fire."

Strangely, the man did not move. John blinked. Was he imagining this? Smoke was pouring out the window all around him, but the guy wasn't budging. The smoke had to be easily visible from across the street, and yet the man continued to stare up at the dorm like he was waiting for something to happen, or like he was looking directly at John. What was wrong with this jerk?

"Move!" Another shout pierced his brain, the feeling like somebody was stabbing the inside of his skull with an icepick. It made him forgot about the guy and think about his roommates and all the other people on the floor. Where had the fire started? Did they know about it? Were they already evacuating? Why weren't the alarms going off? Weren't there supposed to be sprinklers?

Feeling a surge of panic, he left the window open, got down on his hands and knees where the smoke was much thinner, and crawled toward his door. On the way he pulled on the jeans he had thrown off when he got into bed and pulled on his boots. He didn't bother to lace them. The bedroom door was hot, but no hotter than the floor. He opened it and looked out. More smoke, but thankfully no sign of flames.

He crawled into the living room, found a pitcher of beer that was still three-quarters full then grabbed a crumpled sweatshirt off the floor nearby, soaked it with the beer, and held it against his face like a filter. Then he crawled to the door that led to his roommates' bedroom. When he turned on the wall light, he could barely make out two lumpy forms under the blankets on the two beds.

"Fire! Get up!" he croaked.

Neither one moved. John crawled to the window, stood up, and heaved it open to let in some fresh air. He stuck his head out and took a quick breath so his lungs could work. "Get up! Get up!" he shouted. At that, Steve, one of the suitemates, made a groaning sound and started to cough. John crawled over and jerked him out of bed and onto the floor.

"Wha're, you doin,' man?" he mumbled, barely coherent. He seemed terribly out of it, much drunker than he should have been, given the small amount of beer they'd consumed.

"The dorm's on fire." John slapped him hard across the face. "Wake up!"

Steve barely seemed to register the slap. John dragged him to the window, pulled him up, and hung him out. "Breathe!"

He left Steve and crawled over to Mike's bed. Like he had with Steve, he grabbed Mike by the arm and jerked him to the floor.

"Lemme 'lone," Mike slurred.

John slapped him just the way he had Steve, alarmed at how little Mike responded. He dragged him over to the window and pulled him to his feet beside Steve, and a second later both suitemates were hanging out the window coughing.

"Stay here," John...