The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [64]
“Jesus Chrysler!” His eyes abulge, JJ dashed into the kitchen, grabbed a fire extinguisher. Another canister came hurtling down the hall. But this time nothing happened—no explosion, no fire. Noel and Samira watched it to the count of five heartbeats, not knowing what to do. Another smashing sound, another window breaking …
“Let’s get outta here!” Noel shook Norval by the shoulders. “Nor!”
Samira and JJ were now scrambling for the front door. “Where’s your phone?” Samira shouted.
JJ’s face was contorted with fear. “It’s … dead. My battery—” He dropped the fire extinguisher with a loud clang.
“Do you have a hose?” Samira shouted. “A garden hose!”
Norval, finally roused from his delirium, exploded into laughter as he watched JJ scurry out the door. The smoke from the bathroom was now getting thicker. Samira was waving her hands about, fighting through it, towards the kitchen faucets. Noel grabbed Norval, who was cackling hysterically, and dragged him by the arm towards the door. He took three coats off the rack. “Put one on! Give one to JJ!” Noel pushed Norval out the door then raced back into the kitchen. “Sam! Get a hose through that window! Tell JJ! And don’t come back in. Here, take this!”
Samira caught the coat in her arms. “You come too, Noel!” she cried, with fearfully roused eyes, before darting out the door.
Noel was trying to get the fire extinguisher to work when he heard JJ’s voice through the bathroom window. “My letters! Noel! The box with the heart! And my scrapbook! Do you remem—” The wooden Indian toppled onto the floor, split in two, each half bursting into flames. It blocked the front exit. Was there another way out? The smoke was getting thicker.
Noel stumbled towards the sofa, coughing and rubbing his eyes. He reached down blindly until his hand felt the gas mask. He put it on and groped towards the bookcase. He grabbed two items, trusting his visual memory, before heading into a hallway, towards the back of the house. He opened the first door on the right. JJ’s bedroom?
“Noel!” Samira screamed, a muffled sound in his ears. “Noel! Are you all right!” Water came bursting into the bathroom. Along with a hail of snowballs. “Noel!” she cried, her voice dripping with fear. She spun round to look for Norval. The last time she looked he’d been sitting in a snow bank, smiling stupidly, wearing two coats. “Norval!” she cried, hoping he would do something, go for help … “Norval!”
But Norval was no longer sitting in snow. He was in the back yard, peering through JJ’s bedroom window. A human form appeared in the semi-darkness, with a giant insect’s head. Noel was struggling to open the window. But it wouldn’t budge.
Norval looked left, right, behind him. He clawed the snow out of a wheel barrow with his bare hands, picked it up and heaved it at the window. It came bouncing back at him. He heaved it again. Same result, except this time the glass cracked, in a jagged slant across the bottom. “Noel!” he thundered. Long seconds passed before he saw a foot kicking at the cracked window pane, at the anti-theft window that JJ had nailed shut. Black smoke began to curl up from the crack. Norval pounded at the window until his fists were red with blood.
Samira arrived as Noel’s head and shoulders were protruding from the shattered window. “They’ll be cut to pieces!” she muttered, as Norval dislodged a jagged shard of glass with his bare hand, grabbed Noel by the underarms and pulled, and pulled again, until he lost his footing and tumbled backwards into a flowerbed of snow. Still wearing his gas mask, Noel squeezed out of the window, this time with Samira’s help, and fell into Norval’s outstretched arms.
Huffing and puffing, JJ came zig-zagging over with double handfuls of snow and ice-coated, frou-frouing fat-pants. But before he reached his friends the lights inside the house flickered and fizzed, then dipped and died. In the darkness he lost his footing, not far from where Norval had lost his. He went down hard, in a belly-landing on a frozen puddle. The