Head On: A Novel of the Near Future (Lock In #2)(21)

“They closed that company down two years ago, you asshole!”

“I’m not going in!”

“I’ll go in,” I said, loudly.

Everyone turned to look at me. “I’m an FBI agent,” I said.

The manager pointed at me. “Let the Fed go in!”

“Who’s still in there?” I asked

“The old lady on the third floor,” a kid said to me.

I turned to the manager, who nodded. “Shaniqa Miller,” he said. “Everybody else is out but her.”

“Everyone?”

“Yeah,” the manager said. “I’m ground floor, the Waverlys are on first”—he pointed to a couple sobbing at the curb, a small curly dog licking one of their faces in an attempt to comfort its owner—“and Shaniqa’s on third.”

“What about the second floor?”

“That guy’s dead,” someone in the crowd said.

“Not from the fire!” the manager yelled back.

I held out my hand. “Keys.”

The manager handed over a key ring with several keys on it, color-coded. “Third floor is the red keys.”

“How long has the fire been going?”

“Like five minutes,” the manager said. “Out of fucking nowhere.”

I looked at the building. The entryway doors were blown out with glass everywhere. Smoke poured out the door and out of the windows.

“This is a bad idea,” I said to myself, and jumped through the shattered doors.

I turned off my senses of smell and pain but could still feel the heat as I climbed the stairs. The first-floor apartment was wide-open and in flames. The second-floor apartment—Chapman’s—had its door closed. If Shaniqa Miller’s apartment had its door closed, I had a decision to make—opening it could create a column of oxygen rushing through the stairwell, feeding the fire. In a rush to save Miller, I might end up killing her instead.

The problem was moot when I reached the third-floor landing. Miller was on the landing, unconscious, her door ajar behind her. I’d guessed she had tried to make it down the stairs and was overcome by smoke before she’d even gotten to the first stair. Either that or had a heart attack or something else equally grim.

Well, now was not the time to speculate. The fire was still gathering strength. I bent down, picked Miller up in a fireman’s carry, and headed down the stairs as quickly as possible, individual steps groaning under the weight. I had to open the ground-floor doors this time to get through with her on my back.

Crowd members rushed up and relieved me of Miller, carrying her away to a safe distance from the burning building. I turned my sense of smell back on and was hit by a wave of scorched plastic and hot metal scent. I figured the Philly FBI branch was not going to be happy with what I did to their threep.

Someone touched me on the arm. It was a kid, who solemnly pointed to the windows of the second floor of the building. There was something moving there. I looked closer.

“Chapman had a goddamn cat?” I said, out loud, to no one in particular.

“Are you gonna go get it?” the kid asked.

Oh, come on, I thought, but did not say out loud, and turned to the nearest adult. “How long until the fire department gets here?” I asked.

“Come on, this is Strawberry Mansion,” she said to me. “By the time they get here, this building’s gonna be gone.”

Well, I needed to get in there anyway, I thought, and then found the manager in the crowd. “What color key for the second floor?” I asked.

“Green,” he said. “You’re going back in there?”

“There’s a cat,” I said.

“I wouldn’t,” he warned.

“Yeah, but you’re an asshole,” someone said from the crowd. The manager scowled and shut up.

The second trip up the stairs was hotter and more precarious and smoke-filled than the first. I fished the green keys into the door lock, unlatched the door, and prepped myself to open and close it as quickly as possible to keep the burst of oxygen from adding another layer of ignition to the flames, cracked the door—

—and then saw a flash at my feet as the cat shot out of the apartment and zoomed down the stairs. I slammed the door shut and raced back to the stairwell in time to see the cat rocketing out of the shattered front doors of the building. I looked dumbly to where the cat had exited and then remembered where I was. I went back to the apartment door and quickly let myself in.

The apartment was filled with smoke and threeps, and the threeps on display in the front room made it clear what they were meant for. One of them was anatomically male, a second anatomically female, and then there were two threeps that were neither but had an area on their lower abdomen that featured ridges and grooves—three grooves separated by two arcing ridges. That was new to me.

I photographed them as I mapped through the apartment as quickly as I could, seeing that it was, after all, on fire. The plan was to map now, examine closely later. Which was a good thing when I got to the bedroom, which was filled with toys, and the spare room, which was a dungeon, and the kitchen, which was less of a kitchen and more of an erotic art gallery.

I wasn’t judging. It’s just that there was a lot to take in.

But I was also aware that on the surface, and through the smoke, there wasn’t much here that was going to be useful. Chapman clearly had his kinks, but kinks were probably unrelated to his death. This visit had been dramatic but only really that.