Walking Through Fire Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Sherri Cook Woosley

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Talos Press, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  First Edition

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

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  Names: Woosley, Sherri Cook, author.

  Title: Walking through fire : a misbegotten novel / Sherri Cook Woosley.

  Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Talos Press, 2018. |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018014029 (print) | LCCN 2018016654 (ebook) | ISBN 9781945863349 (ebook) | ISBN 9781945863332 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  Classification: LCC PS3623.O728 (ebook) | LCC PS3623.O728 W35 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018014029

  Cover design by Mona Lin

  Cover illustration courtesy of Jeff Chapman

  Printed in the United States of America

  To my son, I didn’t forget you for one moment.

  And

  To all the Mamas out there who have fought, are fighting, and will fight for the mental or physical health of your child. You are strong. You are fierce. You will break and want to quit, but I believe you can put one foot in front of the other.

  PART I

  FIRESTORM

  Then, a face appeared from inside the havoc of the fire tornado, wavering with the flickering of flames, but still recognizable: a dragon’s head.

  ONE

  Photos spread across the oaken dining room table, but Rachel Deneuve’s focus was on the window overlooking the driveway. She knew her son Adam would be mortified if he saw her watching for his return. Worry, a mother’s natural instinct, was magnified in Rachel by the cancer cells made deep in Adam’s bone marrow and held in check only by thirty months of grueling chemo. She wanted Adam safe and she wanted him home. From outside, a sustained rumble of thunder sounded a warning, the heavens ripping open with an anguished groan like a woman with birthing pains.

  With a determined air, Rachel turned away from the window and the sounds of the summer storm toward her project: coloring in the phoenix at the top of the scrapbook page. The firebird’s long tail feathers flowed down the side, framing the photo of baby Adam first brought home from the hospital. Adam was eleven now, so she was years behind on this project, but this seemed the right time to create a graphic story of their family—before the details became muddled. In light of the separation, the responsibility to be fair was heavy across her shoulders. As if she should count each time she or Craig appeared in a photo and the tally should be exactly even. It complicated the job of chronicling from Adam’s birth, through his cancer treatment, and into their new formation, whatever that would turn out to be.

  The pencil’s red tip broke with a snapping sound. She’d pushed too hard. Irritated, Rachel threw down the pencil and shoved a strand of thick hair back behind her ear. Her bangs were cut straight across to draw attention to her large eyes, but right now the sensation of hair touching forehead was annoying. Everything was annoying. She wanted to take a shower and go to bed, but didn’t want to be in pajamas when Craig dropped off Adam.

  Tires rolled over gravel. Finally, they were here. Rachel automatically checked her appearance. Peacock colored tank top under a sheer white shirt, dangling earrings, a flowing skirt and bare feet. Her features were sharp, her neck long, her collar bones jutting. All speaking to a flapper aesthetic from an earlier century in New York City rather than the suburbs of northern Maryland. Craig liked tidy. Rachel resisted the urge to smooth the auburn curls she’d piled into a loose bun and opened the door to her husband and son.

  Craig stood with his hand raised as if to knock on the door. Her door? A moment of confusion. This was all new. He was tall, relaxed, wearing a collared shirt. A small scar stretched down the left side of his neck from a childhood accident. Gray-green eyes that seemed to hold so many emotions at once. Nearly just as he’d looked in college when they started dating. More lines on his face, though. Being the parent of a child with cancer had done that to both of them.

  “Sorry we’re late. Adam wanted to take a shower.”

  Adam’s brown hair was wet. Pale and small for his age, he looked scrawny standing next to Craig. He clutched an overnight bag with both hands. A wet beach towel lay behind his neck, soaking the edges of his T-shirt.

  “You took him to the pool?” Rachel tried to keep her tone even, but all she could think was: You let our immunocompromised son swim in a cesspool of germs.

  Craig rocked back on the balls of his feet. “It’s the first official day of summer. Thought it would be fun.” He nudged Adam’s shoulder. “We had fun, didn’t we?”

  Adam nodded. He yawned. His eyelids drooped, covering the irises. The color—a thin circle of brown around gray-green—always made Rachel think of Craig’s genes and her genes battling it out for dominance. Businessman versus artist, extrovert versus introvert.

  A gust of warm wind made Rachel cross her arms over her chest. Branches on the maple trees lining the driveway rubbed against each other with an unsettling creaking.

  “I should get Adam in bed.”

  “Yeah.” Craig took a step back. “I’m heading to Boston for work. I’ll have my phone.”

  “This late at night?”

  “Any reason not to?” His question was a challenge, both confrontational and hopeful.

  Rachel swallowed. Her heart cramped. They needed this break, but it felt so wrong for him to leave. She made a small shaking motion with her head, but couldn’t think of anything to say other than, “I can’t—”

  “We’ll talk when I get back,” he promised.

  She licked dry lips and Craig seemed to take her silence as assent.

  Adam brushed past her to get into the house, but Rachel stayed to watch the taillights fade as Craig drove away. The stars looked different tonight, closer to earth, as if blinking an urgent message to the planet below. Atmospheric winds blew away the clouds until a gravid red moon dominated the sky. Rachel shivered, the night sky’s vivid colors making her feel unsettled. It was as if, she thought whimsically, the air was vibrating at a frequency beyond human range.

  She felt both dizzy and nauseous at once. Rachel recognized the familiar symptoms of an oncoming panic attack. Whether from imagining something horrible happening that had made Adam late, or the conversation with Craig, or the strange moon, it didn’t matter.

  “Breathe,” she coached herself. She leaned against the outside of the door and closed her eyes, counting until her heartbeat slowed and her shoulders relaxed. Taking one more breath, Rachel opened the door and went inside with a fake smile. She needed to be strong for her son.

  “Alright, buddy. It’s just you and me.” Rachel called as she shut and locked the door.

  The bright kitchen lights dispelled some of the negative feelings of watching Craig leave, of the strangeness from the outside sky.

  Adam was slumped over the kitchen table.
br />   “Come on, no sleeping down here.” Rachel put her hand on Adam’s back to get him out of the chair.

  “I don’t feel good.”

  Adam’s forehead burned against the back of Rachel’s hand.

  “You’ve got a fever,” Rachel said. “I’ll call the hospital.” She hit the preset on her phone and put it on speaker so she could keep moving. In an oncology patient anything over 101.4 degrees meant an immediate trip to the emergency room. Years of chemo battling his leukemia meant Adam had no immune system to fight bacteria or germs.

  Rachel grabbed the overnight bag that stood ready and ripped it open to find a tube of ointment. She helped Adam lean back in the chair and lifted up his shirt to expose the quarter-sized bump under his skin that was a medical port. Rachel squeezed a glob of white onto his chest to numb the spot where the winged needle would go in, covered it with a clear adhesive, and then pulled his shirt down.

  Her phone was still ringing; the hospital’s service hadn’t picked up. That had never happened before, but it didn’t matter. She and Adam had been through this drill many times.

  Rachel said, “This won’t be a long visit.” But she moved to the dining room, sweeping photos, the scrapbook, and colored pencils into the emergency bag for herself. Better to be prepared to stay and then sent home than the other way around.

  Grabbing her phone and wallet with one hand, Rachel put her other around Adam’s waist and helped him out to the car.

  “Don’t forget the charger. It’s in my bookbag,” Adam whispered.

  “Okay.” Rachel left him leaning against the car and rushed back inside. After she’d retrieved the charger and come back to the front door, Rachel’s heart sputtered. Adam was gone. A smell was in the air, at once electrifying and strange. The hair on the back of her neck stood at attention. A force gathered, invisible but tangible, and, with a crack, lightning struck the nearby maple tree. The topmost branch burst into flame. In the sudden light, Rachel saw Adam crouched on the ground underneath.

  Rushing forward, Rachel threw herself to her knees beside her son. Oblivious to her presence, Adam stared down at his cupped hands. “I caught it. I caught the falling star.” Fire reflected from the branch above seemed to glow in Adam’s cupped hands, bright as if someone shined a flashlight from beneath them or from within. A disconcerting illusion.

  More brusquely than she intended, Rachel pulled Adam to his feet and away from the tree. The branch fell from the tree to the lawn, the flames dying out with rebellious snaps and hisses. Rachel looked up at the deformed tree and kicked at the blackened branch with her booted foot again and again, not wanting to return from the hospital to find her home burned down by a spark in the grass. Her foot tingled and she ground the boot heel to erase the sensation.

  Using the wet towel from around Adam’s neck, Rachel wadded it into a ball and put it against the window for him to use as a pillow. She started the Ford NewWave with voice recognition and then glanced in the rearview mirror. Adam’s cheeks were pink and his lips were chapped. She remembered the countless other times he’d been in this same position from eight years old until now as they’d rushed to the emergency room. She knew Adam better than anyone else in the world because of what they’d experienced, the absolute raw moments that no one else would understand. Like when he was younger, on his monthly steroid protocol, how he’d be angry and sad, full of energy and then crashing. How she’d be so frustrated with his mood swings, and then he’d put his arms around her neck, hot moist breath on her skin as he buried his face into her shoulder. They’d cry together, sitting on the carpet, arms wrapped around each other.

  A sudden gust of wind slammed against the car. The maple tree, stripped of its leaves by the unseasonable wind and now missing its top branch, stretched skeletal hands into the sky. Purple swirled like a bruise through the blackness overhead. It was so dark. Where was the moon?

  Rachel told the navigation screen to pull up the parking garage at the hospital. Overhead, sudden lightning arced and danced. Tornado? Hope it holds off until I get Adam into the hospital. The car’s navigation lit up a yellow path. Less than an hour to get there. Not that Rachel didn’t know the way, but she liked to see the miles tick down as they got closer.

  Adam slept in the back seat. Her leg jittered because of the coffee she’d gulped to stay alert. They were making good time to I-95. Rachel tapped on the screen to get the radio on, anything to distract her from Adam’s soft moans of pain. No local channels would come in so she hit ‘scan.’ Up ahead, at the exit onto I-95, a police cruiser slanted across the way, the officer turning people away.

  Rachel gritted her teeth. It would take another twenty minutes to backtrack to Route 1. She drove along the right shoulder of the road right up to the cruiser. The officer waved his arms, a silhouette with blue and red pulses behind him. She had to stop or hit him.

  He rapped on her passenger window with knuckles, shined a flashlight into the interior. Rachel squinted against the light and rolled down the window. The smell of something burning wafted inside.

  The officer sounded angry as he said, “What don’t you understand, Miss, about a police blockade?!”

  “This is a medical emergency. My son’s life is in danger.” Rachel grabbed at her bag and shoved papers at him. Papers that, in a few spare sentences, told their story. Two and a half years ago she’d taken Adam to the pediatrician for strange bruises, then to the local ER for a blood test, then to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, all in the space of three hours. A scream that lodged in Rachel’s throat and didn’t release until she sobbed in the hospital shower that night. ALL. Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. She and Adam had been immediately admitted and then stayed for thirty-one days in the pediatric wing where the rooms have a hospital bed for the patient and a pull-out sofa for a parent.

  The officer flicked his flashlight, read the diagnosis, saw the doctor’s orders, and spotlighted his flashlight on Adam in the back seat. Rachel felt more than saw the officer’s uncertainty.

  “I’ve got to get him to Hopkins,” she said again.

  “There’s a storm coming. Big one.” He stepped back, “Turn around and take cover.”

  Rachel nodded. “I understand.” She did, but the officer didn’t. Without knowing what caused Adam’s fever, every minute mattered. Rachel eased her foot off the brake and slammed the gas pedal. Tires squealed. The officer waved his arms in her rearview mirror.

  Behind him she saw the sky rip open. A flaming meteor fell and an orange glow lit the horizon. The world was on fire.

  TWO

  The officer had said a storm, but this was a fireball plunging into the Atlantic, or maybe even hitting Delaware’s coast. The horizon glowed like daybreak and in the brightness Rachel could see smoke rising high in the air from where the fireball landed. A sudden wave of vibration rocked the car. Rachel clutched the wheel and pumped the brakes. The car slid to a stop on the side of the interstate.

  Adam sat up and rubbed his eyes in the back seat. “Why are you driving all crazy?”

  What she thought was: I will do anything to protect you. What she said was: “Go back to sleep.”

  Rachel opened the car door and, hanging onto the car frame for support, looked up. If the night sky was a piece of dark fabric, someone had taken shears and sliced a gash in it. Red light poured from the hole. Overhead, tiny red sparks floated through the atmosphere like flecks of dried blood.

  “Fire,” Rachel said in disbelief. “It’s raining fire.”

  Panicking, Rachel threw herself back into the car. The radio, still scanning through a sea of static, settled on a strange voice, scratchy as an old-fashioned record, that was somewhere between a sportscaster and a personality. “Hello? Hello? What is this thing? Anybody listening? Ha ha, sweet freedom. That was a rough ride. But seriously, folks, I’m getting too old for this.”

  Some kind of machinery clacked in the background. The voice faded as if the speaker had stepped away from the mike. “What does this do? Oh, and there’s a
paddle wheel. That’s clever.” His voice boomed through the car’s speakers. “The chessboard is reset. My fellow Misbegotten, let the games begin.”

  What is this nonsense? Rachel touched the screen away from radio and back to navigation. A clap of thunder made her jump. The GPS went wild, the screen zooming in and out and their spot on the map disappearing. Rachel turned it off. Didn’t matter now. Sirens. The rearview mirror showed three state troopers tearing down the interstate. They’re coming for me. Fear made her swerve, but they went right past. The troopers were driving away from the fireball, too.

  In the distance, the orange glow had settled to a thin line in her rearview mirror. Rachel grabbed her cell phone, but there was no signal. Either something was wrong with her phone or this “storm” had messed up the entire wireless network. She touched the gold chain around her neck, the three jewels representing Craig, Adam, and her. She’d been wearing it the night of Adam’s diagnosis and worn it every day since. The necklace became a worry stone, a symbol of their family for Rachel to finger as she waited for test results, waited to be allowed into the OR recovery room, waited for Adam to be released so they could go home.

  The next exit was Moravia Road, and then a quick right onto Orleans Street; a straight-shot through the Baltimore ghetto to get to a world-famous hospital. Westbound traffic passed the grilled windows of a pawn shop, fast food restaurants, and boarded-up row homes, evidence of urban blight and a tax code that made no sense.

  Rachel followed a curve in the road. Beyond the residential area, she could see the squat shape of the SHOP’N’SAVE grocery store. One diagonal block down, the expensive architecture of the research hospital and university rose above the surrounding neighborhoods. Two bridgeways decorated with colored glass mosaics stretched between red brick buildings. Science housed within a work of art.

  The street lamps flickered out as Rachel pulled up to the next traffic light. She glanced down the side street to check for oncoming traffic and then froze. City streets on summer nights should have been alive with people sitting on stoops, walking with baby carriages. Instead, a tank drove down the empty street toward the intersection. Rachel gasped. We’re under attack. From whom? Baltimore is close to D.C. Does that mean the meteors were bombs?