Light as a Feather, Silent as the Grave

Chapter 27

"I can't stay calm!" I screamed. "Those boxes are going to catch fire and whatever's in them might be highly flammable. Or toxic!"

I was certain that I had reached the final minutes of my life. There were at least a thousand urgent actions I wanted to take before I closed my eyes and never opened them again. I needed to call my mother and say goodbye. I needed to reach out to Mischa and beg her to seek help in breaking the curse since Trey and I wouldn't ever meet up with her. There were hundreds of songs I wanted to listen to again before I died. I longed to pull up a photo of Jennie on my phone and look at her face one last time. It occurred to me that she might show up at any second to fetch me and escort me over to the "other side," if television shows about near-death experiences could be believed.

We were both coughing desperately as the train reached its normal velocity. I thought maybe it wasn't too late to put out the fire with our winter coats, but I could already hear flames roaring behind me. Heat from the fire singed the tiny hairs on my arms. The temperature in the boxcar had increased so much that its steel walls were scalding to the touch. A dull boom sounded behind us as the fire engulfed the nearest stack of cardboard boxes, igniting whatever they contained. I covered my mouth long enough to grab my winter coat from the floor. Even though it might have prolonged my suffering by a matter of seconds, I planned to beat the flames away when they grew closer to me.

And then suddenly I felt the miraculous jerk of the train's brakes being applied. Previous times when the train had rolled into stations, its speed had lessened in barely perceptible increments until the final twenty seconds or so when it came to a full stop. But this time, the conductor hit the brakes so hard that both Trey and I stumbled a few feet toward the raging fire. When we regained our balance, the conductor braked again, causing us to both lose our footing and fall to our hands and knees.

"They must see smoke!" Trey exclaimed. Through the smoke in the boxcar, I saw his eyes dancing with excitement, illuminated by the orange glow of the flames.

But it didn't matter if the conductor saw smoke. We'd already been inhaling smoke for almost ten minutes. My mind had gone blank. I'd even lost my mental grip on the checklist of things I needed to do before the flames devoured me, and I slumped against the hot steel wall, unable to remain on my feet. However long it would take for the conductor to determine which boxcar was leaking smoke and come to our rescue was too long. The boxcar's door would not open fast enough for us to make it through this. Inside my eyelids I found myself in the basement of the Richmonds' house on the night of Olivia's sixteenth birthday party. The stench of fire that filled my head was coming from a crackling blaze in their fireplace. I was lying on my back on the carpeted floor with pressure from fingertips applied against the bottoms of both of my hips and my feet. The sugary taste of birthday cake lingered on my tongue. When I opened my eyes I saw Olivia Richmond smiling at me and felt fingertips brushing against my temples.

"No," I shouted. "I don't want to play this game!"

I heard a female voice say in wonderment, "Usually when I play this game, I get a good idea as soon as I touch someone. But I don't have any ideas for you. The only thing I can think of is fire, but it doesn't feel right. I mean, I can tell a story about fire if you want."

Those words-words I'd head before in real life and again and again in my nightmares-cut through the heavy fog in my head so clearly that I sat up screaming, "No! Don't tell my story! I don't want to hear it! Don't tell my story!"

"McKenna," a boy's voice said. My name was followed by raucous coughing.

I opened my eyes and saw nothing but blue. I realized that I was lying on grass and looking directly up at the cloudless sky. Trey knelt next to me and was violently shaking my shoulders. About twenty feet behind us, the train on which we'd been riding sat idle. Dark gray, angry smoke poured out of the boxcar in which we'd been hiding. Standing near Trey were two pot-bellied, middle-aged men wearing baseball caps, Ray-Ban sunglasses and orange safety vests. All at once I realized that Trey's plan must have worked. The train's conductor must have somehow seen smoke coming from our boxcar and stopped the train. Trey was doubled over, coughing into his fist. His shirt was soaked with perspiration. His face was covered in black charred dust, making the whites of his eyes look unnaturally bright.