Front Lines (Front Lines 1)

“Help him! Peter! Peter!”

Rio climbs the three wooden steps to the front door, which is closed but surely not locked since the sister must have come out this way. She touches the doorknob. It is not hot to the touch. She peers through the narrow vertical slits of lace-curtained windows beside the door and sees a stairwell inside, and no sign of fire on the lower level.

Taking a deep breath, she opens the door and reels back from the stench of smoke that has crept down the stairway and now billows out through the door and passes above Rio’s head to rise into the night sky.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Rio asks herself.

And just then Tam Richlin comes rushing up and asks the identical question, “What do you think you’re doing?”

Rio has never been so glad to see her father. “The Stamp Man is upstairs. He won’t come down.”

Tam Richlin hears this and nods, showing no surprise but a grim understanding. “He may not care, but this fire could spread to other homes.”

“I called the operator and told her to call the fire department.”

“Good girl. But it’ll take them a half hour this time of night,” Tam says.

“Can we save him?”

“Nothing can save him,” Tam says darkly. “He died a long while ago.” But then, ignoring his own cryptic assessment, he says, “I’ll give it a try.”

He races to a garden hose, turns on the spigot, and drenches himself in water. He tears the sleeve from his pajamas, soaks the cloth, and ties it around his head, covering his mouth and nose.

“Be careful. Don’t get hurt!” Rio cries as her father plunges through the door and pounds up the steps.

Rio hesitates, feeling useless as the sister weeps openly, and now other doors on the street are opening and other lights are coming on, and at last she hears the distant wail of a siren. But something feels very wrong about standing there and doing nothing. Her decision is not thought out but instinctive: she follows her father’s example, tears away the pocket of her chenille robe, and wets it. Holding the rag over her mouth, she rushes into the strange house and up the stairs.

As soon as her head rises above the level of the upper floor she gags on smoke, and that’s when she hears the unmistakable sharp, unbearably loud sound of a gunshot. The sound sends her rushing up, taking steps two at a time. Three rooms, one with an open door, are bright with fire that crackles and roars on fresh breezes from the broken window. A second door is closed. A third is open and lit only by candlelight. Rio hears her father’s voice and peers cautiously around the corner.

The room is stuffed, stuffed almost to the exclusion of furniture, with cardboard boxes spilling reams of paper: old newspapers, age-curled magazines, and thousands of envelopes with the stamps neatly cut away. One entire wall is bookshelves loaded with stamp albums in a dozen different sizes and covers.

In the center of the room, against the far wall, is a bed. It’s a mahogany sleigh bed like those to be found at many a home in Gedwell Falls.

Tam Richlin stands before that bed with his back to Rio. And beyond him, propped against a stack of pillows, lies a monster.

Rio stifles a scream. The creature in the bed must once have been a man, but now he is a nightmare in a sleeveless white T-shirt, revealing a frail, parchment-flesh left arm and a shocking stump where the right arm would once have been. He has only half a face, half an old man’s face, slack and sickly. But the right side of that face is gone. There is a deep crater, as though that half of his face was bitten off by a wild beast. The mouth is a twisted grin on its intact side, but from there the lips seem to melt away, revealing teeth all the way back to the upper molars. The lower molars are mostly gone as the jawbone simply ends, absent, leaving a gaping hole in sagging flesh.

She can look—must look, cannot look away—at the Stamp Man’s throat, a gulping, spasming pink tube revealed through those absent teeth and jaw.

The Stamp Man’s right eye is gone as well, but this is blessedly covered by an eye patch.

He is holding a pistol, aimed at Tam Richlin.

“We have to get you out of here, Captain,” Tam says.

The Stamp Man shakes his head vigorously, a gruesome sight.

“You don’t want to burn to death, Captain. That’s no way to go.”

The Stamp Man shakes the gun as if to say, “I won’t wait to burn.” Then he waves the gun around the room, not threatening, just indicating all of it. He makes sounds, a wet, slurry mimicry of human speech. Rio can see his t

ongue trying to form sounds, see his throat contracting and releasing, all of it creating no intelligible word, only a cry, a plea, a wail of despair.

Tam for the first time notices Rio behind him. “What the hell are you doing up here?” he snaps.

“I just . . . I thought I could help.” She cannot look at him because she cannot will herself to look away from the man in the bed, the Stamp Man, who her father calls “Captain.”

“Get out of here, Rio.” And when Rio doesn’t move, Tam grabs her bicep and shoves her hard. “Now! Go!”