The End - Visions of Apocalypse

Irwin grabbed the pan to stop it from destroying the books beneath. He took hold of the plastic handles and lifted. They felt like tar, hot tar, tacky and soft. He managed to lift the pan, but Chicken Soup was sticking to the bottom. He raised it high trying to shake the book off as it dangled swinging by the cover. He had the pan above his shoulders when both ears came off.

His instinct was to catch the pot. Even as he made the grab he knew it was stupid. Catching the metal sides with his open palms was actually the least of his trouble. He also pulled the pot to his chest where the still flaming remnants of Overcoming Compulsive Hoarding burned his face, flash-frying his eyebrows, lashes, and the tuft of hair that once worked to cover a receding hairline.

Irwin screamed, only without cursing this time. He was too frightened to swear—swearing was for anger, and Irwin had jumped that puddle and landed with both feet firmly in terror. Less a cognitive thought and more a reflex to scorching pain, he let go. The pot fell with a thump and clang.

Outside the wind howled blowing gusts through the broken window flipping covers, fanning pages, flapping the wings of a thousand would-be birds.

Irwin’s eyes watered. His hands burned. Some of his skin remained fused to pan, but all that didn’t matter. For all the pain that grabbing the pot had caused, Irwin no longer noticed. Instead his eyes watched in horror as the contents of the pan spilled. A foot long environmental disaster of book licking flame was set loose on a mountain range of vintage paper, with a side of dried glue.

Thank you, Seymour!

Through the window the wind gusted scattering the embers, breathing on the flames, spreading them across the floor. Irwin watched for two ticks of a second, frozen in shock and disbelief. They were two seconds he wished he could have had back.

Water! He needed to get water from the sink.

He lost more seconds before he remembered the pump didn’t work without electricity.

His blanket! He could smother the flames.

He rushed scurrying rat-like through the tunnels to the Grotto.

Thrilling enough for you, Irwin?

He ripped the blankets free which started a minor avalanche. Coonts, Crichton, and Cussler fell on him in alphabetical order as he scrambled out of the collapsing tunnel like Harrison Ford with an armload of gold idol.

He took a breath and gagged. That was almost it. He started to panic. Trapped and without air his mind fragmented. He couldn’t think, couldn’t process anything more than the broken record skipping over the same moronic thought—Meep! Meep! He just stared as he watched the fire consume his living room. Yellow where the flames danced along the tops, orange where they bit deep into the pages, blue along the spines. And smoke churned across the ceiling, black as ink, rolling like a summer thunderhead.

A new thought arrived the way a car on ice is saved from going off a cliff by another car sliding on ice. I’m going to die! That one coherent estimation of the situation put Irwin’s feet back under him. He pressed the blanket to his face, fell flat to his belly, and shimmed like a snake working back toward the window, back toward the fire.

He was too late. The wind had spread the fire too far. Flames coursed up the Cliffs of Fiction—his living room a forest fire of Arthur C. Clark, David Eddings, Berry Malzberg, Mark Lawerence, and Raymond Fiest. Still he tried. He threw the blanket and himself upon the flames rolling as he tried to at least extinguish the floor, but the fire adored the neat stacks and raced up their heights.

Laying on his back, burned and choking, Irwin cried. The tears soothed his smoke filled eyes, but despite the brilliance of the growing inferno he couldn’t see anymore. Still, he knew where the shattered window was.

He couldn’t let them all go. Even if he couldn’t cross into that promised land with them, he had to save some. Irwin felt blindly for any book. His tortured fingers found a trade paperback and he threw it with a guess and a hope. He heard it bounce off the wall. He reached for another. He had no trouble finding candidates for escape. He just wished he could see—he’d hate to end up having only saved The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. What kind of world would that throw up in its wake? What kind of legacy?

Irwin couldn’t breathe anymore. It felt almost like drowning, something he’d almost accomplished in grade school and had allowed him to add hydrophobia to his list of fears. He was burning too. People always said that in a fire you’d pass out from asphyxiation before you’d actually burn, but that apparently didn’t apply to people trapped in a narrow, flaming canyon of paperbacks being fanned by a winter’s gale.