Chapter 52 - The Conflagration Below
The roar was not merely sound; it was physical force. The ancient bedrock shuddered as the pocket of dormant coal gas met the burning flare, igniting the accelerant Tyler had sloshed along the drainage flume. An expanding wall of crimson fire rolled toward the crypt, vomiting thick, oily smoke that choked out what little oxygen remained in the subterranean vault.
"Get down!" Julian bellowed, his voice cracking against the detonation.
He didn't hesitate. With the reflexes of a man half his age, he lunged across the flagstones, catching me around the shoulders and driving us both behind the massive, carved granite plinth of my great-grandfather’s sarcophagus. The blast struck a fraction of a second later. A scorching gale tore over our heads, showering the chamber in searing sparks and pulverized mortar. The two hired thugs, who had been kneeling by the vault entrance, shrieked as the backdraft threw them across the floor like ragdolls.
Tyler was thrown backward against the iron grating of the eastern coal chute. The impact knocked the wind from him, but the manic terror in his eyes had replaced whatever insanity had possessed him moments before. The fire had taken life. It was no longer a tool of spite; it was an apex predator trapped in a stone cage with five human beings.
"The stairs!" I coughed, the stinging reek of sulfur and burning kerosene clawing at my throat. My eighty-year-old lungs burned with every breath. "Julian, the iron stairs are going to superheat!"
"Not just the stairs, Evelyn—the ceiling!" Julian shouted, coughing violently as dense gray smoke rolled down from the ceiling like a descending ceiling of lead. "The timber framing of the upper chapel floor is right above the flume! If that goes, the whole altar collapses into this cellar!"
Tyler scrambled to his feet, clawing at the soot-stained walls. His hands were blistered, his designer jacket scorched along the hem. "Let me out!" he screamed, his voice pitching into a high, childlike wail of pure cowardice. The bravado, the arrogance, the vicious laughter that had echoed over my birthday cake months ago—all of it had evaporated in the heat. "Grandmother, open the gate! Don't let me die down here!"
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"You lit the match, boy!" Julian snarled, pulling me to my feet while shielding my face with his wool coat. "You dug your own grave—now stand in it!"
Above us, the muffled sounds of battering rams echoed through the ceiling. The county deputies had breached the upper chapel doors. But they were on the surface, and we were trapped sixty feet below in an inferno fed by a century of dried pine and leaking coal oil.
