No Exit by Taylor Adams 2

“It means no.” Darby pulled Lars’s handgun from her
jeans. She wasn’t sure if Ashley had been inside the building
when the fumes ignited, but she hoped her improvised
firebomb had at least blown his eyebrows off. But dead? No.
He wasn’t dead, because she hadn’t killed him yet. She could
rest when she’d fired her stolen .45-caliber bullet right into his
smirking face. No sooner.
“I hope you got him,” Jay said as the inferno swelled
behind them, turning the world foggy with low smoke. The
moon was gone. The trees had become jagged ghosts in the
fire-lit smog. Big Devil held its blackened shape as it burned, a
cage of roiling fire around an epicenter of bone-cracking heat.
And now the glowing embers descended like fireflies from
the darkness, peppering the snow around Darby and Jay. They
sizzled on contact, hundreds of tiny meteors striking puffs of
steam. Too fast to outrun.
“Jay. Take off your coat.”
“Why?”
“There’s gasoline on it.” Darby tugged off her own Art
Walk hoodie and hurled it into the snow. Seconds later, a spark
touched it and it erupted into blue-orange flames, like a
campfire.
Jay saw this and tore hers off immediately.
“See? Told you.”
More embers descended around them, more fireflies riding
the winds, and Darby followed Jay one painful step at a time.
She couldn’t stop. Her hair was still soaked with fuel. One
errant spark was all it would take, and she’d come too far and
fought too hard tonight to be killed by a goddamn spark.
She peeled a wet strand from her face. “The parking lot.
We’ll get into Blue—”
“What’s Blue?”
“My car.”