The torch caught easily. The baron let it burn for a moment, giving the flames time to grow stronger.
“Dean,” Louis said, “time to go.” Some of the other boys were already dropping over the side. Perry was among them.
Stubbornly Dean tried to manage a new angle, reading the way the walls and ceiling were set up.
Without another word, Connrad pitched the torch out into the open. Sparks peeled back off it as it dropped, smoke coiling in the trail it made through the empty air.
Dean turned and ran for the double doors. Louis was waiting, his face pale with fear, eyes reflecting the falling torch.
As Dean reached the double doors, blinking his eyes trying to get some of his night vision in place, he was aware of the gasoline bursting into fiery movement behind him.
He turned his head only slightly, pounding his feet hard against the concrete floor and trying not to think about slipping and falling into the gasoline.
A wave of blue flames, turning yellow on the ends from the richness of the fuel, trailed him to the double doors.
Louis leaped from the edge out into the night.
Dean had a brief impression of buildings, concrete sidewalks and streets that seemed to be choking on underbrush. Then he launched himself out into space, fear causing his heart to bang against his ribs as if it were going to tear through his breastbone.
Gravity took over and he fell. Before he made it to the ground, the flames rushed through the double doors after him. Coiling, the fire followed the stream of gasoline from the doors down the fifteen feet to the ground. Along the way it ignited spatters in the air, turning them into fizzy comets. Most of them died out before hitting bottom.
The flames also set Dean’s gasoline-saturated boots on fire. He felt the heat flare up around his calves, scorching his pant legs.
When the fire hit the ground, it instantly spread across the gasoline pooled at the base of the room at Bally’s, lighting up the area at once.
Seeing his flaming boots, Dean landed hard and stamped them, trying to put out the fire. Ahead of him and a few yards to his right, he spotted a bowl of water nearly three yards across. He ran to the water, knowing it would be only seconds before the flames exhausted the gasoline clinging to his boots and started burning the footwear itself. There was no way he could do without boots.
He didn’t stop running until he was almost knee-deep in the pool. White smoke curled up from the surface as the fire extinguished with hisses.
A bullet whizzed by Dean’s head, sounding like a large buzzing insect. A heartbeat later the sound of the initial shot cracked over them. By then the second bullet was already on its way. Enrique Green howled and went down on his butt, grabbing at his left leg.
Dean whirled, changing clips in his blaster. He hunkered down in the water, wanting to make sure there was no chance the fire on his boots would restart.
Green was on the ground holding his left leg, bright blood staining his left thigh while Moxen and Louis grabbed his arms. Together they dragged the boy to cover behind a stand of trees. Bobby Handley already had a strip of cloth torn from his own shirt ready to make a compress to cover the wound.
“Anybody see the son of a bitch did this?” Louis demanded.
“I got him,” Jordie Ferguson announced calmly. The boy lay behind a wag lying on its side, a sniper rifle extended before him, snugged into his shoulder. “Tree out there. How far?”
Still low in the water, his backside almost touching the surface, Dean glanced at the tree Jordie was talking about. It was obvious, because a bright muzzle-flash blinked on and off again. The third round dug a hole in the muddy ground near Green’s position.
“Hundred and twenty, hundred and forty yards,” Dean called out.
“Which one?” Ferguson asked, working the range marking on his telescopic sight.
“Split the difference,” Louis yelled, “and knock that guy’s lights out before he kills one of us!”