“There’s Ron and Tammy,” Amy whispered, spotting an obnoxious couple from work sitting in a booth across the room. Barb ignored her and stared straight ahead, apparently having already noticed them.

Wearing the orange dress turned out to be a big mistake. It was like a bright sign drawing everyone’s attention to her, including Ron, who waved at her as Barb ordered their food using cash from the fanny pack Amy used as a purse.

She let her eyes wander toward the kitchen, pretending she didn’t see Ron, and felt a jolt of adrenaline. Red lights were flashing around the grill, and a pair of teenagers were acting like they were in a panic. Someone closed the door before she could see more.

“What’s going on back there?” she asked the girl taking their order.

The girl turned to where she was pointing. “What do you mean?”

“The emergency, in the kitchen!” She watched helplessly as Barb started to say something, an alarm screamed one sharp note and stopped, and the kitchen door flew open with a bang. In that last moment she regained control and instinctively tackled Barb to the floor.

She rolled to see flames shooting over the counter. The girl on the other side was screaming, but Amy’s focus shifted to an array of sprinklers on the ceiling that weren’t working, and then to a fire extinguisher mounted on a plaster-covered column forty feet away. She crouched and sprang toward the extinguisher, reciting in her mind the procedure she had learned for using one.

Seconds felt like minutes until she found herself spraying white foam at the fire, hoping that the extinguisher was the right type for the fire’s source. Luckily it was, but she knew there wasn’t enough of it.

“Cover your face!” she shouted at the girl, whose clothes appeared to burning, and sprayed her when she complied. She then kept the flames at bay while Barb helped the girl outside. When the extinguisher stopped working, Amy took a look around to make sure no one was around before bolting for the door. Behind her, the kitchen was an inferno which no one could have escaped.

When she got outside, Amy noticed that three of the restaurant’s employees had herded the others out to the street, and one of them was shouting at her to get as far from the building as possible. She broke into a run, and when she was half-way to them something at the other side of the building exploded.

SCENE 23

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© 2018 Bradley Jarvis