It was a pleasure to see the fire burn.

Irwin Gilbert had managed it with just a magnifying glass, a cotton ball, and what was left of a bottle of 70% isopropyl alcohol, which still bore the CVS drugstore label. That bottle had to be three years old, the cotton balls even older. Irwin had a lot of old things squirreled away in his tiny home. They used to call people like Irwin hoarders, but now they would call him a genius, if anyone knew. But if anyone knew, Irwin would be dead.

For safety’s sake, he’d started the fire in his largest and deepest cooking pot. The one with plastic handles that stuck out to either side like Mickey Mouse’s ears. He set the stainless-steel container on top of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, then after a moment’s consideration, slipped Chicken Soup for the Soul between them. He nurtured the flame first with tissues, then junk mail and newspaper circulars. As the fire grew, smoke began to fill the room, and Irwin started to panic. He’d forgotten about ventilation. Images of Wiley E. Coyote flashed through his mind as he struggled to unearth more of the partially covered window, the only one in the whole house that still admitted light. Digging it out, the room’s interior brightened with the white of winter. Nearly blinding himself in the process, Irwin fumbled for the latch as the cloud of smoke rapidly reached gagging potency. He pinched his frozen fingers, crying out in an effort to move the latch, but the metal twist was painted shut. In forty years, Irwin had never opened the window. He had other ones and a front door, but their locations were forgotten long ago.

Exposed to the harsh light, Irwin’s living room was little more than a narrow gap between precarious cliffs of books, which ran from floor to ceiling. Hardcovers formed the foundations, trade paperbacks the middle strata, and the little mass markets soared to a cottage-cheese-textured ceiling. The stacks of books were easily eight deep from the narrow corridor to long forgotten walls. Even if he knew where to dig, he’d likely suffer an avalanche that would literally ignite disaster, and there was no guarantee of finding one that still worked.

His eyes watered and stung. The stark winter’s light grew hazy as the tiny space filled with smoke. The campfire smell, which had been pleasant at first, now coated his tongue, saturating his nostrils. He began to cough.

Irwin could practically hear the Roadrunner’s Meep, meep! mocking him. Wiley E. Coyote, super genius, smothers in his home. Irwin had few choices. Snuff out the fledgling fire and his life along with it or break the window. He couldn’t spend another night as cold as the one before. Picking up a copy of Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker, he punched the glass.

Thud.

He rolled his stinging eyes and reached for Stephen King’s Under the Dome — one thousand seventy-four pages of hardcover, window-shattering goodness. The pane cracked and splintered into jagged blades. Large shards slipped free from their gummy caulk and fell. The two guillotines missed his fingers but cut the otherwise mint-condition dust jacket right across the big white “K” in King.

“Goddamnit!” Irwin cursed, looking at the damage. He should have used Atlas Shrugged instead.

As if summoned by magic, the smoke took notice of the hole and rushed toward it. Irwin moved the pot closer to the window to aid the migration. The fire was already starting to die, and icy air blew in, carrying the occasional snowflake or two. They were the hard sand sort, more ice than flake. By breaking the window, he’d only made his situation worse. If he didn’t build up the fire enough to radiate significant heat, he’d freeze to death. A fireplace would have been great, a woodstove outstanding. He’d considered using his old electric stove, but it didn’t work — nothing worked anymore. The electricity died two days ago killing it, the television, the lights, and taking the water and furnace as well. That’s when things had gotten cold.

Irwin spent most of his time bundled up in blankets and sleeping in the grotto — what used to be his bedroom, but since he’d gotten rid of the bed years before, it couldn’t sensibly be called that anymore. He needed more space for his books. They were packed pretty tight in there now. Apparently pulp fiction made for good insulation, and his sleeping burrow was cozy enough for a while. He had to shimmy to slip into the small remaining gap, careful not to crush his prized thriller collection with its signed copy of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye and an ARC of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code. He made certain not to let those touch.

When the change came, Irwin figured he’d be all right — much better off than the vast majority of the world’s remaining population. He imagined shadowy hordes moving in a line like Grey Haven-bound elves or solitary figures on a desolate highway similar to the man and boy in McCarthy’s The Road, speaking with an economy of words as if those, too, were in short supply. Irwin was more like Smaug on his pile of gold or Nemo in his submarine, safe from the tribulations of a collapsing world. Decades of saving everything from twist ties to used aluminum foil and even sun-dried tomatoes — which hadn’t started out that way — had left Irwin uniquely prepared for the apocalypse. He was like a bear with enough fat to survive multiple winters. He could cocoon and later emerge into the light of a new dawn. Irwin was the cockroach that couldn’t be exterminated that would live long after its masters had turned to dust like so many Buffy-slain vampires.

He had everything he needed, although not necessarily what he would have selected had he known what was coming. Irwin wasn’t one of those survivalists with stores of high-end freeze-dried stroganoff. He would have to subsist on Ramen noodles, canned goods, and the entire line of Hostess post-apocalyptic rations, led by its Twinkie flagship of never-give-up-never-surrender snack foods. He could melt snow for water as soon as the cases of Mountain Dew Code Red were gone. But what would sustain him was a collection of nearly seventy thousand books. Hari Seldon himself using psychohistory couldn’t have set Irwin up any better to be the next foundation of civilization. The only real problem was the temperature, which continued to drop.

Global warming my ass!

Northern Virginia was heading for the next ice age. That was Irwin’s theory — he had a lot of those too. All the nut-jobs on television had prattled on about environmental shifts. No one agreed on causation. They had plenty of ideas though: industrial waste, carbon emissions, natural weather cycles, solar flares. One fella on FOX, the blond guy with the face pastier than Irwin’s, actually accused China of having a weather machine, as if the leader of the People’s Republic was really Sean Connery’s Sir August De Wynter from the 1989 Avengers movie. Weather is not in God’s hands, but in mine!

The real kicker — the thing that no one had expected, not even Irwin — was that electricity stopped working. The power hadn’t just gone out due to a downed high-tension wire or grid failure. Electricity just stopped functioning, period. Well, not entirely. Irwin was still alive, and he knew from numerous science fiction novels and The Matrix that the human body ran on electricity. So electrons were still flowing at some basic level, but the big currents had dried up as completely as the Nile. Outside the body, you couldn’t get a good shock even with a balloon and a long-haired cat.

It happened in stages. Irwin watched television reports about blackouts in areas where power couldn’t be generated. Scientists were baffled as generators proved useless and fresh batteries dropped dead. The blackouts rolled around the globe like a viral epidemic until one by one all the television stations winked out banishing the modern global community back to their respective caves.

In Irwin’s cave, tiny tongues of flame licked junk mail as he fed the cotton ball like a hungry baby bird in a nest. He was angry with himself for not having more. Of all the things Irwin saved, junk mail wasn’t one, and it had significantly decreased over the years. The postman’s creed failed to mention email as a possible threat that could stay the couriers’ rounds.

The fire grew, eagerly lapping up Father’s Day sales flyers and pre-approved credit card offers, singeing Irwin’s fingers. He sneered as he sucked on his hand.

“You’re not a baby bird — you’re Audrey II.”

Whether Audrey the plant or Tweety Bird, the fire consumed the flyers with a throaty roar. The tide of smoke ebbed as healthy flames grew strong, leaping up above the rim. Irwin was a failure when it came to growing plants but apparently a wiz with potted bonfires. Already he could feel the heat. His previously numb fingers, which had made removing the stubborn cap from the rubbing alcohol an arduous process, were stinging with pins-and-needles. He held out his palms like some cartoon hobo, feeling the reward of his ingenuity.

Meep! Meep! My ass.

In the face of the light from the exposed window, it was hard to tell how bright the fire was. Abraham Lincoln — the non-vampire hunter version — read books by candlelight, and Irwin hoped to do something similar. His evenings as of late had been dull affairs, sitting in absolute darkness, shivering, and employing the only sensory faculty left to him — listening to the wind howl. He was surprised to discover this was no metaphor; it actually howled. Howled and wailed, wailed and howled, speaking a language that took on sinister proportions in the black of night, threats shouted for intimidation’s sake. Irwin was not above being bullied. Even when the wind wasn’t blowing hard, the gusts appeared to whisper conspiratorially to each other as if plotting some terrible crime; a crime Irwin knew targeted him.

But now he had made fire, and a primordial sense of power surged through his being. Is this what ancient man felt when he declared war on nature — when Homo erectus flipped his middle finger at what-went-bump-in-the-night fears and stepped out of the realm of the animal kingdom to take his place on the porcelain throne of the flush toilet and bask in the glow of the computer screen? Irwin smiled at his creation, tapping the Mickey Mouse handles like a proud father. A shame there were no mastodons to slay for he felt oddly up to the task.

Irwin fed Audrey a large pile and settled himself on the floor, leaning against stacks of sturdy hardbacks where a recliner had once been. He looked down the crevasse that divided science fiction from fantasy, a two foot wide space of worn carpet he still called his living room. This Mariana Trench set between precipices of towering genius comprised a wealth of words, a compilation of ideas that transcended reality, the acme of human expression — a landscape of invented worlds. Of this too he was proud. He had saved it all.

For more than a decade, the world had followed the wisdom of the digital word. How many books can you fit on the head of a pin? Infinitely storable, instantly searchable, and for a time believed to be indestructible. Binary numbers never age. But what happens when the body electric suffers a coronary?

Irwin never trusted the ebook. Such trust was dangerous and all too easy; a gift left before the city gates by an army that had miraculously vanished. He refused to roll that giant horse inside, even though one e-reader possessed the capacity to return his living room complete with furniture. Using cloud technology would have made his storage limitless — but also infinitely precarious. The Library of Congress had discovered the treachery of digital. A decade after making the switch, the lights blinked out, taking thirty-two million books with it. Besides, a Kindle or a Nook wouldn’t solve most of Irwin’s problems. A good third of his collection was no longer in print, much less digitized. While the sleek trekian device might have restored a good portion of his living space, it would have come at an emotional price. Each book was a well-loved friend, and Irwin knew what it felt like to be abandoned, to be given away by someone who was supposed to love him forever. He could never do such a thing — not even to a used book, a torn shirt, or an empty pen. He had trouble throwing away soiled tissues.

Maybe he was being prepared. Perhaps that’s why he had suffered, and why his mother had given him up — a sacrifice so he could save the world’s knowledge base as a modern Dark Age monk. He walked Joseph Campbell’s classic hero’s journey. From his pain grew his collection. His stepbrother, Jimmy, called it his obsession. He’d threatened to contact a reality television show that helps hoarders “fix their lives.” Old Jimmy said it was for Irwin’s own good . . . that living in a rat’s nest of rotting paper was a sickness and a fire hazard. Jimmy was full of shit. He just wanted the house that Irwin had inherited. It irked Jimmy that Irwin got the house when he wasn’t a “real son.” But if Jimmy had acted like a “real son,” he wouldn’t have left home after college. He wouldn’t have abandoned Irwin and their mother, taken the bar, and gotten married. Jimmy had been his best friend — his only friend. Now Jimmy was just another lawyer.

Irwin felt cold. The fire in the pot had dwindled. Feed me Seymour!

Irwin remembered seeing the original B-movie version of Little Shop of Horrors starring Jonathan Haze and a very young Jack Nicholson. That was back before it was popular, before it was a musical, and before Jimmy was a prick.

Irwin got up and fed the fire an envelope at a time. It wasn’t long until the pile was gone. Audrey II had eaten everything the US government had delivered.

He searched the narrow tracks, worming through the tunnels and fissures, but found nothing. What he needed was some wood. He thought of breaking down his recliner. He even took a step in that direction before remembering it was gone. His mind also suggested his bed frame. It had been made of pine, but that too had been sacrificed long before the crisis. He had a small table, but it was chintzy plastic patio furniture. He could have torn off the cabinet doors, but he’d removed those long ago as well, having no space to swing them open anymore. The house was too cheap to include crown molding. There might be wood under the carpet, but he didn’t have anything to cut the carpet away . . . much less break and pry up the floorboards.

Was there nothing burnable in the house?

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Irwin ran through a mental inventory of everything he possessed. There were his blankets and clothes, but Irwin didn’t think burning either of those was such a good idea. What else did he have? Bookshelves!

The idea rushed him with such excitement that he stood up, only to sit down again. He had some, but they were buried like the foundations of a failed dam and lost just as completely as the walls. Walls he hadn’t seen in so long he’d forgotten if they were wallpapered or painted.

Did he really have nothing to burn?

The sun was going down, but outside the window everything was white, hidden under a record-breaking snowfall. Any amount of snow in June would break records for Virginia, but Irwin was pretty sure the five feet of white stuff was a record for any time of year. The snow was so high it covered the lower part of the window, making it look like an Eskimo’s ant farm. In the neighborhood where Irwin lived, there had never been many trees and the houses were built of brick and aluminum siding. The best he could hope to find would be a picnic table or a handle from some discarded tool — a rake or shovel. Those would be in garages, and he had no chance of opening any doors. Come to think of it, his back door would be buried beneath a glacier-sized drift. He hadn’t been out of his house since the crisis began.

He felt it unfair that he should die for lack of burnable fuel in a home filled with paper. He noticed a trade paperback sitting absently on top of the foremost tower, its title screaming out at him in three huge, condescending words: Overcoming Compulsive Hoarding — a Christmas gift from Jimmy. His brother thought that giving him a book would be like slipping a pill in a sick terrier’s hotdog. As much as his skin crawled at the thought of damaging any book, he could burn that.

Irwin tore pages out, crumpled them up and fed them to Audrey II, whose name he mentally changed to Audrey III for originality’s sake. The fire reawakened to its bright self once more spreading warmth and life in its glow. Feeding a page at a time, the book wasn’t consumed nearly as fast as the junk mail. He was only up to chapter five, “Applying Cognitive Strategies,” by the time the sun set. If he could make a short book last hours, how long could he survive on David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest? Not that he would burn that, but there had to be others he could sacrifice. In the immortal words of Spock, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

He had another gifted book. Bill Faber, his next-door neighbor, had once handed him a self-help publication, apparently not understanding the nature of Irwin’s situation. He had laughed when reading the title, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Irwin always thought he was extremely effective at what he did — that was the problem. So there were two books he could painlessly sacrifice. The question was how many would he have to burn to survive?

With the broken window, all the James Patterson and Michael Connelly in the world wouldn’t be enough to insulate him. He’d need to do something about that. Irwin had some Ziploc bags and duct tape . . . the universal handyman’s tool. He could seal the window and sleep during the day, relying on natural radiation to keep him alive. Sunlight passing through the window would greenhouse the place a bit. The night was the real problem. If normal temperatures returned in a few days, the snow would melt almost immediately, and he’d be able to strike out in search of wood. Maybe he’d even find some stove piping and a grill allowing him to make a chimney and fireplace of sorts. If he went out, he’d need to be careful. It was possible others had survived, and they would be after his food, clothes, books, and Mountain Dew. They would think nothing of killing him. In post-apocalyptic times, life was cheap. At least that’s what his books had told him. His best bet would be to remain hidden.

Still, he could risk looting a few close houses, get some more food and blankets. Most of his neighbors had likely migrated to greener pastures or died. Irwin grimaced as he imagined tiptoeing through Bill Faber’s house and finding him and his wife rotting like spoiled olive loaf, slick and oily. Were they over there right now wondering how he was faring, or were they already dead, husband and wife huddled on the bed in winter coats like a scene from Titanic?

Outside the darkness closed in and brought a greater sense of isolation. Looking at the solid black of the window that reflected only Irwin and listening to the wind beginning its nightly howl, Irwin wondered if he was the last. Not just in the neighborhood, or the city, or even the state, but the whole world. He brushed the thought away, had to remain positive. There must be people still surviving in remote places. It couldn’t be Jack London’s To Build a Fire, everywhere. Near the equator, there had to be pockets, clusters of people not freezing to death — barefoot free spirits dining on bananas, papaya, and pomegranates. Free of governments, the daily grind, and constant emails they likely celebrated, dancing on white-sand beaches around bonfires of their own. But did they have books? Did anyone? He was much better off.

The digital invasion had extended even to the jungles and deep deserts. Literacy programs dispensed lightweight, waterproof, solar-powered e-readers preloaded with a thousand books — novels by H. G Wells and manuals on digging wells. Charities passed out the equivalent of handheld libraries to every village with sunlight. Gutenberg delivered the written word to the masses, but ebooks delivered masses of written words. The age of wonder had arrived, and in a land of rutted mud, thousands of pounds of paper books had no place in a brave new world. When fire and floods arrived, no one made an effort to save dying relics. Who cared about ink stamped on pulp when they had devices that would speak their content aloud in five different languages? It all seemed like a good idea at the time, but so had the idea of hauling that Greek horse inside Troy. As it turned out, in both cases, disaster occurred overnight.

He shivered, inching closer to the pot. Something about looking outside into the unforgiving night chilled him. He turned away to face his massive stacks now illuminated by the flicker of his pot fire.

Irwin imagined he retained the greatest collection of literature in the world. He had all the classics, the books everyone wanted to have read, but no one wanted to read. Mark Twain had said that; Irwin had his works too. He had plenty of non-fiction: history and science mostly — just the sort of knowledge a struggling new civilization would crave. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Stephen Hawking, and Carl Sagan would become the new Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. He had a vast collection of mysteries and crime novels that could serve as the foundation of a new code of law. In his kitchen, he kept the novels of horror: Lovecraft, the rest of King, Poe, Barker, and Koontz — the parables of motivation and morality. In the grotto were the thrillers, lessons in individualism and tenacity, but it was the living room that held his real treasures. No other room in his home could hold the two most significant branches of literary achievement, what Irwin understood to be the pinnacle of all man’s art — science fiction and fantasy.

The possible and the impossible.

What separated mankind from animals wasn’t our opposable thumbs or use of tools, but the prefrontal cortex that allowed humans to imagine. Within the limitless boundaries of the mind, we could envision everything from mechanical flight to the secrets of the atom. Building a pyramid was nothing compared to the construction of a whole universe. It took the Egyptians thousands of men, but Frank Herbert worked alone. This ability to see into the future, to imagine and anticipate — to dream the unreal — is what allowed a patchwork of apes to step into the sun and throw a femur into the air and spin into a space station. Imagination lay at the basis of every great leap forward. Food, medicine, communication, power and transportation were all the result of mankind’s ability to conceive something from nothing. These annals of science fiction alone needed to be saved as the mystic books of the past, present, and future. Submarines, space travel, the atomic bomb had all been prophesized more accurately than any religious rumor. And if those were not enough, how many had predicted the end of the world? How many had foreseen Irwin’s very situation? Looking out upon the June snow from his little porthole, Irwin felt Revelations did not so aptly describe what he saw as Adam and no Eve, The Postman, Final Blackout, A Boy and His Dog, A Canticle for Leibowitz, and Joseph E. Kelleam’s Rust, just to name a few — although that last one was about robots rather than a man in a buried bunker of books. Still, no purer form of man’s best talent existed than fantasy and science fiction literature.

No less than this did Irwin have before him — a treasure greater than any horde of gold. He had a wealth of knowledge, thousands of tiny doors to other worlds. If he could survive the new ice age, he would emerge as the man of Atlantis, a wizard in a land of forgotten words. But to survive he would need to burn some of them.

Even as he finished up the next chapter of Jimmy’s gift, he knew sacrifices would have to be made at Audrey III’s altar. Yet how could he choose? Irwin moved down the length of his trench peering at the tiny-titled spines in the dim flickering light. Should Heinlein perish because he didn’t care for Stranger in a Strange Land as much as The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester? Should Ender’s Game be sent to the furnace in favor of The Forever War? What about the Wheel of Time? That series alone could keep him alive for a week, but at what cost? Would Tolkien and Martin be enough? Solomon would not be up to such a task.

Could the value of Flowers for Algernon and the lessons taught by Mary Shelley be callously erased in favor of Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, or the rabbit world of Watership Down? Might he have to resort to a practical pound-for-pound measure? Along with Jordan would Erickson need to die? Discworld? Song of Ice and Fire? And how ironic and painful would it be to burn that title?

What if the winter failed to end? Would he burn them all to live? He never thought himself capable of dog-earing a book, but now he had already mutilated one, and like any gateway drug it made the lure of the next that much easier. After cremating David Copperfield, how hard would it be to burn Frankenstein?

Irwin laid his hand on the spines and let his fingertips slide gently down across the titles. He could almost feel their fear, hear them begging for life, smell . . .

Smoke!

Irwin had grown oblivious to the smell, his olfactory receptors as blanketed with the scent as his home was with snow. This and the darkness accounted for why he took so long to realize more was burning than what was in his pot.

Not so much burning, yet, as smoldering.

The pot!

Irwin realized with horror that he’d forgotten more than just ventilation. Metal conducted heat. The stainless steel of the pot was cooking the books it rested on. Like an iron left on newspaper, the heat singed the glossy cover of Chicken Soup for the Soul, causing the lamination to melt and bubble like liquid brown sugar. The smoke issued from under the pot, a thick white cloud like the chugging tufts that oozed out of factory stacks. It crawled up the shiny sides where both of Mickey’s ears were drooping like a guilty dog.

Outside the wind whispered its plot.

“Shit!”

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 had 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 but 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 the pan, but none of that mattered. For all the pain that grabbing the pot had caused, Irwin no longer noticed. The only thing he cared about was Audrey, who was set free as the pot rolled down the crevasse. A foot-long environmental disaster of book-licking flame was loosed 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 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 remembering the pump didn’t work without electricity.

My 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. Koontz, Crichton, and Cussler fell on him in alphabetical order as he scrambled out of the collapsing tunnel like Harrison Ford with an armload of golden idol.

He took a breath and gagged.

That was the beginning of the end. 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: This can’t be happening — this can’t be happening — this can’t be happening.

A new thought arrived the way a car on ice is saved from going over a cliff by another car ramming into it . . . just as helpless on the slick surface.

I’m going to die!

That one coherent assessment of the situation put Irwin’s feet back under him. He pressed the blanket to his face, fell flat to the floor, and shimmied like a snake working back toward the window, back toward the fire.

He was too late.

The wind had spread the flames, which now coursed up the cliffs. His living room was a forest fire of Arthur C. Clark, David Eddings, Mark Lawrence, and Raymond Feist. Still, he tried. He threw himself and the blanket on the flames, rolling to extinguish the floor at least, which he was mostly successful at. 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 the Promised Land, he had to save some.

Irwin felt blindly for a book . . . any book. His tortured fingers found a trade paperback and he threw it with a guess and a prayer. It bounced off the wall. He reached for another. He had no trouble finding candidates for escape. He just wished he could see — he would hate to save only The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. What kind of world would that throw up in its wake?

Irwin couldn’t breathe anymore. It felt almost like drowning, something he’d almost accomplished in grade school which added hydrophobia to his list of fears. He was burning too. People always said you’d pass out from asphyxiation in a fire before you’d actually burn. Apparently, that didn’t apply to people trapped in a flaming canyon of books fanned by a winter’s gale.

It didn’t hurt as much as he would have expected, which just meant he was finally succumbing to the smoke. He wasn’t feeling much of anything anymore except — there was a book in his hand. He felt the narrow spine, a paperback, one of the old ones. He could tell by the semi-matte finish, the curled edges, and its size. It was small, not even two hundred pages. A book so inconsequential it didn’t have a chance, but he gave it a flick, spinning it out of his fingers, rolling off the spine the way a baseball pitcher uses the raised stitches.

It flew.

Irwin heard it flap, like wings on a bird, freed at last. He waited for it to strike the wall, the ceiling, the books. It didn’t. A perfect swish.

Nothing but air.

Outside the wind howled and wailed, wailed and howled.

The little house burned, a bright spot in an endless void of black. Snow hissed as it said hello to the flame and the two did battle. Elements wrestling in an empty world that man had stepped out of.

In the flicker of that battle, on its back in the snow, lay a single book. The wind, a spectator in a fight it helped provoke, brushed the pages that fanned out and closed again, fanned and closed, as if the whispering wind was trying to read.

The cover, a stylistic impression of flames, was dominated by three numbers: four, five, one.