Freeze Frame

The magician got up and surveyed the damage, it was worse than when he saw it seconds before. The fire had broken through the ceiling in two more spots, all that remained of the stairway was a burning frame, most of the carpet was blazing and smoke was everywhere. He put his foot into the nearest flames to see if they were penetrable and his shoe passed easily through them. He inserted his hand in a column of smoke, no problem there either. Although the stairway seemed incapable of holding weight, Bill knew that in a petrified state it would support everything he could put on it. He started up, moving in and out of the blaze. Halfway to the landing he was jolted by a searing pain from above his right eye to the top of his forehead. Bill dabbed at his brow and discovered that he was bleeding. He scanned the stairwell, confused because he couldn’t spot what he had run into. Then he noticed drops of blood on a virtuously invisible strand of cobweb hanging from a charred picture on the wall. It was micro-thin and had cut him like a razor blade. Great, he thought, I really need something else to worry about. He reached the top of the stairs and correctly guessed the children would be in the middle bedroom. Fortunately the door was closed, the windows weren’t shattered and the lack of additional oxygen had kept the flames from destroying much of the room. In two matching cribs he found little girls who appeared to be unconscious. Before moving them he searched the rest of the upstairs to be certain there weren’t any other children or pets trapped. There weren’t. He touched one child, then the other, using his new ability to free them from his hold on time. They neither moved nor cried, but both had a pulse. Bill knew he would have to take them out the way he had come in after first freeing the ravaging fire. He loosed a blanket and wrapped them in it, then gently picked-up the girls and went downstairs, watching for spider webs on his way. When he reached the foyer, he thawed everything with a blink and took advantage of the water pouring in from the hoses to drench the blanket around the kids. He wanted to wait a few minutes for a logical amount of real-time to pass, but within seconds, pieces of burning roof and eaves started falling outside and the ceiling began to crash down on them from within. Bill held the children tight and ran for the open door, bursting through the hose water and flaming debris. He took a dozen more strides before the house imploded. The blast knocked him and his tiny bundles several feet forward onto the lush wet lawn.