Reddit: r/nosleep

PART XI: I'm Having a Picnic

“Where’s Felix?” I ask. It hurts to talk, and I start coughing. “So smokey in here. We need to get out before we burn up.”

“I don’t feel anything.”

Of course she doesn’t. Meredith’s fires don’t hurt her. Somebody just needs to teach her how to put them out. There’s going to be an assembly on fire safety if I recall. Heck, they could have Meredith help teach it.

I sit up. Meredith is curled up in a corner, hiding her face. She’s sobbing and holding herself and rocking back and forth. Between us there’s a person, curled up as well, only they’re kind of on fire and not moving. “Oh, Jesus.” I can’t tell who they are because they’re all black and like I said on fire, but it must be poor Officer Flowers. She smells like burnt hamburgers.

“We gotta get out of here, Meredith,” I choke on the smoke. “I’m in a lot of pain. And your house is on fire. Are those glow-in-the-dark stickers on your ceiling?”

“Just leave me.”

Somebody moves in the doorway to the hall. I turn to look. It’s Roger. He’s wearing his sleeveless shirt and his hair is combed like at his funeral. “Just leave her, assface,” he says. He walks off down the hall. Oh great, I’m hallucinating.

I grab Paschar and Nathaniel off the bed. Scooting past the bad-smelling, burned up body, I crawl over to Meredith and hold out Nathaniel. “Nathaniel says we all need to leave.”

She takes her melted Barbie and hugs him to her chest. Outside, I can hear fire engine sirens. I wait, looking at her. Come on Meredith, snap out of it. She looks back at me, tears in both her eyes. I still wonder if she can see me with that milky one.

“Now that Felix is gone, I can think more clearly.” I whisper. “He gets in your head. He makes you think things... and say things.”

“He makes you tell your secrets.” Meredith mutters. Something big falls over downstairs with a crash. It sounds like Roger banging on his drums, but those are back at the picnic. No, wait, that was a dream. His drums are in our garage.

I grab Meredith by the shoulders. “Meredith, I’m not afraid of sharks.”

She tilts her head like a dog when you tell it to fetch and don’t throw a stick. It’s the universal sign for “huh?” “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Don’t you remember? I told you I was afraid of sharks.”

“So what?”

“Felix made me say it. Don’t you get it? He told me to tell you what I’m scared of, and I said I was scared of sharks. Even in my head, I was thinking suddenly about how scary sharks are. But sharks are out in the ocean! I’m not scared of them. Or clowns. Well... okay, I’m unnerved by clowns. But I wasn’t scared of them until Felix made me confess.”

“So you lied?”

Oh god, the smell of the person on the floor mixed with the pain in my side is starting to make me sick. “Can we discuss this outside, please? I don’t want to die.”

Meredith nods silently. She looks at the dead person smoldering on the floor, then looks away and follows me as I head to the door. Just as we approach the hall, a big man in a yellow fireman’s jacket and yellow fireman’s pants and yellow helmet walks in. He stares at us, then past us at the burned body, then back at us. “Girls, stay low. I’ll get you out of here, just give me a second.”