Sure enough, there was a front pocket on the pack and he fumbled with the zipper and tore it open and his hand found Grandpa’s old Zippo, the one he’d passed on to Bart on his fifteenth birthday (the year he got caught smoking). In triumph, he thumbed the flint wheel and birthed a flame and touched it to the rag fuse of the bottle in his hand. The fabric caught immediately.

When he stepped back into the doorway, he could see them coming at him. They were so close now that the flickering flame played on their sinister faces. He held the firebomb out like a king’s scepter and took grim satisfaction in their changing expressions. “Burn in hell!” he damned them as he threw the bottle at the first open patch of floor he saw, just inside the door. The green glass shattered and spewed flame in three directions, both blocking the doorway and unfurling into the gathering crowd itself. Screams reached his ears, glorious screams that fed a savage glee in his heart. He lit another and threw it into the thick of them, where it made a dull thud and clattered to the floor unbroken. Then the flames reached the gasoline. The bottle exploded in a bright flash, and Del heard glass ping off the walls like shrapnel. One of the monsters was caught in the plume of fire and set ablaze; it ran endlessly, bumping into its brethren and igniting them as well. Del threw the rest of the bombs as hard as he could, lobbing them over the heads of the trapped crowd so they might reach the rear of the basement where Evie and Bart had been. And then he stood back and watched it burn.

The fire spread upward, into the house itself, and he could see the orange glow through the upstairs windows. The roar of the flames was deafening now, drowning out the screams, and the heat forced him back.

The hate and anger bled away from him as he watched. The grief returned, but he would endure it. He had to. “Goodbye, Bart,” he said, wiping the sting of ash from his eye. “Don’t worry about Mom. I’ll find her.”

In his mind, Bart’s voice was no longer there. But he imagined a nodded reply, and that was good enough.