Who: Kellan, then Max. What: Kellan tries to set Max's place on fire and almost blows it up instead. Where: Max's warehouse When: Tonight. Warnings/Rating: Explosions and the fallout from them. Blood, violence, not good injuries.
Kellan didn’t know Cerise’s dead friend. He didn’t know the woman Cerise claimed was responsible. But he knew Cerise, and just well enough to realize that for her to call him, hysterical, on the verge of killing someone, meant she, at least, was serious. And she was willing to pay. Those alone kept him from asking too many questions. Business was business, and he was looking at several months without a real job so far. Even if this was last-second … who said he didn’t work well under pressure? It was practically a relief to actually be going out and doing something that wasn’t drinking.
The warehouse she’d given him the address of was just off the strip, so he moved carefully, looking the whole thing over from a few angles in the dark shadows. Evening was just setting in, and there were a lot of people out and about. He probably could have waited until midnight, but there were lights on in various windows, which meant she was probably home. A small part of him hoped it was actually her and not someone else hanging around - a roommate, or something. This seemed like a pretty big place for one person. Probably should have asked Cerise more about that before, but - he was here now, and the payment was on the line, and it had to be done tonight. No time to plan an elaborate course of action. (His first mistake.)
For the most part, he was careful. He didn’t want to be seen - not a glimpse, not even a corner of his jacket. The doors had to be blocked and the windows sealed. The fire would start from a less-used corner, sneaking in slowly and spreading smoke everywhere to debilitate before the brunt of the flame went for the target. The warehouse itself might not come down, but it would be gutted - everything inside blackened and burnt, ideally. It really depended on how much of the place was actually being used and how much had fallen into disrepair, or had just been covered over to hide the bits that were falling apart, or had been completely renovated. Old places with old materials in a dry place burned best. And fast, too.
There was a steely silence in his mind, but so long as it stayed silence, Kellan didn’t care. Dean could judge all he wanted; this may not have been Kellan’s favorite method of making money, but it had to do, sometimes. More often these days than before.
The minutes ticked on by and it was later than he’d hoped when all the setup was finished. Still, nobody had come out - or tried to and found the door sealed, resulting in a police call that would potentially put this back by weeks - so he made his way to the garbage-infested corner where he’d left a lone window unlocked. He was careful pouring the gasoline in - letting it spread across the floor slowly, reaching the better tinder at the walls and beyond. The stink was powerful, as ever, which - combined with the fact that his sense of smell was already struggling under the wake of his decades of smoking - meant that all he could smell was gasoline. A second mistake.
There was a fusebox down low, not too far from the window where he’d set up the spot where the fire would start. He tried to force it open, but it didn’t want to give, so he slammed a heel into the base of it, near where the pipes guarding the mess of wiring met the box itself. There was a clunk at that nearby, somewhere beyond the wall, making him stop still and listen for anything else. But there wasn’t. No yelling, no swearing, no sudden sounds of surprise. Whatever it was, it hadn’t garnered any attention from the resident. So maybe just a pipe rusted through by disuse finally snapping. He kicked the fusebox again and the door popped open, letting him continue his work without him ever even picking up the smell of natural gas against the much closer gasoline.
Kellan fought with the wires, trying to strip off the coating with the few tools he’d brought with him so he could snap them into overloading once he was out of sight. But they were old wires, even older than he was used to. For his age he’d gotten used to using 80s and 90s technology against itself, and this was encroaching on even older than that. He swore as metal finally gave way after a few minutes of struggle with a snap, letting him get them crossed and broken up so that they’d spark --
Later on he’d laugh about it, probably. About how it was everyone’s fault, including himself, but mostly the original builders’, that everything went to hell. Normally an early spark meant he just had to run like hell before anyone saw him. It had happened before; old wiring couldn’t be trusted to do things quite the way you wanted it to every time. As he got the wires in place, they sparked early, sending little white electric fires down the line until they hit the buildup of natural gas just behind the wall.
There wasn’t even time to swear. Everything exploded. It wasn’t massive, but he was almost at the dead center of it. It knocked him back hard and slammed him into an adjacent building with enough force to crack his ribs and maybe his skull, if the pain was anything to go by, and broke almost every window in the warehouse, even rattling the sealed doors loose. There was a ringing in his ears that drowned out everything and a starburst of white in his eyes that kept him from being able to see.
But there was enough survival mechanism still in him to remember that he had to get away, now. Kellan managed to get to his feet and drag himself away from the scene, his only goal to get out before the cops and firefighters arrived. He ignored the pain in his chest and arms and legs and everywhere and didn’t have the sense to wonder if the screaming he was hearing was coming from inside the building, or inside his own head.
Normally, Max's alarms would have alerted her that something was wrong. But they'd been offline since Corvus had tripped them earlier in the week, since Laura had come. Between her guilty, angry mourning for Jack, and Amanda's arrival, she hadn't thought to reset them. She'd forgotten completely, too caught up in sense of loss she hadn't felt in over five years, and so she didn't notice any of it. Not the breached perimeter, not the open window, and not the arsonist downstairs.
She'd put Amanda to bed, after telling the six-year-old a modified story in which Belle found a rusty, unused suit of armor in the Beast's castle, donned it, and kicked the everliving shit out of Gaston; Amanda wasn't into fairy princesses that sat around waiting to be saved. Then, she'd supervised a Skype call with Brandon, all while leaning in the doorframe and wishing she could actually tell him what had happened. But she couldn't. He would make Amanda come home if he realized how screwed up shit was in Las Vegas, and so she held her tongue and didn't tell him about Jack's death, about how Luke had sounded on the journals, about any of it. But god, she'd wanted to.
Once Amanda was asleep, she'd bid goodnight to Amanda's nanny and maid, and she'd left them to their own devices in the upper level of the warehouse.
She'd gone downstairs, found her way into the kitchen, and she'd opened a bottle of red. Normally, she was a beer woman, but tonight was different. Tonight, she was mourning, and she didn't even notice the smell of gas. It was an old place, and with winter rearing its head in the desert, the gas lines were being pushed to the limit with heaters. Red in a goblet, and she lit a line of candles in the bath, which was where she found herself when the world erupted in a rattle and blast.
The plaster came down atop her, and the windows blew outward, and all she could do was climb out of the tub as fast as she could manage. She didn't bother with clothing, because the only thing on her mind was Amanda.
Not the nanny. Not the maid. Not herself. Her daughter.
She fell three times on the stairs, her damp feet slipping and debris cluttering the way, and she coughed as gas from the lines made the air inside thick and heavy. She could smell fire in the distance, but she still climbed, even as the nanny held onto the bleeding maid at the top landing. She almost shoved them to the ground in her rush to get passed them and to the little girl in the bedroom.
Amanda was screaming, glass was everywhere, and Max grabbed the bedsheet and wound it around the little girl's face and body, not wanting her to inhale anything more than she already had with the screams. The trip down the stairs seemed to take forever, and Max couldn't think about anything but keeping Amanda safe, getting her out. She should have never let her come here. She shouldn't have let her anywhere near this excuse for a city.
By the time they made it out, the ambulance had arrived, and paramedics had to fight to get the little girl out of her arms. But Max finally handed her over, and she allowed herself to be wrapped in a blanket. She could see the maid, a young girl fresh out of high school, her face and neck sliced open by a shard of glass from the windows. The nanny was on the phone - no doubt with Brandon - and Max shoved the paramedic away when he began poking and prodding at her. Right then, she wasn't thinking about Cerise's threats, or about Jack's death, or about her own injuries. She was worried about her child, who was being rolled into the back of an ambulance, a breathing mask covering her small face.
She crawled in after, not even bothering to talk to the firefighters and police that arrived as the white doors closed on the back of the ambulance.