Free Ghost Hand by Ripley Patton

longer.
    I had to get out of the house now, CAMFers or not.
    The smoke was getting thick. My lungs were burning. Fire and heat and smoke went up. I needed to get below it.
    I got down on my knees, but I couldn’t crawl in the damn robe. The air was better though. I took a careful, sipping breath between coughs and tried to think. I had to ditch the robe. It was either that or die of modesty. I undid the belt, threw the thing off and slung the backpack on to my bare back. It hummed between my shoulder blades, warning me what I already knew—the CAMFers were out there.
    Wearing just my underwear, I crawled down the hall and into the kitchen. The cold, hard tile felt like soothing water flowing beneath my knees. The back door was so close. It was right there. All I had to do was open it, run out on to the porch and into the back yard, and I’d be safe. Or would I?
    The house was beginning to make strange groaning noises. If I could just hold out until the fire department arrived, surely the CAMFers would be gone, but I didn’t even hear sirens yet. Hadn’t anyone noticed my house was a raging inferno?
    The kitchen was filling with smoke. My eyes were a watery blur, and I squeezed them shut. It didn’t really matter. I couldn’t see anything anyway. I needed to get below the smoke, but I was already sprawled on the floor. What was lower than the floor? That was it . There was a place lower than the floor, a place to escape the smoke and possibly get out past the CAMFers unseen.
    I felt my way around the butcher block island that my dad had made my mother for their fifteenth anniversary. I crawled until my head hit the wall, then felt along the baseboard to the basement door. Reaching up, I turned the knob and opened it. Cool, fresh air hit me immediately, and I gulped it in. Quickly, I slid onto the cool top step of the basement stairwell and pulled the door shut behind me. I took a few deep breaths, coughing the smoke out of my system, and forced my stinging eyes open. My ghost hand cast a blue glow down the steep stairs.
    I stood up, grabbed the railing, and started down. The wooden steps felt worn and smooth under my bare feet. About halfway to the bottom, I hit a distinct line of even cooler air, the point at which the staircase descended below the insulated ground. I was crossing into another world—the underworld—and a chill traveled up my body as I went down, making things perky and alert that didn’t need to be.
    In the world above, something fell with a thundering crash, rattling the stairwell and raining dust down on my head from the basement ceiling above. I squealed and leapt the last few steps to the frigid cement floor.
    Laid out before me, by the glow of my hand, was the strange jumbled landscape of the basement—mountains of crookedly stacked boxes, foothills of carefully labeled storage tubs, and the occasional strange architecture of abandoned, dusty exercise equipment. Somewhere, there were probably boxes of old clothes, but I didn’t have time to look for them. Hanging from a nail on one of the support beams was my mother’s old rain poncho. I grabbed it and threw it over my head. It was big enough to go right over the backpack and cover most of my important parts, but it was short enough not to impede me if I had to crawl again. And I was pretty sure I’d have to.
    Grey moonlight streamed in the basement’s side windows, but not through the two at the back. That was because my mom and dad had added the back porch after they’d bought the house, and now those two windows opened to the underporch, a small area now enclosed by the porch’s sides.
    At the time of the porch addition, I had been ten, and I’d begged my dad to make the underporch into a clubhouse for me and Emma. He had even helped me draw up plans for it, but my mother had vetoed the idea based on the strong opinion that little girls shouldn’t be encouraged to crawl around under porches like disobedient dogs or trolls. That