Free Sisters of Sorrow by Axel Blackwell Page A

was pushing those fingers into her ears. It came from everywhere. It was inside her, vibrating her organs, rattling her brain. Jittering her teeth. The rising floor wobbled, rippled. Seams popped open between the floor’s stones.
    Hell colored light, like she had seen in the boiler, bloomed in the windows. Everything in the kitchen suddenly moved, rotated. Only two colors existed, black and orange. Shadows spread outward, drifting in graceful arcs, painted by the fireball erupting into the night sky.
    And still the roar escalated. A burning filled Anna’s throat. She realized she was screaming. A saucepan bounced off her left shoulder. A heavy skillet hit the floor by her hand. Ladles and kettles and pots rained down around her from the counter top and overhead racks. Any sounds they may have made were swallowed by the terrible pounding thunder.
    Potatoes and onions spilled out of the pantry, rolling and wobbling across the floor like drunken marbles. Terrified rats scurried among them, darting this way and that.
    The floor stopped rising, ratcheting to a halt, then suddenly dropped. Anna dug at the floor with her fingertips, pressing her face into it. It fell nearly two feet, rippling and rolling like a wave, before settling.
    The roar began to subside, taking on a crackling, splintering texture, like an enormous tree toppling. Other noises surfaced in the receding tide of sound. Clashing, jangling, clattering. Beams snapping, doors slamming. The bell, high in its great tower, bonged and clanged and reverberated. And screams. Someone screaming very close to her.
    Anna remembered Sister Elizabeth and clapped her hands over her own mouth. The screaming continued. Anna peeped around the counter. Sister Elizabeth lay writhing and shrieking, pinned beneath a fallen oak beam. Anna decided she was thrashing about too much to be seriously injured, but had no interest in finding out for sure.
    She turned toward her exit. The door hung ajar, its frame sprung, its oak bar snapped in two. That was the signal, stupid. Run!

Chapter 10
    Anna sprinted into the night. She flew through the kitchen door and plummeted into darkness. Her feet continued running, they continued striking the wooden stairs as they ran, but it felt as if she were tumbling into a bottomless abyss. She had been confined within those walls for five years, never once allowed outside. Now, Saint Frances was exploding behind her, the surf of the Pacific crashed just ahead, and a limitless universe of stars spiraled into infinity above. She was free, and it terrified her.
    As she ran, the stairs became a boardwalk became a dock, stretching out into the churning Pacific. Anna, dizzy and overwhelmed, trying to see everything at once, failed see how close she was to the edge. Just before the line where sea met shore, she ran right off the side of the dock, dropping, with a muffled thud, onto the soft sand.
    She rolled twice, coming to rest alongside a beached rowboat. Overhead, the empty void of night twinkled at her. Stars spun slowly. Anna lay on her back gasping cold salt air until they stilled.
    When her breathing slowed and her vertigo calmed, she sat up, facing the sea. Glassy black breakers rolling shoreward reflected the inferno behind her. Blood-red caps of foam rode these waves as they crested.
    A high-pitched whining, like steam escaping a damaged pipe, filled Anna’s ears. As this whining subsided, the calming hush of waves replaced it. She listened for a breath or two, gathering her wits, then turned to look at what she had done.
    The sight took her breath away again.
    Fire blazed from a pit where the factory once stood. Great stones and timbers and mangled machinery littered the grounds around The Saint Frances de Chantal Orphan Asylum. A few large pieces had fallen as far away as the upper beach, but the sand near the water was clear of any wreckage. The rubble cast long dancing shadows in the wavering firelight.
    The boiler had exploded. It had leveled the