OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller by TAYLOR ADAMS Page B

Minutes
    Burning skin.
    I smelled burning skin. It’s a dense, unmistakable odor. It turns the air solid, burns your eyes, and congeals on your tongue. Most disturbingly, it smells just a little bit like food. Like a hamburger thrown into a fireplace.
    Burnt skin. Burnt hair. Burnt chemicals.
    A guttural scream right beside me, loud enough to rupture eardrums. It exploded inside the confined space, a pressure-cooker roar ringing off tile walls, cut off by a wheezing gasp. Something ice-cold splashed my face.
    I was in a bathroom. A man was doubled over the sink faucet beside me, hurling cupped handfuls of water into his beet-red face. Dirty smoke curled in the air. Black whiskers, scorched dead, fluttered to the sink like bugs. This was all okay. This was Kale Wong, and five seconds ago Kale’s face had been on fire. Because on this New Year’s Eve, he’d attempted ‘fire breathing’ out on the Haunted production manager’s back porch. Apparently there’s a special chemical that the professionals use, and it’s not a water bottle of tiki torch fuel. No one had captured it on video, but they say that for a few transcendent seconds, Kale Wong looked just like the Ghost Rider.
    He screamed a four-letter word into the sink, with sixteen extra vowels.
    A crowd bottlenecked by the bathroom door. “Kale. You okay?”
    He grabbed a fluffy white towel and mashed it to his face. It came back smeared muddy black. “I regret nothing.”
    “He’s okay.” I brushed soot from his shoulder.
    He spat in the sink and looked up at me, the lower half of his face a mask of furious red. “How bad is it?”
    “Not awful,” I said. “Like a sunburn.”
    “Will it scar?”
    As a time traveler, I knew it wouldn’t. It would peel in crispy sheets — he’d look like an Asian Freddy Krueger at Addie’s funeral — but the long-term damage was minimal. The real issue would be Haunted ’s production schedule. Between my absence and his blistered face, LJ’s financiers at the station would be biting their nails all January.
    Kale rubbed his temple and an eyebrow came off.
    “He’s alright!” someone shouted in the hall, and good news passed through LJ’s lake house one voice at a time. This would have become the story of the evening — if not for Adelaide’s car accident. That happened an hour later, give or take.
    Kale slapped a blackened towel to the floor and grabbed another. “I want to know where LJ bought these little towels, man. They’re heavenly soft. Like baby butts—”
    “I’m going to see her,” I said.
    “What?”
    “I’m . . . I’m going to see Addie.”
    He nodded, dropping more burnt whiskers.
    Oh my God. I felt a pull in my stomach. I hadn’t thought about it — I’d just blurted it out, because memories seemed to have a strange, subtle momentum to them, like stepping into a waist-deep river current — but yes, I would see Adelaide now. She was here, at the party. She was downstairs.
    Right now .
    I pushed through the gathering crowd at the bathroom doorway, like elbowing through the ground floor of a concert. The acrid smell of scorched chemicals hung in the hall, a foggy haze of trapped smoke—
    “Tell LJ he’s out of tiki torch fuel!” Kale shouted behind me.
    Down the hall. Gaining speed. I rounded a corner and side-scooted past Holden, drunk and happy. This Holden knew nothing of the Head-Scratching Rifle, Addie’s death, or any of the bitter realities 2015 would bring. This Holden was still in 2014, and 2014 was the best year we’d ever had. It was the year we’d made it, the year Haunted indexed on the Nielsen ratings book (three times!), the year the Boise-based TV affiliate ordered a third season, the year the paychecks became regular. What a year 2014 had been.
    I bumped his beer as I passed, splashing the wall. He was talking to some girl I didn’t recognize. “Dan! Yes, Dan can verify. Remember the Deer Cap Dude? Three thermal signatures, on top of the