I had the horrifying feeling one gets when they know they have to go to school or work tomorrow, multiplied by a thousand times a thousand. I ran out of the room yelling the names of the four boys who had exiled me out of existence. I ran upstairs to the fourth floor and surely found Jack standing all by himself overlooking the ocean below from the balcony outside. A harsh wind was kicking the curtains.

"Jack! What have you done!" I shouted. Running toward him with the intent of grabbing him by the shirt and banging him against the rail.

What stopped me was his swift turn and joker's smile, the two bottles of vodka in his hands, the cry of lifted delirium, "Merry Christmas, Bitches!"

I slid into him and punched him in the chest over and over hammering my fists into his dress shirt he had snagged from the home owner's closet. "You murderer!"

But Jack didn't seem to hear me as he dropped his vodka bottles carelessly with a glassy smash and a wet splash, and he picked me up in his arms and planted grueling vodka kisses on my face, even my eyes, and the unshaven whiskers on his lip scratched me as they came.

"Get off of me! Put me down!" I shouted at him. I wanted to scream at him to go help Craig, the boy he threw over the edge of the balcony and murdered in the flood of debris below, but then a blaring trumpet started playing the song Chestnuts—I turned and it was a drunken George. I wailed for George to help me—to help Craig, but George's Chestnuts got even louder, and then Travis swung in with a tenor Saxophone accompaniment, and I screamed for him to help me, but then Brett ran down and started to drum with a pair of bottles along the walls before coming around to helping Jack lift me completely off the floor in a horizontal float and the two of them cheered as they ran me across the living room, followed by the musical Travis and George and carried me up to the roof—where I screamed and saw a long wooden board had been bolted on the edge of the roof to form a bridge to the other house--

And the squealing, meowing, crying sounds of cats covered the bridge and the two roofs—the other building was on fire, and a row of molotov cocktails, unlit towels hanging out the necks of multiple vodka bottles lined the sides of our roof, ready to be lit and thrown at the other building! Jack and Brett dropped me and laughed as I fell with a thud to the concrete roof on top of a clowder of tomcats and queen, all smelly and scratching as they raced to safety out from under my weight.

I jumped to my feet completely confused and shouted, "Where did all these cats come from!" I soon realized the current of cats was leading from the neighboring building to ours and decided the cats must have been starving in the other building all along, only appearing once the boys build the wooden bridge and forced the cats up and across the bridge by accident once they started the fire. The smoke from the other building was growing immensely.

All four boys shouted in joviality, "Merry Christmas! These cats are for you! We saved them and now they can die with us too!"

I looked around with bewilderment that no one was coherent enough to comprehend the seriousness of my words, "But where Is Craig! Where the hell is Craig?! Was that a body or a cat that I saw fall past my window just minutes ago?!"

Everyone looked at each other and laughed. But then Travis was the only one who seemed to catch himself, when he lowered his tenor saxophone by the handle around his neck and pointed to the other building-- "We forgot! We sent him across to find food in the other house! He's still in there!"

I ran at him and shouted, "But that building's on fire!"

Travis and the rest were suddenly sober, and turned pale white. We all turned to the one man who seemed strangely in charge of such a terrible situation, and all eyes that fell onto Jack said the words, "Jack, even though you hate Craig, we have to go save him!"

Jack looked horrified at all of our drunken attention in that moment and in a what-the-hell uproarious attitude of delight, threw up his arms and shouted. "It's Christmas! Let's go save that sonuvabitch!"

We all ran to the bridge, and the firey smoke from the opposite house seemed to build into the grey sky like a black and brown, smoldering devil out of hell.