Fort (Working Title)

Chapter 3

She hung up and dialled 911. But she suddenly lost her cell phone signal. "Whoop! You may be quick, but you're not quick enough," he called from outside the front door. "I switched on my signal jammer right before you called 911. Now you can't call anyone, you can't even return my call!"

She felt a wave of weakness sweep through her. She sat on her chair, still holding her cell phone. She stared at her cell phone. Tears welled up in her eyes. "Don't be terrified, woman. We can stay here together forever. We even have so many trees," he continued. She heard streaming water outside, followed by spurting sounds.

She stood up to check what happened. He was silent, but she could hear crackling sounds. She walked through the hallway. She turned to the corridor. She opened the curtains.

He had burned two of her trees. The blinding fire was huge and its flames were swirling wildly up toward the sky. The flames were swirling higher up to a point in the sky where they were fading into black smoke. The smoke covered the stars above her house. Despite this, brighter flames continued to eat away at the beautiful leaves of her trees, and more were burning their branches to ashes and charcoal.

"No!" She cried out as she watched her trees getting destroyed. Then she looked at him. He was standing below the burning trees. He turned toward her when he heard her screaming. He had removed his helmet. She was surprised at the sight of his face because he didn't look anything like his behavior. He had a fat, fair-skinned face with red lips that had a natural smile to them. The only strange thing about his face were his piercing grey eyes, which peered at her as if spying from behind a cover. He was holding a small gasoline canister. He turned away from her and walked toward another tree. He began squirting gasoline at its branches. After a few seconds, he lit a match and threw it at the tree. Wild flames burst forth from the branches, travelling toward the leaves and burning them. He did the same to the other trees. "Don't burn them! They're doing nothing wrong to you! What the hell is your problem?! Leave my trees alone!"

She kept telling him to stop, but he never stopped. He set all the trees in her front yard on fire. Then he stood back to admire his work, his tall figure outlined in the brightness of the fire.

The fire was so blinding in the night. The flames were making whooshing noises as they engulfed the branches. The trees and their leaves were making cracking and crackling noises as they burned. She stopped telling him to stop, and ran to the kitchen. She opened a closet under the kitchen and took out a bucket. She closed the closet, and brought the bucket to the bathroom. She opened the bathroom door, entered the bathroom, and placed the bucket before a faucet that was on the bathroom wall. She opened the faucet and waited as the bucket filled with water.

Once the bucket was full, she closed the faucet and took a dipper from the bathroom sink. She put the dipper in the bucket, and carried he bucket out of the bathroom. She carried it through the kitchen, through the hallway, and to the front door.

She was about to open the front door, when she heard the delivery man talk again. "Well, that looks better. Now, the plants ..." His voice was moving to the direction of the garden. She realized that opening the door and going outside to save her trees wasn't such a good idea. She left the bucket at the front door and hurried to the living room instead.

In the living room, she stood in front of the TV. She began pressing on different places on the screen. It was a touch screen. She checked the settings of each CCTV camera in her house using the TV, making sure that they were recording everything.

She could hear him outside the northern windows, behind the drawn curtains. She watched him through the northern CCTV camera. The burning trees were illuminating the garden. He was uprooting the plants and hurling them to the middle of the lawn like a madman. He had formed a large pile of uprooted plants next to the garden. When he finished uprooting all the plants from the ground, he moved on to the plants in the pots. He grabbed them and lifted them to hit their pots against the ground. The pots were shattered to pieces, exposing the roots of the plants and the soil that they had been clinging to. Once the pots of the plants were completely removed, he hurled them to the side to be with the uprooted plants.