Consuming Fire

Chapter 51

Jack peered through the lookout room atop the massive hanger where the Chinese aircraft was rolling in. Outside, the rain poured and the wind screamed but he heard nothing behind the glass. He was on his own, told to watch from a room full of computers and old files while Dr. Wolfe met with the General and his men as they marched out of the military aircraft. There were dozens of them. They were all there for war.

Jack didn't care for the Chinese. They saw him not as a person, but as an object of destruction. Though that was what he had become, Jack didn't like to be a possession in their mind. What they didn't realize was that he could crush every one of their bodies with a blink of his eye if he wanted to.

The General and Dr. Wolfe talked in the hanger for a long time, and Jack became bored. It was never a good thing for him to be bored. He let the voices in his mind overpower him, tell him to destroy things, to listen to the darkness.

He started rifling through the filing cabinets in the office. One was filled with papers and printouts of dull things he didn't care about. Another had rows of discs. They were numerically categorized and Jack couldn't figure out the significance, until he saw a name printed on one near the back.

Hunter Harrison – 11/10/2014

That was only a couple of weeks ago. Jack slipped the disc from its case and sat down at one of the desks. During quiet times like this, his body was at normal size, though if he looked at his reflection in the glass he could see black eyes and thick, dark veins pumping through his body. Ironically, that was the darkness. It was a part of him now.

The images on the screen were of the Death Caves where Dr. Wolfe kept Hunter and her friend Will. Jack didn't know why – perhaps they were being punished. She was walking through the door with two guards behind her. She looked different, brighter. Her mouth was moving, and as Jack tried to turn up the volume on the computer screen, she exploded. Fire burned in her hair and she started sprinting toward the camera. Hands stuck out of all of the cells. She reached one and grabbed hold of it. Jack twisted the volume knob.

"He's alive!" she screamed.

"Who's alive?" came the response.

"My dad, Will, my dad is alive!"

Jack frowned. He had no idea what she was talking about, but something in her voice, something about the way she lit up – even with a power restraint – engrossed him. He watched her shout at the Men in White, laugh, smile and jump around as if she'd never been happier. And the fire ... it burst from her in crazy sparks, flames twisting around her, and before the guards could draw their tasers, the corridor lit up in light. And it wasn't a fire that burned, it was a fire that freed.

Suddenly, Jack started to become dizzy. He looked away from the bright screen, closed his eyes, and found himself remembering things.

A scream in the distance.

The smell of books.

A pencil.

Smoke, heat, fire ...

Hunter.

Jack's eyes flew open. He was back in the quiet control room. The video had ended and the screen was blank. He'd been in some kind of unconsciousness long enough for the computer to move to screen saver mode.

What the hell happened to me?

Jack was so frustrated, not only with the feelings of warmth and longing that had so briefly tried to form inside him again that he lifted the swivel chair he'd been sitting on and threw it against the glass where it shattered to a billion pieces and the chair went soaring down into the hanger below. He huffed and walked across the glass to the edge, looking down into the empty hanger. The Chinese and Dr. Wolfe were gone.

She left you to die ... said the voice in his mind. She doesn't deserve sympathy or remorse. She deserves pain.

Whatever had just occurred, he would forget about it. He would forget about Hunter and the fact that she was to blame for his transformation, and he would forget about any connection they had in the past. He was different now, and there was no turning back. In three days' time, he was going to destroy the world. And no memory of a library and a fire was going to stand in his way.