Choose Wisely

Chapter Ten: A Fire's Fury

The fires were immediate and terrifying in their proximity to me. They were so close the heat seared up my arms and I stepped back automatically. Josh swore under his breath; he was standing behind me, his expression of shock. I had never seen anything like this. Fires hadn’t burned with this kind of ferocity for thousands of years- we had select chemicals to deal with them that extinguished them immediately.

“Come on,” I said to Josh, grabbing at his arm to drag him down the stairs. He stopped me for a moment, his fingers stealing around my wrist, his eyes catching mine just as easily.

“Maybe… maybe we should wait up here,” Josh replied uneasily, nodding his head toward the inferno. “We shouldn’t get mixed up in that kind of thing. The officials will have dealt with it soon anyway; we know how these things are.”

“No, we don’t know how these things are,” I rebutted him, shaking my head. “A fire of this magnitude hasn’t burned in so many places, all at once, for what must be millennium. That means these fires aren’t accidental. They’re deliberate.”

Without waiting for his response, I sprinted to the stairs, rushing down them so that my hair whipped out behind me. Though it had taken me an age to climb them,  the concrete flew away under my feet. As I broke out of the building in the entrance, I saw the houses lining the streets were coughing out streams of people, all looking towards the sky and the plumes of smoke. Dodging crowds, I made my way to the closest fire- in the middle of Pax. Suburban households flew past my vision, white picket fences blurring into a seamless line.

The path I travelled was familiar to me and the sense of foreboding hung heavy on my mind as the distance grew less and I grew closer to the sound of crackling flames. Then, there I was. I rounded the corner, my feet still gathering speed- then cut short to a halt, the breath knocked right out of me. Black-clothed officials stood in a ring around Charlotte’s Café, taking notes on their clipboards serenely, even as the fire raged.

I spotted the flicker of red hair that belonged to Charlotte, though she blended right into the cacophony and colour of the fire. My eyes nearly skipped right past her. She was gesturing widely, her eyes full of rage though every movement she made seemed empty and half-hearted. I stumbled forward: to give her support, to find out what happened- it could have been anything, it could have been nothing, but it quickly didn’t matter.

Charlotte lunged forward; her snarls heard from my distance while she raked her nails across one of the officials’ faces. In a matter of seconds, the officials surrounded her, covering her from my vision like ants swarming over food. I only watched, my heart skipping a beat, as they parted once again, to show her slumped body, which was handed over to another official who carried Charlotte into the back of a van, the city motto emblazoned on the side.

I wanted to run forward, to demand answers, to scream. But I did nothing, even as they slid shut the van’s doors and an official drove Charlotte’s unconscious body away from the burning husk of her café. Because the black slacks and jackets that these women and men gathered in front of me wear, declared them to be officials, up-holders of the law.

Because these officials had up-held the law and they are the law. The van drove on, hurtling through the streets, with the body of my friend hidden inside. I staggered backwards, my body hitting the harsh grittiness of a wall behind me. My nails dug into the brick as I slumped to the ground. The wall scraped my skin but I barely paid heed to it, wrapped up in the vision of the inferno in front of me. Why else didn’t I make a stand against them?

Because I just didn’t understand anymore.

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Josh found me, sitting against that wall, my nails still digging in to unyielding brick. It was like I needed to hold onto something, something tangible. Something that told me that I wasn’t crazy, that what I had just seen was as real as the pain lancing through my fingers.