Matthew Silver and the Monster Hunters, Book One: The Darkest Waters

Chapter One

SilverCHAPTER ONE

The whole world seemed to be on fire, and I was running for my life.

I was running through the dense forest, weaving in every direction to avoid the countless blazing trunks of the towering California Redwoods. The smoke was so thick, I had to guess the direction that I was running in.

CRACK!

I rolled out of the way of a blazing California Redwood that groaned as its thick trunk splintered and snapped in half. The tanker-sized tree smashed into the ground like a sledgehammer, instantly crushing and cutting down everything in its path.

With trunks towering up to heights of three hundred feet and widths of around twenty-five, Redwoods didn’t simply fall over. Something was doing its best to kill me, and sooner or later, it was going to succeed.

Heat waves battered me from all sides.

The girl running with me paused to look up at the sky behind us. Her face was grimy and mixed with ash, dirt, and sweat.

“Keep running!”I yelled. “It can’t hit us unless it lands! The trees are too dense!”

As if to laugh in my face, a fireball the size of a Redwood exploded only several feet from where she was standing. Flames billowed into the air, making me stop in my tracks in horror. I thought she'd been roasted, but her figure burst through the flares with her arms protectively covering her face. She somersaulted back to her feet and gave me a look that said, This is why you don’t make the plans!

We both sprinted off again, and the ground began sloping downhill. It was easier to run at top speed, but it was almost too easy. When there are giant, flaming trees everywhere around you, and you can only see about a foot in front of you, you don’t want to be moving really fast. Hugging a tree at top speed wasn't very appealing. Hugging a flaming tree the size of a skyscraper at top speed was even less appealing.

We kept running through an endless maze of inferno. The smoke was rising high above us now, creating a canopy in the air that blanketed over us. It was very difficult to breathe properly. My lungs were burning from the heat and exhaustion from running for so long.

A wide jet of flame hit the ground behind us as we passed by, pursuing us as we ran. I completely abandoned any effort to take things carefully and kicked things into an all-out sprint for my life, as I raced ahead of the wall of flame that was threatening to overtake me.

I didn’t know where the girl was, but I couldn’t exactly go back and check. Pine needles and low hanging branches whipped against my cheeks opening small cuts, but on my pain scale, getting burned alive trumped getting scratched up, so ignored the minor stings and ran even faster, trying not to wince each time my face caught against a branch.

From somewhere above me, behind the screen of smoke, came a wild screech. It was something of a mix between the world’s biggest eagle and an armada of nails on a chalkboard. The noise went straight into my head and pierced my brain like a hot iron. I grabbed and scratched my ears in pain, almost falling over.

A cloud of white-hot flame exploded right in front of us. If I had been sprinting, I would’ve run straight into the blaze to my certain death, but I was still dizzy and had eased back the pace a little. The girl held me back, just out of the way of the fiery pillar, but my sleeve caught on fire. I beat it out hastily, but my arm had already blistered from the heat. We both had fireproof vests underneath our clothes, but at the moment, they were about as good as a tank of gasoline. All the vest seemed to do was weigh me down and was slowly building up an excruciating heat against my skin. No amount of protection would overcome this kind of fire.