Fiction / Novel Excerpt
He didn’t have to turn the corner to realize he had fucked up. Royally fucked up. He could see the smoke from around the curb, rising up playfully, almost tauntingly.
It was the dull, transparent, unassuming nature of the smoke that convinced him. It didn’t look like that of a house fire (but of course it was). The smoke from a house fire is blacker, thicker, more violent, more sooty. This one was paler, softer. Meaner.
He flexed his fingers on the steering wheel of his car, considering. He had a lot of paths open to him, plenty of options to pick from. The problem is, they all ended with him dead.
He considered that setting his house on fire was only just a show of power, a curt reminder of their dominance over him, of the strings binding his hands and legs. It seemed a little extreme, but that was the point. They were nothing if not extreme.
Well, they also weren’t big on second chances. If they had gone as far as arson, they probably didn’t want to see him again. And this was his house for God’s sake, not an RV that he was meant to dump but had gotten a bit too attached to. Man, the time they had torched his RV had been the last he had ever even thought of crossing them.
A gentle reminder, the note had said, as the steel scaffolds of the once-luxurious vehicle warped and charred under the intensity of the inferno, let us know beforehand if you ever run across trouble covering your tracks in the future.
That had been the last, after that he had disposed of any vehicles or safehouses in the manner prescribed to him and never looked back. Until this assignment, that is.
Were those sirens that he heard from down the road? Little good firetrucks would do his house, once they turned the corner the soft trail of smoke would probably open to a raging hellstorm of chemical fire. What had they used this time? The same stuff as the RV incident? Some fluorine compound? Magnesium? Sulphur? Maybe they had just dynamited the duplex to smithereens and the smoke originated from the smoldering remnants.
The firetrucks overtook him in a rolling blur of red and silver. His hand hovered over the key in the ignition, but what was the point? The city had several exits and they could be waiting for him at all of them. They could track him from above, they could trail him discreetly from a distance. They might already have a tracker on him. Heck, his phone was a tracker, but he couldn’t possibly discard that. It was the only connection he had remaining with his contacts.
Beyond the placid rooftops of the surrounding houses, the line of smoke flickered and twisted like a snake snuggling with itself. He forced himself to grab the steering wheel and take a deep, long breath. He had to think for a calm second bef-
He was fucked. He was licked. He was absolutely boned.
Age-old nervous tics came down to him like a swarm. His left hand scratched his right earlobe, then went searching in his pockets for the cartoon he no longer kept with him. He swallowed hard but his throat was drier than the patch of desert they would bury his body in. He was jittery, fumbling, the surgeon’s ease and precision he had hammered into himself all seeped out like urine from a faulty urethra.
The wheels of the black Humvee rotated and faced the bumper of his car, but the chunky car did not pull into the road. He stared aghast at his rearview mirror. Scared, yes, shit-scared, but more than anything he was surprised. And impressed. So much so that for a moment he was absurdly proud of himself.
They had a military grade Humvee, sure, no big deal, but why in God’s green earth had they put it out in the open? Why had they mobilized one in broad daylight in a good, rich, camera-littered part of the town? Why had they sent out an Humvee just to get at him?
Maybe I’m a big deal after all, he thought, and considered lighting a cigarette and taking the fast way out. Go out as the badass piece-of-shit who had to be taken out with a Godforsaken Humvee. Then he remembered that he didn’t have a cigarette with him and had been cold turkey for two years.
I like living, the right side of his brain thought.
I have to get the fuck out of here, the left hemisphere screamed.
The one-way-mirrored windshield of the Humvee stared his car down. He turned the key in the ignition but could not peel his eyes away from the rearview mirror. The Humvee rolled half-an-inch forwards on his ginormous, reinforced wheels and blinked its yellow indicators.
That did it.
He faced forwards and put the pedal to the metal. His car lurched forward, exhaust gases spitting out of the engine in a quick spurt, and off he went careening forwards, unheeding of the way and of the traffic.
With a galloping heart and shrieking, slipping wheels he cut through the Monday morning traffic. He made a hairpin turn at the next intersection and beelined in the direction of the nearest highway. Unexpectedly, the turn brought him in the vicinity of his house, and the speedometer reading dropped for a fleeting second. But emotion has no purchase over cold, untamed mortal fear, and he snapped his focus back on the road and on the highway and exit beyond. Crisscrossing past the disorganized scattering of firetrucks, he caught a fleeting glimpse of what had once been his house.
Fluorine, they had used fluorine. The flames burned bright, hot, and bright-hot-green. The tendrils of the fire licked and consumed and almost swallowed his house whole, but there was barely any smoke. It was a very efficient combustion. They were always extremely efficient.