Fire Devil

by J L Bryan

  “Ellie!” Michael was still shouting.

  “Okay,” I managed to mumble. “Okay, I'm here. Where are we? Kansas City?”

  “Still in Nevada. And you're bleeding. Let's have a look.”

  Sure enough, the front of my black t-shirt was streaked and wet, right where Amil had slashed me. My fingers came away red when I touched it. At least the skin was still on my fingers; in my dream, they'd been burned down to the bone.

  I helped Michael strip off my shirt, hoping the damage wasn't too deep. It sure hurt like it was, though.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “There's good news and bad news,” Michael said. I reclined on my hotel bed's pillows while he looked over the damage to my torso. “Bad news: you've got an intestine poking out—”

  “What?”

  “Good news: it's just the small one.” He grinned.

  “Jerk,” I grumbled. “I'll just examine myself.”

  “I'm afraid you're not qualified,” he said. “And that can lead to lawsuits. Better leave it to me. I'll just cram your intestine back inside real quick—there you go, just like stuffing a turkey.” He tickled my stomach, and I slapped his hand away. “Just disinfect, bandage, and you'll be fine.”

  “Yeah, fine,” I said. “Living with the knowledge that they can get me in my sleep now.”

  “Now, this is going to hurt a little, so I want you take a sharp, hissing breath through your teeth and close your eyes.”

  “What's that?” I asked, and then he spread the antiseptic cream over the three slashes on my belly. I winced, closing my eyes, and took in a sharp breath.

  “Perfect,” he said. “You're a model patient.” He began bandaging.

  “You probably say that to all the slashing victims.” I sighed. “Michael, this is not good. He has all the upper hands. We're in more danger than ever, and we still aren't sure where to find Melissa.”

  “But we're thinking Chicago, right?”

  “Yeah, but not based on much...Well, in my dream, we were in a burned-out city, but it looked too small to be Chicago.”

  “Chicago now, or Chicago in 1871?”

  “I don't know.” I checked my bandaging after he was done taping it in place. “Nice job on the intestines. But I think you forgot to put my spleen back.”

  “The spleen can actually be left dangling outside the body without any negative health effects,” he said. “Not many people know that.”

  “Guess I'm good to go then. Seriously, nice wrap job. You could be a professional mummy-maker.”

  “Good, I've been thinking of changing careers.” I checked the time. It was late afternoon; I'd slept longer than I'd anticipated.

  While I got ready for the day—or night, I supposed would be more accurate—I checked my phone. Stacey had texted me at midnight to wish me a HAPPY NEW YEAR, and she'd just texted again to tell me that they'd reached Kansas, en route to Kansas City. The one in Missouri, not the one in Kansas. I don't know why they keep naming so many cities that.

  I texted Stacey back a thumbs-up.

  Then I wrote: “Watch out for ghosts in your dreams.”

  “That's a big 'huh-what?' good buddy,” she replied.

  “Clay and Amil attacked me in my sleep,” I texted. “Got Snake Man slash wounds across my belly now. So keep your guard up in your dreams. Michael woke me from my nightmare. So maybe you and Jacob should take turns sleeping and keeping watch over each other.”

  “Or I could just not sleep ever again,” she replied. “Which seems likely now that you've said that.”

  “Whatever works. We'll reach KC in about 20 hours. Find us a hotel. Something NOT HAUNTED. Can't emphasize this enough.”

  “Sure, that'll be a nice change,” Stacey texted back. “While we're texting, I want to mention I'm way not sure about The Texan Exorcist. First off, that sounds like a pro wrestler's name. Second off, he reminds me of this metalhead kid from my high school who used to make these evil-looking robot sculptures in shop class. Nealon smudged my car with a fat stick of sage and said some kind of chant over it before getting in. Like, come on. My psychic boyfriend would totally have noticed if my car was haunted. Can a car be haunted, anyway?”

  “Sure.” I put my phone down.

  “Any news?” Michael asked.

  “They're finding us a rendezvous point,” I said.

  “That sounds like something from a spy movie.”

  “It'll probably be a Holiday Inn in Kansas City.”

  “Yeah, isn't that where they set the last James Bond movie?”

  I snickered. “I think that was Wichita.”

  The desert stretched on ahead, and we made good time as night fell around us. We'd be crossing the Rocky Mountains, and heading on into the Great Plains. It was a real All-American Road Trip, but there was no time for sightseeing. We'd be speeding as quickly as we dared, alternating driving and sleeping, stopping only when we had to.

  Michael was driving, and I'd just spent all day sleeping, plus I had no desire to slip back into that nightmare world of Clay and fire and all his captured souls.

  I downloaded some audio books about the Great Chicago Fire for our drive. We started with one called Apocalypse 1871, which covered the broader pattern of huge, devastating wildfires across America on that day. Chicago was the largest of many.

  For some reason, the book was narrated by Hugh McCowl, an actor best known for horror roles like the chainsaw-wielding Fleshface, as well as the sinister serial-killing virologist Dr. Cain Weatherford in the way-too-creepy Dr. Death trilogy. So everything had an ominous tone when read in his voice.

  “October 8, 1871 was the deadliest day in American history since the end of the Civil War,” McCowl's voice said, his measured serial-killer tones dripping from the van's speakers. “After a long, dry summer, fires erupted all over America, each one a natural disaster in its own right. The Great Chicago Fire left three hundred dead, a hundred thousand homeless, and destroyed more than seventeen thousand buildings. At the same time, the Great Michigan fire ate up entire towns and left hundreds dead. Dozens more died in the Port Huron Fire. In Wisconsin, the lumber mill town of Peshtigo and the surrounding villages were completely consumed, leaving thousands dead. One of the few survivors described it as if the devil himself had swept through town, engulfing everyone in flames, with nowhere to turn but the dense burning forest that surrounded it.

  “What forces raised this infernal constellation of firestorms across so many miles of America's heartland?” McCowl asked, in his most menacing tone yet. “What brought about the Apocalypse of 1871?”

  “That's the titular line,” I noted.

  We listened, for mile after mile, about the destruction of one town after another. The destruction of Chicago was massive, but the truly horrific death tolls had unfolded in lumber towns up north. A drought had not only dried the forests, but had also kept the rivers low, meaning they couldn't send the logs down from the logging camps in the region. Bone-dry timber piled up in heaps in every sawmill town.

  Despite the parched conditions, humans set fires everywhere—to clear trees for farmland or buildings, to cut railroad paths into the ancient forests. It was the same all around Chicago. They had no modern construction equipment, and clearing the huge old trees with hand axes was difficult and time-consuming. Fire was faster and easier.

  “So it came to pass,” intoned our narrator, “On the accursed day of October 8, when hurricane-force western winds came tearing across the country, bringing no hint of rain, every fire was fed and pushed. Hundreds of small fires merged into firestorms that no human could stop. There was no choice but to let the demonic fires run free and destroy and consume until there was no more to feed them, until they reached the shores of the Great Lakes, leaving only ash and destruction behind.”

  I couldn't help but think of my dream, the city where the buildings were made of ash and the streets were paved with the same.

  “I guess it could have been Chicago,” I said aloud. “Or it could ha
ve been one of these other places.”

  “Peshtigo had the largest number of deaths,” Michael said. “Old Anton would be more interested in that than in a bunch of destroyed buildings.”

  “Yep, if he's looking for ghosts. He could be collecting ghosts associated with fire. Like Greta. She was the only kid who died in the Gatwich Inn fire, which must be why she's the strongest ghost, the one that people encountered.”

  “If that's what he wants, then it sounds like Peshtigo would be his choice.”

  “I wonder if the town still exists.” I looked it up, and there it was: Peshtigo, Wisconsin, population 3500. “There aren't many more people living there today than when the town burned to the ground. Most of the search results for the town are about the 1871 fire, actually. There's even a fire museum. I bet the trauma of that fire is much more raw, much more present than in Chicago. Everything in Chicago's been long since paved over, rebuilt, or had a skyscraper dropped on top of it. But this town is still small, still way out in the country. The Chicago fire is just one moment in that city's history, but for Peshtigo, the fire is the single defining moment. Almost everyone in that town died at once. It would be strange if it wasn't haunted.”

  “Should we change course, then?”

  “Kansas City is still pretty on course, I think.” I checked the map and the time. “Hm. Maybe we could move the rendezvous point somewhere north. Like Des Moines. Or Cedar Rapids.”

  “Cedar Rapids sounds more fun than Des Moines. Just based on the names, I mean. I don't know much about those cities.”

  “Cedar Rapids it is,” I said, texting the update to Stacey. “They'll have plenty of time to get there and find a non-haunted hotel before we catch up. It's farther east anyway. Closer to Chicago, Peshtigo, and every town the fires destroyed that day.”

  We drove onward, listening to tales of destruction, suffering, and death. Michael knew more about the event than I did; I guess it was pretty famous among firefighters.

  Personally, though I'd heard of the Chicago fire before and how it had nearly erased the city, I'd had no idea that it was part of a larger pattern of destruction that day. I tried to imagine the implications on a psychic or spiritual level, whatever you want to call it—thousands of people dying in the same horrible way at the same time, with the same underlying cause, across multiple locations.

  That had to mean a lot of ghosts, among other things. And it seemed to be attracting Clay.

  While the audiobook continued over the speakers—quite menacingly, as I've mentioned—I looked through pictures of the destruction on my tablet. I saw the remnants of burned-out brick buildings in Chicago and black smudges that had once been villages deep in the forests of Michigan and Wisconsin. There were a few photographs, mostly of Chicago, and a number of drawings and paintings.

  The Peshtigo paintings were particularly awful, showing people desperately running from a fire-engulfed town, or leaping desperately into a river full of burning logs and limbs, children and babies clutched in their arms. I could almost hear the screams as I looked at those images.

  The photographs of Peshtigo after the fire showed a bleak, ash-covered landscape. In one, a pair of rails ran through the ash, once part of a railroad. It looked like the railroad to Hell.

  I frowned, finding it oddly familiar.

  Then I looked at the few images of Peshtigo before the fire. It looked like a rustic but pleasant town for its time, with a sawmill and a huge woodenware factory, and a number of homes arranged on a neat square-block plan.

  “This is it,” I said, when I found an ink drawing of the dense little cluster of wooden buildings near the bridge across the river. “If you imagine all those buildings turned to ash...that's where I was in my dream. Michael! He's there.”

  “You're sure? Based on that sketch? It kind of looks like any basic old-timey town.”

  “I'm...” I looked more carefully. “I think so. Everything was covered in ash...although, really, these buildings would have been burned completely to the ground.”

  “Yeah, the whole town was just annihilated,” Michael said.

  “...survivors reported fireballs chasing them down the street,” Hugh McCowl intoned over the speakers, in a voice that would have made a birthday cake recipe sound like an incantation from the grimoire of an evil wizard. “The fire in Peshtigo had an intensity, a ruthlessness, as it seemed to seek out and burn every individual in the town. Every child. Every dog and horse. Even those who sought shelter in wells died from the lack of air as the unprecedented fire burned for hour after hour...”

  “What he said.” Michael gestured at the dashboard speakers.

  “Sounds like the kind of place Clay would love,” I said. “Imagine the poor, tortured, fiery souls he could collect there.”

  “So did Clay say anything to you during this dream?” Michael said. “Or was it more of a grab and slash kind of situation?”

  “There was some taunting,” I said. “He's proud of capturing that little-girl soul. It was a new kind of accomplishment for him, I think.”

  “Where's he getting all these new ideas?”

  “Maybe the ring,” I said. “If he can control one powerful soul with it, maybe he can control more.”

  “So we have to get that ring back.”

  “That would be a top priority,” I agreed. “It would take away his power to control Amil, and maybe Greta, and any other souls he might be out there collecting. I almost had it before, down in the caves under the monster museum, but...” I sighed, remembering the emerald ring tumbling in midair. Clay had snatched it a moment earlier than I had. “Another failure on my part, I guess. Just throw it on the heap of them.”

  “Hey, we don't have time for that kind of attitude,” Michael said.

  “Actually, we have hours of driving ahead, and I can spend all that time wallowing in self-loathing if I want. That and listening to Dr. Death tell us about the towns being completely immolated by firestorms.” I took a deep breath. “We're going to get Clay this time. No letting him slip away again. I'm going to make sure he moves on. Even if I have to move on with him.”

  “That's dark and dramatic,” Michael said. “You can't let him kill you, though. You know that. Each kill makes him stronger, right?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I'm not eager to die or anything. At least, not until Clay is completely excised from this world and can't threaten the living again.”

  “Don't you mean 'completely exorcised'?”

  “Whatever works.”

  I texted Calvin an update to see if he had any thoughts, but he didn't write back.

  Michael and I fell into a silence, which left the horror actor's voice to accompany us as we drove into a late night in the deep desert.

  “Some people were reduced to bones by the heat. For others, the heat burned even their bones, leaving only a few charred remnants behind...”

  Chapter Thirty

  By morning of the next day, we'd made it past the Rockies and to a long, flat straightaway that would take us through Wyoming, Nebraska, and across much of Iowa. We flew past ranches and cornfields. Well, “flew” might be stretching it a little, but I kept the van ticking along as fast as it could manage. The straightness and flatness of the road was hugely helpful. It was almost like being back home, except I couldn't smell the ocean. I could smell cows, but that's not quite the same.

  It was about lunchtime when we reached Cedar Rapids, which was appropriate enough, because I was famished. We'd been running on coffee and Pink Fairy snack cakes for the whole trip. We didn't want to stop long enough for a meal; neither of us had the patience or appetite for that.

  I hadn't rested, either. Every time I started to nod off, momentarily lulled by the endless flat highway, I'd think of the scorched towns and the pale captives there, and I'd start awake with a jolt of fear.

  “Almost there,” I texted Stacey. I'd traded the driver's seat back to Michael.

  “Good timing,” she replied, then sent an address to a place call
ed Vivian's Soul Food. Despite my general shortage of appetite, my mouth watered a little at the words “soul food.” That would mean the taste of home, with cornbread and black-eyed peas and such.

  The restaurant was in a plain-looking strip mall, and its interior was pretty no-frills, but it was crowded, and the smell of fried chicken and gravy and salty boiling vegetables helped wake up my appetite.

  Stacey and Jacob sat at one of the small tables, and the sight of them lifted my mood a little more. I almost half-forgot that we were all heading into extreme danger.

  They stood to greet us, and Stacey reached to hug me, beaming.

  “I haven't seen y'all since last year!” she said, which was technically true, since New Year's had just passed. Very funny, Stacey.

  “Stay back,” I told her, wary of her rib-crunching bear hugs. “I've got injuries.”

  “Okay.” She stepped up and hugged me anyway, but gently, with just an arm around my neck. She saved the spine-cracking bear hug for Michael.

  I embraced Jacob gently, glad to have his help with the trouble ahead. “Thanks for coming,” I told him. “Sorry you keep getting dragged into our messes.”

  “Just try to avoid any big messes between now and April 15,” he said. “Getting away from work is no problem around the holidays, but if I try to take off during tax season, it'll be my head on a platter.”

  “Got it,” I said. “I'll tell all the evil ghosts to lie low until the IRS deadline passes.” I glanced around the restaurant. “Is Tucker with you?”

  “He went to the restroom,” Jacob said.

  “Yeah, he's a...pretty interesting guy,” Stacey said. “Does a lot of mumbling with his eyes closed. He says he's meditating or whatever, but he's kinda loud for a guy who's meditating—”

  “I'm reciting protective mantras. It's for the benefit of all of us,” said a man who'd apparently just appeared beside me, making me jump. Sneaking up on four people is no easy feat, though I guess it's a little easier when they're distracted and standing in the middle of a crowded spot.